Group Portrait with Lady (46 page)

So that he might reflect in peace on all these problems, the Au. began by undertaking a journey to the Lower Rhine, traveling second-class on a train without a dining car—in fact without even a snack bar—through the pilgrims’ mecca of Kevelaer, through the home town of Siegfried, arriving shortly thereafter at the town where Lohengrin lost his nerve, and thence by taxi another three miles or so, past the home of Joseph Beuys, to a village that seemed almost unrelievedly Dutch.

Tired, and rendered somewhat irritable by the uncomfortable three-hour journey, the Au. decided on some immediate light refreshment. This he consumed at a snack-stall where an attractive blond served him French fries, mayonnaise, and meatballs (hot), and then directed him for his coffee to an inn across the street. It was a foggy day, mist curling in the air, and it was easy to believe that Siegfried had not only ridden through Nifelheim on his way to Worms but had actually come from this nebulous-sounding place.

Inside the inn all was warm and quiet; a sleepy innkeeper was serving schnapps to two sleepy male customers and pushed a large schnapps toward the Au. with the words: “Best thing for this weather, takes away the shivers; besides, after French fries with mayonnaise it’s a must,” continued to chat quietly with his two customers in a guttural dialect that sounded positively Batavian. Although the Au. was now only some sixty miles from his home base, he felt by comparison like a southerner; he liked the lack of curiosity on the part of the two sleepy men and the innkeeper, who was already pushing a second schnapps across the counter toward him; the main topic of conversation seemed to be “the kirk,” in concrete, architectural, and organizational terms as well as in the abstract, almost metaphysical sense; much shaking of heads, some muttering, then some remarks about the
Paapen
, by which they cannot possibly have meant the embarrassing German Reich Chancellor von Papen; no doubt these three dignified men would not have found him
worthy even of mention. Was it possible, he wondered, that one of these three, who for once, although they were Germans in a bar, were not talking about the war, might have known Alfred Bullhorst? Probably all three did, it was even possible, or very likely, that they had been in the same class at school, had gone to confession with him on Saturdays, fresh from the tub and hair slicked down, and on Sundays to Mass, and on Sunday afternoons to that form of instruction that somewhat farther south was called Crystalation, had slid in clogs along icy gutters, had made the occasional pilgrimage to Kevelaer and smuggled cigarettes from Holland. Judging by their age, they must have, might well have, known him, the man who late in 1944 died in Margret’s military hospital after a double amputation and whose papers had been lifted in order to provide a Soviet soldier—temporarily, at least—with legitimate status.

The Au. declined a third schnapps and asked for some coffee to prevent the pleasant somnolence from putting him to sleep. Was it here in Nifelheim that on just such a foggy day Lohengrin had lost his nerve when Elsa finally put the question; was it somewhere here that he had boarded the swan which later generations have so casually adopted as a symbol for a brand of margarine? The coffee was very good, passed through the hatch by a female person of whom only the plump pink-white arm was vouchsafed to the Au.’s view, the innkeeper heaped a generous portion of sugar onto the saucer, and the mandatory little jug contained not milk but cream. Church and priests, mild anger in the still subdued voices. Why, why had Alfred Bullhorst not been born a couple of miles farther west and, in that case, whose papers might Margret have pinched for Boris on that particular day?

