by André Aciman
A Memorial Tablet in Via Mazzini
1.
WHEN, in August 1945, Geo Josz reappeared in Ferrara, the only survivor of the 183 members of the Jewish community whom the Germans had deported to Germany in the autumn of 1943, and all of whom were generally believed to have ended up in the gas chambers, no one in the city at first recognized him.
Josz. The surname certainly sounded familiar, having belonged to that Angelo Josz, the renowned salesman of wholesale fabrics, who, although a Fascist at the time of the March on Rome, and even remaining in the Ferrarese circle of friends around Italo Balbo at least until 1939, hadn’t, for all of that, managed to protect himself and his family from the great raid and roundup that occurred four years later.* Yet how could one believe—many immediately objected—that this man of uncertain age, enormously, absurdly fat, who’d appeared a few days earlier in Via Mazzini right in front of the Jewish Temple had turned up alive from no less a place than the Germany of Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau, and so on, and above all that he, he of all people, was seriously one of the sons of poor Signor Angelo? And then, even conceding that it wasn’t all a sham, a fabrication, that among that group of Jewish townsfolk sent off to the Nazi death camps there might indeed have been a Geo Josz, after so much time, so much suffering dealt out more or less to everyone, without distinction of political affiliation, wealth, religion or race, what did this character want just then, at that particular time? What was he after?
But better to proceed in an ordered manner, and, tracking a little way back into the past, to begin with the first moment of Geo Josz’s reappearance in our city: the moment where the story of his return should properly begin.
In writing an account of it, there’s the risk that the scene might look rather implausible, a piece of fiction. Even I have doubts about its veracity every time I consider it within the frame of what for us is that familiar, usual street: Via Mazzini, the street, that is, which leaving the Piazza delle Erbe, and flanking the quarter of the erstwhile Ghetto—with the San Crispino Oratory at the foot, the narrow cracks of Via Vignatagliata and of Via Vittoria halfway down, the baked-red facade of the Jewish Temple a little farther on, as well as, along its entire length, the crowded rows of stores, shops and little outlets facing each other—still serves today as the main route between the historic center and the Renaissance and modern parts of the city.
Immersed in the brilliance and silence of the early afternoon, a silence which at wide intervals was interrupted by gunshots, Via Mazzini seemed empty, abandoned, preserved intact. And so too it appeared to the young worker who, from one-thirty on, mounted on some scaffolding with a newspaper hat covering his head, had been busy about the marble slab which he’d been employed to affix at two meters height on to the dusty brickwork of the synagogue’s facade. His appearance was that of a peasant forced by the war to seek work in the city and stand in as a plasterer, but whatever the telltale signs of this were, they would be obliterated in the blazing light, as he himself was well aware. Nor was this annihilating effect of the big August sun at all counteracted by the small group of passers-by, various in color and behavior, which had gathered on the cobblestones behind his back.
The first to stop were two young men, two partisans with beards and spectacles, in short trousers, red scarves round their necks, submachine guns on gun-belts: students, city gents—the young peasant plasterer had thought, hearing them talk and turning for a moment to peek at them. Soon afterward they were joined by a priest in his black vestments, undaunted by the outrageous heat, and then a sixty-year-old from the middle classes with a pepper-and-salt beard, a jovial air, his shirt open to reveal the skinniest chest and a restless Adam’s apple. The latter, after having begun to read in a low tone what was presumably written on the tablet, name after name, had interrupted himself at a certain point by exclaiming with emphasis: “A hundred and eighty-three out of four hundred!” as if those names and those numbers might have a direct bearing also on him, Podetti Aristide from Bosco Mésola, who found himself working in Ferrara by chance, and had no intention of staying a day longer than was necessary, and meanwhile was minding his own business and nothing else. Jews, he now heard it said by a growing number of people. A hundred and eighty-three Jews deported to Germany, who died there, in the usual way, out of the four hundred who lived in Ferrara before the war. So that was cleared up. But just a second. Since those hundred and eighty-three must have been sent to Germany by the Fascists of the Republic of Salò,† what if one day or another they, the tupín,‡ should return to take control, and were biding their time in the hope of a rematch? It was a fair bet that they’d been walking around the streets for some time and in all likelihood they’d have one of those red handkerchiefs round their neck! Taking that into account, wasn’t it better that the Jews, too, pretended not to know anything about it? Ah the tupín! You can imagine that at the right moment they could suddenly resurface, clad once more in their mud-camouflage uniforms, with those death’s heads on their fezzes and pennants! No, no. Given the state of things, the less one knew about who was a Jew and who wasn’t, the better, for all concerned.
