Group Portrait With Lady

  It was charming the way she took charge of the coffeepot, while Lotte put cake onto the plates and Mehmet distributed the inevitable whipped cream, “One spoon? two? three?” according to taste. Leni, it became clear, was not only taciturn and reticent, she was downright laconic, and so shy that her face wore a constant “nervous smile.” Her expression—something that filled the Au. with pride and joy—as she looked at K. was one of satisfaction and benevolence; asked by K. about Haruspica, she pointed to the picture on the wall, which was indeed impressive and—not colorful but colored—hung, five feet by five, over the sofa, and—although still incomplete—radiated an indescribably cosmic force and tenderness; the design of her uncompleted life’s work was not merely multi-layered but (they could be counted) eight-layered—of the six million cones she had by now entered perhaps thirty thousand, of the one hundred million rods perhaps eighty thousand—instead of taking a cross-section she had designed it horizontally, like an endless plain over which one might march toward a still unformed horizon. Leni: “There she is, maybe a thousandth part of her retina, when it’s finished.” She waxed almost talkative in adding: “My great teacher, my great friend.” That was all she said during the thirty-five minutes the visit lasted.

  Mehmet seemed rather humorless, even when he was serving the cream he did not let go of Leni’s hand with his free hand, and when Leni poured coffee he forced her to do it with one hand by hanging on to her free hand. This hand-holding was so infectious that finally K. started holding the Au.’s hand, as if she were keeping her fingers on his pulse. There was no doubt about it: K. was moved. All trace of her academic arrogance had vanished, it was quite obvious that she had known about Leni but not believed in her; she figured in the Order’s dossiers, but the fact that she existed and, what was more, genuinely existed, stirred her profoundly. She gave a deep sigh and transmitted her heightened pulse to the Au.

  Has the impatient reader noticed that quantities of happy endings are now taking place? Holding hands, alliances formed, old friendships—such as that between Lotte and Bogakov—being renewed, while others—Pelzer, Schirtenstein, and Scholsdorff, for example—thirsting and hungering, were getting nowhere? That a Turk who looks like a farmer from the Rhön mountains or the central Eifel has won the bride? A man who already has a wife and four children at home and on account of polygamous rights, of which he is aware but of which he has so far never been able to make use, has shown not the remotest trace of a guilty conscience, in fact may well already have acquainted some Suleika with the situation? A man who, compared with Bogakov and the Au., appears maddeningly clean, positively scrubbed: with creased pants, a tie; who finds bliss in a starched shirt because for him it is all part of the solemnity of the occasion? Who continues to sit there as if the imaginary photographer in artist’s beret and artist’s cravat, a painter manqué somewhere in Ankara or Istanbul about the year 1889, still had his finger on the rubber ball? A garbage collector who rolls, lifts, empties garbage cans, bound in love to a woman who mourns three husbands, has read Kafka, knows Hölderlin by heart, is a singer, pianist, painter, mistress, a past and future mother, who causes the pulse of a former nun who has spent her life wrestling with the problems of reality in literary works to beat faster and faster?

  Even the glib Lotte was silent, as if she too were touched, moved, deeply stirred; bit by bit she told them about Lev’s imminent release and the resultant accommodation problems, the owner of the building having refused to accept “Turkish garbage-truck drivers,” while the Helzens, since Grete Helzen “earned a bit on the side” in the evenings as a cosmetician in one of their rooms, could not relinquish a room, and it was impossible to “squeeze their five Portuguese friends into one room,” yet she wanted to, must, remain—with Bogakov, whom she frankly called “my Pyotr”—close to Leni; all of which meant that she was forced to “stand up to” her sons and her father-in-law. “It’s merely a postponement, it’s not over yet.” That she was willing to marry Bogakov and he her but that there was no evidence of his being either a widower or divorced.

  Eventually Leni did contribute to the conversation by murmuring “Margret, Margret, that poor Margret,” her eyes first moist, then weeping. Until finally Mehmet, by an indefinable movement causing him to sit even more upright than he already was, made it unmistakably clear that he regarded the audience as at an end.

  The good-byes—“not final, let’s hope,” K. said to Leni, who responded with such a sweet smile—followed and were protracted in the usual manner by the guests’ commenting kindly on the photos, the piano, the apartment in general, enthusiastically on the painting, and the group continuing to stand around for a while in the hall, where Leni then murmured, “well, we must just try and carry on with the earthly vehicle, the unearthly horses,” an allusion that not even K., with her apparently inadequate education, understood.

  Finally, outside on Bitzerath Strasse, which seemed very ordinary, K. lapsed into her inevitable, incorrigibly literary pose by saying: “Yes, she exists, and yet she doesn’t. She doesn’t exist, and yet she does.” A pose of skepticism which, the Au. feels, is far below K.’s level.

  However, she did add: “One day she will console all those men who are suffering because of her, she will heal them all.”

  Shortly after that she added: “I wonder whether Mehmet is as fond of ballroom dancing as Leni is.”

  11

  To his relief, the Au. finds that almost all the remainder of the report needs only to be quoted: a psychologist’s opinion, a letter from an elderly male nurse, the deposition of a police officer. The manner in which he came into possession of these documents must remain a professional secret. Granted it was not always done entirely legally or entirely discreetly, but in this case trivial infringements of legality and discretion serve a sacred purpose: to get at the facts. What does it matter, surely, if, as regards the psychologist’s opinion (which, by the way, contains nothing discriminatory), one of the Hoyser office staff (not Girl Friday!) quickly runs a few typed pages through the photocopier; for the Hoysers this meant (bearing in mind the five million that cost the Au. a button) a loss of approximately DM.2.50 (although not allowing for a proportion of the overhead). Is this not compensated for by a box of chocolates worth DM.4.50? The letter from the male nurse, holograph, was procured by the indefatigable M.v.D. and left with the Au. long enough for him to photocopy it personally in a department store for DM.0.50 per page. Total cost (incl. cigarettes for M.v.D.) approximately DM.8.00. The police officer’s deposition was acquired by the Au. gratis. Since the deposition contains no police (let alone security) secrets, being merely a kind of unintentional yet successful sociological study, the only misgivings that might have arisen would have been of a theoretical and not practical nature, and these misgivings were simply washed overboard with a few glasses of beer—beer, incidentally, for which the young police officer insisted on paying, an understandable wish that the Au. respected and did not like to infringe upon even with flowers for the police officer’s wife or a nice toy for his eighteen-month-old son (“cute,” as he was able to confirm, without need of pretense, after one look at the photo. The wife’s picture was not shown him! And indeed he would have been hard put to it to call another man’s wife “cute” in the presence of her husband).

  Let us therefore begin with the psychologist’s opinion. Education, background, age, etc., of this expert remained anonymous, all that the young lady in question would say was that he was esteemed equally by functionaries of the German Labor Federation and members of labor tribunals.

  “The expert (hereafter abbreviated to E.) knew Lev Borisovich Gruyten (hereafter L.B.G.) from an introductory interview that took place four months prior to L.B.G.’s arrest and at the instigation of the personnel manager of the municipal sanitation department. The first interview dealt with the possible promotion of L.B.G. to a post in internal administration at which he would work half the day as spokesman for the numerous foreign workers and the other half as a time-and-m
otion adviser. At that juncture L.B.G. was recommended by the E. for both positions; however, both positions were declined by L.B.G. At the time, L.B.G.’s psychological development could be only superficially assessed, on the basis of certain data; meanwhile, however, with the cooperation of the prison administration, four further interviews, each of one hour’s duration, were made possible, allowing of a considerably more intensive examination, although still not in sufficient detail to do justice in scientific terms to a person of such complex structure. There is no doubt that L.B.G. would be a worthy subject for a detailed and intensive scientific study. The E., now instructor of psychology at a technical college, is therefore contemplating recommending L.B.G. to one of his students as a subject for a graduate thesis.

  “Hence this attempt at a psychogram of L.B.G. must, despite the approximately accurate picture it may convey, be accepted with due reservation in terms of scientific usefulness. It is of use only for internal administrative purposes as a possible means of facilitating further association with L.B.G. and, with the above-named reservations, can serve as an attempt to explain L.B.G.’s motives during his ‘criminal’ behavior.

  “L.B.G. grew up in extremely unfavorable circumstances in terms of his extra-family environment, in extremely favorable circumstances in terms of his family environment. If the word ‘favorable’ used in the latter case requires a qualification that could be appropriately described as ‘indulgence’—then it is this very ‘indulgence,’ looking at the twenty-five-year-old man today, that accounts for the fact that L.B.G. is to be considered, despite the presence in him of considerable social disturbance, an undeniably useful, indeed agreeable, member of our society.

  “What was extremely unfavorable for L.B.G. was the fact that, growing up as he did as an illegitimate and fatherless child, he had no claim to the status of orphan (let alone war orphan) that is so important to psychological development. For the illegitimate child, the deceased father is not an orphan-alibi. Since, furthermore, on the streets and in school he was called ‘the Russian kid,’ and his mother was sometimes abused as ‘the Russian sweetie,’ he was constantly being made to feel—if not specifically nevertheless unconsciously—that the fact of his having been conceived not by rape but in voluntary surrender was particularly disgusting and humiliating. He had been conceived in circumstances that for his father and mother might have resulted in severe penalties, if not the death penalty. In this sense he was, in addition to everything else, a ‘convict’s kid.’ All the other children, the illegitimate ones, had, as the ‘children of dead heroes,’ the psychological advantage of regarding themselves as socially one rank higher than L.B.G. Expressed in popular terms, matters got even worse for him: to an increasing extent he became a victim of that problem-fraught institution (as demonstrated by the E. in numerous publications!) known as the denominational school. Although he had been baptized, and baptized a Catholic, and although this baptism was confirmed by a certain Pelzer under whom at a later date he served a temporary apprenticeship, as well as by other persons, the church authorities insisted on the repetition of this ‘emergency baptism’ to make it a formal baptism. The intensive, pedantic, and embarrassing research carried out in this connection earned for L.B.G. a further and highly macabre nickname, for he was also called a ‘graveyard kid,’ a ‘vault kid,’ he had been ‘conceived and born among corpses.’ In short: his mother refused to have him baptized again since she cherished the memory of the baptism in which L.B.G.’s father had participated; she did not want the memory of that baptism to be wiped out by ‘just any baptism,’ on the other hand she did not want to send her son to the nondenominational school some ten miles away and even less to the ‘Protestants’ (although there was no certainty as to whether the latter might not also have insisted on a new baptism), and so L.B.G. acquired the last, the ultimate taint: was he a ‘Christian,’ was he a ‘Catholic,’ or wasn’t he?

