Group Portrait with Lady (2 page)

What emerges unmistakably from the statements of the informants is that Leni no longer understands the world, in fact doubts whether she has ever understood it. She cannot understand the hostility of her environment, cannot understand why people are so angry at her and with her; she has done nothing wrong, not even to them. Lately, when obliged to leave her apartment to buy a few essential items, she has been openly laughed at, expressions such as “dirty bitch” or “worn-out mattress” being among the more harmless. Even insults rooted in events of thirty years back are to be heard again: “Communist whore,” “Russian sweetie.” Leni does not react to the abuse. To hear the word “slut” muttered as she passes is for her an everyday experience. She is considered insensitive, or even entirely devoid of feeling; neither is true for, according to the statements of reliable witnesses (witness: Marja van Doorn), she spends hours sitting in her apartment crying, her conjunctiva and her tear ducts in a state of considerable activity. Even the neighborhood children, with whom until now she has always been on friendly terms, are being set against her, and they call out after her using expressions that neither they nor Leni properly understand. And yet, to judge by copious and detailed evidence that exhausts even the ultimate, the very ultimate source on Leni, it is possible to establish here and now that up to this point in her life Leni has probably, with a probability bordering on certainty, had sexual intercourse a total of two dozen times: twice with the man to whom she was later married, Alois Pfeiffer (once before, once during, the marriage, which lasted a total of three days), and on the other occasions with a second man whom she would have married if circumstances had permitted it. Within a few minutes of Leni’s being allowed to enter directly into the action (this will not be for a while yet), she will for the first time have made what might
be called a wrong move: she will have yielded to a Turkish worker who, on his knees and in a language unintelligible to her, is going to ask for her favors, and she will yield—this as advance information—because she cannot bear to see anyone kneel to her (the fact that she herself is incapable of kneeling is one of her known character traits). It should perhaps be added that both Leni’s parents are dead, that she has a few embarrassing relatives by marriage, others, less embarrassing, not by marriage, but blood relations, in the country, and a son of twenty-five who bears her maiden name and is at present in jail. One physical characteristic may be of significance, among other things, in assessing male advances. Leni has the well-nigh imperishable bosom of a woman who has been loved with tenderness and to whose bosom poems have been dedicated. What the people in Leni’s environment really want is for her to be either eliminated or removed; the cry is even heard as she passes: “Get lost!” or “Get out of here!,” and there is evidence that from time to time someone demands that she be gassed; this wish has been verified, although whether such a possibility exists is not known to the Au.; all he can add is that the wish is expressed with vehemence.

A few additional details must be supplied concerning Leni’s daily habits. She enjoys eating, but in moderation; her main meal is breakfast, for which she positively must have two crisp fresh rolls, a fresh, soft-boiled egg, a little butter, one or two tablespoons of jam (more precisely: the plum purée known elsewhere as
Powidl
), strong coffee that she mixes with hot milk, very little sugar; midday dinner scarcely interests her: soup and a modest dessert are all she wants; then in the evening she has a cold meal, some bread, two or three slices, salad, sausage and cold meat when she can afford them. What Leni cares about most is the fresh rolls; rather than have them delivered she picks them out herself, not by fingering them, merely by inspecting their color; there is nothing—in the way of food,
at least—that she hates as much as limp rolls. For the sake of the rolls and because breakfast is her daily feast, she ventures out in the morning among people, accepting insults, spiteful gossip, and abuse as part of the bargain.

As regards smoking: Leni has been smoking since she was seventeen, normally eight cigarettes a day, never more, usually less; during the war she gave it up for a time in order to let someone she loved (not her husband!) have her cigarettes. Leni is one of those who enjoy a glass of wine now and again, never drink more than half a bottle, and allow themselves, depending on the weather, a schnapps or, depending on mood and financial situation, a sherry. Other information: Leni has had a driver’s license since 1939 (issued by special authority, details to follow), but since 1943 she has had no car at her disposal. She loved driving, almost with a passion.

