She started to cry as she watched him cross the garden toward the gate, through the rain, with his shapeless peaked cap, his jacket collar turned up. He had forgotten the book Castro’s Path, it lay on the table beside the coffee cup.
She found that Sabine had taken the time to wash the vegetables and peel the potatoes, she needed only to put them on to boil and take the sausages out of the refrigerator. She was still crying when Rolf and the little boy came toward the house.
21
Hetzigrath looked as if the population had been evacuated and the emptied village placed under the strictest guard: at every street corner, uniformed police officers, plainclothesmen, near the cemetery some mounted police, the school playground between church and cemetery—also empty. They might even have given the schoolchildren the day off. Not a sign behind the windowpanes, not a sound; on the market square, at some corners, policemen with megaphones. Silence. Apparently an invasion had been expected that had not arrived: men with long hair, women in ankle-length coats, the so-called sympathizers, but apparently the invasion had not taken place. He was quite calm, Käthe tense, holding the wreath on her lap. Blurtmehl was not himself either: at every intersection he looked uneasily to right and left as if expecting something that hadn’t arrived. Behind the plate-glass window of Breilig the butcher he could see Breilig, one of his schoolmates; next to Breilig, a woman customer.
“You should have worn your coat after all,” said Käthe. “It’s chilly and damp.”
“I can’t wear my decorations on my coat, and I felt this was an occasion to wear them.”
Blurtmehl, who was well versed in matters of protocol, had said that of course decorations could be worn at funerals, but whether at this funeral he really couldn’t say. Certainly no sashes, Blurtmehl had said, and Käthe had also advised against the sashes but approved of his decision to wear his decorations. “I’m surprised at how many good ideas you’ve come up with in two days, Tolm,” she had said, “and fortunately the distance from the mortuary to the Beverloh grave isn’t far—thirty yards, fifty at most; not far from there are the graves of my grandparents, and their parents too, and there are as many Beverlohs buried there as Schmitzes, it’s one of the oldest families in the place; peasant stock.”
A helicopter circled above, then hovered almost directly overhead as Blurtmehl helped them out of the car. The decorations were fairly large, gold with some red in them, one of them quite garish, foreign, almost as big as a saucer. Instead of attaching the bars, as regulations required, he had removed the medals from their sashes, and Blurtmehl had attached them to his jacket with safety pins.
She insisted on carrying the wreath herself: yellow roses and lilac, no ribbon, but she allowed one of the gravediggers to hang it on the plain bier. It all went so fast that she could hardly get into step, and in no time the gravediggers had lifted the coffin onto the ropes placed in readiness and lowered it into the ground. The helicopter was hovering directly above them. Tolm whispered to her: “Say a prayer, Käthe,” and she murmured a Paternoster, then an Ave, threw some earth into the grave with a little shovel, handed the shovel to Tolm, looked at the gravestone. Most of the names were obscured by the freshly dug earth, she could read only the top line: “Ulrich Beverloh, Farmer in Eickelhof, 1801–1869.”
“Come,” she said, but Tolm did not move. He looked into the grave, up to the sky, back to Blurtmehl, who was talking in low tones to a police officer beside the chapel.
“Käthe,” he said, “there’s something I have to tell you.”
“Yes?”
“You know I have always loved you. And there’s something else you must know.”
“Yes, what is it?”
“That some form of socialism must come, must prevail.…”
The helicopter veered off as they walked back to the gate. Blurtmehl turned away from the officer; until that moment he had not recognized him as the young Lühler whom Holzpuke had introduced to him. He knew him only in plain clothes, in uniform he looked younger.
“You forgot,” said Käthe, “to give the gravediggers their tip.”
He walked back again, took out his wallet, and gave one of the men a hundred-mark bill. “That’s for the two of you,” he said. His attention was caught by the helicopter landing on the school playground. As he turned around, that young puppy of a photographer emerged from the chapel. He must have hidden there with Holzpuke’s consent, or even Dollmer’s—the same one who had caught him the other day after the election smoking a cigarette—and now he caught him full face: top hat in hand, medals on his chest, and behind him the gravediggers and the grave, on which the name Beverloh could be discerned. The boy didn’t grin, didn’t smile, showed no emotion as he took his shots, snapped him once more with Käthe as they were about to get into the car; snapped, snapped again. “He’ll do well,” he said to Käthe and Blurtmehl, “he’ll go a long way.”
He felt no apprehension until he saw Dollmer standing by the car, beside Blurtmehl, whose hand was on the door handle. Dollmer looked drained, utterly drained. He hesitated a moment as to whether he should approach Tolm or Käthe, then walked toward Käthe and said: “A day of bad news, dear lady—not only has your daughter, shall we say, run away with one of our officers—your grandson—the manor house is on fire—he must have somehow slipped past the guard in Hubreichen.”
“Is anyone hurt or in danger?” asked Käthe.
“No.”
“Then I could think of worse news,” she said before getting into the car. “Even the news about our daughter doesn’t strike me as bad.”
But she was surprised to hear Tolm laugh.
Heinrich Böll, The Safety Net
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