The Safety Net (11 page)

Perhaps Helga would be sympathetic, would let her have him occasionally … she would be allowed to love him sometimes, be able to show him the child when she was stuck down there in Italy or Spain. He was a man who pursued his career with such seriousness, such intensity, even love. “Safety and order for all.” Maybe a bit too pedantic, and might perhaps have been able to prevent the disaster that struck Erna and Peter, it was strange, she wanted him, wanted to be with him, to sleep with him and yet—live with him?—that probably wouldn’t work, just as it didn’t seem to be working with Erna and Peter. At first those two had wanted only to sleep together, yet they had become so fond of each other, so terribly fond, Peter more so of Erna than Erna of him—she had quite openly admitted that originally she had just wanted to be fucked by him; yes, that’s how she had expressed it, in her vulgar, forthright way. Now he couldn’t do without her, or she without him, they didn’t care about the scandal or Breuer’s rage, weren’t bothered by the questionings and interrogations; he wanted his Erna, to have and to hold, maybe even to marry, he was forever pining for her—but for her, for Erna, it was all too shabby, too cheap, in that tiny apartment, whereas Breuer’s bungalow and Peter for a lover, that could have gone on forever if it hadn’t been for that damn surveillance. And Erna openly swore into the phone, had forgotten about first names, no longer said “My dear Bee,” said in a hard, mean voice: “Now listen to me, Mrs. Fischer …” and she listened, while her thoughts were elsewhere—she was sick of it all, fed up with Erna, Erwin, Peter, Kübler, Rohner, the Klobers, and always when the sun was shining that topless nymphet up there on the terrace with her raucous music.…

Yet she did miss Erna Breuer. She had been such a nice woman, so frank, so spontaneous, even though she spoke too freely about her married life, said quite openly how much she liked doing it, doing it with men. “You know what I mean …” And later: “And I let myself get all hot and worked up by that porn stuff my old man brought home, and he wanted me hot,
but then he couldn’t put out the fire—and so I took the boy who always gave me such burning, yearning looks—well, it turned into love, real love, I forgot all about that porn stuff when I was with that boy—how could I have had any idea? Those damn cops had to mess it all up for me, it could’ve gone on like that for years, but they had to come snooping around, all because of you, you people, your lousy millions—what’s that got to do with me? And if I happen to let Peter into my bed in the morning—what’s that got to do with you? Not a thing. And now the fuss with Breuer about the couches and the suitcases, all the knickknacks and the chesterfield set in the living room, he won’t even let me have the color TV—don’t cry now, don’t cry, I wouldn’t wish it on you, Bee dear—no, I wouldn’t—and anyway it could never happen to you, you’re just not the type.…”

And it had happened to her, exactly as it had to Erna, and no doubt she had given herself to her Peter just as “quickly and joyously” as she had to her Hubert.

Someday—when?—she would tell him more about Eickelhof, about her years there, and about the time at boarding school with the nuns, maybe also more about
that
Beverloh, who in those days, eleven or twelve years ago now, had been one of those young people “of whom one had had such high hopes,” courted by political parties, associations, corporations, showered with bursaries, and they had all thought he would study German literature, or perhaps theater, at any rate amount to something on the cultural scene where he would speak for “our” (whose?) standards. He was considered a conservative (if only someone had ever explained to her what that meant), a reactionary even (if only she had ever been told what
that
meant), looked upon as a Catholic, and devout at that—as she still was, still regarded herself, despite Kohlschröder and Hubert—without knowing exactly what that meant either. But in the end Beverloh had studied banking, here, then in America, together with Rolf, even wrote his thesis on something South American, came back, could dance better than ever—with something cynical, almost mean, about his mouth, was no longer satisfied
with just kissing her, wanted more, and she didn’t like him anymore, and now, with a dreamy look again, he said, “That’s how you get, mean and cynical—or unbelievably stupid, when you’ve been absorbed for years in nothing but money—and I didn’t want to become stupid—in money, working money, in the money you happen to have in your pocket.” Then she saw him once more at Rolf and Veronica’s wedding, where he made a witty speech, even mentioning the paper without hurting Father; yes, Father, they all liked him, and Käthe, and it wasn’t all that long ago. If there was any truth to all the rumors and reports, it was he, Heinrich Beverloh, who was responsible for all this—the protection and surveillance, Erna Breuer’s raw deal, the breakup of the neighborhood, the Klobers’ rage, the neighbors’ coldness, the affair of Pliefger’s birthday cake—and the child she was now expecting from Hubert.