And it was that unfortunate boy, so determined to know nothing, as he was happy enough to be working and wasn’t interested in anything else, and so diffident about whatever else was going on, imprisoned in his rough Po Delta dialect as he turned his back to the sun, who, at a certain point, feeling his calf touched—“Geo Josz?” asked a mocking voice—twisted round, suddenly, annoyed.
Before him stood a short, thickset man, his head covered up to his ears by an odd fur beret. How fat he was! He seemed swollen with water, a kind of drowned man. Still, there was no reason to be scared since, in an apparent effort to win his sympathy, the man was laughing.
His look turned serious and he pointed at the tablet.
“Geo Josz?” he repeated.
He began to laugh again. But quickly, as if contrite, and seeding his speech with frequent “Pardon me’s” in the German fashion—he expressed himself with the elegance of a drawing room orator of another age, and Podetti Aristide stood listening to him with his mouth agape—he confessed himself unhappy, “Believe me,” to have disrupted everything with an intervention which had, he was more than ready to recognize, all the qualities of a gaffe. Ah well—he sighed—the tablet would need to be remade, given that the Geo Josz, up there, to which in part the tablet was dedicated, was no other than himself, in flesh and blood. Unless that is—he immediately added while surveying them all with his blue eyes—unless the civic committee, accepting the fact as a hint from destiny, didn’t immediately give up the whole idea of a commemorative tablet, which—he grinned—though, affixed in that busy place, it would offer the indubitable advantage of almost forcing passers-by to read it, would also have the adverse effect of clumsily altering the plain, honest facade of “our dear old Temple,” one of the few things remaining the same as “before” in Ferrara, thanks be to God, one of the few things that one could still rely on.
“It’s a bit like you,” he concluded, “with that face, with those hands, being forced to wear a dinner jacket.”
And so saying he showed his own hands, calloused beyond imagining, but with their backs so white that an identification number tattooed on to the skin, soft, as if boiled, a little above the right wrist, could be distinctly read: with its five numbers preceded by the letter “J.”
2.
IT WAS thus that, pallid and swollen, as if he had emerged from the depths of the sea—his eyes a watery cerulean coldly looked up from the foot of the low scaffolding: not at all threatening, but rather ironic, even amused—Geo Josz reappeared in Ferrara, among us.
He came from far away, from much further away than he had actually come. Returned when no one expected him; what was it he wanted now?
To face a question of this kind with the requisite calm would have needed a different time, a different city.
It would have needed people a little less scared than those from
whom the city’s middle class devolved their opinions (among them were the usual lawyers, doctors, engineers and so on, the usual merchants, the usual landowners; not more than thirty, to count them one by one . . .): all good folk who, although they had been convinced Fascists until July 1943, and then from December of that same year, had in some fashion said yes to the Social Republic of Salò, for more than three months had seen nothing but traps and pitfalls all around them.
It’s true, they would admit, they had taken the membership card for the Republic of Salò. Out of a civic sense they’d taken it, out of patriotic sentiments, and in each and every case not before the fatal 15 December,§ in Ferrara, and the following outbreak across all of Italy of the fratricidal struggle.
