Group Portrait With Lady

by Heinrich Böll

  Her duties were to waken the girls on time, supervise their morning ablutions, and explain—something the biology sister steadfastly refused to do—what was happening to them and in them when they were suddenly confronted with the evidence that they had entered upon womanhood; and she had a further duty that was regarded by all the other nuns as disgusting, as being beyond the call of duty, but that was carried out by Sister Rahel with nothing short of enthusiasm, with devoted attention to detail: the inspection of the products of youthful digestion in solid and liquid form. The girls were required not to flush away these products into the invisible regions before Rahel had inspected them. She did this for the fourteen-year-old girls in her charge with a quiet diagnostic composure that astounded the girls. Need it be pointed out that Leni, whose interest in her digestive process had hitherto remained unsatisfied, became a truly enthusiastic adept at the hands of Rahel? In most cases a glance was enough for Rahel, enabling her to state with accuracy the physical and mental condition of the girl in question, and, since she could predict even scholastic achievement on the basis of excrements, she used to be positively beleaguered before the writing of term papers, and from one year to the next (starting in 1933) she inherited the nickname Haruspica, as she was dubbed by one of her former pupils who later tried her hand at journalism. It was assumed (an assumption confirmed by Leni, who later became Rahel’s confidante), that she kept carefully detailed records. She accepted her nickname as an endearment to which she was entitled. Taking two hundred and forty school days as an annual average, times twelve girls and five years of floor-service (as a kind of monastic duty sergeant), it is no trick to calculate that Sister Rahel kept statistical records and condensed analyses of some twenty-eight thousand eight hundred digestive processes: an astounding compendium that would probably fetch any price as a scatalogical and urinological document. Presumably it has been destroyed as trash! The Au.’s analyses, the conduct and expressions relating to Rahel that appear from the direct reports of B.H.T., from the indirect (filtered through Marja) reports of Leni, the in turn direct reports of Margret, permit the assumption that Rahel’s training had been in three scientific areas: medicine, biology, philosophy—all suffused by a theological admixture of wholly mystical origin.

  Rahel also took a hand in areas for which she was not actually responsible: beauty culture; and hair, skin, eyes, ears, hairdos, footwear, lingerie. When it is remembered that she advised the black-haired Margret to wear bottle green, and the fair-haired Leni to wear a subdued fiery red and, on the occasion of a house dance with the inmates of a Catholic students’ hostel, cinnamon-red shoes; that for the care of Leni’s complexion she recommended almond bran, regarded ice water as not unconditionally, merely conditionally, wholesome, her overall tendency may be summed up in negative terms: she was not the old-fashioned soap-and-water type. If we go on to add that she not only did not discourage but actually encouraged the use of lipstick (in moderation and good taste, according to type), it is clear that she was far in advance of her time and most certainly of her environment. She was downright strict in her insistence on care of the hair, on vigorous, prolonged brushing, especially at bedtime.

  Her position in the convent was ambiguous. By most of her sister-nuns she was regarded as an existence halfway between toilet attendant and cleaning woman, an attitude which, even if that is what she had been, was shameful enough. A number of them respected her, a few were afraid of her. With the mother superior she was on a footing of “permanently strained respect” (B.H.T.). The mother superior, an austere and intelligent ash-blond beauty who, a year after Leni left school, shed her habit and offered her services to a Nazi women’s organization, did not even decry Rahel’s advice on the subject of cosmetics, although it was contrary to the spirit of the convent. In view of the fact that the mother superior bore the nickname “Tigress,” that her chief subject was mathematics, her secondary subjects French and geography, one can understand that she found Haruspica’s conduct as an “excremental mystic” merely ludicrous and not dangerous. She considered it beneath the dignity of a lady to vouchsafe so much as glance at her own excrement (B.H.T.) and regarded the whole thing as more or less “heathenish,” although (B.H.T. again) it is said to have been precisely the heathenish element that drove her into that Nazi organization for women. In all fairness one thing must be said (all this according to B.H.T.): even after leaving the convent she never betrayed Rahel. She is described by Leni, Margret, and B.H.T. as a “proud person.” Although, judging by all available statements, she was a very beautiful and most certainly “erotically susceptible” person (Margret), she remained, even after her resignation from the convent, unmarried, probably out of pride; because she wished to show no weaknesses, to avoid exposing herself in any way. At the end of the war, scarcely fifty years old, she disappeared between Lvov and Cernauti, where, with the rank of a senior civil servant, she had been implementing a high-level “cultural policy.” Most regrettable. The Au. would have so much liked to “interrogate” her.

