The Safety Net

  “Blurtmehl,” he said suddenly, from the depths of his musings, “do you believe in God, in this—in Jesus Christ?”

  “Yes, of course, sir—do you?”

  In terms of protocol, this riposte was an impertinence, completely at odds with the manservant tradition, it must be a Socialist Party element, and it really did go a little too far; also it was a shock because it was so unprecedented in Blurtmehl, yet he replied: “I do, Blurtmehl, I do too, even if I’m not quite sure who He is and where—but let me ask you one more question, forgive me if I seem too personal—what surprises you most about this strange world?”

  “What surprises me most,” said Blurtmehl, as if he hadn’t had to think about it at all, had kept the reply to such a surprising question always up his sleeve, so to speak, “what surprises me most is the patience of the poor.”

  That went deep, made him fall silent, was a truly surprising answer that couldn’t have anything to do with the Socialist Party after all. The answer was older, went deeper, must have dwelled within Blurtmehl, and it hadn’t even been uttered in sadness: “the patience of the poor”—true, penetrating words from the lips of a masseur. And he was tempted to ask, but he refrained, it would have been too crude, too abominably stupid, this question: “Do you count yourself among the poor?” Besides, he was afraid to put the question, because the answer, which surely could only be no, might not be so certain after all. What if Blurtmehl had said yes—what a philosophical debate on poverty would have ensued, and he would have had to haul out his youthful struggle with poverty—which he hated doing, had never done even with his children, nor with Käthe incidentally: the constant hunger in his student days, and when he came home for the weekends no more milk soup, only potatoes, in every shape and form, mostly—because that was cheapest—in the form of potato salad, whereas if they were boiled some sort of sauce was needed and if they were fried at least a few scraps of margarine; because his father was going crazier all the time, diverting more and more of his salary to his wretched land purchases, stinting on heat and light—oh, those fifteen-watt bulbs in kitchen and basement, twenty-five-watt, at most, in the living room.

  “Poor,” Blurtmehl volunteered, “is what I would call someone who owns no part of this earth, and”—he smiled almost condescendingly—“I do own half the property occupied by my girlfriend’s store.” He went rapidly through the finishing movements, passed his hands once more over him, then gave a pat to bottom and shoulders, and said, this time genuinely distressed: “I would have continued with the treatment, but I sense some resistance to me, perhaps a lack of trust.”

  “No, no,” he said, while Blurtmehl handed him his underwear and shirt. “No, neither resistance nor distrust. I am merely speculating on who will get me, who and how, so I am going through everyone in my mind—even my sons, my wife, my daughters-in-law—all my friends, my enemies—and you too, of course—maybe you happened to catch me at this thought.”

  “But who would want to kill you? There’s no earthly reason.”

  “Just because there is no reason—or can you see any reason or motive linked to certain people? Mr. Pliefger is the nicest boss and family man you can imagine—it’s not directed at individuals—in their way they are technocrats, separating business from emotions—I’m sure they still have emotions, maybe they are as nice as we are.”

  The trousers he could manage, but not his socks and shoes, these he let Blurtmehl put on and lace up. Kneeling before him, Blurtmehl glanced up and said: “Yes, there’s no such thing as security—and yet there has to be a security system. By the way, this weekend I’ll take the liberty of introducing my friend Miss Klensch to you, if you have no objection. Your wife has kindly offered to put her up.”

  “Oh, I’m glad to hear that, I hope she’s staying in the manor?”

  “Your wife and Mr. Kulgreve were kind enough to place the guest apartment at her disposal.”

  After Blurtmehl had brought in the tray with tea, toast, butter, lemon, and caviar, Käthe came into the room, looking tired, pale, a rare thing with her. He had seldom seen her pale, the last time had been at the news of Rolf’s arrest, then again when it became certain that Veronica had gone underground. And she had hardly ever looked so tired, almost old; he kissed her, was about to ask: “Anything wrong?” but she caressed his shoulder and said: “Don’t take it too hard, I realize you’ve never been able to say no—and they won’t harm you, not you … you’re so humane, and they know it.…”

  “That’s one very good reason to harm me—just that, believe me.”

