Group Portrait with Lady (39 page)

“Now during all this tunneling Grundtsch had been a great help—all those family burial vaults, of course, were on our list of permanent-care customers—but he refused to live in them, he had a complex about being buried alive, brought back from the first war, you could never get him into any cellar or basement bar, so I had to hand up the baskets of earth to him, he’d never have gone down into a vault, and he refused to live down there with us. Above ground, fine, there the dead didn’t scare him, but underground he was scared of his own death. So when things began to get dicey he moved out to his native village west of the city, somewhere between Monschau and Kronenburg—at the end of January ’45, if you please! No wonder he walked right into the trap, became a Home Guardsman and, old as he was, landed up in a POW camp.

“So anyway, by about the middle of February I’d got this four-room apartment in the vaults ready, and February was a quiet month, only one air raid, just once for half an hour or so, a few bombs you could hardly hear. So one night I moved
in there with Lotte and her two kids, then Margret joined us, and if anyone tells you I made a pass at her I’d say: I did and I didn’t. There we were, us two in the two von der Zecke rooms, Lotte next door with her kids at the Herrigers’, and of course for Leni and Boris we’d reserved their original love nest, the Beauchamp vault, with mattresses and straw and an electric heater, some crackers, water, milk powder, a bit of tobacco, methylated spirit, beer—just like in an air-raid shelter. Sometimes we could hear the sound of artillery from the Erft front, that’s where at the last moment they’d sent the Russians to build fortifications—Boris with a German uniform in his pack, complete with medals and decorations, all the things that went with those damn papers—so anyway, the Russians were still building fortifications and gun emplacements, living in barns and no longer quite so strictly guarded, and one day Leni turned up on her stolen bike with Boris riding on the crossbar. I must say the German uniform looked pretty good on him, and the phony bandage looked great—he even had a wound-tag, all stamped and signed, that’s how they got past the cops, and they moved into their own little home in the cemetery around February 20, and it turned out I was right: no patrols, either German or American, dared go down into the vaults, and we lived an idyllic existence there, sometimes hearing nothing, seeing nothing, for days on end, and for appearances’ sake I worked during the day at my place, for naturally people were still dying and had to be buried, no longer quite so elaborately, no more salvos, no more proper wreaths but still a few branches of fir, sometimes a flower—it really was madness. In the evening I’d walk back toward home, later I rode there on Leni’s stolen bike—but part-way there I’d turn around and go back to the cemetery.

“I need hardly say that those Hoyser brats were a regular nuisance, the cheekiest little bastards imaginable, crafty and unscrupulous, the only thing that kept them quiet was: learning,
and what they wanted to learn was obvious: how to make money. They’d pick my brains on costing and bookkeeping and so forth. Even in those days they treated their mother like a doormat, and if there’d been such a game as Monopoly we could’ve kept those cheeky little brats quiet for weeks on end. They understood, mind you, that they had to be quiet and not show themselves outside, for they had no wish to be forcibly evacuated, oh no, that much they grasped, but the things they got up to inside! I mean, there are limits, surely, I mean a bit of respect for the dead and all that, surely that’s in everyone, even in me—but those brats dreamed of treasure in the graves, and sometimes they were on the point of unscrewing the tablets from the niches, looking for that damn treasure. If anyone says I made money from the gold teeth of the dead—I’ll say of those kids that they’d have made money from the gold teeth of the living. If Lotte says now that her kids were taken out of her hands, then I say she never had them in her hands. They’d been trained by their grandmother, who was dead, and by their grandfather, who was still alive, for one thing only: to take every last advantage and to accumulate assets. One thing I never did—something all the others did, Margret, Leni, Lotte, even Boris—I never collected my own cigarette butts, let alone other people’s, I find that absolutely disgusting. I’ve always liked everything neat and clean, and anyone will back me up when I say I used to go outside in the cold, break open the ice in the water tank we used for watering the graves—watering the flowers, I mean—and wash myself from head to foot, and if it was at all possible I’d go for my regular morning jog, even then, though later on it became my nightly jog, and that damn butt-collecting was something I hated.

