The Snowman Read online

  Blum saw a man in his undershirt behind her, laughing and raising a beer bottle. Then the window was closed again, and Blum felt a pang in his heart. The train jerked, and came into Cologne Station.

  On the platform there were American women with plastic backpacks, Turks with cardboard suitcases tied up with string, sausage-eating commuters, chain-smoking teenagers all wearing the same trousers, the same hairstyles and the same badges, and police informers studying timetables anxiously like travellers fearing that all trains would fail to stop at their station. The Amsterdam train was on time, and Blum found an empty first-class compartment. It was heated, and the red upholstery with its warmed-up aroma of sweat and perfume was reminiscent of the salons of old-fashioned brothels in Algeciras and Ceuta. Blum sat next to the corridor, hand on his sample case.

  Two men joined him in the compartment at Deutz, a fat man with a briefcase who sat by the window, and a grey-haired Englishman reading the Daily Telegraph. The fat man opened his briefcase and took out a new men’s magazine. He moved his lips as he read. If I were still in the porn magazine business he’d be a good customer, thought Blum. Ah, those happy days with the porn magazines, he thought. Söderbaum’s “Spring Awakening”, those fat Danish tits, all milk and honey – if that was supposed to be perverted, then what was all that out there? He noticed how awkwardly the men sat, either with legs crossed, free hand clasping an ankle, or leaning heavily forward, left hand turned in and propped on the thigh, head bent, and with the right foot curled round the left so as to keep from sitting comfortably, or – like himself – with his right hand clutching his case, a burning cigarette smelling of dung in his left hand, his face red and running with sweat. They were all slaves on vacation, and out there was their district – rolling-mill trains, blast furnaces, atomic piles. Car cemeteries, mines, potash factories. Plastics markets, poison manufacturers, satellite towns, the sun itself a tranquillizer substitute. Housing estate after housing estate, like kraals where the natives danced around a fetish to the shrill howl of the sirens.

  The Englishman got out at Oberhausen. The fat man put his men’s magazine back in his briefcase, loosened his tie and started studying a sex magazine. The flat landscape was covered with a sulphurous haze. Blum had to go to the toilet. He took the sample case with him. The fat man looked up and grinned.

  In the toilet Blum splashed water on his face. It looked to him emaciated and haggard. When he came out into the corridor he saw a man he knew standing outside the toilet in the adjoining second-class compartment. Panic rose in him; his heart raced. He was already hurrying back down the corridor, his case colliding with the doors. The blue suit, the mutton-chop whiskers, the glasses over those froggy eyes, and the fat man with the sex magazine in his own compartment – you see, Blum, we know who you are, you won’t escape us. The train was slowing down. A station. Blum clutched his sample case more tightly, and swiftly passed his compartment. He didn’t look inside. He would have to abandon his travelling bag, his shirts, his cravat, the Bahamas handbook. The train juddered and came to a halt. He opened the door and looked round. No one else seemed to be getting out. He jumped down on the platform. To his left he saw an exit notice and made for it. The station master was already blowing his whistle. The words on a signboard announced: “Welcome to Wesel”.

  30

  Saturday afternoon. Those in gainful employment were taking their overfed families out for walks. In the shopping street, they let the mothers and children off the leash and withdrew with the family dog to a corner pub. Half an hour to go to the sports show, guessed Blum. He knew he didn’t have much time. His pursuers would get out at Emmerich, summon reinforcements at once and start back to Wesel. The others would stay in Emmerich, at the station, on the roads. He had to give them the slip again between Wesel and Emmerich, and for good this time. It would be best if he got into a train going the other way. Back to Cologne, and take a plane from there – but where to? There were security checkpoints and customs barriers at every airport. No, he must go to Amsterdam. He could get rid of the stuff at once in Amsterdam. Not for a great deal of money, obviously, but yesterday evening he’d have been happy with fifteen grand. And this way he could easily make 100 grand out of it yet. The Dutch guilder was a good currency too. The only problem now was getting to Amsterdam. Taxi? But anyone going so far by taxi would arouse suspicion. A hire car was no use. He mustn’t leave any documentary evidence behind him in Wesel. He must never give his name again.

