The Turncoat

by Siegfried Lenz

  The struggle lasted a good half hour; then the fish’s snout emerged from the water right next to the bank. The tall soldier gazed into his adversary’s exposed maw with a feeling of immense satisfaction and triumph: one of the lure’s hooks was fixed deep in the pike’s lower jaw. Thighbone looked his rival in the eye, a calm fish eye, undistorted by fear, gazing indifferently, an eye that reflected neither pain nor death nor danger, seemed at once sinister and friendly, and rested on the man with eerie composure. He was afraid the line wouldn’t withstand the pike’s weight, and so he avoided lifting the fish out of the water. Instead he drew the beast so close to the bank that although its belly still rested on the river bottom, its dorsal fin was already visible above the surface. While the tall soldier opened his knife with one hand, he stepped into the river himself, holding the line short so that the pike had little possibility of movement. Then he bent down, keeping an eye on his prey’s snout and tail, took a high step like a stork, and having thus caught the pike between his legs, he slowly lowered his knife to a point a little above the nape. His intention—if he didn’t immediately kill the heavy, dark-green-striped Satan, which surely weighed no less than twenty-five pounds—was at least to pin his victim to the river bottom, to (as it were) nail him to the earth. Then something happened that Zwiczosbirski hadn’t expected: with a desperate effort, the big, calm-eyed animal shot up into the air and turned over, and as it did so, its snout grazed the fisherman’s pants. The pike fell back into the water, and when the man struck at the mass of whirling rage, his knife missed the flesh. With horror, he realized that the fish was free, and that the lure was now hooked onto his pants. He lifted one foot, aiming to stamp hard on the animal’s thrashing tail while simultaneously sticking his knife in its back, but then it made another leap, an energetic, long, supple leap the man wouldn’t have thought it capable of, plunged into safer, deeper water, shot up above the surface again, this time already near the middle of the river, and disappeared forever.

  The line was intact; on one of the lure’s hooks hung a piece of the pike’s hornlike snout.

  Zwiczosbirski stood there as if someone had driven a ten-inch nail into his forehead. He was trembling in every limb, but jerkily and intermittently; an observer might have thought that what remained of the electricity of life was leaving the man’s body in that way. He threw his fishing pole aside, paid no attention to the lure that was still hooked to his pants, clapped his hands to his face, and started weeping and cursing in Silesian Polish. The tall soldier had a dismal feeling, like a man who has saved up money his whole life, finally takes the money, which he keeps in a cigar box, to a real estate agent to buy a house, and is informed at the agency that all his cash is counterfeit.

  It was late afternoon.

  Zwiczos stopped crying all at once, and when he took his hands from his eyes, his face was changed. It bore the signs of a strange, alarming exhilaration, the features of a lunatic recklessness, and what he now undertook happened spontaneously, with exactly the same assertive fearlessness with which Nature sets off on its adventures. With his open knife in his hand, he ran to the railroad embankment and without looking around or pausing for breath headed down the track. Swamp fever was rumbling in the tall, thin fellow’s brain. Limping, sweating, and groaning, he ran between the rails in the direction of Tomashgrod. His mouth was as dry as a linden leaf one comes across while paging through old books.

  At the Tomashgrod train station, there was no one to be seen. Nobody dashed out of the little station house to stop the two-legged locomotive, which passed by with whistling breath and drawn knife. And in any case, no stationmaster could have halted him so easily.

  His steps, which had become much slower after his long run, sounded muffled and solitary on the village street. Children and chickens scattered out of his way, women watched him through windows, and several men came out of their houses, gazed stunned and incredulous at the soldier as he lumbered past, nodded to one another across the street, and then went back to observing the wild man in uniform, waiting to see what he would do. And each time he passed a house, the women who lived in it appeared as well, accompanied by a pack of serious, apprehensive children, and all of them stared and stared. Everyone in Tomashgrod wondered where this soldier had come from so unexpectedly, at a time when his comrades in arms had long since gone away and he had every reason to fear the worst, particularly since he was all on his own.

