Group Portrait With Lady

  The second nun, Sister Prudentia, had been Leni’s German teacher; she was a shade less ladylike than Sister Columbanus, a shade redder in the cheeks, which is not to say that she was red-cheeked: merely that the former redness of her cheeks still glowed through, while the skin of Sister Columbanus’s face unmistakably radiated a permanent pallor that had been hers from the days of her youth. Sister Prudentia (for exclamation on hearing Leni’s name, see above) contributed a few unexpected details. “I really did my best,” she said, “to keep her in school, but it was no use, although I gave her, and was justified in giving her, a B in German; she wrote a really splendid essay, you know, on The Marquise of O____, a book that was banned, that was thoroughly disapproved of in fact, the subject matter being, shall we say, extremely delicate, but I thought, and I still think, that girls of fourteen should feel free to read it and make up their own minds about it—and the Gruyten girl wrote something really splendid: what she wrote was an ardent defense of Count F., an insight into—well, let’s say, male sexuality—that surprised me—splendid, and it was almost worth an A, but there was that D, actually an E plus, in religion, because no one, as you can imagine, wanted to give the girl an E in religion, and that big fat D in mathematics, no doubt thoroughly justified from an objective point of view, that Sister Columbanus was obliged to give her, although she wept as she did so, because she had to be fair—and that was the end of the Gruyten girl … she left, she had to leave.”

  Of the nuns and teachers at the boarding school where, from her fourteenth to almost her seventeenth year, Leni continued her education, it was possible to trace only one, the third of the nuns presented here, Sister Cecilia. It was she who for two and a half years had given Leni private piano lessons; immediately aware that Leni was musical, but horrified, desperate in fact, at her inability to read music, let alone recognize the sound expressed by the written musical note, she spent the first six months playing phonograph records to Leni and letting her simply play what she had heard, a dubious but successful experiment that—according to Sister Cecilia—proved, moreover, “that Leni was capable of recognizing not only tunes and rhythms but also structures.” But how—countless sighs from the nun!—how to teach the required ability to read music? It occurred to her—an idea almost amounting to inspiration—to try resorting to geography. True, the geography instruction was somewhat meager—consisting chiefly of repeating, pointing to, and reciting over and over again all the tributaries of the Rhine together with the low mountain ranges or other parts of the country bordered by these rivers—and yet: map reading was something Leni had learned: that black line twisting and turning between the hills of the Hunsrück and the Eifel, the Moselle River, was recognized by Leni not as a twisting black line but as a symbol for an actually existing river. All right then. The experiment worked: Leni learned to read music, laboriously, resisting it, often in tears of rage, but she learned it—and since Sister Cecilia was receiving from Leni’s father a substantial special fee that flowed into the coffers of the Order, she felt she “really must teach Leni something.” She succeeded, and: “The thing I admired about her was: she grasped at once that Schubert was her limit—attempts to go beyond that failed so miserably that even I advised her to keep within her limitations, in spite of her father’s insistence that she learn to play Mozart, Beethoven, and all those.”

  Apropos Sister Cecilia’s skin, one further comment: it still showed a few milky places, soft and white, not quite so dry; the Au. freely admits that he was aware within himself of the possibly frivolous wish to see more of the skin of this gracious celibate old lady, despite the fact that this wish may lay him open to the suspicion of gerontophilia. Unfortunately, when asked about a sister-nun who was important to Leni, Sister Cecilia became decidedly icy, virtually rebuffing him.

  At this stage we can do no more than indicate something which in the course of this account may eventually be proved: that Leni has an unrecognized genius for sensuality. Unfortunately she spent many years in a category of sufficient convenience to be in popular use: silly goose. Old Hoyser actually admitted that to this day he continues to place Leni in this category.

  Now it might be supposed that Leni, all her life a splendid eater, had been an excellent cookery pupil and that home economics must have been her favorite subject. Not at all: the cooking classes, although held at the stove and the kitchen table, using materials that could be smelled, handled, tasted, seen, seemed to her (if the Au. has correctly interpreted certain of Sister Cecilia’s remarks) more abstract than mathematics, as asensual as religious instruction. It is hard to determine whether in Leni the world has lost an excellent cook, still harder to determine whether the downright metaphysical fear that nuns have of spices caused the food prepared during cooking classes to seem “bland” to Leni. That she is not a good cook is unfortunately indisputable; soups are the only dishes in which she is now and again successful, also desserts; moreover—something not to be taken for granted—she makes good coffee and was also a dedicated baby-food cook (as attested to by M.v.D.), but the achievement of a proper menu would be beyond her. Just as the fate of a sauce may depend on the swift hand movement, as unorthodox as it is uncodified, with which a particular ingredient is added, so Leni’s religious education was a complete washout (or rather: fortunately failed to succeed). When the subject was bread or wine, or embraces or laying-on-of-hands, when terrestrial matters were involved, she had no problem. To this day she has not the slightest difficulty in believing that a person can be cured by the application of saliva. But then who would apply saliva to a person? Not only did she heal the Soviet individual and her son with saliva: by a mere laying-on-of-hands she could induce a state of bliss in the Soviet individual and soothe her son (Lotte and Margret). But then who would lay their hands on a person? What kind of bread was it they gave her at her First Holy Communion (the last religious activity in which she participated), and where, where for God’s sake, was the wine? Why didn’t they give it to her? Fallen women and so forth, those rather numerous women with whom the Virgin’s Son associated, all that pleased her enormously and could have induced the same ecstasy in her as the sight of a sky full of stars.

