The Russian Passenger

by Gunter Ohnemus

  Luigi surveyed us all with an earnest expression. Any criminals among us?

  Everyone laughed.

  But it’s really fantastic, he said. Blacks and Asiatics, women and other Europeans. Racism, sexism and nationalism. When one of those three villains is hanging around, the other two won’t be far away.

  Bessie and Michael were entranced. Sonia and I were too. But Luigi had another little shocker in store for us.

  The bad thing, he said, the really bad thing is that we’re all racists. We’re all a trifle racist, if not more. It’s built into us, probably – built into the splendid human condition that’s always invoked so solemnly. We’re aware of it, that’s the only difference between us and other less intelligent people.

  Take me, for instance. A few weeks ago I watched a porn film about a Japanese woman. I’m pretty easily aroused in many respects, not because I’m an Italian, simply because I’m easily aroused – passionate by nature. Mind you, it’s always hard to distinguish between passion and hysteria, especially in Italy. There are probably just as many easily aroused people in Holland as in Italy. Or in Switzerland – who knows?

  But that’s beside the point. Anyway, it was a long time before I felt anything. Why? Because the woman was Japanese. Her face didn’t trigger anything inside me. No reaction. Things got better as the film went on. They probably made her face up differently – westernized it. The film may have been one of those subtle, subcutaneous propaganda films that blind us to the fact that we’re being converted. We’re manipulated in such a way that we come to accept the unacceptable. Fundamentally, I’m no better than Broca with his buckshot.

  Bessie was appalled. You call a Japanese woman unacceptable?

  Yes, in that film. I was alone with her, after all.

  And in real life?

  In real life I’d probably fail to notice her. We fail to notice ninety-nine per cent of people. Of course, that’s not so far removed from racism. Not long ago, one was always reading that Japanese on planes change places when they find themselves seated beside Europeans or Americans because the Long Noses – the Caucasians, as you call them in the States – smell bad.

  Bessie looked reassured. Reassured and thoughtful.

  Luigi turned to her with a melting gaze. Bessie, he said, don’t take me too seriously. I’m just a retired anarchist and bomber.

  * * *

  On the way home in the car Sonia said: Wasn’t it a bit risky, provoking her like that?

  No, Luigi replied from behind the wheel. Now she’ll want to argue with me. We’ll have a lot more to say to each other. But that wasn’t why I said that bit about Broca. I said it because it had just occurred to me. You have to needle the righteous now and then.

  We’ve got the passports, said Sonia.

  I could tell from your faces. We’re off the day after tomorrow. I’ve already booked your tickets. I paid for them with the credit card of a good friend of mine, by the way. A very good friend – so good that he’ll disappear into thin air if anyone comes looking for him. But everything’s paid for. Your hotel in LA is booked for four days. I wanted to rent a car for you as well, but that would be too dangerous. If you had an accident or got stopped at a roadblock, your Italian passports could land you in big trouble, Mr and Mrs Cameron. And you can’t rent a car yourselves because you won’t have any credit cards. You’ll have to use cabs or shuttle buses.

  I hadn’t thought of that.

  Credit cards are going to be a problem for you in any case, Luigi went on. You must never stay at any hotel longer than two days. People who pay substantial bills in cash are automatically suspect in the States, but you know that already. So you’ll have to move on pretty often.

  * * *

  The flight to Los Angeles passed off without any major incident. We were an American couple and most of our fellow passengers were Italian. We spoke English with them, We were civil but not too sociable. Sonia said little in case her accent gave her away. We completed our US citizens’ forms in the plane while the Italians filled in their own immigration forms. I helped our immediate neighbours with theirs.

  Los Angeles International Airport presented no problems either. We went through the gate reserved for US citizens. We were both very tense, and I was glad we’d divided the money into three. It meant we had less to carry. The black woman customs officer at the counter smiled at me and said: How was Italy, Mr Cameron?

  Great food, great wines, I said. But my wife was sick on the plane. I turned to Sonia, who had joined me at the counter. She really was looking pale. Poor baby, said the customs officer, giving her a sympathetic smile. It remained sympathetic even when she looked at Bessie Cameron’s passport photo.

