Iron Gustav (53 page)

Old Hackendahl had by now realized whose voice this was, in spite of its having changed so, and for a moment he thought of stealing away; but he had never been a coward, and wasn't one now either. Pushing his hat back off his forehead and blinking in the light, he looked across the table at his son Erich who, all his intoxication suddenly leaving him, stared back at the old cabman with the grizzled beard, baggy, bloodshot eyes and stained blue greatcoat. He had
turned pale. His tongue refused to speak, he wanted to jump up from the table. Yet he could not free himself from that unrelenting gaze. For his father continued to stare at his son with big round eyes, across the table on which the waiters in their red waistcoats and shirtsleeves were ranging bottles of champagne in the coolers. Nothing in his face showed he had recognized his son … had recognized in that puffy white face, with greying temples and thinning hair, the Erich of old, his hope and pride, the possessor of charm and ease, the quick-witted lad whom he had locked up in the cellar for throwing away four gold coins on women … Now the son was sitting between two women under the eyes of his father, one of them with a white arm over his shoulder; the father could see they were obviously local girls dragged up from another bar.

And all that was over in a moment – just a
moment
, in which the past went by. Nine years had flown by since they had seen each other, and now they met again. Time passed, life rolled on, an autumn wind tore the last bright leaves from the branches. Now it was all over, all wrinkled and dead. Yes, it had been just a moment in which both recognized that everything was irretrievably over. And the guests had hardly noticed that the jolly Erich Hackendahl had fallen silent.

And the old man was already in his role. ‘Well, young feller, what's up, eh? What've you got against cabmen? P'r'aps you had to gather horse dung orf the street for Ma's allotment, what? And that's why you've got a grudge against the cabbies. Chuck it, man! These days you've got the stink of petrol from the cars instead. It's just the same. Only you don't notice it.'

There was no need for Erich to reply – his friends had burst out laughing and the girls from the Maxim Bar (who had, of course, heard about Iron Gustav) hastened to instruct their gentlemen concerning the real position of this odd character. The very fat dark gentleman, the only one of the company to be tolerably sober, merely smiled, however – as Erich's friend and patron he no doubt knew that the young man's antipathy to cabmen was no drunken whim. But it had escaped even the clever lawyer and experienced Reichstag deputy that Erich was startled by meeting his father. He also had no idea that father and son were now sitting opposite each
other, and that, misunderstood by everyone, the battle between the two continued.

The champagne glasses had been filled to the brim, the waiters in accordance with the charming custom of inflation bars surreptitiously adding a couple of empty bottles to the dead ones, so as to swell the bill. The trick worked in ninety-five per cent of cases.

The glasses clinked together, and the girls laughed out loud as they lifted them to their lips as the thickset gentleman, in a dinner jacket and with a monocle and duelling scars on his bulldog face, had knocked with a champagne bottle on the side of the cooler. The flower of successful business Berlin began to commemorate the Occupation of the Ruhr, and the man in the dinner jacket spoke: ‘Comrades! Respected Ladies! Esteemed cabmen! To what we are – Youth!'

They drank.

‘To what we love – the sweet life and all that goes with it!' And he pinched the neck of the girl beside him, who gave a little scream.

They drank again.

‘To what we want – that the wretched right-wing Cuno government recovers the Ruhr, so that it's ours again! And soon!'

They drank and laughed. Only the lawyer smiled weakly; he didn't much like such behaviour in public houses.

‘And now,' said the gentleman with the monocle, sitting down, ‘relate us some amusing episode from your life, respected charioteer. You're bound to have had a lot of experience.'

‘I have,' agreed Hackendahl. ‘Only, when I'm in company with educated chaps in monocles who plump money down on the table like the young 'un over there, so that all the waiters immediately sharpen their pencils an' get the bill ready – I don't know, out of sheer respect me tongue freezes an', poor ole fool, I go on rackin' me nut without ever findin' out how you folk earn the dough you do while I can't buy me ole woman the dripping for her bread.'

‘Don't soak so much, old boozer.'