  Without lifting his head, Thighbone turned off the village street, climbed over a fence made of dry brushwood, and entered a dirty, wretched straw hut. Its owner, an old fellow with weather-beaten skin, crossed himself at the sight of his visitor and asked, “Zo Pan chzän?” What do you want?

  Thighbone gave the old man no answer. He pushed him aside and stepped farther into the hut, whose interior smelled of sweat, the coarse-cut Russian tobacco called machorka, and goat cheese. Thighbone kicked a pot out of his way; its contents, goat’s milk, poured out over the floor.

  The old man started whimpering: “Moiä mlika,” he murmured, “o moiä mlika.”

  “Tschicho,” the tall soldier suddenly shouted, his voice shrill, “bunsch lo tschicho ti diablä.” Laughing hysterically, he sat down on the floor, in the spilled milk, pulled the pot closer to him, grabbed it by its handles, and brought it to his lips. While he was slurping up what milk remained, some of it trickled out of the corners of his mouth and down onto his uniform jacket.

  “O moi Jesus,” the old man whimpered.

  The soldier stood up and limped out again, knife in hand. Near the brushwood fence, the men who had followed Zwiczos were waiting; they stepped back when he came out of the hut. He didn’t even look at them; it didn’t bother him that some of them were holding cudgels in their fists.

  Then one of the men yelled, “Hey! What did you do in there?! What are you looking for in Tomashgrod?!”

  Thighbone stopped and turned to the man who’d yelled at him.

  “We want to know what you’re doing here. And we want to know now.”

  The tall soldier called back, “Oh, I have here lost my Jesus. He is fallen out my pocket.” Then he laughed furiously and turned his back on the men and ran away, as fast as his limping gait would allow. For his questioners, this was the signal to go into action. They who so far had only followed the soldier in suspicious, leaden silence now started running after him, shouting and gesticulating and occasionally brandishing their cudgels in his direction. One of them even fired his revolver—which he, who knows how, had held on to despite the surveillance and the house searches—at Zwiczos in his headlong flight, but the shot missed him. When the bullet hummed past him overhead, he took a quick look back at his pursuers and realized that the distance between them and him was getting not greater but instead smaller and smaller; he looked for a good hiding place that he could escape to as a first resort and then, if he had to, defend. In wild haste, his searching eyes fell on a fairly big wooden building with two small towers and long, narrow windows.

  They don’t find me so fast in there…can hide for whole while…just don’t turn around…if I run into little house, they surround me right away…ha ha ha! You men with fishing line…come and get me…just try to catch old pike…

  A giant key was sticking in the door under the handle. Thighbone reached out a hand for the key, grasped it, opened the door, and locked it again from inside. Panting, he leaned against the wall and waited. It wasn’t long before the men were banging on the door and calling, “Come on out, you toad, we’ll puff you up good! Just wait!”

  And Zwiczos laughed at them, shrilly, deafeningly.

  “Chotsch lo!” he howled. “Come on! What you wait for?”

  They understood him, they grasped what he meant, and they shook their heads in wonderment.

  “Who are you?” one of them called through the wood.

  “Old pike,” Thighbone howled in fearsome joy. He waited for more knocking, but there
was none. After a while, he bounced his back off the wall with a jerk and thrust aside the simple gray curtain that blocked his view inside the house. Before him appeared the stuffy interior of a village church. A few people were there, sitting on uncomfortable, hard wooden benches—six or seven women, and in the midst of them, looking comically out of place, a robust young man. In the narrow pulpit stood the priest, his heart laden with God and his tongue well schooled. He spoke down to his congregation in an undertone, sometimes spreading his fingers and stretching them out to the little group of listening faithful. Zwiczos, however, couldn’t understand what he said; the man up there was speaking too softly.

  The priest raised an arm, looked at his little marzipan fingers, and filled his lungs with air so that the word he planned to say might be given the necessary weight. Then he discovered the soldier. He forgot to lower his arm; as though held up by a taut, invisible cord, it pointed heavenward.

