The Safety Net (22 page)

“Also because of Karl, or do you suppose he’s beyond temptation? He isn’t, he’s faithful all right, but not beyond temptation—he has what he calls a ‘strong sense of beauty,’ a true aesthete, that guy, can be carried away, as I say: faithful, but not beyond temptation—but at other times, too, I pray to Her, the Queen of Heaven. I do have a sinful past—oh, I haven’t told everything even to you, and Karl doesn’t know everything either—and sometimes it really gets me, and it makes me cry and pray. But don’t get the idea that I suffer terribly because of Karl. He’s nice, I love him, I like him, I want to stay with him and he wants to stay with me—but apart from that I do need it. Jesus has never been my cup of tea, I’ve never really got along with Him, even when I was young, I never really got through to Him—but She, She helps, maybe She’ll help you too. But please, please, Helga, no more tricks, don’t lower yourself—I couldn’t bear that—I can understand, of course, but don’t try that. What I mean is, make sure you’re always clean and neat, don’t let yourself go—but you wouldn’t do that anyway. I could have a talk with old Mrs. Tolm, her mother, she’d come if I phoned her.…”

“No, Monka, no—it’s all just guesswork, and we might start something much worse. Promise me, not a word to a soul. Not a word. Promise.”

“I promise, and you know I’ll keep my word. But someone has to do some talking in this business—Hubert with you, you with Hubert, you with Mrs. Fischer, Mrs. Fischer with you—by the way, she’s pregnant, it’s in all the papers.…”

“And she’s leaving her husband when she’s pregnant?”

“That happens—there are these pregnancy crises—so I’ve read, anyway. It seems that, in the sixth month … you don’t suppose …?”

“I can’t believe it … I can’t … and I don’t believe it—but
then: what can it be—have I become so repulsive to him? No, it’s not that—I can feel it—please, don’t talk about it, not to a soul, please.”

“I’ve already promised. Where is he now, still with her?”

“No, I believe he’s at the manor house.”

“Where she is too—you know she’s moved to her mum and dad? He’s off again looking for new low-wage countries—the Beehive borrows from me quite nicely too, believe me, and maybe there’s a Chinese woman somewhere who’s sewing shirts designed by me—I wouldn’t be surprised.… I heard on the radio that he’d left.…”

There was not much more to say, it almost took her breath away, the mere possibility—not because it might have happened, not because he had somehow wronged her, or Mrs. Fischer—no, it was the consequences, and that the improbable had gained in probability: in her sixth month, that was exactly five months ago. Hubert with Mrs. Tolm-Fischer, pregnancy—surely not even the Blessed Virgin could help here.

Neither the Blessed Virgin nor the porn wave could help, nor sexual liberation, state, or Church: for someone who took things seriously it was a disaster, and now all she could do was wait, maybe talk to him after all, challenge him, ask, release him, stroke his hair and look deep into his eyes again, not be hard, only questioning and perhaps a little sad.…

“D’you suppose,” she asked Monka, “that you could find out where he—Fischer, I mean—was five months ago? I mean, if she’s actually in her sixth month …”

“Helga—I can find out. How smart you are! …”

Now the tears did come as she took Monka’s hand and thanked her, it had done her good, this heart-to-heart, affectionate yet, on the surface at least, light. She was grateful that there had been no laughter and that none had been suppressed and, come to think of it, why despair? Tears were good. So he did have an affair with her, and she was having a child by him, if their guesswork was right; if that’s the way it was then the child was surely not a disaster, except that it was bad
for him because it must have happened while he was on duty. She felt sure that so far no one had noticed anything. No one knew about it, it was all guesswork. Nothing more. So Hubert was not sick—or whatever the Latin word for it was—he was confused, confused—all she could do now was: dry her tears, take the boy by the hand, and go home on the bus.

