followed not only by curiosity but also by envy. They were under surveillance but not under guard, and he sometimes wondered which he would have preferred, given the fact that, ever since Veronica had started her telephoning, Käthe, Sabine, and himself were all under surveillance as well as under guard. Rolf was making out quite well, seemed even to know something about engines, was consulted when a tractor or a Honda acted up; he also looked after the priest’s car, and that nice priest would ask them over, for coffee, for a drink, while scrupulously avoiding the subject of religion.
Scarcely imaginable that those two, Rolf and Katharina, had been attending Kohlschröder’s church as recently as twelve, maybe even ten years ago: nice young people carrying prayer books at a time when Kohlschröder was lashing out against moral decay even more stridently than today. They felt not the slightest pang that Kohlschröder himself should have meanwhile succumbed to moral decay. They found it entirely logical that he should sleep with Gerta, logical for quite different reasons from those of the farmers, who blamed it on “nature.” They found nothing embarrassing—for them it wasn’t a matter of good taste—when girls who wanted something from Kohlschröder (the vicarage hall for a meeting or a movie or a debate) went to see him and unconcernedly allowed him “a glimpse or two,” as it were “showing their wares,” sometimes even in Gerta’s presence. Rolf and Katharina didn’t find this at all disgusting, or even “natural,” but inherent in the system. In their eyes it corresponded to the human product of the system, which was in no way “natural”; they saw in it a quite specific form of suppression, as well as an indication of decay and rot, and almost rejoiced that decay should now have become manifest in such phenomena. They even prophesied something similar for their nice Pastor Roickler, except that he would never remain in office, would never practice that bourgeois lechery but would go away—he, too, a victim of the system, would have a hard time of it. They could tell just bywatching him with women and girls: sad, troubled, self-conscious, laconic; of course they liked him and would have liked to help him, find him a nice girl or a young woman with whom he could have decamped. Nor did they feel that Kohlschröder had become “humanized”: for them he was the classic personification of the absolute inhumanity of the system. This inhumanity manifested itself in the fact that a human being was legally denied something—in a legal system that exercised its own jurisdiction, and that in a democratic (ha-ha) state! He had made a commitment to celibacy, after all, but then through the back door he was allowed a Gerta, allowed those strange little games with the girls, it was tolerated, he was humiliated doubly, triply, because at any given moment two kinds of law could be mobilized against him: ecclesiastical and, if necessary, secular, for if there was any truth in what the girls “showed” him, it could at any time have been ruled “indecent behavior with minors,” which would most certainly happen if any leftist teacher asked a schoolgirl to show him her tits.
And yet there remained a reticence, there remained the consolation offered by this reticence of theirs: in Sabine’s or Käthe’s presence, Kohlschröder was never discussed, nor was Roickler, to whom they were terribly nice: Rolf looked after his car, remodeled his house, the vicarage—twelve rooms, of which eight were always left empty, something they called “corruption by vacant space in view of the rental situation.” It must drive a sensitive person—and Roickler, in contrast to Kohlschröder, was that—crazy to have eight rooms empty if he made even the most casual inquiries about the rents being paid all around him; those empty, fully furnished rooms, one of them known as “the bishop’s room,” where during the past sixteen
Scarcely imaginable that those two, Rolf and Katharina, had been attending Kohlschröder’s church as recently as twelve, maybe even ten years ago: nice young people carrying prayer books at a time when Kohlschröder was lashing out against moral decay even more stridently than today. They felt not the slightest pang that Kohlschröder himself should have meanwhile succumbed to moral decay. They found it entirely logical that he should sleep with Gerta, logical for quite different reasons from those of the farmers, who blamed it on “nature.” They found nothing embarrassing—for them it wasn’t a matter of good taste—when girls who wanted something from Kohlschröder (the vicarage hall for a meeting or a movie or a debate) went to see him and unconcernedly allowed him “a glimpse or two,” as it were “showing their wares,” sometimes even in Gerta’s presence. Rolf and Katharina didn’t find this at all disgusting, or even “natural,” but inherent in the system. In their eyes it corresponded to the human product of the system, which was in no way “natural”; they saw in it a quite specific form of suppression, as well as an indication of decay and rot, and almost rejoiced that decay should now have become manifest in such phenomena. They even prophesied something similar for their nice Pastor Roickler, except that he would never remain in office, would never practice that bourgeois lechery but would go away—he, too, a victim of the system, would have a hard time of it. They could tell just bywatching him with women and girls: sad, troubled, self-conscious, laconic; of course they liked him and would have liked to help him, find him a nice girl or a young woman with whom he could have decamped. Nor did they feel that Kohlschröder had become “humanized”: for them he was the classic personification of the absolute inhumanity of the system. This inhumanity manifested itself in the fact that a human being was legally denied something—in a legal system that exercised its own jurisdiction, and that in a democratic (ha-ha) state! He had made a commitment to celibacy, after all, but then through the back door he was allowed a Gerta, allowed those strange little games with the girls, it was tolerated, he was humiliated doubly, triply, because at any given moment two kinds of law could be mobilized against him: ecclesiastical and, if necessary, secular, for if there was any truth in what the girls “showed” him, it could at any time have been ruled “indecent behavior with minors,” which would most certainly happen if any leftist teacher asked a schoolgirl to show him her tits.
And yet there remained a reticence, there remained the consolation offered by this reticence of theirs: in Sabine’s or Käthe’s presence, Kohlschröder was never discussed, nor was Roickler, to whom they were terribly nice: Rolf looked after his car, remodeled his house, the vicarage—twelve rooms, of which eight were always left empty, something they called “corruption by vacant space in view of the rental situation.” It must drive a sensitive person—and Roickler, in contrast to Kohlschröder, was that—crazy to have eight rooms empty if he made even the most casual inquiries about the rents being paid all around him; those empty, fully furnished rooms, one of them known as “the bishop’s room,” where during the past sixteen
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