Group Portrait With Lady

  A number of difficulties arose in obtaining reliable information on Leni’s chief adversary at the nursery; it did not occur to the Au. to solicit the services of the war-graves commission until he had thoroughly and unsuccessfully ransacked the citizens’ registration lists, regimental records, etc. An inquiry at the war-graves commission yielded the information that one Heribert Kremp, aged twenty-five, had been killed in March near the Rhine and buried close to the Frankfurt-Cologne Autobahn; to progress from the address of Kremp’s grave to the address of his parents was not difficult, although the conversation with them was disagreeable in the extreme; they confirmed that he had worked at Pelzer’s nursery, that there, “like everywhere else that he lived and worked, he had dedicated himself to order and decency—and then there was no holding him when the Fatherland was so woefully threatened, he volunteered in mid-March ’45 for the Home Guard, in spite of having lost a leg above the knee, and died the finest death he could ever have wished for.” The Kremp parents seemed to regard their son’s death as perfectly normal and expected something from the Au. that he could not offer: a few words of appreciation, and since he was unable to react very cordially, even when confronted by the photo they showed him, it seemed best—as with Mrs. Schweigert—to take a hasty departure; the photo showed a (to the Au.) rather unprepossessing person, with a wide mouth and low forehead, woolly fair hair, and button eyes.

  In order to trace the three surviving female witnesses from Leni’s wartime employment at the nursery, all that was needed was a straightforward request for information at the citizens’ registration bureau, which, after payment of an appropriately modest fee, was duly complied with.

  The first, Mrs. Liane Hölthohne, who had been in charge of the wreath-checking unit and is now seventy, is the owner of a chain of florists with four outlets. She lives in a remarkably pretty little bungalow, four rooms, kitchen, hall, two bathrooms, in a suburb that is still almost rural; the rooms are furnished in impeccable taste, color and contours harmonize, and since she is almost suffocating in books anyway she has been spared the problem of interior decoration. She was matter-of-fact but not curt, silver-haired and soignée; and from the photo of an office party taken in 1944 and shown by Pelzer, it is doubtful whether anyone would have recognized in that short, rather dumpy woman wearing a head scarf and a severe expression the fine-drawn venerable beauty who now presented herself to the Au. with dignity and reserve; earrings of fine silver filigree, shaped like tiny baskets with a loose coral bead trembling in each, made her head—her still strongly pigmented brown eyes being in continual movement—a point of focus that in its fourfold movement was very hard on the eyes: the earrings quivered, inside the earrings the corals quivered, her head quivered, and in her head the eyes quivered; her makeup, the slightly withered skin at neck and wrists, gave an impression of good grooming, but not at all as if Mrs. H. were trying to conceal her age. Tea, petits fours, cigarettes in a silver box (that had barely room for eight cigarettes), a lighted wax candle, matches in a hand-painted porcelain container showing the signs of the Zodiac but only eleven pictures, the center one depicting a stylized archer standing out in pink against the other signs, painted in blue, made it reasonable to assume that Mrs. H. was born under the sign of Sagittarius; curtains of old rose, furniture light brown, walnut, rugs white, on the walls—where the books had left any space—engravings with views of the Rhine, carefully hand-tinted, six or seven engravings (the Au. cannot guarantee perfect accuracy on this point) measuring at most two and a half by one and a half inches, exact and with a gemlike clarity: Bonn seen from Beuel, Cologne seen from Deutz, Zons from the right bank of the Rhine between Urdenbach and Baumberg, Oberwinter, Boppard, Rees; and since the Au. also remembers having seen Xanten, moved by the artist somewhat closer to the Rhine than geographical accuracy would have permitted, there must have been seven engravings after all.

  “Yes indeed,” said Mrs. Hölthohne, offering the silver box to the Au. and looking almost, it seemed to him, as if she were expecting him not to take a cigarette (he had to disappoint her and noticed a very, very faint clouding of her brow). “You see correctly, views of the left bank of the Rhine only” (thus in her perceptiveness swiftly outstripping the Au.’s speed of grasp, awareness, and interpretation!). “I used to be a Separatist, and still am, and not only theoretically; on the fifteenth of November, 1923, I was wounded near the Ägidienberg, not for the honorable side but for the dishonorable one which to me is still the honorable side. No one can talk me out of my belief that this part of Germany doesn’t belong to Prussia and never has, nor in any kind of so-called Reich founded by Prussia. A Separatist to this day, not for a French Rhineland but for a German one. The Rhine as the border of the Rhineland, with Alsace and Lorraine forming part of it too, of course; for a neighbor, an unchauvinistic France, republican naturally. Well, in 1923 I fled to France, where I recovered, and even in those early days I needed a false name and false papers to return to Germany, that was in 1924. Then in ’33 it was better to be called Hölthohne than Elli Marx, and I didn’t want to leave again, emigrate again. Do you know why? I love this part of Germany and the people who live in it: it’s just that they’ve ended up in the wrong history, and you can quote all the Hegel you want” (the Au. had no intention of quoting any Hegel!) “and tell me that no one can end up in the wrong history. I thought the best thing for me to do after 1933 was to forfeit my flourishing business as a landscape architect, I simply let it go bankrupt, that was the simplest and least obtrusive way, though it was hard because the office was doing well. Then came that business with the Aryan pass, tricky, risky, but of course I still had my friends in France and I had them look after it. You see, this Liane Hölthohne had died in a Paris bordello in 1924, and Elli Marx from Saarlouis was simply allowed to die in her stead. I had this nonsense with the Aryan papers done by a lawyer in Paris, who in turn knew someone at the embassy, but although it was done very discreetly a letter turned up one day from a village near Osnabrück, and in this letter a certain Erhard Hölthohne wrote to this Liane offering “to forgive her everything, please come back to your own country, I’ll build a new life for you here.” Well, we had to wait till all the papers for the Aryan pass had been assembled and then have this Liane Hölthohne die in Paris while in Germany she went on living as an employee at a nursery garden. Well it worked. I was fairly safe but not a hundred-percent safe, and that’s why it seemed wisest to lie low at a Nazi’s like Pelzer.”

