Group Portrait With Lady Page 2

  Margret is at present in hospital, in an isolation ward, she is gravely and probably incurably ill with venereal disease; she describes herself as being “a complete goner”—her entire endocrine system is out of order; the only way one may talk to her is through a glass panel, and she is grateful for every package of cigarettes, every drop of schnapps, one takes along, no matter if it is the smallest pocket flask filled with the cheapest liquor. Margret’s endocrine system is so disorganized that she “wouldn’t be surprised if urine suddenly started coming out of my eyes instead of tears.” She is grateful for any kind of narcotic, would even accept opium, morphine, hashish. The hospital is outside the city, in pleasant surroundings, laid out in bungalow style. In order to gain access to Margret, the Au. had to resort to a variety of reprehensible methods: bribery, the multiple felony of fraud combined with false claims to office (pretending to be a professor of the sociopsychology of prostitution!).

  By way of advance information on Margret it must be stated here that “strictly speaking” she is a far less sensual person than Leni; Margret’s undoing was not her own desire for the pleasures of love, it was the fact that so many pleasures were desired of her which she was endowed by Nature to bestow; it will be necessary to report on this later. Be that as it may: Leni is suffering, Margret is suffering.

  “Strictly speaking” not suffering, only suffering because Leni (to whom she is really very devoted) is suffering, is a female person already mentioned whose name is Marja van Doorn, aged seventy, formerly a housekeeper employed by Leni’s parents, the Gruytens. She now lives in retirement in the country, where an old-age pension, a vegetable patch, a few fruit trees, a dozen hens, and a half-interest in a pig and a calf in whose fattening she shares, ensure her a reasonably pleasant old age. Marja has stood by Leni only through thin, she had no reservations until things “really went too far,” none—it must be specifically stated—on moral grounds (surprisingly enough), but some on the basis of nationality. Marja is a woman who fifteen or twenty years ago probably had “her heart in the right place”; meanwhile this over-rated organ has slipped, assuming it to be still there at all; certainly not down “into her boots,” for she has never been a coward. She is horrified at the way people are treating her Leni, whom she really knows very well, certainly better than the man whose name Leni bears ever knew her. After all, Marja van Doorn did live from 1920 to 1960 in the Gruyten home, she was present at Leni’s birth, shared in all her adventures, in all that befell her; she has almost decided to move back to live with Leni, but before doing so she is exerting her entire (and quite considerable) energy in a plan to get Leni to come out to the country and live with her. She is horrified at the things that are happening to Leni and the threats being made to her, and is even prepared to believe certain historical atrocities which hitherto she has not exactly regarded as impossible but of whose extent she was skeptical.

  A special position among the informants is that occupied by Dr. Herweg Schirtenstein, the music critic. For forty years he has been living in the rear portion of an apartment that forty years ago might have been regarded as baronial but which after World War I declined in prestige and was subdivided. He occupies an apartment on the ground floor of a building which, since the rooms facing the courtyard adjoin the rooms in Leni’s apartment facing the courtyard, has enabled him for decades carefully to follow Leni’s practicing and progress and eventual partial mastery of the piano without ever discovering that the player was Leni. True, he knows Leni by sight, having for forty years been running into her from time to time on the street (it is quite likely that he even watched Leni in the days when she was still playing hopscotch, for he is passionately interested in children’s games and the subject of his Ph.D. thesis was “Music in Children’s Games”); and, since he is not insensitive to feminine charms, we can be sure that over the years he has followed Leni’s general appearance attentively, that he has now and again given an appreciative nod, possibly even harbored covetous thoughts. Nevertheless, it must be said that, if one compares Leni to all the women with whom Schirtenstein has hitherto been intimate, he would have considered her “a shade too vulgar” to merit serious consideration. Were he to suspect that it is Leni who, after many years of rather ineffectual practice, has learned to play two, although only two, pieces by Schubert with consummate mastery, and in such a way that even decades of repetition have not bored Schirtenstein, perhaps he would change his mind about Leni—he, the critic who inspired even a Monique Haas not only with dread but with respect. It will be necessary to return later to Schirtenstein, who subsequently and inadvertently entered upon an erotic relationship with Leni that was not so much telepathic as telesensual. In all fairness it must be said that Schirtenstein would have stuck with Leni through thick and thin, but: he never had an opportunity.

