Group Portrait with Lady (40 page)

“So that was how I managed to invest my entire capital between 1945 and 1948: over three hundred thousand feet of steel girders of the very finest quality, neatly stacked up and stored, and right from the start I didn’t pay according to the regular wage scale, I didn’t let those men work for eight or ten marks a day, I paid by piecework, a mark a foot, and some of them, depending on the location, easily made as much as a hundred and fifty marks a day or more, and in addition to that they all got their manual workers’ rations. That was a fringe benefit.

“We moved systematically from the outskirts of the city in toward the center, where the big stores and office buildings were. It got a bit more difficult there because so much concrete was still clinging to the girders, and sometimes a whole tangle of reinforcing rods had to be burned off. In cases like that, of course, I had to pay a mark fifty or two marks a foot, even as high as three fifty, a thing like that has to be negotiated, the way you negotiate in a mine depending on the location of the coal. Fair enough. Leni’s father was in charge of one of these gangs, and naturally he took a hand too, and depending on how many feet of steel were delivered to me in the evening, so and so much cash would be paid: into the open palms went the bills, and some fellows would take home three hundred marks at the end of the day, some of course only eighty, but never less than that. And that at a time when the workers in my nursery were earning barely sixty a week. And still half the town was laughing at my girder collection as it lay rusting on my lots on Schönstätter Strasse, at a time when blast furnaces were being dismantled! Anyway: I hung on, if only out of stubbornness.

“Now I’ll admit the work wasn’t entirely without its dangers, but after all I never forced anyone to do it, never: it was a straight offer, a straight business deal, and I just ignored whatever else they found lying around in the ruins: furniture and
junk, books and household utensils and so forth. That was their own business. People were laughing themselves sick, and whenever they walked past my lots they’d say ‘There’s Pelzer’s money, rusting away.’ And among my pals in the Mardi Gras club, the ‘Evergreens,’ there were even some wits—construction engineers and so forth—who calculated for my benefit exactly how much money was actually being eaten up by rust: they had their conversion tables from bridge-building and stuff like that, all the figures, and to tell the truth, by that time even I was beginning to doubt whether I’d make a good investment. But the funny thing was that in 1953, when the stuff had been lying there between five and eight years and I had to get rid of it—and wanted to, what’s more, if only to be able to build on the lots because of the housing shortage, and I cleared a million and a half marks for it, they all called me a scoundrel, a speculator, a profiteer, and I don’t know what all. Suddenly even the old tanks were worth something too and the trucks and all that extra junk I’d had carted away—all quite legally of course—merely because those two huge lots of mine had been empty and I had all that money lying around.

“Well, it was then that the terrible thing happened, the thing those women have never forgiven me. Leni’s father was killed in an accident while getting out scrap metal from the ruins of what was once the Health Department. I never doubted that this work might be dangerous, some of it highly dangerous, and I used to give the men supplementary risk-pay, that’s to say I raised the fixed rate per foot, which was the equivalent of risk-pay, and I warned old Gruyten when he began waving the cutting-torch around, and I ask you, how was I to know he had so little sense of statics that he would burn the ground from under his feet, so to speak, and go crashing twenty-five feet into the ruins? Good God, he was a construction man, wasn’t he, he had an engineering degree, didn’t he, and he must have used ten times as many steel girders in the course of his
career as I’d managed to get out of the ruins in five years—how was I supposed to know he would bring about his own downfall, so to speak? Could I foresee that, am I to blame for that? Didn’t everyone know it’s a risky business, burning out steel girders from a bombed concrete building in a ruined city, and didn’t I pay for this risk accordingly? And, to be honest, not once on the job, either collecting those girders or cutting or burning them out did that almost mythical construction man Gruyten prove particularly skillful, or even theoretically technically informed—I paid him a bit extra on the q.t. because of Leni, since what was going to happen to her and Boris mattered a good deal to me.”

Pelzer’s tears were now flowing so fast that it would have been a crime to doubt their physical genuineness, whereas it is beyond the Au.’s competence to pass an opinion on their emotional genuineness. On he went, in a low voice, clutching his highball glass, looking around as if his rumpus room, his bar, his wreath collection in the next room, were unfamiliar to him: “It was a terrible fate, to be impaled like that on a bunch of reinforcing rods that was sticking up out of a concrete slab, transfixed, not mangled, just transfixed, transfixed in four places through his neck, through the abdomen, through the chest, and again through the right arm above the elbow, and—it was terrible, awful I tell you—smiling. Still smiling—crazy, he looked like a crucified madman. Madness. And then to blame me for it! And” (hesitation in P.’s voice, anguish in his eyes, trembling hands. Au.) “and the cutting-torch hung hissing, spitting, steaming from the remains of the projecting girder that Gruyten had just burned off. It was crazy, the whole thing, one month before the currency reform, when I was just about to wind up my girder-collecting and anyway my entire Reichsmark capital had been used up.

