“You may go—only I shall have to remove the two officers from here for the time being and station them over there—I can’t spare you that.”
“Even if Kit goes there alone?”
“In that case, until reinforcements arrive I would have to leave one here and send one over there.”
“Then I’ll stay here, look after the stove, get lunch ready, and think of our twelve-room villa in Málaga, which is always empty—where it takes a month to chase away the boredom that’s been piling up there, continues to pile up there: can you imagine such a thing?”
Holzpuke gave her an embarrassed look, took out a cigarette, accepted a light from Rolf, nodded his thanks.
“Boredom,” said Sabine, “believe me, it piles up, thick, dense, I might almost say palpable, and the only way to get rid of it is to scoop it up laboriously by hand. Handful by handful, handful by handful—room by room—and the Spanish policemen in uniform, the German ones in plain clothes outside the door—the sound of the sea, and the palm trees, well, I presume they wave their fronds. No, I’ll stay here, sit by the stove, and roast chestnuts.…”
Katharina was dressed and ready to leave, Holger too. “I must go now,” she said, “the children are waiting, the mothers have to go work—and there’ll be plenty of gossip waiting for me, because of Roickler. They’ll blame us for his leaving, just watch, that’s how it’ll be. Are you coming along, Rolf?”
“Yes, I’ll take you there. From there I’ll go to the Halster farm—it’s being completely renovated, modernized—I get paid double wages for my help and am allowed to take away the stuff they throw out. So long, Sis, we’ll all be back for lunch, you know where the books are, where the toys are kept. And here’s the phone: call up your mother, your brother too if you like—don’t be afraid.”
Kit was crying, casting angry looks at Holzpuke, who still hadn’t left. Fortunately the child was only crying softly to herself, not bawling, and he cleared his throat and said hoarsely: “There’s one more thing I have to talk to you about, alone.…”
“I know,” she said, still seated, stroking the child’s head in her lap. “I know: you’re worried about those three months, maybe even anxious.”
“Yes,” he said, “it might point to a breach in security.”
“No, it’s not that. I’m not going to name any names, neither to you nor anyone else—but it wasn’t a breach in security … I mean, it was a breach but in my inner security—and that has been closed too. It’s a matter between us two, him and myself—and you have nothing to reproach yourself with. Not the least thing, you have done your duty—and you have done it courteously and discreetly, as considerately as possible.… I have only one request, my neighbor, Mrs. Breuer …”
“Nothing will happen to her—not now … not to—her friend, either. She may soon be your neighbor again, here, if you stay on here—you might soon run into her when you go for the milk. She was a Miss Hermes—didn’t you know that? She comes from Hubreichen and may well come back here.… I was in no position to prevent what happened with Mr. Schubler—we had to investigate him, just as we had to include the priest here in our inquiries.”
“Father Roickler too? Why?”
“There are some strange trends in modern theology—and Father Roickler’s support of your brother, the vehement way in which he defended your brother here, made him part of the community—that needed to be investigated. But I can assure you, he was and still is completely above suspicion.”
He went across to the child, ruffled her hair, and said gently: “Well, Kit, still mad at me?” But Kit wouldn’t answer, kicked out at him, and he walked slowly to the door, nodded once more to Sabine, and stepped out into the garden. Buckets of bolts, he thought wearily, how am I supposed to check out millions of bicycles and cyclists? Weigh them, he thought, one could weigh them and the difference in weight would show whether they’re loaded. Loaded bicycles.
