Eventually he had had to split up with Hilde. He had amply provided for her, she was still his co-regent. Martin was by now a very agreeable, “square” high school teacher, Robert a truly endearing pastor—far away, his sons, as embarrassed as their wives when he occasionally turned up. Those were scenes from another life, scenes from a film that had been made without him—yet they were still his children, his sons, totally unsuited for what Rolf Tolm would have been suited for, and of course he visited Hilde, who was living up there in the mountains, had gone to university late in life and become a chartered accountant: memories that were past bringing to life, fixed forever as if under glass, present yet remote, a ghost of intimacy when he pressed her hands, and still, always her questioning look: why? And he couldn’t talk about it, was still haunted by that scene that drove him to drink and whoring, drove him to the dream of possible new marriages, all of which went on the rocks.
No, there would never be a “Bleibl’s Number Five.” Maybe at sixty-five it was time to give up the idea of marriage. But, goddammit, how come Tolm didn’t seem to be haunted by such scenes? Obviously he wasn’t, that suave aesthete, that soft old sidestepper, though he’d been in command of a whole battery and had banged away right into the Russians and must have blown many of them to bits, including children, women, when he banged away into those wretched villages and, retreating, had simply ordered his battery to fire at random, anywhere. And those fine military gentlemen who set so much store by their lousy honor: who if not they had the bloodstained, bullet-riddled, torn clothing on their conscience? No, of course, they hadn’t “profiteered” from the war. Had he? Who could possibly have benefited from that money lying around there ignored, money that had already been credited to customers’ accounts, those pieces of paper in their countless billions that everyone regarded as valueless? Why not use the money to acquire buildings and land, legally, all aboveboard, why not give money to those who desperately needed it, and not at the market, the list price, not at all? What harm had been done? Tolm had been only a very small fish, a lieutenant in the artillery whose alleged crime no one was quite convinced of, so he was promptly released from camp too, after only eight months, and then he was given the newspaper and had done nothing, absolutely nothing with it—wasn’t he a war profiteer?
Now Bangors had appeared on the scene again, retired, white-haired of course, impressive, had reached the rank of general: Korea, Vietnam, et cetera. He had been obliged to have dinner with him at the Excelsior, with Edelgard unavoidably included—a pleasant evening, as one says, with Bangors’s genuinely nice wife who could even risk whispering a few admonitory words to Edelgard. “That’s right,” said Bangors, “this is Mary, still my Number One”: a sporty type, gray-haired, nowhere near as drastically slim as Edelgard always wanted to be—she still didn’t realize that drink could make a person fat, and her revolting habit of chewing candy as she wandered from room to room switching on her goddamn music everywhere, all over the house. Nice people, the Bangorses, she seemed nicer than he, and he was the very prototype of a gentleman—yet with his own feet he had scraped money over the body in the vault like scraping dead leaves over a corpse in a forest, had grinned as he sniffed at the muzzle of the machine pistol—and then: clear out, get away. Never so much as a word about it, not even a hint, not even a wink during the dinner at the Excelsior, nor later in the bar over coffee and brandy while the ladies indulged in a Drambuie. And yet, yet—the scene remained, the horror remained, everything stuck in his gullet the time Kortschede asked him: “Think carefully, Bleibl, think hard, they’ll go through your life with a fine-tooth comb—are you sure you haven’t a skeleton in the closet?” Not meaning it literally, of course, though he might have answered literally enough: “Well, I did leave a body in the vault of the Reichsbank in Doberach.” And when he had apparently turned white as a sheet Kortschede had put a hand on his arm and said: “Take it easy—I don’t mean anything that’s mentioned in your denazification file—I mean something in your youth, perhaps, some Party connection, that they might sniff out.” No, nothing, he had a body in the vault, but there had never been any prosecution, there were no witnesses, or rather the only witness had meanwhile seen or perhaps even been responsible for so many corpses that that particular one had totally vanished from his mind. Coffee and brandy, the ladies with their Drambuie, and even in the bar of the Excelsior that goddamn inescapable music—but at least some people were dancing.
