The Safety Net (10 page)

Of course she hadn’t given herself to Hubert at once, at first sight; she had liked this young police officer right away, liked him more than the others, he was about her age too, maybe even a year or two younger. She didn’t know how old Bernhard was, but nowadays they went to their First Communion very young, and perhaps Hubert was thirty after all, two years older than she. And it was with him that she had done what she would never have thought possible, that with a thousand oaths she would have sworn to be impossible: that she
would go to bed with a man other than her husband—someone who would never, never, have asked: “Did you remember to take it?” There had been plenty of opportunities, approaches too, you might even call them propositions, at the Riding Club, the Tennis Club, at parties; and the occasional one, like young Zummerling, was really charming, nice, not too serious, a real tease: “Why so serious, Sabine dear—why always so serious?” No, just Hubert, and she hardly knew how it had happened, whether it had evolved somehow or simply come about, whether it had been avoidable or unavoidable, whether it had been her initiative or his—it had come about, and whether unavoidable or not, let the gods kindly decide that—he had stood there, walked about, for weeks, almost two months, in the daytime, at night, and one thing was certain: with either of his two colleagues, Zurmack and Lühler, it would have been absolutely unthinkable, although they were nice enough fellows too, knew every bush, every tree, every little bump in the ground, every nook and cranny in the house, garden, and neighborhood, had the exact plan in their heads, including the cloakroom, storeroom, ironing room, garages, and tool shed, driveway and kitchen terrace, where Miss Blum sat on fine days shelling peas or peeling potatoes, with Kit beside her, intensely interested in such labors; and of course the hobby room—Fischer had once taken up carpentry but hadn’t set foot in the hobby room for a year—the sauna in the basement, the two bathrooms—they knew every nook and cranny in house, garden, and neighborhood, and none of them felt comfortable about all that glass in the picture windows.

Things had become more difficult when she was advised to stop sending Kit to kindergarten, and since she no longer enjoyed shopping. There was simply no way the kindergarten in Blückhoven could be protected with an absolute guarantee of safety. Children were constantly being dropped off and picked up, food deliveries were made, there were a number of entrances and exits, bungalows scattered throughout the grounds, shrubberies, flower beds, playground equipment—it
had been deliberately designed and constructed as an open area with no fences between school and swimming pool; cars were constantly driving up, and it was impossible to search them all, and since the affair of Pliefger’s birthday cake the food containers had to be examined too. In the end there was even a minor mutiny among the parents, who felt that
their
children were not threatened (which was not true: “Any child,” Hubert had said, “can be kidnapped, including my own”), and that this constant surveillance was causing mental distress leading to psychic damage, and that anyway it was futile, for if they were going to strike at all it would be somewhere quite different.

So she had to keep Kit at home, couldn’t take her over to the Groebels’ either, where she had always loved playing for hours with Rudi and Monika. The Groebels had made it pretty clear that they regarded it as harmful: always having one or more policemen around. So she had to keep Kit at home, spend time with her, playing, coloring, telling stories, or letting her putter about in the kitchen with Miss Blum. It was easiest in summer, around the pool, with sandbox, swing, slide, and more recently—that had been her own idea, based on a memory of Eickelhof, where Käthe had had something similar installed for them—more recently a mudhole, with clay, sand, and water, where she could spend her time wallowing and building in the mud, where she could get as dirty as she liked, naked when the weather was warm, in briefs when it was cooler, and she had only to be popped into the bathtub or hosed down. And then she had been—again not exactly forbidden but strongly urged not to go to the market in Blückhoven, and she had always enjoyed that so much, and Kit too. With stroller, basket, and head scarf, preferably in the densest crowd, close to people, she enjoyed their contact, even their smell, loved all that milling around, enjoyed milling around with them, hadn’t been afraid either—but the graphically described kidnapping threat to Kit had turned her against visiting the market. There were
too many half-hidden alleys and gaps between booths and stalls, so many illegally parked vans and trucks delivering mattresses, eggs, chickens, vegetables. A small child like that could be snatched up and gone in a twinkling, before anyone noticed, and the booths and stalls and cars and alleyways and gaps really couldn’t be checked and watched, not even as a precaution. So it made more sense to have everything delivered and to leave Kit in the bungalow when she really did have to go into town. But naturally all deliveries had to be examined: every loaf of bread, every head of lettuce, and of course the more intimate items she was forced to order from the drugstore or pharmacy. Well, she happened to be old-fashioned about such things too, and always blushed when the deliveries from the drugstore were examined. This gave rise to tension, friction, intimate knowledge that should never have been allowed to turn into familiarities and yet did. It was difficult to behave all the time as if such things were normal, and always to have two, sometimes three men, but invariably at least one man around the house. One had to be careful when walking half dressed across the corridor or through the hall, into the bathroom, out of the bathroom, into the toilet—and none of them would accept anything while on duty, very occasionally a cup of coffee, and when they went off duty they left in a hurry, in an almost indecent hurry, as if they were leaving a place with a curse on it. And she would have dearly liked to talk to them informally about their wives and children and careers and homes, but there was never anything more than an occasional smile, a proffered cigarette. She wanted so much to know how they lived, what they thought about, whether they felt bored or frustrated, whether their nerves were equal to all this.

