Iron Gustav (78 page)

For
a few days he was worried that the police could come and ask after Erich, but all was quiet. Slowly rage and sorrow ebbed away. He was too old to be angry for long, so old that a vague grief hung about all he thought, said or did.

However, during all this time, as the excitement over his son died down and the greyness of everyday life resumed, he thought more and more about the journey to Paris. For many, many years now he had been driving about Berlin, and suddenly he was tired to death of it. These miserable little fares – eighty pfennigs or one mark twenty, or at the most three marks to the Schlesische Station! No more than a dog's cart worth, with a child's pram, he thought suddenly.

He wanted to drive into the country for a change, not always through the same cobbled streets; he wanted to see the fields he had worked in as a boy, see from the box how the men were at work with plough and harrow, sowing the seed, rolling the ground. Something like homesickness and wanderlust gripped him … He wanted to drive and drive further and further into the country. All the countryside is home to the country-born, the town never. Why go then to a certain village in the Pasewalk district when every village he drove through would somehow be native to him? In every village the people led their teams to the fields in the morning, rang the church bells at noon, stood before their cottages gossiping in the dusk. A girl clattered with her pails to the well. In the country it must be the same now as it used to be. Oh, how he would like to see it once more!

Yes, he was sick of the town. He wanted to leave it, get away from the too familiar. Before facing that which no mortal can avoid, he wanted to do something new, something never done before. He had brooded so much about this journey to Paris that it no longer appeared strange. Heavens, people never stopped travelling; all his life he had driven tourists to the station – why shouldn't he himself travel for once? What was there mad about that? It was quite simple. If he added up all the trips he had made in Berlin he must have driven the distance to Paris hundreds of times. Nothing out of the ordinary – as soon as you got used to the idea.

I'll just set out, he thought. It's nothing special. Why not? Let 'em say I'm mad. The madder they think me the better; everybody'll buy a picture postcard of a real loony.

So
from a vague idea was slowly formed a fixed resolve. Meanwhile he continued to ply with the cab all that winter. And whenever he came across a shop selling maps or globes he had a look at them and was surprised to see how close the two cities were. Why, it's hardly any distance, he thought; I could cover it with me thumb. Dunno why they make such a fuss about it. Couldn't take more than a week surely.

And then there were the picture postcards; he'd have to enquire about those too. So he poked around till he discovered a small printer's, the sort he could enquire of …

‘Picture postcards? Certainly! Thirty-five marks the thousand. With a minimum of five thousand, thirty-two marks. Caption? Yes, we can do that. What do you want? “Iron Gustav, the oldest cab driver in Berlin, drives from Berlin to Paris and back again.” Bit long, but we'll do it for the same money. Are you Iron Gustav?'

‘That's me.'

‘And have you thought what you're doing at your age?'

‘I ain't so old as all that. I'm not seventy yet. And what's in it, anyhow?'

‘Maybe it's all right. Only – have you got a permit? And you must have a passport. You can't just cross the frontier as you like, not with a horse and cab. There's such a thing as Customs duty, you know.'

‘Why, d'you think I'll have to pay duty?'

‘And can you speak French? You'll have to speak French. I mean, if you're alone with a horse in a French village … What does it eat? Oats, of course, yes, but what is French for oats? Otherwise they'll give your nag pickled gherkins. Not that they don't taste good, eh?'

Old Hackendahl was so preoccupied with all these unforeseen problems that he did not perceive the other was mildly poking fun at him. ‘Many thanks!' he said, and made to leave the shop.

‘And what about the postcards?' cried the printer, realizing too late that he had scared away a client with his leg-pulling.

‘I'll sleep on it,' said Hackendahl, going. He climbed onto the box and drove. He stopped at a relay and fed Blücher. He even found customers and drove them. Then he eventually came home, fed the horse, ate himself, and crept into bed – but he didn't sleep. All the time he was thinking and calculating.