  The soldier limped past the wooden benches to the pulpit, in one hand the knife, and in the other the key. The women and the robust lad turned around toward him, their heads moving so uniformly they appeared to be attracted by a magnetic force. Nobody stood up, nobody said a word. An old woman dressed in black—in a dress that looked as if she’d been wearing it for more than ten years, like many old women, who give the impression they’re mourning their own death in advance—surreptitiously crossed herself. There was a moment when Zwiczos disappeared from their sight, when he was mounting the clean, narrow steps to the pulpit. They heard the sound of his hobnailed shoes and noticed that their priest turned his back on them and looked down at the man who was climbing up to him. And then the man’s head appeared over the railing, and his throat, and his chest.

  “Rub, zo sgingest,” he said abruptly. The priest immediately disappeared from the pulpit.

  Then the soldier began to laugh and curse in a bawling voice. He thrust the knife into the railing in front of him and laid the key beside the knife. His face was twitching. The priest appeared below him and went to the first bench and sat down.

  Zwiczos cried, “Jesus is big pike. You catch him with fishing rod, better watch out…if not, he break line…but what do I say? No one can pull pike to riverbank…we all too weak. Who has enough strength is not enough smart, and who is smart has not enough strength…What we supposed to do, pjerunje!” He jerked the knife out—it flashed through the air—and buried it deeper in the railing.

  Then he was howling again: “Jesus has teeth, he can bite…everyone must tremble for him. What we supposed to do with Jesus who cannot bite, eh? What we supposed to do with him? My Jesus has teeth, pointy and sharp…and so should! That is right…World bad, rotten…World like locomotive: shiny brass, dirty boiler…Jesus must know how to bite…if he give nothing but love, nothing worth much…nothing worth nothing. Man who doesn’t get bited doesn’t know pain…and man who never his whole life has pain cannot know what is great love…My Jesus is big pike and has teeth, eh…Ha ha ha! Cannot preach love with false teeth…love not pure! Love like water…everything swims in it…ha ha ha! You do not know what swims in it: in water of love swims fear and pain and hope and sweetness and everything else, ha ha ha! And even more, you old pikes! Death swims in there too, eh, death is big big love…Jesus is love too, is cholera. Out one eye comes life, sweet and wonderful…out other eye comes death…soft and good-natured. Just wait. Now I show you big preachment. I can sing too, if you want hear how I can sing! Here it is, like this.”

  He opened his mouth and constrained his chest to utter a monstrous, bloodcurdling chant. As he sang, he fidgeted with his knife. Zwiczos’s voice took a powerful running start and pounced savagely on the ears of the assembly, who sat there as though frozen in place.

  The robust young man looked at the priest, and the priest looked at the youth, who rose from the graypainted wooden bench. He walked through the sound of the soldier’s thunderous singing, reached the pulpit, and climbed up the steps. The singing broke off, it splintered the way hard dry branches splinter.

  With hostility in his eyes, Zwiczos scrutinized the young man as he came closer, his face calm but resolute. The knife blade thirsted for his throat.

  “Come,” said the soldier. “Come on. Don’t be afraid. I over, you under. Chotsch lo, moi Schwintuletzki, I the king, ja jestem Krul.”

  The women watched the young man’s hair appear over the railing and were already wondering why the soldier was making no attempt to stop the person intent on displacing him when the tall intruder slightly lifted one foot and drove his hobnailed boot into the pit of the young man’s stomach, once, twice. The youth’s face contorted, he gasped for air, and his fingers released their grip on the banister. He slumped and slid down the pulpit stairs in what was not a particularly dangerous fall. And into the lamentations and wailing, into the cries of fear and the prayers for swift help from above, Thighbone howled, “Jesus must bite! Amen! Jesus must have teeth! Amen. Amen, amen, amen!”

  He took up knife and key in one hand and left the pulpit. The little group of frightened faithful cowered as he passed the wooden benches, striding upright with an expression of serene joy on his face. Something had fallen from him, he was free, the foam had been skimmed off his blood.