Erwin’s bonhomie toward these men sometimes came close to a patronizing heartiness, with something of the manner of an officer of the reserves; he would prattle to them about football, beer, and women who were supposed to have been “laid”—underestimating their sensitivity, not only Hubert’s but also Zurmack’s and Lühler’s, for whose sakes he memorized the
football results every Monday—something that didn’t interest Zurmack and Lühler at all but, oddly enough, did interest Hubert, although probably not in that form: contrivedly proletarian, in stadium jargon, linking details of football prowess with hints about potency. Erwin would listen to nobody, knew everything better, would blabber away at her in a loud voice, as if at an office party, and in their presence, about “the fuzz,” and they disliked that more than anything, that word, they heard it often enough, it was the source of deep resentment, and even when he said it as a joke, as if in quotation marks (“And how’s our dear old ‘fuzz’ today?”), they resented it, even in quotation marks. They were very cool when he offered them cigarettes, and positively winced when he grabbed them by the sleeve or, worse still, slapped them on the back.

It really was difficult to become so intimately acquainted yet avoid familiarity, and what Erwin hinted at she didn’t find “dirty” at all, but quite natural: that when lying beside the pool she might arouse their “dirty imaginings.” “And even if you were to lie there naked, it would be none of their business, it’s up to them to stay neutral.” Hubert had confessed that he had desired her from the very first day, that she had aroused him—he spoke not of love but of desire, and the men walked and stood and hung around there as idle as herself, and then came the months, the long months, when the master of the house didn’t appear at all, neither at noon nor in the evening, warm evenings, nights when nothing happened, boredom, deathly silence, so that even Zurmack, that nice respectable man who was actually close to forty and certainly settled in his ways, said to her one day: “Why don’t you go to a party sometime, see some different people? We’ll look after your little girl all right.” So she risked going at least to buy shoes at Zwirner’s and to look for dresses at Holdkamp’s and Breslitzer’s. She left Kit with Zurmack and Miss Blum and drove into town with Lühler; at Breslitzer’s he stood around looking like a store detective; and when she went into the cubicle to change or undress, that elegant salon with its frills and velvets and doodads in every
shade of pink seemed to exude an atmosphere of sultry eroticism, an odor of physical intimacy, that she brought with her out of the cubicle. There seemed to be—well, something of the air she imagined to prevail in upper-class brothels, something lascivious, inviting, a kind of promise that was not kept—and on the drive home she had been on the point of placing a consoling hand on the arm of that poor Lühler, whom she knew to be a bachelor and lively enough, but she realized just in time that that could be fatal. For the first time she understood what her neighbor, the uninhibited, vulgar Erna Breuer, meant when she would say she wasn’t interested in either love or desire, that there were times when she simply wanted to be fucked, and that there were times when men also wanted just that, no more and no less, and Lühler must have also noticed how expensive the two dresses were, almost two thousand eight hundred for the two, and that must seem pretty expensive to him.

