Here the Au., having once again to depart from his rule and intervene directly, would like to describe this event as Leni’s birth or rebirth, as a seminal experience, as it were. However, little material on Leni is available to him beyond that which permits the following summary: not overintelligent, perhaps, a blend of the romantic, the sensual, and the materialistic, a little Kleist-reading, a little piano-playing, a knowledge of certain secretory processes which, although amateurish, was far-reaching (or deep-seated); and even if we assume her to be (because of what happened to Erhard) a thwarted mistress, an unsatisfactory widow, three-quarters orphaned (mother dead, father in jail), even if we regard her as semi- or even grossly uneducated: not one of these dubious qualities, or their totality, explains the naturalness of her behavior at that moment which we will from now on call the “coffee incident.” Granted, she had been touchingly, warmly solicitous of Rahel until the moment when Rahel was buried in a shallow grave in the convent grounds, but Rahel had been a bosom friend, after Erhard and Heinrich the dearest she had ever known—why, then, the coffee for a person like Boris Lvovich whom she was in turn placing in a highly conspicuous and dangerous position, for what was the situation of a Soviet prisoner of war who, on being offered coffee by a naive German girl, accepted it with the utmost naturalness and (so it seemed) equal naiveté? Did she even know what a Communist was if, as Margret believed, she never bothered to distinguish between Jews and non-Jews?
Miss van Doorn, who had known no more about the “coffee incident” (Leni had evidently not regarded it as worth telling her about) than Margret and Lotte, has a straightforward explanation to offer: “One thing, you know, had always been taken for granted at the Gruytens’: everyone got a cup of coffee. Beggars, spongers, tramps, welcome or unwelcome business acquaintances. There was just no question, everyone got coffee, it was that simple. Even the Pfeiffers, and that’s saying something. And—to be fair—he wasn’t the one who committed the unpardonable sin, it was she. It’s always reminded me of how it used to be taken for granted that anyone who knocked at a monastery door got a bowl of soup, without being asked about his religion or required to utter pious sayings. No, she would’ve offered coffee to anyone, Communist or otherwise … and I believe she’d have given some to even the worst Nazi. There was just no question about it—the thing was, that no matter how many other faults she may’ve had she was a generous person, and that’s a fact. And warm and human—only, in one particular point, you know what I mean, she wasn’t what he needed.”
Now here we must at all costs avoid giving the impression that during that wartime period of late 1943 and early 1944 there was or could have been any such thing as Russophilia or Soviet euphoria at Pelzer’s wreathmaking business. Leni’s natural behavior can be assessed only relatively in historical terms, but in personal terms objectively. If we bear in mind that other Germans (a few) risked and suffered prison, hanging, or concentration camp for far lesser favors rendered to Soviet individuals, we are forced to realize that this was not a deliberate display of humanity but—both objectively and subjectively—a relative one, to be seen only in the context of Leni’s existence and the historical juncture. Had Leni been less unsuspecting (she had already demonstrated this aspect of her character apropos Rahel) she would have behaved—as is borne out by subsequent events and actions—in exactly the same manner. And had Leni been unable to express her naturalness in material form—by way of a cup of coffee, that is—the result would have been an inept, probably unsuccessful, stammering of empathy which might have entailed a worse interpretation than the coffee presented as if in a sacred chalice.
It is to be assumed that she derived a certain sensual pleasure from carefully rinsing the cup, carefully drying it: there was nothing pointed about that. Since in Leni’s case reflection had always come later (Alois, Erhard, Heinrich, Sister Rahel, her father, her mother, the war), much later, we must expect her not to realize until later what it was she had done. She had not only given the Soviet individual a cup of coffee, she had positively presented him with it, she had spared the Soviet individual a humiliation and caused a German amputee to suffer one. Hence Leni was not born or reborn in the estimated fifty seconds of deathly silence, her birth or rebirth was not a finished process, it was a continuing one. In a nutshell: Leni never knew what she was doing until she did it. She had to materialize everything. It must not be forgotten that at this moment in time she was precisely twenty-one and a half years old. She was—we must reiterate—a person who was extremely dependent on secretion and hence digestion, totally unsuited for sublimating anything. She had a latent capacity for directness that had been neither recognized nor aroused by Alois, and which Erhard either never had the chance, or never availed himself of the chance, to arouse. The estimated eighteen to twenty-five minutes of sensual fulfillment she may have experienced with Alois had not fully mobilized her, Alois having also lacked the ability to grasp the paradox that Leni was sensual precisely because she was not altogether sensual.
There are only two witnesses to the next-most crucial experience: the laying-on-of-hands. Bogakov, who has already described it and its secretory consequences, and Pelzer, the only other person in the know.
