Group Portrait with Lady (45 page)

The following report by this informant (who wishes to remain as anonymous as the exalted personage) is reproduced here without a break, although in fact it was given in bits and pieces, the informant being constantly interrupted by customers. The Au. was thus able to witness the highly intransigent sales policy of this “sixty-eighter” who, when asked for porno products at least fourteen or fifteen times in less than half an hour, replied brusquely, if not morosely: “I don’t sell that stuff.” Even relatively harmless press organs—such as highbrow and lowbrow daily papers and illustrated weeklies of a
semi
or
moderately
harmless nature—were, so it seemed to the Au., parted with reluctantly by the “sixty-eighter.”

The Au.’s cautious prognosis that, in view of such a sales policy, he had doubts as to whether the kiosk would show a profit, was given a straight rebuttal by this informant. “As soon as I’ve wangled my old-age pension I’m going to close up shop anyway. So far all I’ve got is a small reparations pension, and when that was approved I was made to feel in no uncertain terms that they’d have preferred it if I hadn’t survived. It would’ve been cheaper for them too. No, I’m not going to sell that humiliating bourgeois crap, that porno-imperialism, no matter how hard they try to make me—like: ‘A kiosk in such a key location is morally obliged to maintain a stock for potential customers that conforms to popular demand’ (Quotation from a submission by a city councillor, member of the Christian Democratic Union party). No sir, that’s not for me. Let them finally get around to selling their filth where it belongs: in
church doorways, along with those religious pamphlets and their hypocritical pussyfooting around about chastity. No sir, that’s not for me. Sticks and stones may break my bones—but never mind, let them go on boycotting me and suspecting me, I’ll carry on with my own censorship. I’m not going to sell that humiliating bourgeois crap if it kills me.”

By way of amplification it may be added that this informant is a chain smoker, with the complexion and eyes that betoken a diseased liver, with thick whitish-gray hair, glasses with very thick lenses, trembling hands, and on his face such a concentrated expression of contempt that the Au., try as he might, could not pretend to be excluded from that contempt.

“I might’ve known, back then when they took Ilse Kremer’s husband Werner out of the camp in France, those Vichy Fascists, and handed him over to the Nazis, as I found out later. No one can have any idea of how we felt during that year and a half during the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Well, they shot Werner, and they circulated a rumor that he’d been a Fascist traitor and that in order to get rid of Fascist traitors it was all right to make use of the Fascists. And I went on believing that crap till ’68. ‘Root out the Fascists from your ranks by denouncing them to the Fascists as spies!’ Well, naturally, that way the hands of the dictating proletariat stayed clean at least. O.K. That was enough for me. No sir. I should’ve listened to Ilse in ’45, but I didn’t. For twenty-three years I went on working, legally and illegally, letting myself be denounced, arrested, spied on, laughed at. Now as soon as I close up this place I’m off to Italy, maybe there’s still a few human beings there, and a few who aren’t arselickers like us.

“As for that business with the Pfeiffer girl, the Gruyten girl—at the time even I found it embarrassing, though I was still as bigoted as a whole clutch of cardinals. We’d just found out that, at the risk of her life, she’d had a love affair with a Red Army soldier, that she’d smuggled food to him, maps,
newspapers, war reports, she even had a child with a Russian first name by him. We wanted to make her look like a Resistance fighter, and do you know what that Red Army soldier had taught her? How to pray! What madness! Well, she was very attractive, a lovely-looking wench, and that looked good at those pitiful functions of ours, seeing as how we had to put up some sort of fight against the crazy goings-on of an allegedly Socialist army in East Prussia and so on. If only I’d listened to Ilse, she told me: ‘Fritz, be honest with yourself, admit things can’t be done this way any more, not this way. This isn’t what we wanted in ’28, now is it, when maybe we did still have to support Teddy Thälmann for tactical reasons. Be honest with yourself and admit that Hindenburg won, even in ’45. And leave that nice girl alone, you’ll get her into trouble without doing yourselves any good.’

