The Snowman (21 page)

“What happens if you go further on along here?” Blum asked.

“First you reach the lake, the Aue, we're going to turn off there, the campsite won't interest you so much, and then you'd have to go on through Westerheide to Bislich.”

“I mean after that. Holland must begin somewhere.”

“Are you planning to walk there?”

Blum did not reply.

“Well, yes, then you get to Holland,” said the sales rep, with a long sideways look, “but that's quite a way. First you get to Rees, and then Emmerich, of course, and then you have to go over the border. But that's no problem today, the Dutch will let anyone across, so long as he isn't actually stark naked or has no skeletons in his cupboard.”

“But you go across often?”

The sales rep shrugged his shoulders and flicked the end of his Reval away. “What would I be doing in Holland?”

“I thought you could buy things cheap there.”

“What I need can be bought at home,” said the sales rep, thus closing the subject, but Blum suspected that he didn't cross the border for much more pressing reasons.

They left the Rhine, passed a glider club and came into the open country. There was no footpath beside the road, so they went along it in single file, and when car headlights caught them flies danced in front of their faces. Blum began to wonder if he wasn't in the process of losing his reason. Apparently with coke you didn't lose your mind until you lost control over the dosage, but perhaps as a dealer you lost your mind if you lost control over the trade. And you'd surely lost that if you were stumbling along behind a washing powder rep over the plains of the Lower Rhine on foot on a March night, with a mere few marks in your pocket and several syndicates after you. But the air was refreshing, it was a nice evening, there were even stars in the sky. Blum felt curiously cheerful, relaxed, even full of confidence. What were those five pounds of coke in the
case, to the handle of which he was clinging as tight as if his life depended on it? They were nothing if he couldn't enjoy every moment as much as this one, totally crazy, almost free.

“Enjoy it, friend?”

With his mouth full, Blum nodded. He emptied his plate, and the sales rep cleared away, washed the dishes, and cleaned out the frying pan with scouring powder. A pleasant smell of fat, fried potatoes, bacon and briquettes hung around the sales rep's wooden shed. This, Blum thought to himself, was how the Spartans of today lived – a wooden hut, a camp bed, a roaring stove, a plastic cupboard, egg boxes, plywood furniture, a cheap People's Radio, three rows of paperback classics, the collected works of Karl May. Television sets, refrigerators, best-sellers and women did not feature in the Spartan's life. Instead, he told Blum the tale of the early-nineteenth-century German Wars of Liberation – Major Schilf had been executed in Wesel – and did not refrain from drawing bitter comparisons with his own generation's readiness to sacrifice themselves. They had been led astray, lied to, deceived, fooled, seduced, they had given their all – like Schilf, like Körner – and those who had the misfortune to survive must bear the shame of fighting in the wrong cause to the end of their days. When had it ever before been wrong and shameful to fight for your own country?

“Don't get all worked up again, Erwin,” said the man's colleague, who had turned up after supper, driving a ramshackle delivery truck. His name was Fred, he had small, darting eyes, sparse grey hair and a mouth
over-full of teeth. Blum particularly relished the cold beer he had brought with him, and then he discovered they were in related jobs.

“You're right, Fred,” said the sales rep. “I know, I know. I ought to keep quiet, quiet till the end, quiet as the Russian graves with the birch trees over them. This isn't my world any more, so why do I bother with it? Since Germany ceased to exist I don't have a world any more.”

“Erwin was once at the top of the tree,” said Fred, close to Blum's ear. “The very top of the tree.” And he winked, as much as to say: you know what that means, because now we're at the very bottom.

“But Germany is still beautiful,” said Blum. “I've just been on a little business trip – it seems a pretty flourishing place to me. And we have no less than two Germanies.”

“That doesn't count,” said the sales rep briefly. “Neither of them counts. The golden calf and Bolshevism, that can't be Germany.”

“Perhaps a mixture of them?”

“A mixture! Mixtures, that's the washing-powder culture, my friend. No, there's no point in it, but of course one should never give up. What did you say you were transporting?”

The brown man's glance was still friendly, but he now looked quite hard in the light of the naked bulb that hung from the ceiling. His contours were sharply outlined. He chain-smoked Reval cigarettes and stubbed them out in a metal container of a shape that reminded Blum more and more of a steel helmet.

“That's what I wanted to discuss with you,” said Blum. “I'm looking for a way into Holland where there won't be any checkpoint. Not on account of the police, I can always manage them. But the Federal Criminal
Agency, you understand, those lads are clever, they don't do things by halves. There could be problems if they take a close look at me at the border. And that wouldn't be a good idea at all, see what I mean?”

He laughed, helped himself to another can of Dortmund Actienbräu, and pulled the tab off the top. The head was like the foam in the jumbo cans. He toasted the two colleagues. The sales rep nodded gloomily; Fred's quick eyes swivelled towards the sample case.

“Federal Criminal Agency?” asked Fred. “Isn't that . . .”

“State security,” said the sales rep, relishing the term.

Fred looked at Blum, frowning. Had he gone rather too far? Blum raised his hands.

“I want to be on the safe side,” he said. “I really can't afford to make mistakes.”

His eyes moved over the sample case. The sales rep coughed his way through a couple of Revals without taking his eyes off Blum. His friend Fred drank his beer, looking nervous.

“Slow and easy,” he said. “I don't want anything to do with state security. You have to admit, Erwin, we're out of our league there.”

The sales rep narrowed his eyes and stared through the smoke, perhaps seeing graves with birch trees whispering above them, or perhaps just the damp tarpaulin next Thursday in Neheim-Hüsten, and the housewives staggering out of the supermarket with their ten-pound drums of Ariel.

“The man has to get across the border,” he announced, “and so he shall. No one must be lost. That's what we're here for after all, the last of us.”

They looked at one another, Blum and the man in brown. They did not entirely understand each other,
but at least they knew who they were. And Blum saw himself in twenty years' time, worn out, in a place like this, without any Wars of Liberation, with a fridge and TV in the evening, before shoelaces were abolished world-wide.

“Don't you have any schnapps, Erwin?” asked Fred. “I feel kind of cold.”

As he spoke he looked sideways at Blum, as if he were responsible for the chill in the air. But the sales rep had no schnapps. He put another briquette in the stove, for the benefit of Blum, not Fred. Small-time crooks, his manner suggested, wouldn't quote state security at you.

“It'll soon be the same old story, load your ammunition, they won't get me alive. And all for a sack of potatoes, eh? That's what I call inflation.”

“I can pay,” said Blum.

The sales rep made a dismissive gesture, but Fred was thinking along more practical lines.

“Good ways across are few and far between,” he pointed out. “We can ask a kind of fee, right? You have to look at the practical side, Erwin.”

They reminded Blum of an old married couple – the idealistic champion of mankind's better instincts whose wife has been nagging him for the last forty-five years about the neighbours, neighbours long ago fixed up with official positions and sinecures, and now their block was occupied by good-for-nothing heathens. Finally he settled the matter with a 100-mark note, and Fred remembered that he still had a bottle of spirits in his glove compartment. While he went to fetch it the sales rep cleared the beer cans away, and as he slipped his coat on he said, “I hope you get through safe and sound, friend. Yes, the battle's still worth fighting at your age, never mind what for.”

“You're not on the scrapheap yet, not by a long way,” said Blum.

“I'm sixty-two, and after thirty-five years of this I'm just about ready for the scrapheap. Here, take the torch, I expect you can use it, but go easy with it. The batteries are running out.”

“I don't know how to thank you,” murmured Blum, putting the torch in his jacket pocket.

“Do me a favour and don't let Fred crack up,” said the sales rep, looking at Blum with his blue eyes. “He's the only person I have left.”

“I won't,” said Blum. Then Fred came back with the spirits, and they all had a drink, and Fred had another, and then they left the sales rep's hut.

The sky had clouded over, and a cold wind had risen. The delivery van bore faded lettering: F. KOWALSKI – BEST EGGS, FRESH CHICKENS – BISLICH, LOWER RHINE. They squeezed themselves into the driver's seat, Fred behind the wheel, the sales rep next to him, Blum by the door with his case between his knees. During the drive a loose piece of metal somewhere kept clanging, Fred had difficulty changing gear, and the heating wasn't working. So they juddered on, sticking close to the Rhine, under the sulphurous sky that never allowed complete darkness to fall, making for Holland. No one said anything. Blum was sorry he hadn't taken a pinch of coke. He felt unutterably weary and dispirited. At this crucial moment, he thought, of all times. He could deal with these two colleagues, but if the Italian was waiting for him again in the first Dutch town he reached he'd probably have to give up. He took a deep breath and lit a cigarette. No, he was not about to give up. Federal Germany had almost done for him, its damaged, hopelessly corrupt citizens like Cora. That was all behind him now. See it through, he thought.
See it through. Even if he landed up in Neheim-Hüsten in the end, he might still see Freeport first, maybe even the Punjab Club in Lahore, with Mr Haq . . .

“Wake up, friend,” said the sales rep beside him. “We're there.”

“At the border?”

“We have to go a little way on foot now.”

Blum clambered out of the truck. Fred was standing behind a hedge relieving himself. The truck was parked at the far end of a little wood with a gravel path running past it. The sky was already pale on the horizon, and birds were beginning to stir. The sales rep stood close to Blum.

“Watch out for Fred,” he whispered. “He's got his eye on your case.”

Blum nodded. He looked at the time. Nearly four. The bastard's been driving us around for three hours, he thought. Fred waved. They walked along beside the wood, first Fred, then Blum, then the sales rep. After quarter of an hour they came to a stream. Fred and the sales rep, who were wearing gumboots, simply waded through the water. Blum took a run and jumped. He made it across the stream without losing his case. They went on, zigzagging through a little wood, across fields and meadows, and finally reached a footpath leading straight into the mist.

“Go along there and you'll come to another stream,” said Fred. “Then you're in Holland. Follow the stream and it leads to a canal on the left, then you come to the road and you can catch a bus.”

It was beginning to get light. Blum looked hard at Fred, the case in his left hand, his right on the handle of the knife in his jacket pocket.

“And suppose someone spots me? There must be border guards patrolling around here.”

He saw Fred smile. The sales rep was now standing on his colleague's left.

“Nonsense,” said Fred. “And if they are – I thought they couldn't touch you?” His gaze wandered to the case, his left hand to his coat pocket. “I'd love to know what you've got in there, friend.”

“You're welcome,” said Blum, ramming the case into Fred's stomach, while the sales rep seized his left arm and held it tight. Fred groaned and swore, but not very loud.

“Good thing you noticed he's left-handed,” whispered the sales rep.

“I didn't,” whispered Blum back. He did not shake hands with the sales rep but waved to him after he had gone twenty yards. The sales rep was still hanging on to Fred's arm.

“Do you want to know what's in it?” called Blum softly.

“What?”

“Dynamite,” called Blum. Then he walked quickly away down the path without looking round again.

Blum lay on the bed, staring through the window at the roof of the building next door. Two seagulls were perched on the chimney. It looked as if they were staring back. He heard the hurdy-gurdy from over at the Damrak Hotel playing the same tune all day. The sky was a dirty grey.

He picked up the phone, waited for reception to answer, and said he'd like to try the Frankfurt number again. He read it out once more from the card that Hackensack had given him, although he knew it by heart. The card was dirty too now. And once again he heard the ringing tone and imagined the phone in an empty room – cleared, abandoned everyone gone, only the yellow crocus still shining on the wall. Suddenly there was a crackle on the line. At first Blum thought the connection had been broken, but then a voice actually spoke, a male voice.