DER SCHMUGGLER
Mayer, Milton
Der Schmuggler By MILTON MAYER Goldern/Hasliberg Switzerland "I do not believe," said the Swede, "that I have ever seen so much coffee, tea, cocoa, and tobacco." "Nor have I," I said. "And you...
...We have here, my staff and I, devised a way to help you...
...One and all are invited to attend the docking of the SS Arosa Kulm in New York City August 17 or as soon thereafter, or theretofore, depending on tail-winds, as the Arosa Kulm is able to make it into port...
...A bell rang in the Customs shed...
...I went to the Free Port to get my stuff, including Amanda's foot-locker...
...I got on the train, which had a fine head of steam (or, it being Switzerland now, electricity) up...
...On the package was printed in German—the native language of the Swiss Beamte— the words, New Bed-Sheets...
...He took me into the office of the Chief Beamte...
...The Switzer looked at the German Customs string and, pulling the foot-locker off the truck, said, "Let's open this one first...
...Have you no pity...
...A frozen sweat—it was December, remember—broke out on my forehead...
...those are the places where the inspectors put their hands in...
...Elizabeth prayed to the Lord...
...It would have been none of our business...
...Are you not men...
...I staggered back to the car, threw myself down among my loved ones, and wept like the bride's mother at the wedding...
...twenty-four six-ounce packages of powdered-coffee, all in one big carton...
...The rain fell, day and night, softly, whitely, as it does in Kronenberg at Christmas time...
...I could say "Yes" without lying...
...I never heard of a Swiss boarding-school where the children had to bring their own bed-sheets...
...When I got to the station, the Chancellor, through another of his agents, informed me that I must go across the street to the Customs House and get still another of the Chancellor's agents to come back with me to inspect the foot-locker before I could take it away...
...Myself, I have to have my hands free to show the tickets...
...He chalked them o.k...
...You must pay, Herr Meyer, through the Nase...
...There will be a distribution of ten pounds of tea, twenty pounds of cocoa, seven pounds of tobacco, and ten cartons of cigarettes—providing, of course, that U.S...
...He writes regulations...
...A great plan, Herr Professor, and we shall do all we can to assist you...
...They have nothing to eat in Russia...
...I had made it...
...The foot-locker was filled with coffee, tea, cocoa, and tobacco...
...Yes," I said...
...We must write to Wiesbaden, Bonn, Leipzig, Tanganyika, and Keokuk...
...No dolls, no roses...
...The Beamte jumped...
...My little children tugged at my sleeve, trying to pull it off my coat...
...they couldn't open the luggage if I were already out of the shed, and they might, in general disgust, let it go through...
...Take the stuff," I cried...
...A week later Chancellor Adenauer of Germany informed me—through one of his agents in the German Railways Freight Department—that my foot-locker had reached Kronenberg, and I should come to the station and get it...
...You know, you get mixed up in Europe...
...In the middle it will not be found...
...Now nothing—but nothing—is taxed as heavily in Europe as coffee, tea, cocoa, and tobacco...
...Little Amanda had done her work well...
...Only to the door, so to say...
...Go on out and play," said Mother, "it may be your last Christmas with the children...
...Christmas was nigh in Kronenberg...
...Underneath the one layer of shirts was the five-pound carton of tea...
...We must study the regulations...
...You may call this a lie to a customs agent, but I make a distinction between lying to a customs agent and lying to him about the Russians...
...The customs duty on it would bankrupt you...
...His free hand rested on the shirts that had been beneath the bed-sheets...
...Pig," I said, but I said it in Finnish...
...It will go out of Germany...
...a state secret, aye, the greatest state secret, revealed, mind you, by a German Beamte, for the purpose of fooling the Swiss, whom, to be sure, the Germans detest because they stand between Germany and Sicily and the Germans like oranges...
...You'd better come with me, Herr Meyer...
...I beat my breast, and checked myself, just in time, as I reached to tear out my hair, which is getting to be as thin as Senator Neuberger's...
...He laughed at that one...
...In my mixed-up way—forgetting exactly what was in it—I shipped the foot-locker to Kronenberg, and aboard we got...
...Good coffee costs up to five dollars a pound...
...Little Dicken, who was waiting in the corridor, came in to say his hat was in the chandelier...
...It may be," I said, with a ketch, almost a yawl, in my voice, "that I will not be on board when the train pulls out...
...Still, the Kronenberg Beamten had supervised the repacking of the schmuggled goods in the four pieces...
...But you shipped it into Germany...
...You have now, Your Honor...
...That, Herr Meyer," said the Beamte, and his eyes had a glint as of cold rolled and buttered steel, "I should not advise you to attempt...
...We shall meet again...
...With Little Julie's last farthing, I bought a copy of the Blatt...
...It wasn't that I wouldn't talk—that, too—but that I couldn't...