  He reached the cathedral. There was a builders’ fence in front of it, and someone had painted SIEG on the boards in black paint. A dachshund raised its back leg and did a pee. A beery twilight prevailed in the marketplace pubs, the jukebox played evergreen hits – “Sonny Boy” – and all who were not cast into gloom on a German Saturday afternoon were assembled on the benches. Blum ordered a Pils and drank it straight down.

  “You’ve got a good thirst on you,” said the man beside Blum.

  “I guess I’ve earned that beer,” said Blum, looking more closely at his neighbour. The man was a study in brown: dark brown, neatly parted hair, red-brown wrinkled face, raincoat of shimmering green-brown fabric, turf-brown suit, mustard-brown shirt, horse-dung-brown tie. In his brown, fleshy hands the beer in the glass shone like liquid gold. He must be somewhere between fifty-five and sixty, but had no grey in his hair yet, and his eyes were like two blue marbles.

  They fell into conversation. Something about the man seemed familiar to Blum, and at the same time he felt intrigued. You could still spend whole evenings discussing beer in Germany, but Blum was in a hurry and quickly moved on to something else. He was a commercial traveller, said the man in brown, a sales rep for a soap powder firm. He trudged round the marketplaces and pedestrian shopping malls of the smaller towns, from the Lower Rhine to the Sauerland, flogging obscure washing powders. Blum could well imagine it: under a damp awning in the pedestrian zone of Neheim-Hüsten, with Spring Awakening soap-flakes and Lambswool detergent, two products which for fifty-seven years had been conducting a hopeless campaign against the giant Henkel company, in front of two housewives with headaches and three school-kids, including two from Asia Minor, on a Thursday afternoon with DM 13.30 in your pocket, and the prospect of sausage with potato salad for supper and a cold bed in the Christian Hostel. If you could imagine it, it didn’t mean that the same fate was in store for you, yet a shiver ran down Blum’s back, a fear rooted deeper than the fear of any syndicate.

  “And who do you travel for?”

  “Oh, you mean because of my case – no, I’m not a rep. It’s just my things in there.”

  “In a sample case? Then you must have been a traveller once.”

  “No, no,” Blum assured him. “I’ve always worked in other lines – the construction industry, restaurants, antiques, magazines, well, anything that came along.”

  “A lot will come along yet,” said the sales rep, “you have a lot ahead of you. I didn’t always represent washing powders either.”

  But he wouldn’t say what he had done before. He ordered two more Pilses. Blum looked at the time.

  “Not in a hurry, are you?” asked the traveller. “On a Saturday afternoon?”

  “I have to go on to Holland.”

  “What do you want there? The Dutch don’t like us.”

  “But they do business with us.”

  “Everyone does. That’s in the nature of business. And what kind of business do you have in Holland?”

  “Oh, I’m – I’m looking around the restaurants. You see, I’d like to open a restaurant myself some time, so I’m gathering information about the kind of opportunities there are in that field.”

  The sales rep drank his beer and smiled mildly.

  “Is that why you’re sitting in marketplace pubs?”

  “Even if they may not always look it, bars like these can be a goldmine.”

  “And you’d like a goldmine too?”

  “Wouldn’t we all?”

  “Ah, you still have
illusions,” said the sales rep, wiping the froth from his mouth. “One does at your age. But when I hear the word mine, I think of the mines that killed our comrades and the trenches where we buried them. Back then in Russia, see? We still had illusions then too. We thought when we came back Germany would be there again.”

  “And nothing came of that?”

  “You know that as well as I do, friend. Nothing came of it. Are you catching the night train, or spending the night here?”

  Blum had to pull himself together to find an answer. There was an aura of hopelessness about the sales rep that settled on the brain like murky mist. Yet the man could be useful to him.

  “That’s just what I’d like to talk to you about. But maybe somewhere else, where we won’t be disturbed?”

  The sales rep nodded, as if he had assessed Blum correctly from the first. “Let me invite you to supper. Eggs and fried potatoes – I expect you can eat that?”

