Group Portrait With Lady

by Heinrich Böll

  Margret: “Those two were getting more and more daring, I got terribly scared. Leni was now bringing him something every single day: cigarettes, bread, sugar, butter, tea, coffee, newspapers that she folded into tiny squares, razor blades, clothing—winter was coming on, you see. You can figure that, starting in mid-March 1944, not a day went by without her bringing him something. She dug out a cavity in the bottom bale of peat moss and plugged it up with a chunk of peat moss, turned it against the wall, of course, and this is where he had to pick up the stuff; naturally she had to get on the right side of the guards so they wouldn’t search him—that had to be done carefully, and there was this one cocky fellow, good fun but cocky, who wanted to take Leni dancing and so on and so forth, he called it ‘going into a clinch’—a cocky young pup who probably knew more than he would admit. He insisted on Leni’s going out with him, and finally there was no way out of it and she asked me to go along. So we went a few times to those honky-tonks that I knew so well and Leni not at all, and that cocky young fellow frankly admitted that I was more his type than Leni, that he found her too soulful and I was more of a ‘swinger’—well, the inevitable happened, because Leni was terrified lest that fellow—Boldig was his name—should find out and raise the roof. I—how else can I put it—well, I can’t say I exactly sacrificed myself, I simply took him over—took him upon myself, might be more accurate—but it wasn’t that much of a sacrifice for me either, and at the end of ’44 one more or less probably didn’t make all that much difference.

  “He lived in style, that young fellow did: only the best hotels when he wanted to ‘have a turn with me’—another of his names for it—champagne and all the rest of it, but the chief thing was that it turned out he wasn’t only cocky, he also liked to talk big, and when he was a bit drunk he would blab the whole story. Dealt in anything you care to name: schnapps and cigarettes, that goes without saying, and coffee and meat, but his most profitable deals were in documents for medal awards, wound-tags, identification papers—during some retreat or other he’d taken along the stuff by the ton, and you can imagine that when I heard ‘identification papers’ I pricked up my ears, because of Boris and Leni. Well, first I let him rattle on, then I laughed at him till he showed me the stuff, and true enough: he still had a carton the size of an encyclopedia full of forms, all stamped and signed, as well as leave passes and travel permits. Good enough. I let it go at that—but now it was we who had a hold on him, while he still didn’t know anything about us. I questioned him very carefully about the Russians, he looked on them as poor bastards, and sometimes, he said, he treated them to a few ‘regulars’ “ (regular, i.e., not hand-rolled cigarettes. Au.), “and they always got his cigarette butts anyway, and he wasn’t interested in making still more enemies. For an Iron Cross First Class Boldig charged three thousand marks and considered that ‘a gift,’ and for identification papers five thousand, ‘after all, that could be a lifesaver’—he got rid of all his wound-tags during the massive retreat from France, when the deserters hid in the ruins, shooting one another—at a suitable distance, of course—in the leg or the arm so that then they were legalized with their wound-tags. At that time I’d already been working for two years in a military hospital, and I knew what happened to the fellows with self-inflicted wounds.”

  Pelzer: “That was the time when business began to decline for a while. Luckily for me, Kremp, who was always having trouble with his artificial leg, had to go into the hospital for a few months. I could easily have let two or three people go—reason: not that fewer people were dying, but the evacuation of the city was now being carried out more consistently and rigorously. Instead of the wounded all being brought into the city, they were now usually taken farther away across the Rhine. Well, luckily the Schelf woman and Miss Zeven chose to be evacuated to Saxony—and finally our select little group, if I may call it that, had the place almost to ourselves; but even to keep the rest of the staff reasonably busy was hard enough. I ended up putting them to work in the greenhouses—but even then business lagged, and I hardly made expenses. In ’43 we’d had two shifts, sometimes a night shift, then came a slack period, then suddenly an upturn connected with the British stepping up their air raids—well, we do happen to be in the funeral business—and once again there were plenty of dead in the city. I took the workers out of the greenhouses again and reintroduced double shifts, and it was during this period that Leni hit on an invention, as it may fairly be called, which gave the business a real shot in the arm. She’d discovered a few broken pots of heather somewhere and simply began making wreaths from heather without frames, little tightly woven things which naturally revived the suspicion of romanizing—but after the events of July ’44 there were only a few idiots left who still thought about such trifles—and Leni became a real expert at it, the wreaths were small, compact, almost metallic, later they were even given a coat of varnish, and Leni would weave the initials of the deceased or the donor into them—sometimes, when they weren’t too long, the full names: there was just room for Heinz, or Maria, and this made for some attractive contrasts: like green on purple, and never, not once, did she break the rule of putting the trim in the top left third of the wreath. I was delighted, the customers were thrilled—and since we could still cross the Rhine, with no one to stop us and no particular risk involved, it was no problem to get hold of a cartload of heather. Sometimes she even outdid herself by weaving in religious symbols, and anchors, hearts, and crosses.”

  Margret: “I need hardly say that Leni had her ulterior motives when she started on the heather wreaths. The way she put it was: she wanted her bridal bed to be of heather and, since they were forced to remain within the cemetery grounds, they had no alternative but to decide on one of the huge family vaults for their rendezvous; their choice fell on the large private chapel of the Beauchamps, already considerably damaged by that time; it contained benches and a little altar that screened the heather behind it, and it was a simple matter to remove a stone from the altar and fix up a small cache of supplies, with cigarettes and wine, bread, candy, and cookies. At the same time Leni was getting craftier, for some time she’d only been bringing Boris a cup of coffee every four or five days instead of every day. Sometimes she skipped him when she handed in a wreath, she scarcely ever came near him at work, the whisperings had stopped, and the hiding place in the peat-moss bale was abolished and removed to the altar in the Beauchamp chapel. May 28 was their lucky day: there were two air-raid alarms, one right after the other, both daylight raids, between about one and four-thirty—not many bombs were dropped, just enough to make it a real air raid. Anyway, that evening she came home all smiles saying: ‘Today was our wedding day—March 18 was our engagement day, and d’you know what Boris said to me? “Listen to the British, they don’t lie.” ’ Then there came a tough time, for more than two months there were no daylight raids, most of them being at night, a few just before midnight, and we’d lie in bed with Leni cursing under her breath: ‘Why don’t they come during the day, when are they going to come again during the day, why are the Americans such slowpokes, why is it taking them so long to get here, it’s not that far, is it?’ She was already pregnant, and we were worrying about finding a father for her child. At last, on Ascension Day, there was another big daylight raid, lasting two and a half hours—I believe—and plenty of bombs, some even fell on the cemetery, and a few splinters whistled through the glass windows of the Beauchamp chapel over the heads of those two. Then came the period Leni called ‘glorious,’ the ‘month of the glorious rosary’—between October 2 and 28 nine major daylight raids. Leni’s comment: ‘I have Rahel and the Virgin Mary to thank for that, they’ve neither of them forgotten my devotion to them.’ “ Here we must present, by way of a quick summary, a few facts of practical interest: Leni was twenty-two years old, and in bourgeois terms the three months between Christmas 1943 and the first “visit” on March 18, 1944, might justifiably be called the engagement period, while, starting with Ascension Day 1944, we must
describe them as “newlyweds,” as a couple that has placed its destiny entirely in the hands of Air Marshal Harris, then unknown to them. Infallible statistics are of more use to us here than Pelzer’s and Margret’s statements. Between September 12 and November 30, 1944, there were seventeen daylight raids, with approximately 150 aerial mines, slightly more than 14,000 explosive bombs, and approximately 350,000 incendiary bombs being dropped. It must be realized that the inevitable chaos favored the couple: by that time no one was looking that carefully to see who crawled in where and who crawled out with whom, even if it was the chapel of a family vault. Finicky lovers were stymied at such times and—obviously neither Leni nor Boris was finicky. Needless to say, they now had plenty of time to discuss parents, brothers and sisters, background, education, and the war situation. With the aid of air-raid statistics it is possible to calculate with almost scientific accuracy that, between August and December 1944, Leni and Boris spent almost twenty-four full hours together—three consecutive hours on October 17 alone. Should it occur to anyone to pity these two, let him quickly disabuse himself of this sentiment, for if we bear in mind how few couples, whether legally or illegally joined, whether at liberty or not, were able to spend that much time together in such close intimacy, we cannot but cite this as yet another instance of this couple’s being favorites of Fortune—a couple that was shameless enough to long for daylight raids by the British Air Force in order to come together again in the Beauchamp chapel.