...Merry Christmas, Herr Professor," he said, and he bowed and smiled and held out his hand and added, "I have just read about your project, Herr Professor, in the Kron-enberger Blatt...
...If this one said, "What's in it—just personal things...
...You are going to Switzerland?—So...
...The luggage lay on a baggage-truck just behind the counter in the Customs shed...
...As the train came to a halt at Basel-Bad, I took leave of my loved ones...
...If the luggage was aboard...
...There lay the foot-locker, in the baggage room of the Kronenberg station...
...On the counter at Basel-Bad I set about opening the foot-locker again...
...Oh, maybe once or twice, under extraordinary circumstances...
...I pointed to the four that had the nice green German Customs string around them...
...I'm bringing it all to Russia...
...The Beamte turned to another Beamte and said, "Have you ever heard of a Swiss boarding-school where the children have to bring their own bed-sheets...
...On top was a package of new bed-sheets, underneath them a thin layer of old shirts...
...Elizabeth of Hungary...
...Teetering at the top of the ladder, while thousands cheered, a Beamte recovered Dicken's hat...
...One day they met on the street and he asked her what she had in the basket...
...Now," he said, "we," meaning me, "are in trouble...
...It would be an honor, Herr Professor, if you would come to the Customs House at your convenience...
...Conditions are terrible there...
...seven pounds of tobacco, in pound and half-pound cans...
...Well, fellows, you all know the story of St...
...If the luxuries of the rich were heavily taxed, the rich would be impoverished and there would be no rich to provide work for the poor...
...Why are you bringing them to Switzerland...
...In that fierce December heat I was perspiring profusely...
...There was a long pause— but it wasn't long enough for me...
...Customs allows them to re-enter the United States...
...Ah," said the Chief Beamte, "that is something else again...
...But not if he said, simply, "What's in it...
...Can I let my own children starve...
...Well," said the first Beamte, turning back to me, "now what shall we do...
...And, what was much more important, they had not known that I was, in Europe, a Herr Professor...
...We have plenty to eat here...
...It's cheaper to carry your baggage in Europe (or, come to think of it, in America) than to ship it...
...I took it to Swedish Customs, and the man said, "What's in it—just personal things...
...So to Kronenberg we went...
...in Europe he comes right behind the Holy Family and buys on credit...
...I had not yet heard from the Zollamt...
...The last bell rang and the train rolled forward...
...In a minute we would be over the border into Switzerland, into freedom...
...The Russians, like the Americans, are like that...
...Now a German Beamte, or civil servant, is a special sort of beast or god...
...Or to anyone else...
...and waved them on to the Swiss Beamte...
...Yes, Your Honor...
...At the Russian Embassy in Stockholm we drank tea (not mine) and were told that our visa ought to come any time...
...But right underneath the shirts, invisible, was a five-pound package of tea...
...If, that is, the luggage had been put back aboard...
...The luggage will be taken off the train at the border, at Basel-Bad...
...He lives on a diet of regulations, eating, digesting, and excreting them...
...I couldn't be sure, but the paper looked to me like one of the copies of the paper given me by the Chief Beamte in Kronenberg when the contraband had been repacked and released...
...Don't worry about me...
...Elizabeth's basket...
...Veritably, the staff of life...
...Not at the bottom or the top, not at the sides...
...The stuff was ten pounds of tea, in two five-pound cartons...
...As the package landed on top of the shirts, I heard the half-hollow thud of the carton of tea beneath the shirts...
...The day after Christmas, all the Beamten assembled in the Chief Beamte's office at the Kronenberg Customs House and Herr-Professored me...
...and ten cartons of cigarettes...
...All over the front page, in a dispatch from Stockholm, was an account of Herr Professor Mayer's, or Meyer's, great mission to Russia, complete with a picture of the Herr Professor's lovely wife and their four lovely children...
...But Elizabeth loved the poor, and she brought them bread, schmuggled from her own kitchen in a covered basket, lest the Duke catch her...
...An American traveling third class, he is not worth inspecting...
...Christmas in Kronenberg...
...Then we will open the foot-locker and distribute the contraband among the four pieces of luggage...
...It was Christmas Eve...
...I got off and streaked through the dark—this all happened at night—to the baggage car ahead...
...made with dried milk and sugar, in ten two-pound packages...
...I lifted the lid...
...The import tax on one cigarette is two cents...
...The die was cast, and loaded...
...On the way from the Customs House to the station, the Chancellor's agent yak-yaked away in his faultless German and I bethought me of the contents of the foot-locker...
...And I have a marvelously strong little woman and four lovely children who have grown big and ruddy, if a little flabby, on a lifelong diet of potatoes...
...P.S...
...A squadron of Beamten hurried to the basement and came back with an extension ladder...
...You know, they have nothing to eat in Russia...
...At a Swiss boarding-school...
