The Turncoat

by Siegfried Lenz

  “You’re right, Wolfgang. Where did you figure all that out?”

  “Not in our garden at home, and not in the lecture hall, but here. You can’t figure it out unless you’re here. I’ve always been a lonesome dog, but always glad to be self-sufficient. I’ve never had a girlfriend with a well-cared-for, perfumed body, waiting at home for me. I had myself, and nothing else. But anybody who puts himself under the knife and makes a few good incisions will realize he can never lay that knife aside. He’ll have to keep operating on himself for the rest of his life. And do you know which people are their own best surgeons? The ones who give themselves a silent diagnosis and crawl into their inner solitude and take their own pulse there, with brutal honesty.”

  “I don’t entirely understand you, Wolfgang. Have you studied medicine?”

  “Look, Walter. In the world where we live, we have to orient ourselves toward the good. That sounds banal, I know. But since evil presents itself in many different guises, it’s necessary to reconsider contaminated intentions, identify the damaged areas, seal up the holes in our findings, and revise the results. And that requires a huge amount of analytical ability and radical frankness about oneself. If you perceive that something you’ve run after for twenty years is not only wrong but base, underhanded, dangerous, and murderous, you must have the strength to kick it away. Maybe you know what I mean. We must beware of the national Pied Pipers. Stick our fingers in our ears, run water into them, plug them with wax! I cherish freedom, and skepticism too. We should spread the dung of freedom in our hearts and plant skepticism in it. Do you understand me? I guess I’m a little excited. And no wonder. You’re the first person I’ve ever confided in, Walter. You have to remember that—I’m bursting with things to say…I send my mother letters about consolation. She needs those letters, but every word of solace I write makes me ill; it strikes me as a betrayal. You wouldn’t think I’d feel that way, would you?”

  Proska struck himself on the nape of the neck with one big hand. Behind his low forehead, the wheels of his thoughts were turning hard, and it seemed as though their rotation loosened something in him that until then had existed as a timorous cramping. He felt himself set free, ready for an undertaking; he saw a way. Slowly and a little apprehensively, he stretched out an arm and laid it across Milk Roll’s shoulders. Then he said, “I can’t express myself the way you can, Wolfgang. But I’d like to tell you that you can always count on me. If anyone tries to torment you, come to me. In the place we’re in, we have to rely on each other.”

  “No,” Wolfgang said dramatically. “This isn’t the only place where we have to rely on each other. Men who think the way we do must come together everywhere. The fellowship of the reasonable is small. Because we all—”

  Rat-tat-tat: a sudden hammering. They heard bullets whistling in their direction and impacting the trees around them. Some rounds whirred away over their heads like evil insects.

  “Get down,” Proska cried. “Behind the trunk.” Milk Roll flung himself on the ground beside him. “Did you see the flashes from their guns?”

  “Yes. Over there, behind the embankment. How did they…ah, you lit a cigarette! Put it out, Walter, quick. There’s no point provoking these guys.”

  Proska flung the glowing cigarette away. It struck a tree trunk and sent out a shower of sparks. At the same moment, there came another fusillade of automatic fire, and the two men pressed their faces into the damp ground. They smelled the harsh odor of the grass and felt the dew wet their hands.

  “Shall we answer them?” the assistant asked.

  “There’s no point,” said Wolfgang.

  “So what are we supposed to do? If we lie here all night, we’ll have pneumonia tomorrow.”

  “Maybe they have something planned for the bridge today.”

  “We ought to go there.”

  “Ought to? That’s pretty rash, Walter. If they surprise us, it’s all over. Usually they have people standing guard.”

  “And if they blow up the bridge?”

  “We’ll notice it soon enough.”

  “Aren’t you going to come with me?” Proska asked.

  “Of course I am. Let’s go. We’ll skirt the edge of the woods. Hopefully the moon won’t be too curious about us while we’re crawling over the meadow. At some point, we’ll have to crawl, Walter. If you walk upright, you’ll draw their fire right away.”

  They both stood up and walked with long strides along the margin of the mixed-growth forest. There was nothing hasty, nothing anxious about their movements. They felt well protected in the austere shadow of the foliage; one might have thought that for them, the difference between life and death had ceased to exist. They continued on to a place where the woods suddenly stopped and the meadow formed a kind of bay, as if it had surged into the forest in that spot. And there the moon pounced on the two soldiers. It attacked them with its light, exposing their approach. But Proska and Milk Roll had no doubt reckoned on that, because now they were moving more circumspectly, no longer so heedlessly that someone watching them might have thought no more dangers threatened mankind. Although neither of them had spoken a word of explanation or warning, not so much as a tiny syllable, they both fell on the ground, laid their rifle barrels across their left arms—a reflex that had been etched into their brains—and waited.

