Group Portrait With Lady

by Heinrich Böll

  Ancestral marble has turned gray

  We sit around this place today

  In a darkly heathen way

  The snow falls coldly on our skin

  The snow insists on coming in

  Come join us, snow, we welcome you

  In Heaven you are homeless too …

  And then suddenly, in an impudent voice: ‘Off to Mahagonny, the air is cool and fresh. There’s whiskey there and poker, and horse- and woman-flesh, shine for us, fair green moon of Mahagonny, for today we have folding money under our belts for a big laugh from your big stupid mouth’—then suddenly, solemn enough to make your flesh creep, in a loud chant: ‘When I was a boy a god often rescued me from the shouting and the rod of men, then, safe and good, I played among the flowers of the grove, and the gentle airs of Heaven played with me, and just as Thou gladden’st the heart of the plants when they stretch out their frail arms to Thee, so didst Thou gladden my heart.’ Fifty years from now I’ll still know that by heart, we got to hear it so often—almost every evening and several times a day, and you must picture it: Leni speaking in a strict, stilted High German, whereas otherwise she spoke only in her marvelous dry Rhenish dialect. Believe me, that’s something you never forget, never, and the boy never forgot it either, nor did any of us, not even Margret, and there were some of her English and American boy friends who could never have enough of it, watching and listening to Leni recite and sing, and especially when she recited the Rhine poem to her little boy … well, she was a wonderful girl, she’s a wonderful woman and, I think, a wonderful mother too, the fact that in the end things didn’t work out for the boy isn’t her fault, it’s the fault of those crooks, and I’m including those rotten sons of mine, the ‘united Hoysers’—and their fiendish behavior, especially the old man, my father-in-law; Hubert knew how to fix him all right, when he came to collect his rent, his forty-six marks and fifteen pfennigs for our three rooms—Hubert would laugh every time, laugh like a maniac, every time without fail—till finally they only communicated by letter, and old Hoyser brought up the usual pettifogging argument that the onus was on the tenant to bring the rent to the landlord, not on the landlord to collect the rent from the tenant—well, then Hubert started taking the rent to him in his villa out there on the west side, every first of the month—and he’d laugh his maniac’s laugh there too, till old Hoyser couldn’t stand it any more and insisted on having the rent sent to him. Then Hubert started a lawsuit over whether rent is a debt to be paid by bringing, collecting, or sending—he couldn’t be expected, he said, to spend ten or twenty pfennigs on a postal money order or even on a remittance to a post-office account, he was only an unskilled worker, he said, which was true enough. Well, they actually appeared in court together, and Hubert won his case, so now Hoyser could choose whether he wanted to hear that maniac’s laugh at our place or at his: he’d been hearing it now on the first of the month for forty months, till he finally hit on the idea of employing a rent collector—but believe me, Hoyser still has that maniac’s laugh in his bones, and it’s Leni who has to pay for it today; he’s tormenting her to death, and he’ll have her kicked out if we don’t do something about it.” (Sighs, coffee, cigarette—see above: hand passed over gray cropped hair.)

  “For us it was a happy time, till 1948, till Hubert Gruyten got killed in that frightful accident—it was madness, and since then I haven’t been able to stand the sight of Pelzer, I never want to hear of him again, I really don’t; it was too awful; and it was soon after that, of course, that the kids were taken away from me, the old man just wouldn’t let up, he accused me of carrying on with every man who happened to be staying with us or even just came to see us, every one of them, so he could take the kids away from me, first hand them over to the welfare, then take them over himself; he even suspected me of carrying on with that poor Heinrich Pfeiffer, that poor boy who in those days was still hobbling around without an artificial leg and used to stay with us whenever he had to go into the hospital or to the relief agency. We had to rent out rooms, you see, we had to because he raised the rent and wouldn’t let up—and it so happened that the social worker came a few times, well actually she came several times, and always without warning, and damn it all, you can think what you like, yes damn it all, she happened to catch me three times with a fellow in what she called an ‘unequivocally equivocal situation,’ that’s to say, in plain English I was in bed with Bogakov, who’d been a buddy of Boris’s and sometimes came to see us. Yes, and the third time she caught me in an ‘equivocal situation’ with Bogakov standing by the window in his undershirt, shaving, and using my pocket mirror and a wash basin that stood on the windowsill. ‘Such situations,’ she wrote in her report, ‘would indicate an intimacy not conducive to the upbringing of growing children.’ Well yes, Kurt was nine, of course, and Werner fourteen, maybe it wasn’t right, especially as I wasn’t in the least in love with Bogakov, not even particularly fond of him, we just crawled into bed together; and needless to say they questioned the kids—and then I lost them, lost them for good; at first they cried when they had to leave, but later on, when they moved from the nuns to their grandfather’s, they had no further use for me; then I was not only a whore, I was a Communist and all that, but I must say this for the old man: he saw to it that they finished high school and went on to university, and he speculated so cleverly with the piece of land Mrs. Gruyten made over to Kurt when he was a baby that today, thirty years later, with four blocks of buildings on it and stores at street level, it’s easily worth three million, and the revenue from it would be enough for us all to live on, including Leni, and at the time it was given to Kurt it was meant as a kind of gilded teacup or something—I need hardly say that’s rather different from a tired worn-out old mum who still goes to the office every morning for eleven hundred and twelve marks a month before taxes. And I must say this for him: I’d never have been—never could have been—that smart. Yet that business with Bogakov didn’t mean a thing, not a thing, I was so tired and depressed after Hubert died in that terrible way, and poor Bogakov, he was always in tears and didn’t know whether or not to go home to Little Mother Russia and so on and sang his sad songs, like Boris—my God, all we did was crawl into bed together a few times.

