Group Portrait With Lady

by Heinrich Böll

  Ilse Kremer on the same subject: “Yes, that’s right, I did go along with it. We used to work special shifts so no one would notice. He always said that it wasn’t desecrating the graves, that he got the wreaths from the rubbish heap. Well, I didn’t care. It meant a nice bit of extra money for us, and after all: was it so bad? What was the good of the wreaths rotting on a rubbish heap? But eventually someone did lay a complaint, on the grounds of desecration and grave-robbing, because, of course, there were some people who were surprised to come back three or four days later and find their wreaths gone—but there again he was very nice about it, kept us out of the whole thing, went alone to the hearing, took the blame for everything, even kept Grundtsch out of it, and, according to what someone told me, he very cleverly used the argument of that national mumbo jumbo about the ‘penny gobbler,’ he admitted to ‘certain irregularities’ and donated a thousand marks to a convalescent home; what he said—it wasn’t a regular court, you know, just a guild committee and later a Party court of honor—what he said was, so I was told: ‘Gentlemen, Party comrades, I am fighting on a front that is unknown to most of you—and on the fronts that many of you know better than I, aren’t there times when one is willing to stretch a point?’ Well, after that he did drop it for a while, till the end of ’44 in fact, and by that time the general confusion was so great that no one paid any more attention to such trivial things as wreaths and ribbons.”

  7

  Since Grundtsch’s invitations were both cordial and standing the Au. paid him several successive visits, enjoying with him the truly heavenly silence that reigns over a walled cemetery on warm late-summer evenings. The following passages represent the verbatim summary of some four sessions that all began harmoniously and all ended harmoniously. During these sessions, of which the first took place on a bench under an elderberry bush, the second on a bench under an oleander bush, the third on a bench under a syringa bush, the fourth on a bench under a laburnum tree (old Grundtsch likes variety and claims to have at his disposal other benches under other bushes), tobacco was smoked, beer was drunk, and street noises, distant and almost agreeable, were sometimes listened to.

  Résumé of the first visit (under the elderberry bush): “It’s really a joke, you know, Walt talking about financial opportunities—he’s always taken advantage of them, even at nineteen, when he was with a quartermaster corps during the first war. Quartermaster corps?—well, let’s say they clean up battlefields after the battle—there’s quite a bit to collect, stuff the army might still use: steel helmets, rifles, machine guns, ammunition, cannon even, they pick up every canteen, every lost cap or belt and so on—and of course there are corpses lying around there too, and corpses usually have something in their pockets: photos, letters—wallets with money in them sometimes, and a buddy of Walt’s once told me that he—Walt, that is—stopped at nothing, not even gold teeth, never mind the nationality of the gold teeth—and toward the end, of course, Americans also started turning up on European battlefields—and it was in dealing with corpses that Walt gave the first proof of his business sense. Needless to say, it was all strictly prohibited, but people—and I hope you’re not one of them—usually make the mistake of thinking that what’s prohibited isn’t done. That’s Sonny Boy’s strong point: he doesn’t care a rap about regulations and laws, he just makes sure he doesn’t get caught.

  “Well, the boy came home from World War I, at nineteen, with a respectable little fortune, a nice little packet of dollars, pounds, and Belgian and French francs—and a nice little packet of gold too. And he gave proof of his business sense by showing his instinct, his uncanny nose, for real estate, developed and undeveloped, he liked the undeveloped lots best, I mean undeveloped not in the horticultural sense but ones that hadn’t been built on, but in a pinch he would take the developed ones too. At that time the dollars and pounds came in very handy, and fields, say on the outskirts of town, were dirt cheap, here an acre, there an acre, as close as possible to the main road leading out of town, and a few small buildings belonging to bankrupt tradesmen and business people in the center of town. Then off went Sonny Boy to do his peacetime work, if you like to call it that: he exhumed American soldiers and packed them in zinc coffins to be sent to America—and there was as much illegal business to be done there as legal, for some exhumed bodies also have gold teeth; with their mania for hygiene the Americans paid fantastic sums for this job, and again there were a lot of legal and illegal dollars at a time when dollars were few and far between, and again a few little properties for our man, tiny little lots, this time in the center of town where small grocers and tradesmen were going bust.”

