The Russian Passenger

by Gunter Ohnemus

  As children we had often gone into buildings in the old quarter and snooped around, simultaneously scared and fascinated by their labyrinthine passages. When grown-ups came and asked what we were doing there, we always said we were looking for Herr Zlatobek. It was hard, sometimes, to explain why we should be looking for Herr Zlatobek in the cellar, of all places. Our forays continued for a long time, till we were thirteen or fourteen. The town was a jungle full of mysteries, but I had never been in this particular building before. We never went into buildings that housed shops. Too much activity, too many employees who could have spotted us.

  Holding hands, Sonia and I slowly and cautiously descended the stairs until we found a light switch. Before the light came on she whispered: Did someone say “Alice”?

  Again we negotiated the stairwell with the wonderful banisters Sonia thought had once been gilded.

  What happened to all the gold on them? she asked.

  All the banisters in the town used to be gilded, I improvised. The gold was scraped off by children. When they hadn’t any money but wanted a carousel ride or a cinema ticket, they simply went and scraped some gold off the banisters. In the course of centuries they stripped the gold off all the banisters in town. That’s how it happened.

  Sonia smiled. Oh, she said, so that’s how it happened.

  When we were out in the street again she paused in front of the building and said: Did you have a ferry here?

  We had two, I told her. A little motor ferry across the Danube and a cable ferry across the Inn.

  She scraped a flake of rust off the front door and put it on her tongue. Not gold, she said. Rust. Metal tastes like blood. Or blood tastes like metal. Let’s hope we won’t be taking another ferry across another river tomorrow.

  She looked at me sadly, and I said: Know what we’ll do?

  Yes, she said. If things go wrong tomorrow – if we get separated for some reason – we’ll meet up here. No one will look for us or find us here. All we have to do is keep walking round this building and no one will ever find us.

  We went to our “official” hotel because we had to show our faces there. We mussed up the bed in our double room. Then we went to the hotel where we slept.

  * * *

  The next morning we had breakfast at the same café as before. Afterwards Sonia changed the rest of her francs at one bank and $5000 at another, using her false passports. Normally, she told me, one didn’t have to show any ID for sums up to 30,000 marks, but every bank had its own regulations. Using the passports that day presented no risk. We felt sure the police knew nothing about them, or the names would long ago have appeared in the press. And anyway, the Mafia knew we were here.

  After that we drove out into the countryside. The Bavarian Forest. I showed Sonia a few of the towns and places I had often been to as a boy. We sat beside a stream, more or less at the spot where I’d sat with a friend many years ago. That’s to say, we’d spent most of the time standing in the stream and fishing for trout, but now I sat with Sonia in the meadow through which the stream flowed, and I told her about the meadow and the stream, and how, before we started fishing, we used to catch a few dozen grasshoppers for bait. That didn’t take as long as you might think – maybe five or ten minutes to catch four or five dozen grasshoppers. The place was teeming with them. Every time you combed the grass with your fingers they came out holding a grasshopper. I reckon that meadow was only two or three grasshoppers short of a plague of locusts. By combing the grass for grasshoppers and popping them into old cigar boxes, my friend and I may have been contributing to the area’s ecological balance, who knows?

  We needed all those grasshoppers because the stream was full of trout. There were almost as many trout in the stream as grasshoppers in the meadow. We took our rods and stationed ourselves in the water, which was quite shallow – thigh-deep at the most. Then we baited our hooks with grasshoppers and looked around for one of the innumerable trout. Once you’d spotted one it was all very easy. You simply cast your grasshopper so it landed in front of the trout’s nose, and it struck. That would have been the end of the trout if we’d been fishing seriously, but we only wanted to catch fish, not kill them.

  So we landed our fish and removed the hooks from their jaws like expert orthopaedic surgeons. We were anglers, not murderers. I doubt if we could have brought ourselves to kill a trout. It was a bit different with smaller creatures. The only ones we killed when fishing were grasshoppers, and they were really killed by the trout. Sometimes, when we removed the hook from a trout’s jaws, the grasshopper would still be attached to it. Then, if it was still alive, we used it to catch another trout.

  I want to go swimming with you right now, said Sonia, in your trout-stream paradise. So we had a long swim together. We were almost happy. Skin against skin, body against body, and water everywhere, little eddies all around us. We were children, children in the water, even though we didn’t do childish things. No one watching us would have guessed what lay ahead of us that day. We wanted to forget about it, blot it out, but I kept hearing Sonia’s voice in my head: We all have to die in the end, don’t be frightened.

  Later we passed the house where our tailor used to live. We got all our clothes from him apart from socks and underwear. Nothing off-the-peg. Tess wasn’t terribly bothered, but my grandparents attached great importance to it. Nothing off-the-peg and no margarine. Only tailor-made clothes and butter. Those were their only dogmas, but margarine and off-the-peg were anathema.

  Sonia laughed. Have you perpetuated the tradition?

  Only partly, I told her. I still don’t eat margarine.

