The Safety Net (3 page)

It was all over sooner than expected, Käthe was not yet back from Sabine’s. When there were meetings or conferences, she always withdrew, presiding only briefly as the lady of the house over afternoon tea or coffee, offering homemade cookies and little cakes, she happened to have a weakness for petits fours, which she produced herself in her own delightful kitchen—and she did all this so nicely, so graciously, that it didn’t seem like a mere duty, and she chatted with the men, looked after the secretaries, who appeared genuinely to like her and asked for recipes and advice. “No, really—what fantastic things you always make!” When wives were admitted to the male sanctuary for a few hours, she would ask them upstairs for tea, a chat, a drink, sometimes even showed them her wardrobe to the accompaniment of “Ah’s” and “Oh’s,” talked about children, grandchildren, travel plans, entertained without discrimination even the men’s girlfriends, referring to these openly to her husband as mistresses, doing this so nicely, inspiring immediate confidence, even reassuring these girlfriends—former stewardesses,
secretaries, or salesgirls—when they seemed a bit out of their depth in these unaccustomed surroundings. Maintained her dignity and wouldn’t tolerate any snide remarks if someone tried to malign Rolf or Katharina, Veronica or Holger I; defended Herbert, who was decried as a visionary, would not rise to vicious remarks about their seven-year-old grandson, whose present whereabouts were unknown. “Your son’s current girlfriend, Katharina—she’s a Communist, isn’t she?” And she would reply: “Yes, I believe she is, but I’d rather you asked her personally—I greatly dislike defining other people’s politics.” Comments on the extramarital affairs of her son-in-law Erwin also did not seem to upset her. Hints about Sabine’s life—she remained completely unruffled, while security guards in the corridor, on the balcony, and in the rambling storerooms were watching over her.

He missed Käthe now. If Sabine was to have her child in four months, she must soon be in her sixth month—and had said nothing to anyone. One thing was safe to assume when it came to Bleibl’s pointed remarks—whether he was talking about Rolf, Katharina, Herbert, or Holger I: he always got his facts straight. If he said “in four months,” then it was four months, even if Sabine herself might not be that sure. Such things all came from Zummerling sources, and they had their ear not only to the pulse of the times but also to the abdomens of prominent women; they knew better than the lady herself when a period was missed, they were abdomen researchers of a special kind, no doubt they questioned housemaids and pharmacists, rummaged through garbage cans, snooped around in medical files, perhaps even monitored phone calls, all for the benefit of the public. Surely Käthe would have told him if she had known, and he couldn’t fathom why Sabine hadn’t told them. If Bleibl had read it in the sports page, it must have something to do with riding; he didn’t want to give way immediately to his urge to rush to the phone and call. He was longing to go upstairs to Käthe and have tea with her. He was sure she would refrain
from facetious remarks about his election, if—something he would probably never find out—she felt like being facetious at all. She would hear it on the radio, of course, or see it on TV at Sabine’s, and she would be more likely to feel alarmed than facetious since she knew that Bleibl was out not only to make him deeply afraid but to destroy him.

At last the clatter in the conference room had stopped, all the media people had left, and he could sit down for a moment without being photographed; he felt fatigue settling over his face like a cobweb, actually felt the creases spreading, exhaustion after the amusing and tiring game of his double-track function, but he mustn’t smoke another cigarette just yet. He hated these confrontations with Grebnitzer, his doctor, and no doubt Amplanger would report: three during the session, one after lunch, a fourth one after the interviews. Amplanger had been re-elected secretary by acclamation, without lengthy discussion, and although he was from his own stable—hadn’t he won his spurs on the paper at his father’s side, built up a career in it and on it?—he was never quite sure whether Amplanger wasn’t really a Bleibl or even a Zummerling man. Pleasant, well educated, skillful, he rarely revealed his streak of ruthlessness, and then most clearly when he smiled: he had never seen a harder smile, you could almost hear his teeth grinding. All the Amplangers smiled, his wife, his four children, and malicious wags claimed that soon his dog, his cat, and his parakeets would start smiling too. Amplanger’s smile was notorious and feared—as the head of personnel on the paper he had been feared; there were still a few people left from the paper’s early days with whom he could talk on familiar terms, and they had told him there was a saying: “When Amplanger smiles, you’ve had it.”

Now presumably Amplanger was tired too, too tired to smile?

He seemed almost human as he sat down beside him, looking out over the park, seemed even a bit rumpled about his white shirt collar as if he had been perspiring, his hair slightly
untidy—he seemed almost a “real human being” as he said: “Have another cigarette, sir, I won’t tell.” But he shook his head and merely asked: “What’s all this about my daughter and the newspaper report about her being pregnant?” “It seems your daughter Sabine has withdrawn from training for the championship, and this has led to some speculation, I’ll have it thoroughly checked out—I was surprised myself by Mr. Bleibl’s news. But now—if I may say so—you ought to lie down a bit. This has been a wild day, I’m worn out too, and as soon as I can be sure you’re upstairs in your own domain, I’ll be on my way. Fantastic, if you’ll allow me to say so, the way you coped with the media, simply fantastic.”