  Much about Leni’s parents, little about Leni’s inner life, almost everything about Leni’s external life, was imparted by an informant eighty-five years of age: Otto Hoyser, head bookkeeper, who has been drawing a pension for the last twenty years and lives in a comfortable retirement home that combines the advantages of a luxury hotel with those of a luxury sanatorium. At more or less regular intervals, he either visits Leni or is visited by her.

  A witness with a fund of information is his daughter-in-law, Lotte Hoyser, née Bertgen; less reliable are her sons Werner and Kurt, aged respectively thirty-five and thirty. Lotte is as full of information as she is bitter, although her bitterness has never been directed at Leni; Lotte is fifty-seven, a war widow like Leni, and works in an office.

  Lotte Hoyser, sharp-tongued, describes her father-in-law Otto (see above) and her youngest son Kurt, without the slightest qualification or regard for blood kinship, as gangsters on whom she places almost the entire blame for Leni’s present near-destitution; it is only recently that she has “found out certain things that I haven’t the heart to tell Leni because in my own heart I haven’t yet been able to accept them entirely. It’s simply beyond belief.” Lotte lives in a two-room-kitchen-and-bath apartment in the center of town for which she pays about a third of her income in rent. She is considering moving back into Leni’s apartment, out of fellow feeling but also, as she (for as yet mysterious reasons) ominously adds, “to see whether they would actually evict me too. I am afraid they would.” Lotte works for a union “without conviction” (as she gratuitously added), “merely because, naturally enough, I like to eat and stay alive.”

  Further informants, not necessarily the least important, are: Dr. Scholsdorff, the specialist in Slavic languages and literature who turned up in Leni’s career as the result of a complicated involvement or entanglement; the entanglement, no matter how complicated, will be explained. Because of a chain of circumstances, which will also be explained when the time comes, Scholsdorff now finds himself in the upper hierarchy of the income-tax department; he intends to terminate this career shortly by way of early retirement.

  A further Slavic specialist, Dr. Henges, plays a subsidiary role; in any case, as an informant he lacks credibility, although he is aware of this lack and even stresses it, indeed almost enjoys it. He describes himself as “a total wreck,” a description that the Au. prefers not to adopt precisely because it comes from Henges. Unasked, Henges has admitted that, while in the Soviet Union “recruiting” workers for the German armaments industry (he was at the time in the service of a recently murdered diplomat of aristocratic descent), he “betrayed my Russian language, my glorious Russian language.” Henges is living “in not uncomfortable financial circumstances” (H. about H.) near Bonn, in the country, employed as a translator for a variety of journals and offices dealing with Eastern European politics.

  It would be going too far to enumerate all the informants in detail at this early stage. They will be introduced at the proper time and portrayed in their own context. Mention should be made, however, of one more informant, an informant not on Leni herself, but merely on an important figure in Leni’s life, a Catholic nun: a former book anti
quarian who feels that he is sufficiently authenticated by the initials B.H.T.

  A weak, but still living, informant, who need only be rejected as prejudiced when he is personally involved, is Leni’s brother-in-law Heinrich Pfeiffer, aged forty-four, married to one Hetti, née Irms, two sons, eighteen and fourteen, Wilhelm and Karl.

  Still to be introduced at the proper time, and in such detail as befits their importance, are: three highly placed personages of the male sex, one a local politician, another from the realm of big business, the third a top-ranking official in the Ordnance Department, two pensioned female workers, two or three Soviet individuals, the proprietress of a chain of flowershops, an old nursery gardener, a not quite so old former nursery-garden owner who (his own statement!) “now devotes himself entirely to the administration of his estates,” and a number of others. Important informants will be introduced with exact data as to height and weight.

