Group Portrait With Lady

  “How then, without further ado, am I to approach the highly delicate subject that loses none of its embarrassing aspects even when I visualize you as a modern, broad-minded woman who has been married and is not entirely unfamiliar with certain details still to be mentioned? Well, I too was once a medical practitioner, although I never qualified as a doctor; for reasons associated with the war—although those were not the only ones, there was also my dread of examinations, particularly of pre-med—I got no farther than the rank of medical orderly, and I subsequently accumulated so much knowledge and experience in German and Russian field hospitals that, when I was discharged in 1950 from a Russian POW camp at the age of thirty-five, I was irresponsible enough to pretend to be a doctor, and as such I carried on a successful practice, but then, found guilty of fraud, etc., in 1955, I spent some years in prison until, at the intervention of Professor Kernlich, with whom I had worked in my student days in 1937, I was prereleased, whereupon Professor Kernlich took me in and gave me employment; this was in 1958. So I am somewhat acquainted with the life of a person with a stain on his character. Incidentally, during my five years of ‘medical’ practice, no error was ever laid at my door. Now you know with whom you are dealing—that at least is off my chest.

  “Now how do I go about getting the rest of it off my chest? I will try and take the bull by the horns! Your friend Margret was so far advanced in her recovery that there was no reason her discharge could not have been contemplated within six or eight weeks. All visits agitated her greatly, including the visits of that unexplained but pleasant gentleman who visited her frequently toward the end” (!!! Au.) “whom we first assumed to be an erstwhile lover, then a procurer, later a foreign-office official, i.e., the one who had effected that disastrous contact between her and the foreign statesman whom, in her own words, she was to, and did, get into a ‘treaty mood’ after other ladies had failed to do so.

  “Well, shortly before she was to be discharged, something very strange, paradoxical one might say, took place. Accustomed as I am, after studying medicine and years of ‘medical’ practice, by an association over nearly thirty-five years with the cynical jargon of VD treatment centers, I find it difficult to commit to paper, in writing to a lady such as yourself, something that would be even more difficult to do verbally. Well, my dear Mrs. Pfeiffer, I refer to the muscle that in physical, biochemical, and psychic terms, reacts and functions in such a complex manner and is commonly known as the male sex organ. You will not be surprised to learn (oh how relieved I am that the word is out!) that the women who usually fill our wards do not give this attribute names that one might call exactly delicate. Today as in the past, a variety of masculine first names have been very popular. While out-and-out coarse epithets sound bad enough, at least they correspond to the milieu and retain an almost matter-of-fact, a well-nigh clinical, character that renders them less offensive than the ‘genteel’ ones.

  “Now during the very weeks in which your friend was beginning to recover, the use of masculine first names as nicknames for the aforesaid attribute became fashionable in our ward in a manner that I can only call childishly silly. You must realize, my dear Mrs. Pfeiffer, that in these wards silly fads do occur, the kind one might expect to find only in girls’ boarding schools, and what is more: they carry over onto the nursing and supervisory staff as well. As I had an opportunity to observe during my three years in prison, these ‘dialectic carryovers’ also occur between prison inmates and their guards. Nuns, and nursing nuns, inclined as they are toward silliness, especially enjoy participating in such foolishness in dermatological wards; this is not to be condemned, it is rather a form of self-defense. Now the sisters had always been extremely kind to your friend, when it was a matter of visitors and gifts, alcohol, and cigarettes, they very often turned a blind eye, but since some of them have been associating for thirty or forty years with venereal-disease patients they have in many cases—in self-defense!—adopted their jargon as their own, in fact they not infrequently contribute to its enlargement.

