The Safety Net (6 page)

No, Bleibl knew his weakness only too well, and to this day would grin when he lit up anyway, mouthing meaningfully: “Virginia, O Virginia!”; Bleibl enjoyed protection, right at the top, way in the rear, maybe even on both sides of the ocean, he couldn’t be got at. They all knew of his weakness, of course, but didn’t know where it originated—only Käthe, he had told her all about it, yet even she didn’t know that it was the same with cigarettes as with the milk soup: that taste, that smell, that Virginia aroma—he never found it again, never found it, kept looking for it, probably smoked to find it again, and never did.

Already twilight beyond the forest, the tops of the old trees gray in the rose-red light, those ancient, magnificent trees toward which the owl would soon be flying. The trees were dearer to him than the manor, he sometimes wondered whether he hadn’t bought the whole thing for the sake of the trees, also as compensation for the trees lost at Eickelhof. The owl glided without a sound, perhaps the same one that at Eickelhof had flown every evening from the turret to the edge of the forest, he and Käthe had watched it together. Käthe was afraid when the owl took off from the turret and flew away, she would cling to him and whisper: “We must leave this place, we must leave”—twenty
years before they really had to leave. It also made Käthe nervous when the screech owls started calling; and still, before thunderstorms, when crows and starlings suddenly flew up and flapped away, she would cling to him.

Tranquil, the view over the park, no sound of elevator or departing cars, or of Bleibl’s reverberating laughter that drowned out even elevator noises, those triumphal chest tones with which he blared out that he had finally succeeded in having “one of our oldest members, one of our best,” elected, in a situation where he had been quite unable, at any price, to refuse the candidacy; there were all the prefabricated clichés he had used himself during the interviews: “In the hour of greatest danger. At a moment when each one of us is expected to prove himself. Steadfastness …” So of course they had to elect him, the weakest, the most vulnerable, rendered even more conspicuous by family connections with those “others”—elect him, at a moment when everyone knew that family connections meant increased threat; and he still, neither in private conversation nor secretly, much less publicly, did not dissociate himself from Rolf. That was the question to which his public reply was feared most by his enemies and friends and least by himself, his stereotype answer, identical on video and audio tape: “He is my son, he broke the law, paid the penalty, and since then has lived within the law,” and was tempted to wax biblical and say: “He is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” He was not even afraid of being asked about Veronica: “She was my daughter-in-law, is suspected of serious crimes, and has disappeared. My grandson, of whom she was given custody after the divorce, which took place before the alleged crime, has disappeared with her. He bears our name, the name of his father, my son.” No, he didn’t think “bad egg” was the right term, he sometimes thought they might be the true immigrants from the distant stars, satellite dwellers for whom no yardsticks, no words, had yet been found. Insane? That was too earthbound a description. Yes, he had also known Beverloh, who had been
his guest, frequently, he had found him a nice fellow. Nice? Yes. The terms “nice” and “niceness” said nothing, nothing whatever, about what a person was capable of. It was just that one shouldn’t trust nice people too much. After all, criminal behavior was nothing new either, and there was nothing new about murder since the days of Abel.

They’d get him all right. Who? How? No, the fear didn’t return, it had been completely thrust aside by curiosity, and behind that in turn hovered the pressing fear of being driven out of Tolmshoven. It wasn’t even inconceivable that Bleibl had assigned him the role of decoy bird, released to be shot down, tired, old, so worn out that the role of victim was just about all he was good for: shot down in his wheelchair on the top step.
Potemkin
. And himself shot down, the kindly, cultured, white-haired, nice old man; no business tycoon. Invested with the martyr’s crown. He didn’t wish for this crown, he wanted to drink his tea and watch the birds in flight: the wide, elegant, arrogant wingbeats of the great predators, the short-winged flutter of insect eaters, among whom the swallows were his favorites. Käthe knitting or playing the piano—albeit inexpertly—in the background; three grandchildren, of whom two were called Holger, one of them aged seven, somewhere down there in Iraq or Lebanon, the other aged three, twenty kilometers from Tolmshoven, in Hubreichen, a lively youngster who might or might not bear his name.