  As we were walking down the long passage to reclaim our baggage Sonia came to a halt and hugged me. I was so scared, she whispered.

  Me too, I said.

  There were two customs officers with sniffer dogs in the baggage hall. The dogs were quite small. You always expect German shepherds in customs, but these were diminutive. They were probably searching for drugs. When our bags came into view on the conveyor belt like a pair of lifeboats, Sonia whispered: Do you think the dogs will smell the money?

  Everything here smells of dollars, I told her. They’re inured to it.

  The dogs gave our suitcases a brief sniff and trotted on, tails wagging. They didn’t even glance at us.

  A shuttle bus took us to the hotel. We had a shower, ordered some beer from room service, stretched out on the bed and waited for Luigi. He turned up three hours later, smiling broadly, with a suitcaseful of cash.

  You look like a million dollars in hundred-dollar bills, I said.

  Right, he said. Allow me to introduce myself: Signore Fabri from Bologna. Carlo Fabri.

  Sonia looked surprised. You travelled on a false passport?

  Like all the best people, Signora Camerone. There was a time when I didn’t possess a genuine passport, and I didn’t want to run any needless risks.

  Luigi, said Sonia, you’re a hero of the Underground. She gave him a hug and kissed him on both cheeks.

  There was a time, he said, when I wanted to be a hero of the working class. He went off to his room for a shower. Then we went and had a meal. After the meal we moved on to a bar and drank rather a lot of margaritas.

  I won’t be able to sleep otherwise, Luigi said, and I’ve got to fly back to Italy at midday tomorrow.

  The next morning we had breakfast together. Luigi didn’t want us to accompany him to the airport – he thought it too risky. You’ve been lucky up to now, he told us, but you mustn’t tempt providence. Airports can be dangerous. Steer clear of them.

  Sonia wanted to give him some money in return for all he’d done for us.

  You’ve paid me back for all I’ve spent on your behalf. What else do you owe me? I’ve just spent a few weeks with my favourite enemy. I still love him. He’s still the same, still sitting on a pile of unearned money.

  We all laughed. Luigi looked at Sonia. And I’ve spent a few weeks with you as well. I’d watch all the Japanese porn films ever made if you were in them. I mean, you wouldn’t have to play a leading role. It’d be enough if you walked across the street in some scene or other. I think blue movies attach too little importance to exterior shots in any case.

  Sonia kissed him. Racist, she said.

  Just before getting into the shuttle outside the hotel, he turned and said: I doubt if we’ll see each other again, but if you ever pay another visit to Italy, the first thing we’ll do is drink a cappuccino at the café in La Pesta.

  After the next Ice Age, I said.

  Sure, he said. And I’d so much have liked to found a commune with the two of you. I always detested the commune lifestyle, but with you, who knows?

  After the next Ice Age, said Sonia, and Luigi set off on the return journey to Bessie and Michael Cameron, whom we would never see again either.

  * * *

  We stayed at our hotel for the prescribed four days. On the fifth
day we called the Holiday Inn at Brentwood, booked a room, and took a cab there. The Holiday Inn is only a few hundred yards from the new Getty Museum. The hotel, which is a fairly tall high-rise of twenty-odd floors, looks ultramodern from a distance and utterly frightful at close range. There’s an outdoor pool which isn’t particularly beautiful either, but you can smoke there. They also have rooms for smokers, but I can’t stand the smell in them.

  When we checked into the hotel and were about to go up to our room, an oldish man of sixty or so was standing beside the elevator, desperately fiddling with his suitcase. I left my keys behind in Chicago, he said. It seemed he was an Italian businessman with a second home there. I need my suit, he said, almost hysterically. I’ve got a business dinner tonight.

  I tried to open his suitcase with the keys of our own suitcase, but no luck.

  The Italian businessman was still there when we came down half an hour later, but a hotel employee of Mexican appearance was working on the suitcase with a kind of jemmy. He wore a smart black mechanic’s overall whose fifty or so pockets bristled with gleaming, impressive-looking tools. They hadn’t been much use, obviously, hence his resort to the jemmy. I extracted one of the impressive-looking tools from a pocket, and two minutes later the suitcase was open. We specialize in burglary in Europe, I told the Mexican. The Italian thanked me, and Sonia and I took a cab to Santa Monica.

