Iron Gustav (66 page)

‘Lack of work. They dismissed over a hundred men today. They call it economizing staff – another new invention. And I tell you, Irma, there was an elderly man from the Stocks and Shares. You should have heard him crying! Thinks he'll never get another job. Well, it must be pretty difficult in such a case, so old.'

‘And you?'

‘Me? I'll always get a job, I'm young. Those who can work properly are always in demand. Oh, Irma. Don't pull a face! No, we'll go and see Tutti to start off with … And then …'

‘And then?'

‘Everything will be all right, Irma. Cook, but don't make a noise. I'll see if I can tune this thing. It's wonderful – music out of thin air. Marconi! Oh, Irma! I'm really so terribly happy. A radio and a holiday!'

‘And no job!'

‘Can always get another.'

‘That's true. You're nothing if not hard-working. And I'm terribly happy about Hiddensee too. Everything is going to be fine.'

The time of the rich foreigner was over. There were no more happy American drinkers for Father Hackendahl. Since the stability of the mark meant that life was no longer cheaper in Germany than in other countries, and since you could no longer buy a block of flats
for a month's wages or acquire fur coats for a tip, Berlin had become a wasteland. Germany was left to itself by other countries. Let them get on with their eternal bickering between the Reich and the regions, between Bavaria and Prussia, and within the army. Let them go on arguing about compensation for the princely estates and which flags to wave – if only they pay the war reparations! Other than complete disarmament, this was the only question that still concerned countries outside Germany.

In the early morning when old Hackendahl would cruise down the dismal Kaiserallee towards the Zoo Underground Station, the only question occupying him was whether he would get a fare that day or no, for there were days on which he did not get a fare at all – gloomy days, black days – days when he waited from morning till night at the Zoo Station, seeing the taxis come and go, but hearing no porter call out: ‘Hi, first-class taxi with horseshoes! Well, Gustav, what about it? D'you believe your old horse capable of a jaunt as far as Knie?'

To tell the truth the taxis were having a lean time too, and Hackendahl realized it. That was another change in him. He no longer despised chauffeurs; he talked with them, admitting that they were men like himself, with similar worries.

‘You're all right,' he would say. ‘Your thing don't eat if it don't work.'

‘But the taxes, Gustav! Think of the taxes! Car tax, the licence – whether we're on the go or not.'

‘I have ter pay for a licence too,' said Hackendahl.

‘An' what of it? Five marks, that's all. But we …'

No, there was little reason to be envious, if only one could get a fare which was worthwhile; but that became harder and harder. For a while he managed by forwarding packages. Indeed, his cab was for a time a competitor of the Berlin Parcels Delivery. The office messengers would come along towards evening, shortly before the post office closed and the express trains left for the West.

‘Well, Gustav, what about it? You give us a helping hand, too? For a glass of beer and a schnapps?'

‘Righto. Do anythin'. But why must you chaps always come along at the last moment when everythin's got to be rushed?'

‘Now, keep calm, Gustav. Your charger'll do it all right, he's got staying power. Off you go!'

At times some firm or other would so fill up the cab with parcels that the clerk would have to enthrone himself beside Gustav on the box – stacks of parcels which, to the fury of the postal clerks, were rushed to the post office in the last ten minutes. Sometimes there were consignments that had to be put on a train. ‘We must make the express for Cologne, Gustav, or I'll be fired. Whip up Blücher.' Such fares ranked among the best that Hackendahl got at that time.

Not bad clients, these office chaps! Plenty of backchat, always ready for a joke and a laugh in spite of their own troubles, and not mean in settling up either.

Naturally, it was an inconceivably long time since Gustav Hackendahl, in first-class livery, had driven camouflaged ambulances and senior medics into the Charité Hospital. To have lived like that before, and even had one's little worries – that was almost a joke.

And then the time came when carrying parcels would have seemed the pleasantest thing in the world, if they hadn't gradually come to an end, the devil take it. Cruising along the streets, angling for a catch as he called it, Hackendahl would see one of his old acquaintances pushing a handcart with a few parcels or carrying his load quite easily under one arm.

