Group Portrait With Lady

  5

  A later generation may wonder how it was possible, in 1942–43, for wreaths to be considered war-essential. The answer is: so that funerals might continue to be conducted with as much dignity as possible. Wreaths may not have been in such great demand just then as cigarettes, but they were in short supply, no doubt about that, and they were in demand and important to the psychological conduct of the war. Government wreath requirements alone were vast: for air-raid victims, for soldiers dying in military hospitals, and since there would naturally be “the odd private death” too (Walter Pelzer, one-time nursery gardener, Leni’s former boss, now living in retirement on the revenue from his properties), and “quite often important Party, business, and military people were given state funerals of various categories,” every type of wreath, “from the simplest, modestly trimmed, to the rose-garlanded giant wheel” (Walter Pelzer), was considered war-essential. This is not the place for an appreciation of the state in its capacity as organizer of funerals; we may take it for granted, both historically and statistically, that there were a great many funerals, wreaths were in demand, both publicly and privately, and that Pelzer had managed to ensure for his wreath-making business the status of a war-essential enterprise. The farther the war progressed, in other words the longer it lasted (the connection between progress and duration is to be specifically noted), the scarcer, of course, did wreaths become.

  Should the prejudice exist “somewhere” that the art of wreath-making is trivial, any such notion—if only for Leni’s sake—must be firmly contradicted. When we consider that a wreath of blossoms represents the ultimate and basic design, that the unity of the total design must be unfailingly preserved; that there are different designs and techniques for forming a wreath frame, that in selecting the greenery it is important to select greenery suitable for the design that has been chosen; that there are nine principal types of greenery for the frame alone, twenty-four for the finished wreath, forty-two for bunching and wire-picking (overall category: stemming), and twenty-nine for “romanizing,” we arrive at a total figure of one hundred and twelve types of tying greenery; and although some of these may overlap in the various categories of their use, we are still left with five different categories of use and a complicated system of twining; and although one or the other greenery may be used both for tying and for the finished wreath, for stemming (which again subdivides into bunching and wire-picking), and for “romanizing,” we still find the basic principle applying here too: it is all a matter of know-how. Who, for instance, among those who look down on wreathmaking as an inferior occupation, knows when to use the green of the red spruce for the frame or the finished wreath, when he is to use arborvitae, Iceland moss, butcher’s-broom, mahonia, or hemlock fir? Who knows that in each case the greenery must form a solid layer, that skill in tying is expected throughout? So it will be seen that Leni, who has so far done nothing but light and random office work, now found herself thrust into no easily negotiable terrain, no easily learned craft, but into what almost amounts to an art studio.

  It is perhaps hardly necessary to state that for a time, while the Germanic motif was being vigorously promoted, the “romanized” or Roman wreath fell into disrepute, but that the controversy came to an abrupt end when the Axis was formed and Mussolini took somewhat vehement exception to the defamation of the Roman wreath; that the verb “to romanize” could then be freely used until mid-July 1943 when, however, in view of the Italian betrayal, it was once and for all stamped out (comment by a fairly high Nazi leader: “There will be no more romanizing in this country, not even in the making of wreaths or bouquets”). Every observant reader will understand at once that in extreme political situations not even the wreathmaking business is without its perils. Since, moreover, the Roman wreath had evolved as an imitation of the carved ornamental wreaths on Roman façades, the strict ban on it was reinforced by an ideological rationale: it was pronounced “dead,” and all other wreath designs were pronounced “living.”

  Walter Pelzer, an important witness for that period of Leni’s life, unsavory though his reputation may be, was able to prove with a fair amount of plausibility that at the end of 1943 and the beginning of 1944 he had been denounced to the craftsmen’s guild “by envious people and competitors” and that the following “intensely dangerous” (Pelzer) comment had been entered in his dossier: “continues to romanize.” “Good God, that could’ve cost me my neck in those days!” (P.). Needless to say, after 1945, when his unsavory past came under discussion, Pelzer tried to make out, “and not only on that basis,” that he had been “a victim of political persecution,” an attempt which—through Leni’s assistance, we are sorry to say—met with success. “For those were the wreaths which she—Leni, I mean the Pfeiffer girl—actually invented herself: firm, smooth wreaths of heather that actually looked as if they’d been enameled, but I don’t mind telling you—they really made a hit with the public. That had nothing whatever to do with romanizing or anything else—it was an invention of the Pfeiffer girl’s. But it almost cost me my neck because it was taken to be a variation of the Roman wreath.”

