On
this particular day he finally succeeded. It happened because he paid no
attention to the faces, which in any case could hardly be decoded, and
concentrated on the hands on the steering wheels. How differently each of the
drivers held the wheel, or did not hold it. The classic model, with one hand on
the right and one on the left side of the wheel, marking its diameter, so to
speak, was more the exception than the rule. It was more common to see both
hands resting at only a slight distance from one another close to the peak or
divide of the wheel’s circumference. If the first-mentioned placement of the
hands suggested an image posed for a movie close-up being filmed in a studio,
with the driving merely simulated, as became most pronounced when the drive r
kept turning the wheel slightly back and forth without having to negotiate a
curve, the second placement suggested a film being shot on location, as did all
the other hands glimpsed on steering wheels. What all the hand positions had in
common was that despite the distance from which he was viewing them in the
steady stream of heavy traffic heading toward the airport, each and every one
appeared as a close-up. The most frequent hand position, as he recognized after
a while, was probably the one in which both hands rested close together near
the bottom of the wheel, and the champion was the woman who grasped the wheel
at the bottom from behind, in such a way that her fingers, except of course for
her thumbs (how else?) pointed toward her, while the second-place winner was
the woman whose two hands held the wheel at its lowest point from above, so to
speak, which looked like fists clenched around the wheel, with the knuckles—in
a close-up within the close-up—appearing mo st prominently, paler than the rest
of the hands. Not infrequently he also saw a single hand on the wheel,
sometimes a right hand, sometimes a left, preferably when the wheel had a spoke
to hold on to. This one-handed steering occurred more often with men than with
women, and then exclusively young ones. Only once did he see an old man driving
along casually with one hand, and when he looked closer, the man turned out to
have only one arm. The drivers more advanced in age either kept both hands in
the classic position at the wheel’s midpoint or, and these constituted a slight
majority (he counted them), higher up on the wheel, and almost one hundred
percent of them held their arms out straight, with the seat pushed back,
looking as if they had sunk into it in such a way that only their arms and hands
were visible, seemingly stretching toward the distant wheel from somewhere
underground or from a different horizon. Some truck drivers also did
out-of-the-ordinary things with their hands, sitting either with their torsos
leaning toward the wheel, no matter where their hand, fist, or just the
fingertips rested, or with their elbows braced against the wheel. No matter
what their position, most of the drivers were alone in their vehicles—except
for one time when the car was “packed” with passengers, “as in our
Balkans.”
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