  They had been advised not to use the terrace—it had been found to “jut out too far,” to be too “open,” too plainly visible from the edge of the forest, the tall trees, “like a rifle range” Holzpuke had said (and Tolm had just recently had heating and automatic windows installed because he loved to sit there, particularly in fall and winter, and wait for the owl)—and Tolm hadn’t wanted to close off the forest and the park, free access being an ancient right (not even the stingiest and stupidest of the Tolm counts had ever denied the people that), and of course it was impossible to check up on each individual going for a walk there, there were so many, even from nearby villages, especially at weekends—so they had to stay indoors, to sit side by side over their tea, both looking out onto the park and toward the edge of the forest: “Just like at the movies or the theater!” Käthe had said.

  She poured the tea, spread butter and caviar on toast for him. It still tasted good to him, it always did, and he couldn’t help looking into her eyes, deep and long, and there he discovered fear. She had seldom known fear, seldom in war or peace; fear of the low-flying planes, yes, and of the “Nazis and Protestants” in Dresden. Anger and rage: yes, over the loss of Eickelhof, sadness at the obliteration of Iffenhoven, where for six generations her ancestors had been buried. Fear rarely, not even when Rolf behaved so stupidly. Some people thought her cool and a bit apathetic, and no doubt that’s how she seemed when she had to take part in official functions. She didn’t do that very often, and only for his sake, she found it boring and time-consuming—on such occasions she was indeed cool but not apathetic, he would have called it imperturbable; she would say little, was quite the lady, wasn’t particularly impressed by ministers, presidents, or heads of staff, found the Shah “so dull as to be almost interesting,” and Banzer “more trite than God should ever permit,” those bloodhounds. She showed warmth only toward waiters and chefs, sought them out, praised the food, asked for recipes and how to prepare them, laughed with the cloakroom girl, chatted with the washroom attendants; and a shade of contempt came into her expression when she had to listen to dinner speeches or toasts to herself. Of course she was never rude, yet her manner toward dignitaries—and there was plenty of “top brass” around, as she expressed it—was always a trifle patronizing, almost contemptuous, in any case cool and imperturbable.

  She had got along quite nicely with a few of the “boardroom biddies,” but over the years there had been many divorces and one lost sight of the first, second, and third wives. Käthe always complained about all these divorces: “Hardly have you got to know and like one of them, had a cup of tea and a chat, gone shopping with her—and she takes off as a divorcee to Garmisch or the Côte d’Azur, and a new one pops up, some blonde with a cute bottom and wide eyes, or a brunette with wide eyes and a cute bottom, with bosoms, without—hardly as old as your own daughter. God, how much you men must have missed in your lives in the way of bosoms, bottoms, and wide eyes! Bleibl’s Number Four, for instance, is a rather stupid, dangerously stupid, bitch while his Number One was the nicest as well as the prettiest of the bunch—his Number Three, too, was a really good woman, quite charming, that Elisabeth, he seems to have bad luck with the even figures—his Number Two wasn’t bad but basically stupid. What’s the matter with them all—each time it’s going to be the truly deep, irrevocable love, do you believe that? I wonder what Bleibl’s Number Five will be like. Will she be another of those dumb sex symbols
, like his Number Four—and we’re supposed to have tea with her? I’m sure she knocks back her gin and tonic right after breakfast and then looks for a victim she can tantalize with her bosom. I’m convinced Bleibl gives her a good wallop every now and again.”

  He always blushed a little when she talked like that, usually in the car, openly in front of Blurtmehl, who would then take refuge behind a little cough; on the way home from a party or a reception where he even wore his decorations, the postwar ones, never the others; no, not that, he would have really been too ashamed in front of Käthe—besides, she had threatened him with divorce: “If you do that too”—good God, what else was he supposed to have done?—“if you do that too I’ll ask for a divorce!” He felt embarrassed enough wearing the new ones, but he had to—had to? asked Rolf, isn’t this a free country?—had to for the sake of his paper, and also of the Association, despite the fact that decorations, even the new ones, reminded him of the smell of Virginia cigarettes: he had exchanged his own, the one he had managed to sneak through the body search, for twelve cigarettes, but not even Käthe knew about this, no one knew that even on the most ceremonial occasions when heads of state or rulers, generals and Shah turned up, their chests covered with decorations—he would think of the cigarettes they might buy in a desperate situation; had to—just as he had had to sell Eickelhof, and he had never forgotten the incisive analysis of his “alleged freedom” by that miserable Beverloh—just as he would have to sell Tolmshoven in order to feed a new, cloud-forming power station.