  “Later on I found out it’d been Hoyser who’d squealed on us to the German auxiliary police, telling them we had a supply of black-market goods. He just couldn’t get over the fact that he hadn’t got a thing from the Schnürer Gasse, and so one day, it must’ve been early ’46, those slimy German snoopers turned up at our place and of course they found our supplies in the cellar: the salt butter, the bacon, the cigarettes and coffee, and piles of socks and underwear—and they confiscated the lot; enough to see us through another two or three years, and quite nicely too. Mind you, there was one thing they couldn’t stick us with: we hadn’t sold a single gram on the black market, at most an occasional swap, and we’d even given a lot away, Leni saw to that. Our British-American connections were no help, this was a matter for those German snoopers, and they even searched the house and at Leni’s they found those comical diplomas of hers stating she was the most German girl in the school. One of those stinkers actually wanted to squeal on her, denounce her as a Nazi, all because of those crappy diplomas she’d been given at the age of ten or twelve, mind you, but this fellow was one I’d happened to see in Storm Trooper’s uniform, and I must say he shut up quickly, otherwise it would’ve been awkward for Leni: just try and explain to an Englishman or an American that you can get a diploma for being ‘the most German girl in the school’ yet not be a Nazi. When all this happened Pelzer was really very decent, he’d stowed away his share from the Schnürer Gasse in a safe place, you see, and nobody’d squealed on him, and when he heard that all our stuff had been confiscated he gave us some of his without waiting to be asked: not for money, or services rendered, most likely to get into Leni’s good books. Whatever the reason, that gangster was nicer than old Hoyser. It was later, much later, 1954 I believe, th
at I found out from one of those policemen that it was my own father-in-law who’d squealed on us.”

  Mrs. Hölthohne, whom the Au. had arranged to meet this time at a very fashionable little café—not only out of gallantry but also to avoid exposing himself to any internal or external limitations on his consumption of cigarettes—had found herself at the end of the war in one of those former Carmelite convents, in the cellar of the former convent church, “in one of those crypts where at one time, no doubt, the nuns spent their periods of incarceration. I noticed nothing of the looting, and to me ‘the Second’ was merely a remote, terrible, endless dull roar, bad enough but very far away, and I was bound and determined not to leave that cellar until I was positive the Americans had arrived; I was scared. So many people were being shot and hanged, and though my papers were all right and had stood up to many tests, I was scared: I was scared some patrol might get it into their heads to be suspicious and shoot me.

  “So I stayed down where I was, finally all alone, and let them get on up there with their looting and celebrating. I didn’t come out till I heard the Americans were actually there, then I breathed again and wept, for joy and pain, joy at the liberation and pain at the sight of that totally and senselessly destroyed city—then I wept for joy when I saw that all the bridges, every last one of them, had been destroyed: at last the Rhine was Germany’s frontier again, at last—what an opportunity that was, it should have been taken advantage of. Simply build no more bridges, just let ferries, subject to constant inspection of course, cross back and forth.

  “Well, I immediately got in touch with the American military authorities, after some phoning around located my friend the French colonel, was allowed to travel freely between the British and French Zones, and was lucky enough two or three times to be able to help the little Gruyten girl, Leni, out of rather ticklish situations, when she was naively cycling all over the countryside looking for her Boris.

  “By November I already had my permit, I rented a bit of land, knocked together some greenhouses, opened a store, and right away took on Leni, the Gruyten girl. It was a crucial moment for me when I got my permit and my new papers: should I become Elli Marx from Saarlouis again, or should I stay Liane Hölthohne? I decided to stay Liane Hölthohne. My passport says Marx, alias Hölthohne. I must say you get a better cup of tea at my place than in this pseudo-topnotch establishment.” (Which the Au. confirmed, with both gallantry and conviction.) “What’s really good here is the petits fours, I must remember that.

