Island Operation (Part X)

The next day was Saturday, at this time a normal day of work. I was very happy that my advertisement had made it in. I even went to the kiosk before seven in the morning to pick up a copy of the newspaper. 

When at around ten Bronco and I sat down to breakfast, the telephone rang. 

“About the advertisement.” I started to pay attention. 

On the other end someone was saying that he had for sale a functioning two-person 1942 Volvo. He wanted nine thousand. Immediately I thought about that day’s transport. 

To my question, whether the car had a trunk, I got the answer that it had a huge one. We arranged to meet very close to my house at eleven fifteen. 

I was to wait at the corner in a yellow scarf. I asked Bronco to be at his position at one thirty, and taking cash as well as one of the copies of the contract prepared the previous day, in a yellow scarf, through the secret terrace exit, I left my house. 

About Volvos I knew only so much; that they were solid, fairly traditional automobiles of Swedish production. I did not have much of an idea what they had looked like. 

As I stood on the corner in a yellow scarf, something gave a whir and a small three-wheeled van pulled up in front of me. The driver turned off the engine, got out, came up to me and told me he had called about the advertisement. 

He wore a leather flyer’s cap and a long leather coat, and to this strange shoes, because they were kind of officer’s, but the shoelaces ran the length of the shoes. 

Moreover two of his fingers on the left hand, the middle and the ring finger, were bandaged and stiffened on a narrow, thin piece of wood. He looked a little like Charles Lindbergh, and a little like General Maczek, whose face I never saw in my life, but whose visage in my imagination was partly the same as the owner of the Volvo. 

I looked at him a little entranced, and especially by his vehicle, which looked even stranger than he did. First of all the thing had three wheels. And it wasn’t as if this guy, driving to me in a hurry, had lost one. No, the three wheels were a standard dimension of the Swedish designers who were the creators of this model. 

In the back there were two normal wheels, and in the front, at the very center, was a single wheel, somewhat strange, because it was associated with a small engine, as if it were motorcycle. 

Just on the left side of this wheel there was the metal casing of the chain used to power it. The cabin was very small, I would say, like for elves or even for children, and to this it was also warped at the bottom, so there was no room for normal feet. 

The Swedish designers took as their inspiration an eighteenth century French chariot, or some strange degenerated, English or Chinese horse carriage from that same time period. In the front the flat window had one wiper at the center, on the inside there was a giant steering wheel. The rest of the instruments were very different from the instruments of any car I knew. 

The giant trunk the owner had complimented ended up being a normal bed, the kind that trucks had, only of course smaller. The bed was covered by canvas, similar to the wagons of American pioneers, who, running from Indians almost a hundred years ago, driven by gold fever and not looking at any of the dangers, made the cross country trek in the direction of California.

 I decided that this would be an ideal vehicle to carry cork, of course only this one time. Because it began to rain heavily, we got inside the car. There I told him that I was interested and told him my conditions, showing him the contract and the cash I had ready. After short consideration the owner agreed, adding only that he needed first to take himself home. 

We were to go together and on the way he aimed to show me the best way to drive this vehicle, “because here, as you surely notice, everything is a little different than in a normal auto.” 

I showed him my driver’s license, we signed the contract, I gave him four and a half thousand, and he gave me the vehicle’s papers. 

I said that I would be back at five at the latest and to wait for me at his house. 

He lived very far, it would even be hard to categorize it as the outskirts of town. It was rather closer to the neighboring region. 

From the terminal station of the trolley, passing on the left side the large white Polish Radio building, we drove for a long time down a road cutting through army training camps, before hitting a left to enter some small place. We had to pass through it, go another three kilometers down some road and then came another small place, where the seventh house on the left belonged to him. 

The road to this first place I knew well. In high school there was a classmate a year under me. She was a beautiful girl and denied no one in our crowd her pleasures. We all loved her very much and always, even though it was pretty far away, one of us walked her home. The other girls hated her. 

Now, driving, we had plenty of time, during which Lindbergh-Maczek managed to clue me in to all the little things that made operating this strange vehicle smooth, such that on the return trip I had no real problems with it. 

Of course the car handled kind of strange, it did not have a lot of power, and when it went over larger puddles, from the floor exploded a kind of geyser, such that my feet were slightly covered in mud. 

When I found myself in the vicinity of the university, I parked very close to the statue of the korporant, famous for this that from time to time some prankster, to the chagrin of the nearby residents and the party authorities at the university, placed condoms on his bronze dingaling under the cover of darkness.

I closed the three-wheeler carefully and locked it with the key, on the way having stopped also at the liquor store to pick up two half-liter bottles. I feared only that some joker wasn’t going to scribble something on the side of the truck as a joke. 

I arrived at Vania’s at twenty to one. Maybe because of the tempo that I had thrown myself in since the morning, I managed on this day to gut a whole fifteen boxes. 

I had neither the time nor the energy left to take any books and on my way out I told Vania that I set a few aside to pick up the next day. As always Vania was supposed to be there at the same hours. I went to the car, started the engine with no problem, and drove off. 

I stopped next to the bridge. I honked briefly, but it did not catch Bronco’s attention. When I honked three more times and he realized it was me behind the wheel, he went into such a fit of laughter that the only thing missing was for him to fall into the channel, which in this weather would not be most prudent. 

We packed everything elegantly into the truck. I dropped Bronco off at my house on the way and took the goods to Nowobogacky, yielding that day forty five thousand. 

Then I returned the vehicle, apologizing that unfortunately I was not interested in it. As compensation out of this four and a half thousand, which Lindbergh-Maczek returned begrudgingly, I gave him a hundred, saying it was for the gas which I used, even though we both knew well that given the very small and very weak engine of the vehicle, I did not burn even three złoty worth. 

In return he drove me to the same place where in a yellow scarf I met him at eleven fifteen in the morning.