He hadn’t been able to talk about it to Margret, either, his Number Two; not exactly a stupid bitch, but still pretty dumb—one of his secretaries, quite nice, but three years had been more than enough. Margret had a cultural hang-up: Florence and Venice, Giotto, Mantegna, and all that, and had even—“What do you expect, in Assisi—what else is one supposed to do there?”—become a Catholic, surrounded herself with witty monks, became co-founder of a magazine, fine, had her heart set on an apartment on the Piazza Navona, fine, better than that music nut, his Number Four, that’s for sure, but then she went too far, farther than he could allow, started something with a trendy leftist Italian, an art critic—a real charmer, mind you—something serious, and it got out, became public, and that really wouldn’t do, it was all right as long as it remained a rumor, not harmful gossip, but it became intolerable when the pictures appeared showing her naked on a sunny beach with that intellectual crook. Margret had certainly been decorative, and also quite useful as a decorator—what with Florence, Venice, Giotto, Mantegna, and Assisi. But this was going too far, and even his friends were advising him to get a divorce, especially Zummerling, the very one who had been the first to publish the pictures. And though Margret had quite clearly been the guilty party, he had been generous: let her keep the house in Fiesole, for all he cared, and a car and whatever else, let her marry the fellow, well, maybe it really was the love he had never found, could be, she was even married in church, legally, properly, and she even wrote to him occasionally, postcards with strange words such as “I have forgiven you everything, everything.” That did make him laugh: by that she could only mean the time he had slapped her when, believe it or not, she had burst into tears at breakfast because some madman had scratched up a Rembrandt someplace. That had really been too much cultural claptrap for him, and he had let her have it. So she’d forgiven him. Fine.
With Number Three he had aimed too high: he was no match for that peasant girl with the Modigliani face; he had succumbed to prejudices that didn’t apply—certainly didn’t to her, to Elisabeth. Not because she was a cleaning woman—one day, when he was working late, she had actually come into his private office with scrubbing brush, mop, and pail—no, these days many women were earning money by cleaning, although they certainly weren’t cleaning women: there were refugees and unemployed women of all categories, no, but this cleaning woman really was one, a peasant girl from Istria: the only way he could have her was to marry her, and that had been a bad time, when he had been a laughingstock, for after all he was nearly sixty and she was around twenty-four. “Bleibl in love, actually in love—good old Bleibl!” There had been plenty of ridicule, and Käthe and Fritz Tolm were probably the only ones who didn’t join in, they may have been a bit surprised that it had really caught him this time. The magazines had had a field day, and he had let them have their field day: standing in front of the humble farmhouse with his parents-in-law and his bride Elisabeth, a peasant wedding with more dancing than he was equal to with the best will in the world, and all those difficulties because he was divorced and Elisabeth was a Catholic, the palaver with the parents, the painful forgoing of a church wedding that was hard for Elisabeth too—and it hadn’t lasted long, that third marriage, it had been the shortest, had foundered not only on the scene he couldn’t rid himself of but above all on Elisabeth’s firm dignity: a cleaning woman! There were only a few among his acquaintances with whom she associated, least of all with the Fischers, with whom he had very close connections through textiles and the Beehive, and it was no use pointing out tha
t they really were Catholics, a matter of proven record, attested to even by serious clerics; nothing helped. Wild horses wouldn’t drag her to the Fischers’, to the Tolms’ yes, but they didn’t happen to care for his company.
