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fact that gives him an added resemblance to Erhard. His laugh, his eyes, permit the unhesitating conclusion that there are two of his mother’s traits which he most certainly does not possess: he is neither taciturn nor reticent.
    Finally we must mention an article of clothing to which Leni is attached as otherwise only to the photographs, the illustrations of human organs, the piano, and the fresh rolls: her bathrobe, which she persists, erroneously, in calling her housecoat. It is made of “terrycloth of prewar quality” (Lotte H.), formerly, as can still be seen from the back and the pocket edges, wine-red, by this time faded to the color of diluted raspberry syrup. In a number of places it has been darned—expertly, we must admit—with orange thread. Leni is rarely parted from this garment, which nowadays she hardly ever takes off; she is said to have stated that she would like, “when the time comes, to be buried in it” (Hans and Grete Helzen, informants on all details of Leni’s domestic surroundings).
    Brief mention should perhaps be made of the present state of occupancy of Leni’s apartment: she has rented two rooms to Hans and Grete Helzen; two to a Portuguese couple with three children, the Pinto family, consisting of the parents, Joaquim and Ana-Maria, and their children Etelvina, Manuela, and Jose; and one room to three Turkish workers, Kaya Tunç, Ali Kiliç, and Mehmet Şahin, who are no longer all that young.

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    Now, Leni, of course, has not always been forty-eight years old, and we must turn our eyes toward the past. From photos taken in her youth, no one would hesitate to describe Leni as a pretty, wholesome-looking girl: even in the uniform of a Nazi girls’ organization—at the ages of thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen—Leni looks nice. In passing judgment on her physical charms, no male observer would have gone lower than “not bad, I tell you.” The human copulative urge ranges, as we know, from love at first sight to the spontaneous desire to, quite simply, with no thought of a permanent relationship, have intercourse with a person of the other or one’s own sex, a desire going all the way to the deepest, most convulsing passion that leaves neither body nor soul in peace, and every single one of its variants, whether unorthodox or uncodified, from the most superficial to the most profound, could have been aroused by Leni, and has been. At seventeen she made the crucial leap from pretty to beautiful that comes more easily to dark-eyed blondes than to light-eyed ones. At this stage in her life, no man would have gone lower in his opinion than “striking.”
    A few additional comments are required in regard to Leni’s educational background. At sixteen she went to work in her father’s office. He had duly noted the leap from a pretty girl to a beauty and, mainly because of her effect on men (the year is now 1938), used to see that she was present at important business discussions, in which Leni, pad and pencil on her knee, would participate, from time to time jotting down a few key words. She did not know shorthand, nor would she ever have learned it. It was not that abstract thinking and abstractions were entirely without interest for her, but “chopped-up writing,” her name for shorthand, was something she had no wish to learn. Her education had consisted, among other things, of suffering, more suffering on the teacher’s part than on her own. After having twice, if not exactly failed to be promoted, “voluntarily repeated a year,” she left primary school after Grade 4 with a passable, much interpolated report card. One of the still surviving witnesses from the school’s teaching staff, the sixty-five-year-old retired principal Mr. Schlocks, who was traced to his rural retreat, could state that there had been times when some consideration had been given to shifting Leni to a “special school,” but that two factors had saved her from this: first, her father’s affluence,