Beverloh had now become as unreal as the Eickelhof house, over which the dredges had passed so quickly. “Leveling and digging—that’s the answer!” had been Bleibl’s motto, and in the end the old Eickelhof place had fetched almost enough for Father to pay for the manor. Rolf had taken into account all the good times and bad times since 1880 and had a computer print out the profit margin—it must have been several tens of thousand percent—in any case, as they all agreed, “a fantastic amount for such a dilapidated old place.” And after all it wasn’t only the enormous profit, it was also the example Father had to set when, after much palaver and many protests, all of Iffenhoven was leveled and buried. Sometimes when she drove past there and stopped on the road between Hetzigrath and Hurbelheim to look down into that vast pit, she tried to pinpoint the spot where Eickelhof and Iffenhoven had once stood. For a while the archaeologists had been allowed to have their fun, with Roman and Frankish pottery, shards, burial objects, and, if it was true, even some pre-Frankish, perhaps Celtic—you could see at the museum how much fun the archaeologists had had: the very stuff of dissertations and theses … pitchers
and bones, stones and shards, shards upon shards, and there was an entire cabinet labeled: “Found at Iffenhoven,” and a smaller one that said: “Found on the Eickelhof property, now a brown-coal area.”

Of course Father hadn’t been able to say no, and of course the Board had urged him: “If you refuse, Mr. Tolm, if you refuse, Fritz, what can we expect from the ordinary folk in the way of understanding economic and energy needs?” And they tore down and tore up, leveled and dug, church and vicarage, village and cemetery, the neglected-looking castle of the counts of Hetzigrath, tore down trees, tore out trees, chestnuts and oaks, hedges and fences, not a shred was left, of course not, for they had to get at the coal. Driven from Iffenhoven and Eickelhof, driven from Blorr, and soon, Erwin occasionally hinted to her, soon it would be Tolmshoven’s turn too.

Was it really only eight years since they had been dancing at Rolf and Veronica’s wedding, she once again with Beverloh, who began to make a nuisance of himself? No, she had ceased to be in love with him, she had already been afraid of him when, a bit later, after his nice toast to Father, he had been much less nice when discussing the subject of freedom with Father. They had both been a bit drunk, Father weak-willed as ever, Beverloh incisive as he took the imminent vacating of Eickelhof as an example of how little freedom even the freest of the free had in a free economy: for couldn’t he see he was breaking his wife’s—Käthe’s—heart, that his children felt they were being driven out, didn’t he love the old place himself? And the money, he certainly didn’t need that, did he, with the paper growing and growing? Freedom, force, necessity—what were they but a somewhat more palatable form of expropriation? Only seven years since Father had moved into the manor house with Käthe, after remodeling and modernizing—and that, too, would soon be leveled and buried, and once again the price would be seven to thirty times as high. “Your old man pretends to know nothing about economics, yet he’s the smartest of the lot—for him everything pays off, many times over.”

It also paid off, of course, when Erwin flew about all over the world, closing deals, installing machinery, setting up production chains, having his fun with the unions—“They play along quite nicely”—increasingly adopted the airs of a playboy although, when he tried to make love to her, he had such a hard time of it—oh well, perhaps it really was her fault, now that her thoughts were only of Hubert, only of him since the night he had spent with her, since those wonderful wordless hours they had spent together when he wanted to see her, she him, since they had shared the coffee across the windowsill in the early dawn, in the distance the circus façade of the power stations that were burning up Iffenhoven and Eickelhof. Naturally, it would never have occurred to Hubert to ask: “Did you remember to take it?” And obviously he hadn’t thought even for a second of taking any steps to “get rid of it,” didn’t dream of suggesting something she would never, ever have done: when she told him she was pregnant his joy equaled the shock. He indicated that, although Helga would no doubt be sad, she would certainly be happy about one thing: the child. In all its seriousness, it hit him right in his own seriousness, during the very days when Erwin, ebullient as never before, returned from—how would she know?—probably from Singapore, with flowers and jewelry and all kinds of exotic gifts for her and Kit and Miss Blum, the very essence of that beaming boyishness that had once so attracted her. He actually carried her in his arms through the cloakroom—where all the coats were hanging among which she had sometimes hidden with Hubert—carried her across the hall, across the corridor, into the living room and later onto the bed, and she gave herself to him without surrendering, and he actually did whisper: “I love you, do you realize that? And I think our little Kit’s been alone long enough, what I mean is: stop taking it for a while!” Then he had to go on and make one of his jokes, he couldn’t resist saying: “All clear for the weekend—no speed limits! …”

