Group Portrait With Lady

  “Well, all right, all right, others died, others were treated even worse than I was, and after all I am in good health and not particularly impaired” (?? In what way? Au.). “Let’s forget about it, and the whole hypocritical claptrap of the trial, when they held documents under my nose and accused me of statements that quite honestly I never made, I wanted so much to get that boy safely through the war, and I failed—I failed to find his parents and his sister after the war, and I completely failed to exert any influence on his son’s upbringing. Didn’t I prove that my cultural influence on Boris had not been all that bad? Who was it introduced him to Trakl and Kafka, and ultimately Hölderlin too, tell me that? And couldn’t that obtuse woman have eventually, through me, incorporated those poets into her inadequate cultural background and then passed them on to her son? Was it really so presumptuous of me to feel an obligation to become a kind of sublimated godfather to the sole known survivor of the Koltovskys? I am convinced that Boris himself would not have turned down such a sincere offer, and did they really have to treat me with such contempt? Especially that impudent creature who was living there too—I’ve forgotten her name—with her vulgar socialist notions, who insulted me so rudely and finally threw me out—judging by what I’ve heard she hasn’t even been able to handle her own sons properly and has been living constantly on the periphery of society, not to say prostitution. And as for Gruyten, the father of that strangely silent woman and later on the lover of that impertinent pinko floozy, would anyone claim that during the war he was as innocent as a babe unborn? What I’m getting at is: there was no reason to turn me away so snootily and to accept without question the sentences passed by a court whose dubiousness is by now a household word. No indeed, I certainly got no thanks out of that affair.”

  All this was delivered in a low voice, more injured than aggressive, and every so often Mimi would take his hand to calm him down when his veins began to swell.

  “Money orders returned, letters not answered, advice not followed, when one day that impertinent creature, the other woman, I mean, told me point-blank in a letter: ‘Can’t you get it into your head that Leni wants nothing to do with you?’ Very well then—from that day on I kept entirely in the background, but of course I made it my business to find out what was going on, for the boy’s sake—and what has he turned out to be? I won’t say a criminal, for I am above accepting any legal concept without questioning it. I was a criminal myself, it was a crime for me to decide on my own that the rye-husk and chopped sugar-beet content of Russian POW bread be raised by 5 percent and the cellulose and leaf content correspondingly lowered, so as to make the bread more digestible: I might have gone to concentration camp for that. And I was a criminal simply because I was associated with factories and, because of complex family and financial involvements, was among the major industrialists whose empire, or I should say extent, became so vast that a detailed overview was impossible. So you see I myself was enough of a criminal, during the most varied epochs, not to want simply to call the boy a criminal, but he went wrong, there’s no doubt about that—it’s madness, and the outcome of a crazy upbringing, for someone of twenty-three to try and restore certain property relationships by forging checks and promissory notes, relationships that happen to be legal though painful, irrevocable though the result of the perhaps embarrassing shrewdness, if you like, of the present owners. A deed of land is a deed of land, and a sale is a sale. In terms of psychoanalysis, the boy is suffering from a dangerous attachment to his mother as well as from a father-trauma. That woman had no idea what she was starting with that Kafka of hers—nor did she know that such widely different authors as Kafka and Brecht, when read so intensively, are bound to lie side by side indigestibly—and on top of everything else the extreme pathos of Hölderlin and those fascinating, decadent poems of Trakl: the child drank all that in just as he was learning to talk and listen, and there was that corporealist materialism, too, with its mystical overtones: naturally I am against taboos too, but was it right to pursue that biologism in such detail, that glorification of all the organs of the human body and their functions? After all, we are divided, aren’t we, divided in our nature? I tell you, it’s bitter when you are not allowed to help, it hurts to be rejected.”

  Here again, something the Au. would have considered impossible in this case: T. as the result of W., the latter in turn as the result of hidden S.—and just then the dogs came bounding across the sumptuous lawn, Afghan hounds of regal beauty who briefly sniffed the Au., turned aside from him as being obviously too low-class, and proceeded to lick away their master’s tears. Damn it all, was everyone suddenly beginning to get sentimental: Pelzer, Bogakov, the exalted personage? Hadn’t even Lotte’s eyes glistened suspiciously, hadn’t Marja van Doorn likewise wept openly—and hadn’t Margret already dissolved in tears, while Leni herself permitted her eyes just exactly as much moisture as was necessary to keep them clear and open?

  The parting from Mimi and the exalted personage was friendly, their voices were still wistful as they asked the Au. to see if he could not intervene as mediator, they were still, and always would be, prepared to help Boris’s son—just because he was Boris’s son and Lev Koltovsky’s grandson—“get back on his feet.”

  Grundtsch’s situation, physical and psychic as well as geographical and political, remained unclarified, almost unclear, at the end of the war. A visit to him was readily arranged: telephone call, appointment, and there was Grundtsch, after cemetery closing hours, standing by the rusty gate that is only opened when the pile of those discarded wreaths and flowers which are of plastic, hence useless for compost, is carted away. Grundtsch, hospitable as ever, pleased by the visit, took the Au. by the hand to guide him safely past “the specially slippery bits.”