  Milk Roll hissed, “Ready,” and then both started crawling over the meadow grass: knee, toe-tip, elbow, knee, toe-tip, elbow. Their sweat glands went to work. Onward, you sons of hope, drag yourselves through the marsh! So what if your pants get wet and your nipples bathe in stinking, putrefying water. Your nostrils tremble. Let them tremble: they won’t capture such sublime scents for you again anytime soon, the scents of fatal lethargy, the fumes of the earth that death and life are fighting over. Such a little patch of marsh possesses a double sublimity, a double dignity, namely that of another, departed world and that of your own. Don’t forget that, breathe, breathe. Unlock your lungs; whoever has the privilege of getting so close to the earth should savor it. Every now and then there was a slight squelching sound, as when a mother leans over a barrel of fermenting sauerkraut and presses it down with her soft fist. But in the end, so what? And if a frog that’s taking a break from vocal sac training should get caught under your knee, the accident will neither stop nor change your course. What a shame, how regrettable it is, though, that you can’t take the time to listen to earth’s primordial babbling.

  “We’re close,” Milk Roll panted. “We must be close.”

  Bushes suddenly seemed to spring up in front of them, offering them cover. Both men got to their feet.

  “There’s the bridge. Can you see anyone?”

  “Nobody ever sees them.”

  “Shall we go on?” Proska asked.

  “And then?”

  “Then maybe we’ll catch them.”

  “Or they’ll catch us.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Wait.”

  “For what?”

  “Wait for something to happen.”

  “And what’s going to happen?”

  “That question can’t be answered in advance.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “Nonsense. How about you?”

  “I’ll go on,” said Proska.

  “You stay here, Walter, I’ll go.”

  “Then let’s both go.”

  They crouched down and drew near the bridge, availing themselves of the cover the bushes provided. The bridge rested on the strong shoulders of four concrete pillars, in front of which the river created little whirlpools. In addition, the abutments on the banks were secured by struts as broad as a man’s chest. All in all, this bridge appeared to be a remarkable bastion against time.

  The soldiers pricked up their ears in vain. They heard not a sound. They noticed no one trying to get too close to the bridge.

  “Loo
ks dead and deserted,” Proska said dryly.

  “Lots of flowers bloom in graveyards.”

  “You mean you see one of these—”

  “Ssst!” Wolfgang hissed.

  “I think you’re too tense. If there were anyone here, we’d have spotted him already.”

  “At the front, it’s different.”

  “It’s exactly the same. And to make you understand, I’m going to light a cigarette now.”

  Proska stuck a cigarette in his mouth, lit it, and smoked it greedily.

  “There, you see?” he said. “No one has any objection. They probably think we’ve reinforced the guard in this area. Remember, this is where you all grabbed the old guy. Surely that must have instilled some respect in them.”

  “These people know nothing of respect—and they’re not acquainted with fear either. You can lay their hand on a block of wood and raise your ax: they won’t tell you any secrets. You can bring the ax down: they’ll turn pale and look at you in excruciating pain and remain silent. You can hack off the other hand: the pain will drive them mad, they’ll jump and scream and groan—but you won’t learn what you want to know. You can even bring them to where their wives and children are and make them watch while their families are shot: they won’t speak…Someone who has no respect for death has no need to fear us. Because killing is already the worst thing we can come up with.”

  “Are we going to stay close to the bridge until morning?”

  “No. We’ll stay on the riverbank. There are some well-protected places a little farther upriver. Shall we go there?”

  “All right with me.”

  Hesitantly, they moved out of the shadow of the bridge and waded into the bright yellow swath of light shed by the moon. No shot, no scream, no fall, no gasping, no blood.

  The river gnawed at the bank, as skulking and wary as a rat. And its patience was paying off. It chuckled as the men crept along the low, sloping ground.

  “Come on,” said Proska, “we can sit here. Our pants are soaked in any case. Here, between these bushes. We can still see the bridge.”

  And they sat on the ground and snatched their steel helmets off their heads. The night wind landed on their foreheads and brought cooling. They both stared at the river.

  Damn, I’m hungry, thought Proska.

  She had hair like a gypsy, thought Milk Roll.

  “What are you thinking about?” asked Proska.

  “Eve.”

  “The one with the apple?”

  “No. She had blue-black hair.”

  Proska said, “Like a gypsy girl?”

  “Yes, exactly. And her skin was as brown as a May bug’s wings.”

  “Does she think about you?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Yes…We used to play tag together when we were eight, and we went out for ice cream when we were fourteen. We’d stand on the docks when the fishermen unloaded their big baskets, and we’d look at each other when a ship’s horn blew. She and I were the same age; we were always holding hands; and when we went to the dairywoman’s, she’d say, ‘You two are going to make a pretty couple,’ and when we went to the greengrocer’s, each of us got an apple, and he too said, ‘You two are going to make a pretty couple’; and when my mother was standing at the window and saw us coming down the street hand in hand, she’d say, ‘You look like a pretty couple.’ On my seventeenth birthday, I got a kiss from her—the first. We simply abandoned our friends and met secretly in the garden. I put my arm around her shoulders, and all at once we stopped walking, and she looked at me. I felt how hot her skin was, and then she moved closer to me and we closed our eyes.”

