Group Portrait With Lady

by Heinrich Böll

  Can it be that the sex wave had already begun, and that many photographs being pressed upon us today were taken at delousing stations for slave workers from Eastern Europe?

  Now it is important to realize that the conquest of continents or worlds is by no means easy, that those people had their problems too, and that they tried to solve them with German thoroughness and to document them with German meticulousness. Whatever you do, don’t improvise! Nature’s calls remain Nature’s calls, and it simply won’t do for people destined for execution to turn up on delivery as corpses! It is an outrage and must be severely punished, and it won’t do either for men to soap women or for women to soap men during the delousing process, and as for taking photographs! It simply won’t do. Then no one’s hands remain clean. Have libertines and fiends infiltrated a procedure that is “in itself” perfectly proper?

  Now that disputes over corpses and/or partial corpses have become a hallmark of modern conventional warfare, and libertines and fiends—in uniform!—admit to assaulting women and even taking photographs in the process, there is no further need to bore the reader with similar examples.

  The only thing was: how and where were they to survive, the pregnant Leni, the hypersensitive Boris, the strong-minded Lotte, the overly compassionate Margret, Grundtsch—that grubber in the soil—and Pelzer, who was never a monster? In March 1945, what became of our Marja, of Bogakov and Viktor Genrikhovich, of old Gruyten, and so many others?

  First of all, in late December ’44 or early January ’45 Boris was the cause of a totally unnecessary complication about which Leni tells nothing, Margret everything, and of which Lotte and Marja were ignorant.

  Margret, now under the strictest supervision to prevent the Au. slipping her an occasional something (The doctor to the Au.: “She simply has to starve now for four or five weeks, that’ll give us at least half a chance to restore her endocrine and exocrine balance: she’s in such a mess right now that tears might come out of her nipples and urine out of her nose. So talking’s O.K., but no gifts.”). Margret, already used to asceticism, in fact hoping it would cure her: “But you can give me a ‘regular’ “ (which the Au. did), “well, I was furious with Boris at the time, really angry, and that didn’t let up until later, when we were all living in one another’s pockets and I got to know him—saw how wise and sensitive he was, but at the end of ’44, around Christmastime, or it may’ve been early in ’45, around the first week in January but certainly no later, that Leni came home one day with a name in her head, though this time she at least knew it was a writer, and a dead one at that, so at least we didn’t have to start phoning around.

  “Again it was all about a book, and the author was called Kafka, Franz Kafka; the book: In the Penal Colony. I asked Boris later whether he’d really had no idea of the trouble he was causing by recommending a Jewish writer to Leni at the end of 1944 (!), and he said: ‘I had so much on my mind, so much to think about, that I never thought of that.’ So: off goes Leni again with the request slip to the public library—there was still one functioning, and luckily for Leni it was quite a sensible older woman who tore up Leni’s slip, took her aside then and there and spoke to her exactly as the mother superior had done when Leni had pressed her for information about Rahel: ‘My child, have your wits deserted you? Who sent you here with such a request?’ But believe me, once again Leni was persistent. That woman in the library must’ve seen right away that Leni was no agent provocateur, so she took her aside and explained to her in great detail that this Kafka was a Jew, that all his books had been banned and burned and so on, and no doubt Leni once again countered with her shattering ‘So what?,’ and the woman must have explained to her with great thoroughness, although belatedly, all about the Jews and the Nazis, and she showed her a copy of Der Stürmer—for of course she had it right there in the library—and explained the whole thing to her, and Leni was horrified when she came to see me. At last she was beginning to understand. She still wouldn’t give up though, she just wanted her Kafka, she wanted to read him and she got him! She actually went to Bonn and looked up a few of the professors her father had once worked for, men she knew had large libraries of their own, and she actually found one who was already a grandfather by then, past seventy-five and living in retirement surrounded by his books, and do you know what he told her: ‘My child, have your wits deserted you? Why Kafka of all people—why not Heine?’ He must’ve been very nice to her then, he remembered her and her father, but he didn’t have the book himself so he in turn had to go first to one colleague and then to another till he found one who could trust him and whom he could trust and who also had the book. It wasn’t that easy, it took a whole day, believe me, she came home in the middle of the night with the book in her handbag, it hadn’t been all that easy, for they’d had to find someone who could not only trust the professor and whom the professor could trust, he had to be able to trust Leni too, and not only did he have to have the book but he had to be willing to part with it! It seems they found two who had the book, but the first one didn’t want to let it out of his hands. It was really crazy, the things she and that Boris of hers were worrying about, while all the time it was our bare lives, our bare naked lives, that were in danger.

