The Turncoat

by Siegfried Lenz

  Poppek’s eyes followed the river current, and then for a moment he saw—already a good distance away—a hand emerge and immediately go under again. And after a while, he also spotted something shiny, but again, just for a flashing instant; and then he clenched his teeth in terrible pain, because the shiny thing he’d seen in the distance had reminded him of Zacharias’s substantial advertising pate. He lowered his head and heard his own shots, whose echoes had long since died away, chirping over the water.

  One dive!

  On the opposite bank, nothing moved. The river, that hypocrite, was silently carrying its contents to the sea, past low meadows and upright forests, past the granitic breasts of the bridges, past cities big and small, past, past and gone.

  A man used to dream about his wife.

  Past, past and gone.

  He’d dream of a child whose shock of soft hair he could clasp in one big hand, whose toy fists pummeled his nose and his cheeks.

  Past, past and gone.

  A man had stood up for a birch, speaking earnest, threatening words.

  Everything passes: fire from the lips, wishes from the eyes; tenderness, unwavering fidelity, and heart’s anguish. Only the conscience remains unblasted, that proud, bitter landscape of justice, that fortress against remorse.

  Helmut hastily pulled on his clothes, haphazardly buttoned his pants and coat, stood there for a while uncertainly, as if he didn’t yet know what decision to make, and then stooped and gathered up Zacharias’s clothes and gun and ran back to the Fortress as fast as he could.

  The effort turned his face red. The marshy ground grumbled under his soles.

  Run, run back to them, tell them what you’ve heard and seen. Past the birch your thighs are waiting for, whose neck you’d like to hang on, and which is supposed to replace for you the fathomless adventure of the flesh. The priest, the dead Dynamite Jesus, must be lying over there. You see, he makes an excellent kilometer stone, an infallible direction marker.

  To Death by way of Lust for Life, 2.4 kilometers.

  No one can get lost, there are no detours or deviations or byways. Everybody gets there; some striding powerfully, some hesitantly.

  As Poppek was balancing over the alder bridge downhill from the Fortress, the corporal caught sight of him and called out, “What happened to you? Hey, Poppek! You’re running like you have a burning fuse stuck in your butt. If you want to explode, please do it on the far side of the ditch. Don’t put my men in danger. God, the guy looks like agitation on horseback. What’s going on?”

  Helmut charged up the hill, stopped panting in front of Willi, and looked at Zacharias’s uniform.

  “What is this? Has your comrade joined a nudist colony? He couldn’t wait for his baby any longer, is that it? What’s become of Zacharias? That’s his uniform. And his weapon too!”

  Helmut wanted to say something. He parted his lips, took a deep breath, looked again at the bundle of clothes under his arm, and remained silent.

  “Have they cut out your tongue? I want to know where Zacharias is. He can’t just have shriveled up.”

  “Corporal, sir,” said Helmut with difficulty.

  “Right, that’s what I’ve been for seven years. You’re not telling me any news.”

  “Zacharias—is—dead.”

  “You must have swamp fever!”

  “Zacharias is dead, shot, drowned.”

  “What, what, what? Shot, drowned, dead? Melon!”

  “Yessir.”

  “Come here, there’s a mystery to solve.”

  “Just a minute, I just have to stir the—”

  “Let your stupid cabbage turn into buttermilk. I said come here!”

  “Here I am, here I am.”

  “All right, Poppek: now talk like a rational person. Remember, I’m your corporal. What happened to Zacharias?”

  “Zacharias is dead.”

  Willi pointed an index finger at Poppek’s chest and said, “Wait. Everyone has to hear this.”

  Then he stepped to the Fortress and called in through the open doorway: “Milk Roll and Prostate, or whatever your name is! Outside! Get moving! Dreaming’s over! Leave those women alone!”

  After a short while, the two soldiers thus summoned appeared in front of the bench, on which Helmut had meanwhile laid Zacharias’s carbine and his uniform. A little later, Thighbone joined the group.

  “Listen up!” the corporal ordered, and then, to Poppek: “Tell your story.”

  “It was so damn hot,” said Poppek.

  “That’s no reason to die,” said Willi.

  “It was hot, and we wanted to cool off in the water. But Zacharias started swimming right away, straight out into the river.”

  “That sounds like him.”

  “He wasn’t quite halfway across when they shot at him from the other side with a submachine gun. Zacharias disappeared immediately, and I thought he’d swim back to land underwater. But a little while later, I saw him. The current was carrying him away. He was dead.”

  “You couldn’t be mistaken?”

  “No. I saw his hand and his bald head.”

  The corporal said, “I don’t know how you can be so quick to tell the difference between a bald head on a living man and one on a corpse. What do you say, Melon?”

  “I’ve never had occasion to make a comparison.”

  “What are the eyes in your head for?”

