Group Portrait With Lady

by Heinrich Böll

  “Soon after that, Marja moved out for a time into the country, Heinrich was called up, and I was alone with old Hoyser, who I also had to leave in charge of my kids. As for Leni, the inevitable happened: the second mortgage fell due, and then, yes, then—I’m ashamed to tell you—he actually bought the building off her, a building that was only partially damaged, and in this location, at the end of ’44, when it was already hard to get anything at all in exchange for money—he gave her a further twenty thousand marks, discharged the mortgages, which were in his name of course—and there he was, something he had apparently always aimed at being: a property owner, and now he owned the thing, a building that’s easily worth nearly half a million today, and for the first time I realized his nature when he began right away on January 1, 1945, to collect the rent. That must’ve been his dream, to go around on the first of every month and collect—except that in January ’45 there wasn’t much to collect: most of the tenants had been evacuated, the two top floors were burned out, and it was really quite funny the way he put me on his rent list too, and the Pfeiffers of course, although they didn’t come back till ’52—and it wasn’t until he collected the first rent from me—32 marks and 60 pfennigs for my two unfurnished rooms—that it dawned on me we’d been living all those years with Leni rent-free. Sometimes I’ve thought Leni behaved far from sensibly, I warned her too—but today I think she was sensible, to spend every penny she had with the man she loved. Besides, she never starved, neither then nor in peacetime.”

  Margret: “Now came what Leni herself called her ‘second troop inspection.’ She’d held the first one, so she told me, when the business with Boris began—she went through all her friends and relatives, had even gone down to the air-raid cellars in her building a few times to undertake tests there, she had ‘inspected’ the Hoysers and Marja, Heinrich, and all her fellow workers, and who emerged from this troop inspection as the only suitable lieutenant? Me. In her the world lost a strategist—when I think how she checked over each person, every single person, how she sensed a possible ally in Lotte but then eliminated her on grounds of ‘jealousy,’ old Hoyser and his wife as ‘old-fashioned and anti-Russian,’ Heinrich Pfeiffer as too ‘biased,’ and the way she was so sure that Mrs. Kremer was a potential ally and even went to see her so they could have a noncommittal talk, but then noticed she was ‘just too timid, too timid and too tired, she’s had enough, and I don’t blame her.’ She also considered Mrs. Hölthohne but had to reject her too ‘on account of her old-fashioned moral code, for no other reason,’ and ‘then, then one had, of course, also to know who was strong enough to be told a thing like that and stick it out.’ Well, she’d made up her mind to win the battle, and to her it was the most natural thing in the world to need money and strongpoints for carrying on the war, and the only strongpoint she could find when she first inspected the troops and summed up the situation was me—a great honor and also a great burden.

  “So evidently I was strong enough. In the air-raid cellar, at home, and with the Hoysers and Marja, she systematically tested their attitude by departing from her usual reluctance to talk and offering a variety of stories: she began with a German girl who’d got involved with an Englishman, a prisoner of war, and though the outcome of her tests was devastating enough—most people were in favor of shooting, sterilizing, withdrawal of citizenship, and so on—she then tried it out with a Frenchman, who came off better ‘as a person, as a lover worthy of consideration’ “ (probably because of the French talent pour faire l’amour. Au.) “and prompted a smirk, but then was totally rejected as an ‘enemy.’ But she persisted and produced her Poles and her Russians, or should I say threw them to the lions, and there was only one opinion there, nothing less than ‘off with her head.’ Within the family circle itself, if you include the Hoysers and Marja, people expressed themselves more openly, more honestly, less politically. Surprisingly, Marja was in favor of Poles because she saw in them ‘dashing officers,’ Frenchmen she considered ‘depraved,’ Englishmen ‘probably useless as lovers—Russians inscrutable.’ Lotte thought as I did, that it was all a lot of crap, or shit I might’ve called it. ‘A man’s a man,’ was her comment, and Lotte said she thought that, while Marja and her parents-in-law weren’t free of national prejudices, they certainly had no political ones. Frenchmen were described as sensualists but parasites, Poles as charming and temperamental but faithless, Russians as faithful, faithful, very faithful—but the situation being what it was everyone, including Lotte, thought it was ‘at the very least dangerous to start something with a western European and risking one’s very life to do so with an eastern European.’ ”

  Lotte H: “Once, when she happened to be at our place to transact some financial business with my father-in-law, I opened the bathroom door to find Leni standing naked in front of the mirror, considering the firm lines of her body; I threw a bath towel over her from behind, and as I went up to her Leni turned crimson—I never saw her blush before—and I put my hand on her shoulder and said: ‘Be glad you can love someone again, if you ever did love that other one, forget him. I can’t forget my Willi. Take him, even if he is an Englishman.’ I wasn’t so dumb that I didn’t have a notion, in February 1944, that there was something going on with a man, and probably with a foreigner, when she started coming out with her funny make-believe stories. To be honest, I’d have advised her strongly, very strongly, against a Russian or a Pole or a Jew, that would’ve meant risking your very life, and to this day I’m glad she never told me about it. It wasn’t safe to know too much.”