“Needless to say, right after the accident I liquidated the whole business, and if those women say I did that because
I’d wanted to wind it up anyway, that’s a monstrous lie: I tell you, I’d have stopped even if it’d been the middle of 1946. But just try and prove a ‘would have, if,’ just try and prove that. But as it happened, in actual fact, one month before the currency reform—that’s how it was, and there I sat, those women breathing hatred down my neck and with scorn in their faces all on account of my scrap pile, which went on steadily rusting away and continued to lie there for another five years. And because old Gruyten hadn’t been insured—I’d taken him on as a kind of free-lance colleague after all, not as a worker or as an employee, but more or less as a subcontractor—I volunteered to pay Leni and Lotte a small pension: nothing doing—Lotte spat at me once as I was leaving her place. ‘Bloodsucker,’ she screamed, and ‘crucifier’ and worse. Yet I saved her life in that Soviet paradise in the vaults, I shut her mouth with my own hand when she suddenly began yelling socialist slogans like a madwoman during that looting in the Schnürer Gasse. I put up with her brats, bought my own cigarette butts back as freshly rolled cigarettes from those cunning little devils, when we started to run low at the end of February, in our vaults—we spent almost seven hours cooped up together on ‘the Second,’ clinging to one another, our teeth chattering, and believe me, even that atheist Lotte was murmuring her Our Father after Boris as he recited it for us, even the Hoyser brats were quiet, scared and awed, Margret was crying, we had our arms around one another like brothers and sisters as we crouched there thinking our last moment had come. I tell you, it was as if the world were coming to an end. It didn’t matter any more whether one person had once been a Nazi or a Communist, the other a Russian soldier, and Margret an all-too-merciful sister of mercy, only one thing mattered: life or death. Even if you’d more or less kept out of the churches they still meant something to you, they were part of the scene, after all, part of life—and in one single day they were reduced to dust, for
days we’d still be gritting dust between our teeth, feeling it on our gums—and when the raid was over, out we rushed, the moment we could, to take possession together—together I tell you—of our legacy from the German Army—and that same day, just as it was beginning to get dark, to help bring Leni’s and Boris’s son into the world.”

Still tears, and the voice softer, still softer: “The only person who understood me, who was fond of me, whom I’d taken like a son to my heart, into my family, my business, anything you like, who was closer to me than my wife, closer than my kids are to me today—you know who that was? Boris Lvovich—I loved that boy, although he robbed me of the girl I still hanker after today—the fact is, he really knew me, knew me for what I was, he insisted on my baptizing the little boy. Me. With these hands, yes—and I don’t mind telling you, a kind of shock of horror ran through my body when I thought in a flash of all the things those hands had been responsible for, what they’d done to the living and to the dead, to women and to men, with checks and with cash boxes, with wreaths and ribbons and so forth—and he wanted me, me, with these hands, to baptize his little boy. Even Lotte shut her trap then, she’d been on the verge of making her usual remark about crap—she was flabbergasted, speechless, when Boris said to me: ‘Walter,’ he said—after what we’d been through together we all used first names—’Walter,’ he said, ‘I ask that you now perform an emergency baptism for our son.’ And I did—I went into my office, turned on the faucet, waited till the rust and dirt had run out and the water ran clearer, rinsed out my tumbler, filled it with water, and baptized him, the way I’d so often seen it done when I was an altar boy—and because I couldn’t be godfather too, of course, that much I knew, young Werner and Lotte held the baby, and I baptized him with the words: ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost I baptize thee Lev’—and at that point even that little rascal
Kurt burst into tears and even that shrew Lotte, and Boris, and Margret was in floods anyway—only Leni didn’t cry, she lay there, radiant, her eyes open and inflamed with dust, and at once put the baby to her breast. Yes, that’s how it all happened, and now, would you mind leaving—it’s stirred up too much inside me.”

