The Turncoat Read online

  ALSO BY SIEGFRIED LENZ

  The German Lesson

  The Heritage

  The Lightship

  The Selected Stories of Siegfried Lenz

  Stella

  Originally published in German as Der Überläufer in 2016 by Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, Hamburg

  Copyright © 2016 by Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, Hamburg

  Translation copyright © 2020 Other Press

  The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Text designer: Jennifer Daddio / Bookmark Design & Media Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016.

  Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Lenz, Siegfried, 1926–2014, author. | Cullen, John, 1942– translator.

  Title: The turncoat / Siegfried Lenz; translated from the German by John Cullen.

  Other titles: Überläufer. English

  Description: New York : Other Press, [2020] | Originally published in German as Der Überläufer in 2016 by Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, Hamburg.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020001400 (print) | LCCN 2020001401 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590510537 (paperback) | ISBN 9781590510544 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939-1945—Campaigns—Poland—Fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PT2623.E583 U35513 2020 (print) | LCC PT2623.E583 (ebook) | DDC 833/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001400

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001401

  Ebook ISBN 9781590510544

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  a_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Siegfried Lenz

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Origin

  Text/Versions

  About the Title

  Life and Works

  About the Authors

  • ONE •

  Nobody answered the door.

  Proska knocked on it again, harder, more purposefully, holding his breath. He waited, bowed his head, and considered the letter in his hand. He noticed a key sticking out of the door lock; someone must be home.

  He stepped slowly away from the door and ventured a look through a cloudy window. Doing so gave the sun a clear shot at the back of his head, but Proska didn’t mind. Suddenly his knees, the knees of a robust, thirty-five-year-old assistant, began to tremble. He forced his lips apart—a thin thread of saliva had glued them together.

  Before him, two meters away on the other side of the glass pane, an old man was sitting on a chair. He’d completely bared his left arm—a dry, yellowish, half-withered branch of his body—and was filling a hypodermic needle. The fussiness he brought to bear on this task was intolerable. When it was done, he let the empty, used-up vial fall unheeded to the floor. Proska thought he heard a soft, shattering noise, but he only imagined it; the windowpane blocked the tiny sound.

  The old man carefully laid the syringe on a low table, picked up a ball of cotton wool, and with fleshless fingers plucked out a small piece. Trembling, he twisted the stuff into a plug and held it to the mouth of a bottle, which he then slowly raised and inverted. The liquid soaked the plug, which seemed insatiable as its color changed.

  Proska let no movement, not the slightest gesture, escape his notice. He’d seen the old man only four or five times before in his life, greeted him only four or five times before in his life. Except that he was a druggist, Proska knew nothing about him. His doorplate bore only his name—Adomeit—and nothing else.

  The old man rubbed a spot on his arm with the cotton wad and paused for a moment. While he was waiting, he squinted over the metal rim of his spectacles at the syringe, which gleamed innocuously in the sunlight.

  What’s this old man going to do? Is he going to stick that thing in his arm? In a vein? Why?

  The corners of Proska’s mouth twitched.

  Adomeit picked up the syringe and brought it close to his eyeglasses. He pressed the plunger briefly, and a thin stream of brown liquid shot out of the needle. The instrument was reliable; it worked as it should. Then the old man stabbed it into his arm so suddenly that Proska, standing outside the window, froze as though paralyzed. He couldn’t cry out or raise a hand or run away. While he watched the old man doing something, perhaps some harm, to his own body, Proska himself seemed to feel a sharp, deep pain, a pain as sharp as a tweezed hair and as deep as the wellspring of a human eye. The druggist’s index finger pressed the liquid into his blood, steadily, relentlessly.

  When the old man yanked the needle out of his arm, Proska felt capable of movement again. He hurried back to the wooden door, banged on it, and waited. But no one came to open it. With great care, Proska pressed the handle down; the door moved, reluctant and creaking, and let him pass inside.

  “Hello,” said Proska. His voice sounded hoarse.

  The old fellow made no reply. Apparently, he hadn’t yet noticed the man who had just stepped into his room.

  “I wanted to ask you…,” Proska called loudly. He left the sentence unfinished, for he saw that Adomeit had picked up the cotton pad and was using it to swab the spot on his arm from which he’d just withdrawn the hypodermic needle. Then the old man got up from his chair and walked over to the window. He thrust his yellow arm into the sunlight and murmured, “There, lick it off, quick, make it dry.” Proska could see a small red mark—the needle’s bite—on one of the old man’s veins.

  “Herr Adomeit!”

  Adomeit didn’t turn around.

  “Good morning, Herr Adomeit!”