  Margret: “Even Pelzer had emerged as a potential ally from Leni’s first troop inspection. Grundtsch might have been a possibility too, but he talked too much. Now came the second inspection, and again I was the only reliable one when it came to Leni’s pregnancy and its consequences. We ended up by bearing Pelzer in mind as a kind of strategic reserve and eliminating the older of the two guards, the one who usually brought Boris to work, because he couldn’t keep his hands to himself or his mouth shut, and then we considered Boldig the swinger, I was still seeing him on and off and his business was flourishing—but not for long, he overdid it and got picked up in November ’44—with his entire stock of forms and stationery—and shot on the spot behind the railway station where they’d caught him red-handed in a deal, so he was out, and his sets of identification papers too, sad to say.”

  In order to be fair to Leni and Margret, a few comments must be interjected here relating to prevailing social attitudes. Strictly speaking, Leni was not even a widow, she was the bereaved lover of Erhard, with whom she occasionally even compared Boris. “Both of them were poets, if you ask me, both of them.” For a woman of twenty-two who had lost her mother, her lover Erhard, her brother, and her husband, who had gone through approximately two hundred air-raid warnings and at least a hundred air raids, who, far from spending all her time carrying on with her lover in the chapels of family vaults, was obliged to get up in the morning at five-thirty, wrap herself up against the cold and walk to the streetcar to go to work through darkened streets—for this young woman, Alois’s victory-prattle, still faintly audible in her ear perhaps, must have seemed like some fading sentimental hit tune to which one might have danced some night twenty years ago. Leni—contrary to all expectation and in defiance of the circumstances—was provocatively gay. The people around her were petty, morose, despondent, and if we bear in mind that Leni might have sold her father’s fine-quality clothing with considerable profit on the black market but chose instead to give it not only to him but also to the cold and needy members of a declared enemy power (a Red Army commissar was running around in her father’s cashmere vest!)—then even the most skeptical observer of the scene is bound to approve the word “generous” as a second adjective for Leni.

  A word or two more on the subject of Margret. It would be a mistake to call her a whore. All she had ever done for money was get married. Assigned since 1942 to a huge reserve military hospital, she had far more trying days and t
rying nights than Leni, who could carry on undisturbed making her wreaths, was constantly in her beloved’s company, and was protected by Pelzer’s benevolence. From this point of view Leni is by no means the or even a heroine: it was not until she was forty-eight that she treated a man with compassion (i.e., the Turk by the name of Mehmet, whom the gentle reader may possibly recall); Margret never did anything else, even when on duty at the hospital as day or night nurse she treated “anyone who looked nice and seemed down in the mouth with total compassion”—and the only reason she carried on with a cocky cynical fellow like Boldig was as a cover for Leni’s blissful hours on a couch of heather in the Beauchamp cemetery chapel, to divert Boldig’s attention from Leni. Let us allow justice to prevail and take note of what Margret herself has noted after a long life of total and compassionate dedication: “I’ve been loved a great deal, but I’ve loved only one person. Only once did I feel that insane joy I saw so often on the faces of others.” No, Margret is not to be classed among Fortune’s favorites, she has had far more bad luck then Leni—like the embittered Lotte, yet neither of these two women has shown any sign of envying Leni.

  8

  The Au., by now totally engrossed in his role of researcher (and always in danger of being taken for an informer while his sole purpose at all times is to present a taciturn and reticent, proud, unrepentant person such as Leni Gruyten Pfeiffer—a woman as static as she is statuesque!—in the right light), had some difficulty in gaining, or searching out, from those involved a reasonably factual picture of her situation at the end of the war.

  There was only one point in which all those presented and quoted here in greater or lesser detail were in agreement: they did not want to leave the city; even the two Soviet individuals Bogakov and Boris had no desire to move eastward. Now that the Americans (Leni to Margret: “At last, at last, what ages they’ve taken!”) were approaching, they alone guaranteed what everyone was longing for but could not believe: the end of the war. One problem was solved starting January 1, 1945: Boris’s and Leni’s—for simplicity’s sake let us use the term “visiting days.” Leni was seven months’ pregnant, still quite “perky” (M.v.D.) albeit somewhat hampered by her condition, but—“visiting,” lying together, wrestling, whatever we decide to call it, “was now simply out of the question” (Leni according to Margret).

