The Safety Net by Heinrich Böll Page A

search them all, and since the affair of Pliefger’s birthday cake the food containers had to be examined too. In the end there was even a minor mutiny among the parents, who felt that
their
children were not threatened (which was not true: “Any child,” Hubert had said, “can be kidnapped, including my own”), and that this constant surveillance was causing mental distress leading to psychic damage, and that anyway it was futile, for if they were going to strike at all it would be somewhere quite different.
    So she had to keep Kit at home, couldn’t take her over to the Groebels’ either, where she had always loved playing for hours with Rudi and Monika. The Groebels had made it pretty clear that they regarded it as harmful: always having one or more policemen around. So she had to keep Kit at home, spend time with her, playing, coloring, telling stories, or letting her putter about in the kitchen with Miss Blum. It was easiest in summer, around the pool, with sandbox, swing, slide, and more recently—that had been her own idea, based on a memory of Eickelhof, where Käthe had had something similar installed for them—more recently a mudhole, with clay, sand, and water, where she could spend her time wallowing and building in the mud, where she could get as dirty as she liked, naked when the weather was warm, in briefs when it was cooler, and she had only to be popped into the bathtub or hosed down. And then she had been—again not exactly forbidden but strongly urged not to go to the market in Blückhoven, and she had always enjoyed that so much, and Kit too. With stroller, basket, and head scarf, preferably in the densest crowd, close to people, she enjoyed their contact, even their smell, loved all that milling around, enjoyed milling around with them, hadn’t been afraid either—but the graphically described kidnapping threat to Kit had turned her against visiting the market. There weretoo many half-hidden alleys and gaps between booths and stalls, so many illegally parked vans and trucks delivering mattresses, eggs, chickens, vegetables. A small child like that could be snatched up and gone in a twinkling, before anyone noticed, and the booths and stalls and cars and alleyways and gaps really couldn’t be checked and watched, not even as a precaution. So it made more sense to have everything delivered and to leave Kit in the bungalow when she really did have to go into town. But naturally all deliveries had to be examined: every loaf of bread, every head of lettuce, and of course the more intimate items she was forced to order from the drugstore or pharmacy. Well, she happened to be old-fashioned about such things too, and always blushed when the deliveries from the drugstore were examined. This gave rise to tension, friction, intimate knowledge that should never have been allowed to turn into familiarities and yet did. It was difficult to behave all the time as if such things were normal, and always to have two, sometimes three men, but invariably at least one man around the house. One had to be careful when walking half dressed across the corridor or through the hall, into the bathroom, out of the bathroom, into the toilet—and none of them would accept anything while on duty, very occasionally a cup of coffee, and when they went off duty they left in a hurry, in an almost indecent hurry, as if they were leaving a place with a curse on it. And she would have dearly liked to talk to them informally about their wives and children and careers and homes, but there was never anything more than an occasional smile, a proffered cigarette. She wanted so much to know how they lived, what they thought about, whether they felt bored or frustrated, whether their nerves were equal to all this.
    Erwin’s bonhomie toward these men sometimes came close to a patronizing heartiness, with something of the manner of an officer of the reserves; he would prattle to them about football, beer, and women who were supposed to