Pelzer: “From then on, of course, the Russian got his coffee regularly, from her, and I can swear to it, when she took him his coffee the next day—but by then he wasn’t with the wreath-frame group, he was already working at the final-trim table with Mrs. Hölthohne, I can swear to it—and by then it was no longer naive or unconscious, whichever you like, for she gave quite a little look around in case anyone was watching—she simply laid her left hand on his right, and it went through him, though it only lasted a second or two, it went through him like an electric shock. He shot up like a rocket taking off. I saw it, I can swear to it, and she didn’t know I saw it, I was standing in my dark office with my eye on them because I wanted to see what was going to happen about the coffee. Do you know what I thought, it sounds vulgar, I know, but we gardeners aren’t quite as namby-pamby as some people think; I thought: damn it all, she’s rushing him—boy, is she rushing him, I thought, and I got really envious and jealous of that Russian. Erotically speaking, Leni was a progressive person, she didn’t care that it’s traditional for the man to take the initiative: she did it by laying her hand on him. And even though she obviously knew that in his position he simply couldn’t take the initiative, still it was both things: it was, erotically and politically, a daring act, almost brazen.”
Of both of them (of Leni through Margret, of Boris through Bogakov) it is known that each said, in identical words, that they were both “instantly on fire,” and, as we know from Bogakov, Boris reacted as a man reacts and, as we know from Margret, Leni had an experience that “was much more wonderful than that heather business I once told you about.”
Pelzer on Boris’s professional skills: “Believe me, I’m a good judge of people, and the very first day I knew that Boris, that Russian fellow, was a highly intelligent person with organizational ability. After only three days he became, unofficially, Grundtsch’s deputy as final checker, and he got along fine with Mrs. Hölthohne and Miss Zeven, who were more or less under him but of course weren’t supposed to notice they were under him. He was in his way an artist, and it didn’t take long for him to catch on to the main point: economical use of materials. And no display of emotion when he had to handle ribbon-inscriptions that must surely have gone against the grain for him. ‘For Führer, Nation, and Fatherland,’ or ‘Storm Trooper Company 112,’ and although he was handling swastikas and eagles all day long he never batted an eyelid. So one day, when there were just the two of us in my office, where later he was in sole charge of the ribbon supplies and the ribbon accounts, I asked him: ‘Boris, tell me frankly now, how do you feel among all those swastikas and eagles and things?’ He didn’t hesitate for a moment with his answer. ‘Mr. Pelzer,’ he said, ‘I hope it won’t hurt your feelings—since you ask me so openly—when I tell you: there’s a certain com
fort in not only suspecting and knowing but actually seeing that even the members of a Storm Trooper Company are mortal—and as for the swastikas and eagles, I’m fully aware of my historical situation.’
“As time went on, he and Leni became almost indispensable to me, I want to stress this, if I not only left him in peace but actually did him favors—and the same goes for the girl—there were business reasons for this too. I’m not really one of your starry-eyed philanthropists, never said I was. It was just that the boy had a fantastic sense of order and a gift for organization—he got along well with the staff too, even Marga and the Schelf woman didn’t mind taking suggestions from him because he did it so skillfully. Believe me, in a free-market economy he’d have gone a long way. Well, he was an engineer of course, and most likely knew his math, but he was the first person to notice, though I’d been running the place for almost ten years and Grundtsch had been in the business for almost forty—not one of us had noticed, it hadn’t even dawned on that clever Mrs. Hölthohne—that the frame—I mean the wreath-frame—group was understaffed in relation to the efficiency of the trimming table, and because he and Mrs. Hölthohne were the best checkers I could ever have wished for. So: regrouping. Miss Zeven back to the frame table, she grumbled a bit but I squared that with a raise, and the result: production rose, as the figures showed, by 12 to 15 percent. So are you surprised that I was keen to hold onto him and take care nothing happened to him? And then there were the Party comrades who let me know—sometimes directly, sometimes by hints—that I was to make sure nothing happened to him, that he had powerful protection. Well, it wasn’t all that simple; a nasty little snooper like that Kremp, and that hysterical Wanft woman—they could’ve blown the whole place sky high. And not a soul, not even Leni or even Grundtsch, ever knew that in my own little greenhouse I let him have sixty square feet that’d been especially well manured, to grow his own tobacco, cucumbers, and tomatoes.”
