The Mercedes

The owner of the Mercedes did not arrange to meet like the others, meeting somewhere, and invited me instead to his house. 

He lived relatively close, maybe three streets down from my terrace exit through the gardens and rubble. When I arrived there punctually at ten thirty, he was in a velvet bathrobe, just finishing breakfast. 

The house was big. It grabbed my attention beautifully; there was a giant, Persian divan in the largest room, which not only covered the whole floor, but crept up the wall to the very ceiling. In one corner an arrangement of wooden trunks overflowed with a jumble of old porcelain and some silvers, on another wall leaned a stack of unframed portraits, a few more hung on the walls. 

In the wide doors at the entrance of this room stood, wheels up, placed on a stained UNRRA blanket, a large red Indian motorcycle, around which laid various tools, keys and parts. 

When we shook hands and introduced ourselves, he said his name, “Czechowski,” after which he looked me head to toe and added: “Count Czechowski.” 

He apologized that he had to finish breakfast and, pouring me coffee, sat me across from him, at the other end of the rather long table, where there was an unfinished game of solitaire out. He had to be more than twice my age. 

A handsome, defined face, which I knew actually from sight. Once in the middle of the night my close friend telephoned me, the unrepentant gambler Henio Kozakiewicz. Henio apologized profusely and asked if I didn’t by chance have three thousand at my place. When I told him that I did he asked if I could lend it to him quickly, because the matter was very serious. 

I had no choice, he was my friend, so in the middle of the night, with cash in hand, I schlepped to the address he gave me, and used the complex password he told me was supposed to get me inside. It was a tenement building, miraculously in one piece, standing at the center of town. 

When finally the door was opened for me, I saw a classic gambling cavern, which in a country building socialism was sourly prohibited and even more sourly punished, and limited only to this, that in the worker’s club and the train station lobby you could get a game of checkers or draughts. 

Here in the large smoke filled place I saw more than thirty gentlemen and a few ladies. Illegal spins of roulette, and at three tables games of poker, all illegal too. I was there less than a minute, because Henio jumped at me right away and relieved me of my money, after which I left. 

But Czechowski, Count Czechowski, I remembered well from that place. With a poker face he sat at one of the poker tables. 

Now the count, finishing his breakfast, dressed quickly and we went out to the car. 

He dressed as if ready for hunting. On the way to the car he asked me if by any chance I wasn’t the son of Stefan, who near Grudziądz held the estate at Danków. 

I replied that indeed Stefan was my uncle, and moreover before the war for some time we rented at the estate of the landed Szczyglice in Sochaczew. 

“He was a merry fellow, this uncle of yours,” the count remembered. 

One time everyone in the neighborhood told of how to some party he had rode in an equipage, with a stangret. Someone else rode with him and that person was the witness of this happening. Stefan was always dressed very elegantly in a smoking jacket and somewhat tight patent leather shoes. 

At some moment he ordered the stangret to stop the vehicle, get out and, to his great bafflement put on these unhappy shoes. 

When this person carried out the order, Stefan told him to hold on tightly to the back of the carriage, and he himself sat at the driver’s seat and hit the horse with the baton. 

The carriage went off with a wild quickness together with the runner behind it. 

After some two kilometers Stefan finally stopped and asked the out of breath, sweating runner: “And how is it?” 

“Very hard sir,” the strangret replied. 

“So now you see yourself, brother, how hard it is for a gentleman sometimes,” and gave him two silver five-pieces. 

“And what does your uncle do now?” the count asked. 

“My uncle is no longer alive,” I answered. 

Some two years after the war he had been driving somewhere in the west of the country with two of his workers. At night, while driving through some woods, a Soviet patrol stopped them. The Soviets took a liking to my uncle’s car, it was a French sports Delahaye, and they wanted to requisition it from him. 

During the exchange of words and kerfuffle that followed my uncle was unceremoniously killed with a bullet to the back of his head. For a few weeks this Delahaye, driven by the kacaps, stalked the nearby roads, but unfortunately in these times the Soviets, as liberators, were immune from any penalty and there was no way to punish them. 

The workers managed to run away even though the Soviets fired several shots their way. 

Early in the morning they ran straight to Aunt Halinka. 

“Yes, I remember her, a beautiful woman,” Czechowski interrupted. 

We got to the car, it was revelational. 

Large, low, four-door, with a large separate trunk, amusingly attached to the relatively aerodynamic body; it looked a little like an old chest. 

It had a long, six-cylinder line engine with what looked like two carburetors. The large wheels had rims plus there were two spares, placed at both sides above the front fenders. All the tires were in very good shape. The cockpit and portions of the interior were covered in a finished wood. 

A BLAUPUNKT radio, and above the ashtray an inconspicuous, very expertly cut out from thick aluminum sheet, palm with five branches, the emblem of the Afrika Korps. 

Leather seats, but the skin was completely invisible, covered in a casing sowed from a cheap gray blanket. 

I gave Czechowski eighteen thousand, we signed what we had to, and twenty after twelve, parking as always in the neighborhood of the square near the university, I was already at Vania’s. 

Again fifteen boxes and again forty five thousand from Nowobogacky. When I drove the car back to the count, diplomatically lying that I was saddened to say that I had miscounted a bit with money and couldn’t really offer such a large purchase right now, the slightly enchanted Czechowski said that he too had slightly miscounted and being sure that I would buy the car, spent almost my entire deposit on some serious matters and currently had no way to return it to me. 

But he told me not to worry and to keep his car for a few days, and a week from now at the latest he would return to me the unfortunate eighteen thousand and take back the Mercedes. 

The situation suited me very well.

The cork, new deposits of which I constantly found in the Soviet warehouse, could continue to be exploited normally another week or even two, and having a car semi-permanently, I did not have to repeat each day the nerve-wracking and stressful operation of purchasing an automobile.