Group Portrait with Lady Read Online Free

handle them in the course of her dusting, or Lotte Hoyser, who during the war was for a long time Leni’s second-most intimate confidante, do, however, discover in this art-nouveau bookcaseseven or eight surprising titles: poems by Brecht, Hölderlin, and Trakl, two prose volumes of Kafka and Kleist, two volumes of Tolstoi (
Resurrection
and
Anna Karenina
)—and all of these seven or eight volumes are so honorably dog-eared, in a manner most flattering to the authors, that they have been patched up over and over again, not very expertly, with every conceivable kind of gum and gummed tape, some of them being merely held together loosely by a rubber band. Offers to be presented with new editions of the works of these authors (Christmas, birthday, name day, etc.) are rejected by Leni with a firmness that is almost rude. At this point the Au. takes the liberty of making a remark that goes beyond his scope: he is firmly convinced that Leni would have some of the prose volumes of Beckett there too if, at the time when Leni’s literary adviser still had an influence over her, they had already been published or known to him.
    Among Leni’s intense pleasures are not only the eight daily cigarettes, a keen appetite (although kept within bounds), the playing of two piano pieces by Schubert, the rapt contemplation of illustrations of human organs—intestines included; not only the tender thoughts she devotes to her son Lev, now in jail. She also enjoys dancing, has always been a passionately keen dancer (a fact that was
once
her undoing in that it led her into the everlasting possession of the, to her, distasteful name of Pfeiffer). Now where is a single woman of forty-eight, whom the neighbors would be quite happy to see gassed, to go dancing? Is she to frequent the haunts of youthful devotees of the dance, where she would undoubtedly be mistaken for, if not mishandled as, a sex-granny? She is also barred from joining in church activities where there is dancing, having taken no part in church life since her fourteenth year. Were she to digup friends of her youth other than Margret—who is probably barred from dancing to the end of the days—she would probably end up in various kinds of strip or swap parties, without a partner of her own, and for the fourth time in her life would blush. To date Leni has blushed three times in her life. So what does Leni do? She dances alone, sometimes lightly clad in her bed-sitting room, sometimes even naked in her bathroom and in front of that flattering mirror. From time to time she is observed, surprised even, at this activity—and this does nothing to enhance her reputation.
    On one occasion she danced with one of the boarders, a minor official of the judiciary, the prematurely bald Erich Köppler; Leni would
almost
have blushed had not the gentleman’s palpable advances been altogether too clumsy; in any event she had to give him notice because—he was not without intelligence and certainly not without intuition—he had recognized Leni’s enormous sensuality and, ever since the “impromptu little dance” (Leni) that had resulted so spontaneously from his coming to pay the rent and catching Leni while she was listening to dance music, had stood every evening whimpering outside the door of her room. Leni would not yield because she did not like him, and ever since then Köppler, who found himself a room in the neighborhood, has been one of her most malicious denouncers, from time to time, during his confidential chats with the proprietress of the small general store that is about to succumb to the economic trend, enlarging on the intimate details of his imaginary love affair with Leni. These details arouse the proprietress—a person of ice-cold prettiness whose husband is absent during the daytime (he works in an automobile factory)—to such a state of excitement that she drags the bald-headed judiciary official (who has meanwhile been promoted) into the back room, where she commits