The Safety Net (20 page)

Claudia was a nice girl who didn’t seem to like her mother’s off-color jokes at all, and she did think Hubert went too far and was unfair in once calling Claudia a “convention hooker.” Once he had also called her own sister Monika a hooker, at a time when there was some justification for this description—Monika, who insisted on being called Monka because that name was now “in,” had meanwhile really turned over a new leaf, in fact she never had been a hooker, she had merely moved in circles where such suspicions were not entirely unjustified. Monka was now working for, sometimes in, a boutique, sewing, knitting, designing; she lived with Karl, who was still going to the university and earning money wherever he could. Karl spoke and thought pretty freely about many things, but never, as Monka still sometimes did, flippantly. And anyway: this business of living together without being married, Mrs. Hölster and the Mittelkamps—she felt like such an outsider, yet she was only twenty-nine herself, and that apparently (or maybe genuinely) scientific way of discussing sex sometimes revolted her more than Mittelkamp’s crudeness—once, when his wife was at work and Bernhard at school, he had had the nerve to ask her over for “fun and games.” She had never told Hubert, all hell would have broken loose. She could hardly stand it
when a certain occurrence, which she still called fulfillment, was discussed in appropriate scientific terms—or when Hubert once actually speculated on whether their boy, their dear little Bernhard, was already having erections: horrible word!

There had been days when she had been on the point of going off to her mother’s, who had at last found her own cottage and garden in Hetzigrath and dreamed of a Silesia that no longer existed, if it ever had: it always sounded as if life there had consisted solely of apples and honey, linen and the Catholic faith, incense and the Blessed Virgin—no tensions, no problems; never war, only peace. And the dreadful experience, of course, of having to flee, leaving behind the apples, honey, incense, and the Blessed Virgin, and needless to say “they” had been to blame, no one else. A fairy tale, and she wouldn’t have minded putting up with this Silesian fairy tale for a while if it hadn’t been for Bernhard’s school. Now at last he had this nice, firm Mr. Plotzkehler for a teacher, a friend of Karl’s from the university who was taking such an interest in the boy. No, she couldn’t risk changing schools now.

Things were becoming more and more difficult with Hubert, and there was something else of which the mere thought made her blush, and she couldn’t talk about it to anybody, anybody at all, not even to Monka, for fear she would laugh at her. She couldn’t confess it either, for there was no question of guilt, and the rumors one heard about the clergy increased her doubts about advice from that quarter. Perhaps she could have talked to Karl about it, but he was a man, although undoubtedly discreet and understanding, and would probably have just spouted a lot of scientific words. Fulfillment—not fulfillment of duty—was what she lacked; after all, she did have a sex, female, wasn’t ashamed of it, enjoyed it, and had enjoyed Hubert, just as he had enjoyed her, as she well knew. He had always been loving, nice in his quiet, serious way, never crude, had in fact sometimes lost that deep seriousness and been almost merry; never crude, neither before their marriage nor after; gladly had she been fulfilled by him, given him fulfillment, and now she
longed for it so much that she was beginning to feel ashamed. She caught herself looking through magazines for appropriate columns and articles, was ashamed of the devices she used, felt like a loose woman when she undressed in front of him, left the bathroom door open after Bernhard had been put to bed and she took a shower, didn’t care for such tricks yet used them: scantily dressed and perfumed, with something like an “enticing look,” and sometimes he would kiss her on the shoulder, perhaps on her cheek, never on her mouth, her breast, and then sometimes he would start to sob against her shoulder and for a while even give up his grumbling and grousing, didn’t even get mad when Bernhard knocked over the can of creosote for the garden fence onto the driveway.

Hubert became even more silent, sat in front of the TV watching the stupidest things for hours on end, stupid junk, “celebrity cackle” he used to call it—that contrived wittiness, that “halfwit-nitwit dingdong.” Sports—he watched it all, everything, without seeing it. Sometimes, when she had finished in the kitchen and came to sit by him, she saw him with his head in his hands, his face covered with his hands and not even looking at programs that should have interested him: crime reports, security matters, police deployment, helicopter patrols, brother officers, perhaps even himself on the screen—he didn’t even bother to look. And he had stopped going to church choir practice, meeting colleagues for a beer, and she was almost ready to phone Kiernter the psychologist, or Holzpuke, Lühler, or Zurmack, with whom he was now spending most of his time. Yet she preferred this silent phase to the earlier one when he could turn vicious, downright nasty.