  “I now have something very strange to tell you that will either surprise you or, more likely, confirm your own impression. Mrs. Schlömer was an extremely modest woman. At first they used to tease her by speaking in the above context of ‘Gustav Adolf’ or ‘Egon,’ ‘Friedrich,’ etc., and were highly amused that Mrs. Schlömer did not know what they were talking about. It was all great fun, and the sisters would carry on like that for days and nights on end. At first the cruel game was restricted to out-and-out Protestant names: ‘Gustav Adolf’s been paying you too many visits,’ or ‘The trouble, is, you’ve loved Egon too much,’ etc., etc. Then, when the allusions designed to ‘rid her of that damned innocence’ (Patient K.G., a professional procuress of over sixty) became so obvious that Mrs. Schlömer understood what they meant, she began to blush violently every time a masculine name was mentioned. Her frequent and violent blushing was in turn interpreted as prudishness and hypocrisy, whereupon the cruel game was stepped up until it became the most arrant sadism. Until they reached the point where, in order to make the cruelty complete, they started adding feminine names in the appropriate context. They were especially fond of combining very Protestant names with very Catholic ones, which were then called ‘mixed marriages,’ such as Alois and Luise, etc. Finally Mrs. Schlömer was, in laymen’s terms, in a perpetual state of blushing, she even blushed when the name of a visitor or a nun or nurse was called out in the corridor in some harmless context. Once on this cruel path, and inwardly indignant over a sensitivity with which they were reluctant to credit Mrs. Schlömer, they eventually intensified these torments to the point of blasphemy, and from then on referred only to Saint Alois, who was at one time, of course, the patron saint of the chaste, to Saint Agatha, etc., and the stage was soon reached when psychological sensitivity was no longer required for Mrs. Schlömer not only to blush but actually to cry out in spiritual anguish whenever ‘Heinrich’ or ‘Saint Heinrich’ was mentioned.

  “Now blushing, as you probably know, also has its medical context. What we call blushing is usually caused by a suddenly increased circulation of the blood through the vessels and capillaries of the facial skin through the action of the sympathetic nervous system caused by pleasant agitation or embarrassment (as was the case with Mrs. Schlömer). Other causes of blushing—e.g., overexertion, etc.—need not be mentioned here. Now in Mrs. Schlömer’s case capillary permeability had anyway been increased. Hematomata (popularly known as ‘bruises’ or blue marks) soon began to form, as well as purpura, which might be known vulgo as red or purple marks. This, my dear Mrs. Pfeiffer, is what your friend died of. Ultimately—more than justifying the autopsy which then took place—her entire body was covered with hematomata and purpura, her sympathetic nervous system had been overtaxed, her circulation became blocked, her heart gave out; and since Mrs. Schlömer’s blushing had turned into a massive neurosis, on the evening of the night during which she died she even blushed when the sisters in the chapel were singing the All Saints’ Litany. I know I would never be able to produce scientific proof of my theory, or my claim, yet I feel constrained to tell you: your friend Margret Schlömer died of blushing.

  “After she became too weak to talk coherently she would just keep whispering: ‘Heinrich, Heinrich, Leni, Rahel, Leni, Heinrich,’ and although it might have seemed appropriate to administer the last sacraments to her I decided in the end to refrain from doing so; it would have caused her too much anguish since toward the end they had even started, in their mounting blasphemy, to include in the above context the ‘dear Savior,’ the ‘sweet Child Jesus,’ and the Madonna, Holy Mary, the Most Blessed Virgin, in all Her epithets, even going so far as to take them from the Litany of Loretto, such as Rosa Mystica, etc. A liturgical text recited at her deathbed would, I am convinced, have tormented Mrs. Schlömer more than it would have consoled her.

  “I consider it my duty to add that Mrs. Schlömer, apart from the names Heinrich, Leni, Rahel, also spoke warmly, almost affectiona
tely, of ‘that man who comes here sometimes.’ She was probably alluding to the visitor who was not so much mysterious as obscure.

  “In signing this letter ‘Yours respectfully’ I would ask you not to interpret this as an evasion into a conventional salutation. Since I do not feel I can say ‘Yours sincerely’ lest it imply a certain familiarity, allow me to conclude:

  “With kind regards,

  “Yours respectfully,

  “Bernhard Ehlwein.”

