The Safety Net (19 page)

They also admitted that they weren’t “that badly off” because they too—there could be no doubt about that—profited from the system, that system which existed “somewhere else,” very far away, and yielded such immense profits that they could share in them—they were fully aware that they shared in these profits, that they too lived under the pressure of the system, the system that was producing more sick and dependent people every day—over here as well as over there—and by “over there” they meant the Soviet Union. They were neither aggressive nor arrogant, only very reserved and sad, yes, there was a cold sadness in them, and not only although but also precisely
because
they threatened, kidnapped, killed individuals—yes, that’s why “they” were criminals, not only in moral or political terms, they were even, if you like, criminals in a philosophical-theoretical-theological sense, for they supplied the system with the very thing that reinforced it, the very thing the system should not be allowed to benefit from: victims, martyrs. They supplied the system with those on a multimedia wave
against which, as they sat there smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap red wine, they could not prevail—against this media superiority they could never prevail, ever, were powerless—not quite but almost with their leaflets, their banners. The victims, the martyrs, only served to enhance the power of the media: it was a kind of sorcery, an irrationalism, enough to drive one into total paralysis. On this point they weren’t as ruthless as Herbert’s friends, didn’t even mention his paper, which was, after all, a medium—and what a medium! Naturally they too wanted to live with their wives and children and girlfriends, have parties, dances, picnics, singsongs—but pot and stronger stuff, porn and worse, those were neither for Herbert’s friends nor for Rolf’s—for pot and stronger stuff, porn and worse, even drunkenness and the like, all those were part of the system that by now they barely hated, merely despised in a way that seemed to him more dangerous than hatred. The system was the Nothing, the “established Nothingness” on whose garbage one could live, had to live.…

And he recalled the young people he sometimes met at Sabine’s, or rather: had met, for of course the strict security measures kept visitors away too. Among them there had been occasional flirtations with just that: pot and stronger stuff, quite openly with porn; and from time to time, with considerable discretion, particularly at the house of those dreadful Fischer parents, who positively cultivated a kind of porno-Catholicism or Catho-pornicism—at such parties it not infrequently happened that fairly prominent “personalities” had to be dragged, dead drunk, by chaffeurs into their cars—and the magic word one kept hearing was invariably: baroque. “We happen to be baroque people,” that was the favorite phrase of old Fischer, who had been quite a modest shopkeeper, the very man to whitewash Bleibl: no, it was a fact that he had never been a Nazi, never, he had even helped persecuted priests, hidden them, these stories were forever being trotted out, stories that could “stand up to the most rigorous investigation”; detailed descriptions of how he had taken soup and bread to the hiding
places, had installed stoves against the cold, and “said many a Hail Mary with those in hiding”: there were even photos that didn’t have to be framed, showing a gaunt nun in a tiny cellar, a pot of soup beside her, beside the pot of soup Fischer, both holding rosaries—there were also photos of Erwin at the age of four or five being blessed by priests hidden in the cellar. There was no gainsaying that: the Bleibl-Fischer connection, which, though never openly consummated, everyone was aware of, was unbeatable, especially since Zummerling had acquired the rights to these photos and could publish them at any time.

And then there was somewhere—where? where? where?—that fourth, additional group: “they”—to call them criminals was to his mind an understatement, quite irrelevant, that satellite world from which Veronica sometimes phoned; and the word “Communists” didn’t apply to that world or Rolf’s, didn’t even apply to Katharina, who was still regarded as one although she denied it in her firm but pleasant way.

“Of course I am communist and will continue to be, but what do I have in common with most Communists?—as much as a Catholic priest who has joined the
guerrilleros
has in common with the Pope or with the Princess of Monaco, who is also a Catholic; besides, it’s wrong, misleading, and much too romantic to try and see me in terms of the twenties: I don’t belong there, don’t belong to the Communists you have known, nor to our Commie Uncle Hans—not to the people you dream about, sometimes enthuse about—just think of the changes in other areas of dogma—I’m not even thirty yet, and less than twelve years ago, when I was almost eighteen, I still believed I would be damned to all eternity if I broke the rule of fasting before Holy Communion. Stop dreaming about the Communists you have known, stop dreaming that I belong to the twenties—and believe me, I understand ‘them’ as little as you do, perhaps even less—no, maybe we resemble each other in this: we can’t understand them, we merely know one thing—they are being coerced like all the rest of us.”

