Group Portrait with Lady Read Online Free Page B

to sense the coming “scrap boom” (statement by Lotte H.). Leni’sfather is shown bareheaded, his hair is very thick, only just turning gray, and it is very hard to apply any relevant social epithet to this tall, spare man whose tools lie so naturally in his hands. Does he look like a proletarian? Or like a gentleman? Does he look like someone doing an unaccustomed job, or is this obviously strenuous work familiar to him? The Au. tends to think that both apply, and both in both cases. Lotte H.’s comment on this photo confirms this, she describes him in this photo as “Mr. Prole.” There is not the slightest suggestion in the appearance of Leni’s father that he has lost his zest for life. He looks neither younger nor older than his age, is in every way the “well-preserved man in his late forties” who could undertake in a marriage advertisement “to bring happiness to a cheerful life companion, if possible not over forty.”
    The four remaining photos show four youths, all about twenty, three of them dead, one (Leni’s son) still alive. The pictures of two of these young men display certain blemishes applicable only to their clothing: although these are head portraits only, in both cases enough of the chest is visible to give a clear view of the uniform of the German Army, and attached to this uniform is the German eagle and the swastika, that symbolic composite known to the initiated as the “ruptured vulture.” The two youths are Leni’s brother Heinrich Gruyten and her cousin Erhard Schweigert, who—like the third dead youth—must be numbered among the victims of World War II. Heinrich and Erhard both look “somehow German” (Au.), “somehow” (Au.) they both resemble all the pictures one has ever seen of cultured German youths; perhaps it will make for clarity if at this point we quote Lotte H., for whom both boys resemble the ideal German youth embodied in that Medieval Statue, the Bamberg Rider, a description, as will later become apparent, by no means entirely flattering. The facts are: that E. is blond, H. brown-haired; that both are smiling, E. “to himself, warmly and quite spontaneously” (Au.), an endearingsmile, really nice. H.’s smile is not quite so warm, the corners of his mouth already showing a trace of that nihilism that is commonly mistaken for cynicism, and that for the year 1939, the year in which both pictures were taken, can be interpreted as somewhat premature, in fact almost progressive.
    The third photo of a deceased subject shows a Soviet individual by the name of Boris Lvovich Koltovsky; he is not smiling; the photo is an enlargement, almost graphic it seems, of a passport picture taken by an amateur in Moscow in 1941. It shows B. as a solemn, pale person whose noticeably high hairline might lead one at first glance to assume premature baldness but which, his hair being thick, fair, and curly, is a personal characteristic of Boris K. His eyes are dark and rather large, reflected in his spectacles in a way that might be mistaken for some graphic gimmick. It is immediately apparent that this person, although solemn and thin and with a surprisingly high forehead, was young when the picture was taken. He is dressed in civilian clothes, an open shirt with a wide collar, no jacket, a sign of summer temperatures at the time the picture was taken.
    The sixth photo is of a living person, Leni’s son. Although at the time the picture was taken he was the same age as E., H., and B., he nevertheless appears to be the youngest; this may be due to the fact that photographic materials had improved since 1939 and 1941. Unfortunately there is no denying it: young Lev is not only smiling, he is laughing in this photo taken in 1965; no one would hesitate to describe him as a “jolly-looking boy”; the resemblance between him, Leni’s father, and his father Boris is unmistakable. He has the “Gruyten hair” and the “Barkel eyes” (Leni’s mother’s maiden name was Barkel. Au.), a