The Russian Passenger

by Gunter Ohnemus

  My grandmother told me that, but she didn’t tell me another story – not, at least, when I was still a child and lying in bed beside her. But she told it to me later on – told me how a little boy found his grandmother dead one night. He ran off to tell his mother, who was lying in bed with her overcoat on and a few blankets over her, it was so cold. She’s dead, he told his mother. Yes, my son, said his mother, she’s better off than we are. No one can escape death. We all have to die in the end, don’t be frightened.

  That’s how to console a child, Harry: We all have to die in the end, don’t be frightened.

  That’s what they made us do – made us console our children with the thought of death. I wasn’t consoled like that – I wasn’t alive then, Harry, and neither were you, but that’s how it was. That’s what they did to us.

  And don’t tell me the besiegers didn’t know what havoc they were creating inside the city. You sit in a plane and drop a bomb, you serve a gun and pull some lever or whatever you have to do to fire a shell – how can you know what happens at the other end? Don’t say it, don’t tell me they couldn’t have known.

  But you could know it, Harry. You were born later. You know so much about Peter the Great, the barbarian who civilized a barbaric country, you know how appallingly brutal he was. You know all that, but you know nothing about Leningrad, only that it was besieged during the war. How could the besiegers have known what was happening in the city when they themselves weren’t there? They had maps, Harry – maps marking targets for the artillery. A school, a hospital, a maternity home, the Hermitage, a block of flats. Those were targets, so don’t tell me the besiegers couldn’t have known. You let yourselves be governed by barbarians – not you but the people before you – by barbarians who loudly proclaimed what they thought. I learnt one of their barbarous maxims by heart, so I wouldn’t forget it: Whether or not ten thousand Russian women drop dead from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch is of interest only insofar as they complete that anti-tank ditch for Germany. I’m one of those Russian women, or could have been, and my mother and grandmother were two of those women who didn’t matter.

  So don’t tell me the besiegers couldn’t have known. They were killing people all the time. In Minsk in March 1942 – I know it was Minsk – they transported five thousand Jews from the ghetto to a freshly dug pit outside the city and mowed them down with machine guns. In the children’s case – there were several hundred of them – ammunition was considered too good to waste on them. They were thrown into the pit and buried alive. Many of the men who did that may have kissed and cuddled children of their own back home. I’m not pleading for those children’s lives, but why, I ask you – why did they think ammunition was too good to waste on them?

  You allowed barbarians to rule you and became barbarians yourselves – not you, Harry, not you but the people before you. Many of them. And the barbarian who said those Russian women didn’t matter said something else: The Germans, he publicly declared in the course of a speech, were the only people in the world with a decent attitude towards animals, and they would adopt a decent attitude towards these human animals as well.

  “These human animals” were us, the Russians. The Allies would have done better to deprive you of all your animals after the war. Dogs, cats, horses, chickens – all of them, mice and rats included. That would have been the right kind of dismantling programme, so you didn’t overdo your decent attitude towards them. I wouldn’t like to be the dog of someone who buries children alive.

  Yes, Harry, and here I am, lying beside you, a Russian female and human animal. Russian animal and human female.

  * * *

  We lay there in silence for a long time, maybe an hour. I was holding Sonia in my arms. Suddenly I sensed that she was smiling. Then she said: When two people who love one another, or think they do – two people who are living together or think they are – I mean, when there has been something so violent between two people, like between us just now, that “quarrel” is a pale description of it, they often make love afterwards. East or west, there’s no difference. I’ve never regarded that as a bourgeois form of reconciliation – at least, not often. It doesn’t really have anything to do with sex. It’s just a huge explosion, and sex is merely the vehicle for it.

  Why say that now? I asked.

  Because it just occurred to me, and because I wouldn’t be averse. But it would be obscene, for all that. Too many people died tonight in Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad. In Petersburg. In my head.

  People are always dying, I said. All the time. Throughout our lives.

  We aren’t in love, nor do we think we are, Sonia said, and we don’t think we’re living together and we aren’t, and if it weren’t obscene I would do with you what we won’t do together, or may do after all, and we’ll do it because it’s utterly pointless and absolutely essential and unstoppable in any case, because thunderstorms are unstoppable. But don’t forget: Tomorrow is another day.

  * * *

  We clung to each other, held each other tight so as not to be carried away by the storm that was ourselves, but carried away we were, ever further and deeper and further and more powerfully, and the next morning, which was the same morning but another day, Sonia went out on to the terrace and looked up at the sky, which was blue and cloudless. It’s difficult to say anything after a night like that. We weren’t in love, after all, nor did we think we were, but Sonia did just the right thing. She turned to me and said, through the open door: I bet it’s ages since they’ve had a storm like that here.

  Then, leaning forward with both hands braced against the door frame, she put her head into the room and said: How’s your sex life, taxi driver? I mean, if you leave a city behind and nobody misses you, it can’t have been up to much, can it? She smiled derisively. But then, as you yourself said, you never share your bedroom with women.