Now she was afraid, not of him, but for him. There was something weighing on his mind, and there was only one thing it could never be, never: a woman. Not that, not with him. It had to be the job, something to do with the job, and she recalled what Zurmack had spilled the last time they had all met for a beer—it must have been all of four weeks ago—when he had
been pretty drunk, before Hubert had stopped him: how on one occasion he had had to go shopping for shoes with that young Mrs. Bleibl. “It’s his Number Four, we could never afford that many.… Just put yourself in their place—they must feel pretty lonely, sitting around in their huge offices, and on trips too they’re lonely, and the secretaries are the only ones who know where it hurts, what’s hurting them, and then it happens, and she was his secretary too, and the next will be one too, just put yourself in their place”—and the way she sat there having forty—no, fifty—no, sixty pairs of shoes brought to her and trying them on, smoking and leafing through a magazine, being served coffee, and Zurmack had had to check every single shoe-box before it was opened; the boxes came from the basement or the warehouse, to which there were several rear entrances. How easily someone could have made one of those shoeboxes “hot”—as had happened with the cake for Pliefger. There were plenty of hidden accesses and entrances through which they could easily have slipped in and forced one of the girls, or even taken her place—and so he had not only had to guard the private fitting room but also to open and search every box, and he saw “shoes you only get to see in movies, regular sex sandals of every color and shape, and they weren’t cheap either”—and described in detail how the salesgirls’ faces turned white with anger when, after hours of strutting and stalking around in front of the mirror—and “gold slippers and purple slippers and ‘Oh’s’ and ‘Ah’s’ and slippers that were hardly even slippers”—the “old girl” walked out without buying a single pair. He also told them about going with her to Breslitzer Fashions, all that rustling and whispering “and the lewd giggling in the fitting rooms” and pinning and tucking—“And she’s not that pretty, mind you, certainly not beautiful”—and then the salesgirls at the shoe store and at Breslitzer’s got a dressing down because they hadn’t sold anything, “hadn’t palmed anything off on the old girl.” Then Lühler also started in, talking about his experiences at “certain parties,” describing women “who are practically topless when they meet you as you come on duty—but
just watch out if you behave even remotely like you were a normal man appreciating an offer!” and he was just beginning to tell them about a woman who was always drunk and whom he had had to guard in bars—but at that point Hubert intervened and forbade any further discussion of official secrets.

Good heavens, surely she had enough imagination to know what it must be like, weeks of duty around swimming pools, or at parties where they had to stand at the doors inside and out—watching, listening, being ignored as if they were lampposts or wax figures; always on the alert, unable to relax even for a second, while things were bound to become pretty lively at times, with all that food, liquor, dancing, kissing, and probably worse—and somewhere there must lie the cause of Hubert’s changed nature. Some people—including Mother, Monka, and Karl too, she supposed—had always found him a bit too serious, too severe, had always been surprised when he’d suddenly shown his genial side, his wit and his charm. Hadn’t he danced delightfully with Monka, not exactly flirting but paying her such nice compliments? Everyone had been so surprised that he could be like that too; never angry, rarely annoyed, only on those occasions when he couldn’t avoid being with his parents and his brother Heinz, who had never got over the fact that he had become “only a policeman.” Yes, the father was a “member of the legal profession,” though it turned out later that he was a bailiff; the brother was a lecturer in philosophy, and they let him feel it, that annoyed him, and he sharply reminded his father of the connections between the courts and the police, and demonstrated to his brother the vagueness of his ideas. And the worst thing was when, at any place at any time, regardless of the context, the word “fuzz” was uttered—once Bernhard had been called a “fuzz brat,” and the boy had come home in tears; and on a summer evening one of the guests at a party in the Mittelkamps’ garden had called across the fence: “Come on over and join us, Mr. and Mrs. Fuzz!”—he would go white with rage, ready to start a fight; he was touchy, very touchy—and could be so nice, so kind. Now he was so silent, sad, tired,
apathetic, stared at the box, not even interested in sports or police reports. Had even stopped grumbling about those who were responsible for it all, were the cause of it all. Gone was the enthusiasm with which he used to go to church—sometimes, it had seemed to her, a bit ostentatiously; that solemn but joyous insistence on liturgical forms which he described as “his right”; that pride in his Church with which he countered the scoffing of brother officers and neighbors. Expressions such as “Bible wielder” had been used, and at the beer table one of his colleagues had once said: “Good God, Hubert—the priests don’t have that much clout these days—so why all the fuss?” And he had tried to explain, earnestly but in vain, that it had nothing whatever to do with his career, that it was simply a “deep inner need.” And it was true, he had never thought of it in those terms, and the last thing he could be called was an opportunist. After all, he hadn’t joined the police for want of something better: he had gone through all that training and the rigorous drill because he prized order, desired it, wanted to defend order. He desired to be a custodian of order, serious but never without mercy: many a time—as she well knew—he had let petty thieves and shoplifters go and as a result had landed himself in a lot of trouble, and he had explained to her that such people were actually the victims of seduction. He hadn’t even been very hard on streetwalkers when he was on the beat. No, serious he was, but not hard; he had never been hard on her either, apart from that early phase of his change when he had been constantly finding fault.

