Group Portrait With Lady

by Heinrich Böll

  An attempt to bring Lotte back to the second topic of the interview, Leni’s relationship with Erhard, failed at first. Another cigarette and an impatient gesture. “I’m coming to that, let me finish. Just to make this clear: we two, we suited each other, even in those days, and there were even a few little expressions of affection, or whatever you want to call it, that for a man of forty with a woman of twenty-seven are rather touching. Flowers of course, and twice a kiss on the forearm and then something really sensational: he once danced half the night with me at a hotel in Hamburg; that wasn’t like him at all. Haven’t you ever noticed that ‘great men’ are always poor dancers? Now I’m a pretty standoffish person with men other than my own husband, and I’ve got one miserable habit that I couldn’t get rid of for the longest time: I’m faithful. It’s like a curse. No merit to it, it’s more of a disgrace—how do you think I used to lie there, alone in my bed at night, when the kids were asleep, after they’d let my Wilhelm, my husband, give his life near Amiens for that crap? And I wouldn’t let a soul, not a soul, touch me till ’45—and all against my convictions, for I’m no believer in chastity and all that, and by ’45 five years had passed, five years, and we two, he and I, moved in together. Now about Leni and Erhard, if you like: I must’ve told you already that the shyness of that boy Erhard was something you simply wouldn’t believe—nor Leni’s shyness either, for that matter. He adored her from the very first moment, she must’ve seemed to him like some kind of mysterious resurrected Florentine blond beauty or something, and not even Leni’s extremely dry Rhenish manner of speech, not even her ultradry way of expressing herself, could bring him down to earth. And he didn’t give a damn that she turned out to be totally uneducated in his sense of the word, and that bit of secretion-mysticism she had, and still has, in her head, wouldn’t have particularly impressed him either, I imagine, if she’d ever trotted it out. Well, what didn’t we all do, we three—Heinrich, Margret, and I, I mean—to bring it off between them. There wasn’t much time, mind you: between May ’39 and April ’40 he was there maybe eight times in all. Naturally nothing was said in words between Heinrich and me, just with our eyes, after all we could see how much in love they were. It really was sweet, yes I repeat, it was sweet to see them together, and maybe the fact they didn’t go to bed together isn’t so tragic after all. I got movie tickets for them, for crappy movies like Comrades on the High Seas or trash like Beware, the Enemy Is Listening, and I even sent them to that Bismarck movie because I thought: What the hell, it’s a three-hour program, and it’s as dark and warm in there as in the womb, and they’re bound to hold hands, and maybe it’ll eventually occur to them” (very bitter laughter! Au.’s remark) “to try a kiss or two, and when they get that far surely it’ll go farther—but nothing doing, it seemed. He took her to the museum and explained how you tell a painting that’s only attributed to Bosch from a genuine Bosch. He tried to get her away from her Schubert tinklings onto Mozart, he gave her poems to read, Rilke most likely, I’ve forgotten just what, and then he did something that struck a spark: he wrote poems to her and sent them to her. Well, that Leni was such an enchanting creature—she still is, if you ask me—that I was a bit in love with her myself: if you could’ve seen, for instance, how she danced with Erhard when we all went out together, my husband and I, Heinrich, Margret, and those two—it made you just long for a great fourposter bed for the two of them, all ready and waiting for them to enjoy one another—so then he wrote poems to her, and the most amazing part about it is: she showed them to me, though I must say they were pretty daring; he didn’t exactly mince matters in singing the praises of her breast, which he called ‘the great white flower of your silence’ and from which he claimed he would ‘strip the petals one by one,’ and he wrote one really good poem on jealousy that might even have been fit for publication: ‘I am jealous of the coffee you drink, of the butter you spread on your bread, Jealous of your toothbrush, and of the bed in which you sleep.’ I mean to say, those were all pretty unmistakable things, all right, but paper, paper.…”

  Asked whether there was no possibility of intimacies having occurred between Leni and Erhard of which she, Heinrich, and the others had no knowledge, Lotte blushed, surprisingly enough (the Au. admits that, in the course of what was often laborious research, a blushing Lotte gave him pleasure) and said: “No, I can be pretty sure of that—you see, a little over a year later she ran off with that Alois Pfeiffer, whom she was then stupid enough to marry, and Pfeiffer boasted later on, in fairly unmistakable terms, to his brother Heinrich, who naively passed it on to me, that he had ‘found Leni untouched.’ “ Lotte’s blushing persisted. When she was asked whether there were any chance that this Alois Pfeiffer might have been boasting to his brother Heinrich of a trophy, so to speak, which he was not entitled to claim, she became uncertain for the first time, saying: “He was a showoff all right, one can hardly deny that—and what you’ve just said makes me wonder. No,” she said after a brief shake of the head, “no, I think that’s quite out of the question, though they had plenty of opportunity,” and, to the Au.’s astonishment, blushed again as she said: “Leni didn’t behave like a widow after his death, if you can see what I mean, she behaved, if you really do see, like a platonic widow.” To the Au. this statement was sufficiently clear, he admired her directness but was still not entirely convinced, although he regretted having taken so long to discover Lotte Hoyser, née Berntgen, in her full capacity as a witness. What amazed him was that Leni had been so communicative, one might almost say talkative, during that period of her life. An explanation for this was offered by Lotte Hoyser, now more pensive, quieter, no longer quite so voluble, from time to time giving the Au. an almost brooding look:

  “It was obvious that she loved Erhard, that she loved him expectantly, if that conveys anything to you, and sometimes I had the feeling that she was on the brink of taking the initiative. Now, I’d like to tell you about something, something I’ve never told anybody: I once saw Leni clearing out a plugged-up john, and I simply couldn’t get over the girl. One Sunday evening in 1940, we were all sitting around in Margret’s apartment, having a few drinks and dancing a bit—my husband Wilhelm was there too—and suddenly someone says the john’s plugged up; horrible business, I can tell you. Someone had tossed something in—a good-sized apple that was going bad, as it turned out—that was blocking the waste pipe, so the men set to work to remedy this embarrassing mishap; first Heinrich—no luck, he poked around in there with an iron bar, then Erhard, he tried, and not so stupidly at that, with a rubber hose he got from the laundry room, and tried using mechanical pressure by blowing like crazy into the hose which he stuck, with no squeamishness whatever, into that sickening mess—and then, because Wilhelm, who had after all been a pipefitter, later a technician, and finally a draftsman, turned out to be surprisingly squeamish, and because I and Margret were almost throwing up, do you know who solved the problem: Leni. She simply plunged her hand down, her right hand, and I can still see her lovely white arm covered with yellow muck to above the elbow, then she grabbed the apple and threw it into the garbage pail—and all that horrible mess instantly gurgled away out of sight, and then Leni washed herself—thoroughly, mind you, and over and over again, wiping eau de cologne all over her arms and hands, and she made a remark—now it comes back to me—a remark that I found quite electrifying: ‘Our poets never flinched from cleaning out a john.’ So now, when I say she could tackle any job that had to be done, what I mean is, maybe she ended up by simply tackling that Erhard: I’m sure he wouldn’t have objected. Which reminds me, by the way: not one of us ever got to see that husband of Margret’s.”

  Since Lotte Hoyser’s statements did not quite tally with Margret’s, it was necessary to interrogate the latter once again. Was it true that she had danced with the people named by Lotte on some occasions in her apartment, was it possible that she had already had a more intimate relationship with Heinrich long before that event which we will call the “Flensburg incident�
��? “As for the last thing,” said Margret, in whom a potent slug of whiskey had induced a gentle euphoria tinged with melancholy, “I can flatly deny that, I should know after all, and I’d have no reason to disclaim it. I did make one mistake, I introduced my husband to Heinrich. Schlömer was hardly ever home, I never really found out whether he was in armaments, or an informer, or what, he always had plenty of money whatever it was, and all he asked of me was to ‘be there for him’ whenever he sent me a telegram. Older than I was. In his mid-thirties in those days. He wasn’t at all bad-looking, dressed smartly and all that, a man of the world, you might say, and the two of them got along quite well together. And Heinrich, he was a terrific lover but not exactly an adulterer—in those days he wasn’t that yet; I’d always been an adultress, but he hadn’t reached that stage yet, and it was probably because he was shy after meeting my husband that he hadn’t got around to it yet. But as for the other thing—it must’ve been Lotte who told you that, that I saw him more than twice, and I danced with him, and in the apartment with the others—it’s true, but we certainly didn’t see each other more than four times all told.”

  Asked about Erhard and Leni, Margret smiled and said: “I don’t really want to know about it, and at the time I didn’t really want to know about it either. What had it got to do with me? The details certainly didn’t concern me. Do I or did I want to know if they kissed, if at least their hands took pleasure in each other, if they went to bed together, in my apartment I mean, or in Lotte’s, or in the Gruyten home? I just found it wonderful the way those two behaved together, and the poems he wrote to her and sent her, Leni couldn’t keep it to herself, and it was during those few months that for the first time she came out of her shell, after that she shut herself away again completely. Does it matter so much whether Erhard or that stupid Alois was the first, what difference does it make? Why bother? She loved him, tenderly and passionately, and if nothing happened by then it would have happened during his next leave, I guarantee, and you know, of course, how it all ended, in Denmark against a cemetery wall. Gone. Why don’t you ask Leni?”

