The Turncoat by Siegfried Lenz

Author:Siegfried Lenz [Lenz, Siegfried]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2020-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

• 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 meant 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.

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