Group Portrait with Lady (43 page)

“She brought him up all wrong, of course. She shouldn’t have refused to send the boy to school. After all, the boy was seven and a half then, and the way she carried on with him was completely unrealistic. Singing songs and telling fairy tales and that incongruous mixture of Hölderlin, Trakl, and Brecht—and I don’t really know whether Kafka’s
Penal Colony
is the right reading for a boy of barely eight, and I don’t know either whether the naturalistic depictions of all, and I do mean
all
, the human organs doesn’t lead to, well let’s say, to a somewhat too materialistic outlook on life. And yet: there was something quite wonderful about her, in spite of the pure anarchy that prevailed. I must say, those pictures of human sexual organs, and enlarged at that: I don’t really know whether that wasn’t a bit premature—today, of course, it would already be almost too late” (laughter from both. Au.). “But he was adorable, that child, adorable and quite natural—and what that young woman had gone through, she must have been just thirty at the time, and she’d lost you might say three husbands, and the brother, the father, the mother, and proud! No, I didn’t have the courage to go and see her again, she was that proud.

“We did correspond with her later, when my husband went to Moscow with Adenauer in ’55 and actually managed to find
one—repeat one—person at the Foreign Ministry whom he’d known during his Berlin days, and he barely had time on his way out to ask him about Koltovsky. Result: negative, grandmother and grandfather of that adorable child—dead; and his aunt Lydia—no trace.”

The personage: “I am not exaggerating when I say that it is the fault of the Western allies that Boris is no longer alive. By that I don’t mean that unfortunate and foolish subterfuge with the identification papers, and the fact that he was killed in a mining accident. No, that’s not what I mean. The fault of the Western allies lay in the fact that they arrested me and interned me for seven years, that’s to say, put me under lock and key, even if the locks didn’t lock that well and the keys weren’t always turned. You see, I had arranged with Erich von Kahm that he was to warn me as soon as the situation became acute for Boris, but when his entire guard personnel deserted he lost his nerve, and he did the best thing he could under the circumstances: sent him to the Erft front where he would have had no difficulty going over to the Americans at the first opportunity. Our plan had been a different one: Kahm was to get him a British or American uniform and put him into a POW camp for British or Americans—by the time the mistake was cleared up the war would have been over. It was madness, of course, to stick him with German papers, a German uniform, even a faked wound-tag. Madness. Naturally neither Kahm nor I could have had any idea that there was a woman behind it! And a child on the way, and the air raids! Lunacy! At the time I didn’t get much response out of the girl, she thanked me when she found out it had been I who had wangled Boris a job at the nursery, but thanked—well, you might say the way a reasonably well-brought-up girl would thank you for a bar of chocolate. That girl had no idea what I had risked, and how an affidavit by Boris would have helped me at Nuremberg and so on. I made an utter fool of myself in court and before my fellow
defendants by stating that I had saved the life of one Boris Lvovich Koltovsky, aged so and so much. The Soviet prosecutor said: ‘Well, we’ll try and locate this Boris since you even know his POW-camp number.’ But a year later he still hadn’t been found! At the time I thought it was all just a pretense. Boris could certainly have helped
me
if he had lived and if he had been allowed to.

“They accused me of making the most horrible statements, and while it is true that they were made at conferences I took part in, they were not made by me. Would you credit me with the following?” (Pulling out his notebook he read aloud): “ ‘Leniency is not called for even toward the Soviet prisoner of war who shows willingness to work and docility. He will interpret it as weakness and draw his own conclusions.’ I am also supposed to have suggested, during a meeting that took place in September ’41 with the head of the army munitions industry, that some RLS” (Reich Labor Service. Au.) “barracks which had housed a hundred and fifty prisoners be adjusted to house eight hundred and forty prisoners by installing tiered bunks. In one of my plants Russians are said to have come to work in the morning without bread or work clothes and to have begged German workers for bread—there are also supposed to have been punishment cells. Yet I was the one who in March ’42 complained that the Russians being sent to us had been so weakened by the atrocious camp diet that they were no longer able to operate a lathe properly, for instance. During a discussion with General Reinecke, the man responsible for all prisoners of war, I protested personally against the regulation mixture for what was known as Russian POW bread, this had to consist of 50 percent rye husks, 20 percent chopped sugar beets, 20 percent ground cellulose, and 10 percent ground straw or leaves. I managed to get the percentage of rye husks raised to 55 percent and that of chopped sugar beets to 25 percent, which meant that the horrible ingredients of ground
cellulose, ground straw or leaves, dropped correspondingly, at least in our plants—and at the expense of our plants.

