The Safety Net (18 page)

“We really ought to ask Katharina’s parents over sometime.”

“Of course, they’re Rolf’s parents-in-law, in a way, and Luise—I can remember her as a child, fortunately she was never one of my father’s pupils, so I’d be spared that topic of conversation … Will you have a word with Blurtmehl? I’m curious to meet this Eva.…”

“So am I—I didn’t get the impression that they had any plans. I’ll have to leave you now for a while, do some phoning and see what I have in the way of supplies.”

Sometimes he had made an unexpected, unannounced visit to Rolf in Hubreichen, asking Holzpuke for a reduced escort and telling Blurtmehl to park the car on the empty school playground. He had walked the hundred paces to the vicarage and gone into the garden where the young people lived in a small separate building known for some mysterious reason as “the annex.” He would walk as fast as he could, trying to stay ahead
of swift tongues, while his protectors, swifter than he, took up positions by the vicarage wall inside the garden. He would then pause in the hazel thicket, look into the ground floor of the annex, see his son Rolf playing with Holger: building blocks of wood, of stones, wooden vehicles, handmade (he didn’t even dare to think the word “hobby”—to them that word was insulting, they insisted on “handmade”).

Rolf would be squatting on the ground beside the boy, a happy young father, relaxed, smoking as he sat on his heels, gently guiding the boy’s play and, to judge by the movements of his lips and hands, encouraging him too, and he seemed to be singing softly while painting stones, pasting colored paper on wooden blocks. Once too, while Holger was quietly watching him, he hollowed out a turnip into a lantern, giving it eyes, mouth, nose, and moustache, using his knife to cut a holder for the candle. Everything was very quiet, relaxed, and the two were enjoying themselves—and then inevitably had come the memory of Eickelhof, where he had sometimes played truant from the newspaper to play with the children.

One evening, before he had time to walk to the door and knock, he had been surprised by Katharina, just back from shopping. She exclaimed: “Good heavens, Father”—yes, she called him Father!—“why are you standing around here like an outcast? Come on, you won’t disturb us, you never do.” And he had almost felt tears in his eyes because she was so kind, called him Father, took him by the arm, and led him into the house on that dull, misty November evening. He was surprised at the warmth of Rolf’s greeting, and on the bench that he had been unable to see from the outside he discovered a whole gallery of hollowed-out turnips as well as lanternlike torches consisting of black cardboard frames pasted with colored paper, all made by Rolf for the private kindergarten. He also learned that Rolf had been picked to ride through the village as Saint Martin, escorted by torchbearers, Roman legionaries with silver breastplates and swords, red cloaks. He was offered tea and gingerbread, allowed to smoke a cigarette, sit by the stove,
put on more wood, wood that Rolf had gathered with his own hands in the nearby forest—with permission, of course—and had chopped and cut up, also sacks of fir cones, baskets of shavings. Rolf went around the farms collecting waste lumber, lumber that as a result of rapid modernization (all too rapid, in Rolf’s opinion) lay around ready to be thrown away—roof timbers, planks, also discarded furniture that he collected and either cut up for firewood or repaired for sale in some student secondhand store. That particular evening Rolf had spared him his analysis of stock-exchange reports, had merely used examples to explain the principle of throwing away and what has been thrown away. For the first time and with an undertone of regret he had declared Eickelhof to have been thrown away and the energy gained by that throwing away to have also been thrown away.

