The Russian Passenger

by Gunter Ohnemus

  One of the trio stuck a page showing a naked girl on my window, then looked at me. I pulled it off and held it out. Here, I said, take it.

  He grinned. Why?

  Not my type.

  By now the other two were standing beside my seat. I fished out my wallet and proffered a fifty-mark note. Take that, I told them, and go and sit somewhere else. And leave the other passengers alone.

  That’s not enough, one of them said. Nothing like enough.

  Give us your mobile, said another.

  I didn’t have one with me, but I said: It’s in my bag. I took my bag down from the rack, slowly unzipped it, very slowly took out my gun, and whispered so the other passengers couldn’t hear: Go and sit down over there.

  All four seats on the other side of the aisle were unoccupied. They duly sat down. You’re getting out at Eisenach, I added.

  But we need our things.

  You, I told one of them in a low voice, go round the carriage and take those pictures down – and apologize to people at the same time. You can collect your things after that.

  This is like a spaghetti Western, said one of the two who were still sitting down.

  Sure, I said. We’re taking a little trip down memory lane – and you’re the bad guys.

  I was starting to enjoy myself. Lucky Sonia wasn’t there to see me. The other youth was taking down the pictures. He went round the carriage mumbling that it had all been a joke.

  When he’d sat down next to the others he asked: Are you a cop?

  No, I said, I’m a gangster. I always offer skinheads fifty marks. That’s my contribution to German unity. If they won’t accept it, I chuck them off the train. Now take off your boots, I added.

  They started to protest, but I merely stared at their boots. They removed them.

  At Eisenach I threw them off the train. That’s to say, they jumped out on to the platform one after the other. Not much fun in bare feet.

  Now stand outside my window till the train leaves, I said.

  What about our boots? asked one of them.

  No one’ll steal them, they smell too bad.

  When the train pulled out I watched them until they were out of sight.

  Oh, Sonia Kovalevskaya, you really would have blown a fuse if you’d seen me. I had no choice, though. They would never have left me in peace.

  * * *

  In Frankfurt I failed to get a couchette on the train to Milan, so I had to try to sleep sitting up. When we reached Lugano at six a.m. a German woman sat down in the seat opposite me. Berlin publisher, East German background, bound for Milan. Very intellectual. I told her I was a tennis coach at a holiday hotel in Sicily, and she told me about her work. At some stage she began to tell me about an American author whose latest novel she had managed to acquire for an advance of one thousand dollars.

  A mere pittance, I said.

  She didn’t agree. In her opinion, authors should think themselves lucky that anyone took an interest in them and agreed to publish their books. They ought to be grateful for the appreciation. It took me some time to explain to her that, under the capitalist system, appreciation expressed itself in terms of hard cash, and that there was nothing outrageous or contemptible about this.

  Given that many authors get advances of ten or fifty or a hundred thousand dollars or even more, I said, it’s no mark of appreciation if you publish someone for an advance of a thousand dollars. That thousand dollars is a mark of supreme contempt. The absolute minimum. A slap in the face. You might at least have made it five thousand. Or even three.

  She looked offended. I don’t think she had the first idea what I was getting at. I’m really glad I’m not a writer any more.

  We both got out at Milan. The publisher because she was probably going to pick up an Italian author on the cheap, and I because I had to change trains for Genoa. Before I boarded the train I called Sonia and Luigi. I told them I would be in Grosseto at 2.06 p.m., barring any delays. It was then eight a.m.

  I was relieved to be on my own again. I looked out of the window and thought of Sonia and Luigi. For the first time in ages, two decades or more, I had the sensation of going home. Pavia, Tortona, Genoa, where I changed trains for the last time. Rapallo, Sestri Levante, La Spezia (one of my favourite places), Pisa, Livorno, Follonica. Finally, Grosseto. I felt exhilarated. My last homecoming had been a return to Ellen and Jessie, some time in 1975. And now, once again, someone was waiting for me – someone I looked forward to seeing. It was almost as if I had a future. I felt something akin to happiness. Happiness at the thought of pulling into Grosseto station.

