Read The Safety Net Page 15


  Did one have to eavesdrop on one’s children, take them by surprise, to discover their warmth, to gain insight into their lives? Another day, in turning the street corner on his way to the vicarage, he had seen Katharina, holding Holger by the hand, returning from her shopping, exchanging greetings with passersby, bending down to Holger, who seemed to be pulling some toy behind him and was holding a lollipop. In her left hand she was carrying what was obviously a very heavy shopping bag; a young woman like all the others, with red kneesocks, loose hair, and when she caught sight of him he had seen that sudden smile light up her face—such a spontaneous smile that once again he felt close to tears. He hastened toward her, relieved her of the shopping bag, was kissed, kissed Holger, and then watched her unpack her groceries in the house, arranging them in cupboards and on homemade shelves, while the boy pulled his wooden dachshund around in circles on the floor. He was given tea and a sandwich, and Katharina shook her head as she removed the packet of cigarettes he was reaching for—then, with a shrug, pushed it toward him again. Quite obviously she was fond of him: that sudden smile on her face out there on the street, the liver-sausage sandwich, the tea, the concern over his smoking: a young woman who might have been beautiful had it not been for that trace of austerity about her. He had no difficulty in imagining her as a nun—yet her good sense, intelligence, and sensitivity were limited to this village. Always, when he saw her, he had to think of her uncle, Hans Schröter, the Münzenberg Communist, whom Major Weller had sent him so long ago for his newspaper, his favorite among all the journalists he had come to know on his paper. He had even suggested to Hans Schröter that they use first names, but Schröter had refused, in a manner that was oddly cool and at the same time courteous, and it hadn’t occurred to any of the journalists who had interviewed him this morning to ask: “You were on first-name terms with Communists?”

  He had never managed to take Sabine by surprise in this way: at times she was more strictly guarded than he was himself, also because of Kit. So he had simply been driven there by Blurtmehl, the sixteen kilometers to Blorr (which—fortunately no one knew this, not even Käthe—had played a certain role in his doctoral thesis), disgusted by the new bungalows built on the outskirts of the little place that had once been regarded as a paradise of beech and chestnut trees. Each time he had run into the guards there, pursued by his own guards, and invariably he had been disgusted by the Fischer taste as expressed in copper and marble; Sabine had always seemed harried and tense. Of course they were happy to see him, Kit would be delighted, would want to go for a walk with him, loved to walk hand in hand with him to the farms, to the farmers who still remembered him as a student when he used to ride his bicycle around here, researching, sketching, photographing, noting measurements and construction dates, changes. Old Hermanns, particularly, enjoyed digging around “in the old days.” But all this acquired a loathsome artificiality due to the security people constantly trotting behind them, apparently at random but obviously instructed to keep them surrounded in swarms. Sometimes Sabine would weep, could give no reason for it, would simply weep, ask her neighbor over for tea—a dark, buxom, somewhat vulgar, pretty woman of soothing banality. That quiet, serious Sabine, his dearest daughter (did she know that he was so fond of her and couldn’t tell her?), would wince at the mere slamming of a car door outside, or when Kit threw something against something—perhaps it was better after all to be like Rolf, not guarded but merely under surveillance? Wasn’t this security, which was no security, being bought at too high a price?

  The days had long since gone when Sabine had been able to ride off on horseback as she pleased, and since the affair of Pliefger’s birthday cake it probably really was better to have groceries and other goods that were delivered to the house probed and checked, for by this time everything had happened, everything, and recently even packages of cigarettes had to be opened since the day one had exploded in Plotteti’s hands in Italy and severely injured him as he tore it open: mutilated hand, disfigured face, and there was the constant nuisance with the sherry bottles and their wrap-around labels that made it impossible to check the contents from outside: the fancy labels had to be soaked off the bottles, which, after all, might have been camouflaged Molotov cocktails.…

  No, Sabine didn’t have the peace of mind still to be found with Rolf and Katharina; she was, after all, the daughter-in-law of the Beehive, as well as his own daughter. The villa near Málaga didn’t help either, nor did she find any peace in skiing: the Sabine who had always found such joy in movement—riding and dancing—was becoming apathetic. Perhaps he added to her tension because his presence required a doubling of the guard, the surveillance around the house.

