Iron Gustav (52 page)

The sign bore the inscription ‘Rude Gustav's', and the history of the wine bar was this. The average Berliner, as is well known, is a highly sensitive creature and one very easily offended yet, at a certain stage of intoxication, this self-same Berliner is extremely fond of rudeness and is then simply dying to have his sensibilities trampled on. Down Rude Gustav's narrow staircase would stumble not only unimportant people such as clerks and tradesmen but the leading representatives of industry and intellectual life – merely in order to be treated rudely in the cellar. It was extraordinary what a happy sigh rose from some chief councillor of the Board of Finance when Rude Gustav in his red waistcoat greeted him with the words, ‘Well, old sleepyhead, it seems you've gone and put your face in your pants and your backside in your face again today, what?'

In addition to the greatest crudeness, this bar boasted wooden tables, and everything informal – the gents was called the Knights' Castle and the ladies Dripstone Cave, which aroused the imaginations of the men and reduced the women to giggles. In addition, every half-hour there was a guided tour through the chamber of horrors where you could admire the enema syringe used by Conrad the Hard to scatter his enemies at the Battle of Popocatapetl. You could also see a genuine crocodile tear, Abbess Fringilla's chamber pot, not to mention the Nuremberg funnel for pouring knowledge into children's heads, and a lock (horse hair) from the head of Karl the Bald. Then there were the seven lanterns (kitchen lamps) of the seven foolish virgins, and – in accord with the times – the curse on
the hand that signed the Versailles Treaty. Not to mention the dirty jokes the men took the opportunity to crack at the sauciest remarks. Because it's fun to let the mask of decency drop for a bit and to speak to other men's wives as if they were your own …

Such, then, was the bar into which Iron Gustav stumbled on that happy afternoon. And once again he was lucky. Because he even met the landlord and owner – Rude Gustav himself – although the place was actually a night bar for drunks.

The two Gustavs, Rude Gustav and Iron Gustav, sat down at a table together. Iron Gustav talked of his American and quietly waved his ten-dollar note. Rude Gustav had the afternoon melancholy of innkeepers, and at once began complaining about the cut-throat competition in rudeness. Inflation, like a good hen laying eggs, had deposited all over town rival haunts proud of their rudeness, and every mediocre boor seemed to feel himself competent to insult customers.

All this was grist to Hackendahl's mill. From a normal cab driver, he changed himself into Iron Gustav (of whom Rude Gustav said that he had heard), and in a very short time the two Gustavs were shaking hands in agreement. Iron Gustav was to sit at the large round table by the entrance all evening and part of the night, with a glass of beer and a brandy before him – the real cabby with his long coat, shiny hat and whip. The part he was to play was that of the embittered, old-fashioned driver, rude to those who arrived in cars, and thus encouraging them to drink to entertain them. In a word he had to supplement with authentic Berlin humour their somewhat crippled capacity for enjoyment.

And in exchange Gustav Hackendahl was to have free drinks (but in moderation) and two hearty meals, one when he came and the other when he left. As for what was spent by the guests at his table, here he was to have ten per cent of the bill, as agreed upon between the Iron and the Rude Gustavs and confirmed by handshake.

Ten, even five, years ago Gustav Hackendahl would have laughed in contempt had someone asked him to play the buffoon in a wine bar – now it was he who offered. There had been the war; that army which had been his pride existed no longer; the empire that was his mainstay had broken down miserably; none of his five children had
done anything to be particularly proud of. He himself might have thrown in the sponge or have grown harder. He did something else. He laughed. It was a disease of the times. Before the war people had been told (and they believed it) that mankind was good, helpful, noble, full of faith, painstaking, dutiful (and ought to be so). Now they said: mankind is bad, murderous, lying, swinish, lazy, ignoble – and this too was believed. They were even proud of it. It cheered them up – cheered them up, to be sure, in a crapulous way, grinning as though they had swallowed vinegar, an-end-of-the-world cheerfulness (and for the older generation the world actually had come to an end).

