The Turncoat

by Siegfried Lenz

“No, he’s not.”

  “What is he, then? Speak up.”

  “I believe he’s the mail officer.”

  “Ah, the mail officer. Why isn’t he in here right now? It’s about time he shows his face again. Bring him to me.”

  Melon waddled out the door; Willi counted the cigarettes he kept in his chest.

  A promising morning had made its way to the Fortress and awakened the soldiers. The dew hung twinkling on the grass, the sky looked on, hopelessly cheerful, and the sun shuffled over the treetops without a sound, like a weightless old woman. Proska was asleep and Milk Roll was asleep. They had eaten, hung up their uniforms to dry, and then thrown themselves onto their bunks. Thighbone hadn’t returned yet. But that fazed no one; they all knew they couldn’t lose a man like him so easily. He was too careful, too alert, and too cunning.

  Before Poppek and Zacharias went out on patrol, they had fished the old man out of the ditch and searched his coat pockets. When they couldn’t find anything, they’d gone to Willi and told him so.

  “Then I made a mistake,” the corporal had answered, and when the others asked what they should do now, he’d shouted, “Maybe he gulped those sticks down as fast as he could. Move him far away from the Fortress, just in case he explodes later on today.”

  Melon pushed the mail officer into the Fortress. He was a man with sloping shoulders, and he was carrying a bundle of parcels on one side and a leather bag filled with letters on the other. A submachine gun hung diagonally across his chest. It wasn’t easy to make out the expression in his eyes, for they were screened by the thick, highly polished lenses of his spectacles.

  Sighing loudly, he approached the stove table, threw the parcels and letters on it, and leaned his gun against a stool. Then he went to Willi and said, “The mail, the mail, the mail is here!”

  The corporal growled, “Are you always so witty?”

  That rendered the mail officer speechless; he swallowed the saliva of embarrassment and waited until the corporal turned toward him. Willi closed the lid of his treasure chest and said, “Why has it been so long since we’ve seen you?”

  “When I come isn’t up to me,” the mailman said.

  “You’re still based in Tomashgrod?”

  “A little outside of it.”

  “Ah. And otherwise, you have no complaints?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Just a thought. Do you think too? We do a lot of thinking here. Every night, two sacks, filled with thoughts. We immediately tie up the sacks and throw them in the ditch. What would you think if we sent all that stuff, all those thoughts, home in the mail? You’d have to commit a whole battalion of mail officers just to handle the post for me and my men here. And the people at home would have to spend all their time reading mail…Have you brought a lot?”

  “In four weeks all sorts of things start to pile up, heh-heh-heh.”

  “Why are you laughing like an imbecile?”

  “I’m laughing like an imbecile, Corporal?”

  “You’re laughing like a tickled gelding.”

  “There’s probably a total of forty letters.”

  “I’m not surprised. Twenty of them are surely for our dyspeptic.”

  “Your dyspeptic?”

  “Our stomach-sufferer. Kürschner.”

  “Yeah, pretty many of them are addressed to him.”

  “Anything for me?”

  “Two letters, as far as I know.”

  “Well, let’s see these surprises…Have you got a light?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Have you also got cigarettes?”

  “Just two left.”

  “Hand them over, and a light too.”

  The corporal took three or four deep drags and then went over to the stove table. He rummaged in the mail pile until he spotted his name, picked up the envelope, and thrust it into his breast pocket.

  “You don’t want to read it right away?”

  “For what?” Willi asked. “The words aren’t going anywhere.”

  “You never know, sometimes you have to make a quick decision, heh-heh-heh.”

  “Stop that idiotic laughing, man, you’re making my ears nervous. Did your father command the joke brigade, or what?”

  “He was a locomotive driver, Corporal.”

  “There, you see, practically the same thing.”