  I drove to the house that had once been the home of my Uncle Philipp. It was empty now and would probably be demolished before long. It seemed to symbolize the decline of our family. Or of part of our family. Philipp was the capable and prosperous son of capable and prosperous parents. He was a cousin of my mother’s, and what fascinated me about him was that two fingers of his right hand were missing. It felt strange when you shook hands with him. Not unpleasant, but invariably surprising.

  I’m a pretty naive person. I was a naive child, too (unless all children are naive), and it was years before I grasped why Uncle Philipp had lost two fingers on his right hand.

  At first there was the story of a wood-chopping accident. Uncle Philipp was right-handed. It seemed odd that a right-hander would chop off two fingers of his right hand, but it was possible that he always used his left hand for chopping wood. I never queried this as a boy, nor were any questions expected of me. It had simply been an accident.

  A few years later, maybe eight or nine years after the war, the truth became a little clearer: he had chopped off the two fingers because he didn’t want to go to war. He didn’t want to die. He had absolutely no wish to do so and was afraid of dying, and because it would have raised a lot of unpleasant questions if a right-hander had chopped off two fingers of his right hand, he asked a friend, his best friend, to chop them off for him. Without your middle finger and index finger, especially the latter, you can’t fire a gun.

  As a boy I often wondered if I could do it. Chop off two of my friend’s fingers, I mean, or get him to chop off my middle and index fingers. But it had to be like that, I suppose. Even if you really did use your left hand for chopping wood, it wouldn’t have been easy to convince a draft board that a right-hander used his left hand for that purpose. So his best friend had to chop off the fingers for him. Someone who would never give him away. Two friends were chopping wood together and there was a terrible accident – that was the story.

  After another few years the story became clearer still. To me, at least. The rest of the family had probably known it for ages. Uncle Philipp was a homosexual. That was his main reason for not wanting to go into the army. It would have been difficult for a homosexual to remain undiscovered in the army, and Uncle Philipp was a very sociable and amusing person who always attracted a lot of hangers-on. He didn’t want to go to war, still less to a concentration camp,
so his best friend had to chop off his fingers.

  After the war he did what many homosexuals did in the old days – he got married. His wife was an extremely vivacious woman. Very far from homosexual herself, always amiable and good for a laugh, even though she ended by ruining the firm, which many members of the family construed as an act of revenge. She had a boy and a girl, cousins of mine, and at some stage during the fifties Uncle Philipp was sent to prison. Something to do with young trainees in the family firm. “Sexual abuse by a person in authority.” Or was it “unnatural offences”? That was serious, even if sexual abuse by a person in authority is a pretty fair description of what the husband gets up to in a middle-class marriage.

  I was forbidden to visit Uncle Philipp’s house even before he went to prison, but I went anyway. I went and played with my cousins because I couldn’t see any reason for the ban and my mother declined to explain. All she said one day was: All right, go. Uncle Philipp is sick. No, he’s not really sick, he’s perfectly well, in fact. Anyway, it isn’t catching, so go. But make sure you’re never left alone with him.

  I think I was eighteen or nineteen before I knew the full story. Everyone visited Philipp regularly in prison, and when he was released he resumed his visits to us and was as amusing and entertaining as ever. He was my mother’s favourite cousin, and his handshake continued to startle me every time. Years later, when the firm had ceased to exist, he died in prison, where he was a universal favourite. He’d been sent down again. In the end, prison may have been the only place he wanted to be, and there weren’t any children or youngsters there. He probably died a happy man. He’d sacrificed two fingers so as not to have to die before his time.

  I’m slow to spot things, it’s true – far slower than most people. There are a lot of names in our family that are Jewish or could be. Süss, Roth, Zimmermann, Berlinger … In the States those would all be Jewish names, but I was well into my twenties before it ever occurred to me. Our family isn’t Jewish, in fact, like many of the immigrants from Russia in the nineties who are Jewish in name only. My grandmother was a Süss. She had eight brothers and sisters, and she often recalled what it was like in 1940, when the film Jew Süss came out in the Third Reich. We girls were all married by then, she used to say, but the boys and their families didn’t have a very nice time. Two of them didn’t, at least. The other two had emigrated to America long before.

  For some years in the early 1950s we often received visits from a woman who looked very beautiful and smelt very nice. In appearance she could have been my mother’s sister and my grandmother’s daughter. She had been a family friend before the war, and had come back from America because her husband was dying. Her name was Leykauf. I find it hard to admit this now – admit it to myself, I mean – but I was forty-eight when it first occurred to me that Leykauf was a Jewish name. It’s just about as inconspicuous as Rothschild, but I never noticed. To me she was just a very beautiful woman who had once been deserted by her husband and had returned to keep him company at his life’s end. Before he died he said: I’ve only ever had one love, and that’s my wife. My grandmother often repeated those words in the years that followed – as often as she quoted the German classics – and always gave my grandfather a challenging look as she did so. My grandfather, who was very fond of them both, the husband and the wife, once commented in his sceptical way: They all say that in the end. But a good end doesn’t imply that everything else was good as well.