Reasonably refreshed, the Au. proceeded first to the church, where he consulted the Roll of Honor: there were four Bullhorsts but only one Alfred—and that Alfred was reported as having died (aged twenty-two) not in 1944 but in 1945. That
was puzzling. Wasn’t this case like Keiper’s, for whom Schlömer had died a second death? Shouldn’t a double death have been reported? The sacristan who, on his way to carrying out some liturgical preparations or other (were they green, purple, or red, those cloths being spread out somewhere?) emerged from the sacristy nonchalantly smoking his pipe, knew the answer. The Au., hopeless at either lying or inventing (he is almost painfully dependent on facts, as any reader will have gathered by now), mumbled something about an Alfred Bullhorst he had run into during the war, whereupon the sacristan, skeptical although not suspicious, immediately told him that “their” Alfred had died in a mining accident while a prisoner of war of the French and had been buried in Lorraine; that an annual fee for permanent grave care was paid to a nursery in St. Avold; that his fiancée—“a slim pretty girl, blond, kind, intelligent”—had entered a convent, and that Alfred’s parents were still inconsolable because he “got it” when the war was already over. Yes, he had been employed at the Swan Margarine factory, a good lad, quiet, with no desire to be a soldier, and where had the Au. met him? Still not suspicious but nevertheless curious, the bald-headed sacristan gave the Au. such a penetrating look that the latter, after an awkward genuflection, took his leave with all possible speed. He would have been reluctant to correct the date of Alfred’s death, reluctant to tell Alfred’s parents that their annual payments were benefiting the bones, the ashes, the dust of a Soviet individual, not because he—the Au.—would have begrudged such care of that dust, those ashes—no, but one does like to know, after all, that the person assumed to be in a grave is in fact in it, and it did seem that in this instance this was not the case, and the most disturbing factor of all: it was obvious that here the German bureaucracy of death had failed completely. It was all very puzzling. And no doubt the sacristan had already been given enough to puzzle him.

The difficulty of finding a taxi will not be gone into here, nor the lengthy wait at Cleves, nor the return trip of almost three hours in a most uncomfortable train that again passed through Xanten and Kevelaer.

Margret, asked that same evening for information, swore “up and down” that this Alfred Bullhorst had died in her care: blond, sad, asking for a priest, both legs gone—only, before reporting his death, she had hurried to the orderly room, which had already closed for the night, opened the wall closet with an extra key, and extracted his identification papers, hiding them in her purse, and only then had she reported Alfred’s death. Yes, he had told her about his fiancée, a lovely girl, quiet, blond, had also mentioned his village—the very one which the Au., in the service of truth, had visited at such sacrifice of time and energy, but she admitted the possibility that, in all the hurry of relocating the hospital, the “formalities” had been overlooked, by which she meant not the funeral but the reporting of his death to his relations.

Only one question remains to be asked: did German bureaucracy really fail, or would it have been the Au.’s duty to seek out the elderly Bullhorst couple and make no bones about the bones in whose memory they were having heather or pansies planted year after year on All Saints’ Day, and to ask them whether they had never noticed that from time to time a bouquet of crimson roses lay on the grave, placed there by Leni and her son Lev whenever they came to visit it; or might the Au. have found at the Bullhorsts’ that pink printed card filled out by Boris, telling them he was now safe and sound in an American POW camp? These questions must remain unanswered. Not everything can be clarified. And the Au. frankly admits that, when confronted by the curious, skeptical look of a sacristan so Lower Rhenish as to be almost from the Low
Countries, not too far from Nijmegen, he too—like Elsa von Brabant and Lohengrin—lost his nerve.

To the Au.’s surprise, an explanation—although only partial—could be found, if not for Haruspica’s death, at least for one stage of her life: her future, not as she saw it but as others see it. This time the trip to Rome, which the Au. finally did decide to take, turned out to be well worthwhile. For information on the city of Rome the Au. refers the reader to the appropriate travel folders and guidebooks, to French, English, Italian, American, and German movies, as well as to the extensive literature on Italy to which he has no intention of adding; he wishes merely to admit that—even in Rome—he understood what Fritz was looking for; that he had a chance to study the difference between a Jesuit monastery and a nuns’ convent; that he was received by a truly delightful nun, who could not have been more than forty-one and whose smile was not patronizing but genuinely kind and understanding when she heard such flattering accounts from the Au. of Sisters Columbanus, Prudentia, Cecilia and Sapientia. Even Leni was mentioned, and it turned out that she was known at this Order’s mother house, situated so gloriously on a hill in the northwest sector of Rome. To think they know about Leni there! Beneath pines and palms, among marble and brass, in a cool room of considerable elegance, seated in black-leather Morris chairs, tea of a far from indifferent quality on the table, the burning cigarette perched on the saucer being not studiously, not graciously, but
genuinely
ignored, a truly charming nun who had written a graduation thesis on Fontane, was just embarking on a doctoral thesis on Gottfried Benn (!!), even if only at a college of the Order; a highly cultured Germanist who wore a simple habit (that suited her marvelously) and even knew all about Heissenbüttel—
she
knew about Leni!