  13

  After giving the matter much thought K., who was now taking an active hand in the investigations, decided it would be better after all to convert the police officer’s report into indirect speech rather than quote it verbatim. This results, of course, in a considerable shift in style, and many a nice little detail goes out the window (like the lady in hair curlers, for example, who appeared in the company of a gentleman in his undershirt whose hairy chest was described as “furry”; also a “pitifully whimpering dog,” an installment-bill collector—all these fall victim to an iconoclasm of which the Au. by no means approves, victims of his lack of resistance). Whether the Au. is displaying d.u.a. or d.l.r. (deliberate lack of resistance) must remain an open question. K. deleted everything that seemed to her superfluous, using without a qualm the blue pencil that has become so familiar to her, and what is left is the “gist of it” (K.).

  (1) Police Officer Dieter Wülffen, while seated in his parked patrol car outside the South Cemetery, was addressed a few days ago by a Mrs. Käthe Zwiefäller and asked to break open the apartment of Mrs. Ilse Kremer at 5 Nurgheimer Strasse. On being asked why she considered this necessary Mrs. Z. stated that, after a prolonged search (to be precise: after twenty-five years!—during which, she must admit, she had not been solely occupied with this search), she had discovered Mrs. Kremer’s address and had taken time off to visit her and acquaint her with some important information.

  Mrs. Z. was accompanied by her son, Heinrich Zwiefäller, aged twenty-five, a farmer like his mother (when applied to Mrs. Z. this term should actually be farmeress. Au.). They had come, she said, to inform Mrs. K. that her son Erich, who had died in 1944, had made an attempt to go over to the Americans in a village between Kommerscheidt and Simmerath. In the process he had been shot at by Americans and Germans, had sought and found shelter in the Zwiefäller farmhouse, spent several days there, and an intimate love affair had developed between her, Käthe Z., and Erich K., he aged seventeen, she aged nineteen; they had become “engaged,” “sworn eternal devotion,” and decided not to abandon the house, even when the fighting became fierce, in fact extremely dangerous; the house had been situated “between the lines.” As the Americans advanced, Erich K. had tried to fasten a kitchen towel which, although it had red stripes, was mostly white, to the top of the door frame as a sign of capitulation, and while doing so had been killed by a sniper of the German Army with “a bullet through the heart.” She, Mrs. Z., had actually seen the sniper seated on a raised hunting stand “between the lines,” his rifle aimed not at the Americans but at the village, where admittedly after this occurrence no one (“There were still about five people living in the village”) had dared to run up a white flag. Mrs. Z. stated that she had pulled the dead K. into the house and laid him out in the barn, had wept many tears over him, then later, when the Americans captured the village, had laid him in “consecrated ground” with her own hands. She soon realized she was pregnant, and “in the fullness of time,” on September 20, 1945, gave birth to a son and had him baptized with the name of Heinrich; her parents—at the end of 1944 she had been living alone in the house—had never returned from the evacuation, she had never heard of them again, they were regarded as having simply disappeared, probably killed in an air raid “somewhere along the way.”

  As an unwed mother, alone on the little farm, which she put back on its feet again, things had not been easy for her, yet “time heals all wounds,” she had brought up her son, he had done well in school and become a farmer. When all was said and done, he had something many boys did not have, his father’s grave close by. She, Mrs. Z., had tried “as early as” (!!) 1948 to find Mrs. K., and then “soon after that” (!!), in 1952, had tried again, but she had finally given it up as a bad job, even her next attempt, in 1960 (!!), had come to nothing. True, she said, at the time she had not known Erich K. to be illegitimate too, nor had she known his mother’s first name and occupation. At last, some six months ago, with the assistance of a fertilizer salesman who had been kind enough to intervene in the matter, she had discovered Mrs. K.’s address, but still she had hesitated, not knowing how “she would take it.” Finally the boy had insisted, they had come into town, located Mrs. K.’s apartment, but, after long and repeated knocking, the door had not been opened. Inquiries of the neighbors (this is where the lady in the curlers plays a considerable role, also the whimpering dog, etc.—all this now a victim of that cavalier iconoclasm, reminiscent of the liturgy reform!!) had yielded the information that Mrs. K. could not possibly have gone away, that she never had gone away. In short: she, Mrs. Z., “feared the worst.”