  They were standing on the platform when the train arrived.

  I’ve been looking back at the beginning of this file because my mental picture of Sonia and Luigi standing on the platform at Grosseto has just reminded me of something. Yes, that’s what I wrote about the Mafia right at the start: that they wanted Sonia back. Sonia, the girl, the woman, who was with me. Sonia isn’t a girl, she’s thirty-eight years old, but that’s what I wrote. It wasn’t so wrong, either. When I got out of the train and she caught sight of me, she ran along the platform like a girl. Like a young girl, almost a child. She was wearing a dark blue summer dress with a black belt. I ran towards her and we exchanged a breathless hug. I was home. For a few moments I was home. And, when Luigi arrived on the scene and all three of us hugged each other simultaneously, I was home yet again.

  Luigi said: I’m sure you did a lot of silly things in East Germany.

  Yes, I said. More than you’ll ever know.

  * * *

  We stopped in La Pesta on the way home. We sat outside the café and swapped accounts of what had happened in the last two days, playing corny pop songs on the jukebox while we talked. I didn’t disclose all that had happened to me, because the other two were appalled enough to hear that I’d checked into a hotel in Erfurt.

  Harry! said Sonia.

  Did you kill someone else? asked Luigi.

  I don’t think so, I said. If I did, we’ll read about it in the papers in the next few days. At least no one will think we’re in Italy any more.

  The German newspapers we bought in the next few days didn’t mention the man I’d left with a towel wound round his head. The Mafia had doubtless done a discreet tidying-up job. He must have survived.

  The American colony hadn’t changed much in my absence. A new couple from Massachusetts had arrived, but they were too old for their passports to be of interest to us.

  On the night of my return Sonia and I lay side by side for a long time, quite still, holding hands. We often lay in bed like that. I thought of those three skinheads in the train and what would have happened if I hadn’t had a gun with me – what would have happened if they’d attacked me regardless. I would probably have opened fire on them. Yes, I felt quite sure of it. Not that they would have been any great loss. Sonia was right. They were pit bulls – repulsive warts on the face of the new Germany. Even so, it sickened me to think I would have shot them.

  We’re not going to die, I told Sonia in the darkness. We’re going to get out of this somehow. But I don’t want that gun any more.

  If we fly to America, she said, we won’t be able to take it with us in any case. But till then you must keep it. We must protect ourselves.

  A girl … That’s what I wrote right at the start. She was one, too. I pictured her again on the platform, recalling how she’d run towards me in her blue summer dress and how we both, for a few brief moments, felt at home when we embraced. At home with one another. But then, in my head, I once more heard those terrible words of consolation from Leningrad: We all have to die in the end, don’t be frightened.

  When I quit my flat and gave or threw away everything I owned, I went down to the river and burnt my mother’s diaries as well as all my manuscripts and letters and photos. When they were alight I tried to save them, but it was too late. It was as if I had obliterated her. Tess had noted down so many things that mattered. For instance, her feeling of hap
piness just before an epileptic fit. Life has nothing finer to offer, she had written – I still remember it. It’s paradise. A boundless, entirely abstract feeling of happiness, devoid of object and motivation. And then came the words she sometimes, laughingly, spoke aloud: I’m an epileptic Buddhist. No, that was no joke. Perhaps it’s really true that happiness is merely an explosion in the brain – or, perhaps for Tess, the moments preceding the explosion.

