The Safety Net

  “Has Grebnitzer been talking?”

  “No, Bleibl told us, of all people—he read it in some sports supplement—Grebnitzer then merely told us the month—is that so bad? Why weren’t we supposed to know? Don’t you want the baby?”

  “Oh I do, I do …” Crazy to say such a thing about a baby.

  “Then what is it, something to do with Erwin?”

  A nod—with the front door open, in the hall, a mere nod that said much and nothing, too much and nothing. How could she explain to Käthe how dreadful she always felt after performing her duty, after, not even so much during or before, but after, when he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, couldn’t lie still and be silent for even a minute—and before, those expert caresses he had learned by heart, of which none, not one, was genuine, that “man of the world” pretense, that “experienced lover” pretense, whereas Hubert—involuntarily her thoughts went to Hubert, and it made her ill, yes, that might be wicked and for all she cared it was—whereas Hubert, when he stroked her eyebrows or pushed her hair back from her forehead or shyly touched the tip of her nose, whereas Hubert was always so nice beforehand, so quiet, so tender, and afterward so serious, so calm—and with Erwin those wretched, miserable jokes, all of which, all, he dreamed up from traffic reports on the radio with hardly even a semblance of variety: “There we’ve gone again, failing to give right-of-way—ha-ha-ha!”

  “This time we really took the curve at seventy”—could she ever explain to Käthe, could she have explained to anyone, say a divorce-court judge, what these stereotype jokes did to her after making the supreme effort of performing that strange duty? He was obviously so fond of those jokes that they had now become a necessity to him. Joke before: “Got off for the weekend—no speed limit, no traffic jams!” Joke after: “Through construction area—traffic jam avoided—ha-ha-ha!”

  “Problems with Erwin?” Käthe asked. “And in your sixth month? Isn’t that normal, child—I mean, serious enough, but not final, surely?”

  “Oh, Mama, I can’t go on living with him, I can’t stand him anymore.… I’m driving back with you right now to Tolmshoven, with Kit of course and”—she gave a bitter laugh—“with my knitting.”

  “What nonsense—can’t go on living with him, can’t stand him—that’s not unusual with pregnant women—so they go off to their mother for a few weeks!”

  “That’s exactly what I intend to do, just wait till Kit brings her dolls.”

  “You mean, no cup of tea, no little chat with your mama?”

  “No, no tea, and we can chat on the way, and at home. And, Mama—haven’t you learned to count yet—if I’m in my sixth month, when did I—well, let’s come right out with it—when did I conceive?”

  “Five months ago, I would think.”

  She looked confused, this dear, elderly lady, who had grown prettier, more dignified with age, and was the only one among all the “boardroom biddies,” as Erwin called them—and in this oddly enough, he agreed with Rolf—the only one who had real style, who had taste and dignity, though not always with regard to her hair, as a girl she must have dreamed of having little curls and would sometimes have her hair done that way. But otherwise, in her dress, gestures, speech, and movements, she had style—yet she was only the daughter of a bankrupt nursery gardener from Iffenhoven who had ruined himself with experiments in tulips and roses because he was no good at figures—and figures were something his daughter Käthe had never mastered either, although she sorely needed to. And she had no idea how to count in this particular category, had never understood why people laughed when a baby arrived five or six months after the wedding, had never understood that they—well, that’s to say, before the wedding—although she herself, if Rolf wasn’t one of those famous seven-month babies, had obviously, that’s to say, before the wedding—and bless her, surely she must know that nine months are nine months, and five are five, and that, if she was now in her sixth, she couldn’t possibly be pregnant by Erwin—as Miss Blum had known, of course—yet during the summer Käthe herself had often joked about Erwin being away so frequently and so long.

  “No, I’ve got to leave today, right now, and you can lend me some needles and wool—and don’t you remember where Erwin was five months ago?”