  (2) Wülffen was in a dilemma. Was this a case of “imminent danger,” the sole legal justification for having Mrs. K.’s apartment broken open? Having meanwhile reached 5 Nurgheimer Strasse accompanied by Mrs. Z. and her son, he was able to ascertain that Mrs. K. had not been seen for a week. A neighbor (not the hairy-chested one, but a pensioner of Rhenish descent, known to be a drunkard, who referred to Mrs. K. as “that Ils”—all deleted!) thought he had “heard her bird cheeping pathetically” for three days. Wülffen decided, not because he considered the term “imminent danger” to apply but merely out of compassion, to have the apartment opened up. Fortunately there was, likewise among the neighbors, a youthful person (with such colorless words is an interesting personality dismissed, one who had been convicted four or five times of assault, procuring, breaking and entering, and is known to all the neighbors as “Kröcke’s Heini,” a person whom even Police Officer Dieter Wülffen describes as having “a thick mane of greasy, long brown hair and known to the police”), who with suspicious dexterity and the telltale words “This time I’m doing it for the police,” broke open the apartment.

  (3) Mrs. K. was found dead, from an overdose of sleeping pills, lying fully dressed on the bench in her kitchen. Decomposition had not yet set in. She had merely (!!)—apparently with her finger and using the remains of some tomato ketchup—written the verb “to have” in a number of variations on an old mirror that hung over her kitchen sink. “I have had enough. I had enough. For a long time I had had en …” At this point she had evidently used up all the ketchup. The dead bird, a budgerigar, was found in the adjoining bedroom under a chest of drawers.

  (4) Dieter Wülffen admitted that Mrs. K. had been known to the police. According to the records of K. 14, the political branch of the police, she had been a Communist but since 1932 no longer politically active, although—this was also known to the police—especially after the German Communist Party was banned, she had received numerous visits from a person who had enjoined her to resume her activity. (Here K. had written out “Fritz’s” name in full, and this time it was the Au.’s blue pencil that claimed a victim.)

  (5) Mrs. Z. and her son lodged inheritance claims. Dieter W. took into safekeeping a purse containing DM.15.80, also a savings book showing a balance of DM.67.50. The sole article of value that was taken into safekeeping was a nearly new black-and-white television set on which Mrs. K. had stuck a slip of paper saying “Final installment paid.” From a photo that hung, framed, above the bench Mrs. Z. recognized the father of her child, Erich K. A second photo showed “his father probably. Because of the amazing likeness.” In a flower-painted canister bearing the name of a well-known brand of coffee was found: “A man’s wrist watch, of almost no value but intact. A worn gold ring set with an artificial ruby, likewise of almost no value. A 10-mark bill from the year 1944. A Red Front party badge, the value of which cannot be ascertained by the un
dersigned. A pawn ticket dated 1936 with which a gold ring had been pawned for 2.50 Reichsmarks, another pawn ticket dated 1937 for which a beaver collar had been pawned for 2.00 Reichsmarks. A duly receipted rent-receipt book.” No food supplies of any value were found; half a bottle of vinegar, a can of oil, almost full (small size), some dried-out graham bread (five slices), an opened can of milk, some cocoa in a can—two or three ounces. A jar, only half full, of instant coffee, some salt, sugar, rice, a modest quantity of potatoes, as well as a package of birdseed, unopened. In addition, two small packages of cigarette paper and an opened package of fine-cut, “Turkish Gem” brand. Six novels by someone called Emile Zola, pocket edition, much read, not soiled. Probably of little value. A book entitled: “Songs of the Workers’ Movement.” The entire contents were dubbed by the neighbors who, impelled by curiosity, came crowding in and were promptly told to keep their distance, “nothing but a lot of junk.” Having waited for the arrival of the police doctor, Dieter W. sealed up the apartment as required by regulations. Mrs. Z. was directed to the Department of Justice in the matter of her inheritance claims.

  (6) An offer was made to Mrs. Z. to put her in touch with Mr. (“Fritz”) who, it was thought, might be able to provide her with some interesting details concerning the life of the deceased woman and the father of the deceased Erich K. She declined. She wanted nothing to do with Communists, she said.