  But for me it was just an explosion – a terrifying explosion. Once, just once, I was alone with my mother when she had a seizure. I was eight or nine years old. There was usually someone in the house apart from my mother. One of my grandparents or our housekeeper, Marie, or Franz, who was a kind of business manager. But on this particular day my mother and I were alone together. It was around noon when she had the fit. We were sitting in the kitchen, talking, and suddenly it started. She collapsed on the kitchen’s hard, flagstoned floor and I screamed and screamed. I knew I mustn’t restrain her, so I simply went on screaming. Then, still screaming, I raced upstairs and fetched the duvet and pillows from her bed and piled them up around her because I knew she needed something soft to lie on, and then I raced upstairs again and fetched the pillows and duvets from the two guest rooms and the bedroom where my grandparents slept when they were spending the night with us. My mother lay in the middle of our vast kitchen in a big white cocoon – everything around her was soft and white – and I lay down beside her. I wasn’t screaming any longer. I just looked at her and wept. I don’t know how long for, but at some stage I must have fallen asleep.

  It was dark when I awoke, and my grandmother, who had turned the light on, was standing in the doorway. Wide-eyed with horror, she stared at the two of us lying side by side on the kitchen floor, cocooned in pillows and duvets. She probably thought we’d both had a fit. It’s happened at last! she was probably thinking. He’s started it too! But then she must have realized how the bedclothes had got there, and she smiled at me. You look like a couple of skaters trapped in pack ice, she said, and she picked me up and hugged me very tight.

  * * *

  After I was born Tess regularly made notes about me and how I was developing. When I was six months old she wrote: He looks at me with a thoroughly lucid expression and seems to understand all I say. Today I told him: It’s time you started telling me things.

  That was pretty much what I thought when Jessie was roughly the same age. It’s time you started telling me things. I remember only a few passages from my mother’s diaries, but there’s one story I still recall. Once, when I was four or five and had been admitted to hospital with a high temperature and everyone was afraid I wouldn’t survive, she wrote down a Buddhist story in her diary. It was about a young woman whose little boy died when he had only just learnt to walk. In utter despair, she took her dead son on her back and went from house to house, begging for some medicine that would restore him to life. Everyone said: She’s crazy – she’s gone mad. But someone sent the girl to Buddha, the one person who might be able to help her. Buddha promised to bring her son back to life by means of a ritual. For that, he said, he would need a handful of mustard seed, but it had to come from a house in which no one had ever died. The girl hurried back to the village at once. She went from house to house, door to door, but soon discovered that there was no house, no family, in which no one had ever died. Realizing that death is inescapable, she burnt her son’s body, went back to Buddha, and asked him to admit her to his order.

  Ellen and I when Jessie was buried. When we walked the streets in silence all day long. When Ellen collapsed, sank into the ground. It was as if Tess had written that story down for us. But we’re no Buddhists. We continue to go from door to door in search of those mustard seeds, looking for a family where no one has ever died and wishing we belonged to it.

  What did you say, Harry?

  I must have said something while lying in the darkness at Sonia’s side, but I didn’t know what it could have been, so I said: We’re not going to die. We’re going to get out of this somehow.

  Yes, she said. Maybe you’re right. Let’s hope so.

  Saturday

  We occasionally played beach tennis with an American couple from Connecticut. Bessie and Michael Cameron. We’d brought the equipment from one of the black immigrants who peddle their wares on Italian beaches while their wives toil away picking up truck drivers.

  We’re off in three days, Luigi had told us the day before. To Los Angeles. The bad news is, no charter flight. Seems we Italians can’t get cheapies to California. So it’s three tickets on scheduled flights. I hope you can afford them – even four million dollars won’t last for ever. I’ve already booked your seats in Bessie and Michael’s names. Rome to Los Angeles, so get hold of those passports. I’ll be flying from Rome to LA via London. We take off almost at the same time, ten and twenty minutes to eight. That’s eight in the morning. We’ll have to split the money between three bags. One each. If one of the planes crashes, at least there’ll be a bit left over.

  Luigi’s smile can look positively evil sometimes. You must have those passports by tomorrow night, he said.

