Group Portrait with Lady Read Online Free PDF Page B

forget and to this day makes her as “uncomfortable” as Leni’s genitalia wall posters. Even as a child, Leni was fascinated by the excremental processes to which she was subject and on which—unfortunately in vain!—she used to demand information by asking: “Come on now, tell me! What’s all this stuff coming out of me?” Neither her mother nor Marja van Doorn would give her this information!
    It remained for the second of the two men with whom she had until then cohabited, a foreigner at that and a Soviet individual to boot, to discover that Leni was capable of astounding feats of sensibility and intelligence. And it was to him that she recounted the incident which she later described to Margret (between late 1943 and mid-1945 she was much less taciturn than she is today): that she experienced her first and complete“self-fulfillment” when, at the age of sixteen, just removed from boarding school, out for a bicycle ride one June evening, she achieved—as she lay on her back in the heather, “spread-eagled and in total surrender” (Leni to Margret), her gaze on the stars that were just beginning to sparkle in the afterglow of sunset—that state of bliss which these days is far too often striven for; on that summer evening in 1938 as she lay spread-eagled and “opened up” on the warm heather, Leni—so she told Boris and as she has told Margret—had an overwhelming impression of being “taken” and of having “given,” and—as she later went on to tell Margret—she would not have been in the least surprised if she had become pregnant. Consequently, of course, she has no trouble at all understanding the Virgin Birth.
    Leni left school with an embarrassing report card on which she was given a D in religion and mathematics. She then went for two and a half years to a boarding school where she was taught home economics, German, religion, a little history (as far as the Reformation), and music (piano).
    At this point, before proceeding to memorialize a deceased nun—a person as crucial to Leni’s education as the Soviet individual (about whom there will be much to say later)—we must mention as witnesses three nuns, still living, who, although their associations with Leni go back thirty-four and thirty-two years, still vividly remember her, and all three of whom, when visited by the Au. with pencil and pad in three different places, exclaimed at the mention of Leni’s name: “Ah yes, the Gruyten girl!” To the Au., this identical exclamation seems significant, a proof of the deep impression Leni must have made.
    Since not only the exclamation “Ah yes, the Gruyten girl!” but also certain physical traits are common to all three nuns, a number of details may be synchronized for space-saving purposes. All three have what is called a parchment skin: delicatelystretched over thin cheek-bones, yellowish, slightly wrinkled; all three offered the reporter tea (or had it offered). It is not ingratitude, merely devotion to facts, that obliges him to say that the tea offered by all three nuns was on the weak side. All three offered dry cake (or had it offered); all three began coughing when the Au. started to smoke (discourteously omitting to ask permission because he did not want to risk a No). All three received him in almost identical visitors’ rooms that were adorned with religious prints, a crucifix, a portrait of the reigning pope and one of the regional cardinal. All three tables in the three different visitors’ rooms were covered with plush tablecloths, all the chairs were uncomfortable. All three nuns are between seventy and seventy-two years of age.
    The first, Sister Columbanus, had been the principal of the girls’ high school attended by Leni for two years with so little success. An ethereal person with lusterless, very shrewd eyes, who sat shaking her head throughout almost the entire interview, shaking her head in self-reproach for not having brought out all there was in Leni. Over and