The Russian Passenger Read online

  Günter Ohnemus, born in 1946, lives in Munich and is a novelist, essayist and translator. He has written three collections of short stories and a best seller for teenagers. He won the Tukan Prize of the city of Munich for his first novel and is well known for his translations of Richard Brautigan and Raymond Carver. The Russian Passenger is his first novel to be translated into English.

  THE RUSSIAN

  PASSENGER

  Günter Ohnemus

  Translated from the German by

  John Brownjohn

  BITTER LEMON PRESS

  LONDON

  BITTER LEMON PRESS

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2004 by

  Bitter Lemon Press, 37 Arundel Gardens, London W11 2LW

  www.bitterlemonpress.com

  First published in German as Reise in die Angst by

  Droemersche Verlagsanstalt, Munich in 2002

  The publication of this work was sponsored with the help of a grant

  from the GOETHE-INSTITUT INTER NATIONES.

  © Droemersche Verlagsanstalt, Munich, 2002

  English translation © John Brownjohn, 2004

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced in any form or by any means without written

  permission of the publisher.

  The moral right of John Brownjohn has been asserted in

  accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-9085-2420-1

  Acknowledgement

  Permission to use the quotation on pages 29–31 from A Confederate General from Big Sur, © 1964 Richard Brautigan, © renewed 1992 Ianthe Brautigan Swenson, is granted by PFD on behalf of The Estate of Richard Brautigan.

  Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Broad Street, Bungay, Suffolk

  For Susannah Timmerman

  He stared at the oncoming Frenchmen, and although, only a short time before, he had set off at a gallop with the sole intention of getting to those Frenchmen and cutting them to pieces, he now felt their proximity to be something so terrible that he couldn’t believe his eyes. “Who are they? Why are they running? Are they really running towards me? And why? Do they mean to kill me? Me, whom everyone likes so much?” He thought how fond of him his mother, his relations and friends were, and it seemed quite impossible that the enemy could really be intent on killing him.

  Leo Tolstoy

  War and Peace

  In a room that knows your death

  A closet freezes like a postage stamp.

  A coat, a dress is hanging there.

  Text on an old hippy poster in San Francisco

  Contents

  San Francisco

  Thursday

  Sunday

  Tuesday

  Friday

  Saturday

  Sunday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Friday

  Thursday

  Saturday

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Friday

  Saturday

  Sunday

  Monday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Saturday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Saturday

  Tuesday

  Saturday

  Wednesday

  Wednesday

  Wednesday, Later

  Thursday

  Friday

  Saturday

  Monday

  Saturday

  Sunday

  Thursday

  After the End

  San Francisco

  At fifty the good Buddhist takes to the road, leaving all his belongings behind. His sole possession is a begging bowl. That’s fine. That’s how it should be, and that’s probably how one ought to roam the world for the rest of one’s days. My problem was, there were four million dollars in my begging bowl and the Mafia were after me. It was their money. They wanted it back, and they also wanted the girl, the woman, who was with me: Sonia Kovalevskaya.

  That was around four months ago. Or four years or four centuries. Or was it five months? Two years ago I abandoned everything I owned. Or almost everything. I moved out of the big flat I’d shared with Ellen, with Ellen and the child, Ellen and our daughter. With Ellen and Jessie. With Ellen. But that had been for only a few years. Thereafter I spent twenty-two years alone in that flat. Until, shortly after my fiftieth birthday, I sold it all: the flat, the books, the furniture, the record collection. Almost everything apart from the things you need when you move into a one-room flat.

  I also threw away nearly all my personal stuff, letters, photos and papers. And my birth certificate. Today I couldn’t prove that I was ever born at all. I still have my ID, of course, and my passport and some insurance policies and a few other documents. They would probably suffice to prove my existence. I also have my bank papers. I’m not a poor man, even though I don’t use the money in my account – or rather, I haven’t done so yet. Contacting my bank might prove fatal.

  What I found hardest of all was throwing away the letters and photos and taking the books to a dealer. We had a couple of thousand books, Ellen and I, and I’d always thought life without books was impossible. I haven’t owned a single one since my fiftieth birthday, even though I’ve read a great deal these past two years. I often have plenty of time to spare, waiting for a fare. But now, when I’m through with a book, I simply leave it lying in some café or dump it in a dustbin. Sometimes, too, when I’ve finished a book, I offer it to my passengers. They usually look quite disconcerted. They’ve just paid for a ride in my cab and given me a tip, large or small, and then I say thanks and hold a book under their nose. It startles them every time. My own reaction would probably be just as disconcerted.

  I well remember the young woman I presented with Marcel Proust’s Combray and Swann in Love two years ago. I had first read Proust as a young man of twenty, and now, more than thirty years later, I was giving them to the prettyish, youngish woman I’d just driven from Grünwald to Nymphenburg.