  Résumé of the conversation under the oleander bush: “Walter was four when I began my apprenticeship, at the age of fourteen, with old Pelzer, and all of us, including his parents, called him Sonny Boy—and the name’s stuck. They were nice folk, his parents, she overdid it a bit with her religion, was forever in church and so on, he was quite deliberately a heathen, if you’ve any idea what that meant in 1904. He’d read Nietzsche, of course, and Stefan George, and while he wasn’t exactly a crackpot he was a bit of a crank; he wasn’t specially interested in business, only in breeding, in experiments—to coin a new phrase: he was searching not only for the blue flower but the new flower. He’d been in the Socialist Youth Movement from the word go, and got me involved in it too: I can still sing you all the verses of ‘The Workingmen’ “ (Grundtsch sang:) “ ‘Who hauls the gold above ground? Who hammers ore and stone? Who weaves the cloth and velvet? Who plants the wine and grain? Who gives the rich their daily bread, Yet lives in poverty instead? It is the workingmen, the proletariat. Who toils from early morning Till far into the night? Creates for others riches, A life of ease and might? Who turns the world’s great wheel alone, Yet rights within the state has none? It is the workingmen, the proletariat.’

  “Well, anyway, as a lad of fourteen, coming from the wretchedest Eifel village you can imagine, I turned up at Heinz Pelzer’s as an apprentice. He fixed up a little room for me in the greenhouse, with a bed and a table and a chair, right next to the stove—I got my board and a little money—and even Pelzer ate no better and had no more money than I did. We were communists, without knowing the word or really knowing what it means. Pelzer’s wife Adelheid used to send me packages when I had to do my stint in the army from 1908 to 1910, and where did they send me? You guessed it, to coldest Prussia, to Bromberg, that’s where; and where did I go when I got leave? Not home, that miserable priest-ridden hole, no, I went to the Pelzers’—well, Sonny Boy was always playing outside and forever getting under our feet in the greenhouse, a cute little fellow, quiet, not friendly but not unfriendly either, and you know, if I stop to think what made him so completely different from his father: it was fear. He was afraid. There was always trouble with the bailiffs and checks that bounced, and sometimes we few helpers would scrape our meager savings together to prevent the worst from happening. A nursery garden was never a gold mine, it’s only become that since the flower craze has broken out all over Europe. And that Heinz Pelzer always after his new flower. He believed the new age needed a new flower, he had visions of something way out that he never found, though he spent years pottering over his flowerpots and flowerbeds, as secretive as any inventor, fertilizing, taking cuttings, crossing breeds: yet all he got for it was debased tulips or degenerate roses, ugly mongrels. Well anyway, when Sonny Boy got to be six and went to school, he had only one word in his head, ‘baily’—that was his abbreviation of bailiff. ‘Mum, is the baily coming today? Dad, is the baily coming again today?’ Fear, I tell you, fear’s what’s made him the way he is.

  “Not surprisingly, he never finished high school, dropped out in grade nine and became an apprentice right off, got his green apron, and that was the end, the year was 1914, and if you ask me: 1914 wasn’t only the end for Walter and his education, it was the end of everything, everything, I was twenty-four, and I know what I’m saying: it was the end of any kind of socialis
m in Germany. The end. To think that those idiots let themselves be bamboozled by that soppy crappy Kaiser of theirs! Heinz, Walter’s father, realized that too, and finally gave up his amateurish experiments. He had to join up, like me—and the two of us—out of rage, I tell you, out of fury and grief and rage—became sergeants. I hated them, those greenhorns, those new recruits, nicely brought up, servile, full of shit in both senses. I hated them and bullied them. Yes, I got to be a sergeant major, I sent them off by the score, by the battalion, from the Häcketauer barracks that were identical with the barracks in Bromberg, identical, down to the last detail—so that you could find the office of Company 3 in your sleep, like in Bromberg—I trained them by the score and sent them off to the front. In my pocket, in my wallet, a little photo of Rosa Luxemburg. I carried it around like a saint’s picture, it finally got as dog-eared as a saint’s picture. Anyway, I was not a member of a Soldiers’ Council, no sir: in 1914 German history came to an end for me—and then of course they killed Rosa Luxemburg, had her killed, those gentlemen of the Social Democratic party—and then even our Sonny Boy got into the war, and maybe that was the only smart thing to do, collect gold teeth and dollar bills. His mother was a nice soul, Adelheid, she must have actually been pretty at one time, but then she soon turned sour, her nose got red and pointed, and she got that bitter, sour twist to her mouth that I can’t stand in women: my grandmother had it, my mother too, those lovely faces left with nothing but suffering, sourpusses, listening to nobody but those damn priests and first thing in the morning off to early Mass and in the afternoon off again with their rosaries and in the evening once again with their rosaries—anyway, we had to go quite often to church or the cemetery chapel because we had a rental service for potted palms and such-like, and Adelheid’s church connections came in nice and handy and at club evenings and office parties and so on—well, if I could’ve had my way I’d have spat at the altar, I didn’t, though, because of Adelheid.

