The Russian Passenger

by Gunter Ohnemus

  Aliosha was the youngest of three brothers. In addition to Dmitry there was Ivan. Outwardly, Ivan was the boss of the Firm in direct charge of its four divisions: drug dealing, prostitution, political contacts, and enforcement. He came immediately below his father, but Dmitry and Aliosha were senior to him. Responsible to their father alone, they had to ensure that no one in the lower ranks became too powerful. Not even Ivan was allowed to become too powerful. Sonia said it was rare for a “firm” to be controlled by one family, but that’s how it was in this case. It’s almost Italian, she said. La famiglia.

  But Aliosha was a suspicious character. He didn’t even trust his family completely. He trusted Sonia, and Sonia, in addition to the Luxembourg bank accounts she managed as a “bookkeeper”, had opened one for herself and Aliosha alone. An emergency reserve, as she put it. Not even Aliosha had access to that account, only Sonia. Its purpose was precautionary, in case the Firm collapsed or Aliosha was imprisoned or killed, and if Sonia and Aliosha ever had to make a run for it, they would not lack for funds. There were other accounts in other countries, but only Aliosha had access to those.

  So it’s my money, as you see, said Sonia. And it’s in my name alone. I kept my parents’ name when we married. It’s my money, and only mine. No one else has any claim to it.

  How much is it? I asked.

  Almost exactly four million dollars.

  She took a passport from her rucksack and handed it to me. It was an American passport. Opening it, I saw the photo of a man in early middle age. Hair dark, features lean and slightly tanned. A hesitant, passport-photo smile. Not unappealing. The name was given as Colin Herrick, born 1956 in Denver, Colorado.

  The Russians had trained Aliosha for espionage operations in the United States. He and his fellow trainees had lived in the Soviet Union like Americans. They spoke nothing but English, read nothing but American newspapers, watched American TV programmes and films. Nothing but baseball, basketball, American bestsellers, American drinks, and so on. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sonia told me with a smile, they had everything most other Russians still don’t have. Aliosha is indistinguishable from an American.

  I returned the passport. Sonia said: I loved him very much. It was like a genuine Russian novel. Aliosha was the whole wide world to me.

  But he had less and less time for her. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he poured all his energies into building up the Firm. That wasn’t Sonia’s problem, because she also had plenty to do. Her problem had started the year before, when she found out that Aliosha had tortured a man. His methods were so frightful, and he’d set to work with such enthusiasm, that Sonia had decided to leave him – and the Firm. She visited Luxembourg at least twice a month, so it was quite easy for her to syphon off the four million dollars little by little.

  Aliosha, Sonia told me, had begun by torturing the man with an electric cattle prod. I knew what she meant. I once saw a TV documentary on transporting cattle in the Lebanon. One scene showed an ox that had broken its leg in transit and couldn’t stand. Someone applied a cattle prod, and the poor beast lurched to its feet in agony. I almost vomited in front of the television set. I could well imagine what it must be like for a human being to be tortured with something of the kind. Sonia had never slept with Aliosha after that.

  I didn’t know why she was telling me all this. Perhaps she simply wanted to convey what we had to be prepared for – what form of revenge. She told me that the Brooklyn Mafia had once punished a man by killing his wife. When she was dead the killers ripped out her eyes because they believed that a murderer’s image remains imprinted on his victim’s retinas. No eyes, no evidence.

  Typically Russian, I said. Disgusting. The height of superstition and brutality.

  You’re wrong! she said. It isn’t typically Russian!

  Of course it is! I positively bellowed the words in her face. Still at the top of my voice, I told her how an old Berlin couple, who’d been returning home from the theatre one night, had been brutally beaten up by two men. For no reason. The wife died and her husband was badly injured.

  And I knew right away they were from the East, I shouted. Russians or Yugoslavs. No one else would have been as brutal!

  Stop it! Sonia shouted back. You guessed right for once, that’s all!