  I’ve never read them, she said, taking the books. She now looked prettier still. Most pretty women don’t know they look still prettier when they’re holding a copy of Swann in Love. But I do. I was reading Proust when I met Ellen over thirty years ago. Or was it the other way round, and had I just met Ellen when I started to read Proust? Anyway, it was more or less contemporaneous. I can’t recall which came first, but I do know that pretty women look even prettier when they’re holding a copy of Swann in Love. Even Ellen, who couldn’t have been any prettier than she was, looked prettier still. These books, I told the puzzled young woman in the passenger seat beside me, are just as good as they were thirty years ago, when I read them for the first time.

  She looked at me and said: You don’t look as if you could have read books like these thirty years ago. I mean, you don’t look old enough.

  Oh, I said, I was an infant prodigy.

  She smiled indulgently. Why should I read them? she asked.

  You always have to explain to the younger generation precisely why they should do something. Above all, why they ought to read some book or other.

  Well, I said, looking at the cover of Combray, that’s one of the best books ever written.

  Maybe, she said, but what was it that appealed to you particularly? Or who?

  Oh, I said, the grandmother. And I told her how the grandmother always removed the rose supports when she walked through the garden, to allow the plants to develop naturally. When I’d finished, I said: My grandmother was just the same. She always did that too.

  The fact is, my grandmother never did that. Being pe
rpetually worried about the health of every member of the family, she would have found it quite natural to support weak plants of any kind.

  I’d told a downright lie. I lie quite often – several times a day, I guess. On the other hand, it wasn’t really a lie. One winter, when I was four or five years old, I developed a high temperature and had to be taken to the hospital by ambulance. The hospital was situated in a mountain valley, and the approach road was so steep and icy that the ambulance couldn’t make it. One of the ambulance men was about to carry me down, but my grandmother said to let her do it. She took me on her lap, sat down on the frozen road, and slid the last hundred yards. Well, that’s not so different from someone who removes the supports from roses.

  I like that bit about the rose supports, said the young woman. Plants must grow strong by themselves.

  She probably votes for the Greens.

  I must read that, she said, like someone who might well have decided not to. Swann in Love had a close shave. I mean, if she hadn’t taken both books I would probably have chucked it into a refuse bin on some street corner.

  The last thing I said to her was: There are plenty more where they came from.

  Strange that I should be writing all this. I’ve now been on the run from the Mafia for weeks and months on end. I don’t really have the time, and I’m sometimes scared to death at night. No, I’m scared to death most days – scared if someone in the street gives me more than a passing stranger’s cursory glance. My whole body stiffens as if in response to a shrilling alarm bell, even though it probably doesn’t show at all on the outside. Yes, it’s true, I don’t have much time left. I’m running for my life, yet I’m sitting here writing about a chance encounter. About a woman to whom I once gave two books, and who may never have read them and never will.

  My time has run out, and that young woman is merely someone from a time that no longer exists, that’s been washed away while I sit here writing. It’s been washed away by this nothingness that also keeps me on the move through an ocean of time and fear and suspense. There are no more dates, no weeks, no months, no years. There are only these days that still have names – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday – nothing else, and here I sit in this hotel room, in some hotel room in which it’s Monday or Wednesday, and tomorrow I’ll be sitting in another hotel room in which it may be Friday or Saturday. I sit in these rooms, writing to stave off fear and this ocean of time that will sooner or later wash me away.

  Thursday

  The young woman may never read the book, and she’ll never know, of course, what became of her tip. I’m not entirely like one of those itinerant Buddhist monks who roam around with their begging bowls. I drive my taxi through the city and its environs (and sometimes a bit further, to Vienna or Zurich or Regensburg), but I seldom venture far from Munich, and I live on the money I make from my fares. But I don’t keep my tips. Those I always give away to tramps. I know some of them quite well. Where two or three of them are concerned, I sometimes think I’m their most important source of income. Or was their most important source of income, because that’s all over – permanently. I don’t know who gives them his tips these days. The tramps never venture very far from the city either. We were all like stationary itinerant monks waiting for eternity or a miracle. A miracle that would last for ever, or an eternity replete with miracles. But the age of miracles is past, even though I sometimes manage to recapture the fringe of that age. I see a girl, a young woman in the street somewhere in the city, and there comes a moment when that young woman is Jessie, and I know that it isn’t, that it can’t be her, yet it is and it isn’t, and I protect her like some unseen spirit. Just for a moment. For the space of a breath or two.

  Yes, that’s what I’d like to be now, an invisible spirit protecting my daughter, or I’d like to be sliding down this long, cold street on someone’s lap. That’s what I’m made for, not for protecting Sonia Kovalevskaya and taking on the Mafia.

  Sonia has just gone into town because she wanted to see a movie. Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. I don’t like letting her go alone, but she insisted on being alone tonight. She simply wanted to sit there in the dark and breathe easy. Besides, she said, I must improve my accent.