  His situation inside the cemetery had meanwhile improved considerably. Now the holder of a key to the public toilet as well as to the shower rooms of the municipal cemetery workers, and equipped with a transistor radio and a television set, he was enjoying to the full (It was around Eastertime. Au.) the imminent hydrangea boom expected for Low Sunday. On this cool March evening, although sitting about on benches was not possible, a peaceful stroll through the cemetery was, this time to the main path called by Grundtsch the main road. “Our best residential area,” he said with a chuckle, “our most expensive lots, and in case it should ever occur to you not to believe our Sonny Boy, I’ll show you a thing or two that prove his story. He never lies, you know, no more than he was ever a monster” (chuckle). Grundtsch showed the Au. the remains of the electric cable laid by Pelzer and Grundtsch in February 1945: pieces of inferior-grade cable, with black insulation, leading from the nursery to an ivy-covered oak tree, thence through an elderberry bush (the clips attached to it, although rusty, still visible), through a privet hedge to the family tomb of the von der Zeckes. On the outer wall of this imposing burial place, more clips, more remains of inferior-grade cable with black insulation—and then the Au. was standing (not without a slight shiver, it is true) facing the solemn bronze door that had once formed the entrance to the Soviet paradise in the vaults but which on this nippy evening in early spring unfortunately was locked.

  “Here’s where they went in, see?” said Grundtsch. “Then inside over to the Herrigers’, and from there on over to the Beauchamps’.” The von der Zecke and Herriger tombs were very well tended, planted with moss, pansies, and roses. Grundtsch’s comment: “That’s right, I took over the two annual contracts from Sonny Boy. After the war he had the passages bricked up again and plastered over, rather a botched job I’m afraid, done by old Gruyten, but he said the cracks that showed up later, and the crumbling plaster, were due to the bombs, and that wasn’t so far from the truth either, what with all the banging that went on during ‘the Second,’ it must have been quite something. Over there you can still see an angel with a bomb splinter in its head, as if someone’s battle-ax had got stuck in it.” (Although dusk was falling, the Au. could make out the angel and is able to confirm Grundt
sch’s statement.) “And some of that sentimental art-stuff at the Herrigers’ and the von der Zeckes’ got wrecked, as you can see. The Herrigers had it restored, the von der Zeckes had theirs modernized, while the Beauchamps, that’s to say old Beauchamp, is just letting the grave fall to pieces. The boy—well, by now he’s close on sixty-five too, but back in the early twenties I used to see him in his sailor suit crying his eyes out and praying all over the place here, and he looked pretty funny, for even in those days he was a bit too old for a sailor suit, but he refused to give it up—and for all I know he’s still running around in it, down there in that sanatorium near Merano. Periodically his attorney’ll send a check so that at least the worst of the weeds can be taken care of, and this attorney’s insisting on burial rights for the funny old gentleman in the sailor suit who’s still living off the cigarette-paper factory. Otherwise, I guess, the city would probably pull the whole thing down. So there’s a regular lawsuit going on about a burial plot!” (Chuckle. Au.) “As if the old boy couldn’t just as well be buried down there in the Tyrol. Here we are at the chapel, the door’s fallen to pieces, you can have a peek if you like and see whether Leni and Boris left any of their heather behind.”

  And indeed the Au. did enter the rather dilapidated little chapel, observing with some concern the crumbling sentimental frescoes in the charming (architecturally speaking) shell-shaped niches. It was dirty inside the chapel, cold and damp, and in order to have a good look at the altar, which had been robbed of all its metal ornamentation, the Au. indulged in a few matches (whether he can charge them to his income tax has not yet been determined; since he is a heavy smoker his consumption of matches is considerable, and an audit—by highly paid public and private experts—has still to be made to decide whether some thirteen to sixteen matches can be written off to expenses). Behind the altar the Au. found some dust of vegetable origin that still had a strangely reddish-purple tinge and could unquestionably have derived from decomposed heather; the nature of the female garment normally worn under a dress or sweater on the upper part of the body was explained to him, as he left the chapel in a daze, by Grundtsch as the latter puffed away at his pipe. “Oh well, I guess they go in there sometimes, a few couples wandering off this way and desperate for somewhere to go, no doorway, no money for a room, ones who aren’t scared of the dead.”

  It turned out to be a nice long walk in the nippy air, the evening just right to be rounded off with a kirsch at Grundtsch’s place.

  “What happened was,” Grundtsch went on, “that I simply lost my nerve when I heard there was all that heavy fighting going on back home, and I wanted to go back and see my mother again and be there if she needed me. She was getting on for eighty after all, and it was twenty-five years since I’d been to see her, and though she’d spent her life running after the priests that wasn’t her fault, it was the fault of certain” (chuckle) “structures. It was crazy, but off I went, much too late, relying on my knowledge of the countryside. After all, as a kid I used to herd the cows there, and sometimes I’d go through the forest and along the edge of the forest as far as the White Wehe and Red Wehe rivers. But as luck would have it those donkeys caught me just beyond Düren, stuck a rifle in my hand, gave me an armband, and sent me off with a party of half-grown youths into the forest. Well, what I did was simulate a scout party—I remembered all that crap from the last war—and took those few lads along—but my knowledge of the countryside was no use to me now, it wasn’t countryside any more, it was nothing but craters, tree stumps, mines, and if the Yanks hadn’t picked us up pretty soon we’d have had it—they were the ones, of course, who knew which paths weren’t mined.