  The next morning, when we went to have breakfast in the upstairs restaurant, the Italian and a business associate were breakfasting together. At least, they looked like business associates. Both were wearing smart suits and ties. The Italian, who was now the opposite of yesterday’s bundle of nerves, came over to our table. He thanked me again and introduced himself.

  My name is Fabri.

  Fabri? I said. Not Carlo Fabri from Bologna?

  No, he said, Giovanni Fabri from Milan. I divide my time between there and Chicago, but I have a cousin who’s based in Bologna. His name is Carlo.

  I shut my eyes for an instant and Luigi’s face appeared. He winked at me.

  I looked at Giovanni Fabri from Milan and Chicago and winked at him too. He winked back. Carlo Fabri from Bologna was evidently the kind of man that prompted one to wink at the mention of his name.

  When we were alone again Sonia said: Did he wink at you too?

  Who? I asked. Signore Fabri?

  No, she said, Luigi.

  It was the same with Ellen. Ellen often saw things she couldn’t possibly have seen. Things that only went on in my head. It happened again and again. I still remember the train journey we took when I’d won my first and only prize for literature. We travelled to northern Germany together because Ellen wanted to take the opportunity to visit her parents. Ellen wasn’t particularly interested in the literary scene, but if it could be combined with a visit to her parents, that was okay. We sat facing each other in the train, talking and reading by turns. At some stage I simply sat there, staring into space without focusing my gaze on anything in particular, and I pictured myself saying hello to a member of the jury whom I much admired but had never met. I suddenly became aware that Ellen was looking at me and smiling. Who did you just say hello to? she asked.

  Ellen could look at the tips of my toes and guess what I was thinking.

  And now Sonia had seen Luigi giving me a farewell wink.

  This Kovalevskaya woman is growing on me, I said.

  She smiled. We aren’t Sonia Kovalevskaya and Harry Willemer any more. We’ve got serviceable Italian passports and our names are Raimondo Vinciguerra and Concetta Berlingeri.

  Concetta, I said. I like that.

  Vinciguerra isn’t bad either. After all, we’ve been winning up to now.

  Wednesday

  We can’t stay in this place, Sonia said over dinner in Santa Monica. It’s no good, always having to take taxis, never being able to walk anywhere. We even had to take the shuttle to the museum when it was only a stone’s throw away. We need some place with a decent public transport system.

  She was quite right. Los Angeles can be a very exciting city when you know people and don’t have to spend the whole time in public places. The trouble was, we couldn’t afford to get to know anyone, and downtown LA is as dead at night as any one-horse town. You could introduce driving on the left and no one would notice.

  So San Francisco is the name of the game, I said.

  Yep, said Sonia. We had spent a lot of the time in LA watching television, and she was learning fast.

  And that’s the game we’re going to play right now, she went on. San Francisco’s public transport is as good as Munich’s, so I’ve heard.

  We took a cab to Union Station and caught a train to Oakland. Trains were safer than buses. On a train we could always get away somehow. At least a couple of carriages away.

  This place looks like a church, Sonia said at Union Station. A tower, round arches, marble flooring. When you catch a train here you feel the entire world is holy and full of secrets. In Petersburg the subway stations are like churches too, like magnificent churches, but I never felt that they led to the outside world – that the world was holy. To me the world seemed bleak and dangerous and hostile.

  When we got to Oakland we called a hotel in San Francisco and booked a room. Then we took a cab across Bay Bridge. I was apprehensive of what awaited us. We were entirely dependent on ourselves. There were just the two of us, and because we couldn’t spend all day walking the streets, we would have to move from one hotel room to another until we found some place where we could live. A house or an apartment. But that might take ages. Meantime, the “game” meant taking a drab room in a different hotel every two or three days.

  We would take our dirty washing to a Chinese laundry every week. My shirts would be ironed, we would have visited all the museums and seen all the movies, and still we wouldn’t be truly alive. This had nothing to do with the Mafia. The Mafia was an additional factor. We would probably get on each other’s nerves, that was the worst thing about this state of isolation. Yes, it wouldn’t be long before we’d genuinely have visited all the museums and seen all the movies – and there weren’t that many interesting movies in any case. As for concerts, it ruins the evening if you have to go back to a hotel room you loathe like a prison cell.

