Group Portrait With Lady

  We know that Marga Wanft was evacuated. Evidently she suffered terrible, dreadful things (since she remains silent, the Au. is unable to determine whether these things were objectively or merely subjectively terrible or dreadful). She said only one word: “Schneidemühl.” As for Kremp, we know that he died for the Autobahn, beside the Autobahn, possibly with a word such as “Germany” on his lips.

  Dr. Henges “withdrew” (H. on H.) “with my aristocratic boss to one of the villages where we could be sure that the farm people wouldn’t give us away. Disguised as woodsmen, we lived in a log cabin but were fed and looked after like true gentlemen; even amorous services were not only not refused but positively offered us by the women devoted to the Count’s family. Quite frankly, the erotic practices and sexuality of Bavaria were too coarse for my taste, and I longed for the refinements of the Rhineland, and not only in that department either. Since I didn’t have too many black marks against me, it was safe for me to go home in 1951, the Count had to wait until 1953, then placed himself voluntarily at the disposal of the courts, but at a moment when the fuss over the war criminals was being tacitly called off. He spent the next three months in Werl and soon after that reentered the diplomatic service. I preferred not to expose myself politically again, but merely to offer my knowledge of philology to any who might care to use it.”

  Hoyser, Sr.: “I felt I had to stay on because of my properties. You see, I didn’t only own the Gruyten building: in January ’45 and again in February ’45 I managed to acquire buildings belonging to people who were in great political danger. Anti-Aryanization, or re-anti-Aryanization you might call it; two buildings that had once belonged to Jews and were sold to me by two former Nazis, legally, everything notarized, payment by check, all quite legal. It was a prefectly proper transfer of property. After all, there was no law against buying or selling property, right? I was spared ‘the Second’ because I happened to be out in the country—but I saw the dust cloud twenty-five miles away—a gigantic dust cloud—and when I cycled back the next day I found an apartment on the west side of town that was in perfect shape, and I didn’t have to get out till the British arrived. Those British, I must say, took good care to see no damage was done to the parts of the city they wanted to live in later. The others—Leni and Lotte and the others—left me nicely in the lurch and didn’t tell me a thing about the little Soviet paradise they’d set up in the burial vaults. Well, I was an old man—sixty, after all—and they didn’t want me around.

  “In fact Lotte behaved pretty badly all round, considering my wife had died the previous October. She kept moving from place to place in town with the children, first to her relatives, then to that whore Margret, then to friends, simply to avoid being evacuated, and why? Because she was dead set on looting, and she knew exactly where the army supplies were. Needless to say, nobody let old Grandpa in on it when they looted the warehouse near what used to be the Carmelite convent. Oh no, they went there with handcarts and old bicycles and derelict burned-out cars that were standing around on the streets but which you could still get moving somehow by pushing, and they looted eggs and butter, bacon and cigarettes, coffee and clothing, by the sackful—and they were so greedy they fried eggs for themselves right there on the street, using the lids of gas-mask containers, and schnapps and whatever they wanted—regular orgies, like during the French Revolution, and women always out front, our Lotte leading the way like a virago! Regular battles were fought—there were still German soldiers in the city, remember.

  “I found all this out later and was glad I’d moved out of that apartment in time, for it soon became a kind of bordello when they had to get out of their Soviet paradise in the vaults and Hubert began his affair with Lotte. You wouldn’t have recognized Lotte: mind you, she’s always been a bitter, brittle kind of woman, sarcastic and shrewish, but she was absolutely beside herself, a different woman. During the war we’d put up with her socialist cant, though it was dangerous for us, the things she used to say at the time, and her dragging our son Wilhelm into that Red nonsense, that hurt but we forgave her, she was a decent, conscientious wife and mother after all, but then, on March 5, she must’ve thought socialism had broken out and everything would be divided up, goods and real estate, the works. In fact for a time she actually ran the municipal housing department, first by simply usurping the position, the authorities having fled of course, and then legally because it was quite true she hadn’t been a Fascist, but it just isn’t enough not to have been a Fascist.