  It was decades before I grasped the true significance of this story. Having married a Jewess, the man had probably been presented with a choice: Your wife or your business. He had evidently opted in favour of his business, and now, after all those years of treachery, she had returned so he didn’t have to die alone. Completely destitute by this time, he was living in the attic of a large department store. The building had once belonged to him, and in the good old days the attic had housed his enormous electric train set, which had been disposed of long since. He was the first dead person I ever saw. The room smelt of oranges and cut flowers and something else that will always be associated in my mind with his lifeless face and thin, aquiline nose. And invisible, non-existent trains were running through the room. You could only hear them.

  That’s all I know about the woman, except that she drove a snappy little DKW which also smelt very nice, and that she always wore pale, embroidered gloves when driving, and once in the Austrian mountains, when she took me and Tess away for the weekend, we came to a warning sign beside the road with a black death’s head in the centre, which meant you had to drive with great care.

  Now that I’ve grasped all these things and pondered them repeatedly, I’ve often wondered what would have happened to Uncle Philipp if he hadn’t had those fingers chopped off. His surname was Süss, so the concentration camp authorities would have looked askance at it. Then they might have had two reasons for killing him. Homosexuality and Jewishness, pink triangle and yellow star. Philipp would have been king of the concentration camp.

  Sonia listened to my account of the Leykauf woman and Uncle Philipp with a quiet smile. You’re like a child when you talk about these things, she said. You’re the way you were in the stream, when we were like children, children in the water, even though we didn’t do childish things.

  * * *

  Then the time for childish things was over. We drove back into town, filled up the car and left it in the car park of my hotel. We showered and packed most of our things, and I took the lift down and stowed everything in the boot. The money remained in the room, of course. Then we checked our guns. Mine was Dmitry’s automatic, which had only one round missing from the magazine.

  Don’t forget, Sonia told me, Aliosha may be carrying a gun capable of firing a lot of bullets. It comes from Yugoslavia. I’ve never seen the thing, but the magazine is supposed to hold fifty or sixty rounds.

  We had to do what must be done. We had no choice. Aliosha would either kill us right away or torture us and then kill us. Alternatively, I would kill him.

  No, we had no choice. I looked at Sonia. We could always forget about it, I said. We could still get out of here.

  What do you mean?

  I mean he’s your husband. If everything goes according to plan, I’ll be killing your husband.

  You know what husbands are like, she said. If they have to choose between their wives and the firm, they opt for the firm. Well, I’m opting for myself. And for you. For life. Or survival, at least to begin with.

  I took two blankets from the wardrobe, stuffed them into one of the holdalls we’d bought, and zipped it up. It was just before seven. At half past eight, I said, I’ll arrive here by taxi. You’re to emerge from the restaurant opposite as soon as I get out. They must see us going into the hotel together.

  I walked to the door.

  Harry?

  Yes?

  It’s silly to say this, but take care. He’s a dangerous man.

  Now you know, Sonia – it can take me half a lifetime to recognize a Jewish name, but now I know everything about the world. I’m a dangerous man too.

  Good.

  I kissed her on the forehead. Then I took her hand.

  I feel like a little girl, she said.

  That’s the ideal feeling. For another few hours. Then you mustn’t be a little girl any more. Wait for me. If I don’t show up, just take off. You’ve got enough money.

  * * *

  I took the bag containing the blankets and walked to our official hotel. It was only a few minutes away. I asked for Signore Schmitz’s key. Once upstairs I sluiced my face with cold water. Then I went into Signore Schmitz’s room, drew the curtains, turned the light on, locked the door behind me, took the lift down to reception, and put the bag in the cubbyhole where hotel guests can deposit their baggage when they’ve vacated their rooms but aren’t leaving yet. I left a message for Signore Schmitz at reception and told the porter that we might have to leave very early the next day, but that Signore Schmitz would definitely be arriving tha
t night.

  Then I went to the taxi rank roughly midway between our two hotels. I got in, telling the driver that this was my first visit to Passau for twenty years, so I simply wanted him to drive me around for a bit. Along the Inn to the Neuburg Forest, for example.

  It was twenty past seven. We drove along Nikolastrasse and then out on to the road beside the Inn. As we passed the cemetery landing stage I looked across the river and suddenly felt quite calm. Utterly calm. We drove past the university buildings, a market garden, and the hospital. It occurred to me when we were already past the hospital that the Russian cemetery used to be out there when we were children. We always played football beside the cemetery. It was surrounded by tall bushes, and I don’t think there were any graves, just a stretch of grass that looked exactly like the one we played football on. I’ve no idea who the dead Russians were. Prisoners of war or labour conscripts, perhaps. Strange that I should have remembered the Russian cemetery now, when I was setting a trap for Aliosha! Then we passed the derelict shirt factory, which was no longer even derelict. It simply wasn’t there any more. All I could see was part of the gateway. The rest was overgrown with shrubs and bushes. We got to the rowing club soon afterwards. A few cars were parked outside, none of them occupied. We drove to the edge of the forest, then into it until we reached a hotel or restaurant, I don’t remember exactly. There was no traffic.

  Aliosha hadn’t shown up, just as we expected. Just the way we wanted.