Group Portrait With Lady

  “He knew enough not to offer me a bribe, he merely exerted gentle pressure by reminding me that he had included me in his wreath-recycling group, in other words, had taken me into his confidence—a hint, of course, that my slate hadn’t been all that clean either, for it hadn’t been very nice, had it, the way we spruced up stolen wreaths and even used the ribbons over again—well, I ended up by giving in and letting him have the character reference he wanted, gave my French friends as guarantors for myself, and all the rest of it.

  “He did the same thing with Leni, at that time she had plenty of political prestige, Leni did, just like her friend Lotte, those two could’ve gone right to the top—but Leni happened to be like that, she didn’t give a damn about getting ahead; Pelzer offered her a partnership—just as I did later on—then he offered her father a partnership, but he had no more use for it than she had, he was suddenly quite the proletarian, would have nothing more to do with business, just laughed and advised Leni to give Pelzer his ‘thing,’ his clean bill of health, and she did, without taking anything in return of course. This was all after Boris’s death, when she had turned into a statue. Well, she gave it to him—just as I did. And that saved him, for we both counted for something. And if you ask me whether I regret it I’ll say neither no nor yes nor perhaps, I’ll only say: I feel sick at my stomach to think that we had him in our power—understand? In our power, with a piece of paper, a pen, a few phone calls to Baden-Baden and Mainz, and it was that crazy time when Leni was flirting a bit with the Communist Party, and a Communist Party man was on the tribunal, of course, and so on.

  “Well anyway: we gave him his character reference and got him out—and I must say, whatever he did as a businessman as a speculator, and whatever shady deals he put over with his predatory instincts, he never was and never became a Fascist, not even later, when it would have been quite useful, and once again became quite useful, to be able to do even that. No. Never. I must say that for him, I must give him credit for that, and he never competed unfairly with me, nor against Grundtsch—I must say that for him. And yet—I feel sick at my stomach to think that we had him in our power. And finally even Ilse Kremer went along with it too—he talked her into it, she was a victim of political persecution, and could prove it, and her voice was worth as much as Leni’s and mine, and though we two would have been enough he wanted a reference from her too, and got it—and the Kremer woman didn’t give a damn either, neither about Pelzer’s offer nor about mine nor about the fact that her old Party comrades were now showing up again. She had only one phrase in her head, even in those days: ‘I’ve had enough, I’ve had enough,’ and she’d certainly had enough of her former comrades—she used to call them the Thälmannites who had betrayed her husband or her lover in France, during the year and a half when the Hitler-Stalin pact was in force, which she was against, right from the start.

  “So what became of her, Ilse Kremer? Once again an unskilled worker, first for Grundtsch, then back to Pelzer after all, till I took her on myself, and then she started working with Leni at the job we’d done during the war: making wreaths, trimming them, putting ribbons on them, making bouquets, till it was time for her to retire. Somehow or other I felt them both to be a kind of living reproach: although they neither thought it nor expressed it nor even hinted at it, they’d derived no profit, no advantage, and it was all exactly the way it’d been during the war—Ilse Kremer making the morning coffee, and the coffee proportion was for a time, a fairly long time, even more miserable than during the war. And they came to work with their head scarves and their sandwiches and their coffee in little paper bags just as they’d always done. Ilse Kremer till ’66 and Leni till ’69, fortunately she’d been paying in her unemployment contributions for over thirty years, but what she doesn’t know and mustn’t ever find out is that I took the entire responsibility for her pension affairs and made additional payments out of my own pocket, so that now she at least has a little something. She’s as healthy as can be, mind you—but what’s she going to get when the pension plan really comes off? Less than four hundred marks, give or take a few. Can you understand—though it makes no sense at all—that I feel her to be a living reproach? Although she never reproaches me, just comes to me from time to time shyly asking for a loan because they’re threatening to seize something of hers that she’s fond of. I happen to be quite efficient and able to organize, even to rationalize, and I enjoy keeping a tight hand on my chain of stores and expanding it—and yet: there’s always something there that makes me very sad. Yes. The fact, too, that I couldn’t help Boris, couldn’t save him from that ridiculous fate: arrested like that on the street as a German soldier, and he of all people to be killed in a mining accident? Why? And why couldn’t I do anything about it? After all, I had those good friends among the French, and for me they’d have got not only Boris out but even a German Nazi if I’d asked them to, but when it finally became clear that it was no longer the Americans who were holding him but the French, it was too late, he was already dead—and they weren’t even sure of his fictitious German name—whether he’d been called Bellhorst or Böllhorst or Bull or Ballhorst, neither Leni nor Margret nor Lotte knew for sure. And why should they? For them he was Boris, and naturally they hadn’t looked all that closely at those German identification papers, let alone made a note of the name.”

