Flight to Afar by Alfred Andersch

It happened just as Gregor had imagined it: the pines suddenly came to an end, the road climbed up once more onto the back of the moraine, and he found himself looking down upon the anticipated view: the willows, the fenced-off pastures dotted with black-and-white cows and horses, then the town and behind it the sea, a blue wall.

But the town was astonishing. It was no more than a dark, slate-collared line with towers growing out of it. Gregor counted them: six towers. One double tower and four single towers, leaving the naves of their churches far below them, like red blocks let into the blue of the Baltic, a vast relief. Gregor dismounted from his bicycle and looked at them. He hadn't been prepared for this view. They might have told me, he thought. But he knew that the people on the Central Committee had no feeling for this sort of thing. To them Rerik was a place like any other, a dot on the map, in which there was a cell of the Party, a cell consisting mainly of fishermen and the workers at a small shipyard. Perhaps no one from the Central Committee had ever been to Rerik. They had no idea that these towers were here. And if they knew, they would only laugh at Gregor's opinion that towers like this had an influence on Party work. If Gregor had told them what he thought as he looked down upon Rerik, namely that in a town where there were such towers you must work with quite different arguments from those generally printed in the leaflets, they would simply have shrugged their shoulders. At best they would have said, "Exactly the same people live there as in the slums of Berlin." And that was true. The fishermen of Rerik were certainly just the same people as the workers of Siemensstadt. But they lived in the shadow of these towers. The towers loomed over them even when they went out to sea. For they were also shore markers.

From the towers it must be possible to observe the sea as far as the limits of the territorial waters, thought Gregor. Seven miles. Seven miles of flight lay within view of these towers. But 'the Others' were not sitting at the peepholes of these towers. That was a good thing, thought Gregor; a good thing they were not towers for 'the Others'. Who sat at the lookout peepholes? There was no one there. They were empty towers. But although the towers were empty, Gregor felt himself watched by them. He felt somehow that it would be difficult to desert under their gaze. He had imagined it would be pretty easy. His last job as an instructor was in Rerik, he would carry it out and at the same time question the Rerik contact about the harbor and transport facilities.

But he had reckoned without these towers. They saw everything. Including betrayal. Suddenly Gregor remembered that he had once before come down from a hill toward a town by the sea. The town was called Tarasovka. Tarasovka on the Crimean Peninsula. Evening had fallen and they had at last been given permission to raise the hatches of the tanks, and Gregor had at once thrust the upper part of his body through the hatch to get some fresh air, to gulp at the evening wind after a day of maneuvers with the Red Army. Then he saw the town at the foot of the hill that rose out of the steppe, a jumble of huts on the shore of a sea of molten gold - this town was quite different from Rerik with its red towers against the icy blue of the Baltic - and Comrade Lieutenant Kholtshoff, upright in the hatch in the tank in front of Gregor's, had called out to him: "That's Tarasovka, Grigorii! We've taken Tarasovka!"

Gregor had laughed back, but he hadn't cared whether the tank brigade to which he had been attached as a guest at the maneuvers had taken Tarasovka, he was suddenly fascinated by the golden flux of the Black Sea and the gray dotted line of huts by the shore, a tarnished silver plume that seemed to contract under the threat of a dully rumbling fan of fifty tanks, fifty menacing clouds of steppe dust, fifty pillars of iron dust, against which Tarasovka raised the golden shield of a sea. And Gregor saw the commander, who was standing up in the first tank, raise his arm; the rumbling ceased, the great movement of the steppe came to a halt, and the clouds of dust rose up in veils, in banners, that sank down before the shield of gold. Beneath its plume of five hundred gray huts Tarasovka began to breathe again, before the day went out.

As he looked at Rerik, Gregor remembered Tarasovka, because there his betrayal had begun. The betrayal consisted of the fact that to him, and to him alone, the golden shield was more important than the capture of the town. Gregor never knew whether Kholtshoff and the other officers and men had seen the shield at all; they spoke only of their victory. To Kholtshoff, Tarasovka was a town to be conquered; to the comrades of the Central Committee, Rerik was a point that must be held - there were no golden shields that rose up, no tall red towers that had eyes.

Perhaps the betrayal had begun even earlier; perhaps it had already begun when he suddenly felt tired during a lecture in the Lenin Academy, to which the youth league had sent Gregor for his services to the organization in Berlin. It would have been better if they hadn't sent me there, thought Gregor, to the country in which we have been victorious. Once victory had been achieved you had time to take an interest in other things besides the struggle. True, they had preached to him that in their country the struggle still continued, but a struggle after victory was quite a different matter from a struggle before victory. That evening at Tarasovka, Gregor realized that he hated victories.