  The old man looked out the window and rolled down his sleeve. Then Proska cried out, “I said, ‘Good morning!’ ”

  The druggist slowly turned, discovered his visitor, and gazed at him with friendly, gray, puzzled little eyes. “Good morning,” he said. “You’re Herr Proska, right?”

  “Yes. I wanted to ask if you might lend me a postage stamp.” Proska held up his envelope.

  “A letter for me?” Adomeit asked. “Who would write me a letter?”

  “No,” said Proska. “I wanted to ask if—”

  “You have to speak louder,” the druggist interrupted. “My hearing is very bad.” He sat down on his chair but left his visitor standing.

  “Do you have a stamp I
could use, Herr Adomeit?”

  “Give me the letter. I can’t imagine who would be writing to me.”

  “The letter is not for you!” Proska shouted. “I just wanted to ask if I could borrow a stamp. I’ll replace it tomorrow, probably.”

  “You want a stamp?”

  “Yes. I’ll get you a new one tomorrow.”

  “I have lots of stamps,” the old man said amiably. “I can give you several. We don’t need them anymore over here. And who am I supposed to write to, anyway? I still have a friend, he lives near Braunschweig. We used to be neighbors, just like we’re neighbors now. I’ve known him for sixty years, and in those sixty years, we’ve said everything two people can possibly say to each other…How many stamps do you need?”

  “Two!”

  “How many? You have to talk louder. I don’t hear well.”

  “I need two stamps!” Proska yelled. “I’ll pay you back tomorrow!”

  “You can have them,” Adomeit murmured, standing up. He opened a dresser drawer, took out an exercise book, and lumbered back to his visitor.

  “The stamps are in here. Take what you want.”

  The assistant quickly leafed through the pages of the notebook and found a strip of ten stamps.

  “There they are,” the old man said. “Take as many as you need.”

  He smelled disagreeably like a hospital. Proska felt a slight ache in the left side of his forehead and longed for some fresh air.

  “Go ahead, take some,” the druggist said, encouraging his hesitant guest.

  “These stamps are old. They aren’t valid anymore.”

  “You can take more than two,” the old man said. He was attentively observing the movements of his visitor’s lips.

  “I’m telling you, these stamps are invalid,” Proska said, and then, shouting: “Your stamps aren’t any good! They’re old and obsolete!”

  “But they still stick very well.”

  “Nobody cares about that now. Stamps have to stick and be valid…”

  “All the same, you can take some,” said the old man, eager to help.

  “But I can’t use them.”

  “How many?”

  “I can’t use them!” Proska screamed.

  Adomeit thrust the ten-stamp strip into the exercise book again, shrugged his shoulders regretfully, and moved back to the dresser. Before closing the drawer, he turned around and asked, “Did you say something?”

  Proska shook his head and looked at the unstamped letter in his hand.

  The druggist sat down again. “So you have to mail a letter?”

  “Yes.”

  “At your age,” said Adomeit, winking behind his eyeglasses, “at your age I wrote letters too.”

  “This letter is to my sister.”

  “My mother’s been dead a long time.”

  Proska screamed, “This letter is for my sister!”

  “Sister, yes. Sister? You have a sister?”

  “Yes. Of course. Nothing unusual about that.” Proska wanted to leave, but something was forcing him to stay in this room. His headache kept getting worse; it seemed like a jackhammer was hard at work behind the left half of his forehead.

  Adomeit scratched the arm he’d stuck the needle into and rubbed the spot of the injection with the heel of his hand. “Why are you writing to your sister?” he asked. “Family members don’t usually have very much to say to one another. Is your letter long?”

  “Fifteen pages!” Proska screamed.

  “Good God, fifteen pages.”

  Proska felt his knees start to tremble again. He stroked his low, wide forehead, patted his straggly, sun-bleached hair, and shut his eyes.

  “Are you tired?” the old man asked.

  “Maybe so. I’ve been doing a lot of hard thinking. That kind of thing always takes a toll.”

  “You should try not to work so much,” said the old man.

  Proska screamed, “I’ve been thinking!”

  “Thinking? So, thinking. But that doesn’t do any good.” The old man pressed his fingers together and smiled.

  “Maybe not,” said Proska listlessly. Then, suddenly, he raised his head, gave the old man an unusually long, hard stare, and asked him, “Why did you stick that thing in your arm?” He slid his eyes over to the syringe for a second. “That thing over there. I watched you do it.”

  “Do you still want the stamps?”

  “Why did you?” Proska shouted so loud that he flinched at the force of his own voice. “Why did you stick that needle in your arm?”

  “The needle?” The old man clicked his tongue. “The needle’s sharp. You don’t feel any pain. Once the medicine’s under your skin, it swells up a little around the puncture. But the swelling goes down fast.”