  Seriously speaking, Rahel had no functions to perform at the school on either the educational or medical level, yet she performed on both levels; all she was required to do was report obvious cases of diarrhea and suspected threats of infection, also noticeable lack of cleanliness in terms of the digestive process as well as breaches of accepted standards of morality. This latter she never did. She considered it highly important to give the girls a little talk, on their very first day, on cleansing methods to follow every type of bowel movement. Pointing out the importance of maintaining all muscles, especially the abdominal ones, in a constant state of flexibility and efficiency, for which she advocated field athletics and calisthenics, she would proceed to her favorite topic: that for a healthy and—she would stress—intelligent person it was possible to perform this bodily function without so much as a scrap of paper. However, since this ideal state was never, or rarely, achieved, she would explain in detail how, should paper be necessary, it was to be used.

  She had read—and here B.H.T. is an invaluable source—a great deal about such things, almost the entire bagnio and prison literature, and had conducted intensive research into all the memoirs of prisoners (criminal or political). Silliness and giggling from the girls during this talk was something for which she was fully prepared.

  It must be stated here, since it has been verified by Margret and Leni, that when Sister Rahel looked at the first of Leni’s bowel movements which she was called upon to inspect she went into a kind of ecstasy. Turning to Leni, who was not used to a confrontation of this kind, she said: “My girl, you’re one of Fortune’s favorites—like me.”

  So when, a few days later, Leni achieved “paperless” status, simply because that “muscle business” amused her (Leni to Marja—confirmed by Margret), an unbreakable bond of fellow feeling was created that provided Leni with some advance consolation for all the educational reverses that were in store for her.

  Now it would be a mistake to allow the impression that Sister Rahel displayed her genius in the excremental sphere only. After a lengthy and involved training, she had become, first a biologist, then a physician, later a philosopher, had converted to Catholicism, and entered the convent to “instruct the young” in a blend of biology, medicine, philosophy, and theology; but during the very first year of her teaching activity her teaching permit had been revoked by the General Council in Rome because she was suspected of biologism and mystical materialism. The punishment of being demoted to floor duties had actually been designed to make convent life unacceptable to her, and one had been prepared to accord her an “honorable” secularization (all this Rahel to B.H.T., verbally); but not only had she accepted the demotion as a promotion: she had also felt and regarded and seen her floor duties as offering far better opportunities for applying her doctrines than did the classroom. Since the year in which her difficulties with the Order happened to occur was 1933, one had refrained from actually expelling her, hence she still had five more years as a “
toilet attendant” (Rahel on Rahel to B.H.T.).

  The obtaining of cleaning materials, toilet paper, antiseptics, and even bed linen, etc., was reason enough for her to go by bicycle from time to time to the neighboring medium-sized university town, where she spent many hours in the university library, later many days in that well-stocked antiquarian bookstore where she struck up a platonic but passionate friendship with this B.H.T. He allowed her to browse to her heart’s content among his boss’s stock, even placing at her disposal—contrary to regulations—a hand catalogue for internal use only; he allowed her to read in numerous corners, even letting her have some of the coffee from his Thermos flask, indeed now and again, when her absorption seemed unduly prolonged, even giving her one of his sandwiches. Her main interest was pharmacological, mystical, and biological literature, also herbal lore, and in the space of two years she had developed into a specialist in a delicate area: that of scatological aberrations, insofar as these could be explored in the mystical literature so plentifully represented in the antiquarian bookstore.