It was already two months then since Kit had ceased to be
alone, and those eternal jokes, those carefully calculated, would-be impromptu remarks when she performed her duty toward him; and those parties at his parents’, who in some ways were more vulgar than Erna Breuer could ever have been. The quarrel between Erna and herself pained her, a quarrel for which neither was to blame, only those wretched circumstances for which—if she was to believe Rolf and Father as well as Katharina—Heinrich Beverloh was to blame, also her former sister-in-law, Veronica Tolm, née Zelger, a doctor’s daughter from Hetzigrath … Veronica had phoned her twice, the first time the shock had made her drop the receiver—there it was, that familiar high, clear voice, that “angel’s soprano” as the nuns used to call it, that had so enriched the choir and sung so many solos from the organ loft: oh, Veronica’s
Kyrie
, Veronica’s
Agnus Dei
—those hours of bliss when there were still special May services, and Veronica would sing songs to the Blessed Virgin from the organ loft—wasn’t it really Veronica’s voice that had made of her such an ardent worshipper of the Madonna?—and she still was and always would be, and she must stop by the chapel in Blorr, with some flowers, say an
Ave
, light candles, and she would probably weep for herself, for Hubert, for the child in her womb, for Helga and Bernhard and Kit, and for Veronica, who simply phoned—from where fromwherefromwhere?—and asked: “How’re things? …” and laughed when she picked up the receiver, gasped into the phone, and replied to the second “How’re things, Bee dear?”: “Under constant surveillance, as you must know, and you also know that it’s almost like being in prison.” And Veronica: “You can’t blame me for that.” And she had asked: “And Heinrich?” “He’s figuring, figuring, figuring—tell Rolf that Holger’s fine”—and she was gone. Many months later she phoned again, saying only: “Oh my dear, dear Bee—I’m so sorry about all this, so sad—and do you sometimes think of our little nuns—would you like me to sing something?” and she sang “Mary, Queen of May”—and was gone.…

She hadn’t been able to keep this from Hubert, but he
only laughed and nodded: “We know all about that, at least my boss does—you needn’t be afraid, everything is monitored, and maybe one day they’ll be able to trace the call and we’ll nab her, that would be the best thing for her. As you can imagine, all your calls are monitored too—so don’t ever phone, Sabine dear, ever, and don’t ever write. And of course I can’t ever call you, ever write to you … ever, and my relief is due any day.…”

It was nearly dark after all when Miss Blum returned with Kit from the Beeretzes; she didn’t take the so-called security measures that seriously—always said she didn’t believe in security anyway. “Least of all from
those
people, they come when they feel like it, out of a clear blue sky in the middle of the night.” Kit was proud: for the first time she had carried the four kilos of milk all the way home and had only had to set it down three times, she had been given walnuts and chestnuts that she wanted to roast right away, in the garden over an open fire, “as soon as Papa gets home,” and with a pang she realized for the first time that Kit was indeed deeply attached to her father—that she would suffer too, very badly perhaps, and she said: “We’ll be leaving soon with Grandma Käthe, and you can roast the chestnuts at Grandpa’s in the fireplace—he’ll like that.”

“Are we staying the night?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll leave some here for Papa, some walnuts and chestnuts—and what about the milk?”

“We’ll put that in the refrigerator, it won’t spoil.”

“Must I pack my things?”

“Only your dolls, I’ll take along some underwear.”

“By the way,” said Miss Blum after Kit had left, “you needn’t be afraid that the neighbors’ feelings toward you have changed. After all, who does like having the police in the village for months on end? But they’re not blaming you for that, they’re blaming those others.… I suppose you’ll be staying for more than one night, won’t you?”