  It was not a question but a demand.

  Outside, the mist was grey now and getting darker fast. For a while they followed a country road, and then went a little way along the Rhine. People out walking were standing on the bank, looking west across the river. Crows rose from the fields. A coal barge chugged downstream in the evening mist.

  “What happens if you go further on along here?” Blum asked.

  “First you reach the lake, the Aue, we’re going to turn off there, the campsite won’t interest you so much, and then you’d have to go on through Westerheide to Bislich.”

  “I mean after that. Holland must begin somewhere.”

  “Are you planning to walk there?”

  Blum did not reply.

  “Well, yes, then you get to Holland,” said the sales rep, with a long sideways look, “but that’s quite a way. First you get to Rees, and then Emmerich, of course, and then you have to go over the border. But that’s no problem today, the Dutch will let anyone across, so long as he isn’t actually stark naked or has no skeletons in his cupboard.”

  “But you go across often?”

  The sales rep shrugged his shoulders and flicked the end of his Reval away. “What would I be doing in Holland?”

  “I thought you could buy things cheap there.”

  “What I need can be bought at home,” said the sales rep, thus closing the subject, but Blum suspected that he didn’t cross the border for much more pressing reasons.

  They left the Rhine, passed a glider club and came into the open country. There was no footpath beside the road, so they went along it in single file, and when car headlights caught them flies danced in front of their faces. Blum began to wonder if he wasn’t in the process of losing his reason. Apparently with coke you didn’t lose your mind until you lost control over the dosage, but perhaps as a dealer you lost your mind if you lost control over the trade. And you’d surely lost that if you were stumbling along behind a washing powder rep over the plains of the Lower Rhine on foot on a March night, with a mere few marks in your pocket and several syndicates after you. But the air was refreshing, it was a nice evening, there were even stars in the sky. Blum felt curiously cheerful, relaxed, even full of confidence. What were those five pounds of coke in the case, to the handle of which he was clinging as tight as if his life depended on it? They were nothing if he couldn’t enjoy every moment as much as this one, totally crazy, almost free.

  31

  “Enjoy it, friend?”

  With his mouth full, Blum nodded. He emptied his plate, and the sales rep cleared away, washed the dishes, and cleaned out the frying pan with scouring powder. A pleasant smell of fat, fried potatoes, bacon and briquettes hung around the sales rep’s wooden shed. This, Blum thought to himself, was how the Spartans of today lived – a wooden hut, a camp bed, a roaring stove, a plastic cupboard, egg boxes, plywood furniture, a cheap People’s Radio, three rows of paperback classics, the collected works of Karl May. Television sets, refrigerators, best-sellers and women did not feature in the Spartan’s life. Instead, he told Blum the tale of the early-nineteenth-century German Wars of Liberation – Major Schilf had been executed in Wesel – and did not refrain from drawing bitter comparisons with his own generation’s readiness to sacrifice themselves. They had been led astray, lied to, deceived, fooled, seduced, they had given their all – like Schilf, like Körner – and those who had the misfortune to survive must bear the shame of fighting in the wrong cause to the end of their days. When had it ever before been wrong and shameful to fight for your own country?

  “Don’t get all worked up again, Erwin,” said the man’s colleague, who had turned up after supper, driving a ramshackle delivery truck. His name was Fred, he had small, darting eyes, sparse grey hair and a mouth over-full of teeth. Blum particularly relished the cold beer he had brought with him, and then he discovered they were in related jobs.

  “You’re right, Fred,” said the sales rep. “I know, I know. I ought to keep quiet, quiet till the end, quiet as the Russian graves with the birch trees over them. This isn’t my world any more, so why do I bother with it? Since Germany ceased to exist I don’t have a world any more.”

  “Erwin was once at the top of the tree,” said Fred, close to Blum’s ear. “The very top of the tree.” And he winked, as much as to say: you know what that means, because now we’re at the very bottom.

  “But Germany is still beautiful,” said Blum. “I’ve just been on a little business trip – it seems a pretty flourishing place to me. And we have no less than two Germanies.”

