The Safety Net by Heinrich Böll Read Free Book Online Page A

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 continueto 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 inany 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