The Au. frankly admits that all this had stirred him considerably too, and that he had a hard time suppressing a tear or two that welled up as he seated himself at the wheel of his car. To avoid giving way to excessive sentimentality he drove straight to Bogakov, whom he found in pleasant circumstances: sitting in a wheelchair on a glass-roofed terrace, wrapped in blankets, looking pensively out over an extensive garden-allotment colony toward the intersection of two railroad tracks, between which a gravel pit, a nursery garden, and a scrap yard were squeezed. Somewhere among all this, the incongruous sight of a tennis court, with puddles still visible on its faded red surface, Starfighters in the air, traffic noise from a bypass, children playing hockey with empty cans on the paths between the allotment gardens. Bogakov, likewise in sentimental mood, without his smoking gallows, alone on the terrace, declined the proffered cigarette and took hold of the Au.’s wrist as if he—Bogakov—wanted to feel his—the Au.’s—pulse.

“You know, I left a wife back there, and a son who I imagine would be about your age if he has survived the twenty thousand possibilities of coming to a sticky end. My boy Lavrik was nineteen in ’44, and they’re sure to have taken him—who knows where—and sometimes, you know, I think of going back and dying there, never mind where—and my wife Larissa, I wonder if she’s still alive? I was unfaithful to her as soon as I got a chance in February ’45 when they sent us to the Erft
front to dig ditches and foxholes and gun emplacements. That was the first time in four years that I’d laid hands on a woman and visited with her—in the dark, we were lying there in a barn every which way, Russians and Germans, soldiers, prisoners, women—and I couldn’t tell you how old she was—well, I can’t say she resisted, only later she cried a bit, because I suppose neither of us was used to it, adultery if you can call it that, in that darkness, in that madness, with no one knowing where they belonged—there we lay among the straw and the sugar beets, in Grossbüllesheim, a real rich kulak village—my God, we both cried, I did too—it was really more of a crawling close together in fear and darkness and dirt, we fellows with mud on our feet, and maybe she took me for a German or an American since there were a few half-frozen wounded American boys lying around there too, someone was supposed to get them to a hospital or to an assembly point, but I guess he deserted and just left the boys lying there, and about all they could say at that point was ‘fucking war’ and ‘fucking generals’ and ‘shit on the fucking Hürtgen Forest’—that wasn’t hands across the Elbe, it was hands across the Erft, and it was along a pitiful little river like that, one you could’ve spat across, that the Erft front was to be formed, between the Rhine and the western frontier—a boy of ten could’ve pissed across it. Well, sometimes I think of the woman who opened up to me—I stroked her cheek and her hair, it was thick and smooth. I don’t even know whether it was fair or dark or whether she was thirty or fifty or what her name was.

“We got there in the dark and left again in the dark—all I saw was those big farms, fires burning where men were cooking their meals, soldiers, those frozen Americans, and us in the middle of it all, Boris was there too, Leni following him like the girl with the seven pairs of iron shoes—I hope you know that nice little fairy tale. Darkness, mud on our feet, sugar beets, a woman’s cheek, her hair, her tears—and, well yes, the inside
of her body. Marie or Paula or Katharina, and I hope it never occurred to her to tell her husband about it or to whisper it to some father confessor.

“No my boy, don’t take away your hand, it’s good to feel the pulse of a human being. The pickle-eater and the world-weary Russian from Leningrad have gone off to the movies. To see a Soviet film about the battle of Kursk. That’s fine with me. I was taken prisoner by the Germans back in August ’41, my boy, in some lousy battle not far from Kirovograd. Anyway, that’s what the town was still called in those days, who knows what it’s called today, considering what they did to Kirov—that was my man, our man, Kirov—well O.K., so he’s gone.

“It wasn’t very salubrious, that German POW camp of yours, my boy, and if you tell me that ours weren’t salubrious either then I’ll tell you that our people were going through just as bad a time as the German prisoners—for three days, four days, we marched through villages and across fields and went almost crazy with thirst—whenever we saw a spring or a little stream we’d lick our lips with thirst and quit thinking about eating—five thousand of us stuck into a cattle yard on a kolkhoz, out in the open, and still thirsty. And when peaceful civilians, our own people, tried to bring us something to drink or eat they weren’t allowed near us—the guards just fired right into them—and if one of our own lot approached the civilians: machine gun, my boy, and that was the end of him. One woman sent a little girl, maybe five years old, toward us with some bread and milk, a really sweet little Natasha—she must have thought they wouldn’t do anything to a sweet little kid like that, carrying milk in a jug and bread in her hand, but nothing doing—machine gun—and our little Natasha was as dead as any of the others, and there was milk and blood and bread on the ground.