The Au. must confess that, as regards the surviving witnesses from the wartime wreathmaking business, he preferred to take the path of least resistance and so visited most frequently those witnesses who were most easily accessible. Marga Wanft having turned her back on him even more ostentatiously on the second visit than on the first, he excluded her. Pelzer, Grundtsch, Ilse Kremer, and Mrs. Hölthohne being equally accessible and equally loquacious—somewhat less so in the case of Ilse Kremer—the choice, or the selection, was rendered difficult; in Mrs. Hölthohne’s case the lure was her superb tea and her meticulously furnished apartment, also her well-preserved and soignée attractiveness, as well as her open display of continuing Separatist feelings; the only things that made him hesitate with Mrs. Hölthohne were her tiny ashtray and her obvious dislike of chain smokers.
“Very well then, so our state” (meaning the state of North Rhineland-Westphalia. Au.) “has the highest tax income and supports other German states that have a low tax income—but does it ever occur to anyone to invite the people from the low tax income states—from Schleswig-Holstein and Bavaria, say—over here, so that for a change they can swallow not only our tax pennies but also our polluted air, the air that’s one of the reasons we make so much money here? And drink our foul, dreadful water—and how about the Bavarians with their pristine lakes and the Holsteiners with their shoreline coming here one day for a dip in the Rhine, they’d certainly come out tarred and probably feathered too. And just look at that Strauss, a man whose whole career is made up of unsolved incidents, I say unsolved and I also say obscure because it means the same thing—the way he insults our state” (N.R.-W. Au.) “almost foaming at the mouth—why, I wonder? Well, simply because things are a little more progressive here. He should be compelled to live for three years in Duisburg or Dormagen or Wesseling, with his wife and children, so he can see where the money comes from and how it’s earned—the money he gets for Bavaria and then has the nerve to insult because we have a state government here which, while far from entrancing, is at least not Christian Democrat, let alone Christian Socialist—do you see what I mean? Why am I supposed to feel ‘togetherness,’ why? Did I establish the Reich, was I ever in favor of its establishment? No. Why should we be concerned with all that, I’d like to know, up north and down south and in the middle? Just think for a moment of how we got into this crowd: all because of those damn Prussians—and what’ve they got to do with us? Who sold us down the river in 1815? Was it us? Was that what we wanted, was there such a thing as a plebiscite? No, I tell you. Why doesn’t Strauss take a dip in the Rhine some day and breathe the Duisburg air—but no, he stays put in his wholesome Bavarian air, almost choking on his indignation when he starts spouting about ‘Rhine and Ruhr.’ What have these obscure provincial factors to do with us? Don’t we have our own obscurity? Just think about it!” (Which the Au. promised to do.) “No, I’m a Separatist and always will be, and I’ll accept a few Westphalians if you like, if there’s no alternative, but what would we get out of them? Clericalism, hypocrisy, and maybe some potatoes—I don’t really know what they grow there and I’m not all that interested—and their forests and fields, well, who cares, I can’t take those home with me either—they’d stay nicely where they are, but very well, a few Westphalians. That’s all. The trouble is, they’re always taking offense, feeling slighted, grumbling and whining about ‘equal time on radio’ and nonsense like that. Nothing but trouble with those people.
“That’s the marvelous thing about Leni, that she’s so Rhenish. And I must tell you something. I’m sure you’ll think it very odd: that Boris seemed more Rhenish to me than all the rest of them, except Pelzer, Pelzer had just that blend of criminality and humanity that’s only possible here. It’s true, mind you, he never did anyone any harm, except Kremp maybe, he did give him a bad time whenever he could, and Kremp being a Nazi you might say Pelzer wasn’t such an opportunist after all, but that’s where you’d be wrong—because the Nazis were out-numbered it was highly opportune to give Kremp, and only Kremp, a bad time—nobody liked him, you see, not even the two other Nazis, he was simply an unpleasant character, always after women in that nasty way of his. And yet, and yet, I must try and be fair to him, he was a young fellow and had lost a leg back in 1940 when he was only twenty—and who’s willing to admit, or be forced to admit, that when you come right down to it, it was, or is, pointless? And we mustn’t forget that during the first few months of the war those boys were treated like heroes, besieged by women—but then, the longer the war went on, losing a leg became more and more run-of-the-mill, and later on the ones with two legs simply had better luck than the ones with only one leg or none. I’m quite a progressive woman when it comes to thinking, and that’s how I’d explain that boy’s sexual and erotic status and his psychological situation. I ask you—what, in 1944, was a man who’d lost a leg? Just a poor bastard with a miserable pension—and think for a moment what it’s like when a fellow like that takes off his leg in a crucial sexual situation? Appalling, for him and his partner, even if she’s a whore.” (Oh, that glorious tea of hers, and is the Au. to take it as a declaration of partiality that on his third visit the ashtray had at least the dimensions of a demitasse saucer? Au.)
