Iron Gustav

by Hans Fallada

  § XVII

  Heinz Hackendahl went along the Grosse Frankfurter Strasse carrying two cases. One was light, containing all that he possessed of clothes, linen and shoes; the other was heavier, if not actually heavy, and held his books and whatever else of spiritual treasure had been accumulated during his school years. It was 1 July, and hot. The peace treaty had been signed two days before.

  Passing the fence where his father’s premises used to be, Heinz stopped at the gate, put down his suitcases and, full of curiosity, peeped into the yard. It seemed to have changed hands again. The great stable had been divided into garages, taxis stood in the yard and a driver was washing down his car.

  Heinz nodded. He was not depressed by these changes, even though they meant the end of all his father had been; old ways had to go if the new were to come. There was nothing to be depressed about in that. On the contrary it offered a consolation. Disgrace and shame passed away too. You can get up from the dirt into which you have fallen.

  A car entering honked furiously – Heinz picked up his suitcases and walked on, turning into a side street, into a second one, crossing a couple of courtyards and climbing up five flights of stairs.

  The nameplate – Gertrud Hackendahl, Dressmaker – was still on the door. For a moment he hesitated. It had been barely nine months since he was last here. But it seems an infinitely long time when he considers everything he’d experienced since that evening – Erich and Revolution, Tinette and Irma, Abitur and Eva …

  For a moment he hesitated. But then he pressed the bell firmly.

  Gertrud Hackendahl opened the door: ‘You, Bubi?’

  ‘Yes, me, Tutti – but before I come in with my cases, I want to ask you if you will have me? Do you understand? I want to live with you. I’ve got a little job at the bank. Perhaps I can help you a bit with the lad … ?’

  He’d said what he’d planned to say. But it now seemed weak and false. So he added: ‘And perhaps you can help me a little too, Tutti? We’ve got peace now … Perhaps you can help me. I think you are the only strong person in the family …’

  She looked at him, then she shouted and didn’t hide her pleasure: ‘Come right in, Bubi! – Of course you can help me – with the lad!’

  And in he went.

  SIX

  The Old Cabby

  § I

  Old Gustav Hackendahl – we mustn’t forget that there also existed a young Gustav Hackendahl, Otto’s eldest son, the old man hadn’t even seen him – old Hackendahl was finding it more and more difficult to make one horse support two persons, namely himself and his wife. Formerly, before the war, one could even bring children up on the earnings of a single cab if only one chose the right stands and had a horse that inspired confidence.

  But who thought of taking a cab nowadays? Couples did in the summer, and drunks at all seasons of the year, while there was also a certain demand at election time, when one could take old and ill people with a sensible dislike of motor cars to the polling station. But what did it amount to? There was nothing else doing nowadays – a horse couldn’t even keep itself, much less two old people. Gustav Hackendahl had contracted the habit, as he rattled homewards through the Kaiserallee, of stopping at Niemeyer’s, the grain merchants, so as to make sure of his fodder – the horse came first – and he thought it was the end of the world on the day he was forced to give six hundred marks for a hundredweight of oats that hadn’t cost more than six before the war. But he had been paying six thousand now for some time and the world still went on, in accordance with the saying: the older the madder. With this difference that Hackendahl had long stopped buying oats by the hundredweight. ‘They can say what they like at Niemeyer’s, Mother, I’ll go on getting my twelve pounds of oats a day! The horse gets ten of ’em and that always leaves two over for the Sunday. I look ahead now.’

  But even looking ahead didn’t help. Often Hackendahl had to drive past Niemeyer’s with his head averted, because he had no money, not a single person having stepped into his cab all day. Then he would stand beside his horse in the former joiner’s workshop and make up some feed out of a little hay and straw, while thinking of the old times when oats had been brought down from the loft by the hundredweight – his own oats from his own land – and how fodder master Rabause (whatever had happened to him?) would go through the stable with a full tub of fodder.

  ‘Good times, old boy, good times! Only realize now how good they were. No, I haven’t got anythin’ for you. You can push your muzzle against me – it’s no good.’

  Very well, in his old age Iron Gustav learned to cope with any situation. But it was no pleasure any more. Despite all efforts, things didn’t go forward but resolutely backwards. What difference did it make if he took on a job or two for Niemeyer, delivering oats, hay and straw? No difference at all. Talk about a joke! – that is if you preferred a joke to tears – there was plenty of bread and plenty of butter now, oh yes, but the four-pound loaf cost twenty thousand marks and you had to put down a hundred and fifty thousand for a pound of butter! Such were the fellows who now ran the regiment. First nothing to eat; then no earnings with which to buy anything. That’s what they were like. Somehow they got everything wrong.

  Standing beside his horse, Hackendahl would rack his brains, wondering how he could manage to earn a little more money. He moved the dead butt of his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other. His wife’s appearance was a real mess. The clothes hung off the woman as if a beanpole had been dressed as a scarecrow. Mother simply must put a little flesh on her bones. This starvation was a misery. During the war there had been a certain equality in starvation; everyone had gone hungry, or at least it looked like it. Starvation had been regulated by law and by coupon – one had, so to speak, been able to accommodate hunger to circumstances. But now people were starving in an utterly haphazard way. The shops had plenty of goods, for those who could buy them, but people went past the sumptuous windows without even looking, or if they did it was only to ask themselves what they had done to have to starve. Was their guilt greater than that of the gluttons? But such questions didn’t help much, and poor people queuing up with flat-wagons on hire didn’t help at all. People slaved away for a half a day, and when it came to being paid, they were told: ‘It’s not exactly convenient today. Come back on Friday when Maxe brings his pay packet home.’ The hell with it! If any money was there on Friday, it was only a few farthings, worth only a crumb.

  Sometimes his wife said, ‘Go to the children, Gustav. Sophie and Erich are bound to be doing well. They won’t let their old parents starve, I’m sure.’

  But no, in this matter Gustav was of iron. Rather than go to his children he’d prefer the workhouse. Things had got to the point where he could grin about himself, about his children, about the whole world. He, the former sergeant-major of the Pasewalk Cuirassiers, had brought up five well-fed children. But the five children, all of them better educated than their father, couldn’t feed the two parents. That was what he was grinning about.

  ‘Well, it’s the way of the world, Mother. An’ it’s no good me changing it. Sometimes I see Erich rushing past the Zoo in his car. But he don’t see me! And he’s quite right. What’s the good? Here’s me in my old moth-eaten coat and there’s him in a nifty sealskin what d’you call ’em – well, it don’t go together and God didn’t mean it to. No, Mother, you be glad that they’ve left us in peace. We ain’t dead of hunger yet and we’ll manage somehow. And Heinz still comes …’

  Yes, Heinz still came. He came regularly once a week to supper, because his father was at home then, and he brought his own food, which was the proper thing to do when visiting nowadays. And what he brought was so ample that it left enough over to provide his parents with their lunch on the following day. Which must be accounted to his credit, seeing that he himself was far from prosperous. With sorrow his mother saw that he was still wearing the same overcoat in which he had left home four years ago.

  But, in reply to her questions, he would lau
gh and say: ‘I’m getting on all right, Mother, don’t you worry. We old people can manage. The main thing is to look after the children.’

  ‘Fancy you concerning yourself about the Gudde’s brats, Heinz!’ (To Frau Hackendahl Otto’s wife was always the Gudde, even though she had to some extent forgiven her, once just by sending her some cutlery.)

  ‘They’re marvellous kids, Mother. You let them alone. Life wouldn’t be any good without them. With them there, you know why you do all the work.’

  ‘Shush! Your father!’

  But here things had improved a lot. One could now venture a word or two about the grandchildren; in fact old Hackendahl would sometimes mention them himself, even though in a far from friendly way.

  ‘Ain’t one o’ them really got a hump, Heinz? You’re kiddin’. Even if the hump’s not visible, it’s there inside ’em – I’ll eat my hat if it ain’t.’

  ‘Then eat it, Father!’ smiled Heinz, and went on talking about it, no matter how much Mother signalled him to stop. It wasn’t easy to upset Heinz these days, twenty-two years of age as he was, but calm and collected, and as set in his ways as an old man.

  ‘No, I can’t tell you, Father, what’s going to happen to our currency. I’m only a bank clerk, you know. Probably the mark will go on falling and the dollar rising, especially now that the French want to occupy the Rhineland.’

  The old people said nothing.

  ‘And what am I going to feed my horse on?’ asked the father after a while.

  Heinz reflected. He knew that it was not so much a question of feeding the horse as of feeding two other beings. ‘I’ll tell you next time, Father,’ he said at last. ‘Perhaps I’ll find something.’

  But the next time he came his father was out, which was just as well since he hadn’t found anything in spite of all his endeavours. But – to make up for that – his father had. His mother was very worried and stressed. ‘You’ll see, Heinz, it’ll only end up with Father going on the drink again, just as he did when Otto was killed.’

  But Heinz had confidence. ‘Father’s quite right! You’ll see, Mother, he’ll earn something, and he’s suited to the work. And don’t worry about the drink. Father’s far too proud ever to become a drinker.’

  § II

  On a good day in these bad times, Father Hackendahl found a travelling customer, with long legs and teeth like a horse, at the Zoo Station. The man, who immediately planted his feet on the front seat of the cab, while leaning back on the back seat, demanded to be taken round town by Iron Gustav. ‘What did you say? Two hours, ending up at the Schlesische Station at twelve!’

  It was a dream fare, a boon – a real blessing, an Englishman – no, as it turned out an American, who wanted have a look at Berlin as he passed through. Under Hackendahl’s guidance, he took a thorough look; in other words he tried Berlin’s beer, wine and schnapps very thoroughly. And if at first he entered a local bar like a quiet American, with a ‘Just a moment, please’, the more he approached the centre of town and the eastern part, the more its sociability embraced him, and Father Hackendahl had to accompany him no matter what kind of place he entered.

  He was a great fellow, with a face as white as snow, completely unaffected by alcohol, with long, flaming-red hair. Over there, in his alcohol-dry home country, he must have developed a manic partiality for bottles. He couldn’t be without them even for short stretches in the cab. He put them in his coat pockets, he piled them up on the front seat, and he surveyed them with bleary-eyed but good-humoured looks, shaking them tenderly. And when they glugged, drinking from the bottle, he laughed.

  It was a lucky fare, but a difficult one. It was lucky that at least the old nag didn’t have a taste for alcohol. (They once tried to quench his thirst with cognac, but he refused.)

  By some miracle Hackendahl really was in time for the twelve o’clock train from the Schlesische Station. But the American insisted that ‘my friend Gustav’ went up to the platform. So they were both carried up the station stairs, each by two porters, in a state of heightened and enhanced jollification.

  The pain of parting came with the arrival of the train. They embraced each other, and a porter picked up Hackendahl’s bowler from under the train. Another porter held his whip, while the two other porters propped up the parting friends. America invited Gustav Hackendahl to go with him a bit of the way, till Warsaw. And if it hadn’t been for another porter, who kept on reminding him of the old nag, he would perhaps have done so. As a parting present, the American received a bottle of Mampes bitter schnapps from Hackendahl’s coat pocket, as did each of the porters – which they then had to give back, because the compartment looked much too cheerless and lonely without them.

  In turn, the American emptied out all his German cash, and Gustav even got a genuine American ten-dollar note. After the station master had made a to-do about the to-do, he was so tipsy himself that he gave the signal to depart two minutes late. Then the train got under way, with a large pair of brown shoes hanging out of a first-class compartment, went round a curve as it left the station and disappeared – towards the border, Warsaw, Moscow and certainly numerous glasses of schnapps.

  Meanwhile, the porters carried poor Iron Gustav down to his cab, put him in the corner, wrapped him warm with blankets, hung the old nag’s nosebag round its neck, and kept a watchful eye on the carriage the whole afternoon. Because the Schlesische Station was then a real vulture land, and vultures notice every corpse, especially if it has an American ten-dollar note in its pocket.

  It was in this state that Gustav Hackendahl awoke, after undisturbed sleep, with a well-rested, if slightly numb, head. Yes, it had been a real inflation fare, he thought on his way home, a fare normally only paid to the wretched autocars. But of course it was only an exception, and would remain one, and ten dollars would not last three hungry mugs for ever. No, from that alone Gustav could not feel so happy. He shoved his cigar (genuine American) from one end of his mouth to the other and wondered and brooded over why he actually felt so happy.

  He remembered he had had an idea, and sometimes his brain flashed far away from it, but he didn’t get any further. When his brain so registered, he noted that it had to do with the fact that he was Iron Gustav. However, that was pure nonsense, because everything had to do with the fact that he was Iron Gustav. Without him everything would stop – as far as he was concerned anyway. If I’m dead, everybody’s dead, he thought comfortingly, for it was a very pleasant feeling.

  The old nag trotted on happily – down Lange Strasse, Warschauer Bridge, across Alexanderplatz, through the Königstrasse to the Schloss. Gustav had actually wanted to go home via Unter den Linden and the Tiergarten, but in the end he pulled on the left-hand rein and went ‘the back way’. He went zigzag hither and thither, round corners and back round corners. And the more corners Gustav negotiated, the clearer his head became, and when he stopped in front of the cellar bar in Mittelstrasse, he remembered what a splendid idea he had had in the middle of his intoxication, and nodded fondly and familiarly at the sign outside.

  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 la
dies 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.