  I don’t share my bedroom with women but I’m sharing one with you. The reason has a name: Aliosha. End of story.

  Thanks, she said.

  Ellen – that was the name of the reason I didn’t share my bedroom with women. I hadn’t slept in the same room as a woman since the night I saw that terrible fear in Ellen’s eyes. The fear whose cause was myself. 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.

  Ellen, who had never been afraid of anything, who never let anything – even a moral standard – intimidate her. She was the first person who told me that women don’t want to go to bed with men as often as men do with women. That wasn’t easy at a time when everyone believed they were in the thick of a sexual revolution, and anyone who didn’t fuck like a rabbit was frigid. And it wasn’t easy to say that to a young man who believed that what love meant to him meant the same, and in equal measure, to the other party.

  I was hurt. Furious. Disconcerted. It took a long time to sink in properly. Women simply don’t enjoy fucking as much, let alone as often, as men do, Ellen told me. With the possible exception of nymphomaniacs, that despised breed, but have you ever met a nymphomaniac? I haven’t – apart, of course, from nearly all the men I know. Nearly all men are … well … nymphomaniacs. There doesn’t seem to be an equivalent term for men. Sex maniacs, perhaps?

  Once, when we were driving past a brothel a few years later, I said – just for fun – that it might be interesting for me to try one.

  Yes, you do that, said Ellen. Otherwise you may wind up regretting it at the age of eighty. And by then it could be too late.

  She wasn’t joking. Sex is sex, Harry. It’s all well and good – very good, sometimes – but it’s only sex. There’s nothing personal about it. It doesn’t matter to me who you sleep with, but it would be bad if you loved someone else. That would be really bad, even though I couldn’t do anything about it. The worst thing of all is when someone pretends to love someone because they know it’
s the only way of getting them into bed. That’s obscene in the true sense.

  Ellen knew all this long before I did. Men and women are governed by a terrible fact – a brutal, mechanical, wholly biological fact. Any man would in principle have sex with any woman, and any woman would in principle build a nest with any man provided he could protect and maintain that nest. All this is irrespective of the persons concerned. And that seems profoundly insulting or “offensive”, as those who specialize in being offended would say. The sole difference is that men, when they’ve found a woman, soon want to have sex with other women, whereas most women, when they’ve built a nest, remain in it and love their children. Once again, irrespective of the persons concerned.

  * * *

  And that’s how it was when everything ended. That’s how it was. I could no longer be an author and wrote no more books, and I no longer wanted to share my bed with a woman, nor did I. And sex was just sex. Something utterly anonymous, and when it was really anonymous it could be like a drug. I discovered – only a few times, not often – that anonymous sex can be just as potent as sex with someone very close to you: total dissolution. Ellen disliked phrases such as “total dissolution”. Oh yes, she said once, like an Alka-Seltzer in a glass of water.

  And there were other times, in the street, in the subway, on an escalator somewhere. All at once, in the crowd, a face in which I suddenly immersed myself. For a few moments I immersed myself in that face or that face immersed itself in me. It can happen when you catch sight of someone breathtakingly beautiful. You enter that person like a door, or perhaps it’s the other way round and the woman on the escalator enters you like a door, and at that instant when something melts inside you, she moulds your face and your body in her image. You’re as beautiful as she is. For a moment. For a second or two. For a second or two you are that woman.

  For a second or two. Or for ever. The first time I saw Ellen I was like a door through which she passed. Like a door that would preserve her form for ever. That was how it was and still is. A door for ever. All that remains is that door. At least it still exists.

  That’s how it had been these past twenty-four years – the brothels of Western Europe, occasional anonymous sex and total dissolution, and sometimes this self-immersion in a stranger’s face. And I never shared my bed with anyone – I was always alone. But then, it’s probably true that the most frequent form of sexual gratification, throughout the world, is masturbation.

  One night on television a few months ago there was an interview with a suffragan bishop. I’m not sure what a suffragan bishop is, or whether there’s more than one in a diocese. I’d been channel-hopping, but I stayed with this programme because two people were talking and I wanted to hear some human voices in my flat. I nearly always watch programmes in which people talk to each other, even if they’re talking nonsense. Anyway, I took to this suffragan bishop. He must have been seventy or thereabouts, and at one point, needless to say, the interviewer asked him about celibacy. He positively smacked his lips as he set this time-honoured trap for a Catholic priest. The bishop smiled at him and said: Well, I used to be a young man myself. I was no stranger to women, but there came a time when I resolved to become a priest, and not to marry or go to bed with them. The decision to become a priest is an experiment. A lifelong experiment of uncertain outcome. And now, he said with a faint smile – now the temptation grows weaker every day. It was a wonderful smile, that smile of his, and he was absolutely right.

  That would have appealed to my mother. Tess liked people with a sense of humour. She also liked religious people. Although Buddhism was very important to her, and although she despised monotheistic religions, she liked religious people even when they were Christians. I’m an epileptic Buddhist, my boy, but I’m also a Buddhistic Catholic. I’ve a Catholic childhood behind me, and you never entirely get over that. I’m a fast talker, too. That above all.

