The Russian Passenger

by Gunter Ohnemus

  I pulled up a few yards away from the pair and watched them. And, of course, it instantly occurred to me that Jessie could have been that girl. I always think, when I see a girl or young woman who appeals to me, that she could have been Jessie. In the case of the girl on the bridge, though, that was impossible. She was sixteen or seventeen, perhaps, and Jessie would then have been twenty-eight.

  While the girl and boy were looking down at the tramps, half a dozen smartly dressed riders approached the bridge at a leisurely trot, wearing hard black riding hats. Suddenly the girl took a camera from her little rucksack – yes, I think she had a rucksack with her – and said to the boy: Hey, now we’ll get some really terrific sociocritical pix – members of the upper crust riding past a bunch of tramps with their noses in the air!

  The horsemen slowed as they neared the tramps, rode straight up to them, and then reined in. After exchanging a few words, they dismounted and sat down, and the tramps fetched some cans of beer from the River Isar, where they’d been left to cool, and put them down on the table in front of the riders.

  Cool! said the girl. Then she said: But this is much harder to photograph. We’ll have to come back tomorrow.

  I was terribly happy when she said that: We’ll have to come back tomorrow. Her life still held so many days in store, and there was still so much to discover. Yes. Yes, that girl was Jessie even though she couldn’t possibly have been, and I stood watching her like a tutelary spirit. I think sheer happiness had made me genuinely invisible – at all events, the pair of them hadn’t noticed me. I was like a guardian angel watching over them. They should really have noticed me, and sometimes I think it was all just a dream, and those kids existed as little as Jessie does.

  I looked at Sonia in the rear-view mirror when we were a little way beyond Wittelsbach Bridge. Our eyes met, and I half turned to her and said, smiling like a guardian angel: If you’re wondering whether we’re being followed, we aren’t.

  How do you know? she said. Anyway, what makes you so sure I think someone’s following us?

  I go to the cinema from time to time, I told her. I’ve seen all the relevant films. And I’m a taxi driver, in case you hadn’t noticed.

  She laughed, completely relaxed for a moment or two. It would never have occurred to me that she could be Russian. And now it’s as if that moment in the taxi, when Sonia sat laughing on the back seat and relaxed for a moment or two, was the last thing I remember of Munich. That and the kids on the bridge, who may not – for all I know – have existed at all.

  Yes, those two things were the last I saw of Munich, not that I knew it at the time. I didn’t know I would never return.

  When we’d driven along the autobahn for a while, I asked Sonia: What are you scared of?

  I’m not scared, she said.

  That’s what they all say, I said.

  Okay, she said, I’m scared I’m being followed, and that people will find out where I’m flying to.

  So where are you flying to?

  I could tell she wanted to tell me to mind my own business, but she said: Luxembourg.

  Oh, Luxembourg, I said. To withdraw some cash?

  Drop it, she said.

  If you fly there, I said, they can easily find out where you’re going. It’s all recorded. Had you thought of that?

  She didn’t answer, and I said nothing more for a while, but I could see in the mirror that she was thinking hard. And that she was very frightened.

  When we passed the Garching exit I said: If I drive you to Luxembourg, no one will know where you’ve gone.

  She thought this over. Then she said: Surely it would cost a lot?

  I said: To someone with so much money she has to go to Luxembourg to withdraw it, a taxi fare is neither here nor there.

  She didn’t reply.

  Okay, I said, I’ll drive you to Luxembourg and back for the price of a return ticket.

  I don’t need a return ticket, she said.

  Oh, I said, so it’s like that.

  I suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to drive to Luxembourg. I can’t tell why this was so. I could say it was the memory of those two youngsters on Wittelsbach Bridge, whose guardian angel I was, but I don’t know if it’s true. I only know I wanted to persuade that young woman to let me drive her to Luxembourg, simply because it was safer. I think my interest in the operation was purely technical. At the Eching exit I said: Well, how about it?