Leni still lives in the house where she was born. By a series of unaccountable coincidences, her part of the city was spared the bombings, at least
relatively
spared; only thirty-five percent of it was destroyed: in other words, it was favored by Fortune. Not long ago something happened to Leni that has made her quite talkative, and she could hardly wait to tell it to her best friend, her chief confidante, who is also the Au.’s star witness: that morning, as she was crossing the street to pick up her rolls, her right foot recognized a slight unevenness in the pavement which it—the right foot—had last felt forty years before when Leni was playing hopscotch with some other girls; the spot in question is a tiny chip in a basalt paving stone which, at the time the street was laid out, around 1894, must have been knocked off by the paver. Leni’s foot instantly passed on the message to her brain-stem, the latter transmitted this impression to all her sensory organs and emotional centers and, since Leni is an enormously sensual person who immediately transforms everything—everything—into terms of eroticism, her delight, nostalgia, recollection, and state of total stimulation caused
her to experience that process which in theological reference works—although with a somewhat different meaning—might be termed “absolute self-fulfillment”; which, when embarrassingly reduced, is termed, by clumsy erotologists and sexotheological dogmaticians, an “orgasm.”

Before the impression arises that Leni has been deserted, we must list all those who are her friends, most of whom have stood by her through thin, two through thick and thin. Leni’s solitary existence is due solely to her taciturnity and reticence; one might even call her laconic; the fact is that it is very rare for her to “come out of her shell,” not even with her oldest friends Margret Schlömer, née Zeist, and Lotte Hoyser, née Berntgen, who stood by Leni when things were at their thickest. Margret is Leni’s age, a widow like Leni, although this term may be misleading. Margret has carried on a good deal with men, for reasons to be given later: never from expediency, although sometimes—when she was really down and out—for a fee; yet the best way to describe Margret would be to say that the only erotic relationship she ever had that was based on expediency was the one with her husband, whom she married when she was eighteen; it was then, too, that she made the only verifiable whorelike comment, when she said to Leni (it was in 1940): “I’ve hooked myself a rich guy who insists on going to the altar with me.”

Margret is at present in hospital, in an isolation ward, she is gravely and probably incurably ill with venereal disease; she describes herself as being “a complete goner”—her entire endocrine system is out of order; the only way one may talk to her is through a glass panel, and she is grateful for every package of cigarettes, every drop of schnapps, one takes along, no matter if it is the smallest pocket flask filled with the cheapest
liquor. Margret’s endocrine system is so disorganized that she “wouldn’t be surprised if urine suddenly started coming out of my eyes instead of tears.” She is grateful for any kind of narcotic, would even accept opium, morphine, hashish. The hospital is outside the city, in pleasant surroundings, laid out in bungalow style. In order to gain access to Margret, the Au. had to resort to a variety of reprehensible methods: bribery, the multiple felony of fraud combined with false claims to office (pretending to be a professor of the sociopsychology of prostitution!).

By way of advance information on Margret it must be stated here that “strictly speaking” she is a far less sensual person than Leni; Margret’s undoing was not her own desire for the pleasures of love, it was the fact that so many pleasures were desired of her which she was endowed by Nature to bestow; it will be necessary to report on this later. Be that as it may: Leni is suffering, Margret is suffering.

“Strictly speaking” not suffering, only suffering because Leni (to whom she is really very devoted) is suffering, is a female person already mentioned whose name is Marja van Doorn, aged seventy, formerly a housekeeper employed by Leni’s parents, the Gruytens. She now lives in retirement in the country, where an old-age pension, a vegetable patch, a few fruit trees, a dozen hens, and a half-interest in a pig and a calf in whose fattening she shares, ensure her a reasonably pleasant old age. Marja has stood by Leni only through thin, she had no reservations until things “really went too far,” none—it must be specifically stated—on moral grounds (surprisingly enough), but some on the basis of nationality. Marja is a woman who fifteen or twenty years ago probably had “her heart in the right place”; meanwhile this over-rated organ has slipped, assuming
it to be still there at all; certainly not down “into her boots,” for she has never been a coward. She is horrified at the way people are treating her Leni, whom she really knows very well, certainly better than the man whose name Leni bears ever knew her. After all, Marja van Doorn did live from 1920 to 1960 in the Gruyten home, she was present at Leni’s birth, shared in all her adventures, in all that befell her; she has almost decided to move back to live with Leni, but before doing so she is exerting her entire (and quite considerable) energy in a plan to get Leni to come out to the country and live with her. She is horrified at the things that are happening to Leni and the threats being made to her, and is even prepared to believe certain historical atrocities which hitherto she has not exactly regarded as impossible but of whose extent she was skeptical.