Did one have to eavesdrop on one’s children, take them by surprise, to discover their warmth, to gain insight into their lives? Another day, in turning the street corner on his way to the vicarage, he had seen Katharina, holding Holger by the hand, returning from her shopping, exchanging greetings with passersby, bending down to Holger, who seemed to be pulling some toy behind him and was holding a lollipop. In her left hand she was carrying what was obviously a very heavy shopping bag; a young woman like all the others, with red kneesocks, loose hair, and when she caught sight of him he had seen that sudden smile light up her face—such a spontaneous smile that once again he felt close to tears. He hastened toward her, relieved her of the shopping bag, was kissed, kissed Holger, and then watched her unpack her groceries in the house, arranging them in cupboards and on homemade shelves, while the boy pulled his wooden dachshund around in circles on the floor. He was given tea and a sandwich, and Katharina shook her head as she removed the packet of cigarettes he was reaching for—then, with a shrug, pushed it toward him again. Quite obviously she was fond of him: that sudden smile on her face out there on the street, the liver-sausage sandwich, the tea, the concern over
his smoking: a young woman who might have been beautiful had it not been for that trace of austerity about her. He had no difficulty in imagining her as a nun—yet her good sense, intelligence, and sensitivity were limited to this village. Always, when he saw her, he had to think of her uncle, Hans Schröter, the Münzenberg Communist, whom Major Weller had sent him so long ago for his newspaper, his favorite among all the journalists he had come to know on his paper. He had even suggested to Hans Schröter that they use first names, but Schröter had refused, in a manner that was oddly cool and at the same time courteous, and it hadn’t occurred to any of the journalists who had interviewed him this morning to ask: “You were on first-name terms with Communists?”

He had never managed to take Sabine by surprise in this way: at times she was more strictly guarded than he was himself, also because of Kit. So he had simply been driven there by Blurtmehl, the sixteen kilometers to Blorr (which—fortunately no one knew this, not even Käthe—had played a certain role in his doctoral thesis), disgusted by the new bungalows built on the outskirts of the little place that had once been regarded as a paradise of beech and chestnut trees. Each time he had run into the guards there, pursued by his own guards, and invariably he had been disgusted by the Fischer taste as expressed in copper and marble; Sabine had always seemed harried and tense. Of course they were happy to see him, Kit would be delighted, would want to go for a walk with him, loved to walk hand in hand with him to the farms, to the farmers who still remembered him as a student when he used to ride his bicycle around here, researching, sketching, photographing, noting measurements and construction dates, changes. Old Hermanns, particularly, enjoyed digging around “in the old days.” But all this acquired a loathsome artificiality due to the security people constantly trotting behind them, apparently at random but obviously instructed to keep them surrounded in swarms. Sometimes Sabine would weep, could give no reason
for it, would simply weep, ask her neighbor over for tea—a dark, buxom, somewhat vulgar, pretty woman of soothing banality. That quiet, serious Sabine, his dearest daughter (did she know that he was so fond of her and couldn’t tell her?), would wince at the mere slamming of a car door outside, or when Kit threw something against something—perhaps it was better after all to be like Rolf, not guarded but merely under surveillance? Wasn’t this security, which was no security, being bought at too high a price?

The days had long since gone when Sabine had been able to ride off on horseback as she pleased, and since the affair of Pliefger’s birthday cake it probably really was better to have groceries and other goods that were delivered to the house probed and checked, for by this time everything had happened, everything, and recently even packages of cigarettes had to be opened since the day one had exploded in Plotteti’s hands in Italy and severely injured him as he tore it open: mutilated hand, disfigured face, and there was the constant nuisance with the sherry bottles and their wrap-around labels that made it impossible to check the contents from outside: the fancy labels had to be soaked off the bottles, which, after all, might have been camouflaged Molotov cocktails.…

No, Sabine didn’t have the peace of mind still to be found with Rolf and Katharina; she was, after all, the daughter-in-law of the Beehive, as well as his own daughter. The villa near Málaga didn’t help either, nor did she find any peace in skiing: the Sabine who had always found such joy in movement—riding and dancing—was becoming apathetic. Perhaps he added to her tension because his presence required a doubling of the guard, the surveillance around the house.

