The Safety Net by Heinrich Böll Page A

grow too, of course,” for him to be lectured: potatoes had a genuine, an important, basic reason for existence, as well as a function, an important one: as food. Church and religion didn’t; they were present, no doubt about that—but for them there was no inherent problem. It wasn’t worth talking about, and the fact that Pastor Roickler in Hubreichen was being so nice to them—had offered them a roof, taken them into his own house, defended them against incipient animosity, had placed his enormous vicarage garden at their disposal in return for an absurdly low payment-in-kind of potatoes, eggs, and apples—his being so nice was attributed by them not to his religion, let alone to his Church, but to the very fact that, despite Church and religion, he had remained or become a human being, and they emphasized that they would have found it more typical if he
hadn’t
been nice. They even admitted that they were grateful to him, considered him “truly nice and human,” but of course there were also nice and human capitalists, even nice Communists, nice Liberals, and they themselves were, in a way, nice too.
    How all this could have come about remained a mystery to him, since only ten years ago all of them, the whole lot—Rolf and Katharina and Veronica and even that fellow Beverloh—had been truly religious, almost devout, only that “alone or with others,” that even in those days had ceased to torment them as much as him. He would have understood if they had raged at the churches and had viciously and polemically analyzed religion to the point of excess, to the point of cruelly wounding feelings that were still so very much alive inKäthe and Sabine and to some extent in his own memory too—but for them not even the memory was painful, and so, as far as he was concerned, they too were “satellite children,” from another star, from another world. Yet he didn’t feel alien to the tea he drank with them, the bread he ate with them, the apples they put in his car for him: after all, they were his children, and tea, bread, soup, and apples were of this world.
    What frightened him was that unearthly alien quality in their thoughts and deeds. It wasn’t coldness—it was a state of being alien, out of which, of course, a shot could suddenly be fired or a grenade thrown, yet they too had become the objects of his curiosity rather than of his fear: his own son, growing tomatoes, caring for apple trees, keeping chickens, planting potatoes and Chinese cabbage, all in that lovely old walled vicarage garden in Hubreichen. Living comfortably—there was no other word for it—in the adjoining shack, quite pretty now that they had painted it and put geraniums in the window boxes; fetching milk each evening in a red enamel pitcher from farmer Hermes, spending the odd evening at one of the two village pubs, drinking beer, with Holger along, who was given lemonade: the purest of pure idylls in which no trace of bitterness was discernible. They had long since given up trying to explain their—yes, “their”—brand of socialism to the farmers and laborers, had given up reacting to taunts from drunken oafs, or discussing rural politics, strikes, and highway construction, or rising to the snotty, snot-nosed spoutings of motorcyclists: they would smile, drink their beer, discuss the weather—and yet behind all that (where?), behind that idyllic façade, which was not even contrived—whitewashed house, green shutters, and red geraniums—behind all that there must be something capable of generating the horror: an eerie calm. Certainly, a waiting for something—for what? Katharina had no job yet, but a few women in the village had placed their children in her care; she took them for walks through the woods, across the fields, told them stories, taught them gym and dancing in wet weather, sang songs with them—accepted money forit, of course, and when he thought of Rolf’s and Katharina’s calm, that eerie calm, fear was