But to get quickly to the point about that young fellow Josz, they would continue, raising their heads and swelling their chests under jackets in the buttonholes of which some of them had attached whatever decoration happened to be at hand—what was the sense in his going on covering his head, regardless of the stifling August heat, with a big fur cap? And his endless grinning? Instead of behaving in that manner, he would have done far better to explain how on earth he’d become so fat. As till then no one had heard of an oedema brought on by hunger—this must have been a joke put about in all likelihood by himself, the one most concerned—his fatness could only mean one of two things: either that in German concentration camps one didn’t suffer from the terrible hunger that was claimed in the propaganda, or that he had managed, who knows at what price, to enjoy a very special and respectful treatment. So surely he should behave himself, and stop going around annoying people? Those who go seeking the mote in other people’s eyes should look to the proverbial beam in their own.
And what could be said of the others—a minority, to tell the truth—who barricaded themselves in their houses with their ears peeled to catch the least sound from outside?
Among them, there was one with the tricolor scarf around his neck who had offered to preside at the public auctions for the goods sequestrated from the Jewish community, including the furnishings, the silver candelabras and everything from the two synagogues, one above the other, in the Temple of Via Mazzini; and there were those who, covering their white hairs with Black Brigade caps, had undertaken the role of judges in a special court responsible for various executions by firing squad, who had shown, it seemed, no prior sign at all of being in any particular way interested in politics, but rather, in the majority of cases, had led a largely retired life, dedicated to their families, their professions, their studies . . . And yet they were so frightened for themselves at this point, so fearful they might unexpectedly be called to account for their actions, that when Geo Josz, too, asked no more than to live, to start living again, even in such a simple, such a basic request, they found something personally threatening. The thought that one of them on a dark night might be secretly taken out by the “Reds,” led to the slaughter in some godforsaken place in the country, this terrible thought returned persistently to unsettle and torment them. To stay alive, to keep going in any way possible. They needed to survive. At any cost.
If only that wreck, they would jeer, would take himself away, would get the hell out of Ferrara!
The partisans, having appropriated what had been the HQ of the Black Brigade, were using the house in Via Campofranco still owned by his father, and therefore now his, his alone, as their barracks and prison. So he made do with carting around his ominous face everywhere it wasn’t wanted, with the quite evident aim of continually goading those who, sooner or later, would have to settle all of his accounts. It was scandalous, at any rate, that the new authorities should put up with this state of affairs without so much as batting an eyelid. It would be useless appealing to the prefect, Dr. Herzen, who the day after the so-called Liberation had been made president by that same Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale¶ over which, after the events of December 15, 1943, he had secretly presided—useless because, if it was true, which it certainly was, that every night behind closed doors they updated lists of proscribed persons in his office in the castle . . . Oh yes, how well they knew that kind of person who, in 1939, had let himself be evicted without a word of protest, as though it were nothing, from the shoe factory a couple of kilometers along the road to Bologna, near Chiesuol del Fosso, which at that point he owned, and which later, during the war, had ended up as a pile of rubble! With his half-bald head, his feeble pretence of being a good paterfamilias, with his eternal smile full of gold teeth, with his fat lenses for myopia encircled by tortoiseshell rims, he presented that meek aspect (apart from the rigid straight spine which seemed screwed to the bicycle saddle he was inseparable from: a spine that was so in keeping with his Jewish surname, with its not-so-distant German origin . . .) characteristic of all who should be seriously feared. And what about the archbishopric? And the English governership? Wasn’t it precisely an unfortunate sign of the times that even from such quarters there was never any response, apart from a sigh of desolate solidarity or, worse, a smile poised between mockery and embarrassment?
You can’t reason with fear and with hatred. Though had they wanted to understand with the minimum of effort what was turning over in the soul of Geo Josz, it would have been enough for them to return to the moment of his first reappearance in front of the Jewish Temple in Via Mazzini.
