The only person who never seems to have been in need of consolation is Mrs. Schweigert, who about this time often turns up at the Gruyten house to visit her dying sister, trying to make her understand that “Fate cannot break a person, it can only make him strong”; that her husband, Gruyten, is displaying his poor breeding by being so “broken.” She even has the nerve to expostulate with this sister who has one foot in the grave: “Think of the proud Fenians.” She talks about Langemarck, is hurt, hurt to the quick, when, after inquiring about the cause of Leni’s manifest grief, she learns from Miss van Doorn, who is our informant for all these utterances, that Leni is probably grieving for Mrs. Schweigert’s son Erhard. She is indignant that this “heather girl” (a variation, at least, of the “Oh well girl.” Au.) should have the effrontery to grieve for her son while she is not even grieving for him herself. After this “shocking piece of information” she makes no further visits and leaves the house with the remark: “That’s really too much, I must say—heather indeed!”
Needless to say, movies are being shown this year too, and every now and then Leni goes to the movies. She sees Comrades on the High Seas, Dancing Through the Night, and Bismarck again.
The Au. doubts whether even a single one of these movies brought her anything like consolation or even distraction.
Did the hit tunes of the day, “Brave Little Soldier’s Wife,” “We’ll Storm the Coasts of England,” console her? It is doubtful.
At times all three Gruytens, father, mother, daughter, lie in bed, in darkened rooms, not leaving their rooms even for air-raid warnings, and “staring for days, weeks, at the ceiling” (van Doorn).
Meanwhile all the Hoysers have moved in with the Gruytens, Otto, his wife, Lotte, her son Werner—and an event takes place which, although it could be foreseen, in fact precisely calculated, is nevertheless regarded as a miracle and even contributes to the general recovery: Lotte’s child is born, in the night of December 21 to 22, 1940, during an air raid; it is a boy, weighing seven pounds two ounces, and since he arrives a little earlier than expected and the midwife is not prepared, “busy elsewhere” (with the birth of a girl, as it turns out), and the determined Lotte proves, surprisingly enough, to be as weak and helpless as the van Doorn woman, a further miracle occurs: Mrs. Gruyten leaves her bed and gives her instructions to Leni in a precise, firm, yet pleasant voice; while the final labor pains assail Lotte, water is heated, scissors are sterilized, diapers and blankets are warmed, coffee is ground, brandy set out; it is an icy, dark (the darkest) night of the year, and the emaciated Mrs. Gruyten, “now hardly more than a disembodied spirit” (van Doorn), has her finest hour, in her sky-blue bathrobe, continually checking the necessary instruments laid out on the chest of drawers, dabbing eau de cologne on Lotte’s forehead, holding her hands, spreading Lotte’s legs apart without any embarrassment, then helping her into the prescribed squatting position; quite unafraid she receives the baby as it is born, washes the mother down with vinegar and water, cuts the umbilical cord, and sees to it that the baby is kept “warm, warm, warm” as it is placed in a laundry basket that has been well padded by Leni. She is not in the least bothered by the bombs exploding not very far away, and the air-raid warden, a certain Mr. Hoster, who keeps demanding that the lights be put out and everyone go down to the cellar, is dismissed by her so summarily that all the witnesses to this event (Lotte, Marja van Doorn, old Hoyser) unanimously state, independently of one another, that she acted “like a real sergeant major.”
Did the world lose a doctor in her after all? In any event, she “cleans up the maternal parts” (Mrs. Gruyten according to Hoyser, Sr.), checks the expulsion of the afterbirth, has coffee and brandy with Leni and Lotte; to everyone’s surprise the vigorous van Doorn woman “proved to be a broken reed” (Lotte) and found flimsy excuses for spending most of her time in the kitchen serving coffee to Gruyten and Hoyser and, by speaking constantly of “we” (“We’ll see to that, we’ll manage all right, we won’t let it upset us, we etc.”—with a very subtle dig at Mrs. Gruyten: “I hope her nerves can stand it! Let’s hope it’s not too much for her!”), she keeps her distance from where the action is, Lotte’s bedroom, only appearing on the scene when the worst is over. When Mrs. Gruyten looks around, as if doubting her own capacity for tackling the job, she comes into the bedroom with little Werner and whispers to him: “Now let’s have a look at our baby brother, shall we?” As if someone had doubted it, Mr. Gruyten said to old Hoyser: “I’ve always known and always said that she’s a wonderful woman.”