  And your Aliosha – what will he do to us? Torture us with a cattle prod till our brains spurt out of our ears! Then he’ll shoot us and gouge our eyes out. It won’t hurt by then, but that’s the worst thing of all.

  Stop it! Stop it! Aliosha isn’t a killer. He isn’t superstitious either!

  No, of course not! I shouted. Aliosha isn’t a killer, he’s only planning to kill us. Hurrah for the fine distinction!

  Later, when we’d calmed down and were lying on our beds in the dark, Sonia said: People are the same everywhere. There’s no difference. They’re all capable of the best and the worst. Everyone everywhere. You Germans are no better than us. As for being superstitious, in World War Two the Americans believed the Japanese were unsuited to air warfare because their slit eyes were a handicap when flying. That was before Japanese planes sank the American fleet in Pearl Harbor.

  * * *

  It was on the news the following afternoon. A lumberjack had spotted Dmitry’s body in the clearing, and when the police searched the area they found Viktor among the trees. The authorities assumed them to be victims of an internal dispute between members of a crime syndicate. There was no mention of us or my car, only of tyre tracks that still had to be investigated.

  We learned from the late news that the same weapon had been used both times, but that cartridge cases of two different calibres had been found at the scene. Again no mention of us or the car, so we still had time. No one knew that some of the tyre tracks were mine. No one knew what make of car I drove. No one knew who had been driving it. No one knew I’d shot the two men. No one but Aliosha.

  The driver of the green BMW was bound to have made a note of my number, and even if he wasn’t familiar with my car, a Citroën XM, the Mafia would find it child’s play to discover my identity from the taxi call centre in Munich or the police database. Or from automobile insurance records.

  Sunday

  The night it all ended – the night Ellen went to fetch Jessie – I walked the streets without knowing where I was. All I kept seeing were Ellen’s eyes. Harry, I’m drowning. Harry, the world is ending and I’m drowning. The world died long ago, and I’ve only been dreaming I’m alive. The world is dead and no one can help me. No doctor, no mother, no father, no God. Nor you either.

  It was the night my life ended, even though I’ve already outlived that night by so many years. Three days later Ellen took Jessie and set off by car for her parents’ place in northern Germany. We put everything they wanted to take with them in the boot. Jessie said: Mummy says it’ll all come right again.

  Yes, I said, it’ll all come right again, we need a little time, that’s all. What else could one tell a child? At that moment I may really have thought that all we needed was a little time, but I simultaneously realized that the time we needed would expand for ever like the universe – that it would never end because Ellen must never again be frightened of me, never again get that look of fear in her eyes. There mustn’t be the slightest chance of its happening again.

  It wasn’t raining the night it happened. There was very little traffic in the area – there never is much. For some unaccountable reason the car left the road and hurtled down a grassy slope. It glanced off a tree, inflating the airbags, turned over a couple of times, and came to a stop the right way up. They were both unmarked. Not a scratch, not a graze. Ellen didn’t even have concussion. The people who found them thought they were both dead, they were sitting so still. But only Jessie was.

  It’s odd that I see airbags inflate whenever I think of it, as I do now, while writing this. There weren’t any airbags in 1976, but for many years I’ve seen them inflate when the car glances off the tree in that field. They inflate v
ery slowly, all soft and yielding.

  Four days later everyone came to Munich for the funeral. Ellen, Jessie, and Ellen’s parents. Jessie came in a hearse. She arrived first. Ellen was still stiff and absent, like a ghost. She stood between her parents all the time. After the burial she rested her hands on their shoulders, turned, and walked off. And I kept walking along beside her.

  We walked the streets all day like two mute ghosts, never uttering a word. I noticed people turning to look at us. Once, Ellen went into an ice-cream parlour and sat down on a chair, just like that. When the waiter came to our table I ordered two banana splits. At some stage Ellen went to the ladies’ room, and when she returned she made straight for the exit. But then she lingered in the doorway, irresolutely, as if waiting for me. We walked on through the streets, two mute ghosts condemned to roam for evermore.

