Deviation

by Luce d'Eramo

  Back in bed, relaxed, in a daze, I thought of the great pains that I had gone to, running around, planning, doing everything I could to get to Russia, when it might turn out that I’d arrive just in time to die there.

  *

  Janka reappeared on the eve of the departure to pack my bags. After he did that, he knelt beside my bed and buried his face in my arm:

  “You’re strong, you’ll help me,” he murmured.

  “From the Saar you can easily return, move someplace else with her where nobody knows you, Worms or better yet Mannheim, take back your true identity, marry her for real, and declare yourself to the Polish delegation in that city. She’ll be happy to follow you. All I needed was to be allowed to join the convoy. Once I’m on the way your presence is no longer required.”

  He stood up again. “You’re kind to everyone, except me.”

  *

  The next day at ten o’clock the Soviet commander’s car arrived. It was August 20 or thereabouts.

  “Time to go,” I murmured, saying goodbye to Sister Vincentia. “I’ll see you again in ten years.”

  “God willing.”

  But when the moment came to get into the car, I hid my face in her apron and wept inconsolably, clutching the armrest of the wheelchair.

  “Versuch’ zu beten,”* she said to me, handing me the crucifix to kiss. Then, after a pause, she added: “Perhaps someday you will be able to find what your bizarre mind is seeking. Now lift your head, sit up straight, we two can’t let ourselves go to pieces.”

  The trip was pleasant. I sat in the captain’s car, beside him in the back seat, surrounded by cushions. The chauffeur drove.

  We followed a caravan of vehicles, one of which also carried Johann; the last truck was a prison van transporting Russians who, during German captivity, had enlisted in the SS. The Soviet Commands would search all over for them and, once they tracked them down, they’d arrest them and send them to the USSR, where they would be tried for treason by a military court.

  The landscape was welcoming as we sped along toward the south. When we skirted a vineyard and I mentioned Italy, the captain looked at me, had the car stopped, and got out. He stepped cautiously into the vineyard and returned with two stalks, from which hung a few golden grapes.

  “They’re not yet ripe!” he apologized.

  The men in the vehicles sang with commanding solidarity:

  Esli zavtra vojna, esli vrag napadet,

  Bud segodnia k pokhodu gotov!*

  At the border between Rhineland and the Saar we were stopped first by the Americans and then by the French, where the occupation zones changed hands.

  Toward dusk we entered the transit camp, in the vicinity of Homburg.

  The captain kissed me on the cheeks three times, as is the Russian custom, and I clung to his neck.

  I was put into an ambulance and we left.

  The hospital was nearby, on a hill, a big complex with numerous pavilions, one of them for Russians.

  VII

  The Russians assigned me a nice room on the second floor with two windows, streaming with light, which Johann pompously adorned with double curtains of velvet and tulle, adding vases, books ranging from university physics texts to treatises on palmistry, and a large damask duvet that I kept and still use; the foyer was also at my disposal.

  At first they gave me two Russian women, one for the day shift and one for the night, who took care of the cleaning, because the actual medical care was entrusted to a German nun and a nurse. Soon they replaced the Russian women with a young Polish girl of sixteen, an orphan, thrown into the camps, whose name was Barbara; blonde, with cheerful bright eyes, she was brisk and always ready to have fun. Barbara moved in to share the room with me, and Johann went into the foyer, where a bed was set up for him.

  Johann had entered into the role of husband; he welcomed the Russians from the pavilion who came to visit me, and in the evening he appeared with friends from the transit camp.

  He tried to get close to me but I pushed him away, overcome with fury.

  I had actually expected his attempts to approach me, curious about how he would manage it and how I would feel, but when the time came, my awareness of my condition was stronger than my curiosity. By day I thought he did it out of duty and that he was secretly quite relieved by my rejections; that he persisted out of male obstinacy. I remained aloof. Nevertheless, I had them empty the urinary catheter more often, I combed my hair, I acquired some cologne, and even tried furtively moving my legs.