  “Now to the subject of what certain informants have described to you as the Soviet paradise in the vaults: we were invited to this paradise too, Grundtsch and I, but we were scared, not of the dead but of the living and because the cemetery was right in the planes’ bombing path, between the old part of town and the suburbs; as for the dead, there was nothing about them to bother me in that paradise, after all people have been meeting and celebrating their feast days in catacombs for centuries. The cellar adjoining the crypt of the Carmelite convent seemed safer to me—the military police were welcome to come and ask me for my papers there, but in the cemetery, in the burial vaults: that was rather a suspicious place to be, wasn’t it, and toward the end you really never knew what was the safest thing to be—a Jewish woman in hiding, a Separatist in hiding, a German soldier who had not deserted or who had, a convict who had escaped or who had not, and of course the city was swarming with deserters, and with them around it was anything but pleasant, all of them trigger-happy, both sides.

  “Grundtsch had the same fears, though he had hardly left the cemetery, so to speak, for the past forty or fifty years, but now, around mid-February ’45, he did, and for a while he moved out into the country, and he even ended up joining the Home Guard somewhere, and he was right: for that particular period some form or other of legality was the best protection, and my own motto was—don’t overdo it, lie low somewhere with reasonably good papers, play possum, and wait. Quite deliberately—and it wasn’t easy, believe me, for there were things there we hadn’t even dared dream about—quite deliberately I’d taken no part in the looting, for naturally it was illegal, it carried the death penalty, and while the looting was going on the Germans were still officially in control of the city, and I had no wish to run around even for two or three or four days with a crime like that around my neck. I wanted to live, live—I was forty-one and wanted to live, and that life wasn’t something I wanted to gamble with in the final few days. So I kept as quiet as a mouse and even three days before the Americans marched in I didn’t dare talk about the war being over, let alone lost. There it had been in black and white, ever since October, on billboards and leaflets, that the entire German nation would be relentless in demanding just atonement for alarmists, defeatists, pessimists, lackeys of the enemy—and this atonement had but one name: death. They were getting crazier and crazier: somewhere they shot a woman who had washed her sheets and hung them out to dry—they thought she’d run up the white flag and they shot her—simply shot her through the window with a machine gun. No, better to go a bit hungry and wait, that was my motto, that orgy of looting on ‘the Second’ after the raid—that was too risky for me, and it was as much as your life was worth to then go and cart all that stuff to the cemetery; the city was still in German hands, you know, and they claimed they were going to defend it.

  “Once the Germans had finally left, I didn’t hesitate another moment, I went straight to the Americans and got in touch right away with my French friends; I had a nice little apartment allocated to me and got my first permit for a nursery garden. As long as old Grundtsch still hadn’t returned I used his facilities and duly paid rent into an account for him, and when he got back in ’46 I duly handed his place back to him, in good order, and opened my own business, and then by August ’45 Friend Pelzer was already there wanting his character reference, though he’d started out so cleverly, and who was it gave it to him? Who was it spoke for him at the tribunal? Leni and I. Yes, we gave him a clean bill of health, and I did it against two convictions: against my conscience, because in spite of everything I considered him a scoundrel, and against my business interests, because it was only natural for him to become my competitor, and he continued to be till the mid-fifties.”

  My informant, Mrs. Hölthohne, suddenly looked very old, almost decrepit, the previously firm skin of her face suddenly became slack, her hand unsteady as it toyed with the teaspoon, her voice quavering, almost shaking.

  “I still can’t make up my mind whether it was right to get him cleared—and get him through the tribunal, but, you know, from the age of nineteen to the age of forty-two I’d been a persecuted person, since that battle near the Ägidienberg till the Americans marched in, for twenty-two years I’d been persecuted, politically, racially, call it what you like—and I’d deliberately picked Pelzer because I thought the safest place for me would be working for a Nazi, all the more so if it was a corrupt and criminal Nazi. I knew the kind of things that were said about him and that Grundtsch used to tell me, and now suddenly there he was in front of me, chalk-white with fear, he turned up with his wife, who really was innocent and knew nothing of what he might have done prior to ’33, and he brought along his two really adorable young children too, the boy and the girl, they must’ve been between ten and twelve or so—delightful, and his pale, slightly hysterical wife, who’d really been completely in the dark, I felt sorry for her too—and he asked me whether, during the ten years I’d worked for him, I could accuse him of, or prove, a single, even the tiniest inhuman act directed at me or anyone else, either within the business or outside of it, and whether there wasn’t a point at which a person’s youthful transgressions—that’s what he called them—had to be forgiven and forgotten.