‘Well, Erwin, how's business? Never see you now. Don't you have anything now to be carried?'

‘Carried? Stow it, Gustav. Carry, eh? Why, they can't even carry us now. The boss has given me notice for the first.'

Bad news, sad news; no news at all finally. He saw them no more, the friendly office messengers with their unbelievably white and wide dancing trousers, creases ironed razor-sharp. They had disappeared. It was as if they had never existed.

Old Gustav began to feel very ancient, as though he with his horse and cab belonged to a vanished past, having experienced and outlived all. Now and then it happened that the station porters sent strangers to him so that he should tell them what Berlin had looked like twenty or thirty years ago, where they had built the Kaiser-Wilhelm Church, as the Kurfürstendamm church was called, which also signified the Wild West, with its day trips to the smart
suburbs in smart carriages, and how his grey had once raced a motor car …

‘Yes,' he would say, ‘it was all diff'rent then, everythin's changed. Except me. 'Cause I'm of iron. That's why they call me Iron Gustav.'

But he had changed nonetheless. He hadn't stayed still; that wasn't possible. He also swam with the tide; he was part of the people. He could not avoid what his people experienced; he had to live. And he was always thinking of Mother at home, waiting for him so anxiously, so very anxiously. Waiting, or rather dozing, on his box he often thought of his wife at home; if he was late she went to bed, but she never fell asleep till he came in. Then she would raise her head from the pillow and enquire anxiously:

‘Well, Father?'

‘Hello, Mother. All right?'

‘Any luck, Father?'

‘No, not today. Well, it'll be all the better tomorrow.'

‘Oh, Father …'

It was so difficult to tell her that he had brought nothing home. Without her he wouldn't have minded so much. As long as the horse had its fodder, he would have been quite satisfied with bread and bacon and a pot of coffee. But his wife was like a child. She thought she'd starve to death if they didn't have one hot meal a day.

So, if he had had a good day for once, he kept back a part of his money to be able to give her something next day. Thus he exerted himself, tried to think of new fare opportunities, was restless, would not let go. Perhaps it was even a good thing that Mother was always there with her aches and pains. There were so many who simply keeled over. For them, it was no longer worth it. Just don't bother – it's all hopeless …

Old Hackendahl, however, went on persevering. He worried. If there were no longer enough passengers or parcels, he would have to make do with night work. Something had to be done; he must get money for Mother somehow.

And once again day was put aside for night. It was dark now when he drove to the West End, along gloomy, silent streets where the clip-clop of Blücher's hoofs echoed hollow between the dimly lit houses. It was so quiet, so dismally quiet … The cab went
at as slow a pace as the horse could manage, Hackendahl always on the lookout.

How times have changed, and us with them! Iron? Oh, yes – iron, in our behaviour, iron in our survival, iron in our will to live! Iron in our determination to bring Mother money home – the daily miserable five marks on a good day, but two marks fifty would also do.

The girls strolled along or stood at the corners alone, though sometimes they kept in twos and threes. They were not the expensive ladies who haunted the Tauentzienstrasse and Kurfürstendamm, the girls who were far above anything like a horse-drawn cab – these were the lesser lights, for a certainty no longer pretty, for a certainty no longer fresh; shop-soiled, as the saying goes; girls lying in wait for the shy birds or bent on ambushing drunks whom the night air had sobered sufficiently to make them understand what a girl wanted, or waylaying the slightly sozzled upset by that same fresh air – yes, that was the prey hunted here.

And when the prey had been caught, then it was not at all a bad thing to have old Hackendahl's cab handy – good fun to drive behind a horse again; it pleased the gentleman in his present mood, and it was just as well for a girl if her gentleman could reach his destination quickly, for drunken people make very sudden decisions and another idea might occur to him at any moment.