“And then there was that Pelzer, always the picture of health, whom you can take as a classic example of mens sana in corpore sano, something you find only among criminals, I mean among people totally devoid of conscience. Lack of conscience makes a person healthy, take it from me. Even the guards who brought Boris to work in the morning and picked him up in the evening, even with them he made deals on the side in brandy, coffee, and cigarettes—they used to drive pretty much every week to France or Belgium as convoy guards and bring back brandy, cigars, and coffee by the case, even cloth, you could even order goods from those fellows, like in a store. One of them, called Kolb, a rather dirty old man, once brought me enough velvet from Antwerp for a whole dress; the other was called Boldig and was younger, a cheery nihilist, the kind that emerged by the score from ’44 on. A lighthearted lad if ever there was one, he had
a glass eye and had lost a hand, quite a nice row of medals on his gallant chest, and he was quite cynical about using his lost eye, his lost hand, and the hardware on his chest to his advantage, the way you use counters to gamble with. He cared less about Führer, Nation, and Fatherland than even I did, for after all, though I could’ve managed without the Führer, I’m all for a Rhenish fatherland, for the Rhenish people. Well, he was casual as can be about going off with the Schelf woman—who, after Leni, was the snappiest of the lot—for short spells at the far end of the greenhouse and, as he called it, ‘catching a wee mouse’ or ‘listening to a dickey-bird,’ on the pretext of having her pick him out a few flowers with Pelzer’s consent. He had lots of names for it. Not a bad type—simply: with a cynicism and a nihilism that bordered on the macabre. And he was the one who used to try and cheer Kremp up a bit, he’d slip him a few cigarettes now and then, things like that, and clap him on the shoulder, and loudly proclaim the slogan you began hearing around that time: ‘Enjoy the war, bud, peace is going to be terrible.’
“The other one, Kolb, was a nasty bit of work, always pawing and patting. As for Pelzer—to use a contemporary term: in view of the funeral-market situation, it was only natural for a black market to develop in everything—wreaths, ribbons, flowers, coffins, and naturally he got an allocation for the wreaths for Party bigwigs and heroes and air-raid victims. After all, who wants to have their dear departed buried wreathless? And because more and more soldiers, and civilians too, were dying, the coffins were eventually used not only over and over again but in the end as dummies: the body would be sewn up in canvas, later in sacking, then just wrapped up, more or less nude, and dropped through a flap into the bare earth, the dummy coffin was allowed to remain in place for a certain time, for appearances’ sake, and some earth would be thrown on it to make it more convincing, but as soon as the mourners, the salvo parties, the lord mayors, and the Party bigwigs—well, let’s say—as soon as the ‘inevitable cortege,’ as Pelzer called it, had moved far enough away, out of sight, the dummy coffin would be removed, dusted off, polished up a bit, and the grave hastily filled in—believe me, as hastily as at a Jewish funeral. One felt like saying: Next please, like at the dentist’s. It wasn’t long, of course, before it occurred to Pelzer, who missed out on the coffin rentals as well as the whole lucrative bag of tricks, that wreaths can be used over and over again too, and this double, triple, sometimes even quintuple use of wreaths was impossible without bribing and conspiring with the cemetery custodians. The number of times a wreath could be ‘recycled’ depended, of course, on the stability of the frame material and the tying greenery—at the same time it was a chance to have a good look at the methods and clumsy workmanship of the competition. Naturally this required organization, complicity—and a certain amount of secrecy; this was only possible with Grundtsch, with Leni, with me and Ilse Kremer—and I admit: we went along with it. Sometimes wreaths from nurseries out in the country would turn up, of truly prewar quality. So that the others wouldn’t notice anything, the whole operation was known as the ‘reworking group.’ Eventually it extended even to the ribbons. It got to the point where Pelzer kept his eyes open and manipulated the customers when they placed their orders in such a way that the inscriptions became less and less personal, and this meant increased opportunities for recycling the ribbons. Inscriptions like ‘From Dad,’ ‘From Mum,’ can be used relatively often in wartime, and even a comparatively personal inscription like ‘From Konrad’ or ‘From Ingrid’ has some prospect when you give the ribbon a good press, freshen up the colors and the lettering a bit, and put the ribbon away in the ribbon closet, till once again a Konrad or an Ingrid has someone to mourn. Pelzer’s favorite motto at this time, as at all times, was: Every little bit helps. Finally Boris hit on an idea that turned out to be quite a little gold mine, the idea—and he can only have known about this from his knowledge of second-rate German literature—of reintroducing an old-fashioned type of ribbon inscription: ‘Gone but not forgotten.’ Well, that turned out to be what today we’d call a best seller, and we could go on using that until the ribbon was finally past freshening up or pressing. Even highly individual inscriptions such as ‘From Gudula’ were saved.”
Group Portrait With Lady Page 22