Four
months it'll take, he thought. That means I'll have to leave Mother two hundred an' forty marks at least. Well, two hundred'll do. An' fer me an' the horse I need another five hundred – lodgin's and stablin' and food an' feed. An' then the duty. Blücher'll have to have new harness. An' the cab mus' go to the smith an' wheelwright or there'll be trouble. So all in all I need a thousand marks. A thousan' marks are ten thousan' picture postcards at ten pfennigs each. On the other hand ten thousan' postcards'd cost p'r'aps three hundred marks. That means I want one thousan' three hundred marks, which means I have to sell another three thousan' cards which'll cost an extra hundred marks …

Thinking over things in this way for days on end, he neither slept nor ate.

‘What's the matter with you, Father?' asked his wife.

‘Oh, nothin'! The spring I s'pose. Wakin' up me rheumatism …'

No, he did not breathe a word to her but he was beginning to realize he couldn't carry out his plan by himself. Impossible to raise five hundred marks, let alone a thousand.

We'll see, he thought, we'll see. Jus' wait and see. It's quite simple – only needs settin' about it in the right way.

After long deliberation he decided to ask the advice of a travel agency.

Like everything connected to the journey to Paris, old Hackendahl carefully considered which travel agency he should consult. He was not in favour of the agencies at the railway stations. They only want to sell tickets, he thought. An' if I ask 'em about me an' me cab they'll just pull me leg. And he didn't want anything to do with the steamer agencies, either, which had such pretty little ships in their display windows. (I should buy one of them for me grandson, Otto, to play with.)

In the end he chose one which was housed in the premises of a big newspaper. He had a feeling, not altogether mistaken, that this particular agency had something to do with the newspaper and that newspapers knew a good deal about the world.

Thus
it came about that Gustav Hackendahl one day entered this building, put his shiny hat on a peg, placed the whip nearby, and reviewed place and people. Then, after he had inspected everything, he advanced towards a young man who looked rather more alert than the other clerks – in no way deterred by the fact that the signboard over his brilliantined head bore the words: ‘Traveller's Cheques and Foreign Exchange'.

‘Young feller, I don't want ter buy anythin', I'm only askin' for information. I want to trundle in me cab to Paris, for a joke you know, an' I want to find out how long it'd take an' what money an' papers I need an' whether I must learn French …' Hackendahl had managed to pack all his worries into one sentence. Then, rather short of breath, he gazed at the young fellow who in turn looked at the old man not without interest but also not without the genuine Berliner's fear of being made a fool of. So he answered the last part of the question first. ‘Would you learn French if it were necessary?'

‘O' course, young feller.'

‘How old are you then?'

‘Seventy this year. Has that got anythin' to do with my journey?'

‘When you get older, languages become more difficult,' the young man explained.

‘You think so? Well, young chap, don't you worry. What the little French babies c'n learn you bet I c'n learn too.'

The young man looked at Hackendahl. ‘You really want to drive your cab to Paris? No leg-pull?'

‘Listen, why would I pull your leg? You're a stranger to me. I wouldn't do that with strangers.'

‘H'mmm,' said the young man thoughtfully. ‘So you really want to go to Paris?'

‘Yes, I do,' Gustav Hackendahl confirmed again and awaited patiently the result of this thought. But if he thought that the young man was thinking of travel money and passports, he was wrong. He was thinking of a cousin, at that moment leading a miserable life as a junior reporter two floors higher up. He, the clerk, didn't in the slightest believe in this Paris trip, of course, but he found the old cabby odd and amusing, and wondered if his cousin Grundeis
couldn't write him up; you know, Old Berlin, Real Berlin Humour – the sort of thing people liked to read …

‘Listen,' said the young man thoughtfully.

‘Well?' asked Hackendahl hopefully.

‘I know a man up on the newspaper. I'll send you to him; he knows much more about such things than I do.'

Hackendahl grew suspicious. ‘What's this got to do with a newspaper? I want to make a journey and you're a travel agency, ain't you?'

And the one Berliner understood immediately the doubts of the other Berliner. ‘If the man upstairs doesn't know,' he said reassuringly, ‘you can always come back to me. But he'll know all right. He's just the man you want. I'll ring through about you. Grundeis is the name. Third floor, Room 317.'