“Well, anyway, toward the end of February, just before we went for our great haul to the Schnürer Gasse on ‘the Second,’ we found ourselves running pretty short in that Soviet paradise in the vaults—we had miscalculated, that was all, we’d
expected the Americans a week earlier—and even the crackers were beginning to get low, and the butter too, and even the ersatz coffee, and needless to say the cigarettes; and along came those brats with neatly rolled cigarettes that they’d rolled with their mother’s cigarette machine, they’d got the paper from that good-natured Margret—and they sold me, as it turned out later, my own butts as freshly rolled cigarettes! And in their eyes ten marks apiece was a fair price!

“Those women laughed and thought the boys’ realistic approach was great, but I felt cold shivers up and down my spine as I haggled with those cute little devils. It wasn’t the money, mind you, I had plenty of that, and I’d have paid fifty for a cigarette—it was the principle of the thing! The principle was all wrong. To be amused at such young kids being so mercenary, and to laugh at it! Only Boris shook his head, later Leni did too, when, after ‘the Second,’ the kids began building up a little stock they called their capital. A can of lard here, a package of cigarettes there—we were all much too much on edge to pay proper attention. Leni’s baby, remember, was born on the evening of ‘the Second,’ and she didn’t want to have it—and I can understand that—in a burial vault, and her Saint Joseph didn’t want that either. So they walked across the cemetery, all full of bomb pits it was, to the nursery garden, Leni already in labor, Margret with the medical supplies, and they proceeded to make her a bed of peat moss and old blankets and straw matting, and that’s where she had her baby, probably right where it was conceived.

“It was a boy, weighing nearly eight pounds, and since it was born on March 2 it must, if I can still count, have been conceived around June 2—and you won’t find a single daylight raid around that time, not one! Nor was there any night shift worked that date, my payroll sheets prove that, and certainly not by Boris—so that must mean they took advantage of some opportunity in broad daylight.

“Well, O.K., it’s all past history now, but it was a far cry from being a Soviet paradise. You should have seen the cemetery after the raid on ‘the Second’: heads of angels and saints knocked off, graves torn up, with and without coffins, take yoir choice, and us totally exhausted after the horribly dangerous job of lugging and carting our loot away from the Schnürer Gasse, and, to cap it all, the baby being born that evening! It all went quickly and smoothly, by the way. Talk about Soviet paradise though! Do you know who was the only person to teach us how to pray again? That Soviet fellow! That’s right. Taught us to pray, he did. A fine lad, I don’t mind telling you, and if he’d listened to me he’d be alive today. It was madness, it really was, to move so soon—on the afternoon of the seventh—back into town with the women and kids, carrying those lousy German army papers in his pocket and nothing else. The boy could have stayed down there in the vault for months, reading his Kleist and his Hölderlin and I don’t know what all—I’d even have got hold of a Pushkin for him—till he’d been able to produce some discharge papers, genuine or forged. Farm workers were already being discharged from American POW camps that summer, and all he lacked was some decent British or American discharge papers. Those women never thought of that, they were all caught up in the excitement over the peace and in sheer joy at being alive, but it was a bit premature for that. And talk about those evenings and afternoons sitting by the Rhine, for months on end, with the baby and those Hoyser brats and Grandpa Gruyten with that perpetual smile of his: the boy could be sitting by the Rhine today, or the Volga, if he’d wanted to.

“That’s what I’d got hold of for myself, before I showed up officially in early June: discharge papers, in my own name with a proper POW number, the camp rubber stamp—after all, our trade could be classified as agricultural—it was all quite logical and proper, and God knows there was enough to
do in my line, I mean, people didn’t even have to die, enough had died already, and somehow or other they all had to be got under the ground. That was something Lotte and Margret never thought of, either of them, in spite of all their connections, getting proper discharge papers for the boy—Margret could have done it with a wiggle of her hips, and Lotte would only have had to think of it, with all her rubber stamps and forms and connections. It was plain irresponsible not to legalize the boy after May or June, even if he’d had to call himself Friedrich Krupp. I’d certainly have been prepared to pay a price for that—I wasn’t only fond of the lad, I loved him, and you may smile: but it was he who taught me that all that stuff about subhumans and so forth is just so much crap. Talk about subhumans—they were right here.”

Were Pelzer’s tears genuine? Before he had even finished one highball there were tears in his eyes, tears that he wiped away with a furtive gesture. “And am I to blame for the death of Leni’s father? Me? Must I be avoided like the plague because of that? Tell me, what did I do other than give Leni’s father a real opportunity? Any child could see he wasn’t even a good plasterer, he couldn’t do a decent job even with the best materials, and as for his work gang, people used them because there weren’t any others, but then all the people he worked for found that their ceilings fell down again or the plaster crumbled off the walls—he simply hadn’t learned how to plaster, he didn’t know how to cast the stuff, didn’t know how to swing his arm properly, and all that about not wanting to be a businessman any more and deliberately pretending to be a proletarian, that was nothing but a fantasy he’d thought up in jail or in camp, or been inoculated with by other inmates who were Communists. I don’t mind telling you, that was a real disappointment, the great man with the great scandal in his past turning out to be a regular duffer who didn’t even know how to fix up a wall properly. And it was just a kind of snobbishness, you
know, suddenly starting to go from house to house with an old pushcart, a few galvanized tubs, and a trowel, a spatula, and a shovel, offering his services as a plasterer in return for potatoes, bread, and the occasional cigar. And that sitting by the Rhine with daughter and grandson and son-in-law, singing ditties and watching the ships—that wasn’t the right thing for a man with such terrific organizational talents and guts.

“I made him several fair offers, I told him: ‘Gruyten,’ I said, ‘look, I’ve got three or four hundred thousand marks which, try as I might, I wasn’t able to invest in firm or even reasonably safe assets: take it, use it to start a business, and when the inflation’s over give it back to me, not one to one, not two to one, no, three to one and no interest. You’re smart enough to realize that this cigarette-currency is kid stuff, it’s all right for returning nihilists who had nothing to smoke in camp, it’s all right for kids and nicotine addicts like bombed-out women or war widows, you know as well as I do that one day cigarettes are going to cost five pfennigs again or at most ten, and if you invest five marks fifty today in a cigarette which you sell at the next corner for six fifty, that’s just kid stuff, and if you intend keeping the cigarettes till the currency gets hard again, then I’m willing to bet that for your five marks fifty you’ll get five pfennigs, provided the cigarettes haven’t gone moldy by then.’ He laughed, he thought I was suggesting he go into the cigarette business, whereas I was just using that as an example.

“Now naturally I thought he’d start up a construction business, and if he’d been a bit smarter he could have passed himself off as a victim of political persecution. But no, he didn’t want to do that. I ended up having to invest my money after all, and in those days there wasn’t much doing in real estate. If Leni had sold me her building earlier for half a million I’d have undertaken to provide her with a rent-free apartment for the rest of her life. What did Hoyser give her for it? Four times
the unit value: all of sixty thousand, and that in December of ’44—it’s beyond belief!

“Well, there I sat with my money. I had invested where I could, in furniture and pictures and rugs, I even bought books, but I was still left with that chunk of three or four hundred thousand that I had at home in cash. And then I got an idea, everyone laughed and said: ‘That Pelzer’s become human after all, for the first time in his life he’s doing business that makes no sense.’ What did I do? I bought scrap, not any old scrap, only steel girders of the best quality, legally of course, I even got myself wrecking permits wherever I could—most people were glad to get their properties cleared of rubble that way. As for the girders—it was merely a matter of storing them, and for that I had plenty of land: so what was to stop me!

“Do you know what the wages of a nursery-garden worker like Leni or the Kremer woman were at that time? All of fifty pfennigs an hour. And an unskilled construction worker, well, he might’ve got one mark and, if he was lucky, one mark twenty, but the real plums were the supplementary ration cards for heavy manual labor, with these you got fat, bread, sugar, and so forth, and in order to get those you naturally had to found a company. So I did, my company was called ‘Demolition Inc.,’ and half the town laughed their heads off when I began collecting steel girders, there were miles and miles of them, of course, all Europe was buried under steel, and for a shot-up tank you didn’t even get two packages of cigarettes—well, I let them laugh. I employed four gangs, supplied them with tools, got my wrecking permits, and systematically collected steel girders. Because I thought: laugh away, steel’s steel and always will be. Those were the days when you could get old battleships, tanks, and airplanes for a song, if you’d only cart them away, and I did that too: carted away tanks; I had plenty of land not yet built on.