  The furnishings of Leni’s apartment—or such of them as remain to her after numerous seizures—are a blend of the styles of 1885 and 1920–25: inherited by her parents in 1920 and 1922, a few art-nouveau pieces, a chest of drawers, a bookcase, two chairs, are now in Leni’s apartment, their antiquarian value having so far eluded the bailiffs; they were described as “junk,” unfit for seizure. Seized and removed from the apartment by the bailiffs were eighteen original paintings by contemporary local artists from the years 1918 to 1935, almost all of them dealing with religious subjects; their value, because they were originals, was overestimated by the bailiff, and their loss caused Leni no pain whatsoever.

  Leni’s wall decorations consist of detailed color photographs depicting the organs of the human body; her brother-in-law Heinrich Pfeiffer obtains them for her. He works at the Department of Health, part of his duties being the administration of teaching aids, and “although I can’t quite square it with my conscience” (H. Pfeiffer), he brings Leni the worn-out and discarded wall posters; in order to follow correct bookkeeping procedures, Pfeiffer acquires the discarded posters in exchange for a small fee. Since he is also “in charge” of the acquisition of replacements for the posters, now and again Leni manages to acquire through him a new poster which she obtains direct from the supplier, paying for it, of course, out of her own thinly lined purse. She restores the worn-out posters with her own hands, carefully cleaning them with soap and water or benzine, retracing the lines with a black graphite pencil and coloring the posters with the aid of a box of cheap water colors, a relic of her son’s childhood days at home.

  Her favorite poster is the scientifically accurate enlargement of a human eye that hangs over her piano (in order to redeem the frequently attached piano, to save it from being carried off by bailiffs’ agents, Leni has demeaned herself by begging from old acquaintances of her deceased parents, by obtaining rent in advance from her subtenants, by borrowing from her brother-in-law Heinrich, but mostly by visits to old Hoyser, whose ostensibly avuncular caresses Leni does not altogether trust; according to the three most reliable witnesses—Margret, Marja, Lotte—she has even stated that for the sake of the piano she would be prepared “to walk the streets”—an unusually daring statement for Leni). Less frequently observed organs, such as human intestines, also adorn Leni’s walls, nor are the human sexual organs, with an accurate description of all their functions, absent as enlarged tabulated wall decorations, and they were hanging in Leni’s apartment long before porno-theology made them popular. At one time there used to be fierce arguments between Leni and Marja about these posters, which were described by Marja as immoral, but Leni has remained adamant.

  Since it will sooner or later be necessary to broach the subject of Leni’s attitude toward metaphysics, let it be said at the outset: metaphysics present no problem whatever for Leni. She is on intimate terms with the Virgin Mary, receiving her almost daily on the television screen, and she is invariably surprised to find that the Virgin Mary is also a blond, by no means as young as one would like her to be; these encounters take place in silence, usually late at night when all the neighbors are asleep and the TV stations—including the one in the Netherlands—have signed off and switched on their test patterns. All Leni and the Virgin Mary do is exchange smiles. No more, no less. Leni would not be in the least surprised, let alone alarmed, if one day the Virgin Mary’s Son were to be introduced to her on the TV screen after sign-off time. Whether indeed she is waiting for this is not known to this reporter. It would certainly come as no surprise to him after all that he has meanwhile found out. Leni knows two prayers that she murmurs from time to time: the Lord’s Prayer and the Ave Maria. Also a few scraps of the Rosary. She does not own a prayer book, does not go to church, believes that the universe contains “creatures with souls” (Leni).