  She thought awhile, and I helped her a bit. I’ll drive you there for the price of a single ticket, I said.

  She thought awhile longer, and we were almost at the interchange when she said: All right, drive me to Luxembourg. I briefly debated whether to drive on in the direction of Nuremberg and then turn west, or whether to take the Stuttgart autobahn. I sometimes find it hard to get my bearings, which is unusual in a taxi driver. We’d almost passed the exit and driven on towards Nuremberg when I pulled off sharply to the right because the Stuttgart route struck me as being shorter after all. We shimmied a bit, and the tyres squealed. A few of the drivers behind us sounded their horns. I saw them gesticulate behind their windscreens.

  My God! Sonia exclaimed.

  Don’t worry, I said, I’ve seen all the relevant films.

  When we’d driven on for a few miles and Sonia had calmed down, she said: But shouldn’t you get back to your family?

  I don’t have a family, I said. I don’t even have a cat any more. I could absent myself from Munich for a whole year and no one would miss me. When I’m away there’s just one less taxi in the city. Otherwise, no change.

  I don’t have a family either, said Sonia.

  So who are you running away from?

  She said nothing for a while, then: My name is Kovalevskaya, by the way. Sonia. Sonia Kovalevskaya, I mean, and I would be missed. I’m running away from some people who are either missing me right now or won’t, with luck, miss me till tomorrow or the day after.

  My name’s Harry Willemer, I told her. Are you from Poland?

  No, she said.

  I’d have been surprised, I said. You don’t have a trace of a Polish accent.

  She laughed. Would you recognize a Polish accent?

  Well, I said, I’d recognize a Slav accent of any kind.

  I was born in Leningrad, she said. I ought by rights to have a Russian accent, but I lived in East Germany as a child. My father was an officer in the Red Army. A general.

  Ah, Leningrad, I said, the city of many names. St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, and now St Petersburg again. Built by a barbarian who tortured his son to death.

  She winced when I said the word “tortured”: You say that as if you think all Russians are barbarians.

  I’m sorry, I said. I didn’t mean that.

  It doesn’t matter, she said. Peter the Great was a barbarian who tortured his son to death. Or at least, he watched his son being flogged to death, that’s absolutely true, and two hundred thousand labourers died while he was building the city. And sixty years ago a million people died while it was being besieged by some other barbarians.

  So now we’re quits, I said.

  We’re quits, she said. It’s a wonderful, accursed city.

  Even so, I said, you’ve opted for the German name again. St Petersburg.

  She smiled. Unpredictable folk, these Russians.

  You went back to St Petersburg after East Germany? I asked.

  Yes, she said, after seven years. A few years later I went back to East Germany again.

  As a grown-up, you mean, I said.

  She laughed. Yes, a grown-up secret agent.

  Aha, I said, very frank of you. What do you do in Munich?

  I represent a Russian firm.

  Import–export?

  No, she said, blood and iron. Her big eyes regarded me in the rear-view mirror. Drugs and cigarettes. Counterfeiting and money-laundering. Women and children. Torture and death.

  I see, I said. You really are being frank. Then I said: And what’s your speciality?


  I shouldn’t have said that. She looked utterly horrified. I’ve never harmed anyone, she said. Harmed them physically, I mean, and I’ve never stolen anything either. All I do is handle financial transactions – minor financial transactions. The petty cash, as you call it.

  This petty cash, I said, doesn’t it come from drugs and trafficking in human beings?

  Sure, she said, that’s why I’m sitting here now. But that’s not so interesting. What interests me far more is why you’re sitting here. You don’t look as if you’ve always done this for a living.

  I haven’t, I told her. I was a writer before I drove a cab.

  She thought it extremely funny that someone should have been a writer before becoming a taxi driver. You used to be a writer and now you drive a taxi, she said. Usually it’s the other way round, isn’t it? People start out as taxi drivers, janitors, undertaker’s assistants or petrol-pump attendants, and then they become writers. You really put the cart before the horse. How did it happen? Weren’t you a success?