  What he enjoyed least was visiting Herbert, although he would have dearly liked to have a long tâete-à-tâete with him. He, of course, had an entirely different set of friends, of whom a dozen or more were usually hanging around his place. In some indefinable way, Herbert’s friends had more soul than Rolf and Katharina’s, or Sabine’s friends. They too—Herbert’s friends—were vehement opponents of the system: long-haired, almost all of them, the girls with floppy dresses and jute shoulder bags, they baked their own bread, ate quantities of salad and vegetables, yet did from time to time—“out of solidarity,” as they called it—go to those “poison places,” meaning fast-food shops. They were never embarrassed when he appeared, laughed at the amount of surveillance required in this crazy high rise, laughed not at the guards themselves but at the whole absurd “production,” sometimes asked one of the guards in for a meal, for a chat, avoided the word “discussion,” talked to Tolm about “nonexistent security,” about “death, which may occur but is also nonexistent,” made music, sang, talked without embarrassment about Jesus Christ, not only were not shy but told him frankly that he wasn’t to think he particularly impressed them with his manor house, his newspaper, his huge office that was sometimes shown in magazines along with “the tentacles of that vestibule, the suction cups of materialism,” no, they weren’t impressed by any of that, they merely found him “nice and broken,” broken by the inexorable rise of his paper and the ever-lengthening tentacles, the suction cups into which he himself was now being sucked. Surely that must scare him, not only the system but his paper, which was mainly a waste of paper, wasn’t it, especially since the custom had died out that used in some degree to justify the existence of newspapers: tearing or cutting them into handy squares and spiking them on a nail to be used as toilet paper, as had been the practice at almost every social level: that had been true recycling!

  They told him exactly how many acres of forest, how many trees, had to be sacrificed for both purposes: for toilet paper and newspapers, the colossal pressure of the despotism of hygiene. He should think for a moment of how much totally superfluous, absolutely senseless, useless stuff—which nobody ever read—was being printed in leaflets and pamphlets issued by government departments—provincial, regional, parliamentary—as well as radio, TV, and political parties, not to mention all that revoltingly superfluous advertising material, all that junk which moves from the printing press almost straight into the garbage can. How many forests were being “sacrificed” for that, how many American Indians might be living in those forests that are being needlessly wasted every day—yes, every day (and they had no idea how scared he really was for those and other reasons, not the slightest inkling, and eventually he found them a bit too superior and conceited). Yes, and of course they were against nuclear energy, against “murderous” highway construction—not that they were in the least anti-progress or even radicals in the sense of that idiotic government decree banning radicals from jobs. No, they weren’t even marginally impressed by him, they didn’t even feel sorry for him for having been caught up in the vicious circle of coercive measures—and by that they didn’t mean the security measures, which they found absurdly irrelevant (as if someone could postpone the predestined moment of his death—ridiculous!). Absurd—no, they meant growth erosion, that most horrible of
all cancers, to which, as he must surely know, his second or third home, his present one, the manor house, would fall victim, so that for the second time—or was it more?—he would become a displaced person. Would he never, ever, grasp that the threat was born of the system, was part of the system?

  In one way he found Herbert’s friends less to his liking than Rolf’s. Without being able to pinpoint it, he found them humorless. When irony did enter into their arguments, it was always unconscious and unintentional. He also found their lack of respect a bit excessive, they refused to concede that his little paper had had its function, and still did, as an important factor in the development or creation of a democratic system and of an order that had proved necessary after the total destruction of all values by Nazism.

  Herbert’s friends were not as abstractly intellectual as Rolf’s friends, whom he occasionally met in Hubreichen. These people were neither hostile nor lacking in respect, they simply regarded him as an utter stranger; they were neither arrogant nor embarrassed, they looked at him as if he came from a totally different star, were probably surprised to find that he actually drank tea and ate bread, while to him they didn’t seem so utterly strange at all. He was a fellow citizen, after all, spoke their language, and when he then shyly asked: What do you do for a living? the answer came: Teacher, banned from the profession. Metalworker, blacklisted, even by the union. Social worker, not even particularly leftist (what was that supposed to mean: “not even particularly leftist”?), blacklisted. There were some who said: I was accepted by the civil service (or I got my job) before that lousy decree. They were never against individuals, always against the system, didn’t resent a property owner for raising the rent since the system forced him to do so, forced him if need be by terrorism, and they told him how property owners were put under pressure, terrorized—by people throwing rocks, shitting in the corridors, overturning pails of water, because the owners had not raised the rent.

  They also admitted that they weren’t “that badly off” because they too—there could be no doubt about that—profited from the system, that system which existed “somewhere else,” very far away, and yielded such immense profits that they could share in them—they were fully aware that they shared in these profits, that they too lived under the pressure of the system, the system that was producing more sick and dependent people every day—over here as well as over there—and by “over there” they meant the Soviet Union. They were neither aggressive nor arrogant, only very reserved and sad, yes, there was a cold sadness in them, and not only although but also precisely because they threatened, kidnapped, killed individuals—yes, that’s why “they” were criminals, not only in moral or political terms, they were even, if you like, criminals in a philosophical-theoretical-theological sense, for they supplied the system with the very thing that reinforced it, the very thing the system should not be allowed to benefit from: victims, martyrs. They supplied the system with those on a multimedia wave against which, as they sat there smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap red wine, they could not prevail—against this media superiority they could never prevail, ever, were powerless—not quite but almost with their leaflets, their banners. The victims, the martyrs, only served to enhance the power of the media: it was a kind of sorcery, an irrationalism, enough to drive one into total paralysis. On this point they weren’t as ruthless as Herbert’s friends, didn’t even mention his paper, which was, after all, a medium—and what a medium! Naturally they too wanted to live with their wives and children and girlfriends, have parties, dances, picnics, singsongs—but pot and stronger stuff, porn and worse, those were neither for Herbert’s friends nor for Rolf’s—for pot and stronger stuff, porn and worse, even drunkenness and the like, all those were part of the system that by now they barely hated, merely despised in a way that seemed to him more dangerous than hatred. The system was the Nothing, the “established Nothingness” on whose garbage one could live, had to live.…