  “To add to my troubles, it was just at that time that Schlömer, whom I was married to, turned up. It was his house we were living in, and in this Schlömer all trace of the man of the world, of former elegance, was gone, he was on his beam-ends, was suddenly in army uniform but without papers and he’d got away by the skin of his teeth from the French partisans who’d been just about to shoot him. I don’t know, somehow I’d always been fond of him, he was always kind and generous to me, and in his way I suppose he was fond of me too, maybe he even loved me. Now he was a mere nothing, in a pitiful state, and he told me: ‘Margret, I’ve done things that will cost me my neck everywhere, wherever I go, with the French, with the Germans—the pro-Nazis and the few who are anti—with the British, the Dutch, the Americans, the Belgians, if the Russians get me and find out who I am it’s curtains—and it’s also curtains if the Germans get me, the ones who’re still running the show. Help me, Margret.’ You should’ve seen him in the old days, the kind of man who went everywhere by taxi or turned up in an official car, went on leave three times a year bringing gifts back by the score, always dashing and gay, and now here he was like a pitiful little mouse, scared of the cops and of the Americans, of everyone.

  “So then I hit on an idea I might’ve thought of before. Men were dying all the time in the hospital, and naturally the identification papers were collected, registered, and sent back to the unit or wherever; anyway, I knew where the identification papers were, and I also knew that many soldiers hadn’t handed theirs in or that they hadn’t been found, in cases where the men had been brought in seriously wounded and their tattered bloody rags had been thrown away. So what did I do? That very night I stole three sets—there were plenty lying around there, enough for me to pick some with photos resembling Schlömer and Boris in age and appearance; so I took two of men with fair hair and glasses, about twenty-four or twenty-five years old, and one of a slender dark type without glasses, in his late thirties, like Schlömer, and gave it to him. I took his pack and stowed away all the money I had in it, and butter and cigarettes and bread, and sent him on his way with his new name: Ernst Wilhelm Keiper, I even made a note of it and the address because I wanted to know what happened to him. After all, we’d been married to each other for almost six years, through rather sporadically, and I told him the safest thing to do would be to go to the Army, to the deployment center or some such place, since everyone was on his tail. And that’s what he did. He cried, and if you didn’t know Schlömer before 1944 you don’t know what that means: a weeping, begging, grateful Schlömer who kissed my hand. He whimpered like a puppy—and off he went. Never saw him again. Some time later I went out of curiosity to see the wife of that Keiper, in the coal-mining area, near Buer, I wanted to find out, you see. She’d already
remarried, and I told her I’d nursed her husband in hospital, and that he’d died and asked me to look her up. Well, that was a cheeky little baggage all right, she asked me: ‘Which of my husbands d’you mean—Ernst Wilhelm? He died twice, you know, once in hospital and a second time in some godforsaken hole called Würselen.’ So Schlömer was dead too, and I won’t deny I was relieved. Maybe he was better off that way than being hanged or shot by the Nazis or the partisans. Well, it turned out he’d been a regular war criminal—in France and Belgium and Holland he went around recruiting forced labor, right at the beginning, in 1939; he’d had a business training, of course. I’ve been interrogated quite a few times on his account, and then they took away the house from me and everything in it, all I could take along was my clothes. It seems that Schlömer had been stealing in a big way and, to put it bluntly, taken bribes—so there I was in 1949 out on the street, and I’ve been more or less on the street ever since. Yes, on the street, although Leni and the others have tried to get me back on my feet again. I lived with Leni for six months, but in the long run that didn’t work out because of my men friends, what with her son getting to be a big boy and asking me one day: ‘Margret, why does Harry’—that was a British corporal I was going with at the time—‘why does he always want to go into you so deep?’ “ (Margret blushed again. Au.).

  Schirtenstein’s whereabouts at the end of the war are already known to the reader: he was strumming “Lili Marleen” on the piano for Soviet officers, somewhere between Leningrad and Vitebsk; a man for whom even a Monique Haas had respect. “I had one relentless, terrible desire” (S. to the Au.), “I wanted to eat and stay alive. And I would even have played ‘Lili Marleen’ on the mouth organ.”