  While Willi talked, he pushed the letters apart, read their addresses, perused the contents of cards that had no envelopes, removed the wrapper from a newspaper meant for Zacharias, and threw it on his bed. The mail officer, who was watching him, commented, “There’s only one letter for you? That’s not much in more than three weeks. I thought I saw your name on two letters, but I must have been mistaken…”

  “Think away,” the NCO said without looking up, “but not too much. You can rest your brain and leave the thinking to me and to your superior officers. After all, we’re responsible for you. Is that clear?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Good, I like to be clear.”

  All at once, the corporal gave a start; holding a card in his hand, he hurried to the window and read the card a second time in the brighter light. His thin lips parted, an uncharacteristic smile twitched the corners of his parsimonious mouth, and his Adam’s apple rolled up and down his ruddy, leathery throat. He absentmindedly flicked his half-smoked cigarette onto the floor and crushed it out with his boot sole. Then he bared his teeth and began to laugh loudly; he laughed until a coughing fit seized him and bent his body in half. His eyes bulged out of their sockets, sprays of saliva flew through the air, his hands groped for a hold. He made a weary sign to the mailman, who immediately understood and delivered several heavy blows to the NCO’s back.

  “Lung remnants, fall in on the right and make way for oxygen,” Willi croaked when he was feeling better. With the balls of his hands, he rubbed his eyes, pressing away the moisture that his tremendous efforts had brought welling up. He shook his head resignedly, held the card high again, and as he didn’t want to take the chance of laughing aloud, contented himself with letting the hint of a benevolent grin appear on his drinker’s face.

  “That must be pretty amusing, no?”

  “What?” Willi asked hoarsely.

  “That card. It seems to be making the corporal laugh.”

  “So what? It really is laughable. Even you would laugh at it, you and your idiotic heh-heh-heh. Let me hear it again.”

  “You want me to laugh?”

  “You can’t laugh. I want you to go heh-heh-heh.”

  “At what?”

  “At yourself. But why aren’t you doing it? It’s an order, carry it out.”

  The mailman was silent, as though secretly testing his vocal cords.

  “Well? Let’s go! Let’s hear it!”

  The slope-shouldered man didn’t change expression, but looked at the corporal and went, “Heh-heh-heh, heh-heh-heh—”

  “All right, stop, for God’s sake. That’s enough for me, you’re torturing my eardrums. Furthermore, you can disappear now. But if you let another three weeks pass before you come back, you’re going to have some bad luck. Understand?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Here, don’t forget your SMG. That’s Wehrmacht property. You have to treat it like your own eyes. But I see that your eyes…well. I suppose you’ve laughed yourself to tears at your own jokes so much you can’t see anything anymore. What’s your view of the situation? I mean, through your double pupils. Everything’s going according to plan, right? Good. You can clear out. But take this letter with you. We lost a man. With any luck, his mother can read German…Maybe you’re from Upper Silesia too?”

  “From Farther Pomerania,” said the mailman.

  “Ah, from Farther Pomerania,” repeated Willi. “Does everybody there laugh that way?”

  �
��Yessir.”

  “Then I can understand why you have so many wolves.”

  Willi watched the mail officer until he disappeared around the edge of the mixed-growth forest. Then the corporal read the contents of the postcard for the fourth time and shouted, “Melon!”

  The circus artist with the fat head looked up from his cooking pot and waddled over to his corporal.

  “Melon, listen to the card Zacharias got,” said Willi, and then read it aloud:

  Dear Pappi, I hope you won’t be mad, but it’s a boy. He weighs seven and a half pounds and screams a lot. Everybody says he looks like you. The birth was easy. In ten days, I can leave the hospital. You must be happy—now we’ve got what we wanted. Can you come home on leave? We’re all waiting for you. Erna’s husband wrote to her—he’s been taken prisoner by the Americans. She thought he was dead, it had been so long since he wrote. You could write a little more often yourself. An army postcard would be enough. Shall we name the little one Willi or Lothar? Erna says Lothar. With all my heart, your wife Liesel.

  “Thank God,” the artiste said with relief. “Now he can stop describing his dream to us every morning. In his mind, he’s always been at his wife’s bedside.”