What he enjoyed least was visiting Herbert, although he would have dearly liked to have a long tâete-à-tâete with him. He, of course, had an entirely different set of friends, of whom a dozen or more were usually hanging around his place. In some indefinable way, Herbert’s friends had more soul than
Rolf and Katharina’s, or Sabine’s friends. They too—Herbert’s friends—were vehement opponents of the system: long-haired, almost all of them, the girls with floppy dresses and jute shoulder bags, they baked their own bread, ate quantities of salad and vegetables, yet did from time to time—“out of solidarity,” as they called it—go to those “poison places,” meaning fast-food shops. They were never embarrassed when he appeared, laughed at the amount of surveillance required in this crazy high rise, laughed not at the guards themselves but at the whole absurd “production,” sometimes asked one of the guards in for a meal, for a chat, avoided the word “discussion,” talked to Tolm about “nonexistent security,” about “death, which may occur but is also nonexistent,” made music, sang, talked without embarrassment about Jesus Christ, not only were not shy but told him frankly that he wasn’t to think he particularly impressed them with his manor house, his newspaper, his huge office that was sometimes shown in magazines along with “the tentacles of that vestibule, the suction cups of materialism,” no, they weren’t impressed by any of that, they merely found him “nice and broken,” broken by the inexorable rise of his paper and the ever-lengthening tentacles, the suction cups into which he himself was now being sucked. Surely that must scare him, not only the system but his paper, which was mainly a waste of paper, wasn’t it, especially since the custom had died out that used in some degree to justify the existence of newspapers: tearing or cutting them into handy squares and spiking them on a nail to be used as toilet paper, as had been the practice at almost every social level:
that
had been true recycling!

They told him exactly how many acres of forest, how many trees, had to be sacrificed for both purposes: for toilet paper
and
newspapers, the colossal pressure of the despotism of hygiene. He should think for a moment of how much totally superfluous, absolutely senseless, useless stuff—which nobody ever read—was being printed in leaflets and pamphlets issued by government departments—provincial, regional, parliamentary—as well as radio, TV, and political parties, not to mention
all that revoltingly superfluous advertising material, all that junk which moves from the printing press almost straight into the garbage can. How many forests were being “sacrificed” for that, how many American Indians might be living in those forests that are being needlessly wasted every day—yes, every day (and they had no idea how scared he really was for those and other reasons, not the slightest inkling, and eventually he found them a bit too superior and conceited). Yes, and of course they were against nuclear energy, against “murderous” highway construction—not that they were in the least anti-progress or even radicals in the sense of that idiotic government decree banning radicals from jobs. No, they weren’t even marginally impressed by him, they didn’t even feel sorry for him for having been caught up in the vicious circle of coercive measures—and by that they didn’t mean the security measures, which they found absurdly irrelevant (as if someone could postpone the predestined moment of his death—ridiculous!). Absurd—no, they meant growth erosion, that most horrible of all cancers, to which, as he must surely know, his second or third home, his present one, the manor house, would fall victim, so that for the second time—or was it more?—he would become a displaced person. Would he never, ever, grasp that the threat was born of the system, was part of the system?

In one way he found Herbert’s friends less to his liking than Rolf’s. Without being able to pinpoint it, he found them humorless. When irony did enter into their arguments, it was always unconscious and unintentional. He also found their lack of respect a bit excessive, they refused to concede that his little paper had had its function, and still did, as an important factor in the development or creation of a democratic system and of an order that had proved necessary after the total destruction of all values by Nazism.

Herbert’s friends were not as abstractly intellectual as Rolf’s friends, whom he occasionally met in Hubreichen. These people were neither hostile nor lacking in respect, they simply
regarded him as an utter stranger; they were neither arrogant nor embarrassed, they looked at him as if he came from a totally different star, were probably surprised to find that he actually drank tea and ate bread, while to him they didn’t seem so utterly strange at all. He was a fellow citizen, after all, spoke their language, and when he then shyly asked: What do you do for a living? the answer came: Teacher, banned from the profession. Metalworker, blacklisted, even by the union. Social worker, not even particularly leftist (what was that supposed to mean: “not even particularly leftist”?), blacklisted. There were some who said: I was accepted by the civil service (or I got my job) before that lousy decree. They were never against individuals, always against the system, didn’t resent a property owner for raising the rent since the system forced him to do so, forced him if need be by terrorism, and they told him how property owners were put under pressure, terrorized—by people throwing rocks, shitting in the corridors, overturning pails of water, because the owners had
not
raised the rent.