  “Seen against this background, the word ‘indulgence’ acquires a relativity that almost nullifies it. L.B.G. also had plenty of ‘aunts’: Aunt Margret, Aunt Lotte, Aunt Liane, Aunt Marja, above all he had his mother, all women who ‘indulged’ him; in addition he had ‘uncles’ and ‘cousins,’ father- and brother-surrogates, his uncles Otto and Pyotr, his cousins Werner and Kurt, he had the living memory of his grandfather, with whom he had ‘sat for years beside the Rhine.’ Retrospectively it may be said that his mother’s instinctive reaction to keep him out of school as often as possible—based though it sometimes was on flimsy pretexts—was a thoroughly sound one. Despite the fact that L.B.G. displayed an astonishing psychic strength by voluntarily absenting himself from the ‘sphere of indulgence,’ going out to play on the street, shunning neither passive nor active blows, it is doubtful whether he would have been able to stand up to the daily pressures of school. Had there been—this as a hypothesis—even a suggestion of deformity or sickliness in L.B.G. he would not have withstood those massive multiple environmental pressures beyond his fourteenth year; suicide, incurable depression, or aggression-criminality would have been the result. L.B.G. has indeed overcome a great deal, he has also repressed a great deal. What he could neither overcome nor repress was the fact that his ‘Uncle’ Otto, previously always so friendly, ended by depriving him of the society of his two ‘cousins’ Werner and Kurt who, respectively five and ten years older than he, represented for him the protection that he did not have to contrive, on which he could rely. It is therefore quite clear that the social rift that developed between him and his cousins, coupled with feelings of revenge and defiance, are the motivations for his ‘criminality.’ This ‘criminality’ consisted in the clumsy forging of two checks, although after a total of five interviews it is still not clear to the E. whether the clumsiness with which the checks were forged is to be interpreted as a conscious or unconscious provocation of the uncle and cousins. Since, although these forgeries occurred several (four) times, were hushed up three times and only on the fourth occasion prompted a charge against him, all four forgeries contained the same mistake (error in filling in the line marked: In Words), one is tempted to assume that this was a conscious provocation to be viewed within the context of that wartime shift in the financial circumstances of the Gruyten and Hoyser families of which he had by this time been made aware.

  “Now, how did L.B.G.—as a child and as an adolescent—compensate for this grievance? The fact that the intra-family compensation described here under the general heading of ‘indulgence’ was inadequate, that L.B.G. had also to develop his own initiative, that, especially after the removal from the scene of the two ‘cousins,’ he could not rely on his mother and his numerous aunts, must have been instinctively clear to him; but that in the final analysis he would have to be ‘the man of the house’ must have been borne in on him at an early age in view of the helplessness and vulnerability of his mother.

  “It is now necessary to introduce the concept of deliberate underachievement (hereafter called d.u.a.). First: d.u.a. in school, where for a while he was faced with possible removal to a special ‘school for slow learners.’ Contrary to his indisputable talents and intelligence he behaved as society expected him to in its automatic assessment of a boy burdened with so many antisocial attributes. As a pupil he was far worse than he need have been, even simulating to some extent the behavior of a mental defective. He avoided being required to repeat a year only when this prospect brought the ‘special school’ dangerously close, and this—relegation to the special school—he avoided simply because his mother was worried about the special school’s being so far away. He admitted to the E. that he ‘would have liked to go to the special school,’ but that at the time it was located in a remote suburb and, since his mother was working and L.B.G. had household chores to perform even at an early age, the distance alone would have been enough to disrupt ‘the running of the home.’

  “Parallel with the d.u.a. in school was a deliberate, defiance-motivated overachievement (hereafter called d.o.a.) that, scholastically speak
ing, ‘brought no returns.’ Because of the generosity of a person known to his mother and grandfather who gave him lessons three times a week, he was able at the age of thirteen to read and write Russian fluently. Note: the language of his father! He—one would like to be able to say—surprised his teachers but, in view of the fundamental psychological outlook of the average elementary-school pedagogue during the period in question, it must unfortunately be said that he annoyed his teachers by quoting Russian poetry from Pushkin to Blok while at the same time clinging obstinately to a level in German grammar that would have warranted his transfer to a special school. However, it must have been more than annoying, it must have been taken as an outright provocation that this boy—who at the age of thirteen had progressed no farther than Grade 5!—furthermore confronted his teachers—and uninvited at that!—with Kafka, Trakl, Hölderlin, Kleist, and Brecht, as well as with the poems of an as yet unidentifiable English-language poet, probably of Irish descent.