The Safety Net (5 page)

Four flights, eleven steps each, and he knew every one of them, knew every uneven spot, even the smallest, every nuance, where the rod holding the stair carpet had come loose and he had to take care not to stumble. He had vigorously, with “almost unreasonable vehemence,” as the architects put it, resisted having the staircase straightened, the carpet replaced, and they were right: unreasonable and sentimental, and they could have no inkling of the latter, couldn’t know how often, as a boy, he had gone up, crept up, the stairs to reach Gerlind’s room, now occupied by Bleibl.

He was tired, feeling his age, sometimes in his thighs, sometimes all the way down to his feet; now he felt a new fear: having to move, move away—where to, where to? In the whole village not a wall would be left standing, not a patch of lawn preserved, not a boxwood in the cemetery, and he wondered whether they would take the neo-Gothic confessional along to Neu-Tolmshoven, whether Kohlschröder would take along his Gerta, to an even more fashionable apartment where Chagall would hang beside Warhol, and everything would be moved, the old girls, old women, Anna and Bertha, the farmers and the cemetery, as had happened at Eickelhof and Iffenhoven. The family had never forgiven him for that, nor had Rolf, least of all Käthe, yet they should have known that he was as helpless as he was powerless, not a fighter, never had been, known that
the money attracted him too, his growing wealth, the unforgettable poverty of his childhood—perhaps his father’s craving for land! And damn it all, why did there have to be so much brown coal in the ground right
here
, where they had been born, raised, and spent their lives?

He still refused to be persuaded by Grebnitzer to use a cane, and he wondered which was more ridiculous: to cling to the banister or to use a cane, or to ask for assistance from Blurtmehl, who would, needless to say, have been ready at any time to give him a helping hand. Eventually he would have no choice but cane or elevator, perhaps both, and then one day the wheelchair, where Bleibl would have liked to see him right now. A president in a wheelchair: white-haired, benevolent, cultured—what a feast for the media! He could already hear those obvious, facile comments comparing him with Roosevelt, his liberal leanings in economics with the New Deal. Allegories, clichés, lay ready, waiting to be used, whole series of corny stupidities: what a scoop for the media if they—who? how?—were to catch him in a wheelchair, preferably with cameras at the ready: himself, covered with blood, tipping out of the wheelchair, the wheelchair bouncing down the stairs, the inevitable comparison with the movie
Potemkin
. Stairs, perambulators; stairs, wheelchair—and no doubt the cameraman would swear and say: “For God’s sake, why does the staircase have only eleven steps—this take’s too short!”—and perhaps, in order to extend the take, he would send the bloodstained wheelchair careening down still more stairs.

He flinched when Blurtmehl opened the door for him at the very moment he touched the handle outside; he thought: that’s how it’ll be, it’ll be someone I know, someone I trust, someone who has passed every security test. For God’s sake, had Blurtmehl learned to see through wood? Or had he received a message from somewhere: “Now he’s standing at the door, touching the handle”? That wasn’t unlikely; after all, they were standing up here in the corridor—at least one of them was—with
their transceivers, though hidden in recesses, chests, doorways, or behind jutting old walls. Blurtmehl carried one too, and someone might have signaled his arrival out of sheer kindness, as a favor. The worst of it was that he now stumbled into the room through the open door, falling forward, so that Blurtmehl had to catch him: an embarrassing, totally superfluous demonstration of his physical helplessness that would be attributed to his state of health, not to the sheer technical fact that the door had suddenly given way. Surely he was still able to turn a door handle and enter a room without assistance!

These and other attentions and courtesies had long been accepted by him as indications of his increasingly rigorous imprisonment, in which everything, every courteous gesture, was transformed into both surveillance and threat. Fresh in the minds of all of them was the shock caused by Kortschede’s suddenly yelling and racing around the conference table like a madman when a waiter, unbidden, offered him a light for his cigarette: the silent approach of the waiter, the soft click that could easily have been taken for a muffled shot, had robbed Kortschede of the last of his composure, the silent courtesy had deprived him of all self-control—he yelled and yelled, raced around the table to the door, which was locked, back again, beside himself, no one could stop him, until Amplanger finally caught him in outstretched arms, but he had torn himself away (which later prompted Bleibl, who was always hinting at Kortschede’s homosexual proclivities, to remark cynically: “Like Joseph with Potiphar’s wife”), leaving his jacket behind in Amplanger’s arms, and there had been no alternative but to seize him with the aid of the police officers, who knew the right holds and applied them vigorously. It looked brutal but must have been necessary, they held on to him, clapping his mouth shut, until at last Grebnitzer arrived to give him a tranquilizing injection. Then, sobbing and gasping, he had subsided, collapsed, and had to be taken to his room, watched over by a nurse, until his family arrived to take care of him.