  Before proceeding to a more or less piecemeal account of Leni’s educational background, let us glance at her bookcase, the bulk of whose contents, inconspicuously gathering dust, consists of a library once bought by her father as a job lot. It is on a par with the original oil paintings and has so far escaped the clutches of the bailiff; it contains among other things some complete sets of an old Catholic church-oriented monthly which Leni occasionally leafs through; this periodical—an antiquarian rarity—owes its survival solely to the ignorance of the bailiff, who has been taken in by its unprepossessing appearance. What has unfortunately not escaped the bailiff’s notice is the complete sets for 1916–40 of the periodical Hochland, together with the poems of William Butler Yeats that had once belonged to Leni’s mother. More attentive observers such as Marja van Doorn, who for many years was obliged to handle them in the course of her dusting, or Lotte Hoyser, who during the war was for a long time Leni’s second-most intimate confidante, do, however, discover in this art-nouveau bookcase seven or eight surprising titles: poems by Brecht, Hölderlin, and Trakl, two prose volumes of Kafka and Kleist, two volumes of Tolstoi (Resurrection and Anna Karenina)—and all of these seven or eight volumes are so honorably dog-eared, in a manner most flattering to the authors, that they have been patched up over and over again, not very expertly, with every conceivable kind of gum and gummed tape, some of them being merely held together loosely by a rubber band. Offers to be presented with new editions of the works of these authors (Christmas, birthday, name day, etc.) are rejected by Leni with a firmness that is almost rude. At this point the Au. takes the liberty of making a remark that goes beyond his scope: he is firmly convinced that Leni would have some of the prose volumes of Beckett there too if, at the time when Leni’s literary adviser still had an influence over her, they had already been published or known to him.

  Among Leni’s intense pleasures are not only the eight daily cigarettes, a keen appetite (although kept within bounds), the playing of two piano pieces by Schubert, the rapt contemplation of illustrations of human organs—intestines included; not only the tender thoughts she devotes to her son Lev, now in jail. She also enjoys dancing, has always been a passionately keen dancer (a fact that was once her undoing in that it led her into the everlasting possession of the, to her, distasteful name of Pfeiffer). Now where is a single woman of forty-eight, whom the neighbors would be quite happy to see gassed, to go dancing? Is she to frequent the haunts of youthful devotees of the dance, where she would undoubtedly be mistaken for, if not mishandled as, a sex-granny? She is also barred from joining in church activities where there is dancing, having taken no part in church life since her fourteenth year. Were she to dig up friends of her youth other than Margret—who is probably barred from dancing to the end of the days—she would probably end up in various kinds of strip or swap parties, without a partner of her own, and for the fourth time in her life would blush. To date Leni has blushed three times in her life. So what does Leni do? She dances alone, sometimes lightly clad in her bed-sitting room, sometimes even naked in her bathroom and in front of that flattering mirror. From time to time she is observed, surprised even, at this activity—and this does nothing to enhance her reputation.

  On one occasion she danced wit
h one of the boarders, a minor official of the judiciary, the prematurely bald Erich Köppler; Leni would almost have blushed had not the gentleman’s palpable advances been altogether too clumsy; in any event she had to give him notice because—he was not without intelligence and certainly not without intuition—he had recognized Leni’s enormous sensuality and, ever since the “impromptu little dance” (Leni) that had resulted so spontaneously from his coming to pay the rent and catching Leni while she was listening to dance music, had stood every evening whimpering outside the door of her room. Leni would not yield because she did not like him, and ever since then Köppler, who found himself a room in the neighborhood, has been one of her most malicious denouncers, from time to time, during his confidential chats with the proprietress of the small general store that is about to succumb to the economic trend, enlarging on the intimate details of his imaginary love affair with Leni. These details arouse the proprietress—a person of ice-cold prettiness whose husband is absent during the daytime (he works in an automobile factory)—to such a state of excitement that she drags the bald-headed judiciary official (who has meanwhile been promoted) into the back room, where she commits repeated assaults on him. This person, Käte Perscht by name, aged twenty-eight, is Leni’s most vicious vilifier, she makes libelous moral accusations against her although she herself, through the good offices of her husband, hires herself out to a night club at times when an overwhelming majority of male trade-fair visitors flood the city. Here she does a “Trade Fair Strip” for which she is well paid and, before her appearance, she lets it be known through the medium of an unctuous announcer that she is prepared to follow through and satisfy any and all states of excitation brought on by her performances.