  “That doesn’t count,” said the sales rep briefly. “Neither of them counts. The golden calf and Bolshevism, that can’t be Germany.”

  “Perhaps a mixture of them?”

  “A mixture! Mixtures, that’s the washing-powder culture, my friend. No, there’s no point in it, but of course one should never give up. What did you say you were transporting?”

  The brown man’s glance was still friendly, but he now looked quite hard in the light of the naked bulb that hung from the ceiling. His contours were sharply outlined. He chain-smoked Reval cigarettes and stubbed them out in a metal container of a shape that reminded Blum more and more of a steel helmet.

  “That’s what I wanted to discuss with you,” said Blum. “I’m looking for a way into Holland where there won’t be any checkpoint. Not on account of the police, I can always manage them. But the Federal Criminal Agency, you understand, those lads are clever, they don’t do things by halves. There could be problems if they take a close look at me at the border. And that wouldn’t be a good idea at all, see what I mean?”

  He laughed, helped himself to another can of Dortmund Actienbräu, and pulled the tab off the top. The head was like the foam in the jumbo cans. He toasted the two colleagues. The sales rep nodded gloomily; Fred’s quick eyes swivelled towards the sample case.

  “Federal Criminal Agency?” asked Fred. “Isn’t that . . .”

  “State security,” said the sales rep, relishing the term.

  Fred looked at Blum, frowning. Had he gone rather too far? Blum raised his hands.

  “I want to be on the safe side,” he said. “I really can’t afford to make mistakes.”

  His eyes moved over the sample case. The sales rep coughed his way through a couple of Revals without taking his eyes off Blum. His friend Fred drank his beer, looking nervous.

  “Slow and easy,” he said. “I don’t want anything to do with state security. You have to admit, Erwin, we’re out of our league there.”

  The sales rep narrowed his eyes and stared through the smoke, perhaps seeing graves with birch trees whispering above them, or perhaps just the damp tarpaulin next Thursday in Neheim-Hüsten, and the housewives staggering out of the supermarket with their ten-pound drums of Ariel.

  “The man has to get across the border,” he announced, “and so he shall. No one must be lost. That’s what we’re here for after all, the last of us.”

  They looked at one another, Blum and the man in brown. They did not entirely understand each other,
but at least they knew who they were. And Blum saw himself in twenty years’ time, worn out, in a place like this, without any Wars of Liberation, with a fridge and TV in the evening, before shoelaces were abolished world-wide.

  “Don’t you have any schnapps, Erwin?” asked Fred. “I feel kind of cold.”

  As he spoke he looked sideways at Blum, as if he were responsible for the chill in the air. But the sales rep had no schnapps. He put another briquette in the stove, for the benefit of Blum, not Fred. Small-time crooks, his manner suggested, wouldn’t quote state security at you.

  “It’ll soon be the same old story, load your ammunition, they won’t get me alive. And all for a sack of potatoes, eh? That’s what I call inflation.”

  “I can pay,” said Blum.

  The sales rep made a dismissive gesture, but Fred was thinking along more practical lines.

  “Good ways across are few and far between,” he pointed out. “We can ask a kind of fee, right? You have to look at the practical side, Erwin.”

  They reminded Blum of an old married couple – the idealistic champion of mankind’s better instincts whose wife has been nagging him for the last forty-five years about the neighbours, neighbours long ago fixed up with official positions and sinecures, and now their block was occupied by good-for-nothing heathens. Finally he settled the matter with a 100-mark note, and Fred remembered that he still had a bottle of spirits in his glove compartment. While he went to fetch it the sales rep cleared the beer cans away, and as he slipped his coat on he said, “I hope you get through safe and sound, friend. Yes, the battle’s still worth fighting at your age, never mind what for.”

  “You’re not on the scrapheap yet, not by a long way,” said Blum.

  “I’m sixty-two, and after thirty-five years of this I’m just about ready for the scrapheap. Here, take the torch, I expect you can use it, but go easy with it. The batteries are running out.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” murmured Blum, putting the torch in his jacket pocket.