That moment will perhaps be best recalled by the middle-class man of about sixty years of age, the one with the sparse little greying beard and the dry-skinned throat, who was among the first to stop under the commemorative tablet for the Ferrarese Jews deported to Germany, raising his shrill voice (“A hundred and eighty-three out of four hundred!” he had proudly cried out) to call the attention of all present to the importance of its inscription.
Having been present in silence when the sixteen-year-old survivor made a display of his hands, he immediately made his way through the small crowd to kiss him noisily on the cheeks, the latter, however, with his hands and forearms still nakedly extended before him, merely exclaimed in a noticeably cold tone, “With that ridiculous little beard, my dear Uncle Daniele, I didn’t recognize you.” A phrase which should have at once been considered very telling indeed. And not only about his identity.
And so he continued: “Why the beard? Have you decided, perhaps, that a beard suits you?”
Tightening his lips, he surveyed with a critical eye all the beards of various thickness and measure which the war, rather like the profusion of fake identity cards, had made such a common feature, even in Ferrara—it really seemed as if he were only concerned with that. But rather than the beards it was clear that there was something else, everything else that was troubling him.
In the immediate vicinity of that which, before the war, had been the Josz house, at whose door uncle and nephew presented themselves that same afternoon, there were to be seen, naturally, a good number of beards. And this contributed not a little in giving to the low building of exposed red brickwork, topped by a slender Ghibelline tower and extensive enough to cover almost the entire length of the secluded Via Campofranco, a grim, military air, fitting perhaps to recall the old owners of the establishment, the marqueses Del Sale, but it didn’t in the slightest remind one of Angelo Josz, the Jewish wholesale-cloth dealer who had bought it in 1910 for a few thousand lire, and who ended up in Germany with his wife and children.
The big street entrance door was wide open. In front of it, seated on the steps, with machine guns between their bare legs or lounging on the seats of a jeep parked by the high wall opposite which encircled a huge, burgeoning garden, a dozen partisans were lazing about. But there were others, in greater numbers, some with voluminous files under their arms and all with energetic, determined faces, who kept coming and going. Between the street, half in shadow, half in sunlight, and the wide-open entrance of the old baronial house, in short, there was an intense, vivid, even joyful bustle, fully in keeping with the shrieks of the swallows that swooped down, almost grazing the cobblestones, and with th
e clacking of typewriters that issued ceaselessly from the barred ground-floor windows.
When this odd couple, one tall, thin and wild-looking, the other, fat, sluggish and sweaty, finally decided to step inside the entrance, they immediately attracted the attention of that company—nearly all of them boys, mostly bearded and long-haired, and armed. They gathered round, some rising from the rough benches placed along the walls. And Daniele Josz, who clearly wanted to show off to his nephew his familiarity with the place and its new occupants, was already briskly replying to every question.
By contrast Geo Josz kept silent. He stared one by one at those suntanned, rosy faces which pressed up close to them, as if beneath the beards he hoped to discover some hidden secret, to investigate some taint.
“And they haven’t even offered me a drink,” his smile seemed to be saying.
Having become aware, at a particular moment, with a sidelong glance whose meaning was clear, that beyond the vestibule, right at the center of the adjacent, rather dark and narrow garden in disarray, there still shone a big, full magnolia, he seemed to grow more contented and calm. But that only lasted a moment. Since very soon after, upstairs in the office of the young Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia# Secretary for the region (who in a couple of years would become the most brilliant Communist deputy in all of Italy, so very kind, courteous and reassuring as to provoke wistful sighs from not a few young women of the city’s best families), Geo repeated with a slight sneer: “You know that beard of yours doesn’t suit you at all.”
It was at this moment, however, in the embarrassed chill that suddenly fell upon what, until then, mainly to the credit of Uncle Daniele, had been quite a cordial conversation, in the course of which the future honorable gentleman had brushed aside the polite “lei” form used by the survivor, insisting on the “tu” of contemporaries and party comrades, that the motive for which the other was there suddenly became clear. If only all those who in the following days built up so many futile suspicions about him had been present at this point.