The Safety Net (34 page)

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 Hilde, 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.

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 that 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.