Group Portrait With Lady

  The exalted personage: “I must admit I was pretty mad at him when I found out later that he had let himself in for a love affair. I really was. That was going too far. He should have known how dangerous that was and realized that all of us who were protecting him—and he knew he was being protected—would have been placed in an unpleasant position. That whole complicated co-ordination network would have been unraveled. I am sure you know that in a case like that no mercy would have been shown. Well, it turned out all right, it was only looking back on it that I got a scare and I made no attempt to disguise from Miss—Mrs. Pfeiffer my dismay at such ingratitude. Yes, ingratitude, that’s what I call it. For God’s sake, all because of a woman! Needless to say, my contact men were keeping me constantly informed as to how he was getting along, and every now and then I felt tempted to go there when I was on a business trip and have a look at him—but in the end I never did yield to the temptation. He had caused me enough trouble as it was by apparently provoking people in the streetcar, whether consciously or not I don’t know—but the fact remained that complaints were received about him and his guard, and von Kahm had to follow this up. What Boris had been doing was singing in the streetcar in the early morning, usually humming but sometimes singing so that the words could be understood—and what do you suppose the words were? The second verse of ‘Brothers, toward sunlight, toward freedom—See the procession of millions Surge forth without end from the night, Till your demands and your longings Flood the whole sky out of sight’—d’you think that was smart, to sing words like that to sleep-starved German workers early in the morning one year after Stalingrad, in an overcrowded streetcar, to sing at all in fact, considering how serious the situation was? Imagine if he’d sung—and I’m convinced there was no ulterior motive—the third verse: ‘Shatter the yoke of the tyrants That cruelly tortures the world, Over the mass of the workers Let our banner blood-red be unfurled.’ As you see, I’m not called ‘red’ for nothing. There was trouble, trouble. The guard was disciplined, von Kahm called me up—which he rarely did, otherwise we kept in touch by courier—and asked: ‘What kind of an agent provocateur have you wished on me?’ Well, it could be smoothed over, but the problems it caused! More bribes, another reminder of the instructions from the ‘Foreign Armies Eastern Europe’ department—but then the terrible thing happened: a worker spoke to Boris, whispered to him in the streetcar: ‘Courage, Comrade, the war’s as good as won.’ The guard overheard this, and it was only with the utmost difficulty that he could be persuaded to retract his report—it would have cost the worker his life. No, gratitude is something I most certainly didn’t get out of it. Just problems.”

  It proved necessary to pay another visit to the person who certainly is of a caliber to supplant Boris in the role of chief male protagonist: Walter Pelzer, aged seventy, in his yellow-and-black bungalow at the edge of the forest. Heavily gilded metal stags adorn one house wall, heavily gilded metal horses adorn the other. He has a saddle horse, a stable for the horse, he has a car (de luxe), his wife has a car (standard), and when the Au. went to see him for the second time (further visits will become necessary) he found him steeped in that defensive gloom of his that was close to being remorse.

  “So you’ve given your kids an education, sent them to university: my son’s a doctor, my daughter an archaeologist—in Turkey right now—and what do you get? Contempt for the home environment. Nouveau riche. Former Nazi, war profiteer, opportunist—you wouldn’t believe the things I’m called. My daughter even talks to me about the Third World, and I ask you: what does she know about the first world? About the world that produced her? I’ve plenty of time to read, so I get to thinking. Look at Leni now, Leni who once wouldn’t hear of selling her apartment house to me because she didn’t trust me—so then she sold it to Hoyser, and what does he do with the help of that smart grandson of his? He’s considering sending her an eviction notice because she sublets to foreign workers and for a long time now has been either late with the rent or unable to pay it at all. Would I ever once have dreamed of having her thrown out of her home? Never, no matter what the political system was. Never. I don’t deny having fallen for her the very day she turned up, or that I’ve never been that particular about marriage vows and so on. Do I deny that? I don’t. Do I deny having been a Nazi, a Communist, or that I took advantage of certain financial opportunities the war put in my way business-wise? I don’t. To call a spade a spade—I cleaned up wherever I could. And I admit it. But after 1933 did I ever harm anyone in or outside my business? I didn’t. O.K., so before that I was a bit rough, I admit. But after ’33? Never harmed a living soul. Is there anyone who worked for me or with me who can complain? There isn’t. And no one has complained either. The only one who might’ve done so was that fellow Kremp, but he’s dead. O.K., so I gave him a bad time, I admit, he was such a nuisance, such a fanatic, within an inch of turning my whole business upside down and ruining the atmosphere there for good and all. What that idiot wanted, the very first day the Russian came to work, was to get us all to treat the boy like some kind of subhuman.

