Group Portrait with Lady (56 page)

“Professor Kernlich will not be answering your letter because you are not a relative of the deceased and, even if you were, he would not be obliged to supply you with the ‘more detailed information’ you desire on Mrs. Schlömer’s death. That is proscribed by a doctor’s duty to remain silent, it is also proscribed by a nurse’s duty to remain silent which I do not wish to violate. There is, I admit, a certain if not total indiscretion in my reporting to you on the last week of your deceased friend’s life, and this is why I enjoin you to make no
use of my letter. Naturally the statement on the death certificate as to cause of death is accurate: heart failure, complete circulatory debilitation, but how this point was finally reached, Mrs. Schlömer having been on the road to recovery as far as her acute illness was concerned, is what I would like to tell you.

“To begin with: the severe infection that brought your friend to our ward was contracted by her, as you now know, from a foreign statesman. No doubt you know better than I that during the last two years she had abandoned the frivolous mode of life which she doubtless conducted for many years, and that, after inheriting from her parents, she moved to the country in order to end her days in dignified tranquillity and remorse. By nature she was not, as no doubt you know better than I, in any way a prostitute, or even promiscuous, rather was she a woman forever enmeshed in certain masculine desires. She found it so hard to say ‘No’ when she felt it was within her power to give pleasure. I feel justified in putting it this way since during the night before her death Mrs. Schlömer recounted almost her entire life to me, revealing all the details of her ‘fall,’ and if—after working for twelve years in a university dermatological clinic and especially after the events still to be recounted—if, I say, I am far from inclining to idealize, let alone romanticize, the profession of prostitute, I do know that most of these women die in misery, ill, dirty, the wildest blasphemies on their lips, most of them so riddled with disease that not one of today’s lighthearted sex-magazines would portray them on their covers. It is the most miserable death imaginable: abandoned, riddled with disease, joyless, destitute—and this is why I have gone along to most of the funerals, since usually only a social worker and a routinely functioning priest accompany these women on their final journey.

“How then, without further ado, am I to approach the highly delicate subject that loses none of its embarrassing aspects even when I visualize you as a modern, broad-minded
woman who has been married and is not entirely unfamiliar with certain details still to be mentioned? Well, I too was once a medical practitioner, although I never qualified as a doctor; for reasons associated with the war—although those were not the only ones, there was also my dread of examinations, particularly of pre-med—I got no farther than the rank of medical orderly, and I subsequently accumulated so much knowledge and experience in German and Russian field hospitals that, when I was discharged in 1950 from a Russian POW camp at the age of thirty-five, I was irresponsible enough to pretend to be a doctor, and as such I carried on a successful practice, but then, found guilty of fraud, etc., in 1955, I spent some years in prison until, at the intervention of Professor Kernlich, with whom I had worked in my student days in 1937, I was prereleased, whereupon Professor Kernlich took me in and gave me employment; this was in 1958. So I am somewhat acquainted with the life of a person with a stain on his character. Incidentally, during my five years of ‘medical’ practice, no error was ever laid at my door. Now you know with whom you are dealing
—that
at least is off my chest.

“Now how do I go about getting the rest of it off my chest? I will try and take the bull by the horns! Your friend Margret was so far advanced in her recovery that there was no reason her discharge could not have been contemplated within six or eight weeks. All visits agitated her greatly, including the visits of that unexplained but pleasant gentleman who visited her frequently toward the end” (!!! Au.) “whom we first assumed to be an erstwhile lover, then a procurer, later a foreign-office official, i.e., the one who had effected that disastrous contact between her and the foreign statesman whom, in her own words, she was to, and did, get into a ‘treaty mood’ after other ladies had failed to do so.

“Well, shortly before she was to be discharged, something very strange, paradoxical one might say, took place. Accustomed
as I am, after studying medicine and years of ‘medical’ practice, by an association over nearly thirty-five years with the cynical jargon of VD treatment centers, I find it difficult to commit to paper, in writing to a lady such as yourself, something that would be even more difficult to do verbally. Well, my dear Mrs. Pfeiffer, I refer to the muscle that in physical, biochemical, and psychic terms, reacts and functions in such a complex manner and is commonly known as the male sex organ. You will not be surprised to learn (oh how relieved I am that the word is out!) that the women who usually fill our wards do not give this attribute names that one might call exactly delicate. Today as in the past, a variety of masculine first names have been very popular. While out-and-out coarse epithets sound bad enough, at least they correspond to the milieu and retain an almost matter-of-fact, a well-nigh clinical, character that renders them less offensive than the ‘genteel’ ones.