  “They should call their little offspring Willi,” said the corporal, “like me. Maybe he’ll choose a career as a noncommissioned officer too.”

  “I think we should surprise Zacharias,” said the artiste.

  “And how. Every morning the same thing: ‘I dreamed my wife had a baby.’ Just wait, my boy, we’ll give you the news in bite-sized pieces.”

  “I have to go back to the fire, otherwise I’ll burn the cabbage.”

  “Cabbage again?”

  “Yes, but cooked with pork rinds.”

  “You should take off your Alma’s dress and stick her in the pot instead. She’s bound to taste better than those goddamned pork rinds.”

  “When she reaches retirement age,” said the fat soldier, “when she reaches retirement age,” and returned to his cooking pot. He lifted the lid, waited until the steam made its vertical escape, picked up a wooden spoon, and began to stir. As he did so, he bent so far over the pot that his head was directly above it. When its contents were burbling again, when the fire had so overcome the water that it started jumping about like a whipped top, when the little bubbles were climbing up to the surface, where they lived their short, hot, seconds-long lives—hardly born and already burst—then Melon pressed the cabbage down with his wooden spoon, powerfully, energetically. The fire could return to the attack.

  Without looking, the artiste stretched out a hand for a piece of the firewood that Poppek so happily supplied him with and tried to place it under the pot. It didn’t go in all the way, however, and the effort made him turn his head to one side. Then he got a fright. Two meters away, a big rat was sitting and looking at him through calm black eyes. Its long tail was all too visible, lying across a stick of firewood. The animal moved only its nose, displaying as it did so some large yellow teeth. It ogled the cook with an expression that combined curiosity and expectation.

  Melon carefully lifted the spoon, intending to hurl it at the rat as hard as he could. But even before his arm could reach the necessary throwing position, the animal spun around and with lightning speed disappeared into a hole in the ground next to the woodpile.

  It’ll come back, the fire-eater thought. He seized his carbine, which was lying on the bench in front of the Fortress, loaded the weapon, knelt down, and trained the barrel on the hole.

  He didn’t have to wait long. First he saw the yellow teeth, then the shining black eyes. The rat crept partly out of its hiding place. Its hindquarters and tail remained out of sight.

  Melon didn’t shake; his technique was nearly impeccable as he aimed at one of the rat’s eyes and squeezed the trigger. At that instant, the rat sprang wildly out of its hidey-hole, did a flip in the air, clamped its teeth on a piece of wood that was sticking out of the pile, jerked and kicked its hind legs in mortal pain, and suddenly fell.

  Then the man could see that he’d shot away only one of the animal’s ears and a tiny piece of its head. He loaded another round and took aim. The rat reared up again, and clean red blood dripped on its fur. It started running around in wild circles and then burrowing through the grass. It was searching for its hole.

  Melon guessed the rat’s intention and therefore gave up trying to hit it while it was still raging in the grass, mad with pain. He aimed instead at the nearly round, dark opening in the ground in front of the woodpile so that he couldn’t miss the rat when it found its hiding place. Seconds passed, and he seethed with impatience for the moment when a little mass of brown fur, smirched with blood and dirt, would appear in front of his sights like a moving target in a shooting gallery. Then all he’d have to do was pull the trigger. He thought, It should always be so easy…just aim and fire…the target ought to seek out the bullet, and not the bullet the target…that way things would be easier…someone should invent such a thing…and then Willi would just say, go out there and find some lead…but where in hell is this damn rodent?

  He squinted out of the corner of his left eye and saw the animal lying rather calmly in the grass, stretched out on one side and slightly moving its little feet. Its tail was vibrating, as if the tiny charge of electricity in a toy battery were flowing through it.

  The fire-eater walked over to the rat, and when he was very close, he pointed his rifle barrel down, took meticulous aim, and pulled. The bullet tore the animal’s body to shreds, splashed much of it high in the air, and left behind, on the spot where the creature had lain, a small, funnel-shaped hole trimmed with bits of fur and guts.

