Their silence, emanating from each, crossed paths in the room; their silence brought them together at an invisible intersection.
“Walter,” Wolfgang said abruptly, “be honest. If we’d been born here in this marsh, today we’d be partisans too…But then, haven’t we always been partisans? Don’t we all have a tendency to see legality in illegality? Haven’t we always believed that in some situations there are two kinds of law? And that you can receive absolution in two different ways?”
“Early tomorrow morning, they’ll march us over to the railroad embankment,” Proska said.
“They won’t shoot us.”
A rhythmic, crackling fear was suddenly among them. The men sat and waited. They didn’t see each other, but they knew they were close, close together under the enormous night sky, and they both felt a sense of safety. Neither made any attempt to sleep. They were dead tired, both of them, but the idea of sleeping, of stretching out their bodies and stilling their poor, anguished thoughts—that idea failed to occur to either of them, because such an attempt would have been hopeless. Two soldiers, two lumps of life, hunkered down next to each other like pigeons perching on the hour hand of a clock in a bell tower. True, the hand did move very slowly, unnoticeably, but it moved, and the two experienced men prepared themselves to plunge, to tip over, into the Gorge of Decision. They prepared themselves to decide, the first step in any activity. They were close to each other. Before, they would have been indifferent; before, they would never have had the same feelings; but now not even their dirty gray shirts separated them. They were so close to each other that each could have taken the other for himself. Good comrades.
Late in the night, Proska began to speak. He didn’t say much. He groped his way over to Wolfgang and tenderly stroked his narrow, sloping shoulders, touching him with indescribable tenderness, and then he said, “Wolfgang, we’re going to stay together. You can count on me. I’ll do what it takes. If you should speak to the officer tomorrow—that could happen, couldn’t it?—tell him I’ll help them wipe the Gang off the face of the earth. He should give me a mission, the officer should. Tell him that, Wolfgang, all right?”
• TEN •
In the afternoon, it started to rain. The water drummed on their canvas ponchos, and they kicked their feet sharply with every step to shake the clumps of mud off their boots. Their forward progress was slow at best. They stooped as they walked; their breathing was labored. Wordlessly, they stumbled over a field, past old craters in which thin, marshy water stood. Proska behind, the officer in front. The officer was young, his face freshly shaved. The war hadn’t yet fulfilled all his hopes—you could tell that by looking at him. Proska was carrying out his first mission. He had changed sides.
Hunger was tormenting them when they stopped on the rim of a hollow. They looked at each other as the muffled, leaden voice of a thunderstorm sounded behind their backs. The rain struck their faces and forced them to shut their eyes. The horizon advanced so close it almost made physical contact with them. There was a dense growth of young birch trees in the hollow, their trunks shining dully in the humid air.
“Come on,” said the officer.
Circumspectly, they approached a building with a roof of reeds—a building that had pulled its reed cap down low over its forehead, as if the world were none of its concern—and the officer took a little revolver out of the holster on his belt.
In the courtyard, which was bounded on one side by the main house and on another by a ramshackle stable, stood two wheelbarrows that had been rammed together, a plow, a rusty harrow, and a low chopping block with an ax buried in it. The roof of the stable was damaged, and it was easy for rain to find its way through. The windows of the main building were out of square and smeared with whitewash on the inside. The officer pointed to the ax and said, “Grab that thing there.”
Proska tried to pull the ax out of the wood, but without success. The officer, who’d been observing his efforts, walked over to the chopping block, brought his boot down heavily on the ax haft, and jumped back to avoid being struck by the whirling tool.
“Pick up the ax and come with me. I think we’ll find some hams here. Old chimneys are never empty.”
The officer pushed open the door, which had been left slightly ajar; it squealed on its hinges and banged against a wall. Spiderwebs were ripped apart, and dust swirled up from the hall, which was only about twice the size of the bottom of a coffin. A torn, dark blue jacket hung on a nail, its pockets turned inside out. Below the jacket, on the hardpacked mud floor, lay leaves, bread crumbs, and tobacco shreds that seemed once to have been in the jacket’s pockets. A tattered stretcher leaned upright against the wall.