“Must I start work tomorrow—I mean, go to the office?”

“No, not till the day after, we’ll have a little ceremony then, a sort of reception for the whole staff—you know most of the department heads, of course. No, not tomorrow.”

“I’ll sit here for a while, you might as well go home—give my regards to your wife and family.”

“I’m sure I needn’t spell it out to you that all the security measures taken so far for Mr. Pliefger will now be transferred to you. If you wish, Mr. Holzpuke will give you the details—he’d like to do it himself, though of course I’d be glad to, only I don’t want to tread on his toes. So if I may assume that under these circumstances you will be able to reach your apartment without my help, which you might possibly find bothersome, I’ll say goodbye.”

“Thank you, goodbye—see you the day after tomorrow.”

What he really wanted was to go off right then, walk, across the courtyard, the bridge over the moat, along the avenue into the village, slowly from house to house, as far as the church. There he would have sat down, maybe even said a prayer, later knocked at Kohlschröder’s door, invited himself for coffee and a chat, about the world, not about God, about whom he was less inclined to speak with Kohlschröder than with anyone, probably because he was a priest. He would have stopped
in front of his parents’ house, that one-and-a-half-story “cot” recently refaced with asbestos shingles where the teacher was still living, a young fellow with a car and a wife in jeans: the teacher had added a garage and turned the vegetable garden into a lawn, a thick close-cropped lawn on which the bright plastic toys of his two children could be seen lying around. So far he had refrained—and he intended to go on refraining—from asking if he might be allowed to see the house again from the inside: the two sloping attic rooms, downstairs the living room, kitchen, and tool shed, in the basement the laundry room and storeroom; probably it had all been modernized, and he wondered where they would have put in a bathroom, whether upstairs or down. He would have recalled his parents and his brother Hans—all dead, his parents buried here, his brother far, far away, if there had been anything left to bury. Direct hit. Rocket launcher. Some time or other he must pay another visit to the graves, as Käthe often did—then she would drive to Neu-Iffenhoven to visit her parents’ transplanted graves on her way home, taking along flowers, buying copper candle holders, commissioning gravestones from young sculptors of which he had seen only the designs: roses-and-crucifix symbolism, in marble, almost identical, with only slight variations, for both sets of parents, but he didn’t like going to cemeteries, never had, or to funerals, which some people seemed positively to enjoy.

He would have recalled the milk soup, whose flavor he had never encountered again, neither in war nor in peace; and even Käthe, who made superb soups, had never been able to reproduce that flavor, even after he had explained a hundred times what went into the soup: dollops of beaten egg white, that very discreet flavor of vanilla sugar—she always put in too much—and above all a certain, apparently inimitable creaminess which with Käthe always turned out too thick or too thin. Well, of course, he didn’t know the recipe, he could only remember the taste—and that was the very thing that couldn’t be recaptured, any more than the smell one had been conscious of on a particular evening somewhere—like the smell of
autumn leaves rising from the courtyard in Dresden as he lay with Käthe in the room they had rented for the night.

His most vivid memory was of Saturdays: after confession the bath, in a galvanized washtub in the laundry room, after the bath the soup, bread and margarine, on lucky days cocoa, and not even the memory of confession had diluted the memory of the flavor of the soup. And he would have stopped in front of the Pütz house, the Kelz house, and would have wondered, although he knew he would never do it, whether he should go in and say hello to Anna Pütz (whose present name he knew to be Kommertz) or Bertha Kelz (whose present name he didn’t know); simply go in, say hello, and look into the faces of those old women, who would no doubt have been shy because he now lived in a manor house and was such an influential person. He would have searched in their faces for the girls with whom, more than fifty years ago, he had been so violently in love that it had made him ill: Bertha when he was thirteen, Anna when he was fourteen, one blond, the other dark—girls’ eyes, breasts, legs, hair—he had followed them, sneaked after them, tried to kiss them, made a pass at their breasts and tried to stroke their legs, neither of them had been offended, they just found him a nuisance, probably went through the same thing with other boys, were perhaps used to it, but not yet curious enough to seduce him, as Gerlind Tolmshoven later did—and he had never known how to answer the strange question put to him in the confessional: “Alone or with others?” Pastor Nuppertz seemed to take one or the other for granted with a boy of his age. Was it “with others” when he sneaked up on girls and tried to grab them or merely—and sometimes they allowed that and they would both be amazed in a beautiful, poetic kind of way—wanted to look into their eyes: long and deep, while keeping—as he solemnly promised—his hands to himself. Was that “with others,” to look in a girl’s eyes and search for What? and find What? And Nuppertz’s insufferable question as to whether during his bath on Saturdays he “fiddled around” with himself,
and that it would be better to have the bath water not too hot and to wear swim trunks—that actually gave him ideas he had never had before.

