Group Portrait with Lady (38 page)

“By November I already had my permit, I rented a bit of land, knocked together some greenhouses, opened a store, and right away took on Leni, the Gruyten girl. It was a crucial moment for me when I got my permit and my new papers: should I become Elli Marx from Saarlouis again, or should I stay Liane Hölthohne? I decided to stay Liane Hölthohne. My passport says Marx, alias Hölthohne. I must say you get a better cup of tea at my place than in this pseudo-topnotch establishment.” (Which the Au. confirmed, with both gallantry and conviction.) “What’s really good here is the petits fours, I must remember that.

“Now to the subject of what certain informants have described to you as the Soviet paradise in the vaults: we were invited to this paradise too, Grundtsch and I, but we were scared, not of the dead but of the living and because the cemetery was right in the planes’ bombing path, between the old
part of town and the suburbs; as for the dead, there was nothing about them to bother me in that paradise, after all people have been meeting and celebrating their feast days in catacombs for centuries. The cellar adjoining the crypt of the Carmelite convent seemed safer to me—the military police were welcome to come and ask me for my papers there, but in the cemetery, in the burial vaults: that was rather a suspicious place to be, wasn’t it, and toward the end you really never knew what was the safest thing to be—a Jewish woman in hiding, a Separatist in hiding, a German soldier who had not deserted or who had, a convict who had escaped or who had not, and of course the city was swarming with deserters, and with them around it was anything but pleasant, all of them trigger-happy, both sides.

“Grundtsch had the same fears, though he had hardly left the cemetery, so to speak, for the past forty or fifty years, but now, around mid-February ’45, he did, and for a while he moved out into the country, and he even ended up joining the Home Guard somewhere, and he was right: for that particular period some form or other of legality was the best protection, and my own motto was—don’t overdo it, lie low somewhere with reasonably good papers, play possum, and wait. Quite deliberately—and it wasn’t easy, believe me, for there were things there we hadn’t even dared dream about—quite deliberately I’d taken no part in the looting, for naturally it was illegal, it carried the death penalty, and while the looting was going on the Germans were still officially in control of the city, and I had no wish to run around even for two or three or four days with a crime like that around my neck. I wanted to live, live—I was forty-one and wanted to live, and that life wasn’t something I wanted to gamble with in the final few days. So I kept as quiet as a mouse and even three days before the Americans marched in I didn’t dare talk about the war being over, let alone lost. There it had been in black and white, ever since October, on billboards and leaflets, that the entire German nation would be relentless in
demanding just atonement for alarmists, defeatists, pessimists, lackeys of the enemy—and this atonement had but one name: death. They were getting crazier and crazier: somewhere they shot a woman who had washed her sheets and hung them out to dry—they thought she’d run up the white flag and they shot her—simply shot her through the window with a machine gun. No, better to go a bit hungry and wait, that was my motto, that orgy of looting on ‘the Second’ after the raid—that was too risky for me, and it was as much as your life was worth to then go and cart all that stuff to the cemetery; the city was still in German hands, you know, and they claimed they were going to defend it.

“Once the Germans had finally left, I didn’t hesitate another moment, I went straight to the Americans and got in touch right away with my French friends; I had a nice little apartment allocated to me and got my first permit for a nursery garden. As long as old Grundtsch still hadn’t returned I used his facilities and duly paid rent into an account for him, and when he got back in ’46 I duly handed his place back to him, in good order, and opened my own business, and then by August ’45 Friend Pelzer was already there wanting his character reference, though he’d started out so cleverly, and who was it gave it to him? Who was it spoke for him at the tribunal? Leni and I. Yes, we gave him a clean bill of health, and I did it against two convictions: against my conscience, because in spite of everything I considered him a scoundrel, and against my business interests, because it was only natural for him to become my competitor, and he continued to be till the mid-fifties.”

My informant, Mrs. Hölthohne, suddenly looked very old, almost decrepit, the previously firm skin of her face suddenly became slack, her hand unsteady as it toyed with the teaspoon, her voice quavering, almost shaking.