Reason enough to reflect on the type of coercion to which
he was exposed and to which he was slowly but surely succumbing. A few nostalgic musings were unavoidable, all of them starting with “in the old days.” In the old days, when he had already been a pretty important boss, actually less than six years ago, he had still been able simply to escape from his office, stop at a newsstand for a paper, walk over to Café Getzloser, where he had ordered a snack, eaten it unnoticed and unobserved, been waited on with a smile, phoned Käthe from a booth. Or he had simply gone to a florist’s, bought some flowers for Käthe, Sabine, Edith, or Veronica, dropped into a jeweler’s—now the jewelers with their velvet-lined boxes had to come, under strict guard, to his office, his home, or a hotel. And when had he last been able to browse in antique shops, looking for engravings of the Rhine, its towns, banks, landscapes, not looking for anything in particular, just browsing and coming across engravings and paintings from the era before the Rhine was overrun by tourists—such as his favorite engraving of Bonn, hardly bigger than a cigarette package, engraved with pearly clarity and discreetly tinted by an anonymous artist: the banks of the Rhine, trees, a wing of the palace, on the river a barge and the old customs bastion. And also—impossible today or, if not impossible, so embarrassing that he would never do it—his affair with Edith, who wasn’t even a young thing, she’d been all of thirty-five, unmarried, a stock clerk in a department store on whom he was calling to offer his condolences on the death of her brother, his auditor Scheubler. It had almost turned into a scandal—he couldn’t understand how other people could actually pursue their amours under surveillance, when surely the very thought of the guard’s watchful eye must destroy all spontaneity.

The fear kept returning, growing, fear for him, later fear of him too, that alternated, merged, when he came home “all in, simply all in,” made cutting remarks about the house and neatness in the home, often quite grumpy, almost gruff, something he had never, never been before. He complained about the small house being cramped, the garden too tiny; pulled and plucked and grumbled at every scrap of weed and, with a mere, the merest, trace of disapproval, scrutinized her hair—which, naturally, wasn’t always as tidy as it should be if she happened to have been working in the garden, the basement, or the kitchen or romping with Bernhard and the dog in the garden. Then there was the occasional bead of moisture on her forehead, or something that looked like perspiration around her nose; there might be garden soil on Bernhard’s shoes, blades of grass lying on the driveway or the concrete paths; and he would poke around in his food—which he had never done before—finding the soup too hot or not hot enough, the salad dressing too sour or not sour enough, though she had put in all the ingredients
in exactly the usual quantity, knowing that that was how he liked it; or he would find too much gristle in the stew, though he knew the price of meat and that she had to save up for the celebration of Bernhard’s First Communion. Besides: they had overextended themselves again, the new car, the payments on the house, the credit that had been much too hastily applied for and so quickly granted and that was turning out to be more expensive than they had been led to believe. And since he had been on this special assignment, always in plain clothes now, never in uniform, his clothing—and he was so fussy!—cost more these days despite the supplement. Without exactly barking at Bernhard, he growled at him, found the boy—strange word—not “graceful” enough, said he was too clumsy the way he rode around the driveway or on the garden paths on his little bike, talked about gym lessons for the boy, shook his head in abject despair when he inspected Bernhard’s homework.