...Maybe...
...Remembering Elizabeth, I prayed as I knelt to open the foot-locker...
...The assembled Beamten all rubbed their hands in anticipation of the banquet.—"We shall keep the contraband here, and you will hear further from us...
...A foot-locker filled, so it seemed, with the customary clothing and such...
...We must clarify all the details of this matter and apply all the regulations...
...When I asked him how it got there, he said he was only trying to see if he could throw it in, and he had...
...I had never lied to a customs agent...
...I kissed the children, one, two, three, four, patted Mother's wrinkled old hand, and turned away...
...I had to wait for my change at the window and, turning around, I saw a third Swiss Beamte, this one with braid on his hat, approaching the baggage truck with a blue paper in his hand...
...It will certainly go out of Germany, but whether it will go into Switzerland —." He shrugged his shoulders...
...If," he said, turning to me, "you had brought it in with you on the train and your luggage had not been inspected, we would not cared...
...Eat it up, drink it up, smoke it up...
...Everything," said the Chief Beamte, as Little Amanda worked away on the Customs House floor in Kronenberg, "should be in the middle, always in the middle...
...My loved ones took me in their arms and asked me what happened...
...The German inspectors will not touch it because it is sealed...
...She reminded the Lord of all her good works, of her piety and devotion, of her sacrifice and her good intentions...
...You must pay...
...Don't come that 'door' stuff on me," said the Swede in his patois, "but I'll tell you what," he said, as my babies whimpered, tugging pitifully at his pants-legs, trying to pull them off...
...In every country in Europe the scheme is the same...
...What are these...
...The agent looked at the foot-locker that had once been filled with Little Amanda's dolls, and said: "What's in it...
...Oy, weh," said the customs agent when he saw the inside of the foot-locker...
...The train rolled into Basel for a five-minute stop...
...A likely story...
...The Beamte who had gone to the station with me explained to the chief Beamte that Herr Meyer had shipped an untold amount of contraband into Germany...
...I touched my hand to my cap, which had the word Schmuggler on it, and the Swede ordered Little Amanda's foot-locker, from which we had evicted her dolls to accommodate the stuff, sent to the Free Port...
...In America a professor is, by definition, a hump-backed bum who has to pay cash...
...That," said the Chief Beamte, "we can not do...
...Have you not wives and children of your own...
...He studied the package closely...
...He hated the poor...
...I have a large family —one, two, three, four small children," I counted them on my fingers...
...And it was obvious, then and there, that Elizabeth had been tapped for the Elysian counterpart of Skull & Bones...
...But never to a customs agent...
...New bed-sheets," I said, "bought in Germany...
...But you have schmugg—brought this great amount of contraband into Germany, and we are responsible...
...It's yours...
...What the Germans in Kronenberg seemed to have overlooked was the fact that their Customs string would make the Swiss suspicious...
...But when I'd made an inventory of my good works, my piety and devotion, my sacrifice and my good intentions, I decided I'd better start with my good intentions, and I no sooner got started than the customs agent said, "Here—maybe I can help you," and he took the key, with which I had been fumbling, and turned it in the lock...
...The German Beamte asked me which were mine...
...But you have brought it all to Sweden," said the Swede...
...And," said I, "into Switzerland...
...The wide doors were open, and through them I saw the four pieces of luggage, safe in Switzerland, safe from the Beamten, Swedish, German, Swiss, safe from a Customs payment high enough to balance the national budgets of all of them...
...Take it all, I don't want it...
...twenty pounds of ground chocolate, or cocoa MILTON MAYER, a regular contributor to The Progressive, is now concluding a year of travel in Europe...
...Close it up," said the Beamte, and then, to himself, "a Swiss boarding-school where the children have to bring their own bed-sheets...
...You have a large family, and I am sorry for you...
...You said so yourself...
...Elizabeth, wasn't it...
...You'd better open it," said the agent...
...Remember," said Rocky after me, "what you are always telling us what Socrates said, that no harm can come to a good man...
...Freedom...
...In the baggage car ahead were the four pieces of luggage filled with by what now had come to be known in the family as "the stuff...
...The luggage would be taken off at the station and into the Customs shed...
...Come out and play," they said in chorus, "come out and make a rain-man with us...
...As I moved fast to the cashier's window, to pay the express bill, the foot-locker went back on to the truck...
...And you are bringing it all to Sweden," said the Swede, who had the words Customs Inspector on his cap...
...Without waiting for my change, I ran, not walked, to the nearest exit...
...The train crossed the Swedish-Danish and the Danish-German borders, and the customs inspectors never inspected our baggage...
...Roses," said Elizabeth, who, like me, never lied to a German official unless she had to...
...If the agent asked me what was in the foot-locker, the jig was up...
...I saw the customs agent...
...The caption on the poster was: "Help Us Catch the Schmuggler...