11
At times he was on the point of phoning the Tolms just to have a talk with them, to invite them over or go to see them, if necessary to offer them a cup of tea, possibly even to drink one himself. There were prejudices to be cleared away and decisions to be made—prejudices that had been dragging on for thirty-three years, on both sides of course, judgments that would seem harsh but would also have a salutary effect: it was time for Tolm to give up his newspaper, his last illusions must be taken from him. Tolm had really dropped all the reins, including his own, his paper had now become nothing but a jungle to him, he now had only “vague ideas,” knew nothing, nothing whatever, had no insight, it was time for him to devote himself to some artistic hobby: Madonnas, perhaps, or Dutch masters; an invaluable, even splendid president who now actually imagined that he was to be destroyed—not the slightest intention of destroying him, on the contrary: they wanted him to live for years, to be guarded and protected, to be finally relieved of the burden of the paper. And if he were to start studying Madonnas, or cathedrals, that would be more than a substitute for his “vague ideas” regarding the paper and the whole economic situation, in fact he would probably enjoy it, and a president who knew something about Madonnas or cathedrals, could even be articulate about them, would really be irreplaceable, invaluable, and naturally he would also have to be relieved of the burdens of the presidency. As a figurehead, yes; making speeches, yes—but that was all, no decisions. And for that Amplanger was not enough, nor was the present advisory staff, at least two new people must be brought in to relieve him, to clear his path. Perhaps, if it wasn’t too risky, Kolzheim and Grolzer should be considered; he must think about that.
Unfortunately Tolm’s son—there was no getting around it—had gone off on the wrong track, and there was probably no way of getting him off it. The boy had it in him to be another Amplanger, he might even have been a better Amplanger, he was more sensitive and had a better sense of humor, his smile was not so knife-edged (there were some witty sayings about Amplanger’s smile going the rounds: “It’ll cut anything for you—bread, cheese, sausage, ham. Invite Amplanger, and you can forget about knives”). Nor would young Tolm be as absurdly “with it” as Amplanger, who knew not only all the newest dances but even newer ones and swung around the still enthusiastic wives of the no longer quite so enthusiastic husbands in whatever was the latest craze. He had an almost uncanny knack of presenting the very latest editorials from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Die Welt with skillful variations as his own opinions. Oh, he was good, all right, irreplaceable in his way, yet he lacked something that Rolf Tolm had: personality and originality, and that goddamn Something, that odious tiny particle that apparently could be neither learned nor acquired, that detestable almost mystical, elusive quality that his mother possessed in plenty and his father at least to some degree: charm. Moreover, he knew what his father would never grasp: struggle, not reconciliation, was the watchword. Even in the days when he had been setting fire to cars and throwing rocks, he had had this charm—and had never lost it. And of course he had discovered long ago—perhaps just had a “vague idea,” like his old man—that there was only one country where there might be a chance for him to do more than pick apples and renovate farmhouses: Cuba. In spite of everything, in spite of everything—that goddamn Cuba, that giant canker in the rose over there. Yes, Holzpuke had whispered that to him: now he’s learning Spanish from some Chileans, studying the Cuban economy, getting hold of special reference works, and even has a pupil, that farmer’s son in Hubreichen.
Well, one could forget about him, he would never come back, never, and even if theoretically he were to find his way back, he would never come back. Even if nothing came of his plans for Cuba, he would rather go on gathering nuts, growing potatoes, and producing children with his Communist mistress—if only out of pride, out of icy contempt for Zummerling, even though he no longer set fire to his cars, would never again set fire to a car, never again pick up a rock, would stay cooped up in that hole, counting pears and repairing tractors—would, like hundreds and t
housands of his kind, observe the law and maintain his cold contempt for the system. Too bad, this crown prince was not in the running, yet he would have been a better Amplanger; would have. A waste of intelligence, of a gift for abstract, highly theoretical planning, a gift that was blended with an equal quantity—not too much—of imagination. Amazing, really, considering his parents, their origins and career. And yet they had something like style: there had never been anything upstart about them, not even in the manor house, never, and that was odd, really, considering that he himself, of comparable origins after all, was marked with it, indelibly: that coarse face of his that seemed to indicate brutality, a trait he had never possessed but which later on, when he was constantly being accused of it, did develop. Who would ever believe that he was a timid person? Lonely, lonely and timid. Hilde had not only believed it, she had known it.
