The Safety Net (8 page)

If only Hubert were not so serious—yet she liked him serious the way he was, longed for him, pined for him, and wouldn’t have minded the scandal, would simply have gone up to him, put her arms around him and kissed him, if it hadn’t been for Helga and Bernhard: no, she couldn’t do that, she didn’t want to hurt that woman she’d never met, who had never done her any harm and certainly never would, and perhaps she would simply have gone to see her, talked to her—but not over Hubert’s head.

It was a good thing that Mama, that Käthe, was coming and that she could drive back with her and stay at Tolmshoven; there she was close to him and surely would find a chance to speak to him.

Long before Erwin went off to put his “production chain,” or whatever it was called, “on a firm footing,” his efforts to make love to her hadn’t amounted to much. He still asked anxiously, or even impatiently: “Did you remember to take it?” although he knew she took it reluctantly, was afraid of the stuff, had religious scruples too, but she took it, and he waited for her nod in answer to his question before making love to her. But she couldn’t get in the mood, managed to less and less often, was overtaken by something that, if not precisely dislike or hatred, didn’t enhance the mood: pity for this seasoned athlete, known as an outstanding horseman, dancer, tennis player, yachtsman, and, more recently, also as surf rider and balloonist, and who
still couldn’t bring it off (even in her thoughts she suppressed the vulgar phrases she knew from the weeklies, from wild parties, from the porn scenes scattered about the gutter press, and from her former neighbor Erna Breuer)—pity for the man who had so much trouble reaching a climax; sometimes he never got there at all, blaming her for it. Since then, she had been less ready to believe his whispered confessions when he came back from places like London or Bangkok. “Well, you can probably imagine what a lonely man is sometimes capable of, so far from his sweet little wife.…” She couldn’t really believe him, in any case found it disgusting, whether it was true or a lie, the “sweet little wife” bit made her feel sick, and she wondered whether he knew what a lonely woman might be capable of, yet she wasn’t even thinking of what her neighbor Erna Breuer openly defined by a vulgar word. These days the word was no longer avoided even at parties, there were women there, from so-called respectable circles, who spoke about their tits and described their husbands as lovers. Sometimes they accompanied them to foreign parts, to Asia, where Western restraint in lovemaking was disregarded.

No, she had never been able to bring herself to denounce her upbringing, to nourish resentment at the nuns, she was only shocked, deeply hurt, almost mortally wounded, since she had gone to Kohlschröder for relief. Kohlschröder had insisted on her giving all the details, until a dark suspicion rose in her: she was horrified at the way he quizzed her, also about what she had been up to with Hubert, hm? At that point she had stood up and run away: never again, never again anything like confession. Never again, then rather chat with Erna Breuer, and at the Fischers’, Erwin’s parents, where one sometimes met such amusing, modish, flippant clerics, they would certainly have laughed if she had confessed to them: “I have committed adultery”—characters who could be expected at any time to indulge in a clerical striptease, they bragged about their no-risk love affairs, sometimes brought along their women. Chaos, disintegration, all around—and the fear, not for one’s life, not
on account of the scandal, fear for Helga, and for Hubert, for whom it was as serious as it was for her, couldn’t be anything but serious, and who had apparently had more luck at confession than she had.

Fear, too, of losing her neighbors, the growing resentment in Blorr, which, because of her, had become a “den of cops.” Ever since that business of Pliefger’s birthday cake, the controls had been stepped up. As a result, the love affair of her neighbor Erna Breuer with one of her husband’s drivers had been burst wide open; a nice, pleasant woman, pretty too, not exactly young, probably in her middle or late thirties, with whom one could have a chat across the fence about flowers and cleaning and recipes, who could be asked over for coffee, who, before the controls were stepped up, used occasionally to look after Kit, pass across a head of lettuce or a cauliflower, a perfectly ordinary woman who suffered a bit melodramatically from her childlessness, deploring her “barren womb”—“It’s not my husband, you see, he has children from his first marriage, it’s me”; a nice woman, that Erna Breuer, grew up in Hubreichen, daughter of Hermes, the farmer from whom Rolf got his milk, a dark, now rather buxom beauty, who also complained that “My old man never takes me dancing,” so they had been invited a few times, when there was a party in the garden with dancing, beside the swimming pool, with paper lanterns and fruit punch, champagne and general jollification, and Erwin had swung Erna Breuer around, and the flushed, breathless Erna Breuer had been ecstatic, and her husband, not exactly young either, probably in his early fifties, was also ecstatic, beaming at the sight of his Erna having a real good fling. A wonderful evening, their other neighbors had been invited too, Klober, owner of the cartage company, with wife and daughter, a seventeen-year-old who went in for the “topless” fashion; and Helmsfeld, the paper’s editor, who held forth learnedly, somewhat too learnedly for most of the guests, on terrorism. Even the Blums had come, and the Beeretzes had sent their oldest son, who danced with her quite often. Erna Breuer had been happy that evening,
and with a tolerant smile her husband had overlooked the fact that she allowed herself to be kissed in a quiet corner by Helmsfeld, who, after the others had left, stayed on for coffee and praised—a bit too patronizingly, she felt—Mrs. Breuer’s “vulgar eroticism.”