On the bus she thought about the woman. For her, too, it must be hard, so serious and quiet as she was said to be, she had a child from that other one, the little girl who looked so sweet in her riding habit. It certainly hadn’t been easy, she certainly wasn’t easygoing. They had merely lost their heads and got all caught up, sunk deeper than they had imagined, found they couldn’t extricate themselves from this business that was always made out to be so trivial, so fleeting (“Here today and gone tomorrow—you know how it is”), and now six people were affected, entangled, and a seventh on the way, a human being, six months along.…

He had already confessed it, right at the beginning, having driven one Saturday to some suburban church or other where he had actually found someone in the confessional: a youngish priest smelling of lavender soap who jerked upright when, without much preamble, he came to the serious heart of the matter, the matter he felt to be a sin—unfaithfulness, adultery—and he was relieved when the priest seemed to take it seriously. That must have been due to his own confessional voice that permitted no trifling with the matter. He was told to describe the circumstances, did so, spoke about Helga and Sabine, how serious it was or would be for them both. Was later surprised that Fischer never crossed his mind. The advice was unequivocal: to ask for a transfer, immediately. Yes, he repented, but he also knew while he was kneeling there, later sitting, that he would not ask for a transfer. This was long before it turned out that Sabine was pregnant, at a time when he still had to accuse himself of “extreme unkindness toward his wife and son.” He could not explain how it was that he had become
gentler toward Helga and the boy on learning that Sabine was expecting a child. Often, when he could take an hour or two off on a Saturday, he would drive to the church and go in, but not to the confessional. He didn’t like the church, could find no beauty in it: a postwar building knocked together with shoddy material, looking dilapidated, almost shabby, after barely twenty-five years—cheerless, the Perpetual Light barely visible and, if he was lucky, one or at most two lighted candles in front of the Virgin Mary; not a vestige of all that confessional activity which had still existed when he was a teenager: lineups at the confessional, the smell of incense from the preceding service, the strange sweetness of the almost palpable repentance as people knelt in the pews murmuring their penances; activity.

Now, a dozen years later, nothing, all he’d ever see would be a lone woman or a small group of giggling children who had obviously been forced to go to confession. Yet he felt attached to this church with its pathetically shined-up Saint Joseph, who stood in a niche and seemed to be the patron saint; felt attached to this shabby church—it was here, after all, that he had found a priest who could still be serious—Monka had told him about some strange experiences in the confessional, about priests to whom the word “sin” was no longer acceptable, and Bernhard’s preparations for confession depressed him; Helga did not comment. It pained him to think of her, hurt as much as the thought of Sabine, who had whispered to him that she would never enter a confessional again, never.…

Chaos, disintegration, all around—and himself right in the midst of it, and not through anyone else’s fault, or—and this was a dangerous notion that Sabine had boldly come up with—it was if anything “their” fault. Her “We have
them
to thank for it” echoed constantly in his mind. One thing was certain, he had to talk to Helga, tell her everything, for Sabine’s sake too, for she also was bound by his silence. She, too, would have to talk to someone, her husband, her parents.

The tavern across from the church didn’t seem to be thriving: in the last five months the lessee had changed three times.
There were a few pensioners sitting around, a few foreign workers, and the meatballs and cold cutlets in the display case looked ancient. But the beer was good, and at least it was a tavern where you weren’t constantly inundated with music, the jukebox was out of order, he had never seen any teenagers here, and the landlord was so morosely and pointedly bored that he’d sometimes doze off over his second beer.

A transfer could easily have been obtained at that stage: nerves, fatigue, overfamiliarity with the surroundings; Kiernter would support his transfer, and it would have been possible to transfer the whole team, not split up, they worked smoothly together, had “adjusted to their surroundings,” had also been at the Bleibls’, at parties and big receptions; he could even have left this assignment and asked for a transfer to another city. There was no lack of sympathy for crises, overtaxed nerves, even personal dislikes, it was openly discussed; they wouldn’t be sent to the Bleibls’ again anyway, since Zurmack had said: “Never again to that place, never again to that woman—I’d rather be in some godforsaken hole handing out parking and speeding tickets.” Kiernter called it “a certain lasciviousness that is bothering you.” After all, they weren’t talking about cigarettes but about human lives, about stable nerves. Ticklish matters were discussed, they took the bull by the horns, Lühler kept talking about “those fancy whores who arouse you but won’t let you get at them.” Yes, it had happened once at a party given by some big shot, where a fellow had felt tense enough anyway in the lamplit grounds because it was so hard to keep an eye on everything. Toward three in the morning, when things started to loosen up, and before their very eyes the big shot, dead drunk, had actually to be dragged to his car, Lühler had become the victim of one of those women who was known not to be averse to a little private stripping too. Lühler, “because she thrust it at me,” had made a grab for it, had had his wrist slapped and been stridently insulted: “Get this disgusting fuzz away from me! This instant!” Naturally they had all been on Lühler’s side and had discussed the case as well as possible
cases of a similar kind that Kiernter and Holzpuke classified as “potential involvements.” It had only happened once, and if Lühler had been transferred or disciplined they would have all quit on the spot. The simple solution was never to send him to any more parties where totally drunk big shots had to be dragged like wet sacks to their cars and where some of the women became hysterical; and of course Zurmack would never again be used as an escort on a shoe-buying expedition.

