And now this new office, in which he could decide even less, assuming that he was capable of arriving at any decisions at all. They had made it pretty clear to him, not only Bleibl but Pottsieker and Kliehm too, and most of all Amplanger: he played his part well. By mentioning the literary section, Bleibl had alluded quite plainly, brutally, to his occasional contributions to the paper, when he happened to write about Hieronymus Bosch or Salvador Dali. In him the Association had finally acquired a “literary section,” something for “the ladies.”
Blurtmehl knocked, heard the feeble “Come in!,” entered, and announced: “Your bath is ready.” He was quite obviously ill at ease, would certainly never again open the door in such a way as to make it look as if his boss were stumbling headlong into the room, never again. He was embarrassed after this his first faux pas in seven years, but probably Holzpuke had personally assumed command of him, had given him the order over the transceiver: “Dr. Tolm, our president, is very exhausted, he is struggling up the stairs with his last ounce of strength, now he is entering the corridor, now he is reaching for the door handle—now!” and he had almost fallen into Blurtmehl’s arms. It was with just such precision that assassinations were planned, and the Who began to take shape in the question: would it be Blurtmehl? Why not? He smiled at Blurtmehl, rose slowly to his feet. Of course he knew Blurtmehl’s past history, knew his personal habits down to the last detail, knew about his girlfriend as well as her history and her personal habits, but no one could know his thoughts. Who could assess and predict the susceptibility of this sensitive, emotional man? No doubt he had enough knowledge of anatomy to apply a throttling grip in the bathtub that would leave no trace and make his death appear the result of his notorious frailty. The holding open of the door had made him suspicious since till then Blurtmehl had taken scrupulous care to let him do certain things for himself: open doors, light cigarettes, and certain unavoidable manipulations on the toilet. After all, he had known Kortschede, too, for over twenty years: that man of fine limbs and fine mind who ruled with quiet ceremony over banks and newsprint, steel and real estate, and yet permitted the whisperings of his beloved Horst to be monitored.
“All right, I’m coming,” he said. Smiling, he thought: No, not today, certainly not today.
2
In the end she had allowed Miss Blum to go off with Kit for the milk after all, though she knew she didn’t need it anymore and wouldn’t be taking it with her. Kit insisted on this ritual, also on carrying the milk pitcher, which, of course, was empty and would only be full on the return trip, when the four kilos would get too heavy for her. She loved the cows, the smell of the stable, and for Miss Blum it was a welcome excuse for a chat with the Beeretzes, who were about her age, sixtyish, and somehow related, and there was always plenty to talk about, from the past, present, and future: Blorr in ten or twenty years, if bungalows and roads went on being built at this rate. They were still trying to guess who among the thirty-four eligible voters might have actually voted for the Socialist Party: seven people, and it always boiled down to the newcomers who had rented the old vicarage and fixed it up, a nice couple but a bit of a mystery, they seemed Liberal but almost certainly didn’t vote Liberal: the Blömers, he was an architect, she was an attorney, with grown-up children, four cars, and her brother, who didn’t seem to do anything much, just worked a bit on the house and in the garden, smoked a pipe—seven exactly if you counted the children of voting age. The main thing was that there was plenty to talk about, and fetching the milk would take at least half an hour, or even longer, she hoped: she wanted some time to herself before Mama, before Käthe, arrived, wanted to say goodbye to Blorr, and found herself thinking about the milk: would Erwin be drinking it, would Miss Blum use it to make a dessert for him, or let it stand and thicken?—those last two of the many liters of milk they had fetched from the Beeretz farm: every day for five years, two a day, it must run into thousands.
She was too strung up to figure it out; besides, the fear had returned, rising this time from below, seeming to rise from her feet, heating her calves, blocking bladder and kidneys, creeping over her breast like a heavy, hot cloud, into her head; at other times it moved down from above, beginning in her head, sinking down, and Grebnitzer, whom Father still swore by, was still inclined to think that this was all due to her pregnancy. Of course the fear had to do with the pregnancy, yet these were not pregnancy symptoms; this was no longer the daily, familiar fear that they would kidnap Kit, and herself as well, or herself, or Erwin, or that they would simply do away with all three of them (she imagined someone drawing a line through their pictures and writing underneath: “Done”); it was no longer that intangible yet very real fear, it was quite different—palpable, tangible—and she couldn’t talk to anybody about it. There was no room inside her for two fears of such dimensions, so the tangible fear had supplanted the intangible one: for the past three months, ever since she had known positively that she was pregnant, and not by Erwin. In the four months before that Erwin had not once had contact with her in any way that could have caused the pregnancy.