  Dr. Scholsdorff spent the end of the war in a way that almost stamps him as a hero: he had “retired to a little village on the right bank of the Rhine where, since I had genuine papers and no political stigma, I waited for the end of the war, unmolested by the Nazis and without having to be afraid of the Americans. In order to complete my camouflage, I took over the command of a home-guard group of about ten men, of whom three were over seventy, two were under seventeen, two had lost a leg above the knee, one below the knee, one had lost an arm, and the tenth was mentally defective, in other words, the village idiot; our weapons consisted of a few cudgels and for the most part of white bed sheets cut in four; we also had a few hand grenades with which we were supposed to blow up a bridge. Well, I marched off with my unit, we fastened our cut-up sheets to poles, left the bridge unharmed—and surrendered the village intact to the Americans. Until two years ago I was always very welcome in the village” (the hamlet of Ausler Mühle in Bergisch Land. Au.) “and had a standing invitation to the fair and other similar festivities; but I must say that in the last two years I’ve noticed a change of mood, from time to time I hear the word defeatist—and that after twenty-five years, and in spite of my having also saved the church spire by pledging my life to an American lieutenant, Earl Wittney, that it was unoccupied and not used for military purposes. Well, there’s been a swing to the right, no doubt about that. Whatever the reason, I don’t feel quite so relaxed when I go there these days.”

  Hans and Grete Helzen need only a brief alibi: Hans was not born until June 1945; it is not known to the Au. whether he demonstrated Werewolf sentiments in his mother’s womb. And Grete was not born until 1946.

  Heinrich Pfeiffer, aged twenty-one at the end of the war, his (left) leg having just been amputated above the knee, was in a baroque convent near Bamberg that had been turned into a military hospital. He had—in his own words—“just come round from the anesthetic and was feeling quite lousy enough when the Yanks showed up—luckily they left me in peace.”

  Pfeiffer, Sr., who gives his and his wife’s whereabouts “on the day of defeat” as “not far from Dresden,” has now been dragging his paralyzed leg for twenty-seven years (or, taking today’s date, thirty-five years), the leg that Leni’s father, before he had to go to jail, in 1943, was still calling “the phoniest leg I’ve ever known.”

  Miss van Doorn: “I thought I was being the smartest of the lot, and by November 1944 I’d already moved out to Tolzem, where I’d bought my parents’ home and the property belonging to it with the money Hubert had given away in such quantities. I kept telling Leni she should move out to my place and have her baby—we still didn’t know whose it was—in peace in the country, and I told her, the Americans are sure to be two or three weeks earlier out here than in town where you are, and what actually happened? It was lucky Leni wasn’t with me. They razed Tolzem to the ground—that’s what they call it, isn’t it?—we had half an hour to get away, and they took us in cars across the Rhine, and afterwards we couldn’t go back across the Rhine because over there the Americans were in control and on our side it was still the Germans. How lucky Leni didn’t take my advice! Talk about the peace and quiet and fresh country air and flowers—and so forth: all we could see was a huge cloud of dust—what had once been Tolzem—it’s been rebuilt now, of course, but I tell you: one great cloud of dust!”

  Mrs. Kremer: “After they’d taken away the boy I thought: where do I go now, east or west, or should I stay here? I decided to stay: no one was allowed to go to the west, only soldiers and labor detachments—and east? For all I knew, they might go on playing at war there for months or even a year. So I stayed in my apartment until the Second” (i.e., March 2, 1945, which among certain circles who stayed behind in the city is known simply as “the Second.” Au.). “Then came the air raid when so many people went crazy, or almost; I went across the street into the brewery cellar, thinking: the world’s coming to an end, the world’s coming to an end, and I tell you quite frankly, though I’d never set foot in a church since I was twelve, since 1914, never bothered with all that mumbo jumbo, and not even when the Nazis were apparently” (stress not the Au.’s) “against the priests was I in favor of them: by then I’d swallowed that much dialectic and that much materialistic interpretation of history—though most of the comrades thought of me as just a stupid harmless little hen—believe me, I prayed: that was all I did. It all came back to me: ‘Hail Mary’ and ‘Our Father’ and even ‘Beneath the Shelter of Thy Wings’—I just prayed. It was the worst, the heaviest raid we ever had, and it lasted exactly six hours and forty-four minutes, and sometimes the ceiling of the cellar moved a little. Rather like a tent in the wind, it trembled and moved—and all that on a city that was practically depopulated, down it came, more and more and again and again.