Imagine it: Rome! Shadows of pine trees. Cicadas, ceiling fans, tea, macaroons, cigarettes, the hour about six in the evening, a person of seductive charms both physical and intellectual, who at the mention of
The Marquise of O
______ showed not the faintest hint of embarrassment, who, when the Au. lit a second cigarette after offhandedly stubbing out the first one in a saucer (imitation Dresden, but good imitation), suddenly whispered huskily: “For Heaven’s sake, let me have one too, that Virginia tobacco—I can’t resist the smell”—inhaled in a manner that can only be described as “sinful,” and continued in a whisper that now sounded downright conspiratorial: “If Sister Sophia comes in, it’s yours.”

This person, here at the center of the world, deep in the heart of Catholicism, knew Leni, even as Pfeiffer, not only as Gruyten, and this celestial person now proceeded with scholarly detachment to look through a green cardboard box, surface dimensions: standard letter-size, height: approximately four inches, and, with only occasional recourse to various papers and bundles to refresh her memory, produced information on “Sister Rahel Maria Ginzburg from the Baltic States; born near Riga in 1891, matriculated at Königsberg in 1908; attended university in Berlin, Göttingen, Heidelberg. Graduated from the last-named in 1914, majoring in biology. Jailed several times during World War I as a pacifist socialist of Jewish origin. In 1918 studied under Claude Bernard for her thesis on the beginnings of endocrinology, a work that was hard to place on account of its medical, theological, philosophical, and moral dimensions but was eventually accepted by an internist as a medical work. Practiced medicine in working-class areas in the Ruhr. Converted to Catholicism in 1922. Lectured extensively to Youth Movement groups. Entered the convent after much difficulty, due not so much to her pseudomaterialistic teachings as to her age, in 1932 she was forty-one after all and had not—to put it mildly—lived an entirely platonic life. Intercession by a cardinal. Entered the convent; was barred from teaching after
six months. Well”—at this point the lovely Sister Klementina calmly reached for the Au.’s package of cigarettes and “stuck a fag between her lips” (Au.)—“the rest you know, at least a bit of it. But I must correct any impression that they terrorized her at the Gerselen convent. On the contrary: they hid her. She was reported as ‘escaped’ and, to tell the truth, Miss Gruyten’s (or Mrs. Pfeiffer’s) charitable and possibly even slightly homoerotic association with her, her solicitude for her, posed a real threat to Sister Ginzburg, to the convent, to Miss Gruyten. Even Scheukens, the gardener, behaved most irreponsibly in letting Mrs. Pfeiffer in. Never mind, it’s past history now, we survived it, though painfully, though with mutual recrimination, and since I assume you have some small measure of insight into the dialectics of motivation I needn’t explain that if one wishes to save a person from concentration camp one is more or less obliged to hide that person under concentration-camp conditions. It was cruel, but wouldn’t it have been crueler still to have left her to her fate? One must face the fact that she was not much liked, and there was some harassment, some nastiness, on both sides, for she was a stubborn person.

“Well, to cut a long story short: now comes the terrible part. Will you believe me when I tell you that the Order has not the slightest interest in creating a saint but that, because of certain—certain phenomena which the Order would much rather suppress, it is being virtually forced on a course that is anything but popular? Will you believe me?”

To the Au. it seemed that the interrogative form of the future tense as applied to the verb “to believe,” issuing from the lips of such an eminent Germanist, of a nun “sinfully” inhaling Virginia cigarettes who, whenever she looked in the mirror, could not fail to be gratified by the sight of the classic line of her firm but delicate dark brows, the flattering effect of her nun’s coif, the intensely seductive line of her firm, frankly sensual mouth; who was quite well aware of the effect of her
uncommonly attractive hands; whose chaste habit nevertheless “hinted at” a faultless bosom beneath it—to hear from such lips the interrogative form of the future tense as applied to the verb “to believe” seemed to the Au. most unfair! A simple question in the future tense such as “Will you go for a walk with me?” or “Will you propose to me?” is perfectly permissible in such circumstances, but the question of whether a person
will believe
what he has not yet even heard—! The Au. was weak enough to nod his assent and moreover, penetrating looks having already challenged him to verbal utterance, to breathe a Yes such as is otherwise breathed only at the marriage altar. What else could he—the Au.—do?