  Pelzer, now seventy, living in retirement on the revenue from his properties, twenty-six years after the events, began to look genuinely nervous and had to put aside his cigar for a minute in apparent preparation for a coughing fit. “And anyway—the things I did for her, the things I covered up—that really was appallingly dangerous, worse than the suspicion of romanizing.”

  Of the ten persons with whom Leni worked for a long time in close daily contact, it was still possible to trace five, including Pelzer himself and his head gardener Grundtsch. If Pelzer and Grundtsch are taken, quite correctly, to be Leni’s superiors, of the eight with whom she worked more or less as an equal there still remain three.

  Pelzer lives in an architectural structure which, although he personally calls it a bungalow, may without hesitation be described as a bombastic villa, a yellow-tiled building that had merely the appearance of a single story (the finished basement contains a sumptuous bar, a recreation room where Pelzer has installed a kind of wreath museum, a guest suite, and a well-stocked wine cellar); next to yellow (the tiles), the predominant color is black: wrought iron, doors, garage door, window trim—all black. The association with a mausoleum does not seem unfounded. Pelzer lives in this house with a rather sad-looking wife, Eva née Prumtel, who appears to be in her mid-sixties and mars her pretty face with bitterness.

  Albert Grundtsch, now eighty, still lives, “withdrawn into his shell,” virtually in the cemetery (G. about G.), in a large two-and-a-half-room stone (brick) shed from which he has easy access to his two greenhouses. Grundtsch has not, as Pelzer has done, profited from the cemetery expansion (nor does he wish to, let it be added) and grimly defends “the acre of greenhouses I was fool enough to give him at the time” (Pelzer). “You could almost say that the parks and cemetery administration will heave a sigh of relief when he kicks the—when he pegs—well, when he departs this life, let’s put it that way.”

  In the heart of the cemetery, which has swallowed up not only the few hectares of Pelzer’s nursery garden but also other nurseries and stonemasons’ yards, Grundtsch leads an almost autarkical existence: the recipient of an old-age pension (“Because I kept up his contributions,” P.), he lives rent-free, grows his own tobacco and vegetables and, since he is a vegetarian, has little trouble providing his own food; clothing problems are almost nil—he is still wearing a pair of old Gruyten’s pants which the latter had made in 1937 and which Leni passed on to Grundtsch in 1944. He has switched entirely to the (his own words) “seasonal potted-plant business” (hydrangeas for Low Sunday, cyclamen and forget-me-not for Mother’s Day; for Christmas, small potted firs trimmed with ribbons and candles to put on the graves—“the stuff they bring along to put on their graves—you wouldn’t believe”).

  The Au. felt that the parks administration, if it really is speculating on G.’s death, will have a longish wait. For he is not at all the
kind of person he is made out to be, “an indoor type, always shut away in his greenhouses” (municipal park employee); on the contrary, he uses the now immense cemetery “after business hours when the bell’s rung, and that’s usually pretty early, as a private park; I go for long walks, smoke my pipe on a bench some place, and when I feel like it sometimes go to work on a grave that’s been neglected or forgotten and give it a decent foundation—moss or spruce green, sometimes I even lay a couple of flowers on it, and, believe it or not, apart from thieves looking for copper and such, I’ve yet to meet a soul; of course there’s the occasional crazy person who refuses to believe a certain person’s dead when that person is dead; they climb over the wall so that even at night they can cry and curse and pray and wait beside the grave—but in fifty years I’ve only run across two or three of those—and then of course I make myself scarce, and every ten years or so some couple turns up with no fear or prejudice, lovers who’ve grasped the fact that there’s scarcely a place in the world where you can be so undisturbed—and then I’ve always made myself scarce too, of course, and these days naturally I’ve no way of knowing what goes on in the outlying parts of the cemetery—but believe me, even in winter it’s beautiful, when it’s snowing, and I go for a walk at night, all muffled up and wearing my felt boots and smoking my pipe—it’s so quiet, and they’re all so peaceful, so peaceful. As you can imagine, I’ve always had problems with girl friends, when I wanted to take them back to my place: nothing doing, I tell you—and the more tarty they were the less there was doing, even for money.”