A special position among the informants is that occupied by Dr. Herweg Schirtenstein, the music critic. For forty years he has been living in the rear portion of an apartment that forty years ago might have been regarded as baronial but which after World War I declined in prestige and was subdivided. He occupies an apartment on the ground floor of a building which, since the rooms facing the courtyard adjoin the rooms in Leni’s apartment facing the courtyard, has enabled him for decades carefully to follow Leni’s practicing and progress and eventual partial mastery of the piano without ever discovering that the player was Leni. True, he knows Leni by sight, having for forty years been running into her from time to time on the street (it is quite likely that he even watched Leni in the days when she was still playing hopscotch, for he is passionately interested in children’s games and the subject of his Ph.D. thesis was “Music in Children’s Games”); and, since he is not insensitive to feminine charms, we can be sure that over the years he has followed
Leni’s general appearance attentively, that he has now and again given an appreciative nod, possibly even harbored covetous thoughts. Nevertheless, it must be said that, if one compares Leni to all the women with whom Schirtenstein has hitherto been intimate, he would have considered her “a shade too vulgar” to merit serious consideration. Were he to suspect that it is Leni who, after many years of rather ineffectual practice, has learned to play two, although only two, pieces by Schubert with consummate mastery, and in such a way that even decades of repetition have not bored Schirtenstein, perhaps he would change his mind about Leni—he, the critic who inspired even a Monique Haas not only with dread but with respect. It will be necessary to return later to Schirtenstein, who subsequently and inadvertently entered upon an erotic relationship with Leni that was not so much telepathic as telesensual. In all fairness it must be said that Schirtenstein would have stuck with Leni through thick and thin, but: he never had an opportunity.

Much about Leni’s parents, little about Leni’s inner life, almost everything about Leni’s external life, was imparted by an informant eighty-five years of age: Otto Hoyser, head bookkeeper, who has been drawing a pension for the last twenty years and lives in a comfortable retirement home that combines the advantages of a luxury hotel with those of a luxury sanatorium. At more or less regular intervals, he either visits Leni or is visited by her.

A witness with a fund of information is his daughter-in-law, Lotte Hoyser, née Bertgen; less reliable are her sons Werner and Kurt, aged respectively thirty-five and thirty. Lotte is as full of information as she is bitter, although her bitterness has never been directed at Leni; Lotte is fifty-seven, a war widow like Leni, and works in an office.

Lotte Hoyser, sharp-tongued, describes her father-in-law Otto (see above) and her youngest son Kurt, without the slightest qualification or regard for blood kinship, as gangsters on whom she places almost the entire blame for Leni’s present near-destitution; it is only recently that she has “found out certain things that I haven’t the heart to tell Leni because in my own heart I haven’t yet been able to accept them entirely. It’s simply beyond belief.” Lotte lives in a two-room-kitchen-and-bath apartment in the center of town for which she pays about a third of her income in rent. She is considering moving back into Leni’s apartment, out of fellow feeling but also, as she (for as yet mysterious reasons) ominously adds, “to see whether they would actually evict me too. I am afraid they would.” Lotte works for a union “without conviction” (as she gratuitously added), “merely because, naturally enough, I like to eat and stay alive.”

Further informants, not necessarily the least important, are: Dr. Scholsdorff, the specialist in Slavic languages and literature who turned up in Leni’s career as the result of a complicated involvement or entanglement; the entanglement, no matter how complicated, will be explained. Because of a chain of circumstances, which will also be explained when the time comes, Scholsdorff now finds himself in the upper hierarchy of the income-tax department; he intends to terminate this career shortly by way of early retirement.