  “What’s going on, Fatso?” Willie suddenly shouted. “Are you shooting away the dirt under your toenails?”

  “No. Did you know, Corporal, that rats sometimes have a human look in their eyes? I just exterminated one. A perfect shot. The little beast was looking at me as if it wanted to give me some tips on how to cook cabbage.”

  “It’s not too late for you to learn, you should have let it talk. So where’s the four-footed corpse?”

  “There’s hardly anything left of it. Bang, splat, gone. It blew up like a bottle bomb.”

  “Its intestine is still hanging on your collar. Go wipe yourself off. I hope we don’t find more meat in the cabbage than you put there. Tell me the lid was on the pot.”

  “Yessir. The pot was tightly closed. You can see for yourself.”

  “I always do that at the end of the chapter, understand?”

  The corporal was standing before the rat’s remains with his legs wide apart and his hands in his pockets. He slowly raised one foot and pressed clumps of grass and dirt over the little decorated hole. Then he said to Melon, “I have an idea for how we can surprise Zacharias. I’m going to wrap his news in greaseproof paper and tie it up tight. His fingers will be bloody before he can get to it.”

  “You want to wrap his card in paper?”

  “What have you got inside that fat head? Who knows what he’ll think is in the package. Maybe gasoline. The point is, we want to arouse his curiosity…We have to serve him this problem tastefully. You’re an artiste, right? Haven’t you ever been in high society?”

  “Of course.”

  “There, you see? Fire guzzlers are half-aristocrats. That’s what you call yourselves, no? And the noncommissioned officer is the spinal cord of society. Don’t you agree?”

  “Absolutely,” said Melon.

  The corporal turned around, walked over to the bench, and sat down. The cabbage slowly increased its pressure on the lid of its hot prison, which began—quietly at first—to make boiling sounds. The circus artist laid a piece of firewood on the lid, and the pot immediately grew silent.

  “Hey,” Willi said abruptly, “where’s your Alma?”

  “She went to the latrines.”

 
; “Isn’t she well brought up.”

  “I think she’s searching for gold.”

  “I wish her much success.”

  “When she’s gathered enough, we’ll melt it down and make ingots.”

  “When is she going to lay another egg?”

  “The magazine has to be full first.”

  “That’s a cute way of putting it. So can she learn some tricks?”

  “Better than a dog.”

  “I thought chickens were supposed to be the dumbest creatures on the planet.”

  “The others, yes. But not my Alma.”

  “You ought to teach her how to preach too. Then she can cluck the Old Testament at us.”

  “That’ll come eventually. Right now our training sessions are focused on climbing.”

  “Maybe we’ll be able to use her for airmail service later. In ten years, I mean.”

  “Are we going to stay here that long?”

  “We’ll always be here, Melon. And if they come and get us out of here, we’ll never be able to settle into any other nest. Once you’ve drunk from the Pripet Marshes, you can never spit them out again. Once you’ve breathed this air, it sticks inside your lungs. We’ll never get free of this country, never again. It will follow us everywhere we go. You can believe your corporal—he’s given this subject a lot of thought. And in the process, he’s—”

  Willi interrupted his discourse; all of a sudden, Zwiczosbirski was standing in front of the Fortress. Nobody had seen him coming, he’d just emerged, as if he’d climbed up out of a hidden well. The tall soldier perceived that his abrupt appearance had at the very least confused the two men, and he smiled good-naturedly. He looked exhausted; one trouser leg was ripped and the front of his field jacket was soaked through. He’d hung his carbine diagonally across his back. In one hand he carried his steel helmet, in the other a Russian machine gun. His hair was stuck to his scalp.

  “Come here,” Willi ordered.

  Thighbone obeyed. He walked up close to the bench and laid the MG at his corporal’s feet. The expression on his face combined humility with the expectation of being thanked, like a dog that fetches a stick flung by its master.