  Take care you don’t come out speaking Roman English, I said. She laughed, which was good. It’s good she can still laugh. Here in San Francisco we always travel by bus or streetcar, so we have to speak to as few people as possible (cabbies, for instance), because Sonia speaks English with a perceptible Russian accent. Not a strong one, but you can hear it all the same. We always buy a Muni Pass, a seven-day ticket for fifteen dollars, so we don’t have to speak to the bus drivers. We simply board the bus, show our tickets, say “Hi”, and smile. Sonia can say “Hi” without a trace of an accent. We never board a bus together if we can avoid it, but let a few people go between us. We never sit together, either. That lessens the risk of our looking familiar to someone, some European tourist who’s seen our pictures in the paper. Because it isn’t just the Mafia who are after us. The police are too, though I’m sure no one suspects we’re in the States – yet. They’re probably still looking for us in France and Italy. Or in Eastern Europe. Hopefully in Eastern Europe.

  We never sit together on a bus, nor do we stand together. We usually station ourselves in the rear section of the bus, near the central door, with me behind Sonia and near enough to be able to intervene if anything happens. So far, however, she has only been accosted by a few friendly Americans, and her invariable response has been to smile back and say “Oh”, or “Sure”, or “How wonderful”, or “That’s right”. Aside from “Hi”, those are the things she can say without a trace of an accent. Sometimes she overdoes it a bit and gives people a loud, vivacious “Hi” when a smile would have been enough. When that happens, I’m always afraid her enthusiasm may transmute itself into a Russian accent, and we have to be careful.

  She had no accent at all the day I met her in Munich. She was standing on the kerb in Würmtalstrasse with a small rucksack, and she waved when she saw my taxi approaching, and when I pulled up and lowered the window she said: Are you free? She had absolutely no accent in German. She’d spent several years in East Germany, teaching Russian for the KGB, and had learnt good German in the process. Sonia is quite unembarrassed about having worked for the KGB. A few weeks ago she said to me: For us, being a member of the KGB is a bit like you joining a breakdown service – and it’s actually quite practical.

  It was still pretty early when she hailed me, maybe half past seven, and it must have been a Thursday, because I always drove an old lady to the hospital for her dialysis on Thursdays. If there was time we occasionally had coffee at her place first. Her son collected her from the hospital afterwards. She had to go for dialysis three times a week, but I only took her on Thursdays because I had other regular customers on the other days. So it was definitely a Thursday when I first met Sonia.

  I got out and stowed her suitcase in the boot while she was settling herself on the back seat. She was pretty – I mean, she still is, of course, and it’s strange that women should interest a man even when he’s lost all interest in them. The only women that interested me were Ellen and Jessie, but I naturally noticed how pretty Sonia looked, sitting in the back, and I found that very pleasant. She seemed rather tense.

  Just drive on, she said. I have to get to the airport eventually, but just drive. She had no accent, nor did she look Russian. If she’d looked Russian I might have been a bit more wary. More suspicious, too, in which case I would probably have thought her less pretty. I used to drive quite a lot of Russians around, and I found them rather arrogant and insufferable. They also had that wry, knowing Slav smile, as if they knew what makes the world tick. I mean, as if they knew what a bad place it is, and as if everyone in it is simply out to cheat and deceive the Russians of this world. As if life is one big con. I don’t like that, and I don’t like people who think like that.

  Sonia took me on quite a tour of the south of Munich – Ple
ase turn left here, now turn right – until we were back near the hospital and driving down one of the little side streets. I had to drive very slowly because she seemed interested in one particular house. Then she said: Now we can go to the airport.

  She’d spent the whole time looking round. She probably thought she could do so unobtrusively, but you can’t look round unobtrusively on the back seat of a car. There’s no rear-view mirror, so you have to turn round. I watched her in my own rear-view mirror. She really was extremely edgy, and completely blind to the beauties of the morning.

  We drove down Lagerhausstrasse, and as we were passing Wittelsbach Bridge I said: Lovely day, isn’t it?

  Yes, she said distractedly. She wasn’t the only one whose thoughts were elsewhere. If you’ve lived in a city for a long time, it contains a whole host of sacred places. Places where you’ve had significant experiences. Good experiences and bad. Munich was full of such places. I wasn’t there as a child and didn’t grow up there, but when you’ve lived in a city for over thirty years it’s almost as if you’d been there as a child. And my child had been a child there, so I was one too.

  When we drove past Wittelsbach Bridge I was pretty indifferent to what Sonia thought of the day as she sat there on the back seat. This was because, for some years now, it had always been a nice day when I passed that bridge. I’d driven across it one summer’s day a few years earlier, and two kids were standing roughly in the middle, looking down at the tramps who live there nearly all year round. In fine weather they put out tables and benches, like in a beer garden. Sun umbrellas too.

  So there they stood on the bridge, those two kids, looking down at the tramps. I say “kids”, but they must have been sixteen or seventeen years old. The girl was extremely pretty. She had a very vivacious face, and although she wasn’t smiling in the least, it seemed to wear the smile of someone who knows what makes the world tick. But it wasn’t like that Slav smile which knows that the world is a lousy place and refuses to be conned. It was the smile of someone who regards the world with wonderment. And who wants to know everything.