“I still can’t make up my mind whether it was right to get him cleared—and get him through the tribunal, but, you
know, from the age of nineteen to the age of forty-two I’d been a persecuted person, since that battle near the Ägidienberg till the Americans marched in, for twenty-two years I’d been persecuted, politically, racially, call it what you like—and I’d deliberately picked Pelzer because I thought the safest place for me would be working for a Nazi, all the more so if it was a corrupt and criminal Nazi. I knew the kind of things that were said about him and that Grundtsch used to tell me, and now suddenly there he was in front of me, chalk-white with fear, he turned up with his wife, who really was innocent and knew nothing of what he might have done prior to ’33, and he brought along his two really adorable young children too, the boy and the girl, they must’ve been between ten and twelve or so—delightful, and his pale, slightly hysterical wife, who’d really been completely in the dark, I felt sorry for her too—and he asked me whether, during the ten years I’d worked for him, I could accuse him of, or prove, a single, even the tiniest inhuman act directed at me or anyone else, either within the business or outside of it, and whether there wasn’t a point at which a person’s youthful transgressions—that’s what he called them—had to be forgiven and forgotten.

“He knew enough not to offer me a bribe, he merely exerted gentle pressure by reminding me that he had included me in his wreath-recycling group, in other words, had taken me into his confidence—a hint, of course, that my slate hadn’t been all that clean either, for it hadn’t been very nice, had it, the way we spruced up stolen wreaths and even used the ribbons over again—well, I ended up by giving in and letting him have the character reference he wanted, gave my French friends as guarantors for myself, and all the rest of it.

“He did the same thing with Leni, at that time she had plenty of political prestige, Leni did, just like her friend Lotte, those two could’ve gone right to the top—but Leni happened to be like that, she didn’t give a damn about getting ahead;
Pelzer offered her a partnership—just as I did later on—then he offered her father a partnership, but he had no more use for it than she had, he was suddenly quite the proletarian, would have nothing more to do with business, just laughed and advised Leni to give Pelzer his ‘thing,’ his clean bill of health, and she did, without taking anything in return of course. This was all after Boris’s death, when she had turned into a statue. Well, she gave it to him—just as I did. And that saved him, for we both counted for something. And if you ask me whether I regret it I’ll say neither no nor yes nor perhaps, I’ll only say: I feel sick at my stomach to think that we had him in our power—understand? In our power, with a piece of paper, a pen, a few phone calls to Baden-Baden and Mainz, and it was that crazy time when Leni was flirting a bit with the Communist Party, and a Communist Party man was on the tribunal, of course, and so on.

“Well anyway: we gave him his character reference and got him out—and I must say, whatever he did as a businessman as a speculator, and whatever shady deals he put over with his predatory instincts, he never was and never became a Fascist, not even later, when it would have been quite useful, and once again became quite useful, to be able to do even
that
. No. Never. I must say that for him, I must give him credit for that, and he never competed unfairly with me, nor against Grundtsch—I must say that for him. And yet—I feel sick at my stomach to think that we had him in our power. And finally even Ilse Kremer went along with it too—he talked her into it, she was a victim of political persecution, and could prove it, and her voice was worth as much as Leni’s and mine, and though we two would have been enough he wanted a reference from her too, and got it—and the Kremer woman didn’t give a damn either, neither about Pelzer’s offer nor about mine nor about the fact that her old Party comrades were now showing up again. She had only one phrase in her head, even in those
days: ‘I’ve had enough, I’ve had enough,’ and she’d certainly had enough of her former comrades—she used to call them the Thälmannites who had betrayed her husband or her lover in France, during the year and a half when the Hitler-Stalin pact was in force, which she was against, right from the start.