  “It all began with a cup of coffee that Leni took over to the Russian during coffee break just after nine. It was a very cold day, late December ’43 or early January ’44, and the routine was for Ilse Kremer to look after the coffee. The point was, if you ask me, that she was the most trustworthy of the bunch, and that dumb Kremp might have stopped to ask himself how come a former Communist was the most trustworthy person for a job like that. You see, we each brought our own coffee along in a little paper bag, and that coffee alone contained provocation enough. Some of us only had ersatz coffee, some had made a blend of 1 : 10, or 1:8, Leni’s was always 1 : 3, and I sometimes allowed myself the luxury of 1 : 1, occasionally even straight coffee, the real stuff: in other words, there were ten individual coffee bags, ten individual coffeepots—so, with real coffee being that short, this was a position of the utmost trust for Ilse—who would ever have noticed anything or suspected if she had transferred just an eighth of an ounce from one good bag to hers, which was sometimes lousy? Nobody. That’s what the Communists called solidarity, and Kremp and the Wanft and Schelf women, those Nazis, took advantage of that quite nicely. Never would it’ve occurred to a single one of us to trust Marga Wanft or the Schelf woman, let alone that archidiot Kremp with making the coffee; obviously they’d have switched coffees among themselves. Though I must say that, as far as Kremp was concerned, there would usually have been nothing to switch: he was much too dumb and too honest and mostly drank straight ersatz—and then the smells when the coffee was poured! In those days you could smell right away which coffee contained even a trace of the real thing—and it happened to be Leni’s coffeepot that smelled the best—well, O.K. Can you imagine the envy, the ill will, the jealousy, yes even the hatred, the feelings of revenge, that were released as soon as the coffeepots were handed around at nine fifteen each morning? And do you think that, early in 1944, the police or the party could’ve afforded to prosecute or lay a complaint against every single person guilty of whatever they called it, ‘Violation of the war economy’? I don’t mind telling you, they were glad when people got their ounce or two of coffee, never mind where from.

  “O.K.—so what does our Leni do, the very first day the Russian shows up for work? She pours him a cup of her own coffee—1:3, mind you, while Kremp was drinking his watery slops—pours the Russian some coffee from her own coffeepot into her own cup and carries it over to him, to the table where he spent his first few days working alongside Kremp making wreath frames. For Leni that was the most natural thing in the world, to offer a cup of coffee to someone who had no cup and no coffee—but do you think she had the faintest idea of how political it was? I could see even Ilse Kremer turning pale—she knew, you see, how political it was: to take a Russian a cup of 1:3 coffee with an aroma that was enough to kill all the other slop-blends right off. So what does Kremp do? He usually worked sitting down, without his artificial leg because it didn’t fit properl
y yet, so he takes down the leg from the hook on the wall—you can imagine how attractive that looked, an artificial leg always hanging there on the wall—and dashes the cup from the bewildered Russian’s hand.

  “What came next? A deathly silence is what it’s called, I believe, but even that deathly silence—that’s the literary term for it, that’s what it’s called in the books I sometimes read nowadays—had its variations: deathly in a way that was approving in the case of the Schelf woman and Marga Wanft, neutral in the case of Helga Heuter and Miss Zeven, understanding in the case of Mrs. Hölthohne and Ilse. Well, we were stunned, I don’t mind telling you, all except for old Grundtsch, who stood next to me leaning against the open office doorway and just laughed. It was all very well for him to laugh, he was considered an oddball anyway and didn’t have much to be scared about, though he was a crafty old bastard, crafty as they come. So what did I do? Sheer tension made me spit from the office doorway into the workshop—and if such a thing exists, and I managed to express it, then that spit was pure irony and landed much closer to Kremp than to Leni. Damn it all, how can you explain politically significant details: like my spit landing closer to Kremp than to Leni, and how are you going to prove that the spit was meant to be ironical?

  “Still that deathly silence, and what does Leni do during those tense moments, which were, you might say, breathless but fear-packed? What does she do? She picks up the cup, it had fallen on the peat moss lying around there so it wasn’t broken, she picks it up, walks to the faucet, rinses it carefully—there was a kind of provocation in the care she took over this—and I believe that from that moment on she acted with deliberate provocation. Damn it all, you know how quickly you can rinse out a cup like that, and thoroughly too, but she rinsed it as if it was a sacred chalice—then she did something entirely gratuitous—dried the cup, carefully too, with a clean handkerchief, walked over to her coffeepot, poured the second cup from it—they were those two-cup pots, you know—and carried it over to the Russian, as cool as you please, without so much as a glance at Kremp. Not in silence either. No, she even said: ‘There you are.’ Now it was up to the Russian. He must’ve known how political the whole situation was—a high-strung, hypersensitive boy, I don’t mind telling you, with a sense of tact that no one could hold a candle to, pale, with those quaint steel-rimmed spectacles and that very fair hair of his, a bit curly, there was a touch of the cherub about that boy—what does he, what did he do? Still that deathly silence, everyone felt this was a moment of truth. Leni’s done her part—so what does he do? Well, he takes the cup, saying loud and clear, in impeccable German: ‘Thank you, Miss’—and starts drinking the coffee. Beads of sweat on his forehead—mind you, it was probably years since he’d had as much as a drop of real coffee or tea—the effect on him was like an injection on an emaciated body.