  Perhaps that was too harsh, too direct, for Käthe—her jaw fell, she turned pale, dropped the bag of cookies—on the very spot where for the last time, when saying goodbye, she had given herself to him, between the cloakroom mirror and the door to the toilet, where the revolting advertisement for the Beehive—the Fischer family business—hung on the wall, showing a naked woman entering the opening of a beehive and emerging fully dressed from the other side. “Beehive Outfits Eve!” and now, facing her mother, it struck her that there was a psychological error in this poster: who would want to enter a beehive, where normally one wouldn’t be outfitted but stung? And now Käthe understood, color came back into her face, she took off her glasses, picked up the bag of cookies, and said: “Oh no, child, not you—not you …” and fortunately didn’t ask the obvious question: “Who was it?”

  “Oh yes,” she said calmly, “me. Maybe I’ll explain it to you sometime—but now let’s get going, Mama dear, Kit’s brought her dolls …” and she longed to throw some of Erna Breuer’s words at that innocent, shocked-Mama face; she preferred them to Erwin’s sayings or the Fischers’ vocabulary, and she knew: something else urged her on—Hubert was in Tolmshoven, and she simply must talk to him, and of course she would never reveal his name, if only for Helga’s and Bernhard’s sakes—never!

  And also—why not think of that too, it occurred to her—for the sake of his career. He probably wouldn’t actually be fired, but he’d be likely to run into trouble if it got out—she supposed they didn’t like such things happening while the men were on duty.

  “All right then,” said Käthe, “let’s leave, let’s go, I’d also like to get back to Tolm as quickly as possible, he’ll be dog-tired, need comforting—and now I suppose we enter inevitably upon Phase One,” whispering suddenly: “Has she ever phoned again?”

  “No.”

  “But she phoned me. Got me at Kohlschröder’s, and d’you know what she said: ‘Don’t ever have tea at the Bleibls’.’ That’s all she said, and when I said to her: ‘Come back, child, come back,’ she answered: ‘I can’t, I can’t, I wish I could’—and hung up.”

  Kit was consoled with cookies, with the prospect of walks with Grandfather, of roasting chestnuts over an open fire. Miss Blum actually wept—not sadly, just wept, so that Käthe gave her a searching look, and Miss Blum asked: “What’ll I do with the milk?”

  “Ask my husband whether he’d like some milk or milk puddings, otherwise take it to Mr. Hermsfeld’s or put it out for the cats in the empty Breuer house. Don’t cry.”

  She asked the driver to stop for a moment at the chapel, went in, wiped her eyes, was now calm, almost composed; she would leave Hubert out of it altogether, if he agreed. That would be better for Helga, for Bernhard, for his approaching First Communion; there were enough flowers for the Madonna; the Beeretzes, Miss Blum, and the Hermanns women would look after that, during Rosary month, sometimes they even held a Rosary service without a priest and she had sometimes gone too.

  “Fine,” she said as she got in the car again. “It’ll be lovely with Grandfather. You can feed the ducks again.”

  And although the driver could listen, a stranger whom she didn’t know, Käthe said: “You, child, you of all people!” She shook her head and whispered: “Before marriage, oh well—when you’re fond of each other and intend to marry—but while married, with another man!”

  3

  Blurtmehl had everything ready, had adjusted the temperature of the water and stirred in the bath oil, helped him to undress, in particular to untie his shoelaces; stooping down made him feel panicky, and Grebnitzer had advised him to avoid stooping. Jacket, trousers, underwear, he could still manage all that himself, wouldn’t accept any help, only his socks and shoes, Bl
urtmehl was needed there again, had to help him into the bathtub too, half lifting him as he murmured: “Lost weight, I see, a little lighter again, I don’t have to weigh you, I can feel it—six, maybe seven hundred grams.” And needless to say, the instant his feet and bottom touched the water he felt the urge to urinate (always those vain attempts to deal with that in advance!) and, wrapped in a bath towel, he had to use the adjoining toilet while Blurtmehl checked the temperature of the water with his left hand, let in a little more hot water, and added another dash of bath oil.

  He had had the bathtub positioned in such a way and the window set low enough so that he could at least see the treetops, the sky, which was never completely blue. Today the wind seemed to be blowing from the southwest. The emissions from the power stations, already turned to clouds, moved across the sky, the effect was idyllic, as evocative of nature as in some Dutch paintings, or early Gainsboroughs and Constables—yet twelve kilometers to the west they had still been massive pillars of smoke, harmless—as Kortschede had sworn to him by all that was holy—and consisting only of steam, which happened to form clouds, make weather. Only when the wind blew from the north or northwest—which it very seldom did—was the sky clear, cloudless, it was always gray; only on very rare days—he never counted them though he had often intended to—blue.