“True enough, but the fact is she was a worker, a genuine worker, even if she did come from a bourgeois family that had once seen better days, and, let’s face it, a few times we got her to carry the red flag and march with us through the city, though we had to get her almost drunk to do it because she was so painfully shy, and then a few times she sat very decoratively on the platform while I made a speech. I still feel embarrassed whenever I think about it.” (Was the plainly visible darkening of Fritz’s already dark skin a kind of blush? Surely a legitimate question. Incidentally, the name Fritz is fictitious; “Fritz’s” true first name is not known to the Au.)

“The thing was, she was so gloriously proletarian—totally incapable of adopting, let alone practicing, the bourgeois profit mentality—but Ilse was proved right: we did her harm and ourselves no good, for the couple of times she actually did answer reporters when they asked her about Boris and what she had learned from him ‘underground’ she told them: ‘How to pray.’ Those were the only words she uttered, and needless to say the reactionary press made hay out of them and couldn’t
resist devoting a headline to us: ‘Learns to pray with German Communist Party. Delacroix blonde a Trojan horse.’ Quite unnecessarily, she had at some time or other actually become a party member and forgotten to resign, so she promptly had her apartment searched when we were banned, and then she dug in her heels and, as she put it, ‘just to show them,’ refused to resign, and when I asked her once why she had gone along with us in the first place she said: ‘Because the Soviet Union has produced people like Boris.’ A person could go crazy at the thought that in some very roundabout way she actually did belong in our world but we didn’t belong in hers—and then, yes, then you really get confused because that makes you realize why the world proletarian movement has been such a total flop in Western Europe.

“Oh well, never mind. I’m off to Italy soon, and I’m sorry to hear she’s having such a thin time. I’m not someone she’d like to be reminded of, otherwise I’d ask you to say hello to her for me. I should’ve listened to Ilse and old Gruyten, the girl’s father—he just laughed, laughed and shook his head when Leni marched off with her red flag.”

It should perhaps be added that Fritz and the Au. took it in turns to offer each other cigarettes, while Fritz sold the bourgeois newspapers he found so contemptible with an almost voluptuous contempt. He did it with gestures and in a manner that a perceptive customer might have felt to be insulting. Fritz’s comment: “Now they’ll go off and read that claptrap, that feudalistic blarney, the kind of stuff that, when you read it, you can hear just the right amount of condescension in the writers’ voices. And they gobble up sex and hash the way they used to gobble up all that priests’ hogwash, and they wear their minis and their maxis as dutifully as they used to wear their chaste little white blouses. I’ll give you some good advice: vote for Barzel or Köppler, then at least you’ll get liberal baloney first hand. Personally, I’m learning the language of human
beings, Italian, and I’m spreading the slogan: Hash is opium for the people.”

It was a load off the Au.’s mind to have at least a partial explanation for this embarrassing episode in Leni’s life, but he had no luck when it came to confronting further potential informants as soon as they opened their front doors and greeted him with the question: “Are you for or against ’68?” Since the Au., riddled with the most varied motivations, torn this way and that between the most varied emotions, did not immediately, at least not the first time, understand why he should opt in favor or otherwise of an entire year in the twentieth century, he pondered too long over this particular year and finally decided, on the basis of what he frankly admits to being an almost habitual compulsion to the negative, on the reply: “Against”—thereby closing those doors to himself for all time.

Nevertheless, he managed to find among some archives the newspaper quoted by Fritz apropos Leni. It was a Christian Democrat paper, published in 1946, and Fritz’s quotation was verified as “word for word correct” (Au.). Of interest and hence perhaps worth passing on were two items: the wording of the article itself, and a newspaper photo showing a speaker’s platform, decorated with Communist Party flags and emblems, on which Fritz is to be seen in practiced rhetorical pose—astonishingly young: in his middle or late twenties, as yet without glasses. In the background, Leni holding a banner with Soviet emblems aslant over Fritz’s head, a pose vividly recalling to the Au. the part played by banners during certain liturgical ceremonies that demand the lowering of banners at the most solemn moments. As she was in this picture, Leni made two distinct impressions on the Au.: she seemed both appealing
and out of place, not to say—something that cannot be said lightly—phony. Actually the Au. wishes he could concentrate his visionary powers on this photograph by means of an as yet uninvented lens, so as to burn Leni out of it. Fortunately, in this poorly reproduced newspaper picture she is recognizable only to the initiated, and it is to be hoped that no archives exist containing any negative of this photo. As for the article itself, it may be as well to quote it verbatim. Under the aforesaid photo caption appears the headline:

“Young woman with Christian upbringing taught by Red hordes to pray. It is almost unbelievable, yet a proven fact, that a young woman, of whom one scarcely knows whether to call her Miss G. or Mrs. P., claims to have been taught how to pray again by a Red Army soldier. She is the mother of an illegitimate child whose father, she proudly claims, is a Soviet soldier with whom, two years after her husband P. had sacrificed his life in the native land of the illegitimate father, she entered upon a sexual relationship that was both illegal and illegitimate. She is not ashamed to make propaganda for Stalin. Our readers require no warning in the face of such madness, but perhaps it is legitimate to ask whether certain manifestations of pseudo-naiveté should not be classified as political criminality. We know where we learned how to pray: while being taught Religion at school, and in church; and we also know what we pray for: for a Christian Western world, and readers to whom this report has given food for thought might perhaps utter the occasional silent prayer for Miss G. alias Mrs. P. She can use it. In any event, the prayerful former Lord Mayor Dr. Adenauer has, in our view, greater power of conviction than could be contained in the little finger of this duped, possibly mentally disturbed woman (girl?) who is said to come from a family which, while once respected, has from every point of view gone steadily downhill.”

The Au. fervently hopes that Leni was just as sporadic a newspaper reader then as she is today. He—the Au.—would be very sorry to see her hurt in such Christian Democrat style.

Meanwhile it has been possible to verify another important detail: the notches cut by Marja van Doorn when the Pfeiffers were asking for Leni’s hand on behalf of Alois have been discovered by Grete Helzen on the door frame—and it is clearly evident that on that occasion the word honor was uttered sixty times. This is turn proves two further details: M.v.D. is a reliable informant, and: Leni’s door frame has not been painted for thirty years.

After some devious efforts (which turned out to be superfluous) it was also possible to verify that strange word “Crystalation.” The Au. made some attempts (superfluous, see above) to obtain an explanation from more youthful clerics, this word, despite its mineralogical ring, having been uttered by the unimpeachable Grandma Commer in an ecclesiastical context. Result: negative. The pastoral agencies to which he made a number of telephone calls felt (unjustifiably!) that the Au. was having fun at their expense, and while they listened—reluctantly and with extreme caution—to his explanation, they showed a complete lack of interest in the linguistic context, simply hanging up (or replacing the receiver). Hence these calls turned out to be merely an annoyance and a waste of time, until the thought occurred to him—which it might have done earlier, the word having reached him from the geographical triangle Werpen-Tolzem-Lyssemich—to ask M.v.D. She instantly identified it as a dialect term for “Christian lessons,” a service
that “was actually designed for children as a kind of extra religious instruction but we grown-ups sometimes went too, as a sort of refresher course; mind you, it was usually held at a time when our family was having a nap after a heavy midday dinner: around three on Sunday afternoons” (M.v.D.). More than likely it is a Catholic parallel to the Protestant “Sunday school.”

The Au. (who had fallen behind in his research because of the Clay-Frazier fight) felt some twinges of conscience over the financing of his investigations and the related question of how much the income-tax department was bound to lose. Should he indulge in the trip to Rome, so that by investigating the archives of the Order’s motherhouse he could find out the truth about Haruspica? Although his encounters with the two Jesuits in Freiburg and Rome had had their human value, from the reportorial standpoint they had turned out to be unprofitable and—incl. telephone, telegram, postage, and traveling expenses—an unquestionably poor investment; virtually all he had derived from them was a little saint’s picture, whereas Margret, for all her malfunctioning exocrine and endocrine glands, to visit whom had cost him merely a few bunches of flowers, a bottle of modest dimensions that he had filled with gin, and the occasional few cigarettes—not even a taxi (since for reasons of health he usually preferred to walk there)—had made him the richer by a few significant and unexpected details about Heinrich Gruyten. Besides, apart from the matter of income-tax deductions, were there not also humanitarian aspects to be considered: would he not be getting the kindly Sister Cecilia into trouble, causing embarrassment to Sister Sapientia, and possibly provoking yet another disciplinary transfer for the less than likable Alfred Scheukens?