But the old man on the box saw to it that there was no delay. He knew all the accommodation addresses in the district, the distinguished boarding houses with night bells, the places that let rooms by the hour. In addition, unlike a taxi driver, he wasn't afraid of having his vehicle stolen. He helped the girls out, rang the bell for them, supported their gentlemen upstairs – oh, the old cabby was a real sport! He knows Berlin by day and by night, knows how Berlin laughs and how it weeps – he's not squeamish, he's of iron …

‘Don't worry, Gustav,' the girls would say when the gentleman positively refused to pay for the cab. (Why should he? He hadn't ordered one. And besides, what was he doing there at all?) ‘Don't worry, Gustav, I'll settle up with you tomorrow.'

Yes, those were his night fares, that was the money he took home to his wife. But of such things he never spoke to her.

Had he hoped that they might be spared him? He was spared
nothing. He perhaps didn't like it; in fact he definitely didn't like it – putting drunken gentlemen to bed, and in what beds! But if he wanted to live, if he wanted to bring money home to Mother, he had no choice. He had to take what was offered – he had the choice between life and death. To die was open to him; at that time there prevailed in Berlin a certain joy in dying about which statistics were compiled. Suicide statistics. They showed that the very young and the very old were mainly affected.

But he did not want to die yet; above all he did not want his wife to die. So he had to make his living the best way he could, even if it were not a good living or a clean one – just a living.

No, he did not complain. He didn't complain at all. He was now in his mid-sixties, not yet really old. Like almost everyone of this time, he had the vague hope of outliving it. One day, things had to be different, had to be better. Life couldn't always be going downhill.

If anything worried him on his night drives through the sombre streets it was the thought of Eva. He would not like to meet her again, he on his box and she in the cab with a man. To have to drive Eva to some accommodation hotel would be the end of him. Father and daughter! As long as only he knew what sort of fares he took on nowadays, life was endurable – he alone could decide what rightly might be asked of himself. For someone else to know, however, and that someone a member of his own family, and precisely the one he had turned out of doors because of similar conduct – impossible! The thought of Eva worried him unceasingly and he would gladly have given up his night work on her account. But then there was his wife to think of …

The last time he had seen Eva was in the dock, when she hadn't once looked at her father but only at her Eugen Bast. This fellow alone, obliquely opposite her, she had continued to look at. Her sentence must be up by now but he had no wish to see her again, ever.

But there came an autumn night, an October night, when a gusty, furious east wind drove the rain in sheets through the desolate town. Hackendahl had put the cover over his black horse but it was of no use – the wind slapped it continually against the creature's flanks, and everything was dripping wet, so that there was nothing for it but to drive home, money or no money. Not a soul about.

He was already on his way back when he was hailed from a café. ‘Hi, driver!'

A gentleman in a raincoat ran towards him, glad to have found a conveyance. ‘Driver, here … I've got a lady with me who's had as much as she can carry. Well, we'll manage. Not too expensive, you know.'

‘Righto! Six marks the night for you an' the lady an' you needn't clear out too early next mornin'. But hurry up, my horse ain't a champion swimmer an' he might drown.'

The gentleman brought a girl out of the café and put her into the cab.

‘Come on, off we go!'

The father drove a daughter he did not recognize, who did not recognize him, to an accommodation hotel.

Life spares us sometimes, after all.

Three days previously old Hackendahl had been engaged by one of those servants who no longer exist – an old woman in a white starched apron and a cap with two white streamers down her back. On Thursday, punctually at ten o'clock in the morning, he was to wait outside No. 17, Neue Ansbacher, and drive her old mistress to a nursing home.

‘Righto, Fräulein.'

‘Don't forget. Ten o'clock!'

‘Righto.'

The following day she got hold of him again – he hadn't forgotten, had he?

‘All fixed up, Fräulein. Day after tomorrow. Ten o'clock in the morning. Seventeen, Neue Ansbacher.'

She was satisfied with his memory, yes. But was he a careful driver? He wouldn't run risks with cars, would he? Her mistress hated cars. She had never gone in one. For over twenty years she hadn't once been out of the flat. She was ninety-three.

‘I'll take care of her, Fräulein. I'm getting on for seventy meself.'