  Blurtmehl sat on the stool beside the bathtub, knowing that he couldn’t bear anything or anybody behind him, knowing also that that sense of panic had its origins in the war, in a few very sudden retreats that might have been called flight. To be shot at from behind was worse than being shot at from the front. But perhaps—this was Blurtmehl’s intelligent theory—it was also a Sparta complex that had been instilled into him at school and could never be eradicated, a fear of disgrace. If he was right, it must lie very deep, not quite so deep as the milk soup, confession, the “alone or with others”; he had never felt disgrace, always felt fear. They did get him once, and it had been his salvation, taking him to Dresden, to a military hospital, that was where he had found Käthe; besides, the wound had been ideal, made to order so to speak, and right on time; not dangerous, not very painful, yet not so insignificant that one got stuck in some field hospital. In Dresden he had merely been afraid that someone might find out that he, the battery commander, had issued a standing order: “When they come, as soon as you see them: beat it, scram!” At least he had stayed, like a captain on his ship, till the last moment and had taken along only his cigarettes, pistol, and map, staggered by that overwhelming superiority of tanks and infantry—far from being “ragged Russians” they were all in clean uniforms. Apparently no one had denounced him, not even his Lieutenant Plohn, who always spoke of final victory but obviously no longer believed in it. Dresden, Käthe.

  Today again at breakfast, on the final day of the conference, before going downstairs “into the labyrinth,” as Käthe called it, “to face the Minotaur”—today he was again struck by the resemblance between Käthe’s eyes and Rolf’s. Hers were a little lighter, the merest shade lighter, but they also had that quality of poetic sorrow, barely disguised by an optimism masking despair. At the time she had advised him to sell the paper immediately, to keep Eickelhof, and to become a museum director, a minister of culture, or at least the head of a cultural section—he might have had that chance: the British had found him acceptable, and he would have found some political party; his erroneous and harrowing internment had even enhanced his credit, and he really had never been a Nazi—was that mere chance? He wasn’t quite clear about that: of course he had found them totally revolting, beyond discussion, and for years, under the countess’s patronage, he had managed to make a living as a private tutor and curator, in mansions and archives, cataloguing private art collections and occasionally publishing something in a journal, until the war came and he landed in the artillery.

  Fear was already known to him in the years before that, on his occasional sorties from libraries and archives, from improvised schoolrooms, in search of a girl perhaps, or a woman. He recalled the baronial archives, the episcopal librarians, the “dreamers” in clerical institutions who had been the nicest; recalled the compassion shown him by young schoolteachers and waitresses, and by him to them, no doubt; recalled the wistful longing in the eyes of many a baroness that had filled him with fear, though he had engaged in “let’s take pity on each other” with a countess; after all, though, Gerlind hadn’t been married. He had never been subjected to any direct political pressure, and he still had no idea whether and to what extent he would have succumbed to such pressure, hadn’t known even when he took over the paper; he found his political impeccability uncanny, and the British found it incomprehensible, they simply had to accept it. Sometimes—briefly—he speculated on those potential careers as museum director, or minister of state, resident in Eickelhof, and surely they would have had enough to live on that way too, and many things might, might have turned out differently, Rolf might not have gone to prison, Sabine would never have met that fellow Fischer, and Herbert might have become a little more realistic; perhaps even Veronica and Heinrich might—oh well, perhaps they had all gone a bit too far laughing at his “little paper,” he, Käthe, the children, and his friends—head of a museum, that would have been the right thing, minister less so, that would have landed him right in all that Party crap.

  It suddenly occurred to him that Veronica always phoned Käthe, never him, and that made him laugh: could it be that he was jealous because she never phoned him, only Sabine and Käthe, not even Rolf, of whom she was probably afraid? And of course not—even for kicks—that fellow Fischer, he had only phoned him once himself, in dire necessity, begging him somehow, please somehow, to arrange for Rolf to earn a little money at the Beehive, even if only as a packer or a sweeper. No, Fischer had categorically refused because they had named their little boy Holger even after it had happened, and Fischer made it very clear that he had no intention of allowing his workers “to be contaminated by a person like that.” But, come to think of it, there had been a Holger Danske, there was also a minister-president by that name and, last but not least, Holger Count Tolm, who, somewhere between Málaga and Cádiz, was trying (usually in vain, so he had been told) to seduce female tourists, preferably English and Swedish but in a pinch German too. Well, perhaps it was a needless defiance to call another son Holger when one already had a son by that name.