  At this point, tall Zwiczosbirski, who had been following the interrogation open-mouthed, intervened and said, “O moi Jesus! He always dream about little child, and now little child here and Zacharias not. Never even got to read surprise. O moi bosä! We should grab gun and—”

  “Shut your mouth,” the corporal ordered. “I’m the one who decides what should be done here. Everybody got that? Now I’m going to make a telephone call to Tomashgrod. This can’t go on. If these marsh hens don’t get their skulls cracked, in seven days not one of us will be left alive. Yesterday Stani, today Zacharias. Melon!”

  “Yessir!”

  “The world was created in how many days?”

  Proska and Milk Roll exchanged glances.

  “As far as I know,” said the artiste, “in seven days.”

  “You’re an educated man, as I’ve always said…And in seven days, there won’t be any more world for us. Work proceeds at a good pace down here. Seven days for construction, seven days for demolition. What we’re being put through is demolition. Do you all understand me? Good, then. Now I’ll make that phone call.”

  Willi stepped into the Fortress, and all the others watched mutely as he picked up the handset, turned the crank, and listened hard, his attitude attentive, his posture rigid. No sound came over the line. He cranked the radio again and pressed the handset against his ear, but with no more success.

  Melon said, “The sergeant major…seems to be having a snooze!”

  The corporal flung the handset away, turned around, and said furiously, “Are you crazy, or what? Your superiors don’t snooze, they rest. You’re the ones who snooze, goddamn it, the whole drowsy bunch of you! I’m going to have to give you more to do, don’t you think? You, Ello, on Saturday you’ll maintain the latrines. You think you can get away with mocking your superiors just because you know how to swallow fire? You must have taken some bad advice…The field telephone line has been cut. There’s not even a crackle coming through the wire. These damned marsh dwellers are doing what they want with us. So now we’re cut off. Opekta! Yes, I mean you.”

  “My name is Proska.”

  “Ah, I thought it was Opekta. Do you know what Opekta is? Well, no matter. So, Proska: can you splice a telephone cable?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Good. Get ready and go repair the damage, on the double. First have Melon give you some cabbage. And you three, Kürschner, Poppek, Thighbone, you’ll go out on
a reinforced patrol…But don’t even think about going swimming or getting yourselves shot! Whoever gets shot will be punished. Getting yourself shot is stupid, and stupidity doesn’t protect you from punishment. Understand? You too, Switch-switch? I want to know if you understood me.”

  Thighbone gave his corporal a hostile look, unexpectedly moved very close to him—so close that the others thought he was going to strike him down—and said, his expression unchanged, “I understand real good. If I get little bullet hole, then I come give you greetings from Death. Maybe he give me little package for you. Must wait and see. Nobody knows what will happen…”

  The corporal grinned and replied, “You’re becoming quite a wit, my boy. While you were out, did you happen to meet the mail officer?”

  “Meet, no,” said Thighbone. “But smell with nose.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. But if you start smelling with your teeth and biting with your nose, report to me at once. And now you can all go and eat. I have another letter to write—to Zacharias’s wife.”

  The soldiers got out their mess kits, let the artiste with the fat head serve them cabbage, looked for a place—Poppek sat on the bench, Thighbone went down to the ditch, Proska and Milk Roll stayed close to the fire—and began, after an extended search for a bit of meat, to slurp up the broth and the shreds of overcooked cabbage.

  * * *

  —

  Proska had to search for four hours until he found the place where the telephone line had been cut. The two ends lay twenty meters apart; in all probability, the missing piece had been simply removed.

  As a precaution, however, he’d dragged a spool of cable along, and now he rolled it out, inserted the missing section, spliced the ends together, insulated the splices, and then smoked a cigarette while resting on a tree trunk amputated by a storm. A green, moist silence surrounded him, a silence that at length tired him and invited him to take his ease. He imagined this silence as a slow-working anesthetic; he didn’t want to think about anything, and his muscular neck felt weak, so flabby it could scarcely hold up his head. His veins swelled up, his big, ruddy hands softened and grew even bigger. Whenever he wiped his low forehead with his handkerchief, new sweat broke out at once. The soles of his feet were burning, his knees gently trembling; his underpants stuck unpleasantly to his behind.

  Apathetic, he looked at his rifle butt, whose weight was pressing it into the soft earth and causing an inconspicuous water ring to form around the metal buttplate. The innocently gazing eye of the rifle barrel was pointed at the sky.

  In front of him was a largish stand of reeds, flanked on both sides by bushes and trees; behind him stood blackberry bushes and some old and already rather unstable alders. While Proska was sitting there, immobilized by weariness and the unrelenting heat, his brother-in-law Kurt Rogalski in Sybba bei Lyck adjusted his repaired eyeglasses on his nose (which was fleshy and liberally planted with little blond hairs), pushed a cube of lean bacon between his lips, took a last swallow from his coffee cup, and disappeared behind his newspaper, the Masuria Messenger. He read meticulously, laboriously, word by word. Nothing escaped him; there was plenty of room in his voluminous skull. After all, he paid good money for the Masuria Messenger, and you don’t just throw away money, you want something for it, even if it’s only news and not calves and piglets.

  The door opened.

  “Maria,” he grunted from behind his newspaper.

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t think things are looking very good.”

  “You mean it’s going to rain tomorrow? But the cows are still making solid pats.”