  “And couldn’t find each other,” Proska chuckled.

  “Her mouth was like a little red magnet, it was like a burning lens, you know? And afterward—it took us a pretty good while before we could find words again—we talked about getting married. Slowly, we went back to the house, slowly, slowly. Not slowly enough. Now and then we stopped and embraced and kissed. The last kiss came at her front door, and I felt her body pressing against mine: strong, determined, and full of longing. I understood that longing. I kissed her on the neck. Then she gave me a complicit look and ran inside.”

  Milk Roll stopped talking and drummed his fingers on his rifle stock. His long hair had fallen down and covered one ear.

  “Was her skin as brown as a May bug’s wings all over? I figure you found out the answer to that pretty soon.”

  “Two days after my birthday, I invited her to go swimming. I had laid a plan, a beautiful, promising, reliable plan. We’d travel out to a branch of the Oder, to a spot where there were hardly ever any people. Some bushes were growing there, right at the edge of the water—big, sympathetic bushes that hid anyone who didn’t want to be seen. You understand me, Walter?”

  Proska nodded.

  “Good. So I decided not to give Eve any long explanations about where we were going—I just told her to meet me at the train station at three o’clock. If you can, I said, don’t make me wait too long…I was right on time; she didn’t come. When it got to be four o’clock and she still hadn’t shown up, I boarded the train by myself. At first I was angry at her. But later, when I was lying in the isolated spot where I’d planned to take her, I forgave her. I assumed she’d been prevented from coming by some unforeseen problem. And so, not unhappy but a little disappointed, I enjoyed the afternoon. When evening came and it got dark—about as dark as it is now—I sat down among the bushes. It was a delightful evening, and I wasn’t thinking about leaving yet. I saw the lights of the ships sailing down the Oder, I heard the miniature music of the crickets, and I was satisfied. I conversed with myself; I wanted to pat myself on the back, I congratulated myself on what I hadn’t yet experienced, what was still to come. The longer you postpone great pleasure, the more painful and avid…Ah, you know what I mean.”

  “I know,” said Proska.

  “But as I was sitting there, lost in my little private dreams, I suddenly heard two voices, one male and one female. I resolved to keep quiet so I wouldn’t be discovered. But all at once, curiosity seized me by the collar and turned my head in the direction the voices were coming from. There stood a man lighting a cigarette and a girl rearranging her clothing. I recognized her profile against the night sky. It was her, her! She was laughing softly, and happily. The man, a guy as big as a gorilla, took her in his arms and pressed his lips against the down on the nape of her neck. I heard her sigh—my ears didn’t let me down. Well, so what else can I tell you? I couldn’t move, I couldn’t shout; it was her! They said goodbye. He, the gorilla, went off in the other direction; she passed right next to the bush I was lying behind. I didn’t call to her, I didn’t budge. Now I knew who she was.”

  “Did you see her again?”

  “No.”

  “Hmm,” said Walter.

  The soldiers were silent. Proska’s belly became impatient. “How long do we have to stay out here?” he asked.

  “Until dawn,” said Milk Roll.

  A waterfowl with swiftly beating wings whirred across the river.

  “He’s in a hurry,” said Proska.

  “Quiet!”

  “What is it?”

  “I think someone’s there.”

  “By the bridge?”

  “Sst!”

  They lay down and gripped their rifle stocks and curled their index fingers around the triggers.

  “There, Walter, there!”

  They held their breath; each could hear the other’s heartbeat. A person was slowly coming toward them on the gently sloping riverbank; this person was a girl. Both of them could tell immediately from the silhouette of her head. Like them, the girl must have been lying low among the bushes along the river.

  Milk Roll took aim at her as well as he could, determined to squeeze
the trigger at his next opportunity. But then Proska’s big hard hand came down on his rifle barrel and pressed it to the ground. The girl came closer, calm as could be. Now she was two paces from the men, now even with them, and now past them already. When she was almost out of sight, Wolfgang asked, “Why didn’t you let me shoot? The girls around here are often more dangerous than the men.”

  Proska answered haltingly: “It was her, her. She double-crossed me on the train and spoiled my plan. I recognized her profile against the night sky. Her name is Wanda, and her hair is red like squirrel fur.”

  • SIX •

  Quiet! Let those two sleep!”

  “I just wanted to say—”

  “I decide what gets said here. Is that clear?”

  “Yessir. But we have a visitor. I believe—”

  “No believing here. A visitor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is he? Tell me he’s not another Dynamite Jesus.”