Surprisingly enough she liked Kortschede, and even Pliefger. But everyone else she found “bad company, very bad,” and said about many of them: “They stink, you just can’t smell it anymore.” And just when he had begun to encourage something like friendship between her and Sabine Fischer, the marriage went on the rocks, and she went back to Yugoslavia, had finally even begun to describe senior “government types,” if not very senior, as stinking. “They all stink, you people just can’t smell it anymore.” Eventually she admitted to him that he stank too, “not always, but most of the time,” even said so in hours of intimacy when she released him from the mental scene of horror and he could forget about all the whores, but she wouldn’t deign to describe the stink. Things became quite awkward when she began to sniff at people and wrinkle her nose, saying laconically: “Stinks” or “Doesn’t stink,” and it was quite clear that she didn’t only mean this morally, toward the end she spoke openly of a “stinking German cleanliness.” He had to let her go, back to Istria, gave her money for a smart little hotel where he hoped she wouldn’t have to accommodate any other stinking Germans, and he dreamed of her, dreamed of Hilde, of his nice square sons, and thought with apprehension of having to return Bangors’s invitation: hadn’t there been a flicker in his eyes after all? A connivance, yet he couldn’t start anything against him without implicating himself. The body in the vault was not his alone. Probably someone had picked up the “bloodstained money” after them and discreetly removed the corpse.
It was going to be difficult to get rid of Edelgard. She was tough, and she clung in the most tiresome way to the luxury which, for her, included the surveillance; of course the surveillance would be greatly reduced, if not cease entirely. The rest of the luxury meant nothing to her, yet she wanted it, she liked sitting around in the most expensive hotels reading magazines, listening to her goddamn music, making eyes, driving police officers up the wall, and enjoying her “protocol rank,” driving men crazy, yet none of them wanted her, none of them really swallowed the bait, and she didn’t seem to be all that interested, either. She was worse than a whore, gone rotten early on while hanging around cheap snack bars and bus depots—and she had snared him, had pretended to be panting for him but had then played upon her honor and virginity, had even involved her parents in this crusade of honor, while in fact she had probably been laid at the age of twelve, at the latest thirteen. She had caught him at the right moment, just after Elisabeth had left, when he had had enough of whores and, tired out, was sitting late one evening in his office: a crude approach with freshly made coffee, soft little hand on arm, and a generously granted look at those stupid breasts. Honor, shrieks, virginity, parents, and again a wedding, the fourth. It would be hard to get rid of her, expensive too. There wouldn’t be a fifth. What he needed was a life’s companion, someone like Käthe Tolm, in whose follies there was even a certain charm. Holzpuke had indicated to him that she and her inscrutable son Herbert had probably given that Veronica some money. Even her piety was perfectly genuine, she was worth her weight in gold, like her daughter, whose qualities as horsewoman, churchgoer, mother, housewife, and on the dance floor added up to a fantastic image, beyond price; he must really have a serious word with young Fischer to persuade him not to exhaust that young woman, mentally, physically, possibly even in the bedroom, seeing how he was now on a porn kick. She was a jewel, that young woman, more fragile than she looked—she mustn’t be handled too roughly, as Fischer was obviously doing with his idiotic playboy pose. There must be no danger of the young Tolm woman flipping, clearing out—never mind where to: she had to stick to her role with her cute little brat. Old Tolm needed support too. That left only Herbert, and no one, not even the police, could fathom him. He was “into” philosophy, and that wasn’t without its dangers; one of these days he’d have to discuss all this with Dollmer, maybe even with Stabski—these were problems going far beyond the interests of the Association. They concerned the state.
First of all he had to find out whether by this time Kolzheim and Grolzer had settled down a bit: those two really had flipped, hadn’t been able to take all that guff, Amplanger’s “knife in the face,” they had begun to hit the bottle in a big way and get involved with women who did them no good: greedy bitches out for apartments and furs, wanting to bathe in champagne, so to speak. Out of a sense of surfeit and unrelieved boredom, the two men had then embarked on trendy perversions, three-way, four-way deals, or even by the dozen. As a result, they had dipped into the till, padding their expense accounts. That was inexcusable, they had to be sent back to the front lines, to the harshest, grimmest conditions, and were confronted with the alternative: to be taken to court or to prove themselves in the front line, not at any staff headquarters but right in the trenches. Three or four years behind bars, or demotion: they chose the latter and were sent to one of the supermarkets out in the country, in the sticks anyway, where it was up to them to increase sales, do the dirty work, nag the salesgirls, gyp the customers with wilted lettuce, dream up “special offers,” arrive for work on time in their soiled white smocks, bully the cleaning women, and make sure the cash balanced. If they felt like it, they could join outdoor clubs out there in the sticks, have a grand time with the women at fairs and local hops, go hiking over hill and dale dressed up in all the right togs complete with walking stick and red socks, and could prove their impregnable virtue on the thin ice of small-town sex parties. It must be three or four years now since they had been sent to the front. He must inquire as to how far Kolzheim and Grolzer had proven themselves, whether they had managed to work their way up without patronage and pass all the front-line tests. They had been good assistants, university graduates, smart sociologists with a command of the leftist jargon yet capable of arguing from the right. It would be too bad if they went to seed among the lettuce heads and petty affairs with salesgirls and cashiers.