  One can well imagine that Leni, who throughout her life so dearly loved her fresh rolls in the morning and for the sake of them would even expose herself to the scorn of the neighborhood, looked forward fervently to the celebration of her First Communion. Now in high school Leni had been excluded from receiving the First Communion because on several occasions during the preparatory instruction she had lost patience and positively attacked the religious instructor, a white-haired, very ascetic person, elderly even in those days, who has unfortunately been dead for twenty years, and after the lesson she kept asking, with childish insistence: “Please, please give me this Bread of Life! Why must I wait so long?” This teacher of religion, of whom the name, Erich Brings, and a number of publications have survived, found Leni’s spontaneous expression of sensuality “criminal.” He was appalled at this manifestation of will which for him came under the heading of “sensual craving.” Needless to say, he brusquely rejected Leni’s unreasonable demand, putting her back two years on account of “proven immaturity and the inability to comprehend the Sacraments.” For this incident there are two witnesses: old Hoyser, who remembers it well and is still able to report that “at the time a scandal was narrowly avoided,” and that it was solely because of the politically precarious situation of the nuns (1934!), of which Leni had no idea, that it was decided “not to spread it about.” The second witness was the old gentleman himself, whose hobby was the doctrine of Particles, which involved devoting months, years if need be, to considering all the casuistically conceivable circumstances of what may or might happen, or might have or ought to have happened, to the Particles of the Eucharist. This gentleman, then, who as an expert on Particles still enjoys a certain reputation, later published a series of “Sketches from My Life” in a theological literary journal, revealing among other things this
experience with Leni, whom he shamelessly and unimaginatively abbreviates to “a certain L.G., at that time aged twelve.” He describes Leni’s “flaming eyes,” her “sensuous mouth,” patronizingly notes her dialect-tinged pronunciation, describes her parents’ home as “typically nouveau riche, vulgar,” and concludes with the sentence: “A craving for the most holy of objects, expressed in such proletarian and materialistic terms, naturally obliged me to refuse to administer the same.” Since Leni’s parents, while neither overwhelmingly religious nor particularly church-minded, were nevertheless so conditioned by the part of the country and the milieu in which they lived that they regarded as a blemish, indeed a disgrace, the fact that “Leni had not yet joined the others,” they saw to it that Leni, at the age of fourteen and a half, when she was already in boarding school, “joined the others,” as the saying goes; and since Leni had already—according to convincing statements by Marja van Doorn—entered upon womanhood, the church ceremony was a total failure, the secular one also. So passionately had Leni longed for this piece of bread that her entire sensory apparatus had been ready to fall into ecstasy—“And then” (as she described it to the shocked Marja van Doorn) “that pale, fragile, dry, tasteless thing was placed on my tongue—I almost spat it out again!” Marja crossed herself a number of times and found it surprising that the tangible sensuousness offered: candles, incense, organ- and choir-music, had not been able to help Leni over this disappointment. Not even the customary banquet of ham, asparagus, and vanilla ice cream with whipped cream could help Leni over this disappointment. That Leni herself is a “Particlist” is something she proves daily by gathering up all the bread crumbs from her plate and putting them into her mouth (Hans and Grete).

  Although obscenities will be avoided wherever possible in this account, for the sake of completeness it may be in order to describe the sexual enlightenment offered to the girls before they left boarding school—the youngest at sixteen, the oldest at twenty-one—by the school’s religious instructor (who admitted Leni to her First Communion solely at the principal’s insistence), a youngish, similarly ascetic type by the name of Horn. In a soft voice, availing himself almost exclusively of culinary symbolism and with not so much as a hint of accurate biological details, he compared the result of sexual intercourse, which he called a “necessary reproductive process,” with “strawberries and whipped cream,” rambling on in improvised analogies intended to describe permissible and prohibited kisses, analogies in which “snails” played a (to the girls) unaccountable role. The fact is that Leni, while the soft voice held forth in indescribable, purely culinary symbolism on indescribable details of kissing and sexual intercourse, for the first time in her life blushed (Margret); and, being herself incapable of remorse—a fact that made confession easy for her, reducing it to a routine act in which she could reel off a string of words—this attempt at enlightenment must obviously have had an impact on certain of her as yet undiscovered emotional centers. If we are to try and present Leni’s direct, proletarian, almost inspired sensuality with reasonable credibility, the following must be added: she was not immodest, hence her first blush must be recorded as a sensation. In any event, sensational, agonizing, and painful was how this process of violent blushing, occurring beyond her control, seemed to Leni. There is no need to reiterate that an immense erotic and sexual anticipation slumbered in Leni, or that for a religious instructor to give such an explanation for something that was held up to her, along with Holy Communion, as a sacrament, intensified her indignation and confusion to the point of provoking her first blush. Stammering with rage, crimson-cheeked, she simply left the classroom, thus earning herself another D, this time in religion, on her final report card.