And then this spring she had yielded to Hubert, at noon, while Miss Blum was busy in the kitchen and Kit was whooping gleefully in the mudhole because she had finally succeeded in getting the better of Hubert after constantly challenging him on this warm morning, for perhaps the hundredth time, to come closer to the mudhole. He finally did, was pelted with mud, then slipped and fell, and had to go into the house to clean up. Later, long after she had become pregnant by him, even now, she wondered why she had gone into the house with him, since he knew perfectly well where the bathrooms were and would have found the towels without her help. But she had gone with him, led him into the bathroom, even held the door open for him, had brought him towels and washcloths from the shelf, and that was when they came together. She must have brushed his cheek with her bare arm. She hadn’t intended to, had never thought of it, yet didn’t resist even for a second when he put his arms around her, pushed aside the top part of her bikini, pulled away the lower—and while he was doing this with such apparent expertise she knew he wasn’t an expert at all. He entered into her with a sigh, she into him, joyfully she
yielded to him, and felt, while he kissed her, that she knew him by heart: his smell, his shaved cheeks, his teeth, his serious, light eyes, his hairline, and not only did she allow it to happen, she nodded her consent, although he held her mouth with his, let it happen “on the wing,” and with her left foot closed the door that was still open a crack—Miss Blum on the terrace, where she was cleaning the lettuce, Kit in the garden in the mudhole, this noon hour of a sunny day in May, fifteen minutes before lunch, and she was amazed at how slight her fear was, how great her joy, at the matter-of-fact way she put her bikini back to rights, looked at herself in the hall mirror, adjusting the slight disarray, while in the bathroom he now really did start to clean himself up, to wash the mud off his jacket and pants. Later he let the wet part of his clothes dry outside in the sun, wagged his finger at Kit, retreated to the garage, didn’t speak a word to her that day, seldom spoke openly to her, even later on, would sometimes stand behind her garden chair or in the shrubbery at the pool, whispering “Mrs. Fischer, oh, Mrs. Fischer.” They always addressed each other formally, although now they came together often, more and more often.

They realized it wasn’t a lapse, a one-time indiscretion that had arisen from the situation, simply happened and been forgotten.… It lay deep, sank ever deeper, now never to be dislodged, was anchored in countless details that she would formerly have called shameless. The boldness with which they continued to give themselves to each other, in the cloakroom among the hanging coats where he could pretend if necessary to be coming from the toilet and she could hide behind the coats for the two or three seconds that might be needed to save the situation. In the garden, when he came by and stopped as if by chance beside her, he would tell her about his police training, she would tell him about Eickelhof, which had been bulldozed out of existence, tell him more about it than she had ever been able or allowed to tell anyone. Her brothers were fed up with the subject, and Erwin was too, said it was “downright sentimental to grieve over slaughtered cows.” Father wouldn’t listen at all and,
rare for him, would even show annoyance, probably it weighed on his conscience; and Käthe said nothing, it must have been more painful for her than for any of them to give up Eickelhof and Iffenhoven, where she had been born and brought up, to see everything leveled and buried. Gigantic dredges were on the march, mechanical shovels amiably-pitilessly-innocently-inexorably devoured the forest, swallowing the earth, spitting it out again at a great distance, exhumed the dead (reverently, ever so reverently), tearing down churches and villages and castles, and Käthe got “the shudders” when she drove through Neu-Iffenhoven with its new houses and churches.

To shudder was good. To shudder when she thought of Kit, now standing so rosy, so adorable, in the Beeretz dairy, when she thought of how naturally she had given herself to Hubert, had looked for an opportunity in nooks and crannies, in bathroom and cloakroom; to shudder when she thought of Helga, and the strange fact that she felt like an adulteress not toward Fischer or Hubert but only toward Helga; when she thought of how coolly she emerged from a nook, from a cranny, from the bathroom, while Miss Blum was in the house and Kit in her room, how she smiled as she put on her lipstick, tidied her hair, as if nothing had happened; to shudder when she remembered how rapidly—with birdlike swiftness—she had inspected Hubert to make sure there were no telltale traces—and when she wondered where it all came from, how one simply knew such things, that cool way of dismissing something as if nothing had happened, something that was still and always would be called adultery. How did she know that? No one had told her any of this, she had no experience, she, “our dear, good, faithful, reliable Bee—our darling, our treasure,” from where had she suddenly drawn this knowledge, displayed the very first time when she came from the bathroom and Miss Blum was cleaning the lettuce on the terrace? God knew this wasn’t an everyday occurrence, not for her, yet she had nodded to Miss Blum with a smile and gone into the garden where Kit was innocently playing.