I hear the engine, the hard metallic rhythm draws the demonic weight of materialist matters closer to my closing breath. I would die within the circle of my now empty soul, and never face the devil who with weasel leer will cast me into the fire of feelinglessness.
No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
The unsettled elation triggered by a sudden break in the hopeless two-and-a-half-hour wait for a lift carried the hitch-hikers manically forward to where the Mercedes-Benz had come to a halt some twenty yards down the road.
“Ya beauty,” Tom cried.
“About time,” said Ian as they ran.
On arriving at the car they found a middle-aged man at the wheel who was staring fixedly at the line of traffic that climbed a gentle hill, apparently unaware of their presence.
“He’s yanking our chain.”
“The bastard.”
They bobbed their heads about as though they wanted to look inside, but the real intention was to get noticed. The electric window started its descent and released an odour of sweat and cigarettes, but the man continued to stare in front. He was as still as an oppressively windless day, and it was impossible to sense whether his stillness was relaxed or alert. He said nothing, but waited.
“Are ye gi’ing us a lift or what?”
“Ja!”
“Where are you going?”
“Where are you going?”
Tom was now irritated and uncertain. “Where are you gauin’, man? If you’re no gauin’ oor way, what’s the point?”
“I am going your way. I am out for a drive, and I wish to go a far distance. Just tell me where you are going.” The man spoke in clipped English and still refused to move his head.
“Freaky,” Tom whispered to Ian, almost as a question. “What do we do?”
“Calais,” said Ian.
“You are Scottish, right?”
“Yeah. What of it?” Tom grumped.
“Well, maybe you are Scottish and living in Calais, but I think you are going to Calais to get the ferry, and very probably you are then going to Scotland. Am I right?”
The tetchiness born of standing for hours in the sun endlessly raising an upright thumb to signal to passing cars, followed by this rambling conversation, now struggled against a tickling sense of the ridiculous that rose like a weak but unrelenting vibration and broke out in strangled laughter. “Is this a joke or somethin’?” Tom said in a voice that mingled anger and gaiety.
“This is no joke,” the German said with pedantic forcefulness, still looking up the hill as though expecting someone or something to appear over its brow. “I want to drive somewhere and you want to go somewhere. This is ecological, no? I am not wasting my petrol and polluting the planet for no reason, yes?” he laughed very slightly – the first real movement, but without taking his eyes off the low and distant summit.
“He’s a complete clown,” Tom said turning away, but Ian preferred the company of a clown to another couple of hours waving his thumb at fast-moving traffic.
“That is very kind of you. And yes, we are going to Scotland. To Glasgow actually.”
“Well, please get in. I will take you all the way.”
“Come on. He’s aff his heid. You’re no getting in the car wi’ him. He’s no right – he’ll cut up our body parts and put them in the freezer. And then he’ll have us for supper with sauerkraut and Liebfraumilch for the next few months. I’d rather travel with a load of rotten fish. No way!”
“You’ll excuse my friend,” said Ian while kicking Tom in the shins.
The man continued to stare at the road for several seconds before saying, “I will take you as far as you wish to go. Please get in and just tell me where to go.”
Ian jumped in and Tom reluctantly followed.
They travelled in silence. Tom and Ian were awed by the bulk of the man. In his big car, his considerable mass had not been immediately apparent. Fat, yes, but also strong and menacing. The car moved at speed – and smoothly like the expensive car it was. Even the smoothness could not be trusted; it felt impossibly, illusorily and profoundly unsettling and unnatural. Strangely it was Ian who felt most disturbed and keenest to break the spell. “You’re what we might call a free spirit. A man who takes to the road just to see what happens,” he said.
The big man sat solidly in his seat and took no notice. Ian felt that his words hung in the air like a vaguely unpleasant smell that could not fade in the closed environment of the speeding car. He waited and thought of other things to say, but rejected them all. Then when he had given up hope of a response, the man said, “I am not a free spirit, as you call it. I have always been a man with a purpose. If I do something, I do it for a reason. I do not like spontaneity. Spontaneity, I think, is a very modern thing. It is for the young, like you.”
There was nothing reassuring about that statement.
On the ferry, the German paid for lunch and then went for a snooze. He seemed perfectly relaxed and confident that they would rejoin him for the rest of the journey north. Ian was not so sure. “You were right, Tom, there’s something creepy about the guy,” he said as they leant against the railing on deck and looked down on a grey and foamy wake. “I don’t think we should go any further with him. We should wait and then hitch again.”
“But he paid to take his car across.”
“He’s minted. That’s clear enough.”
“At the speed he goes, we’ll be home tonight or tomorrow morning. No chance of that, if we go back to hitching.”
Tom, short, stocky and strong, and the more quick-witted of the two, was now completely seduced by the idea of a speedy and physically comfortable ride home. Pity about the company and who could credit the man, but for the moment he had given up trying to fathom the German’s motives. Ian, a pale and sensitive youth, was now certain that this trip was a mistake, but he had never been able to assert himself over Tom, except on that one fateful occasion – his determination to accept the silent man’s lift.
After London, the German pulled into a service station and got out of the car without saying anything. The friends followed him sheepishly, hardly looking at each other. The man locked the car remotely without turning round and strode towards the cafeteria. He moved at speed but appeared nonchalant at the same time. He looked and felt like a man always in control – of himself and everything besides. His expression was almost blank or rather would have been blank if it weren’t for a veiled but nevertheless distinct aura of harsh determination.
The man insisted on paying for the rolls and the coffees. The youths did not protest too much, but their consternation never abated. The ham rolls tasted even more plasticky than usual. The coffee made them feel slightly nauseous. Then the man asked Tom if he had a mobile phone; Tom lied that he didn’t. The same question was put to Ian, who stammered for a couple of seconds before realising that it was too late to lie. The man then started to say how he liked to help people out: he saw two nice young men and he wanted to help them. He too had been young once, and used to hitch-hike around the country. Surely he could be of help. He could take them home, and that was what he was doing. Now he remembered that he had to ring some lawyers in Rome about a loan he had taken out. His English might seem good, but he wasn’t fluent like a native speaker, and the Italian lawyer wasn’t that good either. They might misunderstand each other. He felt sure that Ian wouldn’t mind helping him out.
“A mobile to Italy,” said Tom, “that’ll cost a fortune! Why don’t you use your own, even if he is acting as your interpreter?”
The man acknowledged the argument by extracting a wad of notes from his pocket and counting out two hundred pounds in ten-pound notes. He then pushed the money across the surface of the table towards Ian. “That should cover it,” he said without a trace of resentment.
Ian rang the number asked of him and once he got through to the lawyer he found that his English was in fact very poor. “I am ringing on behalf of …” he looked up at the man, realising that he didn’t even know
his name.
“Tell him that it concerns the Libkin case,” the man said as though this should have been clear.
“I am ringing about the Libkin case,” Ian blushed with confusion.
“Ah! Is too long you are not talking. You people very naughty. Mr. Lo Monaco is not ’appy. Not ’appy at all. You understand.”
Ian understood nothing but said yes, and looked at the man.
“Tell him that the funds are now available. We can transfer them,” the man said, still absolutely cool.
“The funds are available. We can transfer them.” Why did Ian say “we”? He was identifying with one side of a transaction he knew nothing about.
“Good! Is good! But late, too late. Mr. Lo Monaco not ’appy. I will ring you this evening on this phone and tell you where to transfer the funds. You understand?”
“Yes!”
“Good,” and the Italian lawyer hung up.
“Well?” said the man.
“He hung up.”
“And?”
“And he’ll ring with the bank details this evening.”
The German cracked a smile. It was not an expansive one, but on that expressionless face it was like a ray of sunlight. It was the first touch of reality. And human reality, we know, is often insincere. “Well, that’s that then. Let’s return to our journey. Let’s get you boys home. Back to your mothers and fathers.”
The German had no intention of driving through the night. They stopped in the early evening at a service station motel. He booked them a twin room and insisted that he would sleep in the chair. The only luggage he took from the car was a spongebag and a darts board with three darts skewered into it.
The two youths sat on the side of their beds, incapable of any action. The man found an appropriate hook for his darts board, extracted the darts and threw them. He then returned to the board and removed them. It was unclear if he kept any score or registered his performance. His nature was sealed up hermetically in an envelope of immobility – except where some activity required a minimum of movement, as in driving or walking or chucking darts. He strode back to his starting position. That lethargic stride again. The pace of a big man. One, two, three, the darts thudded into the board. And off he went again. And again. And again. His behaviour was obsessive and possibly designed to unnerve them further. Or possibly it was just to pass the time of day. Tom now knew that they had to get out. He also knew that it would not be easy.
“Why does he do that?” asked Tom. “Is he nervous or is he bored?”
“Neither,” replied Ian, “he doesn’t have feelings.”
“Of course he does. Everyone does. Even a zombie like that. If we knew, it could help us.”
Ian’s response was a blank stare. He always disliked the way Tom wanted to complicate everything. For him, the man was an inexplicable phenomenon. Any attempt to decipher his behaviour was pointless, nonsensical, even perverse.
They sat for over an hour without saying a word, and all the time the man went back and forth, throwing the darts and retrieving them. Tom wanted to scream at him – or do worse – but he was conscious of his mass and his unchallengeable self-control.
Then Ian’s phone rang. It was the lawyer. “You ’ave a pen?” and Ian scribbled down the bank details. “You make bank transfer tomorrow morning. You understand?”
After that the hitch-hikers went to bed, but they couldn’t sleep. The man, however, soon nodded off in the armchair, leaving the standard lamp next to him switched on. He snored, but when Tom made a move to get up, one of the man’s eyes opened and stared with the empty intelligence of an animal. Tom went back to bed and his worries.
In the morning, the man was slightly more communicative. He smiled again and offered breakfast. Ian found it hard to chew on his muesli. He had little appetite, and Tom was having only a little more success with his bacon and eggs. He knew that he had to be ready to get himself and Ian out of the way as soon as he could.
The man drove them sedately to the nearest town. It was a dull place like many others; a medieval church looked out of place amongst twentieth-century buildings all very similar to each other along a standard high street. The shops all belonged to chains and the people who rushed along the pavements looked as unconvincing as those little plastic people they use on architectural models. They seemed to decorate this newly made toy-town, and yet they were the ones who belonged to normality. They had places to go and things to do; Ian and Tom felt as though they had been kidnapped, but perhaps they had just found a kindly if rather inarticulate man – a foreigner with few words. Why not? There are eccentrics, aren’t there, although perhaps not too many in that suburban village.
The man parked and went into the bank.
“This is where we get off,” said Tom. He opened the back-seat door slightly. “No point in hanging around.”
Ian looked half dead. He hadn’t the strength for more hitch-hiking. “Why not finish the ride?”
“Because the man’s a nutter, aff his heid, I tell ya. This time we’ve got to go.”
“No way, this is a comfy ride. I’m not standing out there on some lay-by or slip road, waving my thumb at smelly lorries and decrepit vans,” said Ian, so tired that his usual anxieties were entirely abated.
Tom could have gone – should have gone. The door was open, and he now understood that something was very wrong. He could not abandon Ian though. Ian was his friend. Friends stick together – look after each other. When he closed the door and remained in the car, he did so principally out of solidarity with his friend – but also, somewhere hidden in the recesses of his mind or, more specifically, his imagination, another motivation was grinding away quietly and unfailingly: his curiosity to know what all this was about: who was this man? why had he given them a lift? It wasn’t generosity, but no other explanation made any sense. It’s not reason that tells us there’s a pattern to this journey; it’s our imagination, which loves the coherence of a story.
They sat for some time in silence, and when the man reappeared, he seemed surprised to see them. “Good boys,” he said as he got into the car. “You waited for me. I am sorry that I am so long in bank.”
Again the silence and the smooth speed of the car. Again the man staring fixedly at the road ahead. However, the man’s surprise on his return to the car had confirmed in Tom’s mind the foolishness of waiting for him. The danger now felt so inescapable that there was little point in worrying about it.
“Where are you from?” Tom asked as they drove through the Southern Uplands.
“I live in Frankfurt.”
“But where were you born?”
Surprisingly the man seemed to open up – relatively speaking. “I grew up in Dresden.”
“That was in the GDR.”
“Of course.”
“Did you work for the Stasi?” Tom joked.
“Yes I did, since you ask,” the man answered bluntly. “I was a young and ambitious officer. My career was very good. Very good indeed. I was married. I had good flat.”
“Did you torture people?” Tom was aware of the naivety of his questions, but they were producing results.
“No. Other people did that. If it was necessary. I hunted people. But a policeman doesn’t hunt people like a tiger; he hunts them like a spider. He leaves a web, a trap which the criminal cannot avoid. The criminal is caught because of his own foolishness.”
“But didn’t the Stasi go after people just because of their beliefs?”
“Of course. Beliefs are very important to a state. No state likes people to have ideas too different from the ones it upholds in any given moment. It is no good believing what the state used to think ten or twenty years ago, or even what the state might think in ten or twenty years’ time – that is even more dangerous.”
“So you believe in communism then?”
“I used to. In a way. But I don’t any more.”
There were a couple of minutes silence while Tom thought this over. Ian was asleep. “Why did
you change your mind about communism?”
“Simple. Communism lost, and communism lost because it didn’t understand human nature. Capitalism understands human nature much better. What is it your philosopher says? ‘There is no such thing as a free lunch.’ That is very much right,” the man laughed, “so obvious, so simple.”
“Reassuringly simple,” Tom agreed. “I suppose you’re right. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Everybody is out to get something, however small.”
“Come off it, Tom,” Ian has just woken up. “We got a free lunch three days ago. Remember? That teacher who gave us a lift near the Swiss border. In the hills around Belleguarde. We stopped at this restaurant with a beautiful view. We had as much paté as you could want, followed by steak and chips. It was great. He gave us a lift and paid for our lunch. And now you’re saying that no such thing exists.”
“That’s right!” said Tom, reassured that the reassuringly simple had turned out to be wrong.
“Ah, but there must have been a motive,” said the German.
“What possible motive could there be?” said Ian.
“Well,” said Tom, “he did keep saying that his son was at university in England, and that he was just paying us back for the hospitality given his son, who also likes to hitch-hike.”
“You see,” said the former Stasi officer, “I am right. There is an exchange of interests here.”
“No there isn’t,” said Ian becoming animated. “He didn’t know we were English, British or whatever when he picked us up and, more importantly, he didn’t have to buy us a meal. We never gave his son any hospitality. This is nonsense.”
“You’re friend is a romantic,” said the German.
“Hardly,” said Ian, but he would have been willing to admit that he was less adept at understanding and manipulating this world than the other two in the car. But romantic he was not. Impractical. Cynical perhaps. He simply had the common sense to recognise where a partial truth can be turned into an absurdity by its isolation from all other factors. He looked out of the car and watched the gentle, pleasant and unremarkable countryside fly by. All he wanted now was to be home. He wanted to be reacquainted with the familiar.
Can the Gods Cry? Page 12