“Now during the very weeks in which your friend was beginning to recover, the use of masculine first names as nicknames for the aforesaid attribute became fashionable in our ward in a manner that I can only call childishly silly. You must realize, my dear Mrs. Pfeiffer, that in these wards silly fads do occur, the kind one might expect to find only in girls’ boarding schools, and what is more: they carry over onto the nursing and supervisory staff as well. As I had an opportunity to observe during my three years in prison, these ‘dialectic carryovers’ also occur between prison inmates and their guards. Nuns, and nursing nuns, inclined as they are toward silliness, especially enjoy participating in such foolishness in dermatological wards; this is not to be condemned, it is rather a form of self-defense. Now the sisters had always been extremely kind to your friend, when it was a matter of visitors and gifts, alcohol, and cigarettes, they very often turned a blind eye, but since some of them have been associating for thirty or forty years with venereal-disease patients they have in many cases—
in self-defense!—adopted their jargon as their own, in fact they not infrequently contribute to its enlargement.

“I now have something very strange to tell you that will either surprise you or, more likely, confirm your own impression. Mrs. Schlömer was an extremely modest woman. At first they used to tease her by speaking in the above context of ‘Gustav Adolf’ or ‘Egon,’ ‘Friedrich,’ etc., and were highly amused that Mrs. Schlömer did not know what they were talking about. It was all great fun, and the sisters would carry on like that for days and nights on end. At first the cruel game was restricted to out-and-out Protestant names: ‘Gustav Adolf’s been paying you too many visits,’ or ‘The trouble, is, you’ve loved Egon too much,’ etc., etc. Then, when the allusions designed to ‘rid her of that damned innocence’ (Patient K.G., a professional procuress of over sixty) became so obvious that Mrs. Schlömer understood what they meant, she began to blush violently every time a masculine name was mentioned. Her frequent and violent blushing was in turn interpreted as prudishness and hypocrisy, whereupon the cruel game was stepped up until it became the most arrant sadism. Until they reached the point where, in order to make the cruelty complete, they started adding feminine names in the appropriate context. They were especially fond of combining very Protestant names with very Catholic ones, which were then called ‘mixed marriages,’ such as Alois and Luise, etc. Finally Mrs. Schlömer was, in laymen’s terms, in a perpetual state of blushing, she even blushed when the name of a visitor or a nun or nurse was called out in the corridor in some harmless context. Once on this cruel path, and inwardly indignant over a sensitivity with which they were reluctant to credit Mrs. Schlömer, they eventually intensified these torments to the point of blasphemy, and from then on referred only to Saint Alois, who was at one time, of course, the patron saint of the chaste, to Saint Agatha, etc., and the stage was soon reached when psychological sensitivity was
no longer required for Mrs. Schlömer not only to blush but actually to cry out in spiritual anguish whenever ‘Heinrich’ or ‘Saint Heinrich’ was mentioned.

“Now blushing, as you probably know, also has its medical context. What we call blushing is usually caused by a suddenly increased circulation of the blood through the vessels and capillaries of the facial skin through the action of the sympathetic nervous system caused by pleasant agitation or embarrassment (as was the case with Mrs. Schlömer). Other causes of blushing—e.g., overexertion, etc.—need not be mentioned here. Now in Mrs. Schlömer’s case capillary permeability had anyway been increased. Hematomata (popularly known as ‘bruises’ or blue marks) soon began to form, as well as purpura, which might be known
vulgo
as red or purple marks. This, my dear Mrs. Pfeiffer, is what your friend died of. Ultimately—more than justifying the autopsy which then took place—her entire body was covered with hematomata and purpura, her sympathetic nervous system had been overtaxed, her circulation became blocked, her heart gave out; and since Mrs. Schlömer’s blushing had turned into a massive neurosis, on the evening of the night during which she died she even blushed when the sisters in the chapel were singing the All Saints’ Litany. I know I would never be able to produce scientific proof of my theory, or my claim, yet I feel constrained to tell you: your friend Margret Schlömer died of blushing.