  That wouldn’t have mattered so much, I said. There came a time when I found I couldn’t write any more.

  That sounds very mysterious.

  It isn’t mysterious, I said. It’s private, that’s all.

  I apologize, she said. Then she smiled. I didn’t mean to invade your space.

  No need to apologize. It isn’t such a private decision, really, becoming a taxi driver. How were you to know it was different for me?

  She looked at me with a mistrustful smile – with that mistrustful Russian smile that says: Nothing in this world is the way it looks. You automatically feel like a conman when someone gives you a smile like that. In recent years I’ve driven Russians around at least once a week, and nearly all of them had the same mistrustful smile. Perhaps it’s inevitable when liberation means you’ve exchanged the KGB for the Mafia. The one Russian I didn’t see smile like that was a man of around forty. As one of the quota of Russian Jews imported into Germany by the Kohl government, he was faced with a problem: the Jewish community he wanted to join insisted that he and his two sons should be circumcised. He was genuinely dismayed, because he didn’t feel he could ask this of his children. He himself was prepared to be circumcised, but his children? No, they must decide for themselves – after all, they now lived in a free country. He was completely at a loss, but he smiled – except that his smile wasn’t a mistrustful Russian smile; it was a forlorn smile. They can’t expect it of me, he kept saying. You can’t tell two boys of fifteen and sixteen to let someone snip a bit of that off. They really can’t expect it of me.

  The worst of those Russian importees was an oldish, stoutish woman who told me precisely how she planned to get her daughter and granddaughter to follow her. Her son-in-law, who commanded a nuclear submarine, could stay in Russia as far as she was concerned. He was just a burden, she said. They were probably averse to taking him along because he might have been contaminated, and anyway, they wanted to start a new life in Germany. Besides, that would have spared them any circumcision problems. All the time she was outlining her plan to me, she smiled in that insidious, mistrustful way. It’s the most repulsive kind of smile there is. If you spend too much time with such people, you can’t help smiling mistrustfully yourself.

  I don’t think you’re a Jewess at all, I told the plump woman.

  Only God knows that, she said, smirking like someone who has decided exactly how much God is allowed to know – someone who has got it all worked out. They don’t even trust their own God. If they have one.

  All Sonia has in common with such people is that smile. Nothing else. She doesn’t even have a Russian accent in German. All the same, that smile sometimes bothers me a bit. It reminds me of that odious woman who didn’t want to take her contaminated son-in-law along. If it had been up to her, he and his submarine would never have surfaced again. Sonia sometimes becomes that woman for an instant. But only for an instant.

  Meantime, I kept watching her in the rear-view mirror. Our eyes occasionally met, and we smiled the way one does on such occasions. Sonia has dark brown bobbed hair and eyes verging on black, and that day in my taxi she was wearing a green dress. She looked pretty sexy. Very far removed from someone who leaves her son-in-law to rot aboard a nuclear submarine.

  Women didn’t interest me any more, and even in the old days I wasn’t interested in women more than a few months younger than myself. That’s just the way it was. Like a law of nature. But in my taxi that day I enjoyed looking at Sonia, nothing more. Our eyes continued to meet in the mirror.

  How old are you? I asked her.

  Oh, she said, thirty-eight.

  Jessie would then have been thirty-two. Jessie’s eyes were grey.

  Wouldn’t you like to sit up front? I asked, watching her in the mirror.

  Why? she said. You can see me far better back here.

  We both laughed, and she said: I’m a dangerous Russian, after all.

  But it’s safer up front, I told her. With the airbags, I mean.

  Fine, she said. That’s just the kind of safety I need.

  I pulled into the next rest area. We stretched our legs for a bit, then she got into the passenger seat. Better like that? she asked. Safer?

  Well, yes, I said. At least we got rid of that Russian agent in the back.

  When we were out on the autobahn again she asked if I would be driving straight back to Munich or staying overnight. I was planning to spend half a day in Luxembourg because I’d never been there before and wanted to take a look around.

