Group Portrait With Lady Read online

  Recently Leni has had the odd opportunity to dance again. As a result of certain experiences, she now only rents rooms to married couples or foreign workers, and so has rented two rooms to a nice young couple whom for simplicity’s sake we will call Hans and Grete, at a reduced rent—and this despite her financial position! And it is this Hans and Grete who, while they were listening to dance music with Leni, correctly interpreted both her external and internal twitchings, so now and again Leni goes to them for an “innocent little dance.” Hans and Grete sometimes even cautiously try to analyze Leni’s situation for her, advise her to update her clothes, change her hair style, advise her to look for a lover. “Just spruce yourself up a bit, Leni, a snappy pink dress, some snappy nylons on those fabulous legs of yours—and you’d soon find out how attractive you still are.” But Leni shakes her head, she has been too badly hurt, she no longer goes to the store to buy groceries, lets Grete do her shopping for her, and Hans has relieved her of her morning walk to the bakery by quickly, before he goes to work (he is a technician with the highways department, Grete works in a beauty parlor and has offered Leni her services free of charge, so far without success), picking up her vitally essential fresh crisp rolls which she refuses to forgo and which are more important to Leni than any sacrament could ever be to anyone else.

  Needless to say, Leni’s wall decoration does not consist solely of biological posters, she also has family photographs on the walls; photos of deceased persons: her mother, who died in 1943 at the age of forty-one and was photographed shortly before her death, a woman bearing the marks of suffering, with thin gray hair and large eyes, wrapped in a blanket and seated on a bench by the Rhine near Hersel, close to a landing stage on which the place-name is legible; in the background, monastery walls; Leni’s mother, it is plain to see, is shivering; one is struck by the lack-luster expression in her eyes, the surprising firmness of her mouth in a face that hardly gives an impression of great vitality; it is clear that she has lost the will to live; were one asked to guess her age, one would be embarrassed, not knowing whether to say that this is a woman of about thirty who has been prematurely aged by hidden suffering, or a fine-boned sixty-year-old who has retained a certain youthfulness. Leni’s mother is smiling in this photo, not exactly with difficulty, but with effort.

  Leni’s father, likewise photographed with a simple box camera shortly before his death in 1949 at the age of forty-nine, is also smiling, with not even a trace of effort; he is to be seen in the frequently and painstakingly mended overalls of a mason, standing in front of a ruined building, in his left hand a crowbar of the kind known to the initiated as a “claw,” in his right a hammer of the kind known to the initiated as a “mallet”; in front of him, left and right beside him, behind him, lie iron girders of various sizes, and possibly it is these that make him smile, as a fisherman smiles at his day’s catch. As a matter of fact they do—as will subsequently be explained in detail—represent his day’s catch, for at the time he was working for the above-mentioned former nursery-garden owner who was quick to sense the coming “scrap boom” (statement by Lotte H.). Leni’s father is shown bareheaded, his hair is very thick, only just turning gray, and it is very hard to apply any relevant social epithet to this tall, spare man whose tools lie so naturally in his hands. Does he look like a proletarian? Or like a gentleman? Does he look like someone doing an unaccustomed job, or is this obviously strenuous work familiar to him? The Au. tends to think that both apply, and both in both cases. Lotte H.’s comment on this photo confirms this, she describes him in this photo as “Mr. Prole.” There is not the slightest suggestion in the appearance of Leni’s father that he has lost his zest for life. He looks neither younger nor older than his age, is in every way the “well-preserved man in his late forties” who could undertake in a marriage advertisement “to bring happiness to a cheerful life companion, if possible not over forty.”