“I sniff something,” said the officer.
He opened one of the two doors that gave onto the hall. A concentrated stench rushed out to meet them. Proska, who was looking over the officer’s shoulder, could for a time see nothing but the whitewashed windowpanes.
“Come on,” said the officer tonelessly.
Proska inspected the room and suddenly uttered a low, horrified cry. He dropped the ax and defensively raised his hands in front of his face. The officer held his nose, took out his handkerchief, pushed back his cap, and wiped his damp forehead.
Until recently, the room they were standing in must have served as a makeshift operating room. Two tables stood against the wall; straps hung from their corners. Those straps were used to lash down the wounded who needed to be operated on quickly. The screams of pain and the whimpers seemed still to be hovering under the ceiling beams.
Proska cried, “There, in the corner! There’s an amputated foot, and two hands, and some more feet, and one of them—”
“Still has its boot on,” said the officer, completing Proska’s sentence. He looked, all at once, very old.
The rain drummed against the windowpanes like a tired machine gun.
* * *
—
In the evening, their stomachs were filled with meat. The rain had stopped. The fog, the cruel evening fog, crept over the meadows and fields and into the abandoned craters and trenches. The two men sat, full and shivering from cold, in a roadside ditch. The officer had discovered some cans and rusks in a blown-up tank. They’d eaten in silence, and then they’d smoked. And after they’d smoked, they’d trudged on, having mutely agreed to stand up simultaneously from the uprooted tree trunk on which they’d sat and fortified themselves.
The thunderstorm did not grow quiet. It was reddening the western horizon, and from time to time the soldiers turned their heads in that direction and listened to the storm.
The seconds dripped down on them, as did the minutes. There behind them, where the thunderstorm raged, shells were streaking into the earth, there trees were bursting apart, there steel was mowing life to the ground. There splinters and shards whirred through the air; there clumps of earth, hurled high, splashed down into puddles; there bodies fell over into nothingness; there, by the conveyor belt, stood death. There behind them, under the thunderstorm.
Proska thought, Maybe Wolfgang’s sleeping now. I’ll see him tomorrow, when we get our midday meal. He’s even younger than this officer, younger, even younger, younger. Younger? Nobody here is young anymore. They all have a job, every one of them has a job: killing and dying…He hasn’t told me yet what’s in store for us tonight. Well, there’s still time…My footwraps are soaked through…I wonder what’s become of Zwiczos?…So far, I haven’t needed to shoot anyone…so far…If it comes time to defend myself, I’ll defend myself. Whoever says A must say B. And I’ve said A…
The officer jumped up. Two headlights shot their beams over the intersection. The shafts of light rose and fell, sometimes shining through the trees that flanked the road at irregular intervals.
The officer climbed out of the ditch. He placed himself on the road, legs planted wide apart, and watched the onrushing car come toward him.
He slowly raised his hand. The headlights were dimmed and then turned off completely. The automobile braked and stopped. Proska thought he could identify the almost soundless opening of a car door, and then the officer speaking to the driver.
“Come,” the officer called out.
The assistant stood up, got his gun, squeezed into the back seat of the vehicle, and laid his weapon across his knees. The engine howled; the car drove on, its headlights dimmed.
Proska noticed a steel box in front of his chest. He assumed the box held some sort of radio set. When he looked at the front seat, he saw the silhouettes of two heads; the officer and the driver weren’t conversing. As the automobile advanced, the thunderstorm became heavier and heavier. The air pressure made the loose windows vibrate. The driver switched off the headlights and reduced his speed. The moon, which had just arrived on the scene, stared into the auto from the side and gave the right half of Proska’s face a pale luster.
All at once, the car stopped. One of the front doors was opened from outside and a head and one wide shoulder thrust themselves inside the vehicle.
“Oj,” said the stranger when the officer whispered something to him. The two exchanged a few more words, sotto voce. Then the officer ordered, “Drive on.”
Shapes flitted across the road and then disappeared again. They emerged from a roadside ditch or stepped out from behind a tree. A shadowy, spooky bustle of back-and-forth movement, like something from another world.
“Slower,” the officer commanded.
Proska heard the driver down-shifting; the engine revved briefly and then started turning at a more moderate rate.
A practically square suitcase, a case for phonograph records, occupied the seat beside Proska.
A nearby explosion sent the car into a skid. A door popped open; the officer, who had almost fallen out, closed the door again. Proska was shaking. He clutched his rifle, although he knew that he couldn’t use it, that it could bring him no relief. Flames shot up more and more frequently from the fields on both sides of the road. The steel, set free, sought life, sought a last breath. Soldiers gave the steel its freedom back. They gasped and called and toted and stuffed new steel down the throats of their cannon. Soldiers flung themselves onto the earth—steel-fear, steel-hope.
The officer ordered the driver to stop in front of a farmstead. With every explosion, the interior of the automobile became so bright that Proska could read the numbers on the rear sight of his assault rifle. He kept staring at the sight and didn’t look outside. Above them, death roared out its greetings, heavy greetings you couldn’t ignore or react casually to.
The fists of the steel turned the horizon into a carousel.
“Eleven,” said the officer after a glance at his watch. The firing was now increasingly sporadic; here and there, flares went up. It became unnaturally still in hell. The whooshing noise that remained in the air even after the steel tubes had fallen silent slowly faded away. Farther off, behind the farm, a machine gun occasionally muttered, but only at long intervals, and it sounded exactly as harmless as a cicada’s song.
“Into the farmyard,” the officer ordered.
The driver steered the car into the yard, dodged a pump he’d been able to see only at the last moment, passed a long, empty barn, and stopped in front of a picket fence.
“This is good,” said the officer.
He turned around and opened the steel box that Proska had taken for a radio set. A lever that held the lid shut snapped open. The officer manipulated knobs and buttons, scratching and buzzing could be heard, and then, above the men’s heads, on the automobile’s roof, a strong, regular humming began.
“Open the suitcase,” said the officer softly, “and give me a record, the first one you put your hand on. There’s a tiny lightbulb under the seat—can you feel it?”
“Yes.”
“Then turn the thing to the right and see what the record is.”
“It’s called ‘Come…into…My…Love Nest,’ ” said Proska, holding the record close to the electric bulb and spelling out the words.
“Give it here.”
The officer laid the record in the steel box and swung the tone arm over the grooves. From a holder, he snatched a microphone, struck it with one hand several times, and blew into it, and when the noises he provoked echoed down from the roof in greatly amplified fashion, he raised the microphone to his lips and said, “Good evening!”
Proska flinched at the voice, electronically boosted to ten times its volume.
The officer went on: “Now that everything’s quiet, I can greet you. Men of the Sixth Regiment: this is one of your brothers speaking! Say goodbye to the war and come over to us—or go home! What are you in civilian life? Locksmiths, tailors, carpenters, civil servants! Do you know who you’re shooting at? You’re shooting at locksmiths, tailors, civil servants. The uniform doesn’t change the heart. Come out of your holes and throw your weapons away. Just look at the sky, at this friendly night sky. Doesn’t it stir some thoughts in you? You’re freezing cold, you have nothing to smoke and nothing to eat. But your regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel von Schlachtzitz, has as much to eat and drink as he wants. In the past week, his wife in Munich has received nine packages—packages containing your cigarettes…Now I’ve said too much…We want to bring you a little night concert. Music will surely help you remember home better. Lead softens the bones, music softens the heart. Here’s the first record: ‘Come into My Love Nest.’ Good evening, and happy listening!”