To this day he had never found out whether Rolf was just living with Katharina or was married to her, and he didn’t like to ask Holzpuke of security about it or ask him to find out for him. Käthe could do that, she could do something he daren’t risk: ask Rolf or Katharina outright, and he knew the answer: “If you are actually interested in something so totally irrelevant, if you find something so trivial of even the slightest importance, we will do you the favor of hereby declaring: we are (or are not) married. Kindly delete what is not applicable!” It was possible that such a question might become important to them
for tactical reasons—temporarily, of course—for the sake of some papers or other, but beyond that it was of no real interest, was not even worth mentioning. It was fairly certain that they weren’t married, because Katharina was probably receiving some kind of support; but the question of marriage
per se
was of no interest, didn’t exist. Technically, yes, and hence politically, but on no other level. It was exactly the same with Church and religion. They existed, of course, there was no doubt about that, but it was enough for him to say “like potatoes, which grow too, of course,” for him to be lectured: potatoes had a genuine, an important, basic reason for existence, as well as a function, an important one: as food. Church and religion didn’t; they were present, no doubt about that—but for them there was no inherent problem. It wasn’t worth talking about, and the fact that Pastor Roickler in Hubreichen was being so nice to them—had offered them a roof, taken them into his own house, defended them against incipient animosity, had placed his enormous vicarage garden at their disposal in return for an absurdly low payment-in-kind of potatoes, eggs, and apples—his being so nice was attributed by them not to his religion, let alone to his Church, but to the very fact that, despite Church and religion, he had remained or become a human being, and they emphasized that they would have found it more typical if he
hadn’t
been nice. They even admitted that they were grateful to him, considered him “truly nice and human,” but of course there were also nice and human capitalists, even nice Communists, nice Liberals, and they themselves were, in a way, nice too.

How all this could have come about remained a mystery to him, since only ten years ago all of them, the whole lot—Rolf and Katharina and Veronica and even that fellow Beverloh—had been truly religious, almost devout, only that “alone or with others,” that even in those days had ceased to torment them as much as him. He would have understood if they had raged at the churches and had viciously and polemically analyzed religion to the point of excess, to the point of cruelly wounding feelings that were still so very much alive in
Käthe and Sabine and to some extent in his own memory too—but for them not even the memory was painful, and so, as far as he was concerned, they too were “satellite children,” from another star, from another world. Yet he didn’t feel alien to the tea he drank with them, the bread he ate with them, the apples they put in his car for him: after all, they were his children, and tea, bread, soup, and apples were of this world.

What frightened him was that unearthly alien quality in their thoughts and deeds. It wasn’t coldness—it was a state of being alien, out of which, of course, a shot could suddenly be fired or a grenade thrown, yet they too had become the objects of his curiosity rather than of his fear: his own son, growing tomatoes, caring for apple trees, keeping chickens, planting potatoes and Chinese cabbage, all in that lovely old walled vicarage garden in Hubreichen. Living comfortably—there was no other word for it—in the adjoining shack, quite pretty now that they had painted it and put geraniums in the window boxes; fetching milk each evening in a red enamel pitcher from farmer Hermes, spending the odd evening at one of the two village pubs, drinking beer, with Holger along, who was given lemonade: the purest of pure idylls in which no trace of bitterness was discernible. They had long since given up trying to explain their—yes, “their”—brand of socialism to the farmers and laborers, had given up reacting to taunts from drunken oafs, or discussing rural politics, strikes, and highway construction, or rising to the snotty, snot-nosed spoutings of motorcyclists: they would smile, drink their beer, discuss the weather—and yet behind all that (where?), behind that idyllic façade, which was not even contrived—whitewashed house, green shutters, and red geraniums—behind all that there must be something capable of generating the horror: an eerie calm. Certainly, a waiting for something—for what? Katharina had no job yet, but a few women in the village had placed their children in her care; she took them for walks through the woods, across the fields, told them stories, taught them gym and dancing in wet weather, sang songs with them—accepted money for
it, of course, and when he thought of Rolf’s and Katharina’s calm, that eerie calm, fear was followed not only by curiosity but also by envy. They were under surveillance but not under guard, and he sometimes wondered which he would have preferred, given the fact that, ever since Veronica had started her telephoning, Käthe, Sabine, and himself were all under surveillance as well as under guard. Rolf was making out quite well, seemed even to know something about engines, was consulted when a tractor or a Honda acted up; he also looked after the priest’s car, and that nice priest would ask them over, for coffee, for a drink, while scrupulously avoiding the subject of religion.

Scarcely imaginable that those two, Rolf and Katharina, had been attending Kohlschröder’s church as recently as twelve, maybe even ten years ago: nice young people carrying prayer books at a time when Kohlschröder was lashing out against moral decay even more stridently than today. They felt not the slightest pang that Kohlschröder himself should have meanwhile succumbed to moral decay. They found it entirely logical that he should sleep with Gerta, logical for quite different reasons from those of the farmers, who blamed it on “nature.” They found nothing embarrassing—for them it wasn’t a matter of good taste—when girls who wanted something from Kohlschröder (the vicarage hall for a meeting or a movie or a debate) went to see him and unconcernedly allowed him “a glimpse or two,” as it were “showing their wares,” sometimes even in Gerta’s presence. Rolf and Katharina didn’t find this at all disgusting, or even “natural,” but inherent in the system. In their eyes it corresponded to the human product of the system, which was in no way “natural”; they saw in it a quite specific form of suppression, as well as an indication of decay and rot, and almost rejoiced that decay should now have become manifest in such phenomena. They even prophesied something similar for their nice Pastor Roickler, except that he would never remain in office, would never practice that bourgeois lechery but would go away—he, too, a victim of the system, would have a hard time of it. They could tell just by
watching him with women and girls: sad, troubled, self-conscious, laconic; of course they liked him and would have liked to help him, find him a nice girl or a young woman with whom he could have decamped. Nor did they feel that Kohlschröder had become “humanized”: for them he was the classic personification of the absolute inhumanity of the system. This inhumanity manifested itself in the fact that a human being was legally denied something—in a legal system that exercised its own jurisdiction, and that in a democratic (ha-ha) state! He had made a commitment to celibacy, after all, but then through the back door he was allowed a Gerta, allowed those strange little games with the girls, it was tolerated, he was humiliated doubly, triply, because at any given moment two kinds of law could be mobilized against him: ecclesiastical and, if necessary, secular, for if there was any truth in what the girls “showed” him, it could at any time have been ruled “indecent behavior with minors,” which would most certainly happen if any leftist teacher asked a schoolgirl to show him her tits.

And yet there remained a reticence, there remained the consolation offered by this reticence of theirs: in Sabine’s or Käthe’s presence, Kohlschröder was never discussed, nor was Roickler, to whom they were terribly nice: Rolf looked after his car, remodeled his house, the vicarage—twelve rooms, of which eight were always left empty, something they called “corruption by vacant space in view of the rental situation.” It must drive a sensitive person—and Roickler, in contrast to Kohlschröder, was that—crazy to have eight rooms empty if he made even the most casual inquiries about the rents being paid all around him; those empty, fully furnished rooms, one of them known as “the bishop’s room,” where during the past sixteen years a bishop had once changed his clothes, not even slept; those empty rooms that Roickler was not allowed to rent, that he was not even allowed to offer rent-free to anyone—they spoke of them as “extortion by standardized ritual expressed in totally senseless extravagance.” Roickler would have much rather given them a few rooms, but he wasn’t allowed to, he
was only allowed to give them that three-and-a-half-room shack, only a fifth of the square footage standing empty in the vicarage. “A nihilism,” said Rolf, “that no nihilist can afford.”

Well, they got along fine with Roickler, were, in their eerily calm way, nice to him, amazingly logical and down-to-earth with surprising elements of warmth. And yet all that might be no more than camouflage. Perhaps they had resolved to spend three or four years in Hubreichen and build up a good reputation in a whitewashed shack with green shutters and geraniums in the window boxes. Rolf was already being consulted about growing vegetables, Katharina about handling children (they were certainly thorough, methodical, hard-working!)—yet someday they might launch an attack from within that invisible space, that reservoir of calm—no, he would never dissociate himself from them, but he wouldn’t guarantee for them either.