  Excellent tea, three times as strong as at the nuns, delicious petits fours, but the Au. reached too often—this was already the third time—into the silver cigarette box, although the ashtray, scarcely the size of a nutshell, would hardly hold the ashes and remains of the third cigarette. No doubt about it: Mrs. Hölthohne was an intelligent and moderate woman, and since the Au. did not contradict her Separatist views, nor cared to do so, it seemed that, despite his immoderate smoking and tea-drinking (this was already his third cup!), her liking for him did not wane.

  “You can imagine my apprehension, though in actual fact there was little reason for it because the relatives of this Liane never showed up, but there might have been a thorough inspection of Pelzer’s accounts and personnel, and then there was also that wretched Nazi Kremp, and the Wanft woman, and that Nationalist Frieda Zeven at whose table I worked. Pelzer, who is and always was a genius at sensing an atmosphere—he must have sensed that I didn’t feel all that secure because when he began quite blatantly working his crooked deals with the flowers and the greenery I was afraid I’d find myself in serious trouble, not because of myself but through him, so I decided to give notice, and when I told him he gave me such a funny look and said: ‘You give notice? Can you afford to?,’ and I’m sure he didn’t know anything but his sixth sense told him something—and I got cold feet and withdrew my notice, but of course he saw that now I was really nervous and had reason to be, and he was constantly emphasizing my name as if it were a false one, and of course he knew that the Kremer woman
’s husband had been murdered in a concentration camp as a Communist, and with the Pfeiffer girl, too, he sensed that something was going on, and there again with his sixth sense he was actually onto something more momentous than he or any of us suspected. That there was a bond of understanding between the young Pfeiffer girl and Boris Lvovich was fairly clear, and that in itself was risky enough, but that—I would never have credited her with the courage. By the way, Pelzer also proved his sixth sense when he knew right off in 1945 that what had always been ‘Blumen’ to him were now ‘flowers,’ only with wreaths he got it wrong, he called them ‘circles,’ and for a time the Americans thought he meant ‘underground circles.’ ”

  A break. Brief. A few questions by the Au., who during the break managed with some difficulty to accommodate the remains of his third cigarette in the silver nutshell and noted with approval that on the otherwise immaculate wall of books the volumes of Proust, Stendhal, Tolstoi, and Kafka seemed very well thumbed, not dirty, not soiled, merely well thumbed, well worn like a favorite garment that has been mended and washed over and over again.

  “Yes indeed, I love to read, and I keep rereading books I’ve already read many many times, I first read Proust in the Benjamin translation back in 1929—and now about Leni: a splendid girl, of course, yes, I say ‘girl’ although she’s in her late forties; only: you couldn’t get really close to her, either during the war or after; not that she was cold, just quiet and so silent; friendly—but silent, and stubborn; I was the first one to be given the nickname of ‘the lady,’ then when Leni started work there we were known as ‘the two ladies,’ but in less than six months they’d stopped calling her ‘the lady,’ and again there was only one ‘lady’ there, me. Strange—it wasn’t till later that I realized what made Leni so unusual, such an enigma—she was proletarian, yes, I mean it, her feeling for money, time, and so on—proletarian; she might have gone a long way, but she didn’t want to; it wasn’t that she lacked a sense of responsibility, or that she was incapable of assuming responsibility; and as for her ability to plan—well that, we might say, she proved to the full, for almost eighteen months she had this love affair with Boris Lvovich, and not one of us, not a single one, had thought such a thing possible, not once was she found out, or was he found out, and believe me, the Wanft and Schelf women and Dirty Berty watched over those two like lynxes, so that sometimes I got scared and thought, if there’s something going on between those two, then God help them. The only danger was at the beginning, when—simply for practical reasons—there couldn’t be anything between them, and I naturally sometimes doubted whether she—if she … knew what she was doing; she was rather naive, you know. And as I said: no feeling for money or for property. We all earned, depending on extras and overtime and so forth, between 25 and 40 marks a week, later on Pelzer paid us an additional ‘list premium,’ as he called it: 20 marks extra for every wreath that was ‘recycled,’ you’d call it now, so that meant a few extra marks a week, but Leni would use up at least two weeks’ wages every week just on coffee, that was bound to lead to difficulties even though she also got the revenue from her building. Sometimes I used to think, and I still think: that girl is a phenomenon. You never quite knew whether she was very deep or very shallow—and it may sound contradictory but I believe she is both, very deep and very shallow, only one thing she isn’t and never was: a light woman. That she wasn’t. No.