  Although everything—everything—has been done to clarify Sister Rahel’s background and origin: beyond the statements made by B.H.T., Leni, and Margret there was no more to be learned; a second and third visit to Sister Cecilia brought to light no further information on their former sister-nun; all that the Au.’s persistence accomplished was that Sister Cecilia blushed—it is freely admitted that the blushing of an old lady of over seventy with milky tones in her skin is not an unpleasant sight. A fourth attempt—the Au. is persistent, as can be seen—was thwarted at the convent entrance: he was no longer admitted. Whether he will succeed in finding out more in the Order’s archives and personnel files in Rome depends on whether he can afford the time and expense of the trip and—most important of all—whether he will be granted access to the Order’s secrets. There remains the duty to recall the situation as it was in 1937–38: an eager little nun, with a mania for mysticism and a mania for biology, suspected of scatology, accused of biologism and materialistic mysticism, sitting in the dark corner of the antiquarian bookstore, is offered coffee and sandwiches by a young man, a (then) not even remotely bald or greasy young man. This genre picture, worthy of perpetuation by a Dutch master of the stature of a Vermeer, would require, in order to do justice to the political situation at home and abroad, a scarlet background, blood-flecked clouds, if it is borne in mind that somewhere the Storm Troopers were always on the march and that the threat of war was greater in 1938 than in the following year when it actually did break out; and even if this passion of Rahel’s for digestive matters is found to be excessively mystical, her preoccupation with internal secretion (to the point where she yearned to discover the precise composition of that substance known as sperm) bizarre—one thing must be said for her: it was she who, on the basis of her private (forbidden) experiments with urine, gave the young book-antiquarian the advice which enabled him to evade service in the German Army, by explaining to him in detail, while he drank his coffee (with which she occasionally spattered priceless antiquarian rarities—her respect for the outward appearance of any book was slight), what he must drink, eat, and swallow in the way of tinctures and pills in order to achieve a not only superficial but permanent classification as “unfit” when his urine was examined at recruiting time; when all is said and done, her knowledge and the results of her reading enabled her to submit his urine to a “progressive plan” (verbatim quotation from Rahel, verified by B.H.T.) that continued to guarantee sufficient albumen throughout the most varied tests even during a stay in army hospital of one, two, or three days. This information merely as consolation for all those who feel the lack of a political angle here. Unfortunately, B.H.T. lacked the nerve to pass on this “progressive plan” in all its details to potential young army recruits. “As a civic employee” he was afraid of running into trouble with his superiors.

  It would probably have been a source of enormous pleasure to Rahel (Au.’s hypothesis) had she been permitted at least once to spend a week in a boarding school for boys, performing similar duties and obtaining similar insights to those she had been accustomed to perform and obtain among girls. Since the literature on the digestive differences between men and women was in those days meager, she had to rely solely on assumptions that gradually consolidated into a prejudice: she regarded almost all men as “hard stoolers.” Had her desire become known in Rome or elsewhere, she would naturally have been instantly excommunicated and expelled.

  With the same passion with which she inspected the john bowls, she would look each morning into the eyes of the girls in her charge and order eye-bathings, for which she kept a small selection of eyecups and a jug of spring water in readiness; she would immediately discover any sign, even the slightest, of inflammation or trachoma, and invariably—to a far greater degree than when describing digestive processes—went into ecstasy as she explained to the girls that the retina was approximately as thick or as thin as a cigarette paper but consisted in addition of three layers of cells, the sensory cells, the dipolar cells, and the ganglion cells, and that in the first layer alone (approximately one third as thick or as thin as a cigarette paper) there were some six million cones and one hundred million tiny rods distributed, not regularly but irregularly, over the surface of the retina. Their eyes, she would preach to the girls, were an immense, irreplaceable treasure; the retina was only one of the eye’s fourteen layers, with a total of seven or eight layers each of which was in turn separated from the next. So when she then got going on ganglia, papillae, villi, and cilia, her second nickname would sometimes be murmured: Silly Billy Sister, or Sister Silly Billy.