Blurtmehl led him to the armchair by the window, seemed somewhat embarrassed, brought some mineral water, added a shot of whiskey, and said: “Your wife will be back around six, in an hour—she asked me to tell you. I’ll have some tea and toast ready then. Meanwhile I’ll get your bath ready.” It had been an effort to persuade Blurtmehl to drop the “Madam” or “the mistress.” He didn’t care for such language, Käthe even less, yet in the beginning it had been as if, by forbidding Blurtmehl to use such forms of address, one were robbing him of some inherent right. Finally they had succeeded by making a joke of it. Every time he used either one, every time it “slipped out,” as he put it, Blurtmehl had to forfeit a cigarette and put it into the attractive malachite box, the gift of some Soviet character.

The other day, at the sanatorium in Trollscheid, where he was visiting Kortschede and they were having a cup of tea on the roofed terrace in the rain, Kortschede had confessed to his homosexual proclivities. The intensity of these had surprised him, especially Kortschede’s dependence on a man called Horst that Kortschede himself described as pathological. Horst was regarded as a dangerous criminal and had to be kept under constant surveillance, even at night when he was in bed with Kortschede. Horst was the key figure in a case of blackmail and robbery that had ended in murder—and the microphones were lying in wait for spilled details, or better still a confession. “I have had to consent to this in order for him to be permitted to visit me—and you may not believe this: the boy loves me—and I am betraying him—but now you can imagine the state my nerves are in—sometimes I want to scream when a door is banged somewhere in the building, when you—forgive me—put down your cup with a click.…”

He, Kortschede, gave Tolmshoven four, at most five, more years, and of course he hadn’t told Käthe this; why worry her now, why? Hard to imagine that there would be nothing left, nothing: only dredges and a gigantic hole, conveyor belts and pumps, and the wind that forms in such cavities, and yet another cloud-forming power station; the manor sold at a high profit,
this ancient pile received long ago by some Tolm as a reward for success in battle—for or against Spain, no one seemed to know exactly, and the countess of those days, who had been for or against the Spaniards, had been forced to marry him. They would bulldoze it all, church and manor, the Kelz house, the Pütz house, the Kommertz house, and the nice little arbor at the end of the vicarage garden where in summer one could sit and drink a glass of wine—pond and bridge, ducks and owls—where would the owl fly to?

“It’s all decided, Tolm, decided before anything’s been discussed, before they allow the local enthusiasts to start shouting, it’s settled, before it could have been settled—billions of tons lie there, and nothing, nothing will stop them from extracting them—and farther off, beyond Hetzigrath, not a house, not a tree will remain standing, not a snail keep its house, not a mole its run, and they will advance right up to the Dutch border and one day they’ll talk the Dutch into it also, if any coal happens to be there too.… There’s not a thing you can do about it, Tolm, nothing, my dear Fritz, and if you want to continue investing in Tolmshoven you should know that of course you’ll be compensated at a profit, but as for all the work, the annoyance, the upheaval involved in any remodeling, you should spare yourself that. Believe me: the plans are ready, the calculations already under way—I assure you.”

In the rain, over tea on the terrace in Trollscheid, and Kortschede could no longer live without his Horst, without tranquilizers. And added with a smile: “And you know of course, or at least you have a hunch, that the paper will fall into Zummerling’s lap—and into mine—just as Tolmshoven will fall prey to the dredges. You should really have paid more attention to economic trends, you should have read the financial pages more than the literary section—and here’s some advice for you: never start anything against a Fischer—you know that the Resistance photos Zummerling has of him are unbeatable. God-fearing textile industry versus liberal newspaper … you couldn’t win, not with your family background,
with Rolf, Veronica, and Katharina … watch out! Take care.”

Since the incident with Kortschede, the last vestiges of irony had vanished from their comments on security surveillance; only Bleibl occasionally permitted himself a passing shot. Their relations with the guards had changed too, since Kortschede’s fit their friendly but sometimes patronizing manner was no longer possible, and since the affair of Pliefger’s birthday cake joking wasn’t possible either—there was work for Kiernter the psychologist, there were long conferences with Holzpuke (in charge of security), who asked for forbearance, after all the guards were only doing their duty, and as for themselves, surely they wanted to safeguard their lives, so they must accept apparent pedantries—such as a guard inspecting the toilet before one of them used it, or “lady visitors” being closely scrutinized—and, please, escapades such as those occasionally indulged in by Käthe should be avoided. Yet they should have realized that there was no such thing as security, either internal or external; he knew that all these measures had to be yet would prevent nothing.