He had never got over that and had stopped going to confession, so the memory of subsequent Saturdays was unsullied—and he shuddered at the thought that the other day his dear child Sabine had actually come over here to have Kohlschröder—of all people!—hear her confession! Just his bath and the milk soup, Mother’s flushed face over the stove, Hans pushing his cocoa toward him—he would usually leave then and, somewhere else, get something better than cocoa!—Father, who fortunately was away, with bike and rucksack looking for cheap land, he had a pathological craving for property, to own pieces of this earth, even if only the swampy meadows, now useless, of bankrupt farmers. Father, who wanted to own land and was not gentle of spirit—a strict, a hated teacher, also a vegetarian—would ride around with bike and rucksack, collecting land, craving earth, collecting acres and square feet, eventually acquiring a few acres of useless soil, rummaging in his papers, collecting land-registry extracts, deeds, all notarized; consumption, death (and those few acres of land around Iffenhoven, Blückhoven, and Hetzigrath had certainly made life a bit easier for his mother after the war: she had exchanged land for food, converting acre after acre into milk, butter, and potatoes—later, when the bulldozing started in that area, the farmers got a hundred times what they had paid for it).

The village children, including Anna Pütz and Bertha Kelz, sighed with relief when his father died, especially the boys, who, now grandfathers, still tell their grandchildren about that dreadful teacher Mr. Tolm, of whom nobody even knew whether he was “at least a Catholic,” a “real” Catholic—granted he went to church and kept order, but he had never been seen in the confessional or at the Communion bench, not even in the neighboring villages where he spent some of his Sundays, with bike and rucksack, tempting the farmers with a bit of cash, offering a down payment over a glass of beer,
preliminary deals sealed after mass with a handshake, among witnesses, ridiculed because he never drank, at most a glass of water or a mug of milk, a tall, bony, skinny fellow, joyless and friendless. His mother, to be sure, had not been without joy: her children and garden, her kitchen and church, she had been active in the Mothers’ Union, had gone on pilgrimages, never been flustered, and had even succeeded—rarely, oh so rarely—in conjuring a smile onto Father’s face when she reminded him of their youth in Blückhoven, of her parents, of his, who had lived there on top of the brown coal.

He really must go and inspect the graves again, Käthe’s floral arrangements, the crucifix-and-roses marble symbolism, the lighted candle in its copper housing. No doubt he would have visited the church and, in spite of all his reluctance, looked in on Kohlschröder, that was a man one could at least talk to about architecture and painting, and about music too; and he might even have gone to the Kommertz house, where the Schröters lived, the present parents-in-law, so to speak, of Rolf, Katharina’s parents. Although to this day, fifty years later, he still felt embarrassed at having sometimes done with Peter Kommertz and Konrad Wergen what he called “alone with others,” the two of them having enlightened him when he asked what old Nuppertz could have meant by “fiddling”—and he had preferred to wait for dreams and then very soon, while commuting to school, he had met Gerlind. Later he coached her in mathematics, right here in the manor house; what with her being a countess, he hadn’t dared make a pass at her legs or breasts, but he had looked deep, deep into her eyes too, and she into his, and one day she had “made short work of it,” saying in her flippant way: “Let’s take pity on ourselves,” adding: “No complexes, Fritz dear—you’re not the first, and you probably won’t be the last, and I know that for you I am the first.” That girl, regarded as a “brazen hussy,” had turned gentle, silent, and even breathless, and that wild rapture in her face, that happiness which might almost be called bliss—he would never forget that, never, nor her smile at his joy. In triumph, not in remorse,
he had gone back once more to the confessional to get rid of that “with others,” to take final leave of confession, maybe of the Church that was trying to force him every week to confess remorsefully to something which an hour later he would do again without remorse. Never forgotten, Nuppertz’s blatant, more than indiscreet, blustering, the barefaced question spat out at him: “With whom?!” which had nothing to do with the secret of the confessional, and besides: he must have known, the whole village knew, and they all knew too that there would be a row, and there was. The usual, the inevitable, happened: strict boarding school for Gerlind, and to everyone’s surprise no banning from the manor house for him. There was even a rumor that the old countess might have not only foreseen it but desired it: the fact that she liked him, encouraged him, was too obvious, and now he coached Gerlind’s brother Holger, also in math. It felt good to be able to give his mother something from time to time, to be able to buy the odd thing for himself. Moreover, there were such things as bicycles, and not even the nuns in Cologne could keep the school hermetically sealed. Gerlind insisted on her right, “guaranteed by ecclesiastical law and theology,” to seek out a father confessor other than the priest attached to the school. And not only were there bicycles, there were also parks, apartments belonging to the parents of Gerlind’s friends: in particular, one near the South Station on the Moselstrasse, where when the windows were open they could hear the trains, and Gerlind always laughed when he insisted on looking into her eyes. He knew, she knew: what he found there was not what he had sought in Bertha’s and Anna’s eyes, and yet it was good: end of the confessional and milk soup.