  One must remember that Rahel’s opportunities for explaining anything to the girls were occasional and limited; the girls’ timetable was fixed, and most of them really did regard her as being responsible for not much more than the toilet paper. Needless to say, she also spoke of sweat, pus, menstrual blood, and—somewhat at length—of saliva; it is almost superfluous to state that she was strongly opposed to excessive tooth-brushing; in any event she would tolerate vigorous tooth-brushing first thing in the morning only against her convictions, and even then only after vehement protests on the part of parents. As well as the girls’ eyes, she also inspected their skin—unfortunately, as it turned out, because on a few occasions she was accused by parents of immodest physical contact—not breast or abdomen, merely arms above and below the elbow. Later she proceeded to explain to the girls that, when one had acquired some personal experience, a glance at the excrements ought really only to confirm what one was aware of anyway on rising: the degree of well-being; and that it was almost superfluous—after sufficient experience—to look at them, unless one was not certain of one’s condition and needed a glance at them for further confirmation (Margret and B.H.T.).

  When Leni feigned illness, which happened more and more often as time went by, she was sometimes allowed even to smoke a cigarette in Sister Rahel’s little room; Rahel explained that at Leni’s age, and for a woman, more than three to five cigarettes was not good. When she grew up she should never smoke more than seven or eight cigarettes, certainly remain below ten. Who would dare contradict the value of education when it can be stated that at forty-eight Leni still adheres to this rule, and that she has now begun, using a sheet of wrapping paper measuring five feet by five (in the present state of her finances, white paper of this size is more than she can afford), to realize a dream for which she has hitherto lacked the time: to paint a faithful picture of a cross section of one layer of the retina; she is actually determined to reproduce six million cones and one hundred million tiny rods, and all this with the child’s paint box that was left behind by her son and for which she occasionally buys additional little cakes of cheap paint. When we consider that her daily output is at most five hundred rodlets or conelets, her annual output roughly two hundred thousand, we can see that for the next five years she will be fully occupied, and perhaps we shall understand why she has given up her job as a fl
orist’s assistant for the sake of her rod- and cone-painting. She calls her picture “Part of the Retina of the Left Eye of the Virgin Mary alias Rahel.”

  Is anyone surprised to learn that Leni likes to sing as she paints? Texts to which she randomly adds Schubert and folksong elements and what she hears on the program “Around the Home” (Hans), mixed with rhythms and tunes that draw from a Schirtenstein “not only emotion but attentiveness and respect” (Schirtenstein). Her song repertoire is obviously more extensive than her repertoire on the piano: the Au. is in possession of a tape made for him by Grete Halzen to which he can scarcely listen without the tears streaming down his cheeks (Au.). Leni sings rather softly, in a dry, firm voice that only sounds soft because of her shyness. She sings like someone singing from a dungeon. What is she singing?

  Silvery is she in the mirror

  A stranger’s portrait in the twilight

  Fading duskly in the mirror

  And she shivers at its purity

  My vows are to be unchaste and poor

  Oft has unchastity sweetened my innocence

  What we do under God’s heaven is sure

  To bring us on God’s earth to penitence.…

  The voice it was of the noblest of rivers, of the

  free-born Rhine—but where is he who was born, like

  the Rhine, to remain free all his life and to fulfill

  his heart’s desire—from propitious heights

  and that sacred womb, like the Rhine?

  When no peace came in the war’s first year

  With spring’s returning breath

  The soldier saw his duty clear

  And died a hero’s death

  Yet I knew thee better

  Than I ever knew mankind

  I understood the silence of the spheres

  Words of mankind I never understood.…