  It wasn’t a romantic tour of the city. Nor a commemoration of the dead. We didn’t visit any of the places that had been important to Jessie or us, we simply walked. When you walk through a void, a leaden waste, that’s the way it has to be. We were two dead people walking through a dead world.

  When it got dark we went into the park near our flat. Ellen came to a halt. She simply halted as mechanically as she had walked all day long. The park was entirely deserted and dark. We stood like that for a long time, side by side, and suddenly Ellen said something – murmured something I didn’t catch. And then she said, quite loudly: What did you say, Jessie? And the tears ran down her cheeks. Her whole body seemed to stream with tears and she sank to her knees. It was as if she had nothing on, as if tears were all she wore. She was all tears, just tears. Her grief was so great, so searing, I thought the ground beneath her would melt and engulf her, and all I thought was: She mustn’t lose her mind. She mustn’t, not now.

  Much later I picked her up and carried her home. I sat beside her bed all night. She slept very soundly. It was the last night we ever spent together.

  Tuesday

  From now on, said Sonia, we shouldn’t withdraw any more money from cash dispensers. They must have identified you by now, and they’ll have your credit card numbers. Aliosha has good connections with the authorities and the private sector, so no more cash dispensers. I’ve got ten thousand marks’ worth of French francs. That’ll be enough for the time being. There’s a hilarious story about a Ukrainian named Balagula whose girlfriend used a credit card in his name, so the KGB were able to trace his route perfectly. It’s a stock joke.

  I started to say something.

  You were going to say “typically Russian”, right?

  Yes. Sorry.

  Aliosha’s good connections also meant that we couldn’t rent a less conspicuous car. But Sonia felt pretty sure that Aliosha would suspect we were in Paris, or not, at least, so close to Luxembourg and the scene of the crime. The Mafia are everywhere, she said, but they can’t look everywhere. Not even they have men enough for that.

  We changed hotels even so, and parked the car in another district, away from the hotel.

  Wednesday

  Ellen stayed with her parents for nearly six months. Then she went off to Switzerland for a year. To Geneva. She took her mother’s maiden name. We weren’t married, which meant that she dropped her father’s name, not mine, and adopted the other one. Perhaps she simply wanted to make the past disappear. I don’t know.

  What I did know, after that last night, was that I couldn’t be a writer any longer. You can’t be a writer if you don’t love anyone any more. If you’ve lost all hope. If you’ve done what I had. If you’ve seen what I had seen: the end of the world in Ellen’s eyes. I was twenty-eight years old, and in Ellen’s eyes the world had ended. Because of me. I wasn’t entitled to be a writer any more.

  I could still have written book reviews, of course. As a reviewer you don’t have to love anyone or anything. Nor do you need to have hope. You have only to turn out your little pieces and need only write about literature, nothing else. I’ve read millions of those pompous, broken-backed sentences that crawl across the pages of the Sunday supplements in the guise of literary criticism. It must be a strange life, spending your days writing that kind of stuff, just being a sausage machine. Tess would have disapproved. You aren’t here on earth to do that, she would have said. You didn’t become my son for that. When Tess read book reviews she often quoted an American author on the subject. In America, young journalists who weren’t capable of turning out adequate reports on sporting events would be handed a book and told: Here, write something about that. Tess said that so often, I remember it as being one of her maxims, like her invariable follow-up: My dear boy, if you want to become a writer, you’ll have to reckon with the direct and indirect descendants of those people. There’s no escaping those who write daft things about you.

  The best that can happen is that what you write will encourage people to buy a book. But what mattered to me wasn’t just that people bought a book when I wrote about it. I also wanted them to read what I wrote because it was good and interesting. Because they could gain something from it, not because I was advising them on what to read.