‘Yes, I always thought Grundeis was the right man for me,' said old Hackendahl, and it was perhaps just this name that made him move on, despite his mistrust, and wait quite patiently for the young Grundeis in the editorial waiting room upstairs.

As for the young Grundeis – Grundeis the firebrand, the young reporter – he had been an apprentice on the editorial floor for some years, and whenever he contemplated the comfortable backsides of his superiors, he had to admit that there was little prospect of his moving up in the foreseeable future. There they sat, and however much he ran, whenever he reached somewhere, there they already were. However much he ran, there was no place for him, and he was much too energetic to wait patiently till someone died. In fact it was he himself who was slowly expiring – from frustrated ambition, for whenever something really good broke he was left in the office and nobody ever said, ‘That's the man who wrote such-and-such a thing,' but they just shamelessly introduced him: ‘This is our young whippersnapper. Runs like Nurmi – a great runner. Does he write, you ask? Yes, he does that too. I must once have seen something by him – in the wastepaper basket.' Yes, ambition was killing him. Sometimes, at night, he would scurry through the dark town imploring heaven to let something happen right in front of him – it couldn't be too extraordinary or too horrible. But nothing, not even the smallest item of news, ever did. Then he was overcome by a feeling of
terrible apathy. The whole world might collapse but the place where he was standing would remain unaffected, he was sure of that.

So when his cousin rang up about the crazy cabman who wanted to drive to Paris, he said: ‘What these old chaps think of! Going by cab's nothing. Now if he were using a scooter! Well, all right, send him up.' Inwardly, however, he felt some excitement. That could be something. That could be something really big – the chance of a lifetime! Article on Berlin Humour? Oh no! Nothing in that. What mattered was the chap himself. Anyone could produce crazy ideas but it was the man, not the idea, that mattered. The man had to believe in his craziness and not find it crazy at all and, what's more, be man enough to carry it through.

Grundeis, having had a look at the man, carried him off to an empty room and got his claws into him. First he got him to talk, and when the old man was completely squeezed out, and had said all he had to say for the third time, then Grundeis brought forth all the objections which occurred to him, dwelling on difficulties, picking the idea to pieces, in fact crying down everything. And was watching his victim.

Grundeis looked at the old man as a journalist. How would he photograph? Had he got it in him to become a popular character? Could he make a speech? Had he a ready sense of humour? How would he behave in a difficult situation, at a reception or banquet, or if an axle broke? Was his health good?

But most of all he was concerned to discover whether he had endurance, or was easily influenced by other people's opinion, if he was sound, and especially whether he was enamoured of his project.

And when old Hackendahl to the tenth objection merely replied stubbornly: ‘That's what you think, young 'un, but it ain't so difficult; at that stage everything'll go like clockwork,' then he was convinced that he had found a man of the requisite tenacity – in other words Iron Gustav himself.

‘Good,' he said. ‘I'll think the matter over then. It's not quite so simple as you believe, Herr Hackendahl. Come again in a week's time. And the main thing at present is not to tell a soul.'

They looked at one another and both grinned. ‘That chap in the
travel agency probably told you I'd a screw loose, eh?' said Hackendahl very pleased with himself.

‘Yes, those young people who've seen nothing of the world like we have!' smiled young Grundeis.

With that they parted on the best of terms, old Hackendahl sure that his troubles were over. For Grundeis, however, trouble had just begun. He had got hold of something good – he felt that in his bones – and it might become something big. But there was a snag, and a bad snag. Grundeis was only a junior, that is to say, a nobody. And a nobody cannot pull off something sensational on his own, however much he may consider it to be his. For that, Grundeis needed the newspaper; not only its money but its connections, its organization, its provincial correspondents, its Paris representatives … in fact the entire newspaper.

Those, however, who could set all this machinery in motion were precisely his dear colleagues, that's to say the men in front, the envious brakes on others' ambitions. And once they came to hear about the project they would either make a mess of it purposely or they would handle the thing themselves and reward its discoverer with a dry bone, such as the drive through Brandenburg. Grundeis, however, wanted the choice morsels – the start from Berlin, the frontier, the reception in Paris and the return to Berlin … the whole story!