  “Anyway, she ran the place for a year and arbitrarily put people into empty villas, people who scarcely knew how to flush a toilet and did their laundry in the bathtub and raised carp and made a kind of sugar-beet jam in the bathrooms. It’s a fact that bathtubs were found afterwards half full of sugar-beet jam. Well, fortunately this confusion between socialism and democracy didn’t last long, and she eventually settled down quite nicely to being what she actually was: a minor employee. But at the time, during the days of wholesale looting, she lived down there with all the rest of them in that vault paradise, with the children, and though she knew where I was, knew perfectly well, she never got in touch with me, not once. Oh, dear me no, no question of gratitude from that quarter, yet actually, if you stop to think of it, she owes her life to us. We’d only have had to hint, just hint, about all the things she used to say about the war and the war aims, just that one little word ‘crap,’ and she’d have been in it up to her neck, in jail or concentration camp, maybe even hanging from a gallows—and then that.”

  There may be a reader who cares to know that B.H.T.’s urine manipulations, inspired by Rahel, did not exactly come to naught, they continued to be successful right up to the end, only—they ceased to benefit him. Late in September 1944 he was called up and assigned to a stomach-ulcer battalion, regardless of the fact that stomach ulcers require a different diet from diabetes. B.H.T. took part in several battles: the Ardennes offensive, Hürtgen Forest, was taken prisoner by the Americans near a place called Würselen, and it is not impossible that he “fought shoulder to shoulder” with the Schlömer who had been transformed into a Keiper. In any event, the end of the war saw B.H.T. in an American POW camp near Reims in the “company of some 200,000 German soldiers of all ranks, and believe me, it was no picnic, in terms either of the company or the food situation, especially in regard to—if you will permit the expression—the prospect of female company—it was a disaster.” (A remark that surprised the Au. He had assumed B.H.T. to be sexually neutral.)

  Although the Au. felt embarrassed at questioning M.v.D. on Gruyten’s death, in order to get at the facts he made a few cautious attempts that ended in angry complaints about Lotte, apparently the object of M.v.D.’s jealousy on account of “certain things that happened.” “It was all because I hadn’t got back yet when he came home, otherwise I’m absolutely sure he’d have looked to me for the consolation—and found it, what’s more—that she offered him, though I’m thirteen years older than her. But you see, I’d landed up on the other side of the Rhine, almost beyond the Wupper I’d say, and there I was, stuck in that hole in Westphalia, where they looked on us Rhinelanders as hard to please, picky eaters, and generally spoiled and weren’t what you might call friendly toward us—and the Americans didn’t show up there till the middle of April, and you’ve no idea how difficult, how impossible, it was to cross westwards over the Rhine at the time. So I had to stay put till the middle of May, and Hubert was back home again by early May, and it seems he crawled into bed with that Lotte right off. So there was nothing I could do about it when I got home. It was too late.”

  Lotte: “Sometimes I get mixed up about the period February to March ’45 and then the time from March ’45 to early May. There was too much going on, you couldn’t see the woods for the trees. Of course I joined in the looting in the Schnürer Gasse near the old Carmelite convent, I took whatever I could, and at the time I preferred to make use of Pelzer’s help rather than my father-in-law’s. The problems we had to s
olve! I had to get out of the apartment, you see, the only one who could’ve stayed there was Leni, but the baby was due in a few days and we couldn’t leave her alone, of course, so we all moved in together into what he calls the Soviet paradise in the vaults. The secret was out now, that the father of her child was a Russian, but she’d been silly enough to register the name of another Russian, because of course she’d been getting special mother’s rations since September or October of ’44—Margret had put her up to it by simply giving her the name of a soldier who had died in the hospital: Yendritsky it was. They’d been a bit too hasty about it, those two, and hadn’t realized that the deceased Yendritsky had been married—there might’ve been all kinds of trouble with his widow and, to my mind, nasty trouble, it’s not right to saddle a dead man with something like that. Well, I managed to repair the damage when I took over the housing department for the military government in mid-March. We had all the rubber stamps and stuff we wanted, and access to all the other authorities, so we were able to give the child its rightful father: Boris Lvovich Koltovsky—when you remember that all the authorities were squeezed together in three offices you can well imagine there wasn’t much difficulty about taking away the paternity of Leni’s child from that poor Yendritsky and fixing the whole thing up.

  “This all happened, of course, after ‘the Second,’ and when those German idiots had finally all left—they were still hanging deserters in the city on March the sixth, you know, before they finally made off, blowing up the bridges behind them. It was only then that the Americans arrived, and at last we could leave the Soviet vault-paradise and go back to the apartment; but even the Americans couldn’t make head or tail of the confusion, even they must’ve been shocked when they saw what the city actually looked like, and I saw some of them in tears, especially a few women outside the hotel across from the Cathedral—and you wouldn’t believe all the types that suddenly showed up: German deserters, Russians who’d been in hiding, Yugoslavs, Poles, Russian women workers, escaped concentration-camp inmates, a few Jews who’d been in hiding—and how were the Americans to tell who’d been a collaborator and who not, and who belonged in what camp? They must have imagined it was going to be simpler, a bit too simple, to decide between Nazis and non-Nazis and all that; and it turned out to be less simple than their childlike mentality had led them to believe. Everything had to be sorted and classified—and when Hubert finally turned up, around the beginning of May, things had been at least partially sorted out, I say partially, and I don’t mind admitting it—with my rubber stamps and certificates I took a pretty generous hand in quite a few destinies; what else are rubber stamps and certificates good for, I’d like to know?

  “Hubert, for instance, turned up in an Italian uniform that had been given him by some of his buddies in Berlin, fellows he’d been clearing out fortifications and subway tunnels with. They’d thought it all out very carefully: to move westward as a German convict was too risky; between Berlin and the Rhine there were still quite a few Nazi pockets where they might have hanged him; he was too young to go as a civilian: at forty-five he might’ve landed up in some POW camp: with the Russians, the British, or the Americans. So he went as an Italian, not that this was any kind of insurance, mind you, but it was quite smart: they had nothing but contempt for the Italians and didn’t always string them up on the spot, and that was the whole object: not to get strung up or shot, that was the tricky part, and with his Italian uniform and his ‘No speaka da German’ he was lucky—only there again it wasn’t exactly the best kind of insurance—to be taken to Italy wearing an Italian uniform and identified there as a German! That could’ve cost him his neck too.

  “Well, he made it, and he turned up here as cheerful as you please, it’s the truth, you never saw anyone so cheerful in your life. He said to us: ‘Well, my dears, I’ve made up my mind to spend the rest of my life smiling, smiling.’ He embraced us all, Leni, Boris, was thrilled to death with his grandson, he embraced Margret and my kids and me of course and said to me: ‘Lotte, you know I’m fond of you, and sometimes I think you’re fond of me too. Why don’t we shack up together?’ So we took three of the rooms, Leni, Boris, and the baby took three, Margret one, and we shared the kitchen. Problems just ceased to exist among so many sensible people, we had everything we needed, after all, the whole inheritance from the glorious German Army’s Schnürer Gasse warehouse, and Margret had managed to liberate a good supply of medicines from the hospital; and we felt it was best to have Hubert go on running around in his Italian uniform—the only trouble was that unfortunately I couldn’t get him any Italian papers, and he got some from the military government with an Italian name that Boris thought up for him: Manzoni, that was the only Italian name he knew, he must’ve read a book by this Manzoni. After all, he couldn’t very well say he was a discharged German convict because actually he’d been in jail not for political reasons but as a criminal, and the Americans were quite fussy about such things. Naturally they didn’t want criminals running around loose, and how could we explain to them that his crime had actually been a political one? So it was better for him to be Luigi Manzoni, Italian, who was living with me. You had to be careful as hell not to get into any kind of camp, even one for returning Germans. Better not to risk it. You never knew where the transports would end up. And that worked quite well till early 1946, by that time the Americans weren’t so keen any more on sticking every German into some camp or other, and soon the British arrived, and I managed to cope quite well with both, the British and the Americans.

