Free The Safety Net by Heinrich Böll Page B

disregarded.
    No, she had never been able to bring herself to denounce her upbringing, to nourish resentment at the nuns, she was only shocked, deeply hurt, almost mortally wounded, since she had gone to Kohlschröder for relief. Kohlschröder had insisted on her giving all the details, until a dark suspicion rose in her: she was horrified at the way he quizzed her, also about what she had been up to with Hubert, hm? At that point she had stood up and run away: never again, never again anything like confession. Never again, then rather chat with Erna Breuer, and at the Fischers’, Erwin’s parents, where one sometimes met such amusing, modish, flippant clerics, they would certainly have laughed if she had confessed to them: “I have committed adultery”—characters who could be expected at any time to indulge in a clerical striptease, they bragged about their no-risk love affairs, sometimes brought along their women. Chaos, disintegration, all around—and the fear, not for one’s life, noton account of the scandal, fear for Helga, and for Hubert, for whom it was as serious as it was for her, couldn’t be anything but serious, and who had apparently had more luck at confession than she had.
    Fear, too, of losing her neighbors, the growing resentment in Blorr, which, because of her, had become a “den of cops.” Ever since that business of Pliefger’s birthday cake, the controls had been stepped up. As a result, the love affair of her neighbor Erna Breuer with one of her husband’s drivers had been burst wide open; a nice, pleasant woman, pretty too, not exactly young, probably in her middle or late thirties, with whom one could have a chat across the fence about flowers and cleaning and recipes, who could be asked over for coffee, who, before the controls were stepped up, used occasionally to look after Kit, pass across a head of lettuce or a cauliflower, a perfectly ordinary woman who suffered a bit melodramatically from her childlessness, deploring her “barren womb”—“It’s not my husband, you see, he has children from his first marriage, it’s me”; a nice woman, that Erna Breuer, grew up in Hubreichen, daughter of Hermes, the farmer from whom Rolf got his milk, a dark, now rather buxom beauty, who also complained that “My old man never takes me dancing,” so they had been invited a few times, when there was a party in the garden with dancing, beside the swimming pool, with paper lanterns and fruit punch, champagne and general jollification, and Erwin had swung Erna Breuer around, and the flushed, breathless Erna Breuer had been ecstatic, and her husband, not exactly young either, probably in his early fifties, was also ecstatic, beaming at the sight of his Erna having a real good fling. A wonderful evening, their other neighbors had been invited too, Klober, owner of the cartage company, with wife and daughter, a seventeen-year-old who went in for the “topless” fashion; and Helmsfeld, the paper’s editor, who held forth learnedly, somewhat too learnedly for most of the guests, on terrorism. Even the Blums had come, and the Beeretzes had sent their oldest son, who danced with her quite often. Erna Breuer had been happy that evening,and with a tolerant smile her husband had overlooked the fact that she allowed herself to be kissed in a quiet corner by Helmsfeld, who, after the others had left, stayed on for coffee and praised—a bit too patronizingly, she felt—Mrs. Breuer’s “vulgar eroticism.”
    But then Zurmack and Lühler had been struck by the rather too frequent presence, usually between ten and twelve in the morning, of a gray Mercedes outside the Breuer house. A boyish-looking man in his late twenties would get out, dressed not quite as might have been expected of a normal visitor to the Breuers’: a little too casually, not in jeans but in corduroys, his hair slightly longer than was by now accepted as smart by the weeklies and by the police; not exactly unkempt, this fellow, but: