A shiver ran down his spine. He stood up, took a couple of steps through the compartment, and stopped in front of the jug, which stood in a corner, slightly vibrating with the swaying movements of the train. It was a simple, probably homemade vessel with a solidly attached side handle. The opening was sealed with greaseproof parchment paper; thin but durable cord had been wrapped around it, the ends conscientiously knotted.
He cast a quick glance over at her, and when he determined that she wasn’t opening her eyelids and was really trying to sleep, he resolutely snatched up the raincoat, unfolded it, and threw it over the jug. She appeared not to notice any of that. As he spread out his arms and stepped to the window, it seemed to Proska that he felt at once freer and braver. The sun greeted him through the treetops; on the forest floor, a rabbit ran wildly in circles and then dashed away. The little locomotive rumbled as it hauled its load through the mixed forest. Proska thought about the wooded surroundings of Lyck, the small Masurian city where he was born. It smelled just like this; the Borecka Forest, especially where it bordered Lake Sunowo, had once made the same impression on him. The assistant spotted a squirrel, looking up at the train with dark, glistening eyes.
Her hair is the color of its fur. I’m going to call her “Squirrel.”
He turned away from the window. She was lying peacefully athwart the seat, her legs crossed, one hand in her lap, the other on her mouth. He cautiously moved close to her, took the hem of her dress between two fingers, and pushed the fabric up a little. Then he bent down and kissed her suntanned leg, just above the knee. He looked at her face; her eyes remained closed, her lips twitched. When he straightened up, she said, “Not on the mouth.”
“I thought you were asleep,” he said.
“Whoever kisses me on the mouth is in for some bad luck.”
“Really?”
“Watch out!”
“I don’t care, I’ll take my chances if—”
“Don’t do it!” she said with a smile.
He lifted her head and kissed her. She returned his kiss and threw her arms around his muscular neck and then affectionately pushed him away.
“It’ll be dark in an hour and a half,” he said. “We have to see each other again.”
“You covered the jug with my raincoat.”
“Yes, I couldn’t stand it anymore. It was making me uncomfortable.”
“Take it off again, please. It will be dark in an hour and a half.”
Proska apathetically did as Wanda asked, lay down on the other bench seat, waved to her, and attempted to fall asleep. But sleep obeys no orders, and the harder the man tried to surrender his senses and forget all his surroundings, the smaller his chances of success became. He squinted in her direction and called softly, “Squirrel?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“You can’t fall asleep either, Squirrel.”
“What’s a squirrel?”
“You, for example.”
“What am I?” she asked weakly.
“A little reddish-brown animal with curious eyes and tiny, pointed ears. You play in the trees, you’re friends with an old, crotchety hazel bush. And you tease the young branches and challenge them and let them bounce you into the air. But in the winter, my little squirrel, you go to sleep, and if you get hungry, you just reach into the nut storeroom behind you…”
“You kissed me on the mouth,” she said.
“Now do you know what a squirrel is?” he asked.
“You kissed me, so bad luck’s on the way.”
She said that with mild seriousness, in a voice he hardly recognized. He grew uneasy and stood up.
“Do you think something’s going to happen to the train?”
“I warned you…”
“So why aren’t you afraid? You don’t care if all of a sudden…”
He took his rifle off its hook, balanced it in his hand, stroked the breech, and pulled a magazine out of his haversack.
From the seat where she lay, she was watching him. “What do you mean to do?” she asked.
“Just in case,” he said, and he rammed in the magazine.
“How many cartridges are in there?”
“Enough.” Leaving the safety catch off, he stood the weapon in a corner and thrust his head through the window opening.
“What do you see?” she asked.
“Nightfall.”
“Is that really something you can see?”
“It’s acting very fearful, and you have to pay close attention if you want to figure out which directions it’s creeping up on us from…What would you say if I had to fire my rifle?”
“Why do you want to know that?”
“It would be your people, after all,” he said, lighting a cigarette.
“In a minute they’ll attack us.”
He moved close beside her. “Get up,” he said.
She lay unmoving.
“You have to get up, Wanda.”
“But I’m so tired. It’ll be dark soon.”
Seized by an odd disquiet, he asked her curtly, “Who’ll attack us in a minute? What’s this prophetic babbling supposed to mean?”
“The mosquitoes. There are so many mosquitoes in these marshes!”
He laughed, and his laughter felt like a liberation.
“You Poles should keep more little birds, you know. Then there would be fewer mosquitoes. But birds die very young in your country. And the few I’ve seen are lonely, they fly around looking sad. Their songs have stuck in their throats.”
“It was different before,” she said.
“I know,” he said.
All of a sudden, the little locomotive blasted out a hoarse, long-breathed whistle and reduced its speed. The man seized his assault rifle and braced its butt against his hip.
“It’s still a long way to Tomashgrod.”
“I can imagine,” he said. “I guess we’re in for it pretty soon.”
Now the train was moving at only a walking pace.
“In the daytime,” he said, “they hunker down in their nests like owls and don’t dare leave. But as soon as night starts to fall, they wake up and get lively. They crawl under night’s skirts and pick out a position in the dark and make little slits and shoot through them like it was broad daylight.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“The boys who blow up the trains.”
“You mean you think they shouldn’t?”
“Be quiet.”
He slowly opened the compartment door, bent down, and glanced up the track. Then he turned back to her and said in a rush, “You have to disappear, right away. Quick, quick, it’s the military police. They’ll probably check the whole train…Hurry up! Lie flat on the embankment and wait. I’ll give you a sign when the coast is clear. Here, you have to get out on the other side.”
She sprang up immediately and dashed to the door. “The lock’s jammed,” she said despairingly.
He raised his foot and kicked at the latch with all his strength.
“All right, Wanda, go, get out now! If they find you here, we’ll both have a very bad time.”
She jumped out, landed flat on the embankment, scooted down a little farther, and lay on her stomach.
The little train traveled on for another fifty meters, and then its brakes squealed.
While he swiftly pulled on his uniform jacket, Proska thought, I have to hope she can run the distance to the train. It can’t be more than fifty meters. She’d better not bail out on me. But she can’t, she left her coat behind, not to mention that blasted jug. I can’t look at that thing anymore.
He wrapped the jug in the raincoat and shoved the bundle far under the train seat. As he was standing up, a policeman clambered into the compartment. “Well,” he said. “Everything as it should be? May I see your marchin
g orders?”
Proska handed him a crumpled piece of paper covered front and back with stamps.
“Where are you headed?” the MP asked.
“Not far from Kiev.”
“And where are you coming from?”
“I was on leave in Lyck.”
“And where might that be?”
“In Masuria, seventeen kilometers from the Polish border.”
“From the former border,” the policeman corrected him, flicking on the quadrangular pocket flashlight that hung on his chest. He aimed the light beam at the shabby scrap of paper. He checked every stamp, pointed with a scarred index finger at a signature, and asked, “That says ‘Kilian,’ right?”
“Yes, exactly right. That’s my captain’s name. He signed the pass. I’m bringing him a package from his wife.”
“You can just send that package right back. The captain’s dead.”
“Killed in battle?”
“Indeed. A Kalmuck got him right between the eyes.”
“When was this?”
“Four days ago. I had work to do near the front. They carried the captain two kilometers to the dressing station, but he couldn’t be revived.”
“So what should I do with his package?”
“What’s in it?”
“According to his wife, wrist warmers and earmuffs. He mostly suffered from frozen ears in the winter.”
“It’s practically summer now,” said the MP. “If you think you’ll be able to use ear warmers yourself next winter, then just keep them.”
“Thanks, the only part of me that gets cold is my feet.”
The policeman looked up at the sky. “The moon’s so curious today. I think it’s going to have something to look at.”
“You think the train’s going to get blown up?”
“Keep your head away from the window,” the policeman said. He switched off his flashlight and disappeared.
The assistant rushed to the other side of the compartment. His eyes scanned the embankment, but Wanda was nowhere to be seen. He waited for a moment, and then he called out, “Squirrel! Don’t you hear me? You can come! Wanda! Where are you? Come here, now!” She didn’t come. She didn’t step out from behind a tree, as he hoped she might, or stand up from the shoulder of the embankment, as he wanted her to.
The train jerked into motion.
“Wanda!” Proska called, more loudly than before. “Why don’t you come?”
The train gained speed.
“We’ll meet again!” he called. “It won’t be long!”
He’d been holding the door open, hoping to make it easier for her to jump in, but now he slammed it shut and sat down.
She forgot the jug and the raincoat. She was probably more scared than she was willing to admit. I’ll hand over the jug in Tomashgrod.
Proska stood up, pulled the bundle with the jug out from under the seat, and set the vessel down on the floor in front of him. Moonlight shone on it. He thought it was blinking at him.
“Don’t be afraid,” he murmured. “I won’t throw you out the window. It would be easy for me, but I won’t do it. I’ll treat you humanely, even though you’re not human anymore. But you were once, and I know what that’s worth. Believe me.”
But then a primordial curiosity seized the soldier, an elemental question began to burn inside his skull, and he slowly drew his sidearm from its sheath.
“I have to see what it looks like when a person has reached this point. I can’t do you any more harm. You mustn’t be angry at me if I take away a bit of you, just a little bit on the tip of my knife.”
He thrust the weapon into the parchment paper covering the opening, tore a largish hole in it, and with trembling hand lifted out a little mound of ash. He smelled it; it smelled of nothing at all.
Could just as well have been wood, or tobacco, or paper.
Proska stood up cautiously and held the knife in front of the broken window. The airstream pounced on the ashes, scattering them all over.
“Forgive me if you can,” the assistant growled.
He was angry that the girl hadn’t come back. Again he squatted down beside the jug, slowly, and without really wanting to, he stuck his knife in a second time. But the weapon didn’t go down very deep. The jug, it turned out, was at most one-third filled with ashes.
What can this be? It sounds almost metallic. Is there something else under the ashes? Maybe she was fooling me, the prophetess with the beautiful breasts. I’ve got to see what’s underneath. Her brother could just as well have been a piece of wood. He picked up the jug in both hands and held it through the window. The wind blew away the ashes, and at the bottom of the container were four gleaming sticks of dynamite!