Therefore Hackendahl didn't regard himself as the hired buffoon of others; no, he wanted to poke his fun at them, he wanted to tickle their drunkenness so that when the vulgarity came out, he would be able to think: it wasn't only me who had the bad luck. They're none of them any better than my own children, they're all baked in the same oven, soft on one side, burnt on the other and doughy in between.

That's how he'd thought it out when his fantasy had been fired by the Irish-American's drink. And even if he later forgot most of what happened, Iron Gustav never did think of himself as a professional joker. Yes, he could afford to grin when he looked around, for things went much better than expected. The table of the ‘Original Berlin Cabby' was rarely unoccupied and Iron Gustav, after he had trained his black horse, achieved a kind of fame in Berlin nightlife, for it turned out that those who got intoxicated at his table invariably wanted him to drive them on to the next place, Rude Gustav's being rather a port of call than a destination. Since he was supposed to be a cabman he had better drive as well. But the landlord did not at all relish the round table being without its chief attraction for an hour at a time perhaps, when even half an hour counted a lot in a place that had little more than six worthwhile hours in twenty-four.

Hackendahl, however, had another idea. He trained the black horse so that when he called ‘Gee-up!', instead of advancing, it backed in the shafts, crab-fashion, and forced the vehicle against the kerb. And the more the driver shouted and cracked his whip the more unmanageable did the black horse become – until it at last lay
down in the road. Then there was nothing for the guests but to get out and look for some other means of conveyance, which they always did with the greatest of good humour. Indeed, it was rare that Hackendahl was not handsomely compensated for the fare he had thus missed; so everybody was satisfied – landlord, customers, cabman – and it is to be presumed that the horse (now called Blücher) also enjoyed the fun.

Heinz had been quite right to comfort his mother. The business at least brought money into the house; after only a short time, Mother's clothes began to look less ill-fitting.

And yet Heinz had been wrong. For Iron Gustav, there were dangers. He had been a man of perhaps restricted vision but with an ideal according to which he had shaped his life, in obedience to the dictates of honesty, work and duty. Now, however, he became every day more of a cynic, one who did nothing but scoff. To be sure, he did not neglect his obligations. There was his wife at home – her wants had to be attended to – and let the atmosphere in the wine cellar be as lively as it liked, every half-hour he went out and saw that the horse was properly covered, fed and watered as it should be.

But all this he did more out of habit than from a sense of duty. He hadn't a single thing to do. His world was shattered – bit by bit, till nothing remained. Ten years before, he would have been horrified by a life of such cynicism and empty bars. He couldn't have led that life. He would have been incapable of entertaining his guests. Now he could do so.

It was precisely that which he and others called iron. His insistence, for example, that he could still drive a horse cab, despite the fact that everyone knew that the era of the horse cab had gone for ever. But that wasn't iron, that was just old. Had he been younger, he would have been sitting behind the wheel of a motor taxi long ago. What seemed iron was that he didn't chase after his children any more, or want to see his grandchildren … But that too wasn't iron, but his age. A younger person gets up after a fall and tries once more, but Gustav Hackendahl never wanted to love anyone again – Eva gone! Erich gone! Never again!

No, all that cannot be called iron.

And yet there was something indestructible – a life force. He
never winced, he never complained, he lay on his bed as he'd made it, but also as others had made it. Naturally – without giving it a thought. With a powerful endurance, a matter-of-fact endurance. He had no realization of his sufferings and would have turned purple with rage, roaring the place down, had he been told he was of iron only in his endurance …

But there came an evening when even this virtue seemed about to forsake him, when endurance itself seemed impossible, and when everything in him seemed empty.

It was not an evening out of the ordinary for the people of Germany – but it was also a particularly bad evening for them, who had become used to such bad days and evenings over the last years. It was the evening of that day when passive resistance had been decided on in the Ruhr. The Cuno government had proclaimed a Day of National Mourning and had called upon the German people to prepare for sacrifices, and to renounce luxury and high living. But, doubting the effect of this appeal, they had ordered all places of public entertainment to be closed at ten o'clock at night.