Still, it was both pleasant and reassuring to look out over moat and terrace onto the park, to imagine that one day it might be possible again to have a party there with all the children and grandchildren: outdoors, on a summer evening with paper lanterns and little lights, with modest fireworks for the grandchildren, ice cream, a barbecue, and cocktails—whatever they wanted; and bitter to know that, for the time being and perhaps forever, it was out of the question, considering that one of his sons was himself regarded as a security risk and that his son-in-law refused “to sit at the same table with someone who after November ’seventy-four had named another of his children Holger,” for who could forget that it had been in November 1974 that Holger Meins, one of the hardest of the hard-core terrorists, had died in prison during a hunger strike? … Another four or five years, so he might as well suppress the fear of moving, although he knew that it would continue
to nag him, to gnaw away at him: “not a snail keep its house, not a mole its run …”

And doubtless “they” would see to it that there were no more carefree parties, among them his former daughter-in-law, who, as was hardly a matter of guesswork anymore, had now joined “them”—and that other one, the young man who had studied banking at his expense and been his frequent guest at Eickelhof.

Fortunately Blurtmehl had, over the years, learned to attune himself to his moods and was probably still embarrassed over his uncalled-for opening of the door: he had left the room before being asked to leave him alone for a while, and had even moved the malachite box close enough so that he need only stretch out his arm, although Grebnitzer had given Blurtmehl strict instructions never to move cigarettes within his reach. But he preferred to take out his crumpled package, which must still contain one cigarette, and there it was, squashed, almost broken in two, but it was still possible to smooth and straighten it out, and it drew when he lit it. He carefully examined the package, discovered one more, a broken one—and it still went against the grain to throw away the package with the two halves, that was more deeply entrenched than the memory of hunger. The memory of being deprived of tobacco lay as deep as the memory of the confessional and Gerlind’s “Let’s take pity on ourselves,” as deep as the smell of autumn leaves in Dresden; that memory of humiliating interrogations, almost cross-examinations, when some upstart of an officer puffed out the aroma of a Virginia cigarette into the air and tossed the cigarette, hardly begun, over his shoulder, how hard it had been for him then to decline the proffered cigarette, but he knew: it was meant to seduce him into confessing something he had never done. No, he really hadn’t had any idea that his godfather Friedrich, whom he scarcely knew, who occasionally turned up for his birthday with a gift, he really hadn’t had any idea that Friedrich had left him the
Bevenicher Tagblatt
, and no one, no one in his family had taken part in
any Aryanization. In January 1945 he had been involved in some withdrawal movements along the Bavarian-Czech border, no more and no less; yes, his dissertation had been on “The Rhenish Farmhouse in the Nineteenth Century,” but here in camp, while being interrogated, he had heard for the first time that he was the owner of the
Bevenicher Tagblatt
. Those cigarettes, those stubs, those hardly smoked Virginians they threw away—only with Käthe could he speak about that, with no one else, least of all with Bleibl, although he had first met him in the internment camp.

Now Bleibl really had been a Nazi (textiles, had his fingers in that, through his family), and had always, “at every stage of his life” as he put it, “had the best of everything,” in war and peace, in camps and tents, in hovels and palaces, always “the best of everything.” In camp he had invariably, with unfailing instinct, sniffed out the most corrupt among the officers and proposed deals to him in which he, Bleibl, could act as go-between. Land occupied by destroyed and undestroyed buildings, vacant lots too, and how many dollars had to be offered to this person or that. He carried around the entire land-registry records of the District of Doberach in his head, knew—since he had been one of them himself—where the worst Nazis had lived; knew how their families, or even they themselves as they sat trembling in their cellar hideouts, could be persuaded with good old dollars to sell their houses or properties in a sort of “counter-Aryanization,” as he called it—through middlemen, of course—and with those dollars they could then clear out, God knows where to, and Bleibl killed two birds with one stone: provided the Nazis with dollars and the means to escape, and the corrupt officer with property, and naturally he could expect a commission from both, in dollars of course, which he could use to acquire this or that property for himself, through middlemen of course, for obviously a Nazi of Bleibl’s stamp couldn’t acquire real estate while still in the internment camp. There were some wild rumors: that Bleibl, together with a small U.S. Army patrol, was “cleaning up” in the vaults of
destroyed banks—safes and cash deposits; they simply—so the rumor went—drove up in armored scout cars, cleaned up and cleaned out—“positively shoveled out money and valuables”—in the chaos of the ruined city. Later Bleibl had free access to the commandant’s barracks, could telephone, was allowed out, was taken along, presumably also to the brothels—and there the rest of them were, almost weeping at the sight, even from a distance, of a woman, any woman—and he tormented them with a recital of his numerous “erections,” brought along whole cartons of cigarettes and let them all have a sniff, drove them crazy—advanced from a textile whiz to a real estate genius. It was not difficult to imagine him “cleaning up” in bank vaults. And before long he was appointed—what was it called? probably “Textile Administrator” for an entire region.