  Whenever he saw Käthe again, even in the morning when he woke up, and at night when he reached out for her hand, he thought of the evening they had met in Dresden at the military hospital. In the corridor, in that grim gray hubbub, he had been heading for the exit, dressed to go out, hurrying to avoid unwelcome companions who were liable to force themselves upon him at any moment: all that blather in the ward about final victory, that stifling, labored confidence in victory in which his silence aroused suspicion, that scanning of a face to see whether it could be trusted—and how easily one could be fooled. He had asked for an early discharge as “fit for active service” so that he could go on leave and take the train home. His discharge papers in his pocket, he was determined to spend the night outside the hospital—and she had passed him in the corridor and stopped, pleasure in her expression, seized his sleeve, blushed, and said: “Excuse me, but—you here? Mr. Tolm?” And he looked down at her, a blond girl with a frank, open face, on the plump side, veiled gray eyes in contrast to the open cheerfulness of her expression, eyes from whose depths he never wanted to, never would, emerge, and he looked at her so intensely that she blushed again. He thought: My God, where do I know her from, am I supposed to know her, know her name? There was certainly something familiar about her. He smiled, having made up his mind to spend the night with her—“somehow.” She said: “I’m Käthe Schmitz, from Iffenhoven, my brother Heinrich was a friend of your brother Hans, and our fathers once had a lawsuit, remember?” Yes, that was it, the nursery garden in Iffenhoven that Hans sometimes went off to, and Father had once again acted too hastily in a bankruptcy case, had been less than aboveboard in an attempt to grab yet another piece of land too cheaply. Yes, that lawsuit with Schmitz, and Hans had complained that his friendship with Heinrich had suffered from it.

  That’s right, Käthe Schmitz from Iffenhoven—somehow, somehow her face had seemed familiar—he must have seen her occasionally, in church (where—at that very time—he sometimes pointedly went in spite of Nuppertz), or in a procession—perhaps at a dance at the vicarage, and there in the corridor in Dresden he asked whether she wouldn’t like to go out with him, get away from this vast, stifling hospital, and she had come closer, held his arm again, and said: “Oh, I’d love to, I’m just suffocating here among all these Nazis and Protestants!” Alarmed, she released his arm: “Oh my goodness, perhaps you’re one of them!”—and he had merely shaken his head, taken her arm, and said: “If you can get away, it would really give me so much pleasure.” He sighed, he knew what was bound to happen, how it would end; he was attracted by more than her eyes. “All right,” she said, “I’m prepared to go AWOL if I must—wait for me at Admittance.”

  Two hours down in the lobby, waiting: typewriters clacking, ambulances being dispatched, sick and wounded arriving, stretchers being carried, screams, pathetic objects—no, certainly not victors—clinging to their mess kits, humbly supplying personal details, showing papers; twice Käthe came to report, she was looking for someone to take her place in the lab where she worked, then at last she arrived, nicely turned out in print blouse and tweed skirt, a fur hat and a soft-blue coat that didn’t go at all with the rest of her outfit, and her obvious pleasure was a delight in itself. She wanted so desperately to go out, to go dancing again, without being constantly propositioned, pawed, accosted.

  They went to one of those cavernous soldiers’ dives that smelled of beer, dancing, and collapse, in those dirty, cynical surroundings that smelled of war’s end and disintegration. Later he confessed to having been determined to spend the night with her, and she confessed that she must have wanted the same thing but had lacked the nerve to admit it to herself—a little afraid of him because of that affair with the young countess and the ruckus in the confessional, that Lothario myth that was still making the rounds of the villages. For God’s sake, afraid of him! He had to laugh, wanted to go off with her, never mind where, wanted to stay with her, look into her eyes and not only into her eyes, he wanted to have her, keep her, and he told her so when the beer haze, the blare, the smell of collapse became too much for them: the fug from sweaty uniforms, from cavorting hookers; there was even a market for girls who would marry you to get you some leave, if you gave them a few hundred marks and the wedding rations—sugar and margarine for the wedding cake—and later calmly let themselves be divorced as the guilty party. As for Käthe, she was disgusted by all that anyway, she had been a bookbinder, had taken a lab course and held a wartime job as a nurse’s aide: blood, urine, V.D. patients; and had landed up here where there was “nothing but Nazis and Protestants”—and roughly a hundred thousand sick and wounded—and no Zwinger Pavilion or River Elbe, no Royal Residence or baroque architecture, could compensate for the misery of whole armies of the maimed. And when they were finally outside, on the street, there remained only one question: “Where shall we go? I want to go with you, I mean it—I don’t care what you think of me—I want to!”