...Tea is still worse...
...Christmas Eve...
...Herr Professor," said the Chief Beamte, "you must forgive us for having caused you so much trouble...
...The reason is that these are the luxuries of the poor...
...What, after all, is more personal than coffee, tea, cocoa, and tobacco...
...When you are ready to leave Germany, please bring three suitcases, already packed with your clothing, to this office...
...He approached me...
...She was married to a German Duke —what she saw in him I can't imagine...
...Again, as at the Kronenberg railway station, I reminded the Lord of my good intentions and urged a miracle upon Him...
...But when I loaded all the baggage on Mother and the kids, including the foot-locker on Little Amanda, Little Amanda's back snapped, and I decided to ship the foot-locker to Kronenberg...
...After a month Sweden got cold, and we thought we would move on to Germany, to the little town of Kronenberg, to spend Christmas among the former Nazis, who are now Christian Democrats...
...And when the customs inspector sees him accompanied by five hungry mouths, all going at once, he figures that whatever the poor devil is trying to smuggle he's entitled to...
...And what," I said, "if I leave the country...
...I shook my head...
...He reads regulations...
...I know I am only an American, but still, is it right that my children, one, two, three, four should starve...
...For my children's beds at a boarding-school...
...Ah, and what a surprise he had when he found the foot-locker filled with Little Amanda's dollsl—No, that was the Duke and St...
...But it didn't...
...They will have nothing to eat in Russia...
...Then it would be reloaded, the passenger would get aboard, and the train would enter Switzerland at Basel...
...On his birthday he gets a leather-bound copy of the regulations for a birthday present...
...he is not an ordinary man...
...I realized that the Beamten, one and all, had not previously believed my Russia story...
...The Swiss Beamte picked up the package of new bed-sheets...
...I told him that the Russians had nothing to eat—the Germans have potatoes—and that we had to take everything with us...
...no conception of time...
...I know they have nothing to eat in Russia," said the agent, "but this is Germany...
...We had come to Europe to try to stampede the Russians into letting us into Russia, to live there a year, and the Russians in Washington told us we could bring anything into Russia we wanted to—provided, of course, that we could get in at all...
...Let's see them," said the Duke...
...I left them their passports and took my own...
...The one-minute bell rang in the Basel-Bad station...
...Oh," I said, "only coffee and tea and stuff for Russia...
...I hope you choke on it...
...So it is really your plan to go to Russia...
...I thought of selling matches in the street, but I did not know the German word for matches...
...But," I said, "it is all for Russia...
...In the agent's office, right over his desk, I had seen a poster showing a great big eye fastened on a man with a suitcase...
...You are an American, but still I am sorry for you...
...The little children made rain-men and pelted each other with rain-balls...
...As the train approached the border station at Basel-Bad, and the Alps just beyond, I found myself perspiring again...
...said the Beamte, in German...
...Herr Meyer," said the Chief Beamte, who, by this time, had called in several other Beamten of varying ranks and orders, all of them carrying books of regulations under each arm, "we have nothing to do with Russia...
...This last I said in Esperanto...
...if* the Swiss were on the scent, I'd better not be there...
...There, with the German and Swiss Beamten working side by side, it would be examined in the presence of the passenger while the train pulled forward a hundred yards or so...
...And the Lord passed a quick miracle, and when the Duke, the dirty dog, tore the cover off the basket, it was filled with roses, and you could of knocked him over with a sashweight...
...She prayed to the Lord to pass a miracle, but quick, and change the bread into roses...
...just like the customs agent saying to me, "You'd better open it...
...When a Professor tells a Beamte he's going to Russia, he's going to Russia, and when the Professor brings a batch of contraband into the country, it is not a case of schmuggling, but of unfortunate error, begging your esteemed pardon, Herr Professor, and we must stretch the regulations in the Professor's behalf...
...I shook my head...
...You get mixed up at home, but in Europe you get mixed up in several languages...
...Well, Your Honor," I said, "I'm not bringing it all to Sweden, exactly...
...I went with him back to the Customs House...
...Never," said the other Beamte...
...Five minutes and the train goes on," he said, throwing the package of bed-sheets into the foot-locker...
...On his day off he makes up regulations, just for fun...
...Then we will put the German Customs Seal on the luggage and send it as express on the train with you...
...As we reached the street, whom did I see but the customs agent?— Grammar requires me to say nobody...
...Let the foot-locker be filled with Little Amanda's dolls, Lord, or even roses, like St...
...I will let this contraband stay aboard the ship and be sent to the Stockholm Free Port, and it can stay there until you go to Russia or wherever you go, so long as you do not bring it into Sweden...
...I told him I was taking my family to Russia, or hoping to take my family to Russia, to find out if the Russians were really human...
...You know that...
Vol. 20 • August 1956 • No. 8