  She not only despised monotheistic religions, she was sometimes filled with hatred of them. She particularly disliked Abraham and those who regarded him as an important figure. Abraham was someone she really despised. Honestly, my boy, Abraham was a peculiarly repulsive character, a man so subservient to his god that he was ready to slaughter Isaac, his own son, simply because that jealous deity had demanded it of him. The fact that he didn’t do so is no credit to him or his god. He would have done so, and his god had demanded it of him, and both things were unforgivable, and this man Abraham, this terrible parent, was the founding father of three religions. To crown everything, it’s said that all the nations on earth have been blessed by his seed. That’s a phrase that often occurs in the Bible, but in this context it has a disgusting aftertaste. Isaac would have had far more reason to kill his father than poor Oedipus, who had no reason at all. He was merely the victim of a combination of unfortunate circumstances.

  It was fate, pure and simple, my mother used to say in her dry way, but the god of the monotheists sets store by such things. For him they represent a system. If the Jehovah’s Witnesses alone had this god – a god who issues orders to kill – one would have serious misgivings about the merits of religious freedom.

  Look at the monotheists’ churches and synagogues and mosques. Listen to their hymns and prayers. They know what pain is, they know the meaning of death and joy and happiness and that crazy presentiment which may or may not be just our imagination. And because they also possess and know these things, we have to tolerate them. We don’t have to tolerate religions simply because they’re religions. There are no grounds for tolerating a religion that preaches murder and war, as religions often have. But there are grounds for tolerating them because they know and possess something: pain and joy and that intimation of eternity.

  And all at once Tess was there again, thoroughly present and preoccupied with the things of this world. I doubt if your father would have made a particularly good father, she told me. He was a macho of the biblical kind, but even he would have laughed to scorn a god who demanded that he slaughter his own son.

  Thursday

  Sonia and I spent four more days in the Markgräfler Land. Or was it five? We were beginning to feel a little too safe. But every night I thought of Aliosha, and every night I became more tense and uneasy.

  We’ve got to do something, I told Sonia. We can’t stay here for ever.

  We could, she said. We’ve got enough money. We could buy ourselves a small hotel or boarding house and live on the takings.

  We both laughed, but I couldn’t endure this sensation of being hunted. I kept thinking of the man in the toilets who hadn’t come in for a pee. I kept seeing the water gushing from the tap in the deserted washroom. Water running for someone with no reason to wash his hands. Ever since then I’ve always gone into a cubicle when using a public lavatory.

  It was an immense strain, covertly eyeing everyone we saw for signs that he might be a spy or a hit man. I was nearing the end of my tether, and Sonia knew it because the tension was wearing her down too.

  After those four or five days we decided to do something.

  Let’s go to another tourist area, I said. Then we have to do something about Aliosha.

  That won’t be much use, Sonia said. Whatever we do about him, it won’t be much use.

  Well, we’ve got to do something, I said, or we’ll both go insane.

  Harry, she said, you saved my life, even if you only did it to save yours. You shot Dmitry when he was about to shoot me.

  And now we’re running away from Aliosha, I said.

  We won’t get very far.

  But we must try.

  All right, she said, where shall we go? Have you given it any thought?

  Yes, I told her. I think we should go east to Passau, right over on the Austrian border.

  Do you know the place?

  Some, I said. I once spent a lovely long summer there as a child.

  She looked at me. Her eyes widened. It’s where you were born, right?

  I nodded.

  Let’s g
o there, then. I’d like to see where you were born.

  * * *

  We took the longer route via Regensburg because I didn’t want to go anywhere near Munich, let alone drive through it. On the long drive to Passau I explained my plan to Sonia. I had to challenge Aliosha – set a trap for him. I had it all worked out.

  We would check into two hotels, but we’d spend the first two days in only one of them. Officially, I alone would be staying there. I also knew which hotel it should be. It wasn’t far from the station, and I’d quite often spent the night there. Once every two or three years. I always spent the night at that hotel because I no longer knew anyone in the town. Tess and I had moved to Munich when I was fifteen. When I visited Passau I occasionally saw a face light up with something akin to a flash of recognition. Somewhere in my face or walk there must still have been some vestige of the youngster I was at seven, twelve or fifteen, but I no longer knew anyone in the town and no one knew me. They didn’t know me at the hotel either, but they had my name in their computer, as well as those of all their other guests. Once you were in the computer you didn’t have to fill in any forms. Above all, you didn’t have to produce any ID.

  The hotel had another advantage: There was no need to pass the reception desk when you went up to your room. You simply got into a lift in the courtyard and pressed the button. The reception desk was on the first floor, so you could bypass it on your way up. Just what we needed.

  I called the hotel on the way and asked if they had a single room. It was the holiday season, after all. Have you stayed here before? asked a man’s voice.