Group Portrait with Lady (7 page)

It would probably have been a source of enormous pleasure to Rahel (Au.’s hypothesis) had she been permitted at least once to spend a week in a boarding school for boys, performing similar duties and obtaining similar insights to those she had been accustomed to perform and obtain among girls. Since the literature on the digestive differences between men and women was in those days meager, she had to rely solely on assumptions that gradually consolidated into a prejudice: she regarded almost all men as “hard stoolers.” Had her desire become known in Rome or elsewhere, she would naturally have been instantly excommunicated and expelled.

With the same passion with which she inspected the john bowls, she would look each morning into the eyes of the girls in her charge and order eye-bathings, for which she kept a small selection of eyecups and a jug of spring water in readiness; she would immediately discover any sign, even the slightest, of inflammation or trachoma, and invariably—to a far greater degree than when describing digestive processes—went into ecstasy as she explained to the girls that the retina was approximately as thick or as thin as a cigarette paper but consisted in addition of three layers of cells, the sensory cells, the dipolar cells, and the ganglion cells, and that in the first layer alone (approximately one third as thick or as thin as a cigarette paper) there were some six million cones and one hundred million tiny rods distributed, not regularly but irregularly, over the surface of the retina. Their eyes, she would preach to the girls, were an immense, irreplaceable treasure; the retina was only one of the eye’s fourteen layers, with a total of seven or eight layers each of which was in turn separated from the next. So when she then got going on ganglia, papillae, villi, and cilia, her second nickname would sometimes be murmured: Silly Billy Sister, or Sister Silly Billy.

One must remember that Rahel’s opportunities for explaining anything to the girls were occasional and limited; the girls’ timetable was fixed, and most of them really did regard her as being responsible for not much more than the toilet paper. Needless to say, she also spoke of sweat, pus, menstrual blood, and—somewhat at length—of saliva; it is almost superfluous to state that she was strongly opposed to excessive tooth-brushing; in any event she would tolerate vigorous tooth-brushing first thing in the morning only against her convictions, and even then only after vehement protests on the part of parents. As well as the girls’ eyes, she also inspected their skin—unfortunately, as it turned out, because on a few occasions she was accused by parents of immodest physical contact—not breast or abdomen, merely arms above and below the elbow. Later she proceeded to explain to the girls that, when one had acquired some personal experience, a glance at the excrements ought really only to confirm what one was aware of anyway on rising: the degree of well-being; and that it was almost superfluous—after sufficient experience—to look at them, unless one was not certain of one’s condition and needed a glance at them for further confirmation (Margret and B.H.T.).

When Leni feigned illness, which happened more and more often as time went by, she was sometimes allowed even to smoke a cigarette in Sister Rahel’s little room; Rahel explained that at Leni’s age, and for a woman, more than three to five cigarettes was not good. When she grew up she should never smoke more than seven or eight cigarettes, certainly remain below ten. Who would dare contradict the value of education when it can be stated that at forty-eight Leni still adheres to this rule, and that she has now begun, using a sheet of wrapping paper measuring five feet by five (in the present state of her finances, white paper of this size is more than she can afford), to realize a dream for which she has hitherto lacked the time: to paint a faithful picture of a cross section of
one
layer of the retina; she is actually determined to reproduce six
million cones and one hundred million tiny rods, and all this with the child’s paint box that was left behind by her son and for which she occasionally buys additional little cakes of cheap paint. When we consider that her daily output is at most five hundred rodlets or conelets, her annual output roughly two hundred thousand, we can see that for the next five years she will be fully occupied, and perhaps we shall understand why she has given up her job as a florist’s assistant for the sake of her rod- and cone-painting. She calls her picture “Part of the Retina of the Left Eye of the Virgin Mary alias Rahel.”

Is anyone surprised to learn that Leni likes to sing as she paints? Texts to which she randomly adds Schubert and folksong elements and what she hears on the program “Around the Home” (Hans), mixed with rhythms and tunes that draw from a Schirtenstein “not only emotion but attentiveness and respect” (Schirtenstein). Her song repertoire is obviously more extensive than her repertoire on the piano: the Au. is in possession of a tape made for him by Grete Halzen to which he can scarcely listen without the tears streaming down his cheeks (Au.). Leni sings rather softly, in a dry, firm voice that only sounds soft because of her shyness. She sings like someone singing from a dungeon. What is she singing?

The last verse is sung fairly often and is heard in four different variations on the tape, once even in Beat rhythm.

As we see, Leni treats otherwise hallowed texts with a good deal of freedom; depending on her mood, she combines elements of both music and text:

So we see that Leni, beyond being merely occupied, is productively occupied.

Without lapsing into any misplaced symbolism, Rahel gave Leni, who was invariably alarmed when confronted with the evidence of womanhood, a detailed explanation of the process of sexual intercourse, without the slightest necessity for Leni or her to blush: such explanations, of course, had to remain secret, for Rahel was clearly exceeding her authority. Perhaps this explains why Leni blushed so violently and angrily when a year and a half later during her official sex-education course she was fobbed off with “strawberries and whipped cream.” Nor did Rahel hesitate to apply the term “classical architecture” to the various shapes of bowel movements (B.H.T.).

It was also during her very first month at boarding school that Leni found another friend for life, that Margret Zeist whose reputation as a “hussy” had preceded her; the well-nigh unmanageable daughter of extremely pious parents who were no more able “to cope with her” than any of her former teachers had been. Margret was always cheerful, was considered “full of fun,” a dark-haired little person who, compared with Leni, seemed downright garrulous. It was Rahel who, while inspecting Margret’s skin (shoulders and upper arms), discovered after two weeks that the girl was carrying on with men. Since Margret is the sole witness to these events, a certain caution may be advisable here; personally, however, the Au. gained an impression of absolute credibility on Margret’s part.