  Oh, how she hated that kissing and fumbling in corridors, corners, toilets, in prep rooms, even operating theaters, then rather some cheap hotel room, and she agreed, she just wanted to be alone with him, alone, and he with her, in that gray war’s-end turmoil, and of course there were “those rooms” wherever there were a hundred thousand soldiers, and finding a room was not nearly as difficult as in his panic he had feared. There were touts who could earn a few percent, amputees, veterans, consumptives who, when they saw a likely looking couple, whispered: “Looking for a love nest?” Yes, they were looking for a love nest, naturally there were differences in price, in category, differences in time: “For a couple of hours, or all night?” Yes, all night, and they found one with antlers, a Defregger reproduction, and a portrait of Katharina von Bora; not bad at all, the room not even dirty, it actually had a washstand. Oh, love nest—what comforting words in that lousy turmoil of war! He had expected tears, there were none, only later when she talked about her brother Heinrich, who was dead, and he about his brother Hans, who was dead too. The tears came later, at first there was only her fear of her “complete inexperience” that made her trust in his “experience,” though it turned out he wasn’t nearly as “experienced” as had been rumored in the villages. It was lovely to see her naked, to show himself naked to her, and she turned out to be the more experienced, while he was made awkward by joy, and there was reason to laugh about it, and to talk about it, about how men acquired a reputation for being Lotharios without being any such thing—there was cause to laugh
about the future, to laugh about her surprise at his actually having a Ph.D.; and he couldn’t get enough of her, had to laugh again and again, look into her eyes—oh, those cursed twenty-five-watt bulbs!—again and again, under antlers, Defregger, and Katharina von Bora, and the smell of autumn leaves drifting in through the open window from the courtyard.…

  The following morning, after attending to his ticket of leave, he simply took her with him, took her home, away from those “Nazis and Protestants,” took her to her father, who had managed to keep one greenhouse with two small adjoining rooms, briquet stove and sofa, and the old man laughed because she turned up with “young Tolm of all people,” and when she described herself as engaged the old man laughed with his stumps of teeth and his pipe in his mouth, placidly accepted, with a cheerful laugh, the tobacco they had brought him. In such a situation the old countess could be a great help, she had a telephone and knew the right people, she was in urgent need of a woman companion, now that she was on crutches, and the produce of her estate was “war essential”—the timber, the vegetables, and the potatoes growing in her park. The countess had Käthe released from her duties, engaged her, and said: “Fritz, I’d always hoped you would stick to Gerlind—but now you’ve found someone better: she’s good, clever, and beautiful—and so full of fun, she really peps me up.” By November they were married at the registry in Blückhoven.

  And before the end of the war, when he came home on leave again, she had whispered in his ear that “Something is already on the way.”

  “Not you, Tolm, they won’t harm you,” and passed him another piece of toast with caviar. “That really would be a disgrace.” “Disgrace,” he said, “isn’t the right word for them, they know no such thing as disgrace, no such thing as limits. Incidentally, do we know such a thing as disgrace? Do I, for instance, have a sense of disgrace now that our paper has swallowed up the Gerbsdorfer Bote? We grow and proliferate, swallow up one little newspaper after another—and I’m enjoying my tea, enjoying my caviar, I enjoy the view over the park, enjoy seeing you again, while Blume, who couldn’t keep the Gerbsdorfer Bote going anymore, may be thinking of suicide. It grows and grows, and you can’t stop it—Amplanger warned Blume as long as four years ago: the computer predicted Blume’s downfall exactly—and the publishing and printing house had been in the family for a hundred and fifty years; liberal tradition, an important contribution to democratic, even republican, ideas—and now it’s being absorbed by our paper, and we know how we feel about that.…”