  On being asked about Leni he became almost embarrassed. “Yes, of course, the Pfeiffer girl—do I remember her! As if I could forget her! Leni. Of course, all the men were after her, all of them it seemed, even Sonny Boy Walt” (referring to Pelzer, now seventy. Au.), “but no one really had the nerve. She was unapproachable, not in any prissy way, I must say, and because I was the oldest—I was already fifty-five or thereabouts—I never even thought I had a chance; of the others, I guess it was only Kremp who tried, the one we called ‘Dirty Berty,’ and in her cool offhand way she snubbed him so thoroughly that he gave up. How far Sonny Boy Walt tried it with her I don’t know—but you can be sure he never got anywhere, and the others, of course, were just women, conscripted for war jobs naturally, and the women were divided pretty evenly for and against—not for or against her, but that Russian who later turned out to be the darling of her heart. Can you imagine that the whole business lasted for nearly a year and a half—and none of us, not one, noticed anything serious? They were smart and they were careful. Well, of course there was a good deal at stake: two necks, or one and a half for sure. My God, I still get ice-cold shivers running down my spine right into my arse when I think of it now, what the girl was risking. On the job? How she was on the job? Well, maybe I’m prejudiced because I was fond of her, really fond of her, the way you can be fond of a daughter you’ve never had or—I was thirty-three years older than her, remember—of a woman you love and never get. Well, she simply had a natural talent—that tells the whole story.

  “We only had two trained gardeners, three if you count Walter, but all he ever thought of was his ledgers and his cash. Two, then: Mrs. Hölthohne, she was more of what you might call an intellectual gardener, Youth Movement and all that, she’d gone to university and then taken up gardening, a romantic sort of person—you know, the soil, and working with one’s hands and all that—but she knew her job all right, and then there was me. The rest were untrained, of course, Helga Heuter, Kremp, Miss Schelf, Mrs. Kremer, Marga Wanft, and Miss Zeven—a bunch of women, and they weren’t chicks either, at least there wasn’t one you’d’ve wanted to lay among the peat moss and the wire-picking material. Well, it only took me two days to realize there was one thing the Pfeiffer girl wasn’t suited for, and that was making wreath frames, that’s rough work and quite hard too, and the Heuter-Schelf-Kremp group took care of that, they were simply given a list and their pile of greens for tying, depending on supply—as time went on we couldn’t get much but oak leaves, beech leaves, and pine—and then they were told the size—usually standard, but for big funerals we had a code of abbreviations, PB 1, PB 2, PB 3—meaning: Party Boss 1st, 2nd, and 3rd class; when it came out later that our private code also included H 1, H 2, and H 3 for Hero 1st, 2nd, and 3rd class, there was a row with that Dirty Berty Kremp who said it sounded insulting and took it as a personal insult because he was a Hero 2nd class: an amputee, one leg, and a few decorations and medals. So, Leni didn’t fit into the wreath-frame group, I saw that right off and put her into the trimming group, where she worked alongside Kremer and Wanft—and believe me, she was a natural genius for trimming, or, if you like, a wire-picking whiz. You should’ve seen how she handled cherry-laurel and rhododendron leaves, you could trust that girl with the most expensive material: not a scrap was wasted or snapped off—and she caught on right away to something many people never grasp: the hub, the center of gravity, of the trim must be in the top left quarter of the wreath frame; that gives a cheerful, sort of optimistic upward sweep to the wreath; if you put the center of gravity on the right, you get the pessimistic feeling of a downward slant. And it would never’ve occurred to her to mix geometric trimming designs with vegetation ones—never, I tell you. She was an either/or type—and that’s something you can see even from trimming a wreath. There was one habit I had to break her of, though, time and again and relentlessly: she had a weakness for pure geometric forms—rhomboids, triangles, and once as a matter of fact—it was a PB 1 wreath, too—she improvised a Star of David out of marguerites, just playing around with geometric designs. I’m sure it wasn’t on purpose, it just took shape under her hands and I doubt if she knows to this day why it made me so nervous that I got really mad at her: just imagine if the wreath hadn’t been checked and had got onto the hearse—and anyway, people liked the vague vegetation designs better, and Leni could make those up very nicely too: she would weave little baskets into the wreath, little birds even—well anyway, if it wasn’t exactly vegetation it was at least organic—and when there was a PB 1 wreath that rated roses and Walt didn’t stint with the roses he let her have, and especially when they were long-stemmed beauties in bud: Leni became a regular artist: whole scenes took shape under her fingers, too bad, in a way, because they lasted such a short time: a miniature park with a pond and swans on it; well, I tell you, if there’d been prizes she’d have won them all, and the most important thing—for Walt at least—was: with very little trimming material she achieved a far greater effect than many people did with a lot. She was economical in other ways, too. Then the finished wreath would go through the checking group, that was Mrs. Hölthohne and Miss Zeven—and no wreath left the place that hadn’t eventually gone through my hands. It was Mrs. Hölthohne’s job to check the wreath frame and the trim and improve them where necessary, and the Zeven woman was what we called the ribbon lady, she would put on the ribbons that were delivered to us from town—and of course she had to watch like a hawk to be sure there was never any mix-up. If someone who’d ordered a wreath with the inscription ‘For Hans—a last farewell from Henriette’ got a wreath with a ribbon saying ‘From Emilie for my unforgettable Otto,’ or vice versa—with that quantity of wreaths that might’ve had embarrassing consequences; and finally there was the delivery van, a rickety little three-wheeler that took the wreaths to the chapels, hospitals, army headquarters, to Party branch office or funeral homes, and Walt wouldn’t let anyone else do that job because then he could goof off, pocket the money, and play hooky for a while.”