Kiernter asked them to try and understand “the other side too”: “You must appreciate that this strict surveillance really does put an end to all private life for those people—they’re bound to crack up sometimes: we must not.” He was immune to such advances, indifferent to women who offered themselves, he found them worse than hookers, who at least were following a profession, however dubious. Kiernter went on to speak of the “fluid line between promiscuity and prostitution.” There was the one eventuality that none of them would regard as likely: that it could become serious—serious, that a woman wouldn’t scream for help, rant about the fuzz, slap wrists, yet not be a hooker; a woman for whom it was so serious that she even seemed almost grateful to “them”—those fiendish bastards—for this happiness. And conceived a child, gave no thought to pill or abortion. It was something that simply happened between men and women, happened to millionaires with salesgirls and secretaries and to millionaires’ wives with policemen, so it seemed.

And he didn’t ask for a transfer, didn’t speak to anyone about it, not even Kiernter, who he was sure would have treated it as a sort of secret of the confessional and supplied other reasons for the transfer than the true ones. With a nostalgia that he knew to be founded in self-deception, he thought about a job with the rural police: fistfights at fairs, impaired driving, petty thefts, but also, as he well knew, hash and heroin and that futile poking and sniffing around in whole swarms of commuting school kids who sat around bored in waiting rooms and cafés. Chaos, disintegration, and he didn’t want to
be sucked in, yet was in the very midst of it, didn’t want to make anyone unhappy: neither Helga nor the boy, was glad that Sabine didn’t seem to be at all unhappy, only—like himself—when she thought of Helga and Bernhard. And the child she had and the child she was expecting, and her husband? After all, she was married to him, and sometimes the wedding pictures were published again, it wasn’t all that long ago: that wickedly expensive “simplicity” with which they were both dressed, radiant and, in that wickedly expensive way, “unpretentious.” He didn’t ask for a transfer, nor did he go to confession again, he just sat in that shabby church, in that seedy tavern across the street, brooding on the decline of Saturday afternoons, thinking about the seriousness of the priest and the only proper advice: transfer. And he kept remembering Sabine’s “We have
them
to thank for it,” and that Beverloh, too, with whom she had danced so often. Jealous? Yes, jealous, and again not of Fischer. He couldn’t follow the advice, didn’t want to leave her, didn’t want to leave Helga and Bernhard together, yet he knew: the three of them, or six or seven, together—that wouldn’t work, it could never be.

And now he was standing in the manor, walking around the house, unable to write to her, to phone her, and all he could think of was: Doesn’t she ever come to visit her parents? She came very seldom, and he tried to imagine what she talked about with her parents: about the child she was expecting; his child. The “my” didn’t come naturally to him, he had found the same thing when Helga was expecting Bernhard: my, your, his—that didn’t start until Bernhard was born; that was his child.…

He didn’t dare think what would happen if it “came out” before he had told Helga; even though it might be called a scandal for a policeman and a woman under his protection, was it really that scandalous for a man and a woman—and both married? The world would survive, had already survived many such things, one transitory occurrence piled upon another, graves and grass, it didn’t occur to him that Sabine was now “ruined,”
she wasn’t. He only had to think of all that “they” perpetrated, how many thousands of tiny wheels they set in motion, what a fine web they wove: from Zurmack’s shoeboxes and the sheer hatred of the salesgirls for that woman, from Lühler’s fancy whore to Sabine, and that awful affair of Sabine’s neighbor with her lover, who both really did seem to be ruined and, as the public was given to understand, “not without reason”—no, one didn’t say “with reason,” one said “not without reason”—for they had actually found a pistol at Schubler’s place and some obscure pamphlets, though not a single indication of connections let alone plans; the “pamphlets” were out of date, around nine years old, the pistol naïve: an ancient revolver such as kids would hide away as a romantic prop, though there was also some ammunition.