Proska’s arms were shaking; he’d expected anything else, only not this. What a dupe, what a fool! I helped her transport these things! Four dynamite sticks: enough for two trains and two weeks’ conversation fodder in the village. Four dynamite sticks meant twisted railroad tracks, shattered railroad cars, and shredded corpses—in other words, new unrest, new fear, new reprisals.
He shut his eyes, breathed deep, filled his lungs to bursting with evening air, and drew back his right hand a little. Then, exhaling hard and exerting his full strength, he flung the jug down the embankment. The container struck a spruce trunk and broke apart, but there was no explosion.
Exhausted, he retreated from the window and sat on one of the bench seats. He felt sweat running down from his armpits and wetting his shirt.
“Lying bitch,” the soldier murmured.
Ly-ing-bitch, the train clattered.
Just you wait, he thought.
Just-you-wait, the wheels rumbled.
The marsh began. A sweetish smell wafted into the compartment, a full, round smell, a smell of joyous, exuberant life.
Proska thought, That’s what I get for being nice. She lay down right here on this seat and stretched out her legs. Lovely legs, I have to admit. If I had known dynamite was in that jug, not her brother! What a devious little thing! If I ever see you again, I’ll…I’ll thrash the living daylights out of you!
Night strode over the marsh and drove off the heat. The air became cooler. The man in the compartment shivered a little. Conifers grew rarer. Now, on both sides of the track, only modest birches could be seen. How indifferently the wood awaits the ax! The human soul is a cuckoo; it flies to God when the sun shines. The willow shrubs, dozing like old beggars. You can never trust them…Sleep, Proska, sleep! Your father was a sheep! Your father yanked the tree around and dynamite came tumbling down! Sleep, for goodness’ sake, sleep!
He stretched out on the seat. First he tried lying on his left side, but then he wrenched himself over onto his right and fell asleep at once.
And so he never actually beheld the marsh village of Tomashgrod. And in any case, the little train stopped there no longer than two minutes. The engine seemed to be longing for its sooty stable. In the supply car, the sentry didn’t even get down from the train. He merely stuck his nose out into the night for a moment; but since he could detect nothing, or only things he found irrelevant—for him the moon was irrelevant, and for him the silence over the marsh was irrelevant, as was a bird’s solitary, peculiar cry—and therefore could discover nothing that appeared important to him, he sat back down on his crate, lit a cigarette, turned it in his fingers, and observed the small, glowing tip.
Had Proska been awake, perhaps he would have tossed the girl’s forgotten raincoat out the window. With that raincoat, he would have flung his last memory of her far down the embankment. But he was asleep, asleep with his mouth open, his hard skull on the hard bench.
The train got moving again faster than it had in Prowursk. The locomotive was certainly small, but it probably already knew that there were finer things than work. Tomashgrod, the shaky, shoddy backwater, did not stir.
/> Pfee-pfee-pfeeee, the locomotive cried.
Proska heard the cry in his sleep and threw himself over onto his left side. What a miracle! At that very moment, Proska’s brother-in-law Kurt Rogalski, asleep in his goose-feather bed in Sybba, near Lyck, also turned onto his left side. Coincidence had tweaked them both in the loins at the same time, pure coincidence. But Herr Rogalski, of course, couldn’t know that Herr Proska was lying in a narrow-gauge railroad car. Nor could he dream about his brother-in-law, for whenever he dreamed, he saw only wheat, turnips, and potatoes. After all, those things occupied his mind more than Walter Proska, his wife Maria’s brother.
The assault rifle, its safety catch off, was leaning in a corner. In the compartment’s luggage rack, right above the sleeper’s head, lay the package with the earmuffs and wrist warmers for Captain Kilian. A falling star streaked across the sky. God’s missile. He let it go from His hand as a mysterious sign to the few who looked heavenward, searching for Him, that they might persevere in their search with attentive patience, a sign that He was indeed there and thoroughly understood their yearning toward Him but could not present Himself to their sight. However, by way of soothing and cooling the fervid pain their searching caused them, He gathered the strength of His hand, lobbed His missile, and let them go on hoping.
Shortly after midnight, the train ran over a mine. The little locomotive was blown frighteningly high in the air, its hot steel body blasted open. The imprisoned steam hissed out into freedom. Four civilians, who by chance happened to be carrying submachine guns, and who by chance happened to be sitting in a tree that overlooked the curve where the misfortune occurred, actually thought at first that the engine would only make a giant leap over the bent, twisted, and burst tracks, land on the sound tracks as though nothing had happened, and travel on. But the four men then had to admit that they’d given the diminutive locomotive too much credit. A jet of fire shot out of its forehead, and then it did a somersault, crashed down onto the edge of the embankment, could hold itself upright no longer, and rolled—like a heavy, mortally wounded animal—down the slope. Into the ditch with it, the engine dragged the two cars it had been assigned to pull. When engine and cars came to rest, two rear wheels kept spinning helplessly, like the movements of a turtle thrown onto its back. The rest of the water the locomotive had taken on in Prowursk flowed out of a burst pipe and seeped into the earth.
The Turncoat Page 3