A certain tension sets in some days later when Lotte positively insists on having Mrs. Gruyten as godmother but refuses to have the boy, whom she would like to call Kurt (“That’s what Willi wanted if it was a boy—a girl would have been called Helene”) christened. She inveighs against the churches, “especially that one” (an expression that could never be properly explained; with a probability bordering on certainty we may assume her to have meant the Roman Catholic Church, she hardly knew any others. Au.). Mrs. Gruyten is not angry about it, only “very, very sad,” consents to be godmother, and attaches great importance to giving the boy something really good, tangible, and lasting. She makes him a gift of a vacant building lot on the outskirts of the city that she had inherited at the death of her parents; she does all this very correctly, through an attorney, and Gruyten, Sr., makes a promise that he certainly would have kept but will not be able to keep: “And I’ll put up a building for him on it.”
The period of deepest melancholy seems to be over. Mr. Gruyten’s hitherto passive-apathetic melancholy becomes active: “triumphantly, gleefully you might even say” (Hoyser, Sr.) he accepts the information that early on the morning of February 16, 1941, his office building has been hit by two bombs. Since these were not followed by incendiary bombs and the explosion did not start any fires, his hope “that the whole bloody place will burn to the ground” remains unfulfilled; after a week of salvaging operations, in which Leni takes part with no particular enthusiasm, it turns out that scarcely a file has been lost, and after a further four weeks the building has been restored.
Gruyten never enters it again, to the amazement of all those around him he becomes something he has never yet been, “not even in his young days, really—he turned sociable” (Lotte Hoyser). Lotte Hoyser goes on: “He got really nice, it surprised us all. Every day he insisted we all get together for coffee between four and five, in the apartment, Leni had to be there, my mother-in-law, the kids, everyone. After five he stayed behind with my father, who brought him up-to-date on all the details of the business, the bank position, receivables, future plans, construction sites—he had a balance sheet prepared and spent hours with attorneys, as well as other legal experts, to figure out a way of turning the firm—which was in his name only—into a company. An ‘old-timers’ list’ was drawn up. He was smart enough to know that at forty-two—and in perfect health at that—he was still liable to be called up, and he wanted to ensure a position for himself as consultant on the board. On the advice of his customers—pretty big brass, a sprinkling of generals among them too, who all wanted the best for him, it seems—he changed his title to ‘head of planning’; I was made personnel manager, my father became treasurer—but with Leni, then just eighteen and a half, there was nothing doing: she refused to be made a director. He thought of everything—there was only one thing he forgot: to make Leni financially secure. Later, at the time of the scandal, we all knew, of course, why he had fixed things the way he had, but Leni and his wife were left high and dry. Well, anyway, he was nice—and another thing, even more amazing: he started talking about his son; for nearly a year the name had never been mentioned, wasn’t allowed to be mentioned. Now he talked about him; he wasn’t so stupid as to talk about Destiny or any such nonsense, but he did say he thought it was a good thing Heinrich had died ‘actively’ rather than ‘passively.’ I didn’t know quite what he meant because after more than a year that whole Danish business was beginning to have a sour tast
e in my mouth, I found it pretty stupid, or, let’s say, I would have found it stupid if those two hadn’t died for it—today I feel that ‘to die for something’ doesn’t make that something any better, greater, or less stupid; to me it just leaves a sour taste, that’s all I can say. Finally Gruyten had completed his ‘reorganization’ of the firm, and in June, the twelfth anniversary of the founding of the firm, he gave this party where he planned to announce the whole thing. It was on the fifteenth, right between two air raids—as if he’d had a premonition. The rest of us suspected nothing. Not a thing.”