  At night I asked myself: What if no other man would later feel any desire to come near me? If this were my last chance? He loved me from before and therefore may still feel a certain attraction. But another man?

  And should I take advantage of a feeling kept alive by memory? Calling back the past?

  Then too—a tiny glimmer of hope—who’s to say that one day I might not find true love?

  I had always had an invidious respect for this mystery. Even if I missed my last chance, rejecting it was worth it rather than taint my pure, passionate, mystifying notion of love. What could be worse than a fumbling, eager contact with Johann, what with the catheter that could be dislodged, the odor of urine, the sores, my deadened flesh, and me, maybe not even wearing the appropriate expression? A pitiful affair, no, better to save face with a detached air of having other things on my mind.

  At this point my sense of irony took over and I began laughing under the covers at the thought of how worried he must be about contriving to be intimate with me.

  I had a fever. When I washed myself and touched the wounds of the ischia, my fingers could feel two slimy grooves between hard ridges, right and left, which exuded a smelly serum, and I thought about Johann.

  Before long he began to lose his patience; in private he gave me intentional looks, with that cold, masculine premeditation that arouses embarrassment and that humiliated me; abruptly he began scowling at the people who came to see me. Thinking that his change of demeanor was to prepare the ground for his departure for Mainz, already decided from the very beginning, I acted kind and sincere, out of spite, while watching him struggle between a sense of guilt and the desire to provoke an argument that would justify his flight.

  One evening when he had gathered some friends in my room, a handsome, funny Soviet man named Piotr suggested that Johann give me to him; he was syphilitic and a marriage abstainer, he grinned, it was just what he needed. As if on cue, they all laughed and laughed.

  Johann left the room, and when the door opened I saw him sitting in the foyer, by himself, his expression strained and vindictive. The Russian spotted him too and in a thunderous voice boomed, “Italian lady, marry me. What do you want with that phantom?”

  The next morning Johann entered without knocking, his accordion over his shoulder.

  “You’re making a fool out of me. I’m leaving,” he announced.

  “It took you this long to get up the courage to tell me?”

  He stared at me with hatred, and was about to reply, but turned sharply and walked out, slamming the door. It was August 30; he had lasted ten days.

  One morning they found my bed wet, the catheter clogged, and there was no way to replace it, since the area was so swollen. I was leaking urine drop by drop, unable to retain any of it, and within days a single wound formed.

  The pavilion doctor, a yellow-toned Caucasian, shy and taciturn, had them summon German specialists. I wasn’t in pain but I was delirious due to my temperature, which had settled at forty degrees. No more urine was coming out. The skin of my lower abdomen was taut with a protruding lump. Impossible to insert a catheter. After thirty-six hours I was urgently transported to the operating room, at night. I saw the flesh on my pubis split, making a rasping sound under the scalpel like fingernails on a blackboard; a jet of urine gushed out into the surgeon’s face, but he remained serious as I burst out laughing before his glaring assistants, and a big rubber tube was inserted into my belly from which the pee would come out from the
n on.

  After the suprapubic cystotomy I thought that if my body was of no help to me, at least it didn’t hurt me. I could consider myself fortunate to be unfeeling. The poor thing was ailing and I was living peacefully, noticing its afflictions only because of the soporific effects of the fever.

  Whether because my condition made me the center of attention, or because I felt free of Johann, I had a lightness about me, a vivacity; I kept everybody cheerful and they smiled fondly at me. Already by the beginning of September the visits had become nonstop: Russians from the pavilion, those from the camp, foreigners from the other wings.

  I don’t know how it popped into my head, but I had a nice multilingual sign made up, which I had hung outside the door. It read:

  GOOD MOOD ROOM

  with rates for visits below. A single session cost one cigarette or one chocolate per minute; there were also group rates. People paid upon entering.