Perhaps it would be best after all if she were to give Kiernter a call, or Holzpuke himself, or maybe just Zurmack, who was an older man and very nice. All that watching in shoe stores and dress salons went through her mind, that hanging about the pool where they horsed around, scantily dressed, fancy drinks in their hands—it must be like the movies; and it was unavoidable—in fact it had leaked out—that sometimes, well, sometimes they had to go along and stand around in or outside bordellos. And why not? Needless to say she was against such
establishments, was horrified by them, and although during his time on the beat he hadn’t given her any details, naturally he had described, “in general terms,” what went on there—but if other men went there, why not the ones they had to guard? They always had to be present, to play dead, yet they weren’t dead. Presumably money was spent in those places like water, caviar and champagne and all that kind of thing, and if a man happened to be groaning under heavy mortgage payments, had to pay off his new car and those extortionate loans, maybe he did start to do some calculating and have some thoughts about it. He’d always had his thoughts, deep ones, devout too. Yet even before they were married he had insisted on fulfillment, for her, for himself, and hadn’t found this contradictory: the Bible said, as he reminded her, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife,” and he was not coveting his neighbor’s wife but his own; that—to covet one’s neighbor’s wife—he found wicked of course. He was by nature a brooder.

Thank heavens he was now being nice again to Bernhard, no longer radiating that appalling contempt, no longer using that terrible word “graceful,” was just sad and quiet, sometimes stroking the boy’s hair with such a sad expression that it almost broke her heart—it was almost a gesture of farewell. Did the police psychologist suspect nothing of all this? Perhaps it would be better to ask for transfer to a rural area, where the offenses were more obvious ones—impaired driving, theft, traffic jams, fistfights, failure to obey closing hours—none of that threatening uncertainty that could occur any place any time and yet occurred so rarely, so rarely that it was almost a relief when they happened to catch someone, like that man Schubler she had read about in the paper—they had actually found a pistol in his apartment that he could quite easily have used to kill Mrs. Fischer, from right next door where he was committing adultery with that woman who appeared to be of somewhat easy virtue. He was still under suspicion since no one would believe in his pure love; they found it easier to believe in her naïveté. It was embarrassing for the woman yet represented
a success after months of waiting. Not a word about it from him, not a syllable. In his quiet way he had brushed off her diffident attempts to find out something about the affair. Yet she knew quite well that he was on duty in Blorr at the Fischers’ and must know the details. In the end Schubler had become muddled during the interrogations, had admitted that he was a leftist, or if he was not, that he had once been one.

Just the same, even though he never mentioned it, she knew: that he was guarding and escorting that young woman and her child, Mrs. Fischer-Tolm. Now
she
really was a beauty, with her warm honey-colored hair like her mother, who was still handsome though she already had quite a bit of silver in her hair—yes, that’s where the word “graceful” must come from—a grace that never made her look thin, she was not merely elegant, there was something more than dressmakers could achieve, a quiet, physical beauty; her figure, her mouth, eyes, eyebrows; and there was something high-strung about her, stopping just short of restlessness, that must make her desirable to men—she blushed at these thoughts, found it unnatural of herself, as a woman, to be regarding female beauty as desirable—and a direct reaction at that, not by imagining herself to be a man. That was a woman one could love and fall in love with; not only was she a beauty, she seemed lovable too. She appeared quite often on TV, in magazines—riding, going for a walk, even in church, kneeling with that dear little girl of hers before the Blessed Virgin. Her husband, “Beehive” Fischer, also appeared often enough, certainly a handsome man, no fault to find with him, really, yet he didn’t attract her when she saw him or pictures of him: on TV at big receptions, holding a glass of orange juice. Again she blushed, was afraid to look in the mirror; any comparison with Mrs. Fischer was bound to be disastrous. She had nothing to hide, it wasn’t that, no reason to feel like a little sparrow, there was nothing wrong with her, not her face, not her hair—though it could have been a bit glossier—not her breasts or legs or movements, that she knew, could feel it, too, from the way men looked at her, and yet: young Mrs. Fischer-Tolm was
in a different class, what might be called a “thoroughbred.”