  Bessie and Michael bore a reasonable resemblance to us. Once, down at the beach, I tried Michael’s baseball cap on. Sonia looked at me and nodded approvingly. I watched Bessie and Michael playing. No, they certainly wouldn’t be needing any passports in the next six days. They wanted to drink wine and eat well and go for strolls and sunbathe and play an occasional game of beach tennis. And Luigi would be bringing the passports back in a few days’ time. By then we would be well established in Los Angeles.

  The next morning we went to two wine tastings. Luigi came too – after all, he had to meet the couple. We planned to spend the afternoon at the beach. On the way back to town I complained so bitterly about the heat, saying I simply had to go home and take a shower, that Michael said: You don’t have to go home, you can take a shower at our hotel.

  Luigi said goodbye outside the hotel. Sonia and I asked for two towels from reception and we all went up to the Camerons’ room and dumped our things.

  You two take a shower, said Michael. We’ll wait in the bar downstairs and have a cappuccino.

  While Sonia was showering I searched the couple’s rucksacks. I took the passports from their wallets and examined them. Excellent. They were classically poor passport photos. Only an absolute pedant would look at them twice. I put the passports in my own rucksack.

  Hello, Mrs Cameron, I said when Sonia emerged from the shower.

  Hello, Mr Cameron, she said. Don’t you think you’ve been neglecting your wife a bit? American girls are very sensitive in that respect.

  But I haven’t had a shower yet. American girls are very sensitive in that respect as well.

  We can soon fix that, she said, and pulled me under the shower.

  * * *

  Later on, down at the beach, we watched Bessie and Michael wade ashore hand in hand. Don’t you think you’re neglecting your wife a bit? Sonia whispered. She jumped up and ran down to the water’s edge, and I ran after her.

  We were far out, but we could still stand. I held her in my arms, and something inside me said: If only it could all be for real. And Sonia said: I really don’t want to leave here.

  There isn’t any Europe for us, I said. Not any more. Not for a long time. Maybe never again.

  That evening the five us went out for dinner. Luigi had reappeared. He was on excellent form. Oh, Europe! he said at one point. Europe is full of resentment and racism.

  America too, said Bessie. The native Americans, the blacks, the Jews…

  And the whites, Luigi said with a laugh. For a while it used to be fashionable to discredit dead white males. Plato, Aristotle, Einstein. Not so long ago – only the day before yesterday, so to speak. But the savages are no better.

  Bessie and Michael stared at him in dismay.

  No, no, don’t let’s be nasty to dead white males. While we’re on the subject of racism, one of my favourite dead whit
e males was Broca. Pierre Paul Broca, know who I mean? Died around 1880, co-founded the Anthropological Society of Paris. He was a serious scientist. Among other things, he located the part of the brain that controls the faculty of speech. He was also a believer in cranial content. He measured it by filling the empty skulls he was studying with shot. With lead pellets! It was really very ingenious. He tried to discover a relationship between intelligence, the size of the skull, and the weight of the brain. This wasn’t too difficult, because he knew in advance that whites were superior to blacks and Asiatics, men to women, and Frenchmen to other Europeans – especially the Germans, of course.

  Luigi looked at me and smiled. Swiss Germans excepted, naturally. But the Germans proved to be a problem. Broca discovered that they had bigger brains than the French. His explanation: Germans were physically stronger than Frenchmen, so they had bigger skulls. Where women were concerned, he didn’t attribute their relative frailty to skull content, or there would have been no further excuse for denying them access to higher education. Man’s age-old, atavistic fear of woman.

  However, Broca really ran into difficulties when he found that the skulls of criminals and native Alaskans held more shot than those of genuine Parisians. He found himself in even deeper intellectual water when measurements taken at a morgue near the Seine revealed that the skulls of the corpses there were also pretty capacious. This he ascribed to the fact that the majority of the morgue’s occupants had been drowned and most were suicides, many of them doubtless insane, and Broca had long known that many lunatics and criminals have brains of larger than average size. Apart from that, of course, the French were the race whose skulls held the largest quantity of shot. And besides, the rest were French lunatics and criminals.