In Margret’s opinion, Rahel found this out not only with her “almost infallible chemical instinct” but also by assessing the physical condition of her skin, of which Rahel later maintained, in a private conversation with Margret, that it “had radiated a tenderness both received and given,” whereupon—to Margret’s credit—Margret blushed, not for the first and far from the last time in her life. Moreover, she admitted that at
night she used to let herself out of the convent by a method she could not divulge and meet the village boys, not the men. Men turned her off, she said, because they stank, she knew this from her experience with a man, in fact with the very teacher who had claimed to be unable to cope with her. “Oh,” she added in her dry, Rhenish intonation, “he managed to cope with me all right.” Boys, she said, of her own age, that was what she liked, men stank—and—she candidly added—it was so wonderful the way the boys enjoyed themselves, some of them shouted for joy—so she would too, besides it wasn’t good for the boys to “do it alone”; the point was, it gave her, Margret, pleasure to give them pleasure—and it must be noted here that for the first time we see Rahel bursting into tears: “It was just terrible, the way she cried, and I got scared, and now, lying here, forty-eight years old and with syphilis and God knows what else, now at last I know why she cried so terribly” (Margret in the hospital). Rahel, after her tears had dried up—which, according to Margret, must have taken quite a while—looked at her thoughtfully, without any hostility, and said: “Yes, you’re a
fille de joie
all right.” “An allusion which at the time, of course, I didn’t understand” (Margret). She had to promise—and solemnly at that—not to lead Leni onto similar paths, nor to divulge to her how she let herself out of the school; although Leni was among those marked out for the bestowal of much joy, she was not a
fille de joie
. And Margret swore she would not, kept her word too, and “anyway Leni was never in any danger of that, she knew what she wanted.” And besides, Rahel was right, it was a skin that was loved with such tenderness and desired so intensely, especially the skin of her breast, and it had been quite incredible, all the things the boys had done with it. Asked by Rahel whether she had carried on with one or many, Margret blushed for the second time in twenty minutes and said—again in her flat, dry, Rhenish intonation: “Only with one at a time.” And once again Rahel had
wept, murmuring that it wasn’t good, what Margret was doing, not good at all and could only end in disaster.

After that, Margaret’s stay in boarding school did not last long; it all came out, what she was doing with the boys in the village (most of them altar boys), there was trouble with the boys’ parents, with the priest, with the girls’ parents, there was an investigation of the case at which Margret and all the boys refused to testify—Margret had to leave school at the end of her first year. For Leni there remained: a friend for life who later was often to prove her worth in situations that were dicey if not extremely dangerous.

One year later, not in the least embittered but with a still unsatisfied curiosity, Leni joined the labor force: as an apprentice (official designation: junior clerk) in the office of her father, at whose urgent request she became a member of that Nazi organization for girls in the uniform of which she even (may God forgive her) managed to look nice. Leni—it must be said—attended the “den evenings” without enthusiasm—and it must also be added, before misunderstandings arise, that Leni had no conception whatever, not the slightest, of the political dimensions of Nazism; she did not like the brown uniforms at all—the Storm Troopers’ uniform was particularly distasteful to her, and those who feel able to some degree to put themselves in her place in terms of her scatalogical interests and of her scatalogical training at the hands of Sister Rahel will know, or at least suspect, why she found this brown so exceedingly unpleasant. Her half-hearted attendance at the “den evenings,” which she finally dropped because from September 1939 on she was working in her father’s business as a “war-essential” employee, had other reasons: she found the whole atmosphere there too redolent of convent piety, for the group to which she
was assigned had been “commandeered” by a strong-minded young Catholic woman whose intention it was to infiltrate “this business,” and who, after making sure—without due thoroughness, unfortunately—that the twelve girls in her charge were trustworthy—restructured whole evenings by devoting them to the singing of songs to the Virgin Mary, meditations on the Rosary, etc. Now Leni, as can be imagined, had nothing against songs to the Virgin Mary, nothing against the Rosary, etc., the only thing was—at this point in time she was barely seventeen—that after two and a half years of painfully endured convent-school piety she was not all that interested, and she found it boring. Needless to say, the infiltration attempts on the part of the young lady—one Gretel Mareike—did not pass unnoticed, she was denounced by a girl—one Paula Schmitz—Leni was even called as a witness, remained (duly coached by Gretel Mareike’s father) steadfast, denied without batting an eyelid (as did ten of the twelve girls, incidentally) that they had sung songs to the Virgin Mary, with the result that Gretal Mareike was spared considerable suffering; what she was not spared was two months’ Gestapo arrest and interrogation, which was “more than enough for her”—and that was all she ever said about it (condensed from several conversations with Marja van Doorn).

By now it is the summer of 1939. Leni enters upon the most talkative period of her life, one that will last for a year and three quarters. She is known as a beauty, obtains her driver’s license by special authority, enjoys driving, plays tennis, accompanies her father to conventions and on business trips. Leni is waiting for a man “whom she means to love; to whom she can give herself unreservedly,” for whom she is already “dreaming up daring caresses—he is to find joy in me and I in him” (Margret).
Leni never misses an opportunity to go dancing, this summer she likes to sit on terraces, drink iced coffee, and play a little at being the “society woman.” There are some startling photos of her from this period: she could still apply for the title of “most German girl in the city,” in the district, in fact—perhaps even in the province, or that political-historical-geographical entity that has become known as the German Reich. She could have appeared as a saint (also as Mary Magdalene) in a miracle play, modeled for an advertisement for face cream, perhaps could even have acted in movies; her eyes are now quite dark, almost black, she wears her thick blond hair as described on
this page
, and not even the brief Gestapo interrogation and the fact that Gretel Mareike has spent two months in detention have substantially impaired her self-confidence.