  What Boris never suspected, and probably never found out, was that Leni was getting into considerable financial difficulties. Considering that her monthly wages were worth scarcely more than half a pound of coffee, that the revenue from her building was worth roughly a hundred cigarettes, but that her coffee consumption amounted to two pounds, her cigarette consumption—including those she constantly had to “slip” this person or that—to presumably three or four hundred, it will readily be seen that one of the simplest laws of economics was being manifested with the speed of an avalanche: increased expenditure coupled with reduced income. To be accurate, at least with a probability bordering on accuracy: Leni needed nearly four thousand, sometimes five thousand, marks a month to cover the cost of coffee, sugar, wine, cigarettes, and bread—taking the blackmarket prices for 1944. Her income (wages and rents) amounted to some one thousand marks a month; the consequences are obvious: debts. And if we further calculate that in April 1944 she discovered the whereabouts of her father and wanted to “see he got something too” from time to time, through devious channels, then from June 1944 her monthly budget rose to almost six thousand marks in expenses as compared to a thousand marks in income. She had never been one to economize, and even her own consumption—before Boris and her father made additional expenditures necessary—had far exceeded her income. In a nutshell: in September 1944 she is known to have already had debts of twenty thousand marks, and her creditors were becoming impatient. It was just at this time that her mania for extravagance assumed a new dimension: she craved such luxury items as razor blades, soap, even chocolate—and wine, an endless supply of wine.

  Comment by Lotte H: “She never borrowed from me, though, because she knew I was having a hard enough time as it was, with the two kids. On the contrary: every so often she’d slip me something, bread coupons and sugar, or occasionally tobacco or a few ‘regulars.’ No, no. She was all right. Between April and October she hardly ever came home, and you could tell she had someone who loved her and whom she loved. We didn’t know who it was, of course, and we all thought she must be meeting him in Margret’s apartment. By then I’d already been gone from the firm for a year, I was working for the Employment Bureau, later for the welfare department that looked after the homeless, making just enough to be able to buy my rations. The firm had been reorganized—after June ’43 a new broom from the Ministry took over, a regular live wire, and because his name was Kierwind we all called him ‘New Wind,’ and he was always talking about ‘airing the good old comfortable ways and letting the stuffy atmosphere out of the place’! My father-in-law and I were part of that stuffy atmosphere. He told me quite frankly: ‘You two have been here too long, much too long—and I don’t want any trouble with you if we now have to start building trenches and fortifications on the western frontier. It’s going to be tough with Russians, Ukrainians, and Russian women, and German penal units. That’s not your cup of tea. The best thing you can do is quit voluntarily.’ Kierwind was the classic go-ahead type, cynical yet not entirely unattractive—a familiar type. ‘You know, the whole place still smells of Gruyten.’ So we quit, I went to the Employment Bureau, my father-in-law to the railway, as a bookkeeper.