  “Then to cap it all Heinz started drinking.… Well, I must say I could understand Sonny Boy staying away from home, digging up dead Yanks, then joining the Liberation Front for six months, in Silesia I think it was. After that he stayed in town for a while, took up boxing—professionally, but that wasn’t very profitable, he did a bit of pimping—first with the really cheap tarts who would do it for a cup of coffee, later on the higher-class ones—and then he actually became a Communist, a card-carrying member, but that didn’t last long either. He was never much of a talker, and it didn’t bother him that he wasn’t making much out of his real estate, he’d never done any gardening, your hands get pretty dirty from that, you see, the dirt eats into the creases of your skin—and our Sonny Boy was always spick-and-span and very health-conscious: went jogging every morning, then a shower, hot and cold, breakfast at home was too frugal for him, ersatz coffee and turnip jam, he’d head straight for his whores’ cafés, order himself eggs, real coffee, and a brandy—all paid for later by the girls’ beaus. And as soon as he could, of course, he got himself a car, even if it was only a Hanomag.”

  Résumé of the conversation under the syringa bush: “I must say, he was always nice to his parents, really nice, I fancy he really loved them. Never a harsh word to his mother, never even laughed at her, and Adelheid was getting more and more fretful, she didn’t die of grief, she fretted her life away, went sour, it was too bad—she’d been as pretty as a picture at one time; in 1904, when I joined the business, she was a bonny woman. Then later, when Walter sometimes drove around with us delivering potted palms, you should’ve seen how convincingly he genuflected, dipped a hand in the holy-water stoup … as if to the manner born. Then in ’32 he joined the Storm Troopers, and early in ’33 he took part in the rounding up of prominent politicians, but he never turned any in, he cashed in instead and let them go in exchange for the family jewels and cash—that must’ve been pretty lucrative, right off there was a new car, new clothes, and by then, of course, there were cheap Jewish properties to be bought too, here a little shop, there a building site, and he calls that ‘being a bit rough.’

  “And all of a sudden he turned into a fine gentleman, manicured nails and all, he married at thirty-four, money of course, Prumtel’s daughter Eva—you know, one of those girls who’re always thinking of higher things; not a bad sort, just a bit hysterical; her old man had some kind of office where you could get credit for installment buying, and later a few pawnshops too—and the daughter, well, she read Rilke and played the flute. Anyway, her dowry contained a few properties and a pile of cash. After ’34 he became an officer in an elite Storm Trooper commando, but he kept out of all the dirty goings-on, out of the brutal ones too, he can’t be accused of that—of being brutal—just of having a sharp eye for property. The funny thing was that, the richer he got, the more humane he became, even that night when they broke the windows of every Jewish store in town he didn’t join in the looting. All he did now was sit around in cafés, the kind where there’s an orchestra playing, go to the opera (season ticket, of course), produce children, two cute kids he idolized, Walter and little Eva, then in ’36 he finally took over the nursery garden, when Heinz had actually drunk himself to death, emaciated, bitter—well anyway, I became Sonny Boy’s business manager, the orders placed by the Party got us started in the wreath business, and he made me a gift of that part of the nursery that still belongs to me, generous, one must say, and never a cross word, never petty. The business started looking up when Heinz and poor Adelheid were under the ground.”

  Résumé of the conversation under the laburnum tree: “Some folk think it would be an insult even to a Nazi to call Walter a Nazi. The change in him came in the middle of ’44, during that business with Leni and the Russian. The welfare of those two was constantly being hammered into him, by phone calls, in conversations. The change was that he started thinking, Walter did. Even he knew the war had been lost and that after the war it wouldn’t do him any harm to have treated a Russian and the Gruyten girl decently—but: how much longer was the war going to last? That was the question that was driving us all crazy: how to survive those last few months, when every minute someone was being hanged or shot, you weren’t safe either as an old Nazi or as a non-Nazi—and damn it, how long did it take for the Americans to reach the Rhine from Aachen? Almost six months. My belief is that Sonny Boy, always in the pink and worshipping his two kids, was now experiencing something he’d never known before: inner conflict. He lived out there in his villa, with two pampered dogs, two cute kids, his car, and more and more real estate. He’d sold the original properties for housing developments and barracks, not for cash, oh no, he didn’t care that much about cash, what he was after was real values; he took payment in lots a bit farther toward the outskirts, double, triple the size of what he disposed of. He was an optimist, you see. He was a great one for keeping fit, still going for his regular morning jog through the park, taking a shower, having a hearty breakfast—at home now—and the odd time he had to go to church, still (or again) managing to bring off an impressive genuflection or a swift sign of the cross.