  Maybe it was the foreigners’ clothing that had prodded me: they’d come out of the camps as beggars, and when looting the German warehouses and wardrobes they had not only grabbed what they could, but had taken a fancy to certain items of apparel. As a result you saw thickset farm girls wearing elbow-length gloves, simple peasants sporting flowered hats that didn’t suit them, sensible men with wide-brimmed, floppy hats set roguishly on their heads, and young men in smart German military jackets and black ceremonial trousers wearing sandals and red cotton bandanas around their necks.

  Barbara acted as my secretary. When someone knocked, she would ask his name and particulars. She then closed the door again and described him to me. We waited awhile to make ourselves seem important and already we started giggling. Then we let the person in. Seeing him come forward with a little bundle in his hand as he cast furtive glances at the curtains and books, we laughed like a couple of lunatics. The visitor glowered, and of course the more offended he was, the harder we laughed. We invited him to sit down and grandly offered him a drop of wine and a tissue-thin slice of black bread with a hint of jam on a tray complete with doilies. Our laughter was contagious because the person ended up joining us, and then I would ask him to help us draw his friends into the joke. The first customers became allies. The jolly Russian, Piotr, became fond of us and was soon the animating spark of our shared evenings: he publicized our services at the transit camp, and because he enjoyed a certain prestige, he always brought us new visitors.

  “That Janka is as much a Soviet as I am Canadian,” he told me with a wink.

  Within a few days we gained quite a reputation. And if for once I couldn’t come up with something to say and remained silent, the visitor laughed just the same, as if it were a new clever ploy. They showed up already having a good time.

  I said a bunch of silly things. For example, I had a piece of a flaking, broken mirror, and Barbara would ask me why I didn’t throw it away. For heaven’s sake, it came from the ruins of Pompeii! And I would describe the find so dramatically and convincingly that a couple of impromptu antiquity lovers came to ask permission to examine it.

  Every so often we singled someone out. I confided to an arrogant little Czechoslovakian lieutenant that my father was a municipal street cleaner and my mother a washerwoman, and that in Italy all the daughters of street cleaners know Latin and speak at least two modern languages.

  Even an Italian priest, dressed in civilian clothes because of the Russians, came to see me, with the intention of hearing my confession and saving my soul. I embarked on a very learned philosophical discourse according to which God was perfect, owing to the detachment that left Him objective; that is, owing to His insensitivity.

  “I wonder,” I concluded thoughtfully, “if we won’t one day find out that God is paralytic.”

  Usually, however, my only thought was to cheer people up. When former deportees came, looking defensive like everyone who’s been buffeted by fate, a weight was lifted from my heart each time their expressions were slowly transformed, first with a charged, forced gaiety, then becoming naturally joyful, their faces untroubled.

  Among the many who appeared were the regulars; to proceed in an orderly way, I wrote up a list where I numbered them in priority order. Barbara announced them to me by number. Some paid extra to get a better number on the list. Sometimes the Caucasian doctor showed up; urging us to sing, he sat apart, melancholic, to listen.

  At first when someone asked me about my husband, I was left speechless; I forgot my new surname, and got our names wrong, his and mine. All in all, in front of third parties, my marital status seemed like just another game.

  Often people wanted to see me to tell me their troubles and ask my advice; I told them what I would do in their place. Later, at night, turning over their difficulties in my mind, I was struck by such doubts that my heart raced. But, faced with their worried expressions, I answered confidently, undaunted. To lighten their spirits, I read palms. The way the lines on the palm were drawn seemed to me a geological history as precise as the formation of the earth’s rivers, mountains, and valleys. I remember a clearly scored, very sound life line that inexplicably stopped, cut short, on the hand of a young Russian man with docile, startled eyes. I later learned that he had been in the SS. The soldiers with the red star and the comrades treated him like all the others, except that when they saw his vacant stare, they nudged him compassionately as if to say: Don’t think about it. He had turned himself in voluntarily to the local Soviet Command after months of hesitation and hiding.

