Mercedes-Benz Pawel Huelle; translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones Serpent's Tail, 160pp, £8.99 ISBN 1852428694

A driving licence is an albatross around the neck. Once equipped with it, once truly adult in the eyes of the world, a person is ready to discover what freedom really means: the pursuit of personal goals through an endless and inescapable maze of forced choices, obstructions, orders, antagonism and constraint. And it is itself a largely forced choice. Pawel Huelle's learner-narrator declares that he intends to continue his journeys by bus or bike or hang-glider after he gets his licence, but, even so, it is something he has to have.

He hits the streets of Gdansk in the early 1990s, the point at which the whole Polish nation is discovering what freedom really means. At that stage, it means doubtful propositions pitched to a nation on its uppers: he chooses to learn with the school that guarantees a licence for the lowest price in town. His instructor is the enigmatic and gamine Miss Ciwle, his vehicle one of the tiny, obsolete Polish-built Fiats that had marked the end of the aspirational road for most Polish drivers in the latter years of the People's Republic. Off he goes, and right away ends up stalled on a crossroads between a tram on one side and a juggernaut on the other, their irate drivers pressing in still closer.

The Fiat and its crew thus find themselves in a position analogous to that of the Second Polish Republic, whose independence ensued from the First World War and was terminated by the two adjacent powers in the Second. At this pivotal moment, it is to that period that the narrator turns. As if it offers a convenient opportunity to reminisce, he tells Miss Ciwle of a similar incident that happened to his grandmother in 1925, when her Citroen stalled on a level crossing during a driving lesson and was flattened by the inevitably approaching express. The occupants jumped free, however, and so does the narrator, escaping from a dismal and pressing predicament into an exhilarating, liberating, brief and delightful novel with a story at every turning. The action goes in circles, in the eyes of the narrator (the author's avatar), in homage to the late Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, to whom the Fiat-sized text is written as a letter.

The fates of the grandparents' cars proved to be in the hands of the great powers. After the incident at the level crossing was picked up by the Times, Le Monde weighed in with a pro-Citroen perspective, and Grandmother Maria ended up with a free car from the manufacturers for publicity purposes. Grandfather Karol in due course upgraded to a Mercedes 170, which was commandeered by invading Soviet cavalry in 1939. He kept the receipt they gave him, and also an envelope of photos. The latter survived and is reproduced in the book, a memento of Chas-kiel Bronstein - the man whose company processed the pictures - and the extirpated part of the Polish nation that he represents. Here also is a photo that matches the description of the last picture Grandfather took in pre-war Poland, a family portrait in front of the Mercedes.

"Pre-war" became a heavily loaded term in postwar Poland, coming to signify, along with "bourgeois", a quality and grandeur that was the antithesis of shoddy concrete socialism. Roman Polanski's film The Pianist is in large part a homage to this vision of pre-war bourgeois elegance. But whereas the film was stately and immersed in its period, Huelle writes as a driver, impelled to keep moving, if only in circles. The past is tackled briskly, as drivers tackle matters arising, and the present is to the fore. Antonia Lloyd-Jones's translation sustains the mischief and verve of the original, though it does introduce a few red lights to a text punctuated by give-ways rather than stops.

The book is also distinguished by a certain old-fashioned sense of pro- priety in the relationship between the narrator and the instructor, who remain Mr and Miss to each other even when stoned. And it has its own distinctive priorities: the narrator and his companions in a Gdansk bar, a literary and patriotic crew of beer-lovers, accept that an era has ended not when Solidarity triumphs, or the Berlin Wall falls, but only when they hear in February 1997 that Hrabal has fallen to his death from a hospital window.

Huelle's wit and his subtle gift for measuring absurdity stand comparison with Hrabal or any of the other great central European ironists. Even so, it fell to commerce rather than art to add the finishing touch. By the time the book appeared, capitalism and culture had developed in Poland to a point where Mercedes-Benz felt able to take the hint from the Citroen anecdote and sponsor the publication. Time had turned another of its circles.

Marek Kohn's most recent book is A Reason for Everything (Faber & Faber)

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website