But then Zurmack and Lühler had been struck by the rather too frequent presence, usually between ten and twelve in the morning, of a gray Mercedes outside the Breuer house. A boyish-looking man in his late twenties would get out, dressed not quite as might have been expected of a normal visitor to the Breuers’: a little too casually, not in jeans but in corduroys, his hair slightly longer than was by now accepted as smart by the weeklies and by the police; not exactly unkempt, this fellow, but: he wasn’t your average, accepted “long-hair” and, as Zurmack put it, showed a “suspicious nonchalance,” had a way of moving his shoulders and legs known to Zurmack only from demonstrations and riots in the films shown to the police for the study of “certain types.” He didn’t look like a hippie, or a disco type, such things are hard to describe, it was just that his movements were something more than youthful and casual: Zurmack had seen something “political” in them.

This visitor came at least twice a week, and it was easy to tell from the license plate that it was one of Breuer’s business cars, that this young man ran all kinds of errands for Breuer, to banks, customers, government offices, other firms (Breuer owned a watch and jewelry business, which, as it turned out, was on the verge of bankruptcy, he had overextended himself in building his new house, and anyway the watch business was in a serious slump). Discreet, very discreet inquiries had naturally been made about this young man: his name was Peter Schubler, he had dropped out of the study of sociology, had taken part in demonstrations, had once been photographed throwing tomatoes. It so happened that the Breuer house was very near the “Fisherman’s Shack”—sometimes the women waved to each other from kitchen to kitchen, and from the Breuers’ terrace there was an unimpeded view of the Fischers’ swimming
pool. That was reason enough to wonder whether Schubler wasn’t actually spying out the land, and the next time the gray Mercedes stopped outside the Breuer house Zurmack followed him five minutes later, rang, waited politely, waited, rang—and then there were angry, raised voices, till, finally, after the third ring, Schubler opened the door, dressed “not quite correctly,” as it was tactfully reported, and Erna Breuer appeared in her housecoat, made a scene—in fact, it was exactly what used to be called a “compromising situation.” This person, she said, cool as you please, was her lover, and there was nothing illegal about that. She must insist that her husband be told nothing about it. But lover—that might also be merely a camouflage. Those types were capable of anything, and to play the lover of such a pretty woman was a role none of them would have found too difficult.

Of course it got out, Breuer didn’t think it was at all nice, it really was going much too far, he split up with Erna—a routine, painful scandal with terrible consequences and with hatred for the Fischers, for “If we hadn’t been living in a place that was always swarming with cops, it would never have got out.” Then other neighbors were made jittery too by “all this everlasting fuss over security.” Who does like it, anyway, always having the police all over the place with their transceivers and cameras on the street? Blorr, this hamlet with its twelve farmhouses and four bungalows, the old chapel and the old vicarage, was so tiny anyway that it was easy enough to observe everything that was going on; and “Who,” said Helmsfeld, “doesn’t have his secrets, or some friend whose way of moving can be read as political rather than a matter of style?” He himself, for instance, had a girlfriend, Erika Pöhler, aged about thirty, and she had been, if not exactly interrogated, certainly questioned a few times because she so often drove to Blorr, in the type of car known as a “student’s car,” and although Erika was leftist and a sociologist, she had no hankering—either theoretical or even vaguely practical—after any form of violence.

Klober, the cartage-company owner, also became jittery
after Erna Breuer’s love affair was exposed. People in big cars often turned up at his place, usually between ten and twelve in the morning, business friends, customers, and, as Hubert later explained to her, “Klober may well be involved in all kinds of deals, smuggling maybe, certainly tax fraud, perhaps worse, and an inspection of his visitors and their business is bound to make him jittery.”

