Free Group Portrait with Lady by Heinrich Böll Page B

know—noble-looking, yes that’s it, noble. He had no idea of the extent of his charm, and for him I’d have literally walked the streets, literally, so he could read books, or whatever else it was he learned besides how to read books and judge churches, study chorales, listen to music—Latin, Greek—and all about architecture; well, he was like Leni—a dark version of her, and I loved him. Twice I was there in the afternoon for coffee and saw him—in August ’39; and on April 7, 1940, he phoned me—I was already married to that rich guy I’d hooked—he phoned me, and I went to him at once, to Flensburg, and when I got there I found the men had been confined to barracks, and it was cold outside; so I must have got there on the eighth. They were quartered in a school, everything packed so they could leave that night, whether they flew or went by ship—I don’t know. Confined to barracks. No one knew, and no one ever found out, that I was with him, neither Leni nor her parents nor anyone else. He got out of the building in spite of the orders to remain inside. Over the wall of the girls’ john into the school playground. No hotel room, not even one in a rooming house. The only place open was a bar, in we went, and a girl let us have her room in exchange for all the money I had on me, two hundred marks, and my ruby ring, and all his money, a hundred and twenty, and a gold cigarette case. He loved me, I loved him—and it made no difference that the room and all that was so tarty. Makes no difference, makes no difference at all. Yes” (the tape was carefully monitored twice to see if Margret had actually used the present tense: makes no difference, makes no difference at all. Objective conclusion: she did). “Well, and soon after that he was dead. What a crazy, crazy waste.” When asked how the surprising word “waste” had occurred to her in this context, Margret replies (typed verbatim from the tape): “Well you see, all that education, all those good looks, all thatmasculine vigor—and twenty years old, how many times, how many times might we—could we—have made love, and not only in tarts’ rooms like that one, but out of doors, once it got warmer—and it was all so pointless—waste, that’s what I call it.”
    Since Margret, Leni, and M.v.D. all persist in what amounted to an iconolatrous attitude toward Heinrich G., some rather more objective information was sought here too: it was obtainable only from two parchment-skinned Jesuit fathers, both over seventy, both seated in studies that were impregnated with pipe smoke, editing manuscripts which, although for two different periodicals, dealt with similar subjects (Opening to the Left or to the Right?), one a Frenchman, the other a German (possibly a Swiss), the first with graying fair hair, the second with graying black hair; both wise, benign, shrewd, humane, both exclaiming as soon as they were asked: “Ah yes, Heinrich, the Gruyten boy!” (identical wording, including grammatical and syntactical details, even punctuation, since the Frenchman also spoke in German), both put down their pipes, leaned back in their chairs, pushed aside the manuscripts, shook their heads, then, pregnant with memories, nodded their heads, sighed deeply, and began to speak: at this point total identity ends and a merely partial one begins. Since one of them had to be consulted in Rome, the other near Freiburg, preparatory telephone calls over lengthy distances in order to arrange appointments had been unavoidable, and the result was considerable expense which, it must be said, did not eventually pay off, aside from the “human value” of such encounters, a value that might be gained at much less expense. For these two fathers did no more than contribute to an enhanced idolization of the deceased Heinrich G.: one of them, the Frenchman, said: “He was so German, so German and so noble.” The other one said: “He was so noble, so noble and so German.” In order