The officer put the microphone back in its holder and set the needle on the edge of the disk. The record began to turn, and into the swollen, lurking silence, into the filled-to-bursting stillness of that autumn night, a phonograph droned out a pop song. The soldiers of the Sixth Regiment raised their heads up out of the mud and listened attentively. They wiped their filthy stubble with the backs of their hands, took advantage of the break to void their bladders in peace, or drew greedily on cigarette butts under the shelter of lice-infested overcoats. The men across the way knew what that was like.
Proska took out a new record while the officer spoke into the microphone. This time, his discourse was briefer; he said only, “Just so we don’t get out of practice, brothers, I must advise you to put out your cigarettes. The next record is a little longer. It’s a documentary recording made in God’s own studio: fifteen minutes of heavy mortar fire. Best wishes for happy listening.”
The driver fired a flare gun through the open window of the car. The glaring, greenish ball of light wobbled obliquely upward, stood still for a moment on high, spread a pale glow over the earth, and went out as it fell back down. Soon afterward, the fraught silence burst, as though lanced by the rumbling artillery barrage and harsh, emphatic detonations. In swift succession, the shells fell along the line of fire, struck the earth, bored fiercely into it, and exploded, flinging everything in the vicinity high in the air: grass, branches, dirt, straw, stones, roots, water, and soldiers. And when it wasn’t whole soldiers that the shells, with grim determination, hurled spinning skyward, then it was pieces of soldiers, limbs, body parts, all effortlessly torn off by the shattering iron. With hollow thuds, fountains of earth spewed up from the churned fields. Shrapnel, low-flying, insidious, and deft, swept the ground. And here and there a man screamed, or gave a rattling gasp, or groaned. All at once, one was missing a hand; another felt blood filling his mouth; another tied off a vein; another had no chance to become aware that his face was gone.
“The next record,” said the officer. Proska handed it to him.
“Stick together, comrades, come to us! We’ll give you time to consider while we play a new record for the survivors of the last one. ‘Alte Kameraden’ is the name of the tune. See you soon, and happy listening.”
The needle ran scratchily along the thin grooves and awakened the music etched into the shellac. The loudspeaker blasted it out into the sile
nce. A cool wind suddenly arrived and carried the notes even farther.
Proska was preoccupied by his headache, which had blossomed in the back of his head and had now advanced to the left side of his forehead. He pressed his hand against his brow, but the pain wouldn’t subside. He followed the torturous throbbing as it spread across the bridge of his nose and made him slightly dizzy. Proska thought, After this record I’ll ask him for permission to get out of the car for a moment…I can’t take it anymore…Maria often complained about splitting headaches…they must run in the family…Why is he talking to the people so scornfully? They’re our comrades, after all…you can’t convince anyone with scorn…and convincing them is the very thing we’re here to do…I’ve never yet found a headache tablet that did me any good…
Walter Proska’s thoughts had reached this point when he removed his hand from his forehead, his headache instantly forgotten.
He sat up straight and listened.
A wall, a horizon of cries was approaching them, rapidly and steadily. Muzzle flashes from the attackers’ weapons lit the darkness in a thousand places. The loudspeaker was far too weak to drown out the frenzied clattering of automatic gunfire.
“Get us out of here!” the officer shouted. “Right now!”
The engine sprang to life. A submachine gun was hammering away, very close to them. Rounds howled as they penetrated the vehicle’s sheet metal; two windows were blown to smithereens. When a hand grenade exploded near the picket fence, the force of the explosion could be felt inside the automobile. “They’re here,” the officer groaned. Proska shoved an assault rifle through the window and emptied a magazine. He received an immediate reply! Now he punched the driver in the back and said, “Let’s go, for God’s sake! What’s wrong with this damn car?” He bent his head forward, as though that would help to increase the vehicle’s speed. Shouts came from nearby. Proska heard the calls very clearly: “Keep going,” they said, and “Don’t stop,” and “This way,” and “The rats must be in the farmyard.”
The Turncoat Page 18