  Ask Leni! That’s easier said than done. She won’t let one ask her, and when one does ask her she doesn’t answer. Old Hoyser called the Erhard incident “a touching but purely romantic affair, although with a tragic ending. That’s all.” Rahel is dead, and that B.H.T. naturally knows nothing about Erhard’s affairs. Since it is known that Leni made frequent visits to the convent, Rahel would certainly have known something. The Pfeiffers did not enter her life until later, and she most certainly told them nothing of what was “precious” to her. “Precious” is how M.v.D., to whom the Au. resorted with a sigh, described the Erhard affair.

  The Au. was obliged to correct some hasty judgments of her that he had made after her remarks about Mrs. Gruyten. When the subject is not Mrs. Gruyten and her husband, Miss van Doorn shows herself capable of giving quite subtle information, fine-grained, you might say. “Now please,” she said, when traced to her rural place of retirement, surrounded by asters, geraniums, and begonias, scattering feed for the pigeons, stroking her dog, an elderly mongrel-poodle, “don’t meddle with that precious thing in Leni’s life. It was like a fairy tale, you see, those two, just like a fairy tale. They were so openly in love, so at ease with each other, I saw them a few times sitting there in the living room—the room that Leni’s now rented to the Portuguese—the best china from the cabinet, and tea, drinking tea—though Leni’s never liked tea, but with him she drank it, and while he didn’t exactly complain about the army, he showed his disgust and dislike so openly that she put her hand on his arm, to comfort him, and you could tell just by looking at him that that touch was enough to cause a real revolution of his senses, or his sensibility, if you like. There were plenty of moments, believe me, when he had the chance to conquer her completely, she was, she stood—and if you’ll pardon my putting it rather crudely—she lay there ready, ready for him, and since I’m talking about it anyway, it was just that Leni was getting a bit impatient, that’s all, impatient—biologically impatient too; not annoyed, no, not angry with him—and if he’d ever been there for at least two or three days in a row, well, things would’ve turned out differently, I’m sure. I’m an old maid and I’ve never had any direct experience with men, but I’ve observed them pretty closely, you know, and I ask you, what must it be like when a man turns up with his return ticket in his pocket and is always thinking of the timetable and the barracks gate he has to go through before a certain hour, or the remustering depot? I tell you—and I say this as an old maid who realized this in the first war as a girl and in the second as an observant woman: leave is a terrible thing for a husband and wife. Everyone knows, when the husband comes home on leave, what the two have in mind—and every time it’s almost like a public wedding night—and people, the ones in the villages hereabouts anyway, and in the towns too, aren’t that sensitive and keep making hints—Lotte’s husband Wilhelm, for instance, he always went scarlet, he was a very sensitive person, you see, and do you think I didn’t know what was supposed to happen when my father came home on leave during the war—and Erhard, it’s just that he’d have needed a bit more time to conquer Leni—how could he when he was always on the point of leaving, and he just wasn’t the man to take the bull by the horns. Those poems of his, they were explicit enough surely, almost too explicit. ‘You are the earth I shall one day become’—can anybody be more explicit than that? No, what he lacked was time, he didn’t have enough time. You must remember that he had altogether maybe twenty hours alone with Leni—and it so happened that he wasn’t a go-getter. Leni didn’t take offense at this, only she was sad, for she was ready. Even her mother knew that, and she wanted it, I tell you. I used to see how she took care that Leni wore her prettiest dress, the saffron-yellow one with the low round neck, and the jewelry to go with it: she made her wear coral earrings, they looked like freshly picked cherries, and she bought her some smart little shoes and some perfume—she dressed her up like a bride; even she knew it and wanted it—but there wasn’t enough time, that’s all it was—just one more day and she’d have been his and not—oh well. It was awful for Leni.”

  There was no getting around it, Mrs. Schweigert had to be called on once more; asked over the telephone by the concierge, she consented to see him, she consented not all that ungraciously but with obvious impatience, over a cup of tea yet without offering any, “to answer a few more questions”; yes, her son had once presented that “Oh well” girl to her, she stressed the distinction between being introduced and presented; besides, there had been no need for an introduction, she had known the girl for quite a while and had gained some insight into her educational background and career; there had, of course, been “some talk of a love affair,” but again she rejected any idea of a permanent relationship, marriage in other words, as being out of the question, a relationship such as the permanent one between her sister and the girl’s father; she volunteered the information that the girl had also visited her once alone, she had—in all fairness—behaved very properly as she drank her tea, the sole topic of conversation had been—yes, it sounded extraordinary but it was true—heather; the girl had asked her when and where the heath was in bloom—was it just then, for instance? “It was toward the end of March, you must realize, and I felt as if I were talking to an idiot”; imagine asking whether the heath was in bloom at the end of March—and in 1940, during wartime, at that—in Schleswig-Holstein; the girl had been totally ignorant of the difference between Atlantic and rock heather, also of their differing soil requirements; in the end, said Mrs. Schweigert, everything had turned out for the best—she evidently found her son’s death at the hands of a German Army firing squad preferable to his possible marriage to Leni.