  “Well, I don’t know how to put this—whether Hoyser was showing his true colors or whether those true colors had been affected by the circumstances. He turned quite nasty, and he’s stayed that way ever since. To say that conditions in our apartment were hellish is putting it mildly. After Gruyten’s arrest we started out with a kind of living and cooking commune in which we included Heinrich Pfeiffer, who was then still waiting to be called up. To begin with, Marja and my mother-in-law did the shopping and looked after the kids, and once in a while Marja would go out into the country, to Tolzem or Lyssemich, and bring back potatoes and vegetables if nothing else, and sometimes even an egg. For a time this worked quite well, till my father-in-law began bringing home the unrationed soup they got at noon at the railway station, and in the evening he’d warm it up and sip it with audible pleasure in front of our very eyes, in addition, of course, to what he got from the communal pot. Then my mother-in-law developed a ‘gram mania,’ as Marja called it, and began weighing everything; the next stage was when everyone locked up their own stuff in a locker with a heavy padlock—and needless to say they began accusing one another of stealing. My mother-in-law would weigh her margarine before locking it up and then again when she took it out—and every single time, without fail, she insisted that some of it had been pinched. What I found out was that she—my own mother-in-law—was even going for my kids’ milk, she’d water it down so as to be able to make the occasional pudding for herself or the old man. So then I teamed up with Marja and left the shopping and cooking to her, and this worked out fine for me, neither Leni nor Marja was ever petty—but now the old Hoysers began sniffing around when something was cooking or appeared on the table, and a charming new variation was added: envy. Well, I must say I envied Leni, she could go off and hide away with her lover at Margret’s—so I thought.

  “But now, since being with the railway, old Hoyser began developing his connections, as he called it. He was in charge of the bookkeeping for the locomotive engineers, and in ’43, of course, they were going into practically every corner of Europe, taking goods in demand there and bringing back goods in demand here. For a sack of salt they’d bring back a whole pig from the Ukraine; for a sack of semolina flour, cigars from starving Holland or Belgium, and wine from France of course, any amount of it, and champagne and cognac. Anyway, Hoyser was in a strategic position, and since he eventually took over the timetable coordination of all the transport trains he soon found himself in business in a big way. He’d make an exact analysis of what was in short supply in which part of Europe, and then see to it that the appropriate barter took place: Dutch cigars went to Normandy in exchange for butter—this was before the invasion, of course—and in Antwerp, say, butter would be exchanged for twice the number of cigars that had been given for the butter in, say, Normandy. And because he was then put in charge of routing, he gained control over the stokers and locomotive engineers and, needless to say, saw to it that those who collaborated best got the best routes, and of course on the domestic market, too, various items in various places brought various prices. In the cities everything fetched a good price: food and luxuries—coffee, of course, was more in demand than food in the rural areas—and through barter business, butter for coffee, say—it was possible to, as he put it, double one’s investment.

  “It was only natural for Le
ni to be the person he lent the most money to; he did warn her, it seems, but when she needed money he gave it to her. Eventually he became her source not only of money but also of goods, and he could make something on the side by charging her a bit extra, which Leni never noticed. She just kept right on signing IOU’s.

  “In the end he was the one who discovered old Gruyten’s whereabouts: first he’d been a construction worker on the Atlantic coast in France, operating a cement mixer with a penal unit, later on in Berlin clearing rubble after air raids—and we finally found a way of getting the occasional parcel to him and getting news from him. The message was usually: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll soon be back.’ Then payments fell due again. The inevitable happened: around August ’44 Leni owed Hoyser twenty thousand marks, and do you know what he did? He pressed her! He said, my transactions will come to a halt, my child, if I don’t get my money back—do you know what the outcome was? Leni took a mortgage of thirty thousand marks on her building, gave the old man the twenty thousand, and was left with ten thousand for herself. I warned her, I told her it was madness to raise money on real estate in a time of inflation—but she laughed, gave me something for the kids and a package of ten ‘regulars’ for myself, and because just at that moment Heinrich slipped into the room looking for some extra goodies, she gave him something too and did a little improvised dance with the lad, who was completely baffled. I must say, it was fantastic the way she had blossomed, how lighthearted and gay she was, and I envied not only her but also the fellow she was so much in love with.