And it was with her that he had split up and since then slithered into a series of unsuccessful marriages. Käthe Tolm was right again: his Number Four, Edelgard, was simply a “stupid bitch”; even her body was in some indefinable way stupid, the few tricks she had learned—where?—or simply picked up had become stale in three weeks. That artificial sensuality, those hoarse whisperings copied from silly movies, it gave him no pleasure, not even her. And her drinking, which now started early in the morning, her pose of melancholy that had absolutely nothing genuine about it—that unhappy-wife mechanism that didn’t net her any boyfriends; the vulgarity that happened to be a shade too genuine to seem merely fashionable. A stupid bitch, perhaps a poor bitch who even had stupid hands, warped, had probably slipped into hash and rock as a school kid hanging around bus depots and cheap cafés, had gone to the dogs, part of a generation that apparently couldn’t live without music, if it would be called music. From morning till night, and even at night when she couldn’t sleep: music, music, music. That would probably provide the true reason for divorce: in every room, even in the toilet, she had her goddamn tape recorders or hi-fi speakers that she switched on automatically almost as soon as she turned the door handle; in the bathroom, of course, in the bedroom, in all the downstairs rooms, even in the basement when she occasionally played at being a housewife and attended to the laundry and the groceries: music everywhere, cassettes lying around all over the house. Luckily she was going away now for a spell, to Norderney or Kampen, he wasn’t sure, and as a result a whole swarm of security officers would be on the move: she enjoyed that, she was jealous of the Tolms because they had still more “security action.” That was her latest sport: to check up on the security apparatus and from that to deduce her “rank”: was she the second-, third-, or fourth-most-closely-guarded woman?
He’d have to split up with her soon, could only hope she wouldn’t be too much of a nuisance. He felt sorry for her parents, they were nice, simple people, the Köhlers, thriftily carrying on with their little store against all economic sense; modest folk who labored eighteen hours a day, which probably worked out at an hourly wage of one mark eighty, at most two marks, and if you added that up, plus the savings in rent in their own building—ignoring, of course, the investment interest of the building—plus the savings through the reduced cost of their personal consumption, they might, with each of them working a hundred hours a week as well as having anxiously to watch the shelf dates of milk and other produce, actually arrive at two thousand five hundred, maybe three thousand marks a month, and they would imagine themselves to be earning good money, whereas actually they were toiling away for far, far less than any Turkish immigrant worker was earning, while he himself was earning more than three thousand marks a day. Needless to say, this mustn’t be pointed out to them, those nice, modest people mustn’t be thrown into confusion. There they sat in their little village, respected, going to church, singing in the choir, even cultured in their own way. There was a certain style about them when they invited you for dinner, the way they set the table, formally, and the way the old man helped in the kitchen, and she would untie her apron and hang it over the chair each time she finished serving a course; it had style. And the wine was excellent, the coffee perfect, the homemade éclairs—probably made by the old man, who had been a baker by trade—were superb. Granted they were a bit reserved, but they were not shy, no trace of shyness with the powerful, the rich, the much-publicized son-in-law who put the whole village in a turmoil with his bodyguard: guards here and guards there, it was almost like a state visit. The milieu reminded him of home: there it had been even more modest, not Catholic but Protestant. More modest—but to make comparisons one would have to know how the Köhlers had lived forty or fifty years ago, before their parents died and they inherited the store. Nice people who didn’t quite trust their wayward daughter’s career—and they were right. When coffee and liqueurs were served, they would ask her to play the piano, and she did, with a bored sullenness intended to express her contempt for that kind of music: messed up the Schubert, deprived the Chopin of even the last vestige of charm, bitched about “this silly musical dessert.” Käthe Tolm was right: simply a “stupid bitch,” his Number Four; it was Amplanger who had told him about this, he managed to pick up a lot of interesting things, probably on the phone too.