“It is all too easily forgotten that the problems were not of the simplest. I pointed out to Backe, the Secretary of State in the Reich Ministry for Food, and to Moritz, the ministerial director, that work in the munitions industry must not be tantamount to a death sentence, and that such work required strong men. Finally it was I who pushed through what later became the famous ‘thick soup days.’ I had a row with Sauckel, who threatened me with jail and literally waved under my nose all the ordinances of the AHC and AFHC and CORSD” (Army High Command, Armed Forces High Command, Central Office of the Reich Security Department. Au.). “And because that utterly inhuman feeding system had to be kept from the German public, I made use of deliberate indiscretions to smuggle news of it out to Sweden and exposed myself to considerable danger in my efforts to alert world public opinion, and what thanks did I get? Two years’ internment, five years’ imprisonment, on account of our subsidiary plants in Königsberg, for which I
really
was not responsible.

“Well, all right, all right, others died, others were treated even worse than I was, and after all I am in good health and not particularly impaired” (?? In what way? Au.). “Let’s forget about it, and the whole hypocritical claptrap of the trial, when they held documents under my nose and accused me of statements that quite honestly I never made, I wanted so much to get that boy safely through the war, and I failed—I failed to find his parents and his sister after the war, and I completely failed to exert any influence on his son’s upbringing. Didn’t I prove that my cultural influence on Boris had not been all that bad? Who was it introduced him to Trakl and Kafka, and ultimately Hölderlin too, tell me that? And couldn’t that obtuse woman have eventually, through me, incorporated those poets into her inadequate cultural background and then passed them on to
her son? Was it really so presumptuous of me to feel an obligation to become a kind of sublimated godfather to the sole known survivor of the Koltovskys? I am convinced that Boris himself would not have turned down such a sincere offer, and did they really have to treat me with such contempt? Especially that impudent creature who was living there too—I’ve forgotten her name—with her vulgar socialist notions, who insulted me so rudely and finally threw me out—judging by what I’ve heard she hasn’t even been able to handle her own sons properly and has been living constantly on the periphery of society, not to say prostitution. And as for Gruyten, the father of that strangely silent woman and later on the lover of that impertinent pinko floozy, would anyone claim that during the war he was as innocent as a babe unborn? What I’m getting at is: there was no reason to turn me away so snootily and to accept without question the sentences passed by a court whose dubiousness is by now a household word. No indeed, I certainly got no thanks out of that affair.”

All this was delivered in a low voice, more injured than aggressive, and every so often Mimi would take his hand to calm him down when his veins began to swell.

“Money orders returned, letters not answered, advice not followed, when one day that impertinent creature, the other woman, I mean, told me point-blank in a letter: ‘Can’t you get it into your head that Leni wants nothing to do with you?’ Very well then—from that day on I kept entirely in the background, but of course I made it my business to find out what was going on, for the boy’s sake—and what has he turned out to be? I won’t say a criminal, for I am above accepting
any
legal concept without questioning it. I was a criminal myself, it was a crime for me to decide on my own that the rye-husk and chopped sugar-beet content of Russian POW bread be raised by 5 percent and the cellulose and leaf content correspondingly lowered, so as to make the bread more digestible:
I might have gone to concentration camp for that. And I was a criminal simply because I was associated with factories and, because of complex family and financial involvements, was among the major industrialists whose empire, or I should say extent, became so vast that a detailed overview was impossible. So you see I myself was enough of a criminal, during the most varied epochs, not to want simply to call the boy a criminal, but he went wrong, there’s no doubt about that—it’s madness, and the outcome of a crazy upbringing, for someone of twenty-three to try and restore certain property relationships by forging checks and promissory notes, relationships that happen to be legal though painful, irrevocable though the result of the perhaps embarrassing shrewdness, if you like, of the present owners. A deed of land is a deed of land, and a sale is a sale. In terms of psychoanalysis, the boy is suffering from a dangerous attachment to his mother as well as from a father-trauma. That woman had no idea what she was starting with that Kafka of hers—nor did she know that such widely different authors as Kafka and Brecht, when read so intensively, are bound to lie side by side indigestibly—and on top of everything else the extreme pathos of Hölderlin and those fascinating, decadent poems of Trakl: the child drank all that in just as he was learning to talk and listen, and there was that corporealist materialism, too, with its mystical overtones: naturally I am against taboos too, but was it right to pursue that biologism in such detail, that glorification of all the organs of the human body and their functions? After all, we are divided, aren’t we, divided in our nature? I tell you, it’s bitter when you are not allowed to help, it hurts to be rejected.”