  “Well, luckily that put an end to that terrible tense deathly silence—Mrs. Hölthohne gave a sigh of relief, Kremp mumbled something about ‘Bolsheviks—war widow—coffee for Bolsheviks,’ Grundtsch laughed again, I spat again, with such lousy aim that I almost hit Kremp’s artificial leg—and that, of course, would’ve been sacrilege. The Schelf woman and Marga Wanft snorted with indignation, the others with relief. And now, of course, there was no coffee for Leni—and what does my Ilse, Ilse Kremer, do? Takes her own coffeepot, pours Leni a cup, and carries it over to her, saying quite distinctly: ‘You must have something to wash that bread down with,’ and Ilse’s coffee wasn’t that bad either. She had a brother, you see, quite a Nazi and something high up in Antwerp, and he always brought her back raw coffee beans—oh well. That was it. That was Leni’s decisive battle.”

  This decisive appearance of Leni’s at the end of 1943 or early in 1944 seemed to the Au. of such importance that he wanted to collect further details on it and paid another visit to all the participants in the scene who were still alive. Above all it seemed to him that the duration of Pelzer’s “deathly silence” had been represented as too long. In the Au.’s view, this was a case of literarization that needed to be clarified, for in his opinion and experience “deathly silence” can never last longer than thirty or forty seconds. Ilse Kremer—who, incidentally, by no means denies her Nazi brother and coffee-supplier!—estimates the deathly silence at “from three to four minutes.” Miss Wanft: “I remember the scene very clearly, and I reproach myself to this day for the fact that we failed to remonstrate and thus gave a kind of approval to the things that happened—deathly silence? Contemptuous silence, I’d say—how long did it last? If it’s so important to you: I’d say, a minute or two. The point is that we oughtn’t to have remained silent, we had an obligation not to remain silent. Our boys out there, in the freezing cold, and always on the heels of the Bolsheviks” (in 1944 that was no longer the case, by that time it was the Bolsheviks who were “on the heels of our boys,” historical correction by the Au.), “and there he sat in the warm getting 1:3 coffee from that tart.”

  Mrs. Hölthohne: “I must say, I had cold shivers down my spine, regular goose pimples, I can assure you, and I wondered then as I so often did later on: Does Leni know what she’s doing? I admired her, her courage and the naturalness and the staggering calm with which in the midst of that deathly silence she rinsed out the cup, dried it and so on, there was a—I’d say calculated—warmth and humanity about it, so help me—well, as to how long it lasted: I tell you, it was an eternity—I don’t care whether it was three minutes or five or only eighty seconds. An eternity, and for the first time I felt something like sympathy for Pelzer, who was quite obviously on Leni’s side and against Kremp—and that spitting seemed pretty vulgar, of course, but at that particular moment it was the only means of expression open to him—and it was clear what he was trying to express: he must have wanted to spit in Kremp’s face, but of course he couldn’t do that.”

  Grundtsch: “I wanted to shout for joy: that girl had guts. Damn it all, right at the outset she fought a decisive battle—probably without knowing it—and yet she must’ve had an idea: after all, she’d only known the boy for the hour and a half he’d been working at the wreath-frame table, at everyone’s mercy—and no one, not even that Nosy-Parker Marga Wanft, could’ve accused her of carrying on with him. If you ask me, and if I may use a military term, Leni created an enormous firing zone for herself before there was anything to fire. No one could find any other explanation for what she did other than pure innocent humanity, the very thing that was forbidden to be shown to subhumans, and yet, you know: even a fellow like that Kremp could see that Boris was human: he had a nose and two legs didn’t he? and even spectacles on his nose, and he was more sensitive than that whole mishpokhe put together. Through Leni’s brave deed Boris was simply made a human being, proclaimed a human being—and that was that, in spite of all the bad times ahead. As for how long it lasted: oh, it seemed to me like at least five minutes.”

  The Au. felt obliged to establish the possible duration of the deathly silence by way of an experiment. Since the workroom—now in Grundtsch’s possession—is still in existence, it was possible to take some measurements: from Leni’s to Boris’s table—thirteen feet; from Boris’s table to the faucet—ten feet; from the faucet to Leni’s table (on which the coffeepot stood)—six feet; once more the thirteen feet to Boris’s table—a total of forty-two feet, covered by Leni probably with outward calm but actually, we imagine, with dispatch. Unfortunately, the cup being dashed to the floor could only be simulated, the Au. having neither amputee nor amputee’s prosthesis at his disposal; there was no need to simulate a cup being rinsed and dried, the coffee being poured: he—the Au.—performed the experiment three times in order to leave no room for doubt and to arrive at his objective: the factual mean value. Result: first experiment—45 seconds; second experiment—58 seconds; third experiment—42 seconds. Mean value—48 seconds.