Departure
The noise of the door being slammed was a salute of freedom. She was gone. “Oh Happy Day” came blaring from the small transistor radio he kept upstairs. Pete opened the window and looked out. A quiet Sunday morning in July met his tired eyes. It was already so hot you could fry eggs on your car’s bonnet. He couldn’t see anyone frying eggs. She was defiantly gone. What a day. When she had told him ten days ago that she planned to spend six wonderful long weeks in Tenerife with her friend Dagmar he couldn’t believe it.
“Are you sure Mother?” he insisted.
“I’ll be dancing all the way down to the airport. Six weeks without you brats will be the happiest in my life.”
Pete wasn’t too sure about that. She never said anything and Pete would think she finally had accepted his ways when she used to explode without warning. She accused him of being selfish, an inconsiderate jerk, a nuisance, an intolerable burden, a scumbag who never would make it in life and all the rest of crimes the world hadn’t yet seen were all of a sudden put on his shoulder. In seconds he was indicted, judged and sentenced and done away with. Be thankful for your caring mother. What a relief that the real courts didn’t work like that.
But now she was gone. Pete went back in bed and curled himself happily into the blankets. How come that he didn’t mind that terrible gospel shattering out of the radio.
When Pete woke up again it was noon and the sun was blistering away. The heat started penetrating every corner of the house, filled the cupboards and even hid in the drum of the washing machine. It was a merciless summer with permanent blue skies an no winds to mend the burning concrete. Cars collided on melted tarmac and pensioners dropped dead like falling leaves in autumn. Hamburg turned into a pizza oven with its inhabitants ready to be served with fresh imported olives from Spain. The Bildzeitung spoke of a Hitzekatastrope and for once Pete agreed. Not long ago he had demonstrated at the headquarters of Springer (the right-wing owner of the right-wing Bildzeitung, the devils news as Pete used to called it). They had marched against the war in Vietnam and of course against Springer, the personified evil who poisoned the mind of the working classes using Bild. But a leather gloved police fist nearly had broken his nose and as a consequence Pete’s desire to save the world had been a bit postponed. However, he could imagine better things than sitting in overcrowded meetings and distributing leaflets with hot feet. It was summer, school holidays and he had his mothers house all for himself. The twins had been evacuated to aunt Hildegard and for the first time in his life Pete was on his own.
“There you have your independence” his mother had said reluctantly giving him the keys.
“What’s about money”, Pete had replied already knowing the answer.
“Don’t get funny. You want to be your own master? Go and get a job!”
There he was at last on the hottest Sunday of the century. He’d been allowed a survival pack stored away in the fridge. A glass of pre-cooked potatoes, six eggs and a bottle of milk. That wasn’t quite the answer to life as Pete would imagine it. As he wandered around the house he spotted a Bildzeitung on mothers desk and froze. What a deliberate act of malice! He instantly new it was the Friday issue with all the jobs. Great. She couldn’t have been more insulting. As he scanned through the ads he spotted the name Nestle, a coffee factory not far away from Farmsen were he lived. They needed labour. People just could turn up in the morning. They would take anybody. He would probably have to fill up sacks of contaminated milk powder for third world countries. The imperialistic system not only had created full employment, it even sucked up labour from Turkey, Italy, Spain and Portugal. They were so desperate they even would fly in aliens from mars. “Macht kaputt was euch kaputt macht!” came to his mind (destroy the system before it destroys you) . A protest song that had been in the charts for a while, not at a very prominent position, but noticeable. Bavarien Nazis, especially the CSU party, already had called for legislation to blacklist communist propaganda. They obviously didn’t know what they were talking about and got a bit speechless when asked to define communist propaganda. Then they changed communist propaganda for political art. Pete wasn’t impressed. They wanted to define a free society by their murky ideas of Lederhosen, a streamlined public as a goal. They wouldn’t get it, would they? Maybe they would in the end. Most of his friends took their youth for progress and their wasteful uncommitment for freedom not thinking of the fact that eventually they themselves would get old . It seemed doubtful that they could carry all the nice things along over the threshold of twenty-five. Then they would accept Lederhosen to start with.
Well, he’d found a job. Enough worked for the day. A Sunday afternoon in Farmsen was no fun. Neighbours insisted on something they called Mittagsruhe (midday rest) and complained if someone took laundry out on the lawn to dry it. It was an offence to wash cars, play games or kick the lawnmower. To spend Sunday afternoon on a graveyard was definitely more enjoyable than in Farmsen. People would be hustling around to maintain graves and if you were lucky you could witness the odd burial and dream about converting the undertakers car into a camper.
Nestle
“You are five minutes late”, said the foreman at Nestles coffee factory. He didn’t wait for Pete to respond. “If this happens tomorrow you’ll be sacked. Here is a net for your hair, lets hope its clean. Go to conveyor seven and ask for Hubert. What you’re staring at, what you’re waiting for? Get going! Even if he had expected an answer from Pete he wouldn’t have got one. At seven in the morning Pete wouldn’t answer the alarm for an atomic raid. Hubert said “Moin” which meant to be a friendly “Good morning Sir” and pointed to a raw of jars filled with instant coffee sealed at the top with golden painted pieces of aluminium. The coffee jars were moving along on a conveyor and Hubert demonstrated how to screw caps on to them.
“Why can’t the machine screw on the caps then?” asked Pete.
“Because it can’t,” said Hubert, “start working, we haven’t got time for intellectual debates. You have to complete 50 a minute at least. Otherwise you’ll be sacked.”
Obviously Nestle had embraced the KISS principle (keep it simple and stupid) but as Pete found out very soon it wasn’t quite so. First of all the caps had to be tightened to a certain degree to prevent them becoming loose on their way to the super markets (the end consumer as Hubert liked to emphasise, showing off his intellectual capacity). If they were tightened too much, the plastic split and the sharp edges could inflict injuries. Secondly to fit a cap in just a bit more than a second needed some serious training. If you didn’t get hold of a cap the right way or had to grab a second time the target jar already had travelled past you. Pete’s first attempts to lean over in order to complete the job led to the fact that he had to lean over for every jar. In a few minutes that proved too much for his diaphragm and he had to let go tens of jars undone in order to recover. Hubert came rushing.
“You won’t get old here I bet.” He demonstrated the job again and Pete nodded.
“The caps don’t get fitted by nodding,” Hubert said, “if you can’t keep up with the others very soon the whole group will fall behind and will get paid less because of you.”
Very well. Pete tried again. He hardly managed to keep up with the jars dinging past him, but finally he did. After thirty minutes the next disaster approached as he discovered blisters on his hands. These golden caps looked so innocent. A few of them weren’t a threat at all but 1500 could wreck your hand and forearm and make your eyes illusion flying saucers. Instead of the latter Hubert came flying from the depths of the factory.
“Your caps are not tight enough!” His voice now compared nicely with the factories siren and the looks of five Turkish ladies on the other side of the conveyor were suggesting something short of capital punishment.
The Club
Nestle was a 15 minutes walk away from his home in Berthold Schwarz Strasse. Pete only had been part of the working world for eight hours but it seemed a million years to him. Besides his arms ached, the blisters on his hands had ballooned and his feet told him they didn’t want to see any more of polished concrete floors or else they would detach themselves for a holiday in the Bermudas. Pete couldn’t imagine Hubert working there for the last twenty years; same company, same building, same room, same machine, same coffee jars. Well, the design of the coffee jars had changed with time, getting bigger optically holding less content, and the conveyor had been modernised; but the windowless concrete walls had remained and created pale, empty minded, featureless creatures like Hubert who thrived on the Bildzeitung. His eyes only brightened up when glazing at naked girls pinned up at the lunch room. Pete didn’t know for whom he should feel more sorry, for Hubert or for himself. Regarding to the blisters on his hands the choice was easy. Now he needed a treat. The fresh bank notes handed to him after his ordeal lifted his spirits and he could motivate his sore feet to rush through a super marked before carrying him back home in a fashion.
Pete took a long bath. The radio station NDR one had just introduced a special afternoon feature called Musik fuer junge Leute (Music for young people). Needless to say they started with “Oh happy day”. Pete thought they shouldn’t have let it out of church in the first place. Well, for taking a relaxing bath after an imperialistic ordeal it was good enough. The DJ used to recite Ginsberg Poems between titles and promptly was accused of furthering drug abuse. The right wing CDU and not least the Bildzeitung shouted “Communist Propaganda” and the DJ, likewise Pete, was told that he wouldn’t get old in his job. Maybe Pete could enhance his own position at Nestle by reciting Ginsberg over coffee jars. Whatever, now it was spaghetti time. As the only meal his mother really could perform was spaghetti with tomato sauce (in which at some rare occasions you could find minced beef) – Pete was stuck with it. He knew of course how to slice bread but cooking spaghetti meant already overstraining his knowledge of Nouvelle Cuisine. They were too long to fit in the pot to start with. Naturally, in the end he coped leaving the kitchen in a state like Hamburg after a British bomb raid. This was a historic moment indeed. First self owned money and first self prepared meal and nobody telling him the sweat of somebody else had materialised it. Pete attacked his creation telling himself off for bad table manners. He cut the spaghetti with a fish knife and poured the milk in one of mothers cherished crystal wine glasses. Anarchy flooded his mind as the tomato sauce stained the white table cloth, an heirloom from emperors times. “People still used to have good manners then”, granny would say raising her thin finger into Pete’s face. “The bloody fields of the Ardennes, the slaughter of Verdun and Amiens once have been the result of good manners”, Pete used to retort risking another finger from granny. Emperors spilling tomato sauce could have avoided the first world war. The Italians would now be the worlds leading nation – making peace by pasta – if only somebody would listen. Brezenev could poke his Margarita in contempt upsetting the worlds press and the white house would send him anchovies to get olives in return. Soldiers would be running over the battle fields holding pizza bottoms and receiving the toppings falling out of the sky from the enemies bazookas.
Pete’s body was wrecked and his mind dulled by the factory and he would have called it a day, put his feet up and switched on TV – yet the evening had barely started and he felt something was missing. The waitress at Club 68 would be distributing the ashtrays now and bracing herself for elderly chaps inviting her into their filthy beds, and tables running away leaving her short of her evening’s profits. People would ask her “Where is Pete today ?” and she would consult her watch saying “He’s late, that’s for sure.” Pete had the impression something might be happening there right now, something disastrous or wonderful or unique, something people would still mention thirty years later. He would never forgive himself for not having been in the Club when something happened. Although almost no thing ever happened at the Club, Pete felt he would let down the public not making an appearance. Somehow he had a duty to sit those hours in a loud and smoky environment, sipping his coke. Now he could even afford a splash of gin. That would be a just irresistible way of waiting for something to happen.
It was still bright outside and apparently the heat didn’t care about late hours or public clocks showing nine thirty. The young trees planted along Rahlstedter Weg six months ago to give Farmsen a green face, followed the pensioners example, and abandoned their yellow brown leaves onto the heads of dogs whose contributions didn’t give them any relief at all. Caring souls rushed out with buckets of water resulting in the only effect of a Bildzeitung reporter rushing behind them for a sentimental story. A popular singer had died in a car crash and her last song “Mein Freund der Baum ist tot” climbed the charts like a rocket. Mineral water companies and breweries ran short of supplies and public swimming pools out of space. Hamburg turned into a disaster area and yet this was a great summer. Pete embraced the heat (when not working), and loved the sun burning on his skin. People who never spilled a word at all, of a sudden turned to complete strangers and said: “Was eine Hitze” and then stopped short, not knowing what else to say; and older people reported a community spirit “Just like in the war”. Great! Pete thought, your community spirit only pops out in war and warm weather. Whats about the rest of your life? He lit a cigarette as he waited for the bus.