Here again, something the Au. would have considered impossible in this case: T. as the result of W., the latter in turn as the result of hidden S.—and just then the dogs came bounding across the sumptuous lawn, Afghan hounds of regal beauty who briefly sniffed the Au., turned aside from him as
being obviously too low-class, and proceeded to lick away their master’s tears. Damn it all, was everyone suddenly beginning to get sentimental: Pelzer, Bogakov, the exalted personage? Hadn’t even Lotte’s eyes glistened suspiciously, hadn’t Marja van Doorn likewise wept openly—and hadn’t Margret already dissolved in tears, while Leni herself permitted her eyes just exactly as much moisture as was necessary to keep them clear and open?

The parting from Mimi and the exalted personage was friendly, their voices were still wistful as they asked the Au. to see if he could not intervene as mediator, they were still, and always would be, prepared to help Boris’s son—just because he was Boris’s son and Lev Koltovsky’s grandson—“get back on his feet.”

Grundtsch’s situation, physical and psychic as well as geographical and political, remained unclarified, almost unclear, at the end of the war. A visit to him was readily arranged: telephone call, appointment, and there was Grundtsch, after cemetery closing hours, standing by the rusty gate that is only opened when the pile of those discarded wreaths and flowers which are of plastic, hence useless for compost, is carted away. Grundtsch, hospitable as ever, pleased by the visit, took the Au. by the hand to guide him safely past “the specially slippery bits.”

His situation inside the cemetery had meanwhile improved considerably. Now the holder of a key to the public toilet as well as to the shower rooms of the municipal cemetery workers, and equipped with a transistor radio and a television set, he was enjoying to the full (It was around Eastertime. Au.) the imminent hydrangea boom expected for Low Sunday. On this cool March evening, although sitting about on benches was not possible, a peaceful stroll through the cemetery was,
this time to the main path called by Grundtsch the main road. “Our best residential area,” he said with a chuckle, “our most expensive lots, and in case it should ever occur to you not to believe our Sonny Boy, I’ll show you a thing or two that prove his story. He never lies, you know, no more than he was ever a monster” (chuckle). Grundtsch showed the Au. the remains of the electric cable laid by Pelzer and Grundtsch in February 1945: pieces of inferior-grade cable, with black insulation, leading from the nursery to an ivy-covered oak tree, thence through an elderberry bush (the clips attached to it, although rusty, still visible), through a privet hedge to the family tomb of the von der Zeckes. On the outer wall of this imposing burial place, more clips, more remains of inferior-grade cable with black insulation—and then the Au. was standing (not without a slight shiver, it is true) facing the solemn bronze door that had once formed the entrance to the Soviet paradise in the vaults but which on this nippy evening in early spring unfortunately was locked.

“Here’s where they went in, see?” said Grundtsch. “Then inside over to the Herrigers’, and from there on over to the Beauchamps’.” The von der Zecke and Herriger tombs were very well tended, planted with moss, pansies, and roses. Grundtsch’s comment: “That’s right, I took over the two annual contracts from Sonny Boy. After the war he had the passages bricked up again and plastered over, rather a botched job I’m afraid, done by old Gruyten, but he said the cracks that showed up later, and the crumbling plaster, were due to the bombs, and that wasn’t so far from the truth either, what with all the banging that went on during ‘the Second,’ it must have been quite something. Over there you can still see an angel with a bomb splinter in its head, as if someone’s battle-ax had got stuck in it.” (Although dusk was falling, the Au. could make out the angel and is able to confirm Grundtsch’s statement.) “And some of that sentimental art-stuff at the Herrigers’
and the von der Zeckes’ got wrecked, as you can see. The Herrigers had it restored, the von der Zeckes had theirs modernized, while the Beauchamps, that’s to say old Beauchamp, is just letting the grave fall to pieces. The boy—well, by now he’s close on sixty-five too, but back in the early twenties I used to see him in his sailor suit crying his eyes out and praying all over the place here, and he looked pretty funny, for even in those days he was a bit too old for a sailor suit, but he refused to give it up—and for all I know he’s still running around in it, down there in that sanatorium near Merano. Periodically his attorney’ll send a check so that at least the worst of the weeds can be taken care of, and this attorney’s insisting on burial rights for the funny old gentleman in the sailor suit who’s still living off the cigarette-paper factory. Otherwise, I guess, the city would probably pull the whole thing down. So there’s a regular lawsuit going on about a burial plot!” (Chuckle. Au.) “As if the old boy couldn’t just as well be buried down there in the Tyrol. Here we are at the chapel, the door’s fallen to pieces, you can have a peek if you like and see whether Leni and Boris left any of their heather behind.”