Group Portrait with Lady Read Online Free Page A

repeated assaults on him. This person, Käte Perscht by name, aged twenty-eight, is Leni’s most vicious vilifier, shemakes libelous moral accusations against her although she herself, through the good offices of her husband, hires herself out to a night club at times when an overwhelming majority of male trade-fair visitors flood the city. Here she does a “Trade Fair Strip” for which she is well paid and, before her appearance, she lets it be known through the medium of an unctuous announcer that she is prepared to follow through and satisfy any and all states of excitation brought on by her performances.
    Recently Leni has had the odd opportunity to dance again. As a result of certain experiences, she now only rents rooms to married couples or foreign workers, and so has rented two rooms to a nice young couple whom for simplicity’s sake we will call Hans and Grete, at a reduced rent—and this despite her financial position! And it is this Hans and Grete who, while they were listening to dance music with Leni, correctly interpreted both her external and internal twitchings, so now and again Leni goes to them for an “innocent little dance.” Hans and Grete sometimes even cautiously try to analyze Leni’s situation for her, advise her to update her clothes, change her hair style, advise her to look for a lover. “Just spruce yourself up a bit, Leni, a snappy pink dress, some snappy nylons on those fabulous legs of yours—and you’d soon find out how attractive you still are.” But Leni shakes her head, she has been too badly hurt, she no longer goes to the store to buy groceries, lets Grete do her shopping for her, and Hans has relieved her of her morning walk to the bakery by quickly, before he goes to work (he is a technician with the highways department, Grete works in a beauty parlor and has offered Leni her services free of charge, so far without success), picking up her vitally essential fresh crisp rolls which she refuses to forgo and which are more important to Leni than any sacrament could ever be to anyone else.
    Needless to say, Leni’s wall decoration does not consist solely of biological posters, she also has family photographs on the walls; photos of deceased persons: her mother, who died in 1943 at the age of forty-one and was photographed shortly before her death, a woman bearing the marks of suffering, with thin gray hair and large eyes, wrapped in a blanket and seated on a bench by the Rhine near Hersel, close to a landing stage on which the place-name is legible; in the background, monastery walls; Leni’s mother, it is plain to see, is shivering; one is struck by the lack-luster expression in her eyes, the surprising firmness of her mouth in a face that hardly gives an impression of great vitality; it is clear that she has lost the will to live; were one asked to guess her age, one would be embarrassed, not knowing whether to say that this is a woman of about thirty who has been prematurely aged by hidden suffering, or a fine-boned sixty-year-old who has retained a certain youthfulness. Leni’s mother is smiling in this photo, not exactly with difficulty, but with effort.
    Leni’s father, likewise photographed with a simple box camera shortly before his death in 1949 at the age of forty-nine, is also smiling, with not even a trace of effort; he is to be seen in the frequently and painstakingly mended overalls of a mason, standing in front of a ruined building, in his left hand a crowbar of the kind known to the initiated as a “claw,” in his right a hammer of the kind known to the initiated as a “mallet”; in front of him, left and right beside him, behind him, lie iron girders of various sizes, and possibly it is these that make him smile, as a fisherman smiles at his day’s catch. As a matter of fact they do—as will subsequently be explained in detail—represent his day’s catch, for at the time he was working for the above-mentioned former nursery-garden owner who was quick