Not for a long time had the centre of Berlin been so crowded as on that evening; people seemed possessed by the devil of contradiction. Having been ordered to go home by ten o'clock they made a point of going out at precisely that hour. That was a result of the period that had just passed. They mistrusted every government, and every order. They had completely lost all trust in anything. The police had to bear the brunt. No sooner had they chased the people out of one place than they crowded into the next. This the police emptied and in the meantime the first place was full again. Behind closed shutters, behind locked doors, sat those who were rejoicing at this chance of snapping their fingers at the government and the police.

But meanwhile, French and Belgian battalions were marching on the Ruhr. They took possession of the drinking places, the mines and the factories, and they occupied the banks, having confiscated
the money. They also confiscated – in the middle of the coldest winter – coal deliveries to hungry, freezing Germany, and they imprisoned anyone who didn't carry out their orders. Into a densely populated part of the country they brought extreme misery and the worst death. At the end of the battle for the Ruhr, a hundred and thirty-two people had paid with their lives, and countless had lost their freedom; a hundred and fifty thousand people had been expelled from their homeland, and the damage to the German economy was estimated to be four milliard gold marks.

However, Berlin celebrates – but mourns when it wants to, not when ordered to. The worse things get, the more we'll celebrate; when things are really bad we shan't be able to celebrate at all – we'll be dead.

At Rude Gustav's they were at first uncertain whether to shut down or not, but by ten o'clock the place was more than half full and in those days of devaluation a landlord was not inclined to eject patrons simply because they wanted a drink at all costs. So the windows were darkened and a couple of lads sent out to do their best to fill the bar by the back door, through the courtyard.

Gustav Hackendahl sat alone at his round table; it was too early for him to play his part yet. At this hour most of those present were couples; he could see them sitting in dark corners where possible, or at least separated from the next couple by a vacant table. A dead cigar in the corner of his mouth, Gustav was sleepily discussing the evening's prospects with his namesake and what would happen to a landlord and what to a cabman should the place be raided, and whether Marshal Retreat, the black horse Blücher, wouldn't be giving them away by standing outside.

By eleven o'clock the bar was crowded. Over and over again the door leading to the service rooms and the coal cellar opened to admit guests who, bewildered by the dark entry, looked surprised to have got there at last. Then he was slapped on the shoulder. ‘All right, fatty, are you here too? Your friend Olga is already sitting back there by the pillar. What? I would never have known! It's your wife! Couldn't you have been a bit clearer and given a hint? Then I'd know straight away to be more careful. Well, it's too late now. Fancy our fatty as a philanderer! What do you think of that, my good lady?
Blows his own trumpet occasionally, says he has an important business meeting. But haven't I seen you before somewhere, my good lady? Weren't you sitting over there with the bald-headed fat man, kissing his pate? My, how wonderful love can be!'

So the old jokes were churned out, to the thankful laughter of the guests whose dim flame of matrimonial love was thereby a little fanned into life. Then, when the wine list was placed before them, the silence which could be heard … ‘Spot of Rhine wine? Oh no, you don't, there's only champagne going tonight. D'you think I'm risking me licence and quod for the sake of a thimbleful? Stop being so mean; you don't behave like that with your girlfriend … Well, hurry up, man, the dollar won't wait.'

Suddenly a new batch of visitors was admitted and this time it was for Iron Gustav to receive them. ‘Eh, chaps, shove the silver away. These nobs only eat with silver knives and you don't want to pay for a stomach operation to get 'em back again …' Settling himself in his chair – one hand round the stem of his glass, his whip in the other – with the shiny hat over his brows and his head sunk on his chest, he looked the genuine article, a cabby dozing off in the warmth of a bar.

And indeed he felt like dozing. As through a fog he heard the new arrivals, the waiters, the landlord talking. Then a rather unctuous voice called out: ‘Champagne? Of course! Champagne!' Something was slapped down on the table. ‘Money? What's it matter about money? Get rid of it! There's plenty more where this comes from. No end! You can just go on dipping into their pockets for ever – long live all suckers! Champagne!' Then the voice was lowered. ‘You, landlord, get that old cabby away from our table. Why's he dossing here? He should sleep it off somewhere else. Anyway, I can't stand cabmen, I've taken a dislike to them.'