He had never been like that—serious, yes, and sometimes strict, too strict she felt, when he tore up the boy’s comics, calling them “filthy porn” when really it was comparatively harmless stuff considering what the kids could see at every newsstand. There were worse things than those overblown blondes with their teased hair—at least only their cleavage was visible. What could that possibly mean to an eight-year-old boy who need only go to the public swimming pool to see more—not even the public one, he had only to look through the garden fence to watch their neighbor Ilse Mittelkamp sunbathing or mowing the lawn; he saw more there than at the pool, more than in those dreadful comics with those little blondes with all their “uplift” who might equally well be seven, seventeen, or twenty-seven. Vulgar little bitches, that they most certainly were, a sort of combination of child and prostitute, their vulgar pouting mouths sometimes as naïvely rounded as a little girl’s, sometimes as cynical as a tart’s. “Consumer hookers,” “consumer vampires,” that they most certainly were, their heads empty of everything but travel, dancing, champagne, music—“poolside nymphets”—true, but she couldn’t very well let the boy loose in the world with blinkers
on, could she? Granted things were pretty dreadful; chaos, disintegration all around, and in the midst of it all the boy was supposed to be undergoing preparation for his first Holy Communion: chastity and all that, while if one were to believe even half of what one heard, the clergy themselves hardly lived like that anymore, and the boy himself probably didn’t even know what unchastity meant. For Bernhard was certainly—at least
she
was certain, Hubert had his doubts, and there had been some loathsome arguments about it—not yet sexually arousable. And Hubert had talked to Kiernter, the police psychologist, had obtained some literature on infantile sexuality, and all he had to do was look in the boy’s eyes, where he would find only fear and bafflement at the reason for Hubert’s anger, not fear about the thing itself, whatever that might be. And needless to say, the monthly payments continued to be too high, they had to economize, and of course the shirts he bought himself were too expensive, simply too expensive, now that Hubert, too, had gone on what Monika called a “cotton kick.” Surely it couldn’t be the job that made him come home so “all in, all in”: standing around outside those fancy villas, or wandering around the manor house, keeping an eye on entrances and exits—ever on the alert. Of course he took it all very seriously—took everything seriously, too much so—and of course the responsibility was great, she could see that, yet she still felt that his irritability and brusqueness toward her were out of all proportion.

He never told her any details about his work, he never had, never any details about his period of training. She knew they all underwent regular psychological examinations and tests, there was a lot of stress, she knew that. Yet his recent preoccupation with cleanliness and neatness seemed to her almost pathological—no longer merely pedantic but almost pathological, the way he sometimes spent almost an hour under the shower, found fault with his freshly pressed trousers, and—this was really an insult—sniffed at his socks before putting them on and, if he discovered the tiniest crease in those expensive cotton shirts, made a face as if seriously offended.

Not so long ago she had looked forward to his coming home, to their evening meal, to having coffee, sitting down with Bernhard and helping him with his homework, drinking a glass of beer on the terrace, chatting over the fence with the neighbors about the housing shortage and keeping up with payments, about bringing up children and the times in general. Sometimes the neighbors had also asked him for a bit of advice, almost always something to do with cars, No Parking and No Stopping zones, or speed limits, and they’d also been asked over by the Hölsters on their right and the Mittelkamps on their left; and they had themselves invited the neighbors, for beer and pickles or coffee and dessert. The whole atmosphere had cooled considerably, not exactly hostile but cooler because Hubert was so touchy about obscenities, which Mrs. Hölster had a way of quietly but rather vulgarly weaving into her conversation. And from time to time the word “fuzz” had been used, when they forgot that he was one of them himself and didn’t notice their faux pas, although they would then pretty soon want to know what his duties were, since he was constantly “going off all dressed up in his new car.” That was enough to make him clam up completely.

The Mittelkamps were coarser, more outspoken, by no means more agreeable and, when he was briefly attached to the vice squad, wanted details, talked about “hookers and fags” and “this new job of yours—that must really be something—security unit, hm?” To such a question, neither yes nor no was possible, and silence was probably taken for assent. The Mittelkamps were young, in their late—more likely their middle—twenties, he was a warehouse foreman, she a supermarket cashier, with no children, few if any financial worries. The Hölsters were older, getting on for fifty, he worked in the revenue department, while she, when their daughter had finished her training, had “gone back to the office,” just for a short time, and was then unemployed, and had once whispered to her at the garden fence, “I simply can’t break myself of the habit, that porn stuff, I simply can’t—you mustn’t mind, Helga,
when now and again something slips out.” The Hölsters with that daughter of theirs who at first had seemed a bit of a mystery, in her middle twenties, always smartly dressed and driving a smart car, with marvelous hairdos and always a pleasant smile—apparently with no steady or regular occupation. At times she was to be heard typing away for hours, then she would be away again for long periods, sometimes she would sleep late and have a copious breakfast on the balcony; then, at hours when other people were working, she was to be seen sitting in the garden reading, and finally, when asked outright by Mittelkamp, she divulged that she was a convention secretary, taking home taped speeches and letters as well as shorthand minutes of conventions and negotiations and transcribing them at home. Her work was steady, all right, but not regular.