“So what became of her, Ilse Kremer? Once again an unskilled worker, first for Grundtsch, then back to Pelzer after all, till I took her on myself, and then she started working with Leni at the job we’d done during the war: making wreaths, trimming them, putting ribbons on them, making bouquets, till it was time for her to retire. Somehow or other I felt them both to be a kind of living reproach: although they neither thought it nor expressed it nor even hinted at it, they’d derived no profit, no advantage, and it was all exactly the way it’d been during the war—Ilse Kremer making the morning coffee, and the coffee proportion was for a time, a fairly long time, even more miserable than during the war. And they came to work with their head scarves and their sandwiches and their coffee in little paper bags just as they’d always done. Ilse Kremer till ’66 and Leni till ’69, fortunately she’d been paying in her unemployment contributions for over thirty years, but what she doesn’t know and mustn’t ever find out is that I took the entire responsibility for her pension affairs and made additional payments out of my own pocket, so that now she at least has a little something. She’s as healthy as can be, mind you—but what’s she going to get when the pension plan really comes off? Less than four hundred marks, give or take a few. Can you understand—though it makes no sense at all—that I feel her to be a living reproach? Although she never reproaches me, just comes to me from time to time shyly asking for a loan because they’re threatening to seize something of hers that she’s fond of. I happen to be quite efficient and able to organize, even to rationalize, and I enjoy keeping a tight hand on my chain of stores and expanding it—and yet: there’s always something
there that makes me very sad. Yes. The fact, too, that I couldn’t help Boris, couldn’t save him from that ridiculous fate: arrested like that on the street as a German soldier, and he of all people to be killed in a mining accident? Why? And why couldn’t I do anything about it? After all, I
had
those good friends among the French, and for me they’d have got not only Boris out but even a German Nazi if I’d asked them to, but when it finally became clear that it was no longer the Americans who were holding him but the French, it was too late, he was already dead—and they weren’t even sure of his fictitious German name—whether he’d been called Bellhorst or Böllhorst or Bull or Ballhorst, neither Leni nor Margret nor Lotte knew for sure. And why should they? For them he was Boris, and naturally they hadn’t looked all that closely at those German identification papers, let alone made a note of the name.”

A number of conversations and some extensive research were needed to obtain precise information on the Soviet paradise in the vaults. But at least its duration could be accurately ascertained: from February 20 to March 7, 1945, Leni, Boris, Lotte, Margret, Pelzer, and Lotte’s two sons Kurt and Werner, then aged five and ten, lived in catacomblike conditions in a regular “vault system” (Pelzer) under the municipal cemetery. Whereas Boris and Leni had previously been able to spend their “visiting days” above ground in the Beauchamp chapel, now they had to “go underground” (Lotte). The idea originated with Pelzer, who contributed the psychological rationale, as it were.

Cooperative as ever, he received the Au. on a further (and still not final) occasion in his rumpus room adjoining his wreath museum, at the swivel-top built-in bar, where he served highballs and placed an enormous ashtray as big as a fair-sized
laurel wreath at the Au.’s elbow. The Au. was struck by the melancholy of a person who had come unscathed through highly contradictory periods of history. A man of seventy who, while not having to worry about a heart attack, still plays his two weekly games of tennis, goes for his regular morning jog, took up riding “at the ripe age of fifty-five” (P. on P.) and, “confidentially” (P. to Au.), “man to man, all I know of potency problems is from hearsay”; this melancholy, so it seemed to the Au., increases from visit to visit, and the truth is—if the Au. may be permitted this psychological conclusion—that the reason for this melancholy of Pelzer’s is a surprising one: unrequited love. He still desires Leni, he would be willing “to take the stars down from the sky for her, but it seems she’d rather carry on with unwashed Turks than grant me a few favors, and presumably all because of something for which I was genuinely not to blame. What had I done, after all? If you get right down to it, I actually saved Boris’s life. What good would his German uniform and his German papers have done him if he’d had no place to hide, and who was it who knew how scared the Americans are of corpses and cemeteries, of anything to do with death? Yours truly. My experiences in the first war and during the inflation, when I’d worked for that exhumation outfit, had taught me they’d look everywhere but most certainly not in burial vaults—and that goes for the cops, too, the whole pack—they weren’t going to be in any hurry to search the nether regions of cemeteries. Obviously Leni couldn’t be left alone, with the baby expected any day, and since Lotte and Margret were forced to go into hiding anyway it was clear that Leni couldn’t stay behind alone in the apartment.

“So what did I do? After all, I was the only able-bodied man in the group, and my family was somewhere in Bavaria—and I had no wish to join the Home Guard or be taken prisoner by the Americans. So what did I do? I did a regular mining
job, digging and propping, digging and propping, till I’d made galleries joining the Herriger vault, the Beauchamp vault, and the extensive von der Zecke burial chambers. That made altogether four little underground rooms, clean and dry as a bone, each measuring about six by eight, a regular four-room apartment. Next I installed electric current, taking it through from my own place, not more than fifty or sixty yards away. I got hold of some small heaters, because of the kids and Leni being pregnant, and—why hide it—there were also recesses for coffins, hollowed out but not yet occupied, reserved seats, so to speak, for the Beauchamps, the Herrigers, and the von der Zeckes. And these, of course, were ideal for storage. Straw on the floor, then mattresses, and, just in case, a little coal stove—for nighttime, of course, it would’ve been madness to light the thing during the day, as Margret later once tried to do—that girl had no conception of camouflage.