My Dream to Be Free

by Juergen Stollin

  My people brought their sleeping bags and lay down in the common dispensing room like herrings next to each other. The two rooms, which were free, were occupied by the rest of them who could pay a bit more. The last room was for me and Sabrina.

  But my crazy, sick boy wanted to constantly go to the kitchen and then he screamed at the landlady that she was a prostitute and finally he crapped in the near the toilet seat. This was too much for the hostess and she demanded from me that I should let him sleep in the bus. She didn’t care how cold it could become. I had no other choice than send the idiot into the bus. I explained to him once again how he could open the door and that he could sleep well on the back seat. I took the key and went back to the heat guesthouse.

  Since I was very tired but had also drunk some grog and Jägertee, I slept like a log till someone woke me up the next morning by shaking me roughly. Sabrina was there with some passengers in my room and told me I should take a look at the bus. I guessed that something was wrong but couldn’t imagine what the circus was all about. So I went into the restaurant where everything was tidy and I first had a coffee.

  Even a customs officer came and asked me to go to the bus, which I did after my breakfast. Nothing could be as important as my first European breakfast after such a long time. You must enjoy an Austrian breakfast. I guessed that it would be two destroyed tires, which would have been accomplished by my crazy junkie. But what I saw knocked my socks off!

  Now I understood my nervous passengers, who had woken me up so roughly.

  From the outside I saw that nearly all the window panes of the bus were smashed. Except the ones at the back and three of them on the right side, all were broken.

  All the fittings and the radio and the loudspeakers on the ceiling were broken.

  How could the boy do something like this and no one had stopped him?

  The officials who were on duty all night must have surely heard something. I always had a hammer in my driver’s door to check the inner tires. With the Hammer I knocked the tires to see or hear better if there was still air pressure present.

  The idiot had used this hammer to break everything and no one had heard or wanted to hear anything. With the help of officials, we called the father of the boy on the phone and told him what the boy had done. The father, a pastor from the Bielefeld area, was very odd and told us that he did not have anything to do with his son since a long time. He said the son was a lost sheep and could not be saved. He told us that we had to see to it how we would manage him. He, the parish priest, did not assume any responsibility for what his son had done.

  I can only say to that: Alleluia!!!!

  I could not drive by that bus anywhere. So the tires were completely useless. New window panes, a whole lot of fittings and discs and the tires would cost more than what the whole bus was worth. So I had to come up with something. I could kill the junkie, but would also not help.

  I had to find another solution.

  Around noon I knew that the bus would remain in the field.

  What would happen to my passengers?

  There were some possibilities for me of getting a taxi and escaping from there, refund the money to the people in proportion, charter another bus and pay for it or buy train tickets for the people.

  Running away wasn’t possible, that was not my style.

  I couldn’t give back the money either, since why should I do anything at all for these people? I was in this situation now because of them. I had enough losses: first the hashish and now the destroyed bus! I needed the money myself to buy another bus.

  Before every trip I had made my announcement with the following words: if I lost my bus due to drugs, the trip was over, without any refunds. This was the case here. I also explained to the people that I could not refund any money but I would arrange with every truck driver driving to the west to take people along. That was all that I was willing to do.

  Some of them grumbled but most of them gave up and surrendered themselves to their fate.

  There were truck drivers, who were driving even to England. There were also some driving to France and Germany.

  The girls left first.

  Through the help of the officials, I got to see the ID cards of most of the drivers. I also wrote down the vehicle numbers. It was almost three days after which only Sabrina and I remained.

  The three days of circus and an occasional cup of tea or a couple of sandwiches had already cost me.

  My “brothers and sisters" were not impressed that I got rid of them in such a way.

  Some threatened me with a lawyer and the Embassy but I simply ignored them.

  I had twenty Afghan sheepskin coats for sale in the bus. How was I to bring them to Germany?

  As a little extra income, I brought T-shirts from Pakistan in summer, which were sewn with small mirrors, for sale with to Germany. At that time it was a fast seller. In Winter I brought these "Pustingers", the fur coats along. Now I had to get rid of them. I had paid just twenty dollars per piece and I would get at least up to hundred dollars for it in Germany. Of course this was all duty-free.

  Now I would be glad if I could get the purchase price. I was lucky and could sell all the coats at the gas-filling station before the border to the leaseholders with a profit of ten dollars per piece.

  The weather was not so cold anymore and while starting the engine, it sounded very suspicious like an engine damage, so I switched off the engine immediately.

  I already recognized this noise.

  Why didn’t I ever put anti-frost agents in the cooler?

  I told the customs officer that the battery was empty and asked whether the bus could remain so.

  He said that that was okay but I had to hurry and assign it at a workshop or a towing service. So far nobody had noticed the leaking water and so I told the customs officer that I was letting the bus to be scrapped and would assign a scrap materials company to fetch it. The customs officer, who scented a business, came up with an idea. And that is precisely what I wanted!

  The donated bus and the customs officer

  "I can give you a few dollars if you sell me the bus", the customs officer told me.

  Thinking of the broken engine block and everything else to be repaired, I told him that I would give the bus to him as a gift. Thus he would not be able to come to later with something, that I had cheated him. Towing the bus and its disposal would have only cost me time and money.

  I asked him to get me two train tickets for Salzburg and that I would pay for them. Next morning, I received the train tickets and signed a gift certificate.

  Thus, the customs officer had a bus and I had one less thing to worry about.

  Fortunately I was also able to send Sabrina with a truck driver, so I was able to swap the second ticket and had a bit of "pocket money", which I gave to Sabrina.

  Later I heard that this man had taken a detour to drive Sabrina in front of her mother's house. I remember that this truck driver’s name was Josef and he was an Austrian. Sabrina wrote me a letter in which she told me this. Except for this loving letter, which I received later in Kabul, I never heard from Sabrina again, which is a pity.

  Now I could clear the battlefield and drive to Salzburg. From Salzburg I drove to Munich and from there I headed for Neu-Ulm to Kässbohrer.

  I could not drive to my parents, since I only had money to buy a bus again. This time I did not get any spare parts because it was a foreign vehicle, no "Setra", but a "Magirus".

  I drove to Amsterdam and got a new load of hippies to travel to India and Nepal. On the way back from Nepal, I sold the bus in Afghanistan this time.

  Since I did not want to fly again by "Ariana", I bought a ticket to Lahore in Pakistan.

  From there, I traveled by taxi to Amritsar in India and by train to Delhi.

  With a cheap ticket from the Student Travel, I flew to Frankfurt and by train to Neu-Ulm, where I was now a regular customer, a fairly exotic one, as people noticed. It was now the third time that I came t
o the limits of the playground.

  During the last time when I had to go eastwards I had to push forward the bus, which I had given as a gift to the customs officer, some meters in front, because the half of the bus allegedly stood on the Yugoslavian area. If we push back the bus, the bus would below to the Yugoslavs.

  The Yugoslavs also wanted to have the bus and only I was allowed to move the bus.

  Since I was already on the Yugoslavian land, my hippies and I had to first complete the Yugoslavian formalities.

  The hippies, who helped me in pushing the bus, were surprised that there was so much of bureaucracy.

  And that day, at the border crossing, my bus purchaser came to me again but he was very angry and he showed it as well.

  From the west to the east there was certainly no need for checking for hashish but he wanted to make trouble for me and arranged for all the luggage of the hippies to be checked.

  Then he came at last to the subject: I had to get the bus away from the border, he had detected in the meantime that the engine was broken and he did not want to have the bus any more. The disposal of the bus would cost him too much. So I was asked to follow him and he wanted to show me the new parking place of the bus.

  They had moved it a little behind the building, so that it couldn’t be seen immediately that it was only scrap. The bus was parked jacked up on bricks, without wheels, now on Austrian soil and nobody wanted to have it.

  So that was what the loser wanted to tell me. After a year, he wanted to give me back the bus. I reminded him of the gift certificate and that I would keep my word. I told him what was given as a gift was given. The heap of scrap did not belong to me but to him.

  The customs officer was not at all impressed by my stubbornness and swore to me that when I come from the east to the west the next time I would get the shock of my life.

  Although the payment of the "Magic - Bus" in Amsterdam was very good, I still wanted to drive to Istanbul since the matter with this customs officer was too hot for me. Otherwise I had to drive from Yugoslavia via Italy and Switzerland. But these considerations still had time because first, I had to return to India and then we would see further.

  Since my daughters were already 7 and 8 years old and went to school and since their mother was a prostitute, I really ought to have taken care of these girls and stop driving hippies around. I wanted to do this trip, then sell the bus and take care of my family.

  Sometimes I really got my leprechaun down: I was not a good son, not a good father nor a good husband. So whatever.

  The other thing that my good imp told me was that I should simply stop loafing around and that I wouldn’t make a lot of money anyway. Something came in between that constantly. If I had a bit of money, it got over very quickly due to some circumstances or the other. He also told me to go home and take up a normal job.

  However the imp on my left-hand side worked against it and said in turn: I should stay as I was because I loved freedom and I would not hold out at home in Germany for very long anyway. He said I was doing well and I had enough money for myself and the women, and even the very young women adored me, like this English woman. She was 23 and always wanted to be near me. I should take a closer look at this Lilian, he said. She was pretty, had a super figure and was also intelligent.

  I told the devil that he should leave me alone. But somehow he was right.

  Lilian was a creature of a special class. OK, it was an English woman. These were the people who had called me a Nazi pig.

  But this blond, slim girl couldn’t do anything about it. That was from another generation. She traveled with a girlfriend, who was however not so pretty – so it had to be Lilian.

  I had imagined that it would be somewhat difficult to come into contact with Lilian. But my passenger list helped me in this. She immediately agreed to write these lists. I offered her a tentative invitation for lunch as a favor in return, so to say.

  By the time we reached Sofia, she was able to already handle the cassette recorder.

  Before we reached Istanbul, I knew about her whole life.

  We already had breakfast in Istanbul together because we were sleeping in the same room.

  By the time we were leaving Istanbul, we were also already sleeping in the same bed.

  She was simply a sweet innocent girl from the countryside.

  Her parents had a farm and a chicken farm near Bristol.

  Her girlfriend was just as old as her but she was not attractive for me at all, just a nice English woman. I made sure that she did not get jealous or cause any problems for Lilian. I arranged with a boy, that I would pay half of the amount for the room, if he would share the room with Lilian’s girlfriend.

  So she was not alone, and we could see, they both also became a couple. Lilian was just as happy as I was about it. Such a trip from Amsterdam to Kathmandu takes three to four weeks. And you don’t want to be alone in it.

  Since I had decided that this was to be my last trip, I took a lot of time and I pampered Lilian with little excursions, whenever possible. I wanted her to see all the beautiful things that I had already seen. In Istanbul we drove with Mike, my Turkish friend, in his taxi to the Black Sea or I made a small boat tour to one of the small islands in the Sea of Marmara. In Teheran, the Amir Kabir hotel was not feudal enough. Every day we were in a different big hotel and we spoiled ourselves with delicious fish, for example, sturgeon kebab or a delicious sirloin steak.

  Jacklien and the twelve dead hippies

  We had to witness a terrible accident en route from Taybat on the Iranian border to Islam Quala at the Afghan border in the no-man's-land.

  A French woman Jacklien, who also had a bus and drove the route from Paris to Nepal, had a nasty accident with twelve fatally injured passengers.

  We arrived when the injured and the rest of the passengers were being brought back to Taybat in trucks.

  The dead passengers lay there covered in sleeping bags and blankets, still on the roadside.

  Nothing had happened to Jacklien but they had kept her held in a truck and had tied her tightly in the driver’s cabin with a rope so that she could not escape. As a result of my recommendation, I managed to get her into our bus. Of course she was a nervous wreck. I promised her that I would wait till the police or an official came. She was I managed it in our bus. Of course, she was finished with the nerves. I promised you, so long to wait until the police or a public authority would be. She was terribly scared that the truck drivers would rape her or even kill her. It was very late and it was already dark, when a police vehicle arrived with officials. Meanwhile Jacklien had told me how this accident had happened.

  The road was not very wide but was straight as a die, candles straight. Two oncoming vehicles had difficulty to drive past each other without touching one another. You would have had to drive slowly or drive completely away a couple of meters from the tarred road downwards and the other let pass, depending on who was approaching whom.

  The law of reason says quite clearly that the bigger vehicle is also the stronger one. But here it was completely different. The two 60-ton tank trucks were slightly staggering and the drivers were having a little chat.

  The tank trucks in Iran could hold up to 70,000 liters. The one in the direction of Iran was empty and the other in the direction of Afghanistan was loaded.

  In between that, there were about thirty meters free space, as per her estimation. They were not directly next to each other because they needed a few meters during their encounter till they both came to a standstill.

  Roughly speaking, they were parked on the portal and Jacklien wanted to drive through this opening.

  Her estimation had been completely wrong since the trailer was longer than she had thought. She had not touched the empty tank trailer in the direction of Iran but the one loaded and going towards Afghanistan, i.e. the one that was even farther, she had fully collided with the right side of her bus and the bus was torn open at the rear part. The seats were thrown out and t
he young people died.

  Only after the police had assured me that nothing would happen to Jacklien, because no local person had any damages from it, it became a matter for the embassy. It was not just the French, who had died were. Jacklien would be taken to Tehran and she had to wait there to see what would happen to her. Then they took Jacklien in their police car.

  The trip to Nepal was of course cancelled for Jacklien and the hippies, who had had the accident.

  Bad Karma? Bad luck? Misfortune?

  I drove on only up to the Afghan border, then announced a break up the next morning. My friend, the passport official, was waiting for us already. This time there was no lamb, but in the meantime they had already opened up something like a small "restaurant". There was also tea, rice with raisins and vegetables and the delicious flat bread. Of course we did not have to give up a joint.

  To my horror, I noticed that I was in love once again.

  I realized that it was not only superficially, but it was very deep in me, which I didn't want at all, because it would end in Kathmandu anyway.

  Since after a long time the chemistry was right once again, I couldn’t just ignore it. At least I could not! I drove to the Bamian in Kabul with Lilian to show her the largest standing Buddha statues hewn into the rock and also to the three mineral lakes and of course Mazar-i-Sharif. It was just great to be with Lilian together. We also planned to visit the Old Fort and of course the Taj Mahal in Agra.

  That had to be done!

  During this trip, almost all passengers had booked up to Kathmandu, the route that I didn’t like. Most of my hippies were happy about the long stops that I took, but there were also some who couldn't wait till they were finally in Nepal and get their stuff.

  Normally I drove via Benares, Patna and Pokhara to Nepal. But this time I wanted to use the border crossing of Rauxel.