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Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at https://archiveofourown.org/works/31588961.
Fandom: Fahrrad fahr’n - Max Raabe (Music Video)
Rating: General audiences
No warnings
Published 2021-05-28 for the Jukebox exchange
Words: 1,172
Most rabbits just run. You see them on their errand rounds around the city, ears alert, eyes wide, always appearing ready to dash into the street in front of an oncoming car but stopping at the last moment. Visitors from out of town are always terrified by this; they share it around as one of the reasons to ditch the car and take public transit when visiting Berlin. This suits the locals just fine, and anyone who earnestly complains about the rabbit thing gets politely informed of how many other towns and cities they could move to if they preferred.
It’s rare to see rabbits and hares using other forms of transport, though there’s certainly the occasional elderly rabbit lady rolling her grocery trolley onto the bus.
It’s not clear where Henrik got his bike, or why. He used to dash about like the rest of his kin. But one day, there he was: ringing his little bell, throwing his head back to let his ears trail behind him in the wind, infuriating the geese when he rode right down the middle of a large flock out for a walk. They popped their heads up along the road from the ditch where they’d leapt for safety and honked indignantly at him. He paid them no mind, or didn’t seem to; but after a few days of riding he got less disruptive, without ever seeming to pay more attention to where he was going.
A city adapts quickly to the quirks of its residents, and soon most people were used to the singular rabbit coasting down Alexanderplatz. It’s hard to begrudge someone an eccentricity when it makes them so happy.
What really draws attention is when other pedestrians start getting bitten by the bike bug.
The geese like to say that of course they would ride their bikes if they lived in Amsterdam where everybody does; but there’s always some reason they don’t see Berlin in the same light. It’s too large, probably, or maybe too small. Definitely too old, except that it would have been better before the major building overhauls of the nineteenth century. Inconveniently, back then the bicycle had yet to be invented. Such are the circular conversations of geese, up to the point they find someone to blame for something, and then they can happily honk away in a game of whose-fault one-upsmanship for hours.
And so a part of what they found so irritating, when Henrik started cycling all over the place, is that he proved it could be done. They wouldn’t have said it that way, but that was why they honked at him so loudly as he passed.
Of course, the geese could fly anywhere at any time they choose; but it turns out Berlin is the wrong city for them to do that, too, for reasons that make perfect sense to them whether or not they’re apparent to others. And so they flock together on foot, complaining about everyone who effortlessly does the things that they could easily have done themselves.
They do still swim, and raise their children largely on the water, which is logistically much harder than any of the transit options they disdain. But nobody has told them they ought to do that, and they don’t mind trouble if it’s of a goose-ish sort.
The adolescent gosling who doesn’t care for swimming, who maybe casts a wistful eye at Henrik going by, and who seems to be gone an awful lot these days, is at first something the geese just don’t talk about. But when he starts wheeling his own bike up to the family home and making it clear where he’s been, the geese are determined not to act surprised, or to admit that anything one of their children is doing could be strange. They fuss about it for a day and then agree that it takes all kinds, and you never know what ideas your children will pick up in the city nowadays, and of course it’s still quite unacceptable for a bike to disrupt the flock, but the modern world really is full of amazing things, isn’t it?
Nobody expects the really large animals to start biking. The tigers, rhinoceroses and the like simply seem too dignified for it, too austere and self-controlled. If questioned, many Berliners would have related a vague sense that those animals were too big for a bike, that the balance would be wrong, and bicycles weren’t really designed for such animals.
And it’s true that bikes aren’t often marketed that way. The bodies in the illustrations on the bike lane signs, the mascots for the bike stores, the animals showing up to support bike-friendly development at the community planning meetings, tend to be smaller creatures. They’re often weasels—skinny, lanky, and capable of the kind of flexibility that other creatures find almost unimaginable.
But, “Never mind the weasels!” shouts Niklaus, a full-grown adult hippopotamus with a bicycle to scale, whizzing past a café table of hippos in Neukölln who all look up from their coffees with an unmistakably wistful expression when they see him go by. He’s gone too fast to finish his sentence, so he loops back around and continues, “Come see me at Nilpferd Bikes!” and then, zooming past them one more time in his original direction, “I mean you might not like it! But also, you might! Don’t count yourself out!”
It takes them a while to admit they are interested in following his advice, but as the hippos sit there with their coffee they manage to talk each other into doing what they were all considering anyway. Niklaus sells bikes in all the sizes nobody thought existed. Big ones, for the animals everyone assumed couldn’t balance right; tiny ones for squirrels and rats and even tinier ones for mice, shrews, and voles; bikes with handlebars at the right height for wings, or short arms, or very long ones, or tree-trunk-like ones without opposable thumbs. He adjusts the pedals as needed, recommends the right tires for a large animal wanting to travel long distances or a small one who wants to zip around the city; he gives instructions on changing an inner tube and, perhaps most impressively of all, can tell a customer that the bike they’ve been riding this whole time is wrong for them, without ever suggesting that this means they were stupid to choose it.
No one could say for sure that it’s thanks to him that there are so many bicyclists in Berlin these days, zooming down the Kurfurstendamm, or having little races by the Wannsee, or leisurely pedaling in the Tiergarten. After all, he didn’t get all of them started.
And when you can be part of the rabbit-tiger-rhinoceros-hippo brigade having a ball on a Sunday afternoon—or offer a ride to Isabell Igel, the hedgehog who never thought about riding, who coasts downhill on Henrik’s bike having the time of her life—well, with rewards like that, no one needs to be thanked in words.