  I wanted to kill myself, of course. It was the only solution, in fact, and if Jessie had survived I would probably have done so. But I didn’t want to leave Ellen alone in the world, even though we would never see each other again. Till doomsday, we always said when we got to know each other. That was clear from the start. Ellen also said: At least for the next fifty years. She’s a great realist. We always made bets as to which of us would die first because each of us wanted to die first, sometime in the next fifty years. We usually ended by agreeing to die together.

  Then, one August, there was that cycling accident. Jessie was with her grandparents at the time, and Ellen and I were pedalling pretty fast along the river bank. It was raining, and the road was deserted. We were riding some ten or twelve yards apart, and all at once we both came to grief. Quite independently of each other. As I hit the ground I thought: Damn it, that was my head, but my head was quite unscathed. It was Ellen who had hit her head. She had a cut on her forehead and was slightly concussed, and our left thighs turned green, red, blue, and black. The bruises lasted for weeks. It was a curious accident. Afterwards, when we got home, Ellen said with a smile: If it hadn’t been a stupid accident – if it hadn’t been something negative – you could say it was a miracle. The two of us at the same time and quite independently of each other. Perhaps we’ll both go the same way one day.

  * * *

  No, I wasn’t going to write any book reviews and I wanted to go on living. I had to go on living. Till doomsday. Instead of killing myself I got my cabby’s licence.

  That was it. That was my life. I drove a taxi. There had to be taxis and I drove one. That was a sufficient raison d’être. That has long been my function among the living: I’m a taxi driver.

  After her year in Geneva Ellen moved to Scotland. That was the first time we talked at any length on the phone. Do you know what it said on the door of the office where I had to register with the police? she said. “Aliens & Firearms.” Two extremely dangerous things behind one and the same door. Speaking of xenophobia, I’m an alien. What do you think of that?

  You can laugh again, I said.

  Yes, she said, I can. Occasionally. One can laugh again in the end. Somebody once said: It’s awful that it isn’t awful enough.

  I’d always like to know where you are, I said. That’s all.

  Yes, she said.

  * * *

  I called her once a year, usually on her birthday. I’m living in a wonderful street called Lover’s Walk, she told me the year she moved into the flat where she lived from then on. I paid a visit to Munich, to Jessie’s grave. But I didn’t want to call you.

  No, she told me once, she wasn’t lonely. She was very busy and knew a lot of people.

  Is there, I asked, I mean, is there anyone –

  Are there any men around, you mean? Yes, several, and it’s not good for a person to be alone. But I don�
�t need any man. Why should I? It was you I needed, Harry. Only you. I don’t need just any man.

  A few years later I asked her: That time … I mean, did you mean to …

  Suicide isn’t an option for me, she said. You ought to know that.

  One can never tell.

  But Harry, I would never have killed my own child.

  Who would have looked after your child if you’d really killed yourself?

  You, she said.

  Me? I said. Me, of all people?

  Yes, you. I can’t conceive of a better father. I simply can’t. But forget it.

  Friday

  I think we should get rid of your car, said Sonia, two days and two hotels later.

  I didn’t want to get rid of my car, so I debated what to do. The taxi colour wasn’t paint, it was plastic film. A lot of cabbies get that done to their taxis because it makes them easier to sell later on. Applying a film of that kind costs around a thousand marks. Maybe a bit more by now. My car was really dark blue, and a dark blue Citroën wouldn’t stand out in France, even with German number plates. Or not so much, and I might be able to organize some new plates. But I didn’t know how to remove the film. It had to be subjected to heat, that was all I knew, but how could I heat up a car in the street in the middle of France?

  It was a real shame, but it couldn’t be done. If only I had a gigantic hairdryer, I said to Sonia. But we can’t go on driving around in this colour.

  No, she said. That inconspicuous shade of ivory stands out like a sore thumb.

  The evening news gave a description of my car, together with the licence number and my name. A German taxi driver by the name of Harry Willemer was strongly suspected of the murders. He was thought to be in the Paris area, probably accompanied by a woman.

  The late night news showed a photograph of me, probably obtained from the passport office. It looked very much like my passport photo.