Leni resumed her attempts at the piano, with concentration and an “expression that had suddenly become very determined” (Hoyser, Sr.), and Schirtenstein, who has already been mentioned, and who (all this according to his own statement) had listened to her, “not entirely without interest but by and large rather bored” as he stood meditating at the window, “suddenly pricked up my ears and then one evening in June I heard the most astonishing interpretation I have ever heard. All of a sudden there was a discipline in the playing, an almost icy discipline, such as I had never heard before. If you’ll allow me—an old man who has torn many a performer to shreds—a comment that may surprise you: I was hearing Schubert as if for the first time, and whoever was playing—I couldn’t have told you whether it was a man or a woman—hadn’t merely learned something but had understood something—and it’s very rare for a nonprofessional to achieve that kind of understanding. That wasn’t someone playing the piano—that was music happening, and again and again I found myself standing by the window and waiting, usually in the evening between six and eight. Soon after that I was called up and was gone for a long time, a very long time—and when I got back the apartment was occupied by the military, 1952—yes, I was gone eleven years, a prisoner of war—in Russia, where I strummed away far, far below my level—didn’t have too bad a time of it—dance music, hit tunes—terrible stuff; do you know what it means for an ‘intimidating music critic’ to play ‘Lili Marleen’ about six times a day?—and four years after I returned, it must have been in ’56, I finally got back my old apartment—I happen to love these trees in the courtyard, and the high ceilings—and what do I hear and recognize after fifteen years—the moderato from the Sonata in A minor and the allegretto from the Sonata in G, with greater clarity, discipline, and depth than I had ever heard them, even in 1941 when I suddenly began paying attention. It was playing of the very highest caliber.”
4
What follows now might well be headed: Leni does something foolish, Leni strays from the path of virtue—or: What’s got into Leni?
On the occasion of the firm’s anniversary party, scheduled for mid-June 1941, Gruyten had included in his invitation “all staff members who happened to be on home leave at the time.” What no one could suspect, “what was, in fact, not conveyed by the invitation” (Hoyser, Sr.), “was that it could occur to anyone that former staff members might consider themselves invited, and even the term ‘former staff member’ would have been somewhat of an exaggeration for him, in 1936 he had once worked for us as a trainee for six weeks—no, he didn’t want to be called an apprentice, that was too ‘primitive’ a word for him, he had to be a ‘trainee’ right off, but he had no intention of learning anything, all he wanted was to teach us how to build—we got rid of him fast, and then pretty soon he went into the army, he wasn’t really such a bad sort, that boy, just a romancer, not a good romancer like young Erhard, say—a bad romancer with a tendency toward megalomania which didn’t suit us at all. His idea was to get away from concrete and ‘rediscover’ the ‘majesty’ of stone—well, fair enough, maybe there was something in it, but we simply had no use for him, mainly because he didn’t want to handle stone and didn’t know how to. Damn it all, I’ve been in the building game for nearly sixty years now, even in those days I’d been in it for almost forty, and I had a pretty good idea of the ‘majesty of stone’; I’ve watched hundreds of masons and mason’s apprentices handling the stuff—you ought to have a look one day at how a real mason handles stone! Fair enough—but that fellow, he simply didn’t have the right hands or the right feeling for stone: he just liked to talk big, He didn’t mean any harm by it, oh no—he was just full of highfalutin ideas, and we knew where they came from.”
A further unforeseen, unfortunate aspect of the party: Leni was dead set against going. She had lost all interest in dancing, she was ‘a very serious, very quiet girl these days, got along well with her mother, studied French with her and a bit of English and was head over heels in love with her piano” (van Doorn). Besides, she knew “all the local staff quite well enough, there wasn’t a single one of them capable of reviving her interest in dancing” (Lotte H.). It was only from a sense of duty and at the urgings of her parents that she went to the party.
The point has now been reached where, although he plays only a minor role, it is unfortunately necessary to say a few words about this Alois Pfeiffer who has been so witheringly described by Hoyser, and about his clan, his background.