  The four remaining photos show four youths, all about twenty, three of them dead, one (Leni’s son) still alive. The pictures of two of these young men display certain blemishes applicable only to their clothing: although these are head portraits only, in both cases enough of the chest is visible to give a clear view of the uniform of the German Army, and attached to this uniform is the German eagle and the swastika, that symbolic composite known to the initiated as the “ruptured vulture.” The two youths are Leni’s brother Heinrich Gruyten and her cousin Erhard Schweigert, who—like the third dead youth—must be numbered among the victims of World War II. Heinrich and Erhard both look “somehow German” (Au.), “somehow” (Au.) they both resemble all the pictures one has ever seen of cultured German youths; perhaps it will make for clarity if at this point we quote Lotte H., for whom both boys resemble the ideal German youth embodied in that Medieval Statue, the Bamberg Rider, a description, as will later become apparent, by no means entirely flattering. The facts are: that E. is blond, H. brown-haired; that both are smiling, E. “to himself, warmly and quite spontaneously” (Au.), an endearing smile, really nice. H.’s smile is not quite so warm, the corners of his mouth already showing a trace of that nihilism that is commonly mistaken for cynicism, and that for the year 1939, the year in which both pictures were taken, can be interpreted as somewhat premature, in fact almost progressive.

  The third photo of a deceased subject shows a Soviet individual by the name of Boris Lvovich Koltovsky; he is not smiling; the photo is an enlargement, almost graphic it seems, of a passport picture taken by an amateur in Moscow in 1941. It shows B. as a solemn, pale person whose noticeably high hairline might lead one at first glance to assume premature baldness but which, his hair being thick, fair, and curly, is a personal characteristic of Boris K. His eyes are dark and rather large, reflected in his spectacles in a way that might be mistaken for some graphic gimmick. It is immediately apparent that this person, although solemn and thin and with a surprisingly high forehead, was young when the picture was taken. He is dressed in civilian clothes, an open shirt with a wide collar, no jacket, a sign of summer temperatures at the time the picture was taken.

  The sixth photo is of a living person, Leni’s son. Although at the time the picture was taken he was the same age as E., H., and B., he nevertheless appears to be the youngest; this may be due to the fact that photographic materials had improved since 1939 and 1941. Unfortunately there is no denying it: young Lev is not only smiling, he is laughing in this photo taken in 1965; no one would hesitate to describe him as a “jolly-looking boy”; the resemblance between him, Leni’s father, and his father Boris is unmistakable. He has the “Gruyten hair” and the “Barkel eyes” (Leni’s mother’s maiden name was Barkel. Au.), a fact that gives him an added resemblance to Erhard. His laugh, his eyes, permit the unhesitating conclusion that there are two of his mother’s traits which he most certainly does not possess: he is neither taciturn nor reticent.

  Finally we must mention an article of clothing to which Leni is attached as otherwise only to the photographs, the illustrations of human organs, the piano, and the fresh rolls: her bathrobe, which she persists, erroneously, in calling her housecoat. It is made of “terrycloth of prewar quality” (Lotte H.), formerly, as can still be seen from the back and the pocket edges, wine-red, by this time faded to the color of diluted raspberry syrup. In a number of places it has been darned—expertly, we must admit—with orange thread. Leni is rarely parted from this garment, which nowadays she hardly ever takes off; she is said to have stated that she would like, “when the time comes, to be buried in it” (Hans and Grete Helzen, informants on all details of Leni’s domestic surroundings).

  Brief mention should perhaps be made of the present state of occupancy of Leni’s apartment: she has rented two rooms to Hans and Grete Helzen; two to a Portuguese couple with three children, the Pinto family, consisting of the parents, Joaquim and Ana-Maria, and their children Etelvina, Manuela, and Jose; and one room to three Turkish workers, Kaya Tunç, Ali Kiliç, and Mehmet Şahin, who are no longer all that young.

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  Now, Leni, of course, has not always been forty-eight years old, and we must turn our eyes toward the past. From photos taken in her youth, no one would hesitate to describe Leni as a pretty, wholesome-looking girl: even in the uniform of a Nazi girls’ organization—at the ages of thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen—Leni looks nice. In passing judgment on her physical charms, no male observer would have gone lower than “not bad, I tell you.” The human copulative urge ranges, as we know, from love at first sight to the spontaneous desire to, quite simply, with no thought of a permanent relationship, have intercourse with a person of the other or one’s own sex, a desire going all the way to the deepest, most convulsing passion that leaves neither body nor soul in peace, and every single one of its variants, whether unorthodox or uncodified, from the most superficial to the most profound, could have been aroused by Leni, and has been. At seventeen she made the crucial leap from pretty to beautiful that comes more easily to dark-eyed blondes than to light-eyed ones. At this stage in her life, no man would have gone lower in his opinion than “striking.”

  A few additional comments are required in regard to Leni’s educational background. At sixteen she went to work in her father’s office. He had duly noted the leap from a pretty girl to a beauty and, mainly because of her effect on men (the year is now 1938), used to see that she was present at important business discussions, in which Leni, pad and pencil on her knee, would participate, from time to time jotting down a few key words. She did not know shorthand, nor would she ever have learned it. It was not that abstract thinking and abstractions were entirely without interest for her, but “chopped-up writing,” her name for shorthand, was something she had no wish to learn. Her education had consisted, among other things, of suffering, more suffering on the teacher’s part than on her own. After having twice, if not exactly failed to be promoted, “voluntarily repeated a year,” she left primary school after Grade 4 with a passable, much interpolated report card. One of the still surviving witnesses from the school’s teaching staff, the sixty-five-year-old retired principal Mr. Schlocks, who was traced to his rural retreat, could state that there had been times when some consideration had been given to shifting Leni to a “special school,” but that two factors had saved her from this: first, her father’s affluence, which—Schlocks is careful to stress—had no direct bearing, only an indirect one, on the matter, and second, the fact that for two successive years, at the ages of eleven and twelve, she won the title of “the most German girl in the school” that was awarded by a roving commission of racial experts who went from school to school. On one occasion Leni was even among those selected for “the most German girl in the city,” but she was relegated to second place by a Protestant minister’s daughter whose eyes were lighter than Leni’s, which at that time were no longer quite as light a blue. Was there any way that “the most German girl in the school” could be sent to a school for slow learners? At twelve Leni entered a high school run by nuns, but by the time she was fourteen it was already necessary to withdraw her as having failed. Within two years she had once fallen hopelessly short of promotion, once been promoted upon her parents’ giving a solemn promise never to take advantage of the promotion. The promise was kept.

  Before any misunderstanding can arise, let us now present, as factual information, an explanation for the dubious educational circumstances to which Leni was obliged to submit, or to which she was subjected. In this context there is no question of blame, there were not even—either at the primary school or the high school attended by Leni—any serious disagreements, at most there were misunderstandings. Leni was thoroughly capable of being educated, in fact she hungered and thirsted after education, and all those involved did their best to satisfy that hunger and thirst. The trouble was that the meat and drink offered her did not match her intelligence, or her disposition, or her powers of comprehension. In most—one can almost say all—cases, the material offered lacked that sensual dimension without which Leni was incapable of comprehension. Writing, for example, never posed the slightest problem for her although, considering the highly abstract nature of this process, the reverse might have been expected; but for Leni writing was associated with optical, tactile, even olfactory perceptions (one has only to think of the smells of various kinds of ink, pencils, types of paper), hence she was able to master even complicated writing exercises and grammatical nuances: her handwriting, of which she unfortunately makes little use, was and still is firm, attractive and, as the retired school principal Mr. Schlocks (our informant on all essential pedagogic details) convincingly assured us, nothing short of ideally suited for the evocation of erotic and/or sexual excitement.

  Leni had particularly bad luck with two closely related subjects: religion and arithmetic (or mathematics). Had even one of her teachers thought of explaining to the little six-year-old Leni that it is possible to approach the starry sky, which Leni loved so much, in terms of both mathematics and physics, she would not have resisted learning the multiplication tables, by which she was repelled as other people are by spiders. The pictures of nuts, apples, cows, and peas with which an effort was made to try, in primitive terms, to achieve mathematical realism, meant nothing to her; in Leni there was no latent mathematician, but there was most certainly a gift for the natural sciences, and had she been offered, in addition to the Mendelian blossoms that were forever cropping up in textbooks and on blackboards in red, white, and pink, somewhat more complex genetic processes, she would—as the saying goes—have “thrown herself into” such material with burning enthusiasm. Because the biology instruction was so meager she was denied many joys that she has had to wait until middle age to find, as she goes over the outlines of complex organic processes with the aid of a box of cheap water colors. As has been convincingly assured by Miss van Doorn, there is one detail dating from Leni’s preschool existence that she will never forget and to this day makes her as “uncomfortable” as Leni’s genitalia wall posters. Even as a child, Leni was fascinated by the excremental processes to which she was subject and on which—unfortunately in vain!—she used to demand information by asking: “Come on now, tell me! What’s all this stuff coming out of me?” Neither her mother nor Marja van Doorn would give her this information!

  It remained for the second of the two men with whom she had until then cohabited, a foreigner at that and a Soviet individual to boot, to discover that Leni was capable of astounding feats of sensibility and intelligence. And it was to him that she recounted the incident which she later described to Margret (between late 1943 and mid-1945 she was much less taciturn than she is today): that she experienced her first and complete “self-fulfillment” when, at the age of sixteen, just removed from boarding school, out for a bicycle ride one June evening, she achieved—as she lay on her back in the heather, “spread-eagled and in total surrender” (Leni to Margret), her gaze on the stars that were just beginning to sparkle in the afterglow of sunset—that state of bliss which these days is far too often striven for; on that summer evening in 1938 as she lay spread-eagled and “opened up” on the warm heather, Leni—so she told Boris and as she has told Margret—had an overwhelming impression of being “taken” and of having “given,” and—as she later went on to tell Margret—she would not have been in the least surprised if she had become pregnant. Consequently, of course, she has no trouble at all understanding the Virgin Birth.

  Leni left school with an embarrassing report card on which she was given a D in religion and mathematics. She then went for two and a half years to a boarding school where she was taught home economics, German, religion, a little history (as far as the Reformation), and music (piano).

  At this point, before proceeding to memorialize a deceased nun—a person as crucial to Leni’s education as the Soviet individual (about whom there will be much to say later)—we must mention as witnesses three nuns, still living, who, although their associations with Leni go back thirty-four and thirty-two years, still vividly remember her, and all three of whom, when
visited by the Au. with pencil and pad in three different places, exclaimed at the mention of Leni’s name: “Ah yes, the Gruyten girl!” To the Au., this identical exclamation seems significant, a proof of the deep impression Leni must have made.

  Since not only the exclamation “Ah yes, the Gruyten girl!” but also certain physical traits are common to all three nuns, a number of details may be synchronized for space-saving purposes. All three have what is called a parchment skin: delicately stretched over thin cheek-bones, yellowish, slightly wrinkled; all three offered the reporter tea (or had it offered). It is not ingratitude, merely devotion to facts, that obliges him to say that the tea offered by all three nuns was on the weak side. All three offered dry cake (or had it offered); all three began coughing when the Au. started to smoke (discourteously omitting to ask permission because he did not want to risk a No). All three received him in almost identical visitors’ rooms that were adorned with religious prints, a crucifix, a portrait of the reigning pope and one of the regional cardinal. All three tables in the three different visitors’ rooms were covered with plush tablecloths, all the chairs were uncomfortable. All three nuns are between seventy and seventy-two years of age.

  The first, Sister Columbanus, had been the principal of the girls’ high school attended by Leni for two years with so little success. An ethereal person with lusterless, very shrewd eyes, who sat shaking her head throughout almost the entire interview, shaking her head in self-reproach for not having brought out all there was in Leni. Over and over again she would say: “There was something in her, something strong in fact, but we never brought it out.” Sister Columbanus—a graduate mathematician who still reads technical literature (with a magnifying glass!)—was a typical product of the early emancipation years of the feminine urge for education, an urge that, in a nun’s habit, unfortunately brought little recognition and even less appreciation. When politely asked for details of her career she told him she had been going around in sackcloth ever since 1918 and had been more laughed at, despised, and scorned than many of today’s hippies. On hearing details of Leni’s life from the Au., her lackluster eyes brightened a little, and she said with a sigh, yet with a hint of enthusiasm: “Extreme, that’s it, extreme—her life was bound to turn out that way.” A remark that aroused the Au.’s suspicions. On taking his leave he looked sheepishly at the four cigarette butts embedded with such provocative vulgarity in their ashes in a ceramic ashtray shaped like a vine leaf, that was probably seldom used and in which the only object ever to grow cold may be the occasional prelate’s cigar.