  And he recalled the young people he sometimes met at Sabine’s, or rather: had met, for of course the strict security measures kept visitors away too. Among them there had been occasional flirtations with just that: pot and stronger stuff, quite openly with porn; and from time to time, with considerable discretion, particularly at the house of those dreadful Fischer parents, who positively cultivated a kind of porno-Catholicism or Catho-pornicism—at such parties it not infrequently happened that fairly prominent “personalities” had to be dragged, dead drunk, by chaffeurs into their cars—and the magic word one kept hearing was invariably: baroque. “We happen to be baroque people,” that was the favorite phrase of old Fischer, who had been quite a modest shopkeeper, the very man to whitewash Bleibl: no, it was a fact that he had never been a Nazi, never, he had even helped persecuted priests, hidden them, these stories were forever being trotted out, stories that could “stand up to the most rigorous investigation”; detailed descriptions of how he had taken soup and bread to the hiding places, had installed stoves against the cold, and “said many a Hail Mary with those in hiding”: there were even photos that didn’t have to be framed, showing a gaunt nun in a tiny cellar, a pot of soup beside her, beside the pot of soup Fischer, both holding rosaries—there were also photos of Erwin at the age of four or five being blessed by priests hidden in the cellar. There was no gainsaying that: the Bleibl-Fischer connection, which, though never openly consummated, everyone was aware of, was unbeatable, especially since Zummerling had acquired the rights to these photos and could publish them at any time.

  And then there was somewhere—where? where? where?—that fourth, additional group: “they”—to call them criminals was to his mind an understatement, quite irrelevant, that satellite world from which Veronica sometimes phoned; and the word “Communists” didn’t apply to that world or Rolf’s, didn’t even apply to Katharina, who was still regarded as one although she denied it in her firm but pleasant way.

  “Of course I am communist and will continue to be, but what do I have in common with most Communists?—as much as a Catholic priest who has joined the guerrilleros has in common with the Pope or with the Princess of Monaco, who is also a Catholic; besides, it’s wrong, misleading, and much too romantic to try and see me in terms of the twenties: I don’t belong there, don’t belong to the Communists you have known, nor to our Commie Uncle Hans—not to the people you dream about, sometimes enthuse about—just think of the changes in other areas of dogma—I’m not even thirty yet, and less than twelve years ago, when I was almost eighteen, I still believed I would be damned to all eternity if I broke the rule of fasting before Holy Communion. Stop dreaming about the Communists you have known, stop dreaming that I belong to the twenties—and believe me, I understand ‘them’ as little as you do, perhaps even less—no, maybe we resemble each other in this: we can’t understand them, we merely know one thing—they are being coerced like all the rest of us.”

  Reason enough to reflect on the type of coercion to which he was exposed and to which he was slowly but surely succumbing. A few nostalgic musings were unavoidable, all of them starting with “in the old days.” In the old days, when he had already been a pretty important boss, actually less than six years ago, he had still been able simply to escape from his office, stop at a newsstand for a paper, walk over to Café Getzloser, where he had ordered a snack, eaten it unnoticed and unobserved, been waited on with a smile, phoned Käthe from a booth. Or he had simply gone to a florist’s, bought some flowers for Käthe, Sabine, Edith, or Veronica, dropped into a jeweler’s—now the jewelers with their velvet-lined boxes had to come, under strict guard, to his office, his home, or a hotel. And when had he last been able to browse in antique shops, looking for engravings of the Rhine, its towns, banks, landscapes, not looking for anything in particular, just browsing and coming across engravings and paintings from the era before the Rhine was overrun by tourists—such as his favorite engraving of Bonn, hardly bigger than a cigarette package, engraved with pearly clarity and discreetly tinted by an anonymous artist: th
e banks of the Rhine, trees, a wing of the palace, on the river a barge and the old customs bastion. And also—impossible today or, if not impossible, so embarrassing that he would never do it—his affair with Edith, who wasn’t even a young thing, she’d been all of thirty-five, unmarried, a stock clerk in a department store on whom he was calling to offer his condolences on the death of her brother, his auditor Scheubler. It had almost turned into a scandal—he couldn’t understand how other people could actually pursue their amours under surveillance, when surely the very thought of the guard’s watchful eye must destroy all spontaneity.