  Why did Veronica never phone him? He had never done anything to hurt her, she had always been nice to him, and he to her, although he had never done what Käthe and Herbert probably had: given her money. Käthe was surprisingly open-handed when it came to spending money, was more generous than he, and that could hardly be due to environment. His father had on principle spent half his meager salary on land, on poor soil, in his insatiable greed for acreage. Käthe’s father had also been no more than a permanently bankrupt nurseryman, her mother had secretly worked nights cleaning in stores, secretly because the neighbors mustn’t be allowed to know what everyone knew: that she worked as a cleaning woman. That had all been very modest, even more modest than their own lives, yet she was quite without inhibitions or complexes, felt neither shame nor triumph when she sometimes spent considerable sums at the dressmaker’s or took a taxi to Café Getzloser.

  He was sure Sabine hadn’t given Veronica any money, Fischer would see to that, he kept her pretty short. He’d only do something, give something, if it improved his image: horses and clothes for pictures of Sabine, sometimes with, sometimes without Kit, that dear little granddaughter of his whom he so seldom saw. Fischer had coolly arranged for her to be voted “most charming child of the month,” in May, in a riding habit, barely four years old. The “most charming child of the month” was Fischer’s invention: the pictures were published in illustrated weeklies, in Sunday supplements, even his own paper was not exempt, those adorable little creatures popped up on all sides, always displaying Beehive fashions, and Beehive, as almost everyone knew, stood for: Fischer. Sometimes nostalgic, recalling a Renoir or
a Rubens, sometimes provocative, as if already in training for striptease, leather-clad and languid, then again exotic, Sicilian, Andalusian—now even Russian in anticipation of the Olympics. The most charming child of the month always wore Beehive, and from among the twelve would be chosen the most charming child of the year; and it had to be Bleibl who had seen it in the paper, told him that Sabine was pregnant again, an item in connection with some equestrian event! Amplanger had sent up the clipping: “Sabine Fischer, one of our greatest hopes, has unfortunately had to withdraw as she is expecting.” That was how he discovered that a new baby was on the way, and he could imagine how Rolf, on reading it, would feel like “throwing up” yet grind his teeth with glee at the unmasking of the system, “the inexorably mounting prostitutional elements of the system.”

  Blurtmehl let out some bath water—added more hot, asked him to exercise his legs: true enough, this was easy in the water, they became light and would probably have stayed light had his paper not weighed like lead in his limbs—a light-footed museum director and a light-footed—no, not minister, but perhaps state secretary. Those birds against the gray sky with the deceptively white clouds, those idyllic formations for which they had to thank the power stations: the clouds moving along as if created by God’s own hand, white, calm, richly varied, yet they came from Hetzigrath, must have been brought forth by the coal that had lain below Eickelhof, also created by God’s hand that it might bring forth divine clouds, almost a fine afternoon, already poetically darkened by the dusk. Even swallows flew into his field of vision; among all the swifts, the swallows were his favorites, especially the house martins, nimble, beautiful birds, skillful and intelligent. But his special favorites were the soarers: buzzards, falcons, hawks. He loved the falcons that were still nesting in the tower: where would they fly to when Kortschede’s prediction came true? Soaring and sailing through the sky with scarcely a wingbeat. And over and over again the thought of the owl taking off from the tower when dusk began to fall and flying toward the edge of the forest, soundlessly, with a round wingbeat. Sometimes, too, he saw pigeons from Kommertz’s dovecote—how strange: he didn’t like pigeons, didn’t like their cooing and clucking as they nested in wall crannies, didn’t like their flight, and wondered why he preferred the birds of prey: watching them in the gray, white-streaked square of sky from his bathtub while Blurtmehl felt his pulse at intervals, and nodded, which meant: no need to worry.