  “Naturally lots of people asked why we didn’t get married, what with me being a widow and him a widower, and some people say I didn’t because of my pension, but that’s simply not true. It was just tiresome, that’s really all it was, to tie oneself as irrevocably as, let’s face it, marriage does. Today I regret it, because later on my kids got swallowed up in my father-in-law’s sphere of influence. Leni would have liked to marry her Boris, and vice versa, but obviously that was impossible since Boris had no papers; he didn’t want to admit to being a Russian, there were some cushy jobs to be had, mind you, but most of the Russians were simply packed up and sent home to Papa Stalin against their will and without knowing what they were in for, and Margret had given him some German papers that had the name Alfred Bullhorst, but a healthy German male of twenty-four, suffering only from slight undernourishment, do you know what was in store for him? Sinzig or Wickrath, those hellish POW camps—and naturally we didn’t want that. So that was no insurance either.

  “He spent most of his time at home anyway, and you should’ve seen how those two carried on with their little son: like the Holy Family. He stuck to his belief that a woman is not to be touched for three months after her confinement nor from the sixth month of pregnancy on—so for six months they lived like Mary and Joseph with now and again a kiss of course, but other than that only the child! They fondled him and spoiled him and they sang songs to him, and then one evening they jumped the gun a bit, in June ’45, they went for a walk beside the Rhine, until curfew time. We all warned them, all of us, Hubert and I and Margret, but there was no stopping them: every evening beside the Rhine. And it was wonderful, I must say, Hubert and I often went along, too, and we’d sit there and feel something we actually hadn’t felt for twelve years: peace. No ships on the Rhine, wrecks all over the place and the bridges smashed—just a few ferries and the American army bridge—sometimes, you know, I think it’d have been best not to build any more bridges across the Rhine and let the German West finally be the German West.

  “Well, things turned out differently—and for Boris too; one evening in June he was picked up by an American patrol, and stupidly enough he had his German papers in his pocket, and there wasn’t a thing we could do: my American officers couldn’t help, and Margret’s American boy friends couldn’t help, nor my going to the city commandant and telling him the whole involved story about Boris: Boris was gone, and at first things didn’t look too bad; all that happened was that he
’d been taken prisoner by the Americans and would come home as Alfred Bullhorst—seeing he didn’t want to go to the Soviet Union. It was no paradise, mind you, an American POW camp—but what we didn’t know was that during the summer the Americans began to, well let’s say, hand over German prisoners to the French—it could also be called selling them, because they got themselves reimbursed in dollars for the cost of food and accommodation—and we also didn’t know that this was how Boris ended up in a mine in Lorraine, in his weakened condition—the truth is that, thanks to Leni, or shall we say, thanks to Leni’s mortgage, the boy hadn’t exactly starved, but then he wasn’t that strong either—and now—you ought to have seen Leni: she took off right away, on an old bicycle. She got across all the zone borders, even across all the national frontiers, into the French Zone, into the Saar Territory, right into Belgium, back again into the Saar Territory, from there to Lorraine, going from camp to camp and asking each of the commandants after Alfred Bullhorst, pleading for him, courageously and stubbornly, I tell you, but she didn’t know that in Europe there were probably fifteen to twenty million German POW’s; she was on the road with her bike till November, coming home at intervals to replenish her supplies—and then she’d be off again. To this day I don’t know how she managed to get across all the frontiers and back again, with her German papers, and she never told us either. Just the songs—sometimes she’d sing them to us, and over and over again she’d sing them to the boy: ‘On Christmas Eve, this very day, We poor folk sit here as we pray, The room is cheerless here within, Outside winds blow and enter in, Lord Jesus come, be with us here, We truly need Thy presence dear’—oh the songs she used to sing! It brought tears to our eyes. Several times she rode her bike clear across the Eifel and on through the Ardennes and back again, from Sinzig to Namur, from Namur to Reims, and to Metz again and to Saarbrücken again, and once again to Saarbrücken. It wasn’t the best kind of insurance, I can tell you that, crossing and re-crossing that corner of Europe with German papers. Well, believe it or not, she found her Boris, her Yendritsky, her Koltovsky, her Bullhorst—pick any name you like. She found him, she found him in a cemetery, not in a Soviet paradise in the vaults, no, in a grave, dead, killed in an accident in an iron mine between Metz and Saarbrücken in some remote village in Lorraine—and she’d just turned twenty-three and, if you want to be exact about it, had been widowed for the third time. After that she really did become a statue, and we’d go hot and cold all over when she sang to the boy in the evening, the songs his father had loved so much: