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Fiction

Rickshaw Diaries

By Stephanie Bart
Translated from German by Katy Derbyshire
German author Stephanie Bart pulls a rickshaw and no punches.

August 27, 2014
Lucky Punch

My second novel Deutscher Meister is about how the professional boxer Heinrich Trollmann beat the Nazis; it was published by Hoffmann und Campe in 2014. As I was writing the last chapter, researching liver punches, those ending in K.O. and those not, and how differently and yet specifically to the liver punch the recipients fall, and what kind of pain they feel, and how liver punches take effect on the inside, in anatomical terms, I worked out where a person’s K.O. button is and how it gets pressed, and I suddenly remembered an experience I hadn’t previously understood, at the 2004 Oktoberfest, and it was instantly clear to me that I must have hit my opponent in the liver at the time.

To pre-empt any accusations—it was his own fault. To begin with, anyone wearing such a provocative pair of lederhosen, blatantly highlighting and emphasizing the genital area by means of all kinds of decorative embroidery, flaps, and buttons, is asking for trouble and shouldn’t be surprised to get it. Secondly, had he stayed home and not gone to the Oktoberfest I wouldn’t have been able to knock him out, and thirdly, if he hadn’t touched me without asking I wouldn’t even have thought of teaching him a lesson, because God knows I had better things to do, namely earning my living with the hard work of driving a rickshaw.

Hard work until late at night. The tents closed, the people came flooding out. The entire Esperantoplatz at Munich’s main rail station was full of people, some of them standing around and continuing their drinking while the others swayed and wobbled around without the slightest coordination, and there I was in the midst of it all. I’ve got passengers in my rickshaw; in my case the passengers sit at the front and I push them, cycling stop-and-go around broken glass and between the crowds, people making unexpected movements because of the alcohol, and there’s plenty of shouting and noise. My passengers are beyond caring, the man’s eyes glazed over, practically in a coma and showing almost no reactions, the woman mistreating him, demanding sex on the spot, hardly capable of waiting, and suddenly there’s a pair of strange hands on my back. They’re placed over my kidneys, making full contact, then they feel their way down, then they run up and down my sides, and I stop and take my right hand off the handlebar.

The handlebar is attached to the passenger seat, so I have to apply pressure on the left when I brake and let go on the right. I apply pressure with my left hand, raise my right elbow, take a deep breath, open my mouth wide and turn around with a yell of “Go to hell, jerk-off!” and with a good deal of momentum. I turn with as much momentum as I can summon in this physically unstable situation and with my ridiculously low body weight, I turn above all with evil intent, I feel like really hurting the offender, the worse the better, I turn around to him with my elbow raised and momentum and evil intent, and it works out very well that I’m rather short, which means the tip of my elbow happens to hit the right side of his torso, directly below his ribs, right on his liver in other words, and happens to hit him at exactly the right angle. Great. All I see is the lederhosen guy taking a vertical fall.

It must have been the liver, there’s no other explanation, because had I hit him anywhere else but the liver I would never have had the strength to knock him to the ground so that he landed on his ass, his legs tangled beneath him, and then tipped over entirely and stayed down, holding his belly and writhing with pain. The sexually provocative lederhosen clamored for a kick but that wasn’t possible in all the hubbub and with the passengers in my rickshaw.

Now that I know how my blow to his liver cut off the lederhosen-wearer’s connection to his legs, of which he subsequently lost all control, and how the blood supply to his inner organs simultaneously dropped to almost zero and thereby caused a dramatic sense of dizziness while the brain retained complete clarity, and what fearsome pain he suffered, how every single fiber of the dense, intricate network of nerves encasing his liver switched instantly to the highest possible state of pain, only to remain in that state, paralyzed by the shock effect, and transmitted that pain without interruption around the entire abdominal cavity where a feeling of being ripped to shreds came about through continued explosions that could not be localized—now that I can imagine all this, I think that the evildoer was probably sufficiently punished by the blow to his liver and didn’t require that additional kick in the lederhosen. With regard to my novel, however, I might add that boxers don’t attack from behind and blows with the elbow are banned, and that the boxers have to declare their willingness to fight in writing beforehand, because in the ring, between the ropes, things are considerably more civilized than at the Oktoberfest.

May 5, 2011
I Saw Günter Grass

Last year I saw Günter Grass while I was waiting for customers with my rickshaw at Pariser Platz. Dressed in corduroy and smoking a pipe, Grass came out of the Academy of Arts and walked toward Unter den Linden, immersed in conversation with another gentleman. Grass walked very slowly, the mental effort forcing him to stop now and then. While his interlocutor lapped up his every word, Grass’s shoulders sagged. I considered approaching Grass. “Herr Grass, may I ask, would you grant me the honor of driving you some of your way in my rickshaw?” Then Grass would have sat in the same kind of rickshaw as was used in the film adaptation of his story “The Call of the Toad,” and I would have trumped all my colleagues in our internal celebrity passenger competition by a mile. However, controversial discussions would have been possible in view of such famous passengers as . . . and just as I was thinking this, Grass, now exactly parallel to me, stopped walking once again. He took the pipe out of his mouth, his expression darkened, and then he performed a hand movement with the pipe, sweeping everything away. He gripped the bowl of the pipe between thumb and forefinger, splayed out the other three fingers, and sliced a tight horizontal semicircle in the air with the back of his hand. The gesture was so radical, the pipe commanding such respect, the motion sweeping everything away so fully, including my consideration, that I abandoned it that very moment and resorted instead to following the two gentlemen with my eyes, so as not to miss anything of these possibly significant moments in literary history. Perhaps this conversation between Grass and the other gentleman would make its way into Grass’s diaries, and then I could later boast of having been a witness at least. Thus, I was immersed in the sight of Günter Grass’s corduroy-clad back—he had just passed the red carpet outside the Hotel Adlon and was now vanishing between other passers-by—when, as if from nowhere, a man called out from the back seat of my rickshaw, “That’s Grass over there! Quick, step on it! Overtake him, drive past him!!! I want to see Grass!” I pedaled off, knowing full well the customer wouldn’t get his money’s worth. Grass had not continued along Unter den Linden, you see, but had turned right onto Wilhelmstraße. He had walked between the bollards with which the British Embassy had blocked off the road since the Iraq War, not for pedestrians or cyclists, but certainly for cars and rickshaws. I braked. There we stood behind the bollards, unable to continue and watching Grass edging away at a snail’s pace. My customer couldn’t quite face chasing after Grass on foot. Dumbfounded, he climbed out of the rickshaw, watched the slouching, pipe-smoking corduroy suit walk away, and repeated over and over again, “I just missed Günter Grass, I missed Günter Grass, I missed Günter Grass . . . ”

July 20, 2010
Pledge of Allegiance

It’s eighty-two degrees and there’s a tiny breath of breeze and a few frills of cloud in the sky. I’ve brought two ladies up Unter den Linden and I cycle through the Brandenburg Gate and find the square on the other side, namely Eighteenth of March Square (where Seventeenth of June Street begins), blocked off by red and white barriers, behind which police officers in bullet-proof vests are planted every five yards to secure the cordon. Beneath the trees on the northwestern side are police vehicles, one alongside the next, a corral of wagons around the pledge ceremony. A public pledge of allegiance by recruits, from which the public is excluded. Blocked roads, security zones, access routes. From the corner of Behrenstraße and Ebertstraße, along the northern half of the Tiergarten park all the way to the station, everything’s chockablock. They’ve been putting up the barriers and the tribune in front of the Reichstag for a week. For a week the place has been crawling with military and normal police and soldiers, all acting like there was nothing at all going on in their nervous to-ing and fro-ing.

A helicopter pulls up, the two ladies pull off, and I pull over into the shade. A fellow rickshaw driver is resting there, too, and he can’t understand with the best will in the world why the recruits’ pledge of allegiance isn’t part of a torch-lit nighttime parade and why premilitary training hasn’t been reintroduced to schools like it was in East Germany.

“Say,” I ask him, because he ought to know; he was in the National People’s Army, “do you think an army that has to be protected from the people by the police in its own country, do you think you can win a war with an army like that?”

“Forget the army—I know something better.”

I try to forget the army, thinking of how earlier, just before I drove off with the two ladies, our senior political ranter declared in a tone of the most sober objectivity that he couldn’t imagine this world without armies and weapons, he was certain it wouldn’t work, and how another colleague, from whom we expected precisely this behavior, imitated the senior political ranter: “That shows very well how successful capitalist propaganda is—it works so efficiently that you can’t even imagine anything as obvious, simple, and wonderful as that.”

I resist the capitalist propaganda and imagine this world without armies and weapons, in actual fact an obvious, simple, and wonderful thought, while my colleague straightens up next to me. When he’s waiting for customers he always sprawls along the length of his rickshaw, his feet on the saddle, ass on the backrest, but now he sits upright and beams from ear to ear. “I had a celebrity passenger yesterday!”

He tells me there was a tourist around sixty standing among all the others outside the Reichstag yesterday, waiting for someone, and he must have been bored so he, the tourist, came up and talked to him, my colleague. The tourist pointed at the half-finished tribune for the pledge of allegiance and asked what was going on.

“It’s not easy to forget the army,” I interject, and he says:

“That’s why they’re making all this fuss.”

Anyway, he tells me, he answered the tourist: “That’s where the recruits have to swear they’re prepared to give their lives for the fatherland and oil profits.” And so they’d got into conversation, in English, makeshift English—the tourist was Dutch—and he, my colleague, didn’t hold back his opinions on the military and the inscription above the entrance to the Reichstag building—Dem deutschen Volke: To the German people. The Dutch tourist sympathized with him and his views, he tells me, and remarked in an aside that his great-uncle once set fire to the building and that his name was misspelt on the sign. Then the woman he was waiting for arrived and they took a short ride in the rickshaw.

“Woooooow, that’s amazing!”

“Yeah, it was the great-nephew of Marinus van der Lubbe!”

“I can’t match up to that with my old onion-peeler Günter.”

We talk about the Reichstag fire and regret that it didn’t work out back then, and especially that they caught Marinus van der Lubbe and murdered him and arrested four others along with him. To say nothing of the consequences. Aside from that, we note that a lot of our colleagues haven’t bothered working today because of the pledge of allegiance. And seeing as we can’t envisage ever doing anything like what Marinus van der Lubbe pulled off back then, we pack it in for the day and go home.

March 6, 2011
You Can’t Imagine

You can’t imagine what hard work it is! Even just the weight, and that’s not all by any means—the rickshaw (depending on the model, 130 to 300 pounds), tools, floor pump, food supplies (average daily ration: four pounds of pasta with sauce, two pounds of nuts, one pound of chocolate, ten pints of water or other drinks), blankets, customers (statistical average: two adults = 350 pounds), shopping bags and boxes, children between 0 and 18 years (on their laps), small, medium, and large stuffed suitcases, dogs, strollers, wheelchairs, laptops, briefcases, tripods, film cameras. It soon adds up to six to nine hundred pounds, if not a thousand. Add to that the terrible state of Berlin’s roads. Our number one tourist street, the boulevard Unter den Linden, has potholes so big you can take a bath in them when it rains. You have to realize that every bump in the road surface, in physics terms, is resistance against the direction of movement, an attack on making progress, a setback that has to be compensated with double the physical effort. The state of the rickshaw also influences how long you can stick it out, when the point comes at which you simply can’t do it any more.

Then you have to stop or take a break. A rickshaw in a poor state of repair has a lot of friction, and friction saps your energy. For example, a wonky wheel costs several times the energy you need if the wheel’s straight. Of course, we take care of our rickshaws and keep the friction as low as possible. We can’t eliminate it entirely though; friction is always there, all of life is one big friction, and the friction in the air is wind. Just think of parachutes and sails: these are the forces that we have to not only stand up to but also progress against, and wind is usually blowing in the other direction. Sometimes gusts of wind force us to stop in the middle of the road. Then we wipe the wind-cold sweat from our brows and have to start off again, have to overcome the inertia of mass anew to get into motion from a standstill and to pedal on against the air drag.

Yet we suffer enough on the wonderfully windless days too. What a mistake to think Berlin is a flat city. Remember that weight, poor street surfaces, and that notorious friction amplify one another in the most ruthless manner. As a result, even weak gradients barely noticeable on a normal bicycle make themselves felt all too painfully as a backward and downward drag. Gravity reigns triumphant. The start of Stülerstrasse, the middle of Rhododendronallee, the end of Bremer Weg—awful, awful, awful.

All this added up (and under these circumstances, perhaps also problematic customers), all this you have to try and imagine if you want to know how hard the work really is. Over the winter we have to strap ourselves into training devices for at least three hours a day so that we don’t collapse when the season comes around. But then again, we can’t imagine either how anyone can stand to sit in an office all day long.

 

“Schriftstellerin und Rikschafahrerin” first published on the website begleitschreiben.net. © Stephanie Bart. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2015 by Katy Derbyshire. All rights reserved.

English German (Original)

August 27, 2014
Lucky Punch

My second novel Deutscher Meister is about how the professional boxer Heinrich Trollmann beat the Nazis; it was published by Hoffmann und Campe in 2014. As I was writing the last chapter, researching liver punches, those ending in K.O. and those not, and how differently and yet specifically to the liver punch the recipients fall, and what kind of pain they feel, and how liver punches take effect on the inside, in anatomical terms, I worked out where a person’s K.O. button is and how it gets pressed, and I suddenly remembered an experience I hadn’t previously understood, at the 2004 Oktoberfest, and it was instantly clear to me that I must have hit my opponent in the liver at the time.

To pre-empt any accusations—it was his own fault. To begin with, anyone wearing such a provocative pair of lederhosen, blatantly highlighting and emphasizing the genital area by means of all kinds of decorative embroidery, flaps, and buttons, is asking for trouble and shouldn’t be surprised to get it. Secondly, had he stayed home and not gone to the Oktoberfest I wouldn’t have been able to knock him out, and thirdly, if he hadn’t touched me without asking I wouldn’t even have thought of teaching him a lesson, because God knows I had better things to do, namely earning my living with the hard work of driving a rickshaw.

Hard work until late at night. The tents closed, the people came flooding out. The entire Esperantoplatz at Munich’s main rail station was full of people, some of them standing around and continuing their drinking while the others swayed and wobbled around without the slightest coordination, and there I was in the midst of it all. I’ve got passengers in my rickshaw; in my case the passengers sit at the front and I push them, cycling stop-and-go around broken glass and between the crowds, people making unexpected movements because of the alcohol, and there’s plenty of shouting and noise. My passengers are beyond caring, the man’s eyes glazed over, practically in a coma and showing almost no reactions, the woman mistreating him, demanding sex on the spot, hardly capable of waiting, and suddenly there’s a pair of strange hands on my back. They’re placed over my kidneys, making full contact, then they feel their way down, then they run up and down my sides, and I stop and take my right hand off the handlebar.

The handlebar is attached to the passenger seat, so I have to apply pressure on the left when I brake and let go on the right. I apply pressure with my left hand, raise my right elbow, take a deep breath, open my mouth wide and turn around with a yell of “Go to hell, jerk-off!” and with a good deal of momentum. I turn with as much momentum as I can summon in this physically unstable situation and with my ridiculously low body weight, I turn above all with evil intent, I feel like really hurting the offender, the worse the better, I turn around to him with my elbow raised and momentum and evil intent, and it works out very well that I’m rather short, which means the tip of my elbow happens to hit the right side of his torso, directly below his ribs, right on his liver in other words, and happens to hit him at exactly the right angle. Great. All I see is the lederhosen guy taking a vertical fall.

It must have been the liver, there’s no other explanation, because had I hit him anywhere else but the liver I would never have had the strength to knock him to the ground so that he landed on his ass, his legs tangled beneath him, and then tipped over entirely and stayed down, holding his belly and writhing with pain. The sexually provocative lederhosen clamored for a kick but that wasn’t possible in all the hubbub and with the passengers in my rickshaw.

Now that I know how my blow to his liver cut off the lederhosen-wearer’s connection to his legs, of which he subsequently lost all control, and how the blood supply to his inner organs simultaneously dropped to almost zero and thereby caused a dramatic sense of dizziness while the brain retained complete clarity, and what fearsome pain he suffered, how every single fiber of the dense, intricate network of nerves encasing his liver switched instantly to the highest possible state of pain, only to remain in that state, paralyzed by the shock effect, and transmitted that pain without interruption around the entire abdominal cavity where a feeling of being ripped to shreds came about through continued explosions that could not be localized—now that I can imagine all this, I think that the evildoer was probably sufficiently punished by the blow to his liver and didn’t require that additional kick in the lederhosen. With regard to my novel, however, I might add that boxers don’t attack from behind and blows with the elbow are banned, and that the boxers have to declare their willingness to fight in writing beforehand, because in the ring, between the ropes, things are considerably more civilized than at the Oktoberfest.

May 5, 2011
I Saw Günter Grass

Last year I saw Günter Grass while I was waiting for customers with my rickshaw at Pariser Platz. Dressed in corduroy and smoking a pipe, Grass came out of the Academy of Arts and walked toward Unter den Linden, immersed in conversation with another gentleman. Grass walked very slowly, the mental effort forcing him to stop now and then. While his interlocutor lapped up his every word, Grass’s shoulders sagged. I considered approaching Grass. “Herr Grass, may I ask, would you grant me the honor of driving you some of your way in my rickshaw?” Then Grass would have sat in the same kind of rickshaw as was used in the film adaptation of his story “The Call of the Toad,” and I would have trumped all my colleagues in our internal celebrity passenger competition by a mile. However, controversial discussions would have been possible in view of such famous passengers as . . . and just as I was thinking this, Grass, now exactly parallel to me, stopped walking once again. He took the pipe out of his mouth, his expression darkened, and then he performed a hand movement with the pipe, sweeping everything away. He gripped the bowl of the pipe between thumb and forefinger, splayed out the other three fingers, and sliced a tight horizontal semicircle in the air with the back of his hand. The gesture was so radical, the pipe commanding such respect, the motion sweeping everything away so fully, including my consideration, that I abandoned it that very moment and resorted instead to following the two gentlemen with my eyes, so as not to miss anything of these possibly significant moments in literary history. Perhaps this conversation between Grass and the other gentleman would make its way into Grass’s diaries, and then I could later boast of having been a witness at least. Thus, I was immersed in the sight of Günter Grass’s corduroy-clad back—he had just passed the red carpet outside the Hotel Adlon and was now vanishing between other passers-by—when, as if from nowhere, a man called out from the back seat of my rickshaw, “That’s Grass over there! Quick, step on it! Overtake him, drive past him!!! I want to see Grass!” I pedaled off, knowing full well the customer wouldn’t get his money’s worth. Grass had not continued along Unter den Linden, you see, but had turned right onto Wilhelmstraße. He had walked between the bollards with which the British Embassy had blocked off the road since the Iraq War, not for pedestrians or cyclists, but certainly for cars and rickshaws. I braked. There we stood behind the bollards, unable to continue and watching Grass edging away at a snail’s pace. My customer couldn’t quite face chasing after Grass on foot. Dumbfounded, he climbed out of the rickshaw, watched the slouching, pipe-smoking corduroy suit walk away, and repeated over and over again, “I just missed Günter Grass, I missed Günter Grass, I missed Günter Grass . . . ”

July 20, 2010
Pledge of Allegiance

It’s eighty-two degrees and there’s a tiny breath of breeze and a few frills of cloud in the sky. I’ve brought two ladies up Unter den Linden and I cycle through the Brandenburg Gate and find the square on the other side, namely Eighteenth of March Square (where Seventeenth of June Street begins), blocked off by red and white barriers, behind which police officers in bullet-proof vests are planted every five yards to secure the cordon. Beneath the trees on the northwestern side are police vehicles, one alongside the next, a corral of wagons around the pledge ceremony. A public pledge of allegiance by recruits, from which the public is excluded. Blocked roads, security zones, access routes. From the corner of Behrenstraße and Ebertstraße, along the northern half of the Tiergarten park all the way to the station, everything’s chockablock. They’ve been putting up the barriers and the tribune in front of the Reichstag for a week. For a week the place has been crawling with military and normal police and soldiers, all acting like there was nothing at all going on in their nervous to-ing and fro-ing.

A helicopter pulls up, the two ladies pull off, and I pull over into the shade. A fellow rickshaw driver is resting there, too, and he can’t understand with the best will in the world why the recruits’ pledge of allegiance isn’t part of a torch-lit nighttime parade and why premilitary training hasn’t been reintroduced to schools like it was in East Germany.

“Say,” I ask him, because he ought to know; he was in the National People’s Army, “do you think an army that has to be protected from the people by the police in its own country, do you think you can win a war with an army like that?”

“Forget the army—I know something better.”

I try to forget the army, thinking of how earlier, just before I drove off with the two ladies, our senior political ranter declared in a tone of the most sober objectivity that he couldn’t imagine this world without armies and weapons, he was certain it wouldn’t work, and how another colleague, from whom we expected precisely this behavior, imitated the senior political ranter: “That shows very well how successful capitalist propaganda is—it works so efficiently that you can’t even imagine anything as obvious, simple, and wonderful as that.”

I resist the capitalist propaganda and imagine this world without armies and weapons, in actual fact an obvious, simple, and wonderful thought, while my colleague straightens up next to me. When he’s waiting for customers he always sprawls along the length of his rickshaw, his feet on the saddle, ass on the backrest, but now he sits upright and beams from ear to ear. “I had a celebrity passenger yesterday!”

He tells me there was a tourist around sixty standing among all the others outside the Reichstag yesterday, waiting for someone, and he must have been bored so he, the tourist, came up and talked to him, my colleague. The tourist pointed at the half-finished tribune for the pledge of allegiance and asked what was going on.

“It’s not easy to forget the army,” I interject, and he says:

“That’s why they’re making all this fuss.”

Anyway, he tells me, he answered the tourist: “That’s where the recruits have to swear they’re prepared to give their lives for the fatherland and oil profits.” And so they’d got into conversation, in English, makeshift English—the tourist was Dutch—and he, my colleague, didn’t hold back his opinions on the military and the inscription above the entrance to the Reichstag building—Dem deutschen Volke: To the German people. The Dutch tourist sympathized with him and his views, he tells me, and remarked in an aside that his great-uncle once set fire to the building and that his name was misspelt on the sign. Then the woman he was waiting for arrived and they took a short ride in the rickshaw.

“Woooooow, that’s amazing!”

“Yeah, it was the great-nephew of Marinus van der Lubbe!”

“I can’t match up to that with my old onion-peeler Günter.”

We talk about the Reichstag fire and regret that it didn’t work out back then, and especially that they caught Marinus van der Lubbe and murdered him and arrested four others along with him. To say nothing of the consequences. Aside from that, we note that a lot of our colleagues haven’t bothered working today because of the pledge of allegiance. And seeing as we can’t envisage ever doing anything like what Marinus van der Lubbe pulled off back then, we pack it in for the day and go home.

March 6, 2011
You Can’t Imagine

You can’t imagine what hard work it is! Even just the weight, and that’s not all by any means—the rickshaw (depending on the model, 130 to 300 pounds), tools, floor pump, food supplies (average daily ration: four pounds of pasta with sauce, two pounds of nuts, one pound of chocolate, ten pints of water or other drinks), blankets, customers (statistical average: two adults = 350 pounds), shopping bags and boxes, children between 0 and 18 years (on their laps), small, medium, and large stuffed suitcases, dogs, strollers, wheelchairs, laptops, briefcases, tripods, film cameras. It soon adds up to six to nine hundred pounds, if not a thousand. Add to that the terrible state of Berlin’s roads. Our number one tourist street, the boulevard Unter den Linden, has potholes so big you can take a bath in them when it rains. You have to realize that every bump in the road surface, in physics terms, is resistance against the direction of movement, an attack on making progress, a setback that has to be compensated with double the physical effort. The state of the rickshaw also influences how long you can stick it out, when the point comes at which you simply can’t do it any more.

Then you have to stop or take a break. A rickshaw in a poor state of repair has a lot of friction, and friction saps your energy. For example, a wonky wheel costs several times the energy you need if the wheel’s straight. Of course, we take care of our rickshaws and keep the friction as low as possible. We can’t eliminate it entirely though; friction is always there, all of life is one big friction, and the friction in the air is wind. Just think of parachutes and sails: these are the forces that we have to not only stand up to but also progress against, and wind is usually blowing in the other direction. Sometimes gusts of wind force us to stop in the middle of the road. Then we wipe the wind-cold sweat from our brows and have to start off again, have to overcome the inertia of mass anew to get into motion from a standstill and to pedal on against the air drag.

Yet we suffer enough on the wonderfully windless days too. What a mistake to think Berlin is a flat city. Remember that weight, poor street surfaces, and that notorious friction amplify one another in the most ruthless manner. As a result, even weak gradients barely noticeable on a normal bicycle make themselves felt all too painfully as a backward and downward drag. Gravity reigns triumphant. The start of Stülerstrasse, the middle of Rhododendronallee, the end of Bremer Weg—awful, awful, awful.

All this added up (and under these circumstances, perhaps also problematic customers), all this you have to try and imagine if you want to know how hard the work really is. Over the winter we have to strap ourselves into training devices for at least three hours a day so that we don’t collapse when the season comes around. But then again, we can’t imagine either how anyone can stand to sit in an office all day long.

 

“Schriftstellerin und Rikschafahrerin” first published on the website begleitschreiben.net. © Stephanie Bart. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2015 by Katy Derbyshire. All rights reserved.

Rickshaw Diaries

Lucky Punch

Am 12. August 2014 erscheint bei Hoffmann und Campe unter dem Titel Deutscher Meister mein neuer Roman darüber, wie der Profiboxer Heinrich Trollmann die Nazis besiegte. Als ich das letzte Kapitel schrieb und mich zu diesem Zweck mit Leberhaken auseinandersetzte, solchen mit K.o.-Wirkung und solchen ohne, und wie verschieden und doch leberhakenspezifisch die Getroffenen fallen, und welche Art von Schmerzen sie erleiden, und wie die Leberhaken innen, also anatomisch wirken, und als ich sah, wo der K.o.-Knopf ist, und wie man ihn gedrückt kriegt, da fiel mir plötzlich jenes bisher unverstandene Erlebnis auf dem Oktoberfest 2004 wieder ein, und mir wurde schlagartig klar, dass ich damals meinen Kontrahenten in die Leber getroffen haben musste.

Um das gleich vorwegzunehmen: Er war selber schuld. Zunächst einmal ist, wer eine solch provokante Lederhose trägt, die durch allerlei Zierstickereien, Klappen und Knöpfe den geschlechtlichen Bereich aufdringlich hervorhebt und betont, ohnehin selber schuld und muss sich über nichts wundern. Wäre er zweitens erst gar nicht aufs Oktoberfest gegangen, sondern zu Hause geblieben, hätte ich ihn nicht k.o. schlagen können, und hätte er mich drittens nicht ungefragt angefasst, so hätte ich gar nicht daran gedacht, ihm eine Lehre zu erteilen, denn ich hatte weiß Gott besseres zu tun, namentlich, durch anstrengende Arbeit mit der Rikscha Geld zu verdienen.

Anstrengende Arbeit bis tief in die Nacht. Die Zelte schlossen, die Leute strömten heraus. Der ganze Esperanto-Platz war voller Menschen, von denen die einen herumstanden und weiter tranken, während die anderen völlig unkoordiniert in alle möglichen Richtungen gingen und torkelten, und ich mittendrin. Ich habe Fahrgäste in der Rikscha, bei mir sitzen die Gäste vorn, ich schiebe sie, ich fahre stop and go um Scherbenhaufen herum und zwischen den Leuten hindurch, die wegen des Alkohols auch unerwartete Bewegungen machen, und es ist ein ordentliches Geschrei. Meine Fahrgäste sind hinüber, der Mann hat glasige Augen, er ist so gut wie im Koma und reagiert fast gar nicht, die Frau malträtiert ihn, sie will auf der Stelle Sex, sie hälts kaum aus, und ich habe plötzlich fremde Hände am Rücken. Ganzflächig kontaktierend liegen sie auf meinen Nieren, dann tasten sie mich ab, dann fahren sie mir an den Seiten herauf und hinunter, und ich halte an und nehme die Rechte vom Lenker.

Der Lenker ist eins mit der Fahrgastsitzbank, ich muss, wenn ich bremse und die Rechte löse, mit der Linken gegenhalten. Ich halte mit Links gegen, fahre den rechten Ellenbogen aus, hole Luft, reiße das Maul auf und wende mich mit dem Aufschrei: »Verpiss Dich, du Wichser!« und mit einiger Wucht. Ich wende mich mit soviel Wucht, wie ich in dieser physikalisch instabilen Situation und mit meinem lächerlich geringen Körpergewicht eben aufbringen kann, ich wende mich vor allem mit böser Absicht, ich habe Lust, dem Übeltäter richtig weh zu tun, je doller, je besser, ich wende ich mich mit ausgefahrenem Ellenbogen und Wucht und böser Absicht zu ihm um, und es trifft sich ausgezeichnet, dass ich eher kurz gewachsen bin, weshalb die Spitze meines Ellenbogens auf seiner rechten Körperseite, zufällig genau direkt unter den Rippen, das heißt auf seiner Leber, und zufällig genau im richtigen Winkel einschlägt. Toll. Ich seh den Lederhosenträger bloß noch senkrecht runtergehn.

Es muss die Leber gewesen sein, es gibt gar keine andere Möglichkeit, denn anders als in die Leber hätte ich ihn mit der geringen Kraft, die mir überhaupt zu Gebote stand, keinesfalls niederschlagen können, so dass er auf dem Arsch landete, darunter die verknoteten Beine, und dann vollends umkippte und, den Bauch haltend und sich in Schmerzen windend, liegen blieb. Die geschlechtlich provokante Lederhose schrie danach, getreten zu werden, doch das war in dem ganzen Tohuwabohu und mit den Gästen in der Rikscha nicht möglich.

Heute, da ich weiß, wie der Schlag in die Leber dem Lederhosenträger die Verbindung in die Beine abschnitt, über die er infolgedessen die Kontrolle verlor, und wie gleichzeitig die Blutversorgung der inneren Organe gegen Null abfiel und hierdurch, bei völliger geistiger Klarheit, ein dramatisches Schwindelgefühl einsetzte, und welche grauenhaften Schmerzen er dabei litt, wie also jede einzelne Faser jenes dichten, feinen die Leber umhüllenden Nervengeflechts übergangslos in den höchstmöglichen Schmerzzustand geriet, um, paralysiert von der Schockwirkung, darin zu verharren und pausenlos den Schmerz in die gesamte Bauchhöhle hinein weiterzuleiten, wo durch fortgesetzte, nicht lokalisierbare Explosionen ein Gefühl der inneren Zerfetzung entstand – da ich mir also heute dies alles vorstelle, denke ich, der Übeltäter war mit dem Lebertreffer wohl hinreichend bestraft und bedurfte des Nachtretens in die Lederhose nicht. Im Hinblick auf den Roman darf ich aber anmerken, dass beim Boxen nicht von hinten angegriffen wird und Schläge mit dem Ellenbogen verboten sind, und dass überhaupt die Kämpfer ihr Einverständnis zum Kampf vorher schriftlich erklären müssen, denn im Ring, zwischen den Seilen, geht es erheblich zivilisierter zu als auf dem Oktoberfest.

 

Ich habe Günter Grass gesehen

Letztes Jahr habe ich Günter Grass gesehen, als ich am Pariser Platz mit der Rikscha auf Kundschaft wartete. In Cordsamt gekleidet und Pfeife rauchend kam Grass aus der Akademie der Künste, ging in Richtung Unter den Linden und war dabei mit einem anderen Herrn tief in ein Gespräch involviert. Grass ging sehr langsam, die geistige Anstrengung zwang ihn, hin und wieder stehen zu bleiben. Während sein Gesprächspartner an seinen Lippen hing, hingen Grass’ Schultern nach unten herab. Ich erwog, Grass anzusprechen: »Herr Grass, darf ich Sie bitten, gewähren Sie mir die Ehre, Sie ein Stück des Wegs mit der Rikscha zu fahren?« Grass hätte dann in einer solchen Rikscha gesessen, wie sie in der Verfilmung seiner Erzählung »Unkenrufe« zum Einsatz gekommen ist, und ich hätte alle meine Kollegen in unserem internen Promi-Fahrgast-Wettbewerb haushoch ausgestochen. Allerdings wären kontroverse Diskussionen möglich gewesen angesichts solch prominenter Fahrgäste wie … und gerade, als ich dies dachte, blieb Grass, der nun genau auf meiner Höhe war, abermals stehen. Er nahm die Pfeife aus dem Mund, sein Blick verfinsterte sich, und dann vollführte er mit der Pfeife eine alles wegwischende Handbewegung. Er hielt den Pfeifenkopf mit Daumen und Zeigefinger umfasst, spreizte die anderen drei Finger ab und schnitt waagrecht mit der Handkante einen knappen Halbkreis in die Luft. Diese Geste war so radikal, die Pfeife so Achtung gebietend, die Bewegung so restlos alles, also auch mein Ansinnen wegwischend, dass ich es im selben Moment fallen ließ und mich stattdessen darauf verlegte, den Herren mit den Augen zu folgen, um mir nur ja nichts von diesen womöglich literaturgeschichtlich bedeutsamen Augenblicken entgehen zu lassen. Vielleicht würde dieses Gespräch zwischen Grass und dem anderen Herrn Eingang in Grass’ Tagebücher finden, und dann könnte ich mich später, bei deren Erscheinen, immerhin der Zeugenschaft rühmen. So war ich also in den Anblick des cordsamtbekleideten Rückens von Grass vertieft, eben hatte er den roten Teppich des Hotel Adlon passiert und verlor sich nun zwischen anderen Passanten, als sich wie aus dem Nichts ein Mann auf die Sitzbank meiner Rikscha warf: »Das ist doch der Grass da vorn!, schnell, fahren Sie!, fahren Sie an dem vorbei, der Grass!!!, den will ich sehen!« Ich fuhr los, obwohl ich wusste, dass der Kunde nicht auf seine Kosten kommen würde. Denn Grass war keineswegs geradeaus die Linden hinunter gegangen, sondern rechts in die Wilhelmstraße eingebogen. Er war zwischen den Pollern hindurch gegangen, mit denen die Britische Botschaft seit dem Irakkrieg die Straße hat sperren lassen, zwar nicht für Fußgänger und Fahrradfahrer, durchaus aber für Autos und Rikschas. Ich bremste ab. Da standen wir nun vor den Pollern, konnten nicht weiter und sahen Grass sich unheimlich langsam entfernen. Mein Kunde wollte es nicht über sich bringen, Grass zu Fuß nachzulaufen. Wie geschlagen stieg er aus, sah kopfschüttelnd dem hängenden, Pfeife rauchenden Cordsamtanzug hinterher und wiederholte in einem fort: »Ich hab den Grass verpasst, ich hab den Grass verpasst, ich hab den Grass verpasst…«

 

Der 20. Juli

Wir haben 28 Grad, eine hauchfeine Brise und ein paar Zierwölkchen im Himmel. Ich habe zwei Damen die Linden heraufgebracht, fahre durchs Brandenburger Tor hindurch und finde den Platz auf der anderen Seite, namentlich: den »Platz des 18. März«, (an dem die »Straße des 17. Juni« beginnt), abgesperrt mit rotweißen Gittern, hinter denen alle fünf Meter Polizisten und Polizistinnen in schusssicheren Westen stehen, um die Absperrung zu sichern. Unter den Bäumen auf der nordwestlichen Seite Einsatzfahrzeuge der Polizei, eins neben dem anderen, eine Wagenburg ums Gelöbnis herum. Öffentliches Gelöbnis der Rekruten unter Ausschluss der Öffentlichkeit. Weiträumige Absperrungen, Sicherheitszonen, Zufahrten. Von der Ecke Behrenstraße/Ebertstraße, über die nördliche Tiergartenhälfte bis zum Bahnof rauf: Alles dicht. Der Aufbau der Absperrungen und der Tribüne vor dem Reichstag ist seit einer Woche im Gange gewesen. Seit einer Woche wimmelte es von Polizei und Feldjägern und Soldaten, die alle so taten, als wäre überhaupt nichts los bei ihrem nervösen Hin und Her.

Ein Hubschrauber zieht auf, die beiden Damen ziehen ab, ich verzieh mich in den Schatten. Dort steht ein Kollege, der sich beim besten Willen nicht erklären kann, wieso eigentlich das Gelöbnis nicht in einen nächtlichen Fackelzug eingebunden, und wieso Wehrkunde noch nicht wieder als Pflichtfach an Schulen eingeführt ist.

»Du sach mal«, frag ich, denn er muss es wissen, er hat gedient, »glaubst Du, dass man mit einer Armee, die sich im eigenen Lande von der Polizei vor den Bürgern schützen lassen muss, dass man mit so einer Armee noch einen Krieg gewinnen kann?«

»Vergiss die Armee, ich weiß was Besseres.«

Ich versuche die Armee zu vergessen und denke daran, wie vorhin, kurz bevor ich mit den zwei Damen losgefahren bin, unser Oberpolitisierer vom Dienst im Tonfall nüchternster Sachlichkeit erklärte, er könne sich diese Welt ohne Armeen und Waffen nicht vorstellen, er sei sicher, dass das nicht funktioniere, und wie daraufhin ein anderer Kollege, von dem genau dies zu erwarten gewesen war, den Tonfall des Oberpolitisierers imitierte: »Daran kann man sehr gut sehen, wie erfolgreich die kapitalistische Propaganda ist: Sie arbeitet so effizient, dass man sich etwas so Naheliegendes, Einfaches und Schönes nicht einmal mehr vorstellen kann.«

Ich widersetze mich der kapitalistischen Propaganda und stelle mir diese Welt ohne Armeen und Waffen vor, in der Tat ein naheliegender, einfacher und schöner Gedanke, währenddessen mein Kollege sich aufrichtet. Er lümmelt nämlich, wenn er auf Kunden wartet, immer so hingeflegelt in seiner Rikscha herum, die Füße auf den Sattel gelegt, den Arsch auf der Kante, aber jetzt setzt er sich aufrecht hin und strahlt übers ganze Gesicht: «Gestern hab ich Prominenz gefahren!«

Er erzählt mir, dass gestern am Reichstag unter all den anderen ein Tourist um die Sechzig so herumgestanden habe, auf jemand gewartet, dem sei wohl langweilig gewesen, und da habe er, der Tourist, ihn, meinen Kollegen, angesprochen. Der Tourist habe auf die fertig aufgebaute Tribüne fürs Gelöbnis gezeigt und gefragt, was das für eine Veranstaltung sei.

»Gar nicht so einfach, die Armee zu vergessen«, werfe ich ein, und er:

»Deshalb machen die das ja.«

Jedenfalls habe er dem Tourist geantwortet: »Da müssen die Rekruten schwören, dass sie bereit sind, ihr Leben für Vaterland und Öl zu geben.« So sei man ins Gespräch gekommen, und zwar auf Englisch, Schmalspur-Englisch, der Tourist sei aus Holland gewesen, und er, mein Kollege, habe seine Ansichten übers Militär und die Schrift über dem Eingang des Reichstagsgebäudes nicht hinterm Berg gehalten. Der niederländische Tourist habe mit ihm und seinen Ansichten sympathisiert und eher beiläufig angemerkt, dass sein Großonkel in diesem Gebäude mal Feuer gelegt habe, und dass dessen Name auf dem Schild falsch geschrieben sei. Dann sei die Frau herangekommen, auf die er gewartet hatte, und sie seien ein Stück mit ihm gefahren.

»Määänsch, daschanding!«

»Jau, das war der Großneffe von Marinus van der Lubbe!«

»Da kann ich natürlich nicht mithalten, mit meinem ollen Zwiebel-Günter.«

Wir unterhalten uns über den Reichstagsbrand und bedauern, dass es damals nicht hingehauen hat, und vor allem, dass sie Marinus van der Lubbe erwischt und ermordet und vier andere gleich mitverhaftet haben. Von den Folgen gar nicht zu reden. Außerdem stellen wir fest, dass heute viele Kollegen und Kolleginnen nur des Gelöbnisses wegen gar nicht rausgekommen sind. Und da wir uns nicht in der Lage sehen, etwas Ähnliches wie seinerzeit Marinus van der Lubbe aufzuführen, machen wir Feierabend und haun ab.

 

Unvorstellbar

Es ist unvorstellbar, wie anstrengend es ist! Allein das Gewicht, und das ist noch lange nicht alles: die Rikscha (je nach Modell: 60 bis 140 Kilo), Werkzeug, Standluftpumpe, Proviant (durchschnittliche Tagesration: zwei Kilo Nudeln mit Soße, ein Kilo Nüsse, ein halbes Kilo Schokolade, fünf Liter Wasser oder andere Getränke), Decken, Kundschaft (statistisch: zwei Erwachsene = 160 Kilo), Tüten und Kartons (vom Einkaufen), Kinder zwischen 0 und 18 Jahren (aufm Schoß), kleinere, mittlere, große prallvollgepackte Reisekoffer, Hunde, Kinderwagen, Rollstühle, Laptops, Aktentaschen, Stative, Filmkameras. Da ist man schnell bei drei bis vierhundert Kilo, wo man nicht auf eine halbe Tonne kommt. Dazu der schlechte Zustand der Berliner Straßen. Unsere Repräsentierstraße Nummer eins, der Boulevard Unter den Linden, hat Schlaglöcher, in denen man bei Regen baden gehen kann. Man muss sich klar machen, dass jede Unebenheit im Straßenbelag, physikalisch gesprochen, ein Widerstand gegen die Fahrtrichtung ist, ein Angriff aufs Fortkommen, ein Rückschlag, den es mit doppelter Kraftanstrengung wett zu machen gilt. Auch der Zustand des Fahrzeugs entscheidet, wie lange man durchhält, wann der Punkt kommt, an dem man schlicht und ergreifend nicht mehr kann.

Dann muss man aufhören oder eine Pause machen. Ein Fahrzeug in schlechtem Zustand hat viel Reibung, und Reibung zehrt, Reibung kostet Kraft. Beispiel: Eine Acht im Rad kostet das achtfache der Kraft, die es ohne Acht gekostet hätte, daher der Name. Natürlich pflegen wir unsere Fahrzeuge und halten die Reibung so gering wie möglich. Eliminieren können wir sie nicht. Reibung ist immer da, das ganze Leben ist eine Reibung, und die Reibung in der Luft ist der Wind. Man denke an Fallschirme, an Segel, das sind die Kräfte, denen wir nicht nur standhalten, sondern gegen die wir vorwärtskommen müssen, und Wind ist meistens Gegenwind. Manchmal zwingen uns Böen mitten im Fahren zum Stehen. Dann wischen wir uns den windkalten Schweiß von der Stirn, und dann müssen wir wieder anfahren, müssen die Trägheit der Masse aufs neue überwinden, um aus dem Stillstand in die Bewegung zu kommen und weiter gegen den Luftwiderstand anzustrampeln.

Doch haben wir auch an den wunderbar windstillen Tagen reichlich zu leiden. Welch ein Irrtum, zu glauben, Berlin sei flach. Man halte sich vor Augen, dass Gewicht, schlechte Straßen und notorische Reibung einander aufs rücksichtsloseste multipizieren. Infolgedessen machen sich selbst schwache, auf dem Zweirad kaum merkliche Steigungen nur allzu schmerzlich fühlbar, und zwar als ein Ziehen nach hinten unten. Hier feiert die Schwerkraft Triumphe. Der Anfang der Stülerstraße, die Mitte der Rhododendronallee, das Ende des Bremer Wegs, es ist schlimm, schlimm, schlimm.

All dieses zusammengerechnet, (und unter diesen Umständen vielleicht auch noch problematische Kunden), all dies muss man versuchen, sich vorzustellen, wenn man wissen will, wie anstrengend es wirklich ist. Wir müssen uns den ganzen Winter über jeden Tag mindestens 3 Stunden lang in Trainingsfoltergeräte einspannen, damit wir in der Saison nicht zusammenbrechen. Allerdings können wir uns natürlich auch nicht vorstellen, wie man es aushalten kann, den ganzen Tag im Büro zu sitzen.

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