‘When I see that,' said old Hackendahl, pointing to his son who was glancing at him uneasily, ‘that's a young chap all right and I ask meself, how's he do it? Naturally he's got education but education
don't earn you money nowadays. I ask meself, how do the likes of him do it? I should have been in quod long ago.'

Erich compressed his lips and tried to look threateningly at his father but shrank immediately from the old man's eye.

Some of those round the table protested. ‘Dry up, old fellow. We're not here to drink their apple juice and be made fools of by you.'

‘The old chap's jealous.'

‘No, it's dense I am,' went on Hackendahl. ‘I can't an' don't understand it. I'd like to be put wise.'

‘You can't be,' said the man in the monocle. ‘You've got to be born to it. The gentleman you're speaking about was born to it, that's all.'

‘Well, I certainly wasn't or else I wouldn't be actin' the ole fool before you puppies.' Complacent laughter. ‘But I'd like to get hold of it all the same.'

‘What is it you want to get hold of?'

‘Well, how you set about it, profiteering, I mean. People talk of nothing else but I don't grasp it. How d'you pull off a big deal now? I rack me bloody brains but what can I profiteer in? The young gentleman here – I ask him with all due respect – is he a profiteer p'r'aps?' And he pointed to his son.

All except Erich were amused. The girls beamed. In such dens of extortion to be a profiteer was a kind of honour. Money has no smell; that saying was to many their one and only article of faith.

‘He a profiteer! Why, you can call him a king of profiteers,' said the man with the monocle. ‘He could sell you and you wouldn't even notice it.'

‘There you are then! But p'r'aps I'd get to know I'd been sold in time. Young feller,' he was addressing his son now, ‘show a bit of kindness to an ole man an' tell me how you get yer money out of the mugs.'

‘I …' began Erich defiantly. Then he reached out for his glass. ‘I find this boring. Can't we go on somewhere else?'

‘You can't get away now, young feller. Don't you hear the police whistles outside? What a comedown if you had to go to the police
station! It don't matter about me, but then I'm only a common cabby.'

‘Hackendahl,' said the man with the monocle, ‘let's do the old man a favour and show him how you make money. As a matter of fact I've got something for you.' He reached into the inside pocket of his dinner jacket and brought out what was, for such a well-dressed gentleman, a rather soiled pocketbook. ‘Now where was it?' he muttered, turning over the pages.

‘Don't bother,' said Erich, annoyed. ‘It's all too idiotic …'

‘Please do be nice, my dear. Here's some real profiteering.'

‘A little more caution in public,' advised the lawyer, Erich's patron.

‘Do an ole man a favour,' begged Hackendahl. No less persuasively the gentleman with the monocle chimed in. ‘And why not? Everybody's profiteering now. The cloakroom attendants deal in cocaine, mothers deal in their daughters, daughters deal in silk stockings on the sly in the big stores – everybody's in the game. And I really have something for you, Hackendahl. I can offer your four trucks Silesia at thirty-six.'

‘Oh, not now, Bronte.'

‘Silesia? What's that stand for?' asked old Hackendahl.

‘Can't say. Potatoes, I think – there's no need to know what you deal in … Well, Hackendahl?'

‘You don't have to know? Marvellous!' said the old man admiringly.

‘Do leave me in peace,' said Erich furiously. ‘I'm in no mood now.'

‘Very well,' said Bronte and was about to put away his pocketbook when a small, lively-looking man at the table called out: ‘Stop, Bronte! Four Silesias at thirty-six? I bid two at thirty.'

‘You bid two Silesias at thirty, I offer two at thirty-six.'

‘You offer two at thirty-six, I bid two at thirty and a half.'

‘You bid two at thirty and a half, I offer two at thirty-five and a half.'

Across the table, the champagne bottles and the glasses they flung their mystic formulae to and fro, while all stared open-mouthed. At the nearby tables people turned round with a smile but their faces soon grew respectful, even grave. It was clear that business was being transacted – and business was a god.

‘I'd like to advise against,' said the lawyer, smiling weakly. Then to Erich: ‘Quite right, my son …'

‘So that's how money is made?' marvelled old Hackendahl.