  “No,” he said, without looking over the paper. “I mean things aren’t looking very good in the war. They’re coming closer and closer. I’m already feeling sorry for all the geese and the horses.”

  “Which geese? Ours?”

  “Well, obviously. What did you think, Schliebukat’s geese? If they come any closer, shooting up everything, we’ll have to slaughter some stock.”

  “Oh,” she said, picking up his cup, “don’t worry about that. We still have time before that happens. And besides, Walter isn’t back yet. When he comes, we’ll have time enough. And then he can help us.”

  “With the slaughtering, but not with the eating.”

  “I’ll can the meat. That way we’ll have it longer.”

  He threw the newspaper on an old-fashioned corner table, stood up, and said, “I’d really like to cancel my subscription. You spend so much money on a newspaper in these parts, and what you get in exchange is nothing but bad news…I’m going to water the horses now.”

  “Yes, go ahead…Who knows if Walter will ever come back at all.”

  Walter Proska, reclining on his amputated tree trunk, had a sudden feeling that his head was being cut off, and cut off in a very protracted, agonizing way. Something warm and slim encircled his neck, gradually clasping it tighter and tighter, though not so tight as to cause him difficulty breathing. At first he didn’t dare move, because he feared the clamp around his throat would become so strong he wouldn’t even have time to register it. He was afraid that the slightest movement could be the end of him.

  Then the present reasserted itself in his consciousness, his muscles contracted, and he forgot his burning feet. At the same time, he realized that the clamp he’d so feared in his half-waking state was nothing but a human hand. He carefully squinted down at his rifle. It was still standing next to him. With a tremendous effort, he jumped up, simultaneously snatching his weapon, turned 180 degrees around while still in the air, and leveled the barrel at—

  “I told you we’d meet again, Walter. Don’t you recognize me? From the train, you remember. Your comrade, the sentry, wanted to shoot me. He wasn’t friendly at all. How’s he doing?”

  “Squirrel,” he said, looking at her uncomprehendingly.

  “Did I surprise you that much?”

  He lowered his assault rifle.

  “You should always reckon on surprises, Walter.”

  “You lying bitch,” he said in a strained voice.

  “What’s a bitch?” she asked, smiling. She was wearing the same little leaf-green dress she’d had on in the train, and her breasts were just as provocative as before, her waist as narrow as the middle of an hourglass.

  “You wanted to blow up the train. Your brother’s teeth hadn’t turned to ashes—they looked a lot like dynamite sticks.”

  “You must have made a mistake.”

  He didn’t budge, looked at her immovably, and said, “I should comb your fur with bullets, my little squirrel!”

  “You want to shoot me too?” she asked, looking up at him.

  “No. What would I get out of doing that?”

  She took a step closer to him. “Stay where you are,” he ordered her. “Why didn’t you come back that time? The policeman left right away. I waited for you.”

  “I was too scared.”

  “You knew there was dynamite in the jug?”

  “Did anything happen to the train?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said ironically. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. Did the people in your village talk about a derailed train?”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose you’re looking for your brother.”

  “No.”

  “Who, then?”

  “You!”

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “A lapwing told me. He saw you.”

  “Can that be true?”

  “May I read your forehead again?”

  “I don’t trust this peace we’re at. Are you alone?”

  “No.”

  Proska looked around hastily, in all directions. “Who else is here?”

  “You,” said she. She sat on the tree trunk he’d been sitting on, crossed her knees, looked at him, and smiled.

  He tho
ught, Maybe she really is harmless…someone else might have hidden those sticks in her jug…it’s possible she knew nothing about them…I don’t believe she would be capable of anything like that…too bad Wolfgang isn’t here…then again, it’s a good thing he’s not…

  His eyes pierced her like two shots. He asked, “Did you wait for me here?”

  “Yes.”

  “You knew I’d come?”

  “No.”

  “Did you cut the wire?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought, maybe they’ll send Walter out to repair it.”

  “Did you really think that?”

  “Yes—but you didn’t need to fix the cable. The soldiers have left Tomashgrod.”

  “Heading in which direction?”

  “West.”

  “All of them?”

  “All of them.”

  She stretched out her suntanned legs and straightened her upper body and threw her hair back with a toss of her head.

  “That’s funny,” said Proska.

  She shrugged her shoulders and waved him over to her. He obeyed. He stepped to her with downcast eyes and sat down next to her on the fallen tree.

  “You don’t need to worry,” she said.

  “I don’t worry. All this will be over soon.”

  “All what?” she asked, and curved her fingers around his powerful neck.

  “This whole swindle; all this nastiness, this fear, these disappointments.”

  “Are you glad I’m here with you, Walter? I am.”

  He nodded absentmindedly, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it.

  “You were nice to me.” She ran her index finger back and forth over the nape of his neck. He stared straight ahead; worried, she gazed at him from the side.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  “Milk Roll.”

  “What’s that?”

  “My friend.”

  “Is he here too?”

  “Yes…Were your brother’s ashes really in the jug?”

  “I think so, yes. Are you sad?”