  “I didn’t get any restitution in 1945 because it was never clarified whether I had gone into hiding as a Separatist or as a Jewess. For Separatists in hiding there was no compensation, of course—and as a Jewess, well, you just try and prove you deliberately went broke to divert attention from yourself. What I did get, and that only through a friend in the French Army, was a permit for a nursery garden and florist’s business, and right away at the end of 1945, when Leni was having rather a thin time of it with her child, I took her into the business, and she stayed with me twenty-four years, till 1970. Not ten or twenty times, no, more than thirty times I offered to make her manager of one of the branches, even a partnership, and she could have worn a nice dress and looked after customers out front, but she preferred to stand in her smock in the cold back room, making wreaths and bouquets. No ambition to get on or ahead, no ambition. Sometimes I think she’s a dreamer. A bit crazy but very very lovable. And of course, and here again I see something proletarian, rather spoiled: do you know that, even as a worker earning at most fifty marks a week, she kept on her old maid right through the war—and do you know what that maid baked for her every day with her own hands? A few fresh rolls, crisp and fresh, and I tell you, sometimes it made my mouth water and—in spite of being quite ‘the lady’—I was sometimes tempted to say: ‘Let me have a bite, child, do let me have a bite.’ And she would have, you can be sure of that—oh, if only I had asked her, and if only, if she’s so badly off now, she wouldn’t mind asking me for money; but you know what she is as well? Proud. As proud as only a princess in a fairy tale can be. And as for her wreathmaking abilities, there she was very much overrated; she had clever fingers, I grant you, and a gift, but for my taste her trimming had too much filigree about it, it was too dainty, like embroidery, not like that lovely knitting done on big needles; she would have made a very good gold- and silversmith, but with flowers—this may surprise you—you sometimes have to treat them roughly and boldly, she never did, there was courage in her trimming but no daring. Still, when you consider that she was completely untrained, it was remarkable, subjectively quite remarkable, how quickly she picked it up.”

  Since the teapot was no longer being lifted, the silver cigarette box no longer being opened and proffered, the Au. gained the impression that the interview was (for the time being justifiably, as it turned out) at an end. He felt that Mrs. Hölthohne had made a substantial contribution to the rounding out of the Leni-image. Mrs. H. permitted him a glance into her little studio, where she had recently resumed her work as a landscape architect. For cities of the future she is designing “hanging gardens,” which she calls “Semiramis”—a term that, to the Au., seems relatively uninspired for such an avid Proust reader. In taking leave he was left with the impression that this visit was definitely at an end but that further ones were not out of the question, for a great deal of amiability, albeit fatigued, remained behind on the face of Mrs. H.

  In the case of the ladies Marga Wanft and Ilse Kremer we can again resort to partial synchronization: both are old-age pensioners, one aged seventy, the other sixty-nine, both white-haired, both living in one-and-half-room public-housing apartments, stove heating, furniture dating from the early fifties, both giving an impression of “slender means” and frailty, but—here the differences begin—one (Wanft) with a grass-parakeet, the other (Kremer) with a shell-parakeet. Marga Wanft—here the differences become considerable—severe, almost unapproachable, tight-lipped, as if she were constantly spitting out cherry stones and, because of her small mouth, with difficulty at that, was not prepared “to say much about that hussy. I knew it all along, I sensed it, and I could still kick myself for not getting to the bottom of it. That’s a girl I’d have liked to see with her head shaved, and a bit of running the gauntlet wouldn’t have hurt her either. To take up with a Russian while our boys were at the front and her husband killed in action and her father a war profiteer of the first water—and after three months she was given the trimming group and it was taken away from me. No. A slut, that’s all she was—no sense of honor, and that provocative body of hers—she drove all the men crazy; Grundtsch used to fawn over her like a tomcat, for Pelzer she was a sex nest-egg, and even Kremp, who was a good worker and always gave of his best, had his head turned by her so that he got quite unbearable. And always pretending to be a lady while actually she was nothing but a down-at-heel nouveau riche. No thanks. How well we all got along together before she came! After that there was always a kind of crackle in the air, tensions that were never resolved, a good beating would’ve been the best way to clear the air. Yes, and that sent
imental amateurish dabbling in flowers, she fooled the lot of them with that. No, I was isolated, downright isolated, after she came, and she never fooled me with all that nonsense about offering coffee and so on, that’s what we call ‘sweet talk,’ that’s all she was, a trollop, a tart practically, and no better than she should be.”