A.’s father, Wilhelm Pfeiffer, had been a “school chum and wartime buddy” of Gruyten, Sr.; they came from the same village, and until Gruyten’s marriage they had carried on a casual friendship that ceased when Wilhelm P. began “to get on Gruyten’s nerves to the point where Gruyten couldn’t stand it any more” (H.). The two men had fought together in a battle of the Great War (near the Lys, as it turned out), and after they came home from the war Pfeiffer, at that time twenty, “suddenly began” (H., including all of the following) “to drag his right leg as if it were crippled. Now I don’t mind, of course, if someone manages to wangle a pension, but he overdid it, he talked of nothing else but a ‘shell splinter the size of a pinhead’ that had hit him at a ‘critical spot’; and he certainly had stamina, for three years he dragged his leg from doctor to doctor, from pension board to pension board, till they finally gave him a pension and, what’s more, financed his teacher-training course. Fair enough. Fair enough. Nobody wants to be unjust to a fellow creature, and maybe he was—I mean, is—really crippled, but no one ever found that splinter—and that needn’t be the fault of the splinter, and I’m not saying the splinter doesn’t exist, fair enough—and of course he got his pension and became a teacher and so on, but it was a funny thing: it irritated Hubert to distraction to see Pfeiffer coming along dragging his leg; it got worse and worse, at times he would even speak of amputation, and later on his leg did, as a matter of fact, appear to be stiff—but no one ever saw or found any evidence of that ‘splinter the size of a pinhead’ even on the most sensitive X-ray screen, never. And because no one had ever seen it Hubert said to Pfeiffer one day: ‘Tell me, how d’you know the splinter is the size of a pinhead, if no one’s ever seen it?’ I must say, it was a staggering argument—and there’s no doubt that from then on Pfeiffer’s feelings were hurt beyond repair. But then he turned the whole thing into a kind of pinhead-Weltanschauung, and over and over and over again the kids in school out at Lyssemich were told about the splinter and about the ‘Lys,’ and this went on for ten, twenty years, and again Hubert said something very much to the point—we were always hearing things about him, you know, from the village where we all come from and have so many relatives—Hubert said: ‘Even if he has a splinter in it, that’s the phoniest leg I ever heard of, and there he goes dragging it around; and all that talk about a battle is nonsense, I was there, wasn’t I?—we were in the third or fourth wave, and never even got into the battle—of course there were some shells and so on, but—well, we all know war makes no sense, but it wasn’t anything like as bad as he makes out, and that’s a fact, and for us two it only lasted a day and a half—surely that’s not enough to live on for the rest of your life.’ Well” (a sigh from H.), “so then Wilhelm’s son, Alois, turned up at the ball.”
A few visits to the village of Lyssemich, to obtain some factual information on Alois, could not be avoided. Two innkeepers, about the same age as A., were interviewed, together with their wives,
who still remember him. A visit to the parsonage proved fruitless: the only thing the priest knew about the Pfeiffers was that the parish register “showed them to have been living in Lyssemich since 1756,” and as Wilhelm Pfeiffer eventually moved away (although not until 1940), “not so much because of his political activities, which were rather embarrassing, but because we just couldn’t stand him any more” (Zimmermann, innkeeper in Lyssemich, aged fifty-four, a solid citizen and plausible informant), traces of the Pfeiffer family have all but disappeared; the only witnesses are unfortunately all—one way or another—prejudiced: Marja van Doorn, all the Hoysers, Leni (Margret knows nothing about the Pfeiffers); the particulars supplied by both partisan groups do not contradict one another in data, merely in their interpretation.
All the witnesses of the anti-Alois party state that, at fourteen, Alois—in this respect his career has some resemblance to Leni’s—had had to give up all idea of high school, while the Pfeiffers maintain he had been “the victim of certain intrigues.” What no one disputes, although this characteristic too is mentioned in the most varied ironical refractions, is: that he was “handsome.” Leni has no photo of him on the wall, the Pfeiffers have about ten, and it must be said: if the term “handsome” has ever had any meaning, it fits Alois. He had light blue eyes, dark, almost blue-black hair. In the context of extremely vulgar race theories, much has been said about A.’s blue-black hair; his father was fair, as were his mother and all his ancestors (the following information all comes from the Pfeiffer parents), inasmuch as anything is known or has been handed down regarding the color of their hair. Since all the known ancestors of the Pfeiffers and the Tolzems (Mrs. Pfeiffer’s maiden name) first saw the light of day in the geographical triangle of Lyssemich-Werpen-Tozlem (a triangle with a total periphery of 16.2 miles), extended travel was not required. Two of Alois’s sisters, Berta and Käthe, who died young, were—like his still surviving brother Heinrich—fair-if not golden-haired. There must have been fantastic black-hair/fair-hair mutterings among the Pfeiffers, whose No. 1 breakfast-table topic this must have been. There was even a willingness to resort to the repulsive measure of casting suspicion on the Pfeiffer ancestors as an explanation for A.’s hair; within the geographical triangle mentioned (although in view of its dimensions no great expenditure of effort could have been required), some snooping around went on in church and municipal records (the district registry was located at Werpen), in the hope of digging up female ancestors who could be suspected of introducing—by way of amorous adventures—the dark hair into the family; “I remember,” says Heinrich Pfeiffer in talking about his family, quite without irony by the way, “that in 1936 they finally dug up a woman in the Tolzem church records whose legacy might have included my brother’s surprising dark hair: it was a certain Maria, of whom only the first name was entered although her parents are registered as ‘vagabundi.’ ”
Group Portrait With Lady Page 12