  She said: If I pay you the price of a return ticket, not just a single, could you stay a few hours longer and do me a favour?

  Her plan was quite simple. She owned a small flat in Luxembourg, and I was to fetch two suitcases from the basement of the block, then meet her in a restaurant on the outskirts of the city and hand them over.

  What’s in the suitcases? I asked. Drugs? Guns? A nuclear warhead? I wanted no truck with drugs or guns. I’m all in favour of decriminalizing drugs because it would simplify a lot of things, but dealing in them is quite another matter.

  The suitcases are empty, she said.

  So all I have to do is turn up at this restaurant with two empty suitcases? Why not fetch them yourself?

  I can’t enter the building, she said. It may be watched. Besides, you’ll have to put something in them.

  She explained what I would have to do. The suitcases were in the basement storage space of a neighbour who had gone off to Australia for a few months. Sonia, who had promised to keep an eye on her flat, had taken the opportunity to store the suitcases – and the money I was to put in them – in the neighbour’s space in case her own was searched. The money was in some dusty old cardboard boxes. While I was stowing it in the suitcases and getting them out of the building, Sonia would go to her bank to distract the attention of anyone who might be watching the bank or the apartment house.

  It must be a lot of money if it takes two suitcases to hold it, I said. How much?

  How much is beside the point, she said. It’ll fit, that’s the main thing.

  Is it clean? I asked. Not counterfeit, I mean?

  No, it’s clean, she said. Then she smiled and said: It’s even been laundered. And it’s mine, even though one or two people think it belongs to them. So you won’t be doing anything illegal, my dear cabby. You’ll simply be helping me to preserve my money from the clutches of some criminals.

  That sounded good. Intriguing. Even if a single air fare from Munich to Luxembourg wasn’t a very generous fee for an operation that might lead to a head-to-head with some crooks. But Sonia reassured me on that point. She had laid a false trail for the people from the “Firm” – she always called it that. A girlfriend of hers had flown to London for three days, using Sonia’s name and passport, so anyone making inquiries would be bound to believe she was in England. No one in the Russian Mafia knew this friend. She had simply flown to London on Sonia’s passport and would never use it again.

>   Which means you’re now short of a passport, I said.

  She gave me an indulgent smile, reached back and retrieved her little brown rucksack from behind the passenger seat. Then she opened it, took out three passports, and said solemnly, as though reciting a short poem:

  One German.

  One French.

  One Italian.

  One burgundy.

  One claret.

  One chianti.

  Gesine Kerckhoff.

  Catherine Marchais.

  Patrizia Calabrese.

  The French and Italian passports were more oxblood than wine-red. Sonia opened them. They’re genuine, she said. Three different photographs, but they’re all of me. They aren’t too similar, though. People never look like their passport photos. Three different names too, of course, and three different dates of birth. Even three different years of birth, although I don’t like being made older than I am. The Firm really does allow for everything. Except for the fact that Sonia Kovalevskaya isn’t in London. Let’s hope they haven’t allowed for that.

  Great outfit to work for, I said. Do you get a pension as well?

  Yes, she said. I’m just about to draw mine.

  What makes you so sure I won’t run off with the money once I’ve put the suitcases in the boot?

  One can never be a hundred per cent sure, she said, but I’m a pretty good judge of character. You’re a romantic. You might run off with a woman, but not – unless I’m very much mistaken – with money. If you did run off with the money I’d have to go back to the Firm. I wouldn’t get a pension, that’s all.

  Beyond Ulm I turned off at the Aichen service area and pulled up in the car park.

  What are you doing? Sonia asked.

  Relax, I told her. I won’t be a minute.

  I took an adjustable spanner from the boot and removed the taxi sign from the roof. It only attracts attention, driving around abroad with a taxi sign. The colour of our cabs, that inconspicuous shade of ivory, is conspicuous enough already. Sonia had got out of the car and was watching me.