  A number of conversations and some extensive research were needed to obtain precise information on the Soviet paradise in the vaults. But at least its duration could be accurately ascertained: from February 20 to March 7, 1945, Leni, Boris, Lotte, Margret, Pelzer, and Lotte’s two sons Kurt and Werner, then aged five and ten, lived in catacomblike conditions in a regular “vault system” (Pelzer) under the municipal cemetery. Whereas Boris and Leni had previously been able to spend their “visiting days” above ground in the Beauchamp chapel, now they had to “go underground” (Lotte). The idea originated with Pelzer, who contributed the psychological rationale, as it were.

  Cooperative as ever, he received the Au. on a further (and still not final) occasion in his rumpus room adjoining his wreath museum, at the swivel-top built-in bar, where he served highballs and placed an enormous ashtray as big as a fair-sized laurel wreath at the Au.’s elbow. The Au. was struck by the melancholy of a person who had come unscathed through highly contradictory periods of history. A man of seventy who, while not having to worry about a heart attack, still plays his two weekly games of tennis, goes for his regular morning jog, took up riding “at the ripe age of fifty-five” (P. on P.) and, “confidentially” (P. to Au.), “man to man, all I know of potency problems is from hearsay”; this melancholy, so it seemed to the Au., increases from visit to visit, and the truth is—if the Au. may be permitted this psychological conclusion—that the reason for this melancholy of Pelzer’s is a surprising one: unrequited love. He still desires Leni, he would be willing “to take the stars down from the sky for her, but it seems she’d rather carry on with unwashed Turks than grant me a few favors, and presumably all because of something for which I was genuinely not to blame. What had I done, after all? If you get right down to it, I actually saved Boris’s life. What good would his German uniform and his German papers have done him if he’d had no place to hide, and who was it who knew how scared the Americans are of corpses and cemeteries, of anything to do with death? Yours truly. My experiences in the first war and during the inflation, when I’d worked for that exhumation outfit, had taught me they’d look everywhere but most certainly not in burial vaults—and that goes for the cops, too, the whole pack—they weren’t going to be in any hurry to search the nether regions of cemeteries. Obviously Leni couldn’t be left alone, with the baby expected any day, and since Lotte and Margret were forced to go into hiding anyway it was clear that Leni couldn’t stay behind alone in the apartment.

  “So what did I do? After all, I was the only able-bodied man in the group, and my family was somewhere in Bavaria—and I had no wish to join the Home Guard or be taken prisoner by the Ameri
cans. So what did I do? I did a regular mining job, digging and propping, digging and propping, till I’d made galleries joining the Herriger vault, the Beauchamp vault, and the extensive von der Zecke burial chambers. That made altogether four little underground rooms, clean and dry as a bone, each measuring about six by eight, a regular four-room apartment. Next I installed electric current, taking it through from my own place, not more than fifty or sixty yards away. I got hold of some small heaters, because of the kids and Leni being pregnant, and—why hide it—there were also recesses for coffins, hollowed out but not yet occupied, reserved seats, so to speak, for the Beauchamps, the Herrigers, and the von der Zeckes. And these, of course, were ideal for storage. Straw on the floor, then mattresses, and, just in case, a little coal stove—for nighttime, of course, it would’ve been madness to light the thing during the day, as Margret later once tried to do—that girl had no conception of camouflage.

  “Now during all this tunneling Grundtsch had been a great help—all those family burial vaults, of course, were on our list of permanent-care customers—but he refused to live in them, he had a complex about being buried alive, brought back from the first war, you could never get him into any cellar or basement bar, so I had to hand up the baskets of earth to him, he’d never have gone down into a vault, and he refused to live down there with us. Above ground, fine, there the dead didn’t scare him, but underground he was scared of his own death. So when things began to get dicey he moved out to his native village west of the city, somewhere between Monschau and Kronenburg—at the end of January ’45, if you please! No wonder he walked right into the trap, became a Home Guardsman and, old as he was, landed up in a POW camp.

  “So anyway, by about the middle of February I’d got this four-room apartment in the vaults ready, and February was a quiet month, only one air raid, just once for half an hour or so, a few bombs you could hardly hear. So one night I moved in there with Lotte and her two kids, then Margret joined us, and if anyone tells you I made a pass at her I’d say: I did and I didn’t. There we were, us two in the two von der Zecke rooms, Lotte next door with her kids at the Herrigers’, and of course for Leni and Boris we’d reserved their original love nest, the Beauchamp vault, with mattresses and straw and an electric heater, some crackers, water, milk powder, a bit of tobacco, methylated spirit, beer—just like in an air-raid shelter. Sometimes we could hear the sound of artillery from the Erft front, that’s where at the last moment they’d sent the Russians to build fortifications—Boris with a German uniform in his pack, complete with medals and decorations, all the things that went with those damn papers—so anyway, the Russians were still building fortifications and gun emplacements, living in barns and no longer quite so strictly guarded, and one day Leni turned up on her stolen bike with Boris riding on the crossbar. I must say the German uniform looked pretty good on him, and the phony bandage looked great—he even had a wound-tag, all stamped and signed, that’s how they got past the cops, and they moved into their own little home in the cemetery around February 20, and it turned out I was right: no patrols, either German or American, dared go down into the vaults, and we lived an idyllic existence there, sometimes hearing nothing, seeing nothing, for days on end, and for appearances’ sake I worked during the day at my place, for naturally people were still dying and had to be buried, no longer quite so elaborately, no more salvos, no more proper wreaths but still a few branches of fir, sometimes a flower—it really was madness. In the evening I’d walk back toward home, later I rode there on Leni’s stolen bike—but part-way there I’d turn around and go back to the cemetery.

  “I need hardly say that those Hoyser brats were a regular nuisance, the cheekiest little bastards imaginable, crafty and unscrupulous, the only thing that kept them quiet was: learning, and what they wanted to learn was obvious: how to make money. They’d pick my brains on costing and bookkeeping and so forth. Even in those days they treated their mother like a doormat, and if there’d been such a game as Monopoly we could’ve kept those cheeky little brats quiet for weeks on end. They understood, mind you, that they had to be quiet and not show themselves outside, for they had no wish to be forcibly evacuated, oh no, that much they grasped, but the things they got up to inside! I mean, there are limits, surely, I mean a bit of respect for the dead and all that, surely that’s in everyone, even in me—but those brats dreamed of treasure in the graves, and sometimes they were on the point of unscrewing the tablets from the niches, looking for that damn treasure. If anyone says I made money from the gold teeth of the dead—I’ll say of those kids that they’d have made money from the gold teeth of the living. If Lotte says now that her kids were taken out of her hands, then I say she never had them in her hands. They’d been trained by their grandmother, who was dead, and by their grandfather, who was still alive, for one thing only: to take every last advantage and to accumulate assets. One thing I never did—something all the others did, Margret, Leni, Lotte, even Boris—I never collected my own cigarette butts, let alone other people’s, I find that absolutely disgusting. I’ve always liked everything neat and clean, and anyone will back me up when I say I used to go outside in the cold, break open the ice in the water tank we used for watering the graves—watering the flowers, I mean—and wash myself from head to foot, and if it was at all possible I’d go for my regular morning jog, even then, though later on it became my nightly jog, and that damn butt-collecting was something I hated.