  “Why do you do it?”

  “Do you want to try? It’s really easy. You hold the thing like this, look…”

  The druggist grasped the syringe and held it with the needle pointing straight up in the air.

  “Why are you giving yourself shots?” Proska bellowed. He was furious at the old man, though he had no reason to be; he clenched one hand into a fist and struck his own thigh. He had big red hands.

  Adomeit laid the syringe on the little table, gave his visitor a friendly smile, giggled for a while, and then raised his head like a roebuck that’s just heard a suspicious sound. “Herr Proska, I’ll tell you just why I give myself shots. That was what you wanted to know, right?”

  “Yes—if you don’t mind.”

  “Good, I’ll explain the reason as precisely as I can. But for God’s sake, don’t get angry.” He scratched the site of his recent injection, glanced briefly through the window, and turned to Proska with a sly twinkle in his eye.

  “Just don’t get angry. So: I like sitting by windows. I suppose you do too, don’t you? And sometimes when you look out, I suppose thoughts come to you too, don’t they? Memories? Or not? And when you see the stupid old roads and the woods with their comfy hiding places and the pretty spot behind the big juniper tree, I suppose nothing occurs to you, right? And if a girl goes down this road into the woods, you don’t think anything about that either? Maybe you just calmly spit into the wind or peel yourself an apple. Even when you know that a girl could mean more to you behind the big juniper than on the boring road?

  “Look, I’m an old man, a lame fox every hen can outrun. But I have memories, you know? Some people can live for twenty years on memories. They carry them around wherever they go, they fasten them to a watch chain and put them in their safest pocket. I can’t do that, I hate it! But memories come to you even if you don’t summon them—there they are, whether you can use them or not. At least, that’s the way it is with me. If I look out at the street, and…do you understand what I’m saying? People shouldn’t remember! Very few can learn from what happened, and I’m not one of them. So that’s why I send memories to the devil, and to make sure they don’t come back, I shoot that stuff into my arm. You can understand that, can’t you? Now you’re mad at me.”

  Proska tilted his square head to one side and cleared his throat.

  “Did you say something? You have to talk louder.”

  “No!” Proska screamed. “Said nothing, thought nothing.”

  “I’m not finished yet either,” said the druggist. “Memories aren’t good for much. They’re as heavy as sugar sacks. You drag them around long enough, sooner or later they’ll bring you to your knees. I don’t like memories. Every day is different; nothing repeats itself.”

  Sweat covered Proska’s forehead. His headache throbbed against it. “May I sit down?” he asked.

  “Now? Why? You have to go already?”

  “I asked if I could sit down!” Proska shouted.

  “Yes, yes—here, on the bed. Just sit, go on, make yourself comfortable. I’m not finished yet, but I
won’t be much longer. And you’re not mad at me after all, are you? No, you’re not. Look, I too was a soldier once. I was in a war, not this last one, but there were lots of corpses back then too. And I also shot a man, a handsome young man. He had black hair and a pretty nose like a girl’s—small, thin, slightly turned up. What they call a snub nose, I guess. What good does it do me to remember all that? Does it do any good? Look, when it happened, I was lying full-length on the ground beside a kind of lane in the woods. My chest was resting on my arms, my chin on my hands. The needles under me were damp and soft, their smell practically enough to make me tipsy. You know what pine needles smell like up close. A jaybird shrieked somewhere above me, big, lonely clouds drifted across the sky, and everything was quiet and peaceful and beautiful. Then, all of a sudden, a man was coming down the narrow path, calm as could be—a young fellow, a handsome Russian enemy. He couldn’t see me, so he had no idea someone was lying there with eyes fixed on him like a buzzard watching a field mouse. He came closer, and that was when I saw the big silver medal on his chest, silver with a blue border. Ten steps away from me, he stopped, stood in place, and rubbed one of his lovely, dark eyes. Some bug had obviously flown into it. I let him rub his eye in peace, but when he finished and started coming even closer to me, so close he was sure to spot me any second, I pulled the trigger…Now do you know why memories do so little good? Look, maybe he was a very unhappy man. Maybe he’s grateful to me today. What’s the point of remembering such things? Those who can learn from them should do so. Those who can’t should focus on what’s affecting them today, right now; that’s more important.”

  Adomeit stopped talking and looked at the syringe. His eyelids narrowed and formed two slits. He felt he’d said more than he really wanted to, and that made him angry.

  Proska stood up and screamed, “What did you aim at?”

  The druggist murmured, “The silver medal.”

  Both men were silent for a while, their eyes meeting and then turning away to scan the room.

  Suddenly the old man’s face changed. He said, “Maybe I have some other stamps after all.”