Let her carry on with her boring tit-games on the isle of Norderney. He would give the Tolms a call, go there for tea or ask them over for tea, if necessary even drink some; there were things to be straightened out. Of course he had “hoisted” Tolm into that position, but not to destroy him, on the contrary: he wanted to lighten his load, wanted him to be released from the paper. It was his paper that was making his bones ache, his legs ache; it was his own fault that it had slipped more and more through his fingers. He wanted him to be released, to recover his health, to be given two more assistants in addition to Amplanger and the experienced advisory staff; he wanted him to get well and live. And then there were those prejudices formed in the internment camp and dragged along for more than thirty years. True: he, Bleibl, hadn’t behaved “nicely” there, but then he had never pretended to be nice, had never blazoned “niceness” on his coat of arms; there they had confused toughness with brutality and had spread the myth that he had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
That pitiful dry-goods store in Doberach was supposed to have been a silver spoon, where in winter his mother, her fingers stiff with cold, had sold a few cents’ worth of this and that: notions and underwear, sometimes as much as a whole roll of elastic to repair bloomers and underpants, where darning needles were bought one (in words and figures one) at a time, where a rare sale was a pair of socks, and that bitter struggle behind the scenes as Confirmation Day approached: prices reduced, and reduced yet again, damn it. And of course he had—what else—joined the Brownshirts in the early days, if only for the sake of orders for Papa that later led to something almost like affluence because Papa was given a sort of monopoly, for shirts and blouses, trousers and ties, later even for boots, and all that annoyance with shoemakers and shoe stores, with hatmakers and hat stores, because Papa was also given the monopoly for boots and for caps, and whoever thought in those days of murder? Who? Even nice old Pastor Stermisch, who had confirmed him, had been fooled, used to warble in nationalistic, even anti-Semitic tones, and went so far as to advise Papa expressly not to “overdo your humaneness” in cases involving the takeover of Jewish businesses.
Stermisch enabled him to go to university, and by the time it came to his Ph.D. thesis Papa was able to finance it himself. “Problems Facing the Textile Industry in Periods of Raw-Material Shortage,” based on the experiences of World War I, a subject that proved ideal when World War II eventually broke out. Needless to say, he was declared essential to the war effort, was given every opportunity to apply, extend, modify, develop his theory, he never soiled his hands, never accepted a bribe, and found it quite logical for the Americans to lock him up: in fact it was an honor, indicating that they considered him more important than he had ever thought himself to be. The credit for his not taking himself too seriously must go to Hil
de, his wife, who by this time was known almost reverently as “Bleibl’s Number One”; she had been anything but a “stupid bitch,” on any level, including business. Thrifty without being stingy, she had bought real estate, all perfectly legal and normal; she comforted him when he had been upset by the tide of blood-soaked, torn, bullet-riddled textiles—civilian and field gray, with kids’ clothes among them too. As the law required, the garments of persons hanged and shot had to be collected from prisons and parade grounds and recycled, not to mention “enemy textiles,” which meant not only booty textiles but also children’s clothing—and he had children himself: Martin and Robert—oh well, one had to be tough, even brutal if necessary. Hilde had been a good, a clever wife, in business too but also with her music—she was such a good pianist and accompanied her own singing; she had been a good wife to him, a wonderful cook, and in other respects too; in every way.
The trouble was: after the war, when he came out of camp and at Bangors’s instigation was reappointed Textile Administrator—they hadn’t been able to prove anything against him, not the shedding of a single drop of blood, nothing!—he couldn’t go on, couldn’t go on sleeping with her, couldn’t find his way to her, into her. He had been able to do it with whores when Bangors took him along, even after the affair in the bank, that terrible affair that he had never yet been able to talk about to anyone, anyone, not even to Bangors, who had been a witness, a silent witness: that night in the Reichsbank, when they had been literally shoveling the cash and the contents of the safes into sacks, a young woman had suddenly loomed up, wrapped in blankets, she must have sought shelter there, and he, Bleibl, had snatched up Bangors’s machine pistol and shot the woman dead. It was the first time in his life that he had fired a gun, and the last time too, and the dead woman literally turned the pile of money into blood money. They had left the woman and the money lying there on the floor, had thrown the blankets over her, heaped money over the corpse, and fled, into the car, to the camp casino: hit the bottle, tied one on, and not a word to a soul, not a single word! And later he had carefully studied the newspapers for any mention of a corpse or later of a skeleton found in the basement of the Reichsbank: nothing, never a word. Had it been a dream, then, an apparition? He was haunted by the scene, saw it whenever he wanted to embrace Hilde, saw it whenever Martin and Robert kissed him goodnight; tough, harrowing years in which he created his empire: textiles with the politically immaculate Fischer, real estate with Hilde’s help, later newsprint with Kortschede and publishing with Zummerling: working fallow land before the old wolves came crawling out of their cages again. No, there had been no silver spoon for him: his father’s business had been insignificant, an absurd little store where after the war a few hundred Storm Trooper shirts, which were hard to re-dye, had gradually rotted away.
The Safety Net Page 27