  “Well, anyway, toward the end of February, just before we went for our great haul to the Schnürer Gasse on ‘the Second,’ we found ourselves running pretty short in that Soviet paradise in the vaults—we had miscalculated, that was all, we’d expected the Americans a week earlier—and even the crackers were beginning to get low, and the butter too, and even the ersatz coffee, and needless to say the cigarettes; and along came those brats with neatly rolled cigarettes that they’d rolled with their mother’s cigarette machine, they’d got the paper from that good-natured Margret—and they sold me, as it turned out later, my own butts as freshly rolled cigarettes! And in their eyes ten marks apiece was a fair price!

  “Those women laughed and thought the boys’ realistic approach was great, but I felt cold shivers up and down my spine as I haggled with those cute little devils. It wasn’t the money, mind you, I had plenty of that, and I’d have paid fifty for a cigarette—it was the principle of the thing! The principle was all wrong. To be amused at such young kids being so mercenary, and to laugh at it! Only Boris shook his head, later Leni did too, when, after ‘the Second,’ the kids began building up a little stock they called their capital. A can of lard here, a package of cigarettes there—we were all much too much on edge to pay proper attention. Leni’s baby, remember, was born on the evening of ‘the Second,’ and she didn’t want to have it—and I can understand that—in a burial vault, and her Saint Joseph didn’t want that either. So they walked across the cemetery, all full of bomb pits it was, to the nursery garden, Leni already in labor, Margret with the medical supplies, and they proceeded to make her a bed of peat moss and old blankets and straw matting, and that’s where she had her baby, probably right where it was conceived.

  “It was a boy, weighing nearly eight pounds, and since it was born on March 2 it must, if I can still count, have been conceived around June 2—and you won’t find a single daylight raid around that time, not one! Nor was there any night shift worked that date, my payroll sheets prove that, and certainly not by Boris—so that must mean they took advantage of some opportunity in broad daylight.

  “Well, O.K., it’s all past history now, but it was a far cry from being a Soviet paradise. You should have seen the cemetery after the raid on ‘the Second’: heads of angels and saints knocked off, graves torn up, with and without coffins, take yoir choice, and us totally exhausted after the horribly dangerous job of lugging and carting our loot away from the Schnürer Gasse, and, to cap it all, the baby being born that evening! It all went quickly and smoothly, by the way. Talk about Soviet parad
ise though! Do you know who was the only person to teach us how to pray again? That Soviet fellow! That’s right. Taught us to pray, he did. A fine lad, I don’t mind telling you, and if he’d listened to me he’d be alive today. It was madness, it really was, to move so soon—on the afternoon of the seventh—back into town with the women and kids, carrying those lousy German army papers in his pocket and nothing else. The boy could have stayed down there in the vault for months, reading his Kleist and his Hölderlin and I don’t know what all—I’d even have got hold of a Pushkin for him—till he’d been able to produce some discharge papers, genuine or forged. Farm workers were already being discharged from American POW camps that summer, and all he lacked was some decent British or American discharge papers. Those women never thought of that, they were all caught up in the excitement over the peace and in sheer joy at being alive, but it was a bit premature for that. And talk about those evenings and afternoons sitting by the Rhine, for months on end, with the baby and those Hoyser brats and Grandpa Gruyten with that perpetual smile of his: the boy could be sitting by the Rhine today, or the Volga, if he’d wanted to.

  “That’s what I’d got hold of for myself, before I showed up officially in early June: discharge papers, in my own name with a proper POW number, the camp rubber stamp—after all, our trade could be classified as agricultural—it was all quite logical and proper, and God knows there was enough to do in my line, I mean, people didn’t even have to die, enough had died already, and somehow or other they all had to be got under the ground. That was something Lotte and Margret never thought of, either of them, in spite of all their connections, getting proper discharge papers for the boy—Margret could have done it with a wiggle of her hips, and Lotte would only have had to think of it, with all her rubber stamps and forms and connections. It was plain irresponsible not to legalize the boy after May or June, even if he’d had to call himself Friedrich Krupp. I’d certainly have been prepared to pay a price for that—I wasn’t only fond of the lad, I loved him, and you may smile: but it was he who taught me that all that stuff about subhumans and so forth is just so much crap. Talk about subhumans—they were right here.”