  Since Leni never complained about her work either to Miss van Doorn or Margret, or even to old Hoyser or Heinrich Pfeiffer, it must be assumed that in fact she enjoyed it. The only thing that seems to have worried her was that her fingers and hands took a real beating: after she had used up her mother’s and father’s supply of gloves, she asked around in the whole family for “cast-off gloves.”

  It may be that she used to think quietly ab
out her dead mother, about her father, that many thoughts were devoted to Erhard and Heinrich, possibly even to the deceased Alois. She is described as “nice and friendly and very quiet,” as far as that year was concerned.

  Even Pelzer describes her as “silent, my God, she scarcely ever opened her mouth! But she was nice, friendly and nice and the most efficient help I had at that time, apart from Grundtsch, who was a real old pro, of course, and that Mrs. Hölthohne, but with her there was something so damned pedantic, so academic, about the way she sometimes corrected good ideas. Besides the Pfeiffer girl wasn’t only good at designing, she also had a feeling for the botanical side, she knew by instinct that you can—in fact must—handle cyclamen blooms differently from a long-stemmed rose or a peony, and I don’t mind telling you it was always a financial sacrifice for me when I had to let them have red roses for wreaths—there was a nice little black market, you see, for young blades who thought roses were the only possible gift from an admirer—you could’ve really cleaned up, specially in the hotels where young officers went with their girl friends. How many times did I get phone calls from hotel porters, they’d offer me not only money but good merchandise for a bouquet of long-stemmed roses. Coffee, cigarettes, butter, even cloth—genuine worsted—was offered me once, somehow it seemed a shame, really, that slmost everything went for the dead and hardly anything was left for the living.”

  In the meantime, while Pelzer was having his rose problems, Leni was on the verge of becoming a victim of housing control: the authorities regarded the occupation of a seven-room apartment with kitchen and bath by a total of seven persons (Mr. Hoyser, Sr., Mrs. Hoyser, Sr., Lotte with Kurt and Werner, Leni, Miss van Doorn) as insufficient. Up to this point the city had, after all, gone through more than five hundred and fifty air-raid alarms and a hundred and thirty air raids, and the entire Hoyser clan was allocated three—admittedly large—rooms, and Leni and Marja van Doorn, “after every possible string had been pulled, were allowed to keep one room each” (M.v.D.). It may be assumed that the high-placed local government official who would rather remain anonymous played a part in this, although he modestly denies “having been of assistance.” Be that as it may, two rooms remained to be “controlled,” “and those awful Pfeiffers, who had meanwhile been driven out of their rabbit hutch by a bomb explosion” (Lotte H.) “moved heaven and earth ‘to live under the same roof as our dear daughter-in-law.’ Old Pfeiffer enjoyed being an air-raid victim as much as he enjoyed his gammy leg, and he had the bad taste to say: ‘Now I’ve also sacrificed my humble but honestly acquired possessions to the Fatherland.’ “ (Lotte H.) “Needless to say, we all got a scare, but then Margret found out through her friend at city hall” (??A.) “that old Pfeiffer was about to be transferred to the country with his class, so we gave in—and actually had them on our necks for three weeks, then in spite of his game leg he had to go off to the country, taking his mopey old missus with him, and we were left just with that nice Heinrich Pfeiffer, who had volunteered and was only waiting to be called up, and just after Stalingrad at that” (Lotte H.).