  He opened the door all unsuspectingly, without bothering to verify whether the villagers were still waiting for him outside. That wasn’t important to him. He left the church and seemed not at all surprised when, cudgels in hand, they intercepted him on the street. And then he did something he certainly wouldn’t have done a short time previously: he smiled, blithely, trustingly, casually. He smiled at the silent men, and some of them smiled back. No cudgel was raised against him.

  Zwiczos walked by them as one walks by statues. But when he was already a good way past them, they closed ranks and followed him at a distance they apparently had no intention of narrowing. His footsteps on the village street sounded decisive and self-assured in the evening air. It always makes a powerful impression when a man walks through a village alone.

  He went back the exact same way he’d come. A man came charging out of the little station house and asked, “Where are you going? What’s happening?”

  By way of reply, the tall soldier gave him a smile.

  “The train…there are no trains,” the stationmaster stammered.

  “Schwistko jedno,” said the soldier.

  As soon as he was on the railroad embankment, he broke into a ponderous run. He ran between the rails, which led—out there, in the far distance, where no eye could reach—to the sky. His followers stood on the embankment and watched him go. They stared at his retreating figure as one would look, simultaneously bewildered and sorrowful, at a departing miracle. He became smaller and smaller, his shape seemed to dwindle as he got farther away, the setting sun struck his back, and for an instant, his knife flashed as he held it in his hard fingers. It was like a last goodbye.

  • EIGHT •

  It will be dark soon, Walter. I have to read faster. Do you still want to listen?”

  “Yes,” said Proska. He clapped his hand to his forehead and killed a mosquito.

  Milk Roll read in a soft monotone:

  …and you can always console yourself with the thought that death is nothing but the last and probably most mysterious form of sleep. Bourgeois sleep—and in this, of course, it differs from death—is a holiday of limited duration, an operation with a functional purpose. But don’t say that death therefore accompanies us for no particular reason. It well knows why it remains our neighbor. We, naturally, don’t know this, and not one of us will ever learn it. Death doesn’t condescend to speak with us, it’s conceited, and for cause. Many a one who took up with it in order to solve its riddle has realized that the knowledge thus gained contains a new riddle. You shouldn’t think that I look up to it only in fear, or that I suffer torment when it gazes at me, its neighbor, longer than usual. For then I always tell myself that its look could be m
eant for someone standing near me just as easily as it could be meant for me; and there are so many men standing near me. There wouldn’t be any point in trying to deceive it, it would in fact be foolish to try, that is, to withdraw oneself from its sight. Death must be a man, he’s proud and strong. He overthrew Father, who certainly possessed great strength, with no more effort than I would need to knock down a two-year-old child. Unusual as it may sound, I’d gladly suffer defeat at the hands of such a man as death is. It would be, it must be, a splendid, manly defeat. You defend yourself and you’re grabbed hold of and you feel you’re tangling with something a thousand times mightier than you. Who would be capable, in such a moment, of thinking about some guileful subterfuge, some insidious counterhold that would allow him to delay the inevitable by a few absurd seconds? No, I’m telling you, whoever wants to be a man must go down with his head high. And no one can hold up his head if he lacks capacity.

  Death is a man, Mother. He may be vain, he may be unjust, he may even be petty; but you will admit that he’s proud in his solitude, severe, vigorous, dependable, and intrepid. Just consider how hard he has it, and how easily we would despair in his place: before him this immense, determined mass of life, this bunker of blood, this mountain of flesh and breath—and he? Alone, obedient, and male. He remains undaunted, where every one of us would necessarily be daunted, because none of us would have the courage to endure. Mother, I don’t think anything is harder than enduring life. If people nevertheless resist, endure, let them not think they’ve subjugated it. For resisting and subjugating are two different things.

  Death, as I said before, is the most mysterious kind of sleep. I’d like to think it’s also the most innocuous. Father will know, even though he can’t confirm it to you. Sleep is not rest in itself; true rest, definitive, purposeless rest, can be found only in death.