Mercedes

A short somewhat autobiographical story

… and I drove down Forty-second Street

In my Cadillac

Good car to drive

After a war

(Bob Dylan, Talking World War III Blues)

When my mother first visited my father in the little apartment in which he lived, soon after they had been introduced by a mutual friend, not long after the war in which he had fought against the fascists, on a small table she saw a book by Albert Camus — this was the moment when she felt that he might be the right man for her. By the time it turned out that a friend of his had left the book there, and my father not only never had read anything by Camus but didn’t even really know who that was, it was too late. They stayed together until her death more than sixty years later, but she never ceased to look down upon him.

Abortions were not only illegal, they were also expensive. I was born when they couldn’t afford another one. She once told me.

I was maybe five when my parents had a huge fight. My mother told me much later that my father had already packed his belongings in a suitcase and was about to walk out of the flat, and only stayed because I was crying so loud and piteously from the fear of losing him. In fact I had no idea, I only cried because they were so agitated and shouted so loudly, and I felt left out and wanted to have my share in what was going on. This is how I came to save their marriage.

The first car, which we got when I was twelve, was an old Opel Olympia, given to my father by his new employer. Everybody else already had a car, even if this didn’t include those who did not, who were still the majority, but most people whom my parents were close to had one. When my mother saw the car which my father had proudly parked across the street from our house (not our house, of course, the tenement building in which we lived — back then, finding parking space was easy) she was aghast, it was so miserably and disgustingly old, she’d be ashamed to ever be seen in it. With an amazing amount of chrome at its front that brightly shone in the sun when it was freshly polished, it proudly looked like something from a different age. She finally resigned herself to it, and it didn’t take that long before he got a better one, a black Peugeot 403 that looked so close to a Mercedes that Roman Polanski used one in his film “Knife in the Water” in 1962, in Poland, when the actual Mercedes he had used in earlier shots wasn’t available anymore. Our car was proper now, it was just us who fell a bit short.

Already a few years before that first car my father succeeded to get his driver’s license. He had learned to drive in the army, had driven trucks, but he had to learn for the theory test, and failed it twice. We asked him what the question was that he hadn’t been able to answer, and when I knew the answer she let me mock him relentlessly. I was maybe eight at that time. Asked, many years later, why she did not want to get a driver’s license herself, she said she didn’t want to learn to drive because in a marriage there has to be at least one thing in which the man is better than the woman.

Three cars later my father finally had a Mercedes, a white one.

I never liked it, it seemed unwieldy, sluggish and technologically uninspired to me and I made fun of it, but he was seriously proud of it.

It wasn’t new when he bought it but he had it for thirty years, until old age finally forced him to give it up.

In late years, when for instance he had to drive to a new car repair shop and didn’t know the traffic lanes on the bridge across the river, he first went there by public transport to have a look at which lane he would have to take. It felt sad and ridiculous to me. Not that many years later I’ve often done that myself, not by public transport, but by satellite view on my computer.

A few days before his death K. asked him, uncle Leo, if you could live your life again, is there anything that you would want to do differently? And he said no, there wasn’t, he’d do everything the same again. Except, he added after a pause, except with the women — this I would do differently. She only told me after he had died, so I could never ask him what he had meant. He and I had never had such talks.

And now E. and I have a Mercedes, electric, sleek, smooth, elegant and strong, light mint-blue because the only other colors without a heavy surcharge would have been black or white, and white is boring, and could you seriously imagine me in a black Mercedes? It is very unlike the one my father had, a science fiction fantasy made real, more of a magic carpet than a car, we both enjoy it. And this summer we drove to Stuttgart to visit the Mercedes Museum.

I am not proud of it the way my father was. I have not earned it the way that he had, not by narrowly escaping with my life, not by fighting my way back from exile in a war (was this car a final token of victory for him?), not by working my way up from the dirt of the oil fields, I have just been lucky. And I had never aspired to a Mercedes, it came as a surprise when we found that it was them who built the car that came so close to what we wanted. And then the weight of that name hit, and I expected I would feel some kind of inappropriateness, awkwardness or shame, but it didn’t happen.

* * *

And again there is a war, and again there is a genocide. And some of the children and grandchildren of the murderers have become friends, and too many of the children and grandchildren of the liberators and of the victims have become murderers, and all around the world is burning, and the fascists and the arsonists are on the rise again.

And still it is a good car to drive, far away from the war. It really is. And why should we not enjoy it, while we can? But what feels so wrong, is that my father will never see it.

R.S., 10/2026

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