‘You bid two trucks at thirty-two and a quarter,' shouted the man with the monocle. ‘I offer two at thirty-four and a half.'

The girls goggled and then broke into a foolish laugh.

Old Hackendahl was the only one who comprehended that this jobbing went beyond mystic formulae and profits, and had to do with the staple food of the poor. Potatoes, to which if necessary you only need add a bit of salt, and which are still nourishing. Many a day, till he had become buffoon at Rude Gustav's, potatoes had been the only dish on the table at home and even then had been too dear. And, had it not been that the father was sitting there, Erich would have done the bargaining, Erich, his favourite once.

The two were still yelling at one another, the rest intent on the struggle; the protagonists were now separated only by a half – half of what, the devil alone knew.

Getting up, the old man threw a significant glance at his son and slowly went to the lavatory … There he waited. It was an ugly, stinking place. The only good thing about it was the clean water that ran lightly gurgling through the stand-ups. But that immediately became sewage water and filth. Everything clean in this life immediately becomes sewage and filth.

He stood and waited. Then the door opened. But it wasn't his son, it was someone else.

Yes, Erich hadn't changed. His hair was thinner, his face had become puffy – but otherwise there was no change. He had always been afraid to face his father. As a child he would slink off to bed and sham sleep when he had been up to mischief. The water gurgled and ran. The father waited.

Well, it was at least good to know that his son couldn't escape. This was the exit.

Finally old Hackendahl returned. Five tables away he could see his son's back – the lad had always cringed like that when he was afraid of a box on the ears … Tapping Erich's shoulder, he said: ‘Well, young man, you had something to say to me, hadn't you? Or shall we talk about it here?'

The
deal in margins seemed to have been concluded – all were laughing, talking, drinking. Nobody paid any attention to the pair, or hardly anybody.

Erich turned towards his father and the two looked into each other's eyes. Then Erich said quietly: ‘It's useless, Father.'

The father looked into his son's eye without blinking. He saw it, as a whole blue but with brown and green flecks, and round it he saw a face a little like his own, ageing and getting puffy. His son's eye seemed so cold, so empty … there was nothing there, neither sadness, love, nor regret. For a moment the father's image came to the surface, but the son only had to turn his eye, to look at a champagne glass, or a prostitute, and the father's image was extinguished, as if it had never existed.

The father removed his hand from the son's shoulder. Walking backwards, keeping his gaze on his son (as if wanting his image to stay with him as long as possible), he went to the door. When the door closed, the son breathed a sigh of relief and grabbed a glass. Suddenly he had to laugh. Now it was all over! The old man would never pester him again … Erich, liberated, laughed and drank.

Old Hackendahl had left the Rude Gustav bar. He'd experienced much with his children, but not yet this. That a son should say to his father's face, ‘It's useless, Father' – that was completely new. Now it had got this far. They didn't creep like a coward in front of their father – that had been bad enough. No, now they said to his face that they didn't want him any more!

Old Hackendahl could well imagine that a son who had grown rich might be ashamed of an impoverished father; that was despicable but it was human. With Erich, however, it was not so much that he was ashamed. It was something far worse – his father was less to him than the wench with whom he was sitting or the waiter juggling with the empty champagne bottles under the table. With them he could talk but to his father he had nothing to say, nothing whatever.

That was inhuman, that was little better than patricide. A play
like that had had a long run in the theatre. The father clearly remembered reading about it on the advertising pillars when he stopped at his cab stand. So the whole world had been reduced to a play – to nothing but a mean travesty! You had to laugh at the very misery of it.

Old Gustav, without noticing that the beast looked round at him very surprised, took the rug from his horse's back. Blücher wasn't used to his master driving away unaccompanied at that time of night. Where were the fares, then, for whom one had to go crabwise? The driver, however, clicked his tongue and the cab rolled on.

The streets were still full of people, even though the crowd had begun to thin out a little. The police patrols untiringly asked them to move on. But these people were true Berliners; they stopped before the sign of each night haunt and stared. The signs were unlit, the places closed, there was nothing to see, but they waited in the hope that something might happen.