“After she became too weak to talk coherently she would just keep whispering: ‘Heinrich, Heinrich, Leni, Rahel, Leni, Heinrich,’ and although it might have seemed appropriate to administer the last sacraments to her I decided in the end to refrain from doing so; it would have caused her too much anguish since toward the end they had even started, in their mounting blasphemy, to include in the above context the ‘dear Savior,’ the ‘sweet Child Jesus,’ and the Madonna, Holy Mary, the Most Blessed Virgin, in all Her epithets, even going so
far as to take them from the Litany of Loretto, such as Rosa Mystica, etc. A liturgical text recited at her deathbed would, I am convinced, have tormented Mrs. Schlömer more than it would have consoled her.

“I consider it my duty to add that Mrs. Schlömer, apart from the names Heinrich, Leni, Rahel, also spoke warmly, almost affectionately, of ‘that man who comes here sometimes.’ She was probably alluding to the visitor who was not so much mysterious as obscure.

“In signing this letter ‘Yours respectfully’ I would ask you not to interpret this as an evasion into a conventional salutation. Since I do not feel I can say ‘Yours sincerely’ lest it imply a certain familiarity, allow me to conclude:

“With kind regards,

“Yours respectfully,
“Bernhard Ehlwein.”

After giving the matter much thought K., who was now taking an active hand in the investigations, decided it would be better after all to convert the police officer’s report into indirect speech rather than quote it verbatim. This results, of course, in a considerable shift in style, and many a nice little detail goes out the window (like the lady in hair curlers, for example, who appeared in the company of a gentleman in his undershirt whose hairy chest was described as “furry”; also a “pitifully whimpering dog,” an installment-bill collector—all these fall victim to an iconoclasm of which the Au. by no means approves, victims of his lack of resistance). Whether the Au. is displaying d.u.a. or d.l.r. (deliberate lack of resistance) must remain an open question. K. deleted everything that seemed to her superfluous, using without a qualm the blue pencil that has become so familiar to her, and what is left is the “gist of it” (K.).

(1) Police Officer Dieter Wülffen, while seated in his parked patrol car outside the South Cemetery, was addressed a few days ago by a Mrs. Käthe Zwiefäller and asked to break open the apartment of Mrs. Ilse Kremer at 5 Nurgheimer
Strasse. On being asked why she considered this necessary Mrs. Z. stated that, after a prolonged search (to be precise: after twenty-five years!—during which, she must admit, she had not been
solely
occupied with this search), she had discovered Mrs. Kremer’s address and had taken time off to visit her and acquaint her with some important information.

Mrs. Z. was accompanied by her son, Heinrich Zwiefäller, aged twenty-five, a farmer like his mother (when applied to Mrs. Z. this term should actually be farmer
ess
. Au.). They had come, she said, to inform Mrs. K. that her son Erich, who had died in 1944, had made an attempt to go over to the Americans in a village between Kommerscheidt and Simmerath. In the process he had been shot at by Americans and Germans, had sought and found shelter in the Zwiefäller farmhouse, spent several days there, and an intimate love affair had developed between her, Käthe Z., and Erich K., he aged seventeen, she aged nineteen; they had become “engaged,” “sworn eternal devotion,” and decided not to abandon the house, even when the fighting became fierce, in fact extremely dangerous; the house had been situated “between the lines.” As the Americans advanced, Erich K. had tried to fasten a kitchen towel which, although it had red stripes, was mostly white, to the top of the door frame as a sign of capitulation, and while doing so had been killed by a sniper of the German Army with “a bullet through the heart.” She, Mrs. Z., had actually seen the sniper seated on a raised hunting stand “between the lines,” his rifle aimed not at the Americans but at the village, where admittedly after this occurrence no one (“There were still about five people living in the village”) had dared to run up a white flag. Mrs. Z. stated that she had pulled the dead K. into the house and laid him out in the barn, had wept many tears over him, then later, when the Americans captured the village, had laid him in “consecrated ground” with her own hands. She soon realized she was pregnant, and “in the fullness of time,” on
September 20, 1945, gave birth to a son and had him baptized with the name of Heinrich; her parents—at the end of 1944 she had been living alone in the house—had never returned from the evacuation, she had never heard of them again, they were regarded as having simply disappeared, probably killed in an air raid “somewhere along the way.”