  “There were only six of us in the cellar, two women, me and a young woman with a little boy of three, she just sat there with her teeth chattering—and for the first time I saw what that means, what you so often read about: someone’s teeth chattering; it was purely mechanical, she couldn’t help it, she didn’t even know she was doing it—finally she’d bitten through her lips till they bled, and we stuck a piece of wood between her teeth, some smooth little piece we found lying around, probably from a barrel stave; I thought she was going nuts, that I was going nuts—it wasn’t all that noisy, it was the shaking, and the ceiling sometimes looking like a rubber ball, when it’s broken and you can press it in or out; the little boy was asleep: he just got tired, fell asleep, and was smiling in his dream.

  “There were three men there too, an elderly warehouse helper in a Brownshirt uniform—on the Second, imagine!—well, he simply shit in his pants till they were full, he was trembling all over as if he had the shakes—and he peed all down his pants too and then ran outside, just ran outside yelling—out onto the street; not so much as a collar button did they find of him, believe me. Then there were two younger men too, in civvies, Germans, deserters I think, who’d been lurking around in the ruins but then got the daylights scared out of them during this raid; first they were very quiet and pale, and suddenly, after the older fellow had run outside, they got—well, I’m sixty-eight now and it must sound terrible when I tell it like this, the way it really was, I was forty-three then, and the y
oung woman—I never saw her again, never, not one of the four, neither the young fellows nor the child, no one—the young woman was in her late twenties maybe—well anyway, these young fellows, who were at most twenty-two or -three, suddenly started—how shall I put, getting randy, pestering us, no that’s all wrong, and after all, for three years, ever since they tortured my husband to death in the concentration camp, I hadn’t looked at another man—well the two of them, you can’t exactly say they fell on us and we didn’t put up much of a fight either, they didn’t rape us—anyway: one of them came over to me, grabbed me by the breast and pulled down my underpants, the other one went over to the young woman, took the piece of wood out from between her teeth and kissed her, and suddenly there we were, going at it together, or however you want to call it, with the little boy sleeping right there in the middle, and I know it must sound terrible to you, but you simply can’t imagine what it’s like when for six and a half hours the planes come over and drop bombs, aerial mines and nearly six thousand bombs—we simply closed in together, the four of us, the little boy in the middle; and I can still feel how the young fellow, the one who’d picked me, had his mouth full of dust when he kissed me, and I can still feel that dust in my mouth—it must’ve all come trickling down from that swaying ceiling—and I can still feel how glad I was, how I calmed down, went on praying, and I can remember how the young woman suddenly got quite quiet, her fellow was lying on top of her and she stroked the hair back from his forehead and smiled at him, and I stroked my fellow’s hair back from his forehead and smiled at him, and then we got dressed again, fixed ourselves up a bit, and sat there quietly; without discussing it we’d taken everything out of our pockets, cigarettes and bread, and the young woman had some preserves in her shopping bag, pickles and strawberry jam—and together we ate the lot, not saying a word and, as if by common consent, we didn’t ask one another’s names—didn’t say a word, and dust was gritting in our teeth, the young fellow’s dust in mine, and mine in his, I suppose—and then it was all over, about four-thirty. Silence. Not quite. Somewhere a thud, somewhere a wall collapsed, somewhere there was an explosion—nearly six thousand bombs. Well, when I say silent I mean no more planes—and we all ran out, each for himself—no good-byes. Well, there we all stood in an enormous cloud of dust reaching right up to the sky, in a cloud of smoke, in a cloud of fire—I passed out, and a few days later I woke up in the hospital and was still praying—well, that was the last time. I was lucky they didn’t just bury me in the rubble, how many people d’you think got buried like that by mistake? And what do you imagine happened to the brewery cellar? It collapsed, two days after we left it—I imagine the vaulted ceiling went on bulging like a rubber ball and then caved in. I went there because I wanted to see what happened to my apartment: nothing left, nothing, nothing—not even what you might call a decent pile of rubble, and the next day, when I left the hospital, the Americans arrived.”