  But where and how to survive? It sounds simple enough if we disregard who had to hide from whom. Margret, for instance, ought—like any soldier she was subject to orders and regulations—to have crossed the Rhine eastward with the hospital. But she did not, nor could she take refuge in her apartment, from which she would have been forcibly removed. Lotte H. was similarly placed, being an employee of a government department that was likewise shifting to the east. Where was she to go? If we recall that as late as January 1945 people were being evacuated to almost as far as Silesia, i.e., were being transported directly into the path of the Red Army, a brief geographical reminder will not be amiss: in mid-March 1945 that German Reich to which frequent allusion has been made was still some five to six hundred miles in width and scarcely more in length. The question of where to go was of the most pressing urgency for the most varied groups. Where were the Nazis to be sent, the prisoners of war, the soldiers, the slave workers? There were, of course, tried and true solutions: execution, etc. Yet even that was not always a simple matter since the executioners were not all of one mind and some were inclined to play a rather different role, namely that of rescuer. Many a man who was in principle an executioner became a nonexecutioner, but how, for instance, were the potential victims of execution—let us call them the executees—to behave? It is not that simple. One is inclined to think that all of a sudden there occurred something called the end of the war, that at some point there was a date, and that was it. How was a person to know whether he had fallen into the hands of a reformed or unreformed executioner, let alone into the hands of a specimen of that emerging breed whom we might call the “now-more-than-ever executioners,” many of whom had previously belonged to the nonexecutioner group? There were even branches of the SS that disclaimed their reputation as executioners! Correspondence ensued between the SS and the glorious German Army in which each side tried to palm off the dead onto the other, like so many rotting potatoes! “Elimination” and “disposal” were expected to be carried out by honorable persons and institutions which—like their correspondents—were bent on arriving with reasonably clean hands at that state which it would have been wrong to call peace but right to call the end of the war.

  The Au. reads, for example: “The commandants of the concentration camps complain that some 5 to 10 percent of the Soviet Russians marked for execution arrive at the camps either dead or dying. This gives rise to the impression that the POW base camps use this method to dispose of such prisoners.

  “In particular it has been noted that on foot marches, e.g., from railway station to camp, a not inconsiderable number of prisoners of war collapse dead or dying from exhaustion and have to be collected by a truck bringing up the rear.

  “It is impossible to prevent the German population from noticing these occurrences.

  “Despite the fact that the delivery of prisoners to concentration camps is as a general rule carried out by the Army, the population will nevertheless hold the SS responsible for this state of affairs.

  “In order as far as possible to prevent a repetition of such occurrences, I hereby order, to take effect forthwith, that in future any condemned Soviet Russians already manifestly moribund (e.g., from starvation-typhoid), hence no longer equal to the exertions of even a short foot march, be excluded from transportation to concentration camps for purposes of execution.

  (Signed): Müller (Deputy)”

  It is left to the reader to meditate on the phrase “not inconsiderable” as applied to those marked for death. This had been a problem as early as 1941, at a time when the German Reich was sufficiently large in extent. Four years later the German Reich was, God knows, much smaller, and there were not only Soviet Russians, Jews, and the like, to be eliminated and disposed of, but also a sizable number of Germans, deserters, saboteurs, and collaborators; furthermore, concentration camps and towns had to be emptied of women, children, and the aged, the intention being to leave nothing but ruins for the enemy.

  Not surprisingly, problems of morality and/or hygiene arose. For example, the following:

  “It is not unusual for the district chiefs and/or village elders (many of whom are corrupt) to cause the skilled workers whom they have selected to be taken at night from their beds and locked up in cellars awaiting transportation. Since the male and/or female workers are frequently allowed no time to pack their belongings, etc., many of them arrive at the assembly camp with totally insufficient equipment (without shoes, two dresses, eating and drinking utensils, blanket, etc.). Hence in extreme cases new arrivals must be immediately sent back in order to collect the bare necessities. Threats and beatings administered by the aforesaid village militiamen to the skilled workers in cases where the latter do not immediately obey orders to accompany them are common practice and have been reported from most communities. In numerous cases women were beaten until incapable of participating in the march. One particularly flagrant case has been reported by me to the head of the military police (Colonel Samek) for severe punishment (Village of Zotsolinkov, District of Dergachi). The excesses of the district chiefs and militiamen are of a particularly serious nature in that, in order to justify their actions, the persons cited usually maintain that everything was undertaken in the name of the German Army. The truth is, however, that in almost every case the latter has behaved with exemplary consideration toward skilled workers and the Ukrainian population. However, this cannot be said of many administrative departments. As an illustration of the above: in one instance a woman arrived wearing not much more than an undershirt.”

  “With reference to reports received, it must also be pointed out that it is irresponsible to keep the workers locked up for m
any hours in railway cars so that they are not even able to relieve themselves. Opportunity must as a matter of course be given at intervals to allow these people to fetch drinking water, wash, and relieve themselves. Railway cars have been shown in which workers have bored holes in order to relieve themselves. It is to be noted, however, that when trains are approaching large railway stations the opportunity to perform bodily functions must, wherever possible, be given beyond the limits of such stations.”

  “Reports of impropriety have been received from delousing stations, where some male staff or other male persons have been employed or have circulated among the women and girls in the shower rooms—even to the point of soaping such females!—and, vice versa, female persons among the men, and in some cases men have spent protracted periods taking photographs in the women’s shower rooms. Since most of those transported during recent months emanate from the Ukr. rural population, whose female portion has a strong moral sense and is accustomed to a strict code of behavior, such treatment must inevitably be regarded by them as a national degradation. The first-named improprieties have meanwhile to our knowledge been eliminated by the action of those in charge of transportation. The photographing was reported to us from Halle, the instances of soaping from Kievertse.”