Herr Hasenklee,” Weller told me, “our headmaster.” Drawn into the conversation by Weller, he lost no time in assuring me that he wouldn't be running a school here if his pupils were in any kind of danger.
“And if they were, what would you do?”
“What kind of question is that? I've been a teacher for twenty years and have always been totally committed to my pupils.”
Other regulars joined us: a pharmacist, a doctor, the manager of the local savings bank, a baker, and a man who ran the local employment office. Poison gas in the Lampertheim National Forest? That's old hat. But the director of the employment office dropped a few hints, which the bank manager made specific: “I'll tell you something, it's not a coincidence that this rumor keeps surfacing. Viernheim is an industrial zone that's waging all-out competition on every side. First there's Mannheim, which needs every penny it can scrape together, then there's Weinheim, which is expanding its industrial zone around the autobahn junction, and the minute we here in Viernheim come up with an investor, the guys in Lampertheim snatch him away with a juicier offer. There are solid interests behind these rumors, I tell you, solid interests.” The others nodded. “I'm glad they removed the stuff from Fischbach, though. That way, all the claptrap about poison gas has stopped making headlines.”—”Then again, maybe it's our turn now. You know, Viernheim instead of Fischbach?”— “Nonsense. All the papers said that with Operation Lindwurm all the poison gas was cleared out of Germany.”—”It's incredible that the Viernheimer Tageblatt printed that story in March.”—”Have you noticed the reporter who's been creeping around here for the past few days?”—”And then on top of everything, we have to be nice to those guys, otherwise they take it out on us.”
“Don't forget the Communists,” Headmaster Hasenklee, sitting next to me, mumbled. “For them something like this would be heaven-sent.”
“In this day and age?”
“We used to have old Henlein around here—back in the sixties and seventies he kept handing out fliers about the forest and making a big stink. He was a Communist. It's true you don't hear anything about him anymore, or about Marx or Lenin. But if you ask me, our Karl-Marx-Strasse here is an outrage. Leningrad has been changed back to Petersburg, and in a few years you won't find a single street or square with Karl Marx's name on it anywhere in the East—except here in Viernheim!”
I asked if they knew about the tanker trucks in Strassen-heim. They did. “You mean the orange trucks from the Federal Emergency Management Agency? They're always around, doing exercises and things.”
I took my leave. The streets were empty. Everyone was already sitting at their Sunday roast, and I hurried to the green dumplings and the Thüringer leg of mutton that was roasting in Brigitte's oven. She has managed a seamless culinary unification of East and West German cuisines.
I didn't know whether Weller and his friends at the Golden Lamb had been putting on a charade for me or for themselves, or if they had told me what they really and truly believed. Weller's position was clear. Even if poison gas was being stockpiled in the forest, posing a threat to him and everyone else, you couldn't simply get up and leave, turning your back on everything you had worked for all your life. Were you supposed to start all over again at the age of sixty in Neustadt or Gross Gerau? One didn't do that at fifty, or even at forty. The only difference is that when one is younger one might still have a few illusions. I understood all that. And yet the presbyter and his friends at the pub struck me as weird, as I thought of them sitting there at that gloomy, smoky table, spinning out their conspiracy theories.
The afternoon was bright and breezy. We had our coffee in the garden. Manu followed in his Brazilian father's footsteps by flirting up a storm with Sonya, while Brigitte's friend Lisa turned out to be a very nice young woman. She knew all the stories about poison gas in the forest. She also remembered old Henlein, a hunchbacked little man who, for a long time, Saturday after Saturday, had stood on the Apostelplatz handing out flyers. She also knew about patients who periodically complained of rashes, suppurative sinusitis, cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea—this more often than in Rohrbach, where she had lived and worked before.
“Did you ever discuss this with any of the