  “Luckily at least those lads came through, so did I, though it was quite a while before they let me go, four months of empty stomachs and tents, muck and cold, well, it wasn’t exactly a picnic with the Yanks, I’ve had rheumatism ever since and I never saw my mother again. Some German blockhead shot her dead for running up a white flag—the little place lay between the lines, sometimes the Yanks, sometimes the Germans, and my old woman didn’t want to leave. And the Germans actually let my old mum have it with a machine pistol though she was nearly eighty, most likely the same bastards who’re now getting monuments put up to them. And still the priests are doing damn all about stopping those fucking monuments from being put up. I tell you, I’d just about had it when the Yanks finally let me go in June, with the agricultural workers. I had quite a time getting out, what’s more, though I genuinely did belong in that category. The word about agricultural workers, see, had been kept dark in camp by members of the Catholic Guild, and they passed it on as a tip to their buddies. Well, I made like old Father Kolping himself, like a Christian worker, rattled off a few pious sayings, and that way I got out by June.

  “When I got back here I found a nice little business, all cleaned up and running properly and duly handed over to me by Mrs. Hölthohne, together with the lease. I’ve never forgotten that, and to this day she still gets her flowers from me at cost. Sonny Boy never asked me for a reference—I’d have let him sweat it out for a few months at least, I don’t mind telling you, seeing as how he came through all those bad times without a scratch. Just as a kind of therapy of course, a bit of squirming wouldn’t have done him any harm. Well, he treated me right too, he worked out my share of the business and gave me a loan so I could finally start up my own business. We divided up the accounts between us, the ones for perpetual grave care, and he was generous, I must say, in helping me out with seed, but I still say that six months or so locked up some place would’ve done that fellow good.”

  The Au. stayed on a while (about an hour and a half) at Grundtsch’s, the latter giving not the least sign of tearfulness and from then on maintaining a soothing silence. It was nice and cozy at his place, there was beer and kirsch, and here in Grundtsch’s quarters the Au. was permitted something that Grundtsch had forbidden him to do while in the cemetery (“You can see a cigarette for miles.”): to smoke.

  As Grundtsch accompanied the Au. outside, again guiding him past the slippery rubbish, Grundtsch said, in a voice full, if not of tears, of emotion: “Something drastic must be done to get Leni’s boy out of the clink. All he did was make a fool of himself, after all. He was only trying to get some kind of personal restitution from that Hoyser gang. He’s a fine lad, just like his mother, like his father too, and don’t forget he was born right where I live and he worked for me for three years before going to work for the cemetery and then becoming a street cleaner. A fine lad, and not nearly as close-mouthed as his mother. We have to do something for that lad. He used to play here as a kid, when Leni came to help Pelzer out, and later myself, during the busy season. If necessary I’d hide him here in this very cemetery where his father was hidden. Not a soul would ever find him here, besides, he doesn’t have my fear of vaults and cellars.”

  The Au. bid him a cordial farewell and promised—a promise he intends to keep—to come again; he also promised to give young Gruyten, if he managed to escape from jail, what Grundtsch called the “tip about the cemetery.” “And what’s more,” Grundtsch called out after the Au., “tell him there’ll always be a cup of coffee and a bowl of soup and a smoke for him at my place. No matter what.”

  The following is a summary of the few extant quotations direct from Leni:

  “to walk the streets” (to save her piano from seizure)

  “creatures with souls” (in the universe)

  “impromptu little dance” (with E.K.)

  “when the time comes, to be buried in it” (in her bathrobe)

  “Come on now, tell me! What’s all this stuff coming out of me?” (Leni as a little girl, referring to her excrements)

  “spread-eagled and in total surrender”; “opened up”; “taken”; “given” (experience in the heather)

  “Please, please give me this Bread of Life! Why must I wait so long?” (statement that led to her being refused First Communion)

  “And then that pale, fragile, dry
tasteless thing was placed on my tongue—I almost spat it out again!” (referring to her actual First Communion)

  “muscle business” (referring to her “paperless status” in connection with bowel movements)

  “whom I mean to love, to whom I can give myself unreservedly”; “dream up daring caresses”; “he is to find joy in me and I in him” (referring to “the right man”)

  “The fellow” (does not have) “tender hands” (first rendezvous)

  “so I could have a little cry in peace” (visits to the movies)

  “so sweet, so terribly sweet and nice” (her brother Heinrich)

  “scared of him because he was so terribly well educated” (her brother Heinrich)

  “then surprised because he was so awfully, awfully nice” (her brother Heinrich)

  “managed quite well to keep his head above water”; “wrecker” (referring to her father after 1945)

  “even in those days probably represented a genuine temptation for Father, by which I don’t mean she was a temptress” (referring to Lotte H.)

  “awful, awful, awful” (referring to the family coffee gatherings with her brother H.)