He would have to ask Amplanger for a report, and he must give the Tolms a call, talk to them at long last after they had been lugging prejudices around like heavy lumps for thirty-three years. Perhaps he could phone Hilde too and ask her to be, if not his life’s companion, maybe his housekeeper. He’d had enough of this wild-bull image, didn’t need it anymore either, was sick and tired of women, including whores. Above all he must convince Tolm that no one in the world was out to destroy him. On the contrary: they wanted to keep him and to keep him well, and at last he was to have time for his Madonnas or cathedrals or crucifixes. He was to get well and stay well, for as long as possible, and if Kolzheim and Grolzer had been purified, had been tempered to new hardness, they would be the best assistants for him: streamlined young whippets, with a sense of humor and, after three or four years in the crucible, a long way from being spoiled. Perhaps Käthe Tolm was the only person he could talk to about his corpse in the vault, about his loneliness.
12
After breakfast a delegation from the newspaper turned up after all, with flowers and a blown-up front page, mounted on cardboard, of that day’s edition, which had been devoted to his election. That was nice of them, it really touched him, especially since they sent only three people—old Thönis, who officially was still editor-in-chief, one of the old émigré bunch originally sent him by Major Weller, newsprint allocation and license alone not being quite enough. From Thönis and the vanished Communist Schröter he had learned at least the rudiments of journalism, again and again they had dinned into him the word “jour, jour, jour,” for one day, to last one day. He had understood, but he had never learned it, and in whatever he wrote he had never been able to drop his academic diffuseness and thoroughness. They had also sent along Blörl, one of the old printers, and his secretary Birgit Zatger, not that young either, all of them old-timers, they were fond of him, as he was of them, and they knew that. Thö
nis had actually dug out Tolm’s doctoral thesis: “The Rhenish Farmhouse in the Nineteenth Century”—that pathetic, cold, unfriendly architecture, those little Frankish farmhouses with their tiled walls, their yards, not much more than burrows. He could only hope that no one would read this unflattering dissertation, with its many comparisons with North and South German peasant architecture. Somehow or other those shabby façades had always reminded him of confessionals, and they were something he couldn’t stomach.
Pictures of himself: as a boy with his bike outside the manor house, as a student, as a returning soldier, and Käthe hadn’t escaped them either—as a young wife carrying Rolf, sitting beside Zummerling at a dinner party. Himself again with his postwar decorations, standing with smiling cabinet ministers. “A full life. A successful life.” He actually felt a few tears come to his eyes as he raised his glass with Thönis, Blörl, Miss Zatger, and Käthe; Käthe not quite in tears but moist-eyed. Champagne, cigars, a promise to appear before the staff, who felt they shared in his honor, to accept their congratulations, and on a sudden impulse he suggested to Thönis that they use first names, after thirty-three years, tried desperately to remember Thönis’s first name, felt that his suggestion had come too late and at the wrong moment. Thönis was embarrassed, couldn’t bring himself to say Fritz, and it occurred to him too late that Thönis was called Heinrich—and all this time he was thinking of Sabine, of her future, thinking of Kortschede’s prediction of a new, inescapable expulsion. Where to? Where to?
The Safety Net Page 28