  Also repeatedly drummed into her during religious intruction without arousing any enthusiasm in her: the three mountains of the Western world—Golgotha, the Acropolis, and the Capitol, although she did not dislike Golgotha, a mountain known to her from Bible instruction to be merely a hill and not in the Western world at all. Bearing in mind that, despite all this, Leni still remembers the Lord’s Prayer and the Ave Maria, in fact still makes use of these prayers; that she can still recite a few fragments of the Rosary; that her association with the Virgin Mary seems perfectly natural to her—this might be the appropriate place to remark that Leni’s religious gifts have remained as unrecognized as her sensuality—that in her, of her, a great mystic might have been discovered and fashioned.

  We must now finally get down to the task of at least sketching the design for a memorial to a female person who unfortunately can no longer be either visited or summoned or cited as a witness; she died at the end of 1942 in still unexplained circumstances, as a result not of direct violence but of the threat of direct violence and the neglect that those around her allowed her to suffer. B.H.T. and Leni were probably the only people whom this person loved; her name in private life did not yield even to painstaking research, nor did her place of origin or her background; the only name she was known by—and for this there are witnesses enough, Leni, Margret, Marja, and that selfsame former book antiquarian’s apprentice who considers himself adequately authenticated by the initials B.H.T.—was her convent name: Sister Rahel. Also her nickname: Haruspica.

  Her age, at the time when she first met Leni and simultaneously this B.H.T. (1937–38), may be estimated at around forty-five. She was short, wiry (not even Leni, only B.H.T., did she tell that she had once been German Junior champion in the 80-meter women’s hurdles!); probably [in 1937–38 she had every reason to keep details of her origin and education to herself] she was what in those days used to be called a “highly educated person,” which by no means precludes the possibility of her having a master’s degree and perhaps (under another name, of course) even a Ph.D. Her height can only be guessed at from the recollections of witnesses: about five foot one; her weight around, say, 98 pounds; color of hair: black streaked with gray; eyes: light blue; possibility of Celtic, also Jewish, origin, not to be discounted. This B.H.T., now working as a librarian (nongraduate) in a medium-sized public library where he studies the old-books catalogue and exerts a certain influence on the new-acquisitions policy, a (for his age) relatively burned-out person, kind, although rather lacking in initiative and temperament, must, despite a difference in age of at least twenty years, have been in love with this nun. His managing to evade military service until 1944, thus representing a kind of “missing link” between Leni and Sister Rahel (when he was called up in the fifth year of the war he was almost twenty-six and in perfect health, so he maintains), bespeaks a dogged and systematically functioning intelligence.

  In any event, he brightened up, became almost enthusiastic, when addressed on the subject of Sister Rahel. He is a non-smoker, a bachelor, and—to judge by the odors in his two-room apartment—an excellent cook. For him the only books are old books: for new publications he has nothing but contempt: “A new book is not a book at all” (B.H.T.). Prematurely bald, existing on a presumably good but one-sided diet, his organism inclines toward the formation of fatty deposits: a large-pored nose, as well as a tendency toward small growths behind the ears, observed over the course of numerous visits, point to this. By nature not very talkative, he positively bubbles over with information when the subject is Rahel-Haruspica; and for Leni, known to him from the nun’s tales merely as that “uniquely lovely blonde girl for whom many wonderful and many painful things are in store,” he harbors an infatuation, both idealistic and youthful, which might tempt the Au. (supposing he were inclined to such things and were not himself in love with Leni), at this late stage, some thirty-four years later, to pair off the two. Whatever peculiar traits, covert and overt, this B.H.T.-fellow may have, of one thing there is not doubt: he is faithful. Possibly even to himself.

  Much could be said about this fellow but it would be irrelevant since he has almost nothing to do with Leni directly and can only render certain services as a medium.

  It would be a mistake to suppose that Leni had suffered at
this boarding school; no, something wonderful happened to her there: she fared as all favorites of Fortune are wont to fare: she fell into the right hands. What she learned in the classroom was more or less uninteresting; her private lessons from the quiet and kindly Sister Cecilia were important and bore fruit. The crucial figure in Leni’s life, at least as crucial as the Soviet individual who cropped up later, was Sister Rahel, who (in 1936!) was forbidden to teach, the only duties she performed being those held in very low esteem: the duties of what the girls called a “floor sister,” and her social status was roughly that of a not very superior cleaning woman.