  Barbara and I had gotten into the habit of consulting the tarot cards, which we obeyed religiously. Once they decreed that we stay in bed until two in the afternoon, and when anyone knocked, we yelled out, laughing: “We can’t, the cards won’t let us!” Another time they made us start our toilette at five in the morning.

  That late September the weather was bad, we had no heating, and a windowpane was broken. In the morning the room was plunged in fog.

  One evening there was a pelting rainstorm that, with its flashes of lightning and bursts of thunder, felt like a bombing. Can we go to sleep? we asked the cards. No. Is anyone coming? Yes.

  At ten a fearful little knock. We sat up, yawning and numb with cold, and Barbara ran to open the door: it was Adamo, the pavilion’s innocent. We hadn’t even put him on the list, nor had we ever received him in a private session. We offered him a chair, we stuffed him; I read his palm where the lines seemed to have been wiped away, I played a little tune on the harmonica for him and he grinned, flushed and befuddled with pleasure. At eleven we consulted the cards: they answered yes. We said goodbye in a hurry; Barbara walked him to the door and turned the key in the lock. From under the bed she pulled out the box in which we kept our haul, which we gazed at endlessly and divided up each night.

  Piotr traded the stuff that our customers brought us for clothing and money. Barbara favored silk stockings, transparent lingerie, and handbags of all shapes and sizes; I was given to long oversize shirts, woolen shawls, rabbit fur wraps, a Persian muff, as if I were going to the Pole. I still have a blue pleated dress with lace from that period. I had rings, necklaces, watches, and four thousand marks corresponding to forty thousand Italian liras at the time, a negligible sum in Germany, where a kilo of black bread gummy as glue cost sixty marks under the counter, but considerable in Italy and, I hoped, in Russia. Our good mood business was booming, all in all.

  The nurse, who sized up all foreigners as potential boyfriends (though, fearing they would make fun of her, she bombarded them with questions and went from one letdown to another), gave me, in accordance with the custom followed by German girls of the time, a sampler with words she’d embroidered herself: Humor ist wenn man trotzdem lacht.*

  My fever fluctuated because, although the abscess at the entrance to the urethra had burst, a third wound had opened at the sacrum: I couldn’t manage to get my body back on its feet.

  *

  On the last day of September a tragedy occurred.

  In our pavilion, on the ground floor, there was
a thirty-five-year-old German communist who was applying for Soviet citizenship on the grounds of the three years he’d endured in a concentration camp because of his views. His big brown eyes twinkled in his puffy face. He lived with an eighteen-year-old German girl, excited to be the free-thinking girlfriend of a political martyr. He taught them all, his voice now weakened, citing himself as an example and recalling the tortures he’d suffered. He made me feel depressed and I was ashamed to find him so annoying. For his part, he was rightly disappointed by my frivolity, given that I was a fellow internee—we would speak about Dachau together.

  The girl’s father, an invalid in a wheelchair, was also hospitalized with us, through the intercession of the former detainee. The elderly soldier could not forgive the young “idealist” for taking away his only child without marrying her; for him it was a dishonor, and he constantly accused his wife of not raising their daughter properly, of having ruined her. She, in return, asked him why he accepted the benefits that he received from his daughter’s boyfriend if he hated him so much.

  “Where else can I go?” the man shouted in exasperation. “With no house or job, you want me to kill myself?” She, for spite, turned to the young man, calling him “our benefactor” in front of her husband.

  The two men were completely incompatible.

  “What does he want from me if they persecuted him?” the old man whispered to me. “What can I do about it?” Deep down he thought the younger man was exaggerating, that he was a clever poseur.

  For his part the young man expounded on free love, offering him abstract arguments, and told me he regretted the poor invalid’s reactionary narrow-mindedness.

  One evening, mother and daughter, who were also living at the Russian pavilion, returned home after a ride in the former internee’s car, and had to break down the bedroom door, where they found the old man on the floor, dead.

  He had slipped a noose around his neck, tied the other end of the rope to the handle of the locked door, and jumped off the side of the bed opposite the door, strangling himself.