  We had to do something, take the initiative, start to live again. We had all that money, and we couldn’t do anything with it. Nothing much, anyway. We were like a couple of dogs standing guard over a pile of money. For no good reason.

  * * *

  On our third day in San Francisco I bought myself a laptop and a pack of diskettes, and Sonia found an interesting game in a gift shop in the Castro district, where the gays live in a clean, relaxed, pretty, not particularly exciting little community of their own. The shop sold Buddhist devotional articles, and Sonia found this drawing set there. Using a brush and special watercolours, you paint something on a sheet of paper – characters of some kind or a mountain, Fuji perhaps – and when the picture is finished it gradually disappears, until after a few minutes the paper is as blank as it was in the first place. The idea, I suppose, is to meditate on some picture you’ve painted in the knowledge that it will soon disappear for good.

  Sonia was absolutely delighted with this, and now, as we have for the last four weeks or so, we often spend several hours a day painting and writing in our endless succession of hotel rooms. Sonia sits in front of the picture she has just painted, engrossed in its gradual reversion to a blank sheet, while I sit at the table or on the bed or window sill and write what I’m writing now. I don’t possess a printer, of course, and if anything happens to the laptop it’s possible that all I’ve written will vanish like the black characters and pictures on Sonia’s drawing paper.

  We write and paint and read and make long excursions into the city and go to movies or concerts. We talk a lot and smile at each other across the table during meals like two people who have just got to know each other and are gradually falling in love, and one day I told Sonia about J
essie, making it sound as if Jessie had been the daughter of some friends of mine. I told her about Jessie and the eighteen months the three of us spent in England. Jessie was four or five at the time, and I told Sonia how it was when she learnt English, how quick she was, and how at first, when she was lying alone in bed at night, she would make noises that sounded like English but weren’t proper words. Already half asleep, she would quite instinctively alter the set of her mouth to accommodate sounds that might have been English. All those long, drawling vowels – way-wee-why-woe-woo – and all those short ones – bat-bet-bit-bot-but … One evening, when we were back in Munich, we watched a Western on television together. She was sitting on my lap – she always sat on someone’s lap when she watched television. Two of the characters in the Western had just fallen in love and exchanged a kiss, and Jessie looked up at me and asked, in English: Are they an item now?

  Sonia chuckled at this anecdote as we sat there in the restaurant looking like two people who have just got to know each other and are slowly falling in love.

  Are we an item now? she said with a laugh, knowing that we weren’t.

  Maybe, I said, knowing – sensing – that our relationship was steadily congealing.

  We no longer made love. The last time we did, we had just become Bessie and Michael Cameron and Sonia had pulled me under the shower with her. No, I’m wrong, the last time was in the sea. Now, here in San Francisco, she put her hand on mine and said: What’s to be done about Raimondo Vinciguerra and Concetta Berlingeri? What can we do to make them an item?

  I don’t know, Sonia. Let’s go.

  We’re like a pair of ghosts, she said when we were outside in the street. Two ghosts that are slowly but steadily fading away. It hurts when you fade away. We’ve had such a good meal and you told me such nice stories about that little girl, yet I hurt all over. I feel as if I’m slowly dissolving in the pain.

  Thursday

  That was yesterday. Sonia has just gone to the cinema again. I didn’t even ask her what film she was going to, I’m so benumbed. And that in the city where I was born a second time. Many years ago, when I was sixteen or seventeen. Yes, it was true what I told Sonia in Passau: that I’d gone to America for romance – that I made the perfect knight errant. They sent me to San Francisco, and there was black-eyed Susannah with her dark red hair, so dark that the red was just another form of black, and the Drifters sang Save the Last Dance for Me at a high school party, and we were just two teenagers in the middle of the sixties, and Susannah shook out her long hair, and a flock of blackbirds soared into the sky, and I wanted to see those blackbirds take wing again and again. Three months earlier, it seemed like the day before yesterday, I had been just another European youngster, a model-aeroplane-building youngster with two zits on his face, and now I wanted nothing better than to see those blackbirds take wing again and again. I wanted to die in that hair.