Between their house and the Klobers’ there were only the four garages, and from the bathroom window one had an unobstructed view of eighteen-year-old Friedel Klober doing her “topless thing” on the terrace. She had once caught Erwin in the bathroom staring at the girl through his binoculars, and he didn’t even put them down when she suddenly came in, merely confining himself to the remark: “My God, she certainly has two good reasons to sit there like that.…”

No, things weren’t what they used to be with the neighbors—Helmsfeld complaining, the disaster at the Breuers’, and the Klobers pointedly frosty. And weren’t the local people already cooler, almost unfriendly, in their manner? Hadn’t there been a coolness, if not outright hostility, when she went to fetch the milk with Kit, and wasn’t that why she had recently been sending Miss Blum for the milk? Only the Blömers seemed unaffected, or at least to feel unaffected: as soon as the house was ready they wanted to give a big party. Blorr was no longer quiet and idyllic—but maybe it would be so again when she was gone, and maybe she would come back for a visit, for tea at the Helmsfelds’ or for coffee at the Blums’ or the Beeretzes’—and would find that Blorr was its old self again, and it was time once and for all to put aside the thought of suicide: there was Kit now, and the new baby, there was Hubert, and the desire to live somewhere—where?—without guards. To emigrate, and live somewhere unknown and unrecognized with Kit and the new baby, by the sea, abroad, with an allowance from Erwin and something extra from Father, and perhaps take up some
work: translating or knitting, or both. She had always been told how good her French was, and as for knitting, she had really learned that, no one could have taught her better than Käthe, than Mama. Emigrate, knit, translate. Father would see to it that she received commissions, she must get away from Blorr, away from Germany.

Rohner emerged from between garages and front door and quietly, very politely, asked her to leave the terrace, to go into the house if she didn’t mind, and to close the terrace door. She nodded and went in, closing the door; dusk was beginning to fall. The certainty that she must leave Blorr today was painful, and she started to cry, letting the tears fall, and drew the curtain. She had loved this village, and the house, which was a little too stylish for her, too open, with too much glass; the trees of Blorr, those old oaks, the beech trees and chestnuts, the walks with Kit, fetching milk and baking bread, the farmhouses—it had been at least some compensation for Eickelhof. Riding in the mornings; taking the horse out of the Hermannses’ stable, saddling it, and off across the fields, through the woods.

Erwin had insisted on notifying the press of her pregnancy, now that she had to give up riding for a while and certainly wouldn’t be able to train for the championship. Besides, someone would have had to ride with her, some police officer who was used to horses. That wouldn’t have been any fun. In the past, too, she had sometimes decided at the last moment to go to a concert in the evening, especially when that young Russian was performing, the one who played Beethoven so magnificently—or to an exhibition, she had seen reproductions of a young painter who was having a show. But ever since she had had to “give advance notice,” request security, so to speak, it wasn’t fun anymore.

What would the locals think when it got out that she wasn’t pregnant by Erwin at all, but by a police officer, the strictest, the youngest of the last-but-one group, by the man none of them cared for that much? He was so serious, and so solemn, “totally
devoid of humor,” Hermanns had said of him because he had forbidden Hermanns’s son to play with old war material, not because it was dangerous but because it was illegal. The boy wandered through the woods, shrubs, and fields, looking for objects left over from World War II, and no one could say that wasn’t dangerous either, seeing how many people—farmers and children—had been injured, some of them blown to bits, by old shells; she defended Hubert vehemently—perhaps too vehemently?—over this. Yes, Hubert was serious, as she was, he couldn’t just take such things lightly. And Blorr, it was no longer pleasant, going for a walk under guard, fetching the milk under guard, going under guard to the chapel where she used to enjoy taking flowers to the Blessed Virgin, saying the
Ave Maria
under guard, chatting with the locals about God, the world, cattle, children, the weather, Church and state—under guard. The breakup of a neighborhood. Erna Breuer’s dire fate, which was quite obviously a consequence of her being guarded; now she was cooped up with that Schubler in his one-and-a-half-room apartment, looking for work, not finding any, Schubler looking for work, not finding any. Breuer’s divorce was under way, Breuer had finally gone bankrupt, the house next door was empty, up for sale, and now, because it was empty, under stepped-up surveillance, with even potential buyers being investigated; the disgruntled agent even hinted he might sue for damages, letting it be known that naturally the value of the house had dropped ever since Blorr had become a “police hangout.” There was even talk of a citizens’ group said to have been formed by those who had suffered loss or damage as a result of the security measures, and that the Klobers were supposed to have joined it; this organization was reputed to have spread to other areas, there being many people who had suffered in this way.