Sometimes, yes, she did think of suicide: take some stuff or other, and it would all be over. What held her back was not the sinfulness, as such, in which she had been taught so emphatically to believe; but the thought of Kit, of Hubert, of her parents and brothers, even of Katharina and the nephews, and last of all—least of all, she realized—it was the thought of Erwin Fischer, her husband. Leaving him was easy enough, and now she had made up her mind and hadn’t discussed it with anybody, had sent off Miss Blum and Kit with the milk pitcher as if nothing had changed. Everything, everything had changed. This time Kübler had gone along with them for protection; like all those before him, even Hubert, he would refuse to come into the house for a drink, he would stay in the courtyard, watchful, aloof, keeping a sharp eye on both entrances to the courtyard, while Rohner was indoors guarding her, keeping a watching eye on the weak points of the bungalow: the terrace, where she was now standing looking down on Blorr, and the rear garage door leading into the garden. What they all feared most was dusk, and now, in late fall, the milk had to be fetched earlier, and, although she hoped Miss Blum would take her time, she mustn’t stay out until dusk. That would lead to more trouble with Holzpuke; not that he became angry exactly, but he didn’t hide his annoyance when they failed to follow advice or instructions, and was always stressing—quite rightly, as she knew from Hubert—the nervous tension of his men, who would be held responsible if … After all, the affair of Pliefger’s birthday cake had been extremely serious, and as for Father—he was already dreaming of flying saucers descending on him and Käthe, now he was even scared of birds since that business with the duck and since old Kortschede had gone completely around the bend at the click of a lighter. And there had been that terrible business with Plotteti’s cigarette package.
Her fear was for Hubert, not for herself; she would be able to handle Erwin and the whole clique, the scandal and the howls of the Zummerling gang; she looked forward to the baby that was kicking away in such lively fashion inside her, she was afraid only for its father: Hubert, with whom for the past six weeks she hadn’t been able to exchange a single word. Since he had been made a bodyguard at Father and Käthe’s, she sometimes caught a glimpse of him, saw his silhouette in the corridor upstairs in the manor, couldn’t speak to him, couldn’t write to him, couldn’t phone him. Because of Veronica, of course, she was being not only guarded but kept under constant surveillance, and fortunately neither Rolf nor Father nor Käthe had let on that she too had at one time been friendly with Beverloh. He had been Father’s protégé, after all, as well as Rolf’s friend, and Veronica had at one time been Rolf’s wife.
Fear also for Helga, Hubert’s wife, whom she had never met, of whom she knew only that she was blond, was called Helga, and was a very nice person, and then there was a dear little boy called Bernhard, who would soon be receiving his First Communion; she knew the address but couldn’t go there, of course. K
übler and Rohner, the new guards, never let her out of their sight, and she couldn’t very well—while escorted and observed by Kübler or Rohner—go to Hubert’s home, stand outside the house, and wait for Helga and Bernhard to come out. Divorce was out of the question for Hubert, and Erwin in his pride and vanity still believed that she was three months pregnant by him, whereas the sixth month had just begun.
He had been away for four months, traveling to Singapore, Panama, Djakarta, and Hong Kong, carrying on complex negotiations for the Beehive. He had had to establish whole production chains, find agencies, install mechanical equipment, hire representatives—and after successfully concluding this campaign he had come home jubilant. She must speak to Erwin, too, before he ran into Grebnitzer, who would congratulate him on the baby due in four months but which Erwin didn’t expect for six: a healthy child from a healthy mother, a healthy father. “Those hot flushes your wife suffers from sometimes are quite natural, perfectly normal,” and Erwin had already generously declared: “Even if it’s another girl, we’ll celebrate!” Of course he would let the press in on it, and the illustrated weeklies. “New blood in the Beehive! New blood in the Fisherman’s Shack,” as their smart bungalow was called. “A blessed event expected by one of our hopeful horsewomen: Sabine Fischer of the Tolm clan—one of our most endangered women!” Now the lid would be put on all that, no champagne, no paper lanterns, while somewhere—where?—she would give birth to the child of a policeman. Where? Not here in Blorr, probably not at Tolmshoven, perhaps at Rolf’s, if he could spare her a room. She supposed she could have discussed it with Katharina, maybe with Rolf too, but first she had to speak to Hubert, she couldn’t very well let others into the secret over his head, and over Helga’s and Bernhard’s heads, before they suspected anything, she mustn’t start rumors, and there was one more thing that was as serious for Hubert as for Holzpuke: dereliction of duty.
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.
The Safety Net Page 6