by Luce d'Eramo
With the Italians I relaxed: they cooked spaghetti with tomato sauce; from their walks in the fields they brought back hedgehogs, snails, and chicory, which we made into tasty dinners.
Johann had left, I don’t remember when, nor does it matter any longer. As much as he hit it off with the Italians, that’s how much he disliked the French, whom he considered corrupt, arrogant, and politically at fault, along with the British, for having deceived Poland with their guarantees at the time of Gdansk, leaving the country prey to Germany and ultimately trapped between the Nazis and the Bolsheviks. Even while we were staying in the Russian pavilion, he would sometimes mutter under his breath, “I am a true Pole: all I do is change masters.”
Piotr would deride Poland, a nation of dandies, in front of Johann, and he could not react. But I hadn’t been aware of Johann’s torment.
“I gave up my country for you,” he muttered bitterly, and, though he’d always boasted to the Germans about being Polish, showing off the P in his buttonhole like a decoration, I didn’t believe the strength of his feelings and in my heart accused him of merely employing rhetoric meant to disguise his intention to return to his girlfriend.
“Your master is still the same,” I replied. “Still German, only the gender has changed from masculine to feminine.”
His time was divided between Mainz and Homburg as though between two families. He spent a few hours with me, arriving on a motorcycle, mostly to make sure I wasn’t doing anything rash. Practically speaking he lived with the other one, Grete, and in a couple of weeks he’d flourished again and regained his strength: he appeared clean shaven, dressed with care, wore clean underwear and an air of well-being for which I did not forgive him.
I could very well confess to not being his wife, a sham, unconsummated marriage, and regain my freedom, but I was not reckless to the point of closing my eyes to the risks of such a revelation. The mood was uncertain. The Nuremberg trials, in addition to prompting a resurgence of rancor against the Germans, had also triggered a state of political surveillance among us foreigners, a kind of reassessment of our positions, and had repressed national spirits. Each group observed that its people would never have committed the atrocious crimes of Nazism. We Italians, suspect due to the Rome-Berlin axis, asserted that we were good, humane, incapable, even in a climate of dictatorship, of falling into the fanatic zealotry of the Nordics, thanks to a Latin critical sense, to the restraint of a skepticism attributable to millennia of civilization and historical experience.
My need to go to Russia had dissolved by itself, almost without my being aware of it. When I looked at my future in the Soviet Union, I had a new feeling of cowardice, as if, given the paralysis, my independence had a limit that was called Italy.
Johann informed me that as soon as I was able to withstand the strain of the journey, we would leave. We would stop in Warsaw, where, introducing me to his parents and consulting them, he would decide what to do. Freshly shaven, he spoke soberly, looking around slowly, like a husband; and I watched him, wondering who he was; I didn’t know this man, we had nothing in common he and I, and the idea of living beside him seemed inconceivable to me.
In order to silence me, he occasionally alluded to the fact that he was a Russian soldier and sometimes appeared in uniform, though he only stayed a few minutes, as if uneasy. His going back and forth, acting on his own with no rules or regulations, did not convince me.
Olga, buxom, dark-haired, and vivacious, was a local fifteen-year-old girl who had taken a liking to me as a model to imitate. She judged Johann to be a shady opportunist and made it her duty to follow him with an intent hatred; for this reason she quietly left for Mainz, on whatever form of transport was available—rather rash, considering the times—and looked for him, relying on information she’d wheedled out of me. She found him in a room at the former barracks, sitting on a bed in which his Grete was lying, wearing a U.S. Army uniform. At a loss for words, Olga blurted out that I had sent her there from Homburg to ask him for an alarm clock! She returned that same evening, pale but proud, to report the outcome of her investigations.
So he was not a Russian soldier; who knows what scam was behind his changing uniforms. He must certainly have to avoid attracting the authorities’ attention to himself: he no longer intimidated me. I started smoking again. I put on lipstick.
After about ten days during which I didn’t see him, he showed up in my room one afternoon when I was talking with two Frenchmen and the Italian with the ulcer. Noticing my displeasure, he announced that I was painted like a French whore and that I was ruining myself by hanging around with those people. When I shrugged, he slapped me, actually just barely a tap, but my French champions intervened and the Italian as well. Johann then ordered me to say that he hadn’t hurt me, that he was my husband, and that the others should back off, but I remained silent. They came to blows and he punched the Italian squarely in the stomach, knocking him to the floor. At a whistle from the first two Frenchmen, their comrades rushed into the room and immobilized Johann while one went to get the handcuffs. He appeared dismayed and so meek that his keepers relaxed their hold, but then he unexpectedly wrenched free and climbed out the open window.
They searched the hospital grounds to no avail.
The Frenchmen transferred me up to the second floor for fear that he might return through the window and beat me at a moment when they weren’t there.
That night, in bed, alone in the second-floor room, I heard a thud; a figure dangled in the shadows outside the window, occasionally bumping against the wall, like a hanged man, then stepped onto the windowsill. I heard the screech of diamond on glass, the clink of glass shattering on the floor, felt a cold draft, then the handle turned and Johann leaped into the room. He turned the flashlight on and then off, and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Get it through your head that I will get to you no matter where. I’m not the same as I was before. Your viciousness has made me a man.” In the darkness, in the silence, I could hear him breathing hard. “Now listen to me: either you take it upon yourself to ask to return to the Russian pavilion, by tomorrow, in which case I’ll wait for you as long as you like, I’ll be here for you—”
“In Mainz,” I interrupted.
“In Mainz or wherever I choose, no one can forbid me to get elsewhere what I can’t get from you.”
“Or?”
“Or the following day I’ll take care of things myself and we’ll leave for Russia at once. Answer me.”
I replied that I was paralyzed, I couldn’t see my way clearly, I needed time for so many things, I couldn’t think about him.
“You bring up the paralysis when it suits you.”
“I learned that from you.”
He left through the window, leaping onto the same tree on which he’d been perched earlier, watching as the French searched the grounds before moving me to the very room facing it. Then he slid down.
The following morning, blindfolded, I underwent a neurological examination with pinpricks, pinches, hammer taps, hot and cold stimuli applied to my body and my legs, articulations of the lower limbs. It turned out that while I had no epidermal sensitivity, the deep sensitivity of movement, temperature, and touch had returned, attenuated as if through a cloth and altered. I again felt bowel and bladder stimuli but I was not yet in control of those organs. My intestines were not working properly. A doctor suggested applying an artificial emission duct for stool, a tube made of special material with a tap at the end to open and close at will; it would eliminate the filth and reduce the risk of infection due to there being excrement in my wounds.
Johann’s words about the experiments of former Nazis came to mind; having had a laminectomy just a month ago—I told the doctor—I had no intention of undergoing further surgery for the time being.
“We’ll talk about it again,” the doctor said, smiling imperturbably and confidently.
*
The following morning, three Russian soldiers came marching into my room: two of them, o
ne being Johann, carried a stretcher; the third one, in a helmet, indicated me.
I rang the bell as the agreed-upon alarm signal. The blue eyes of René Payoux, the “old man” (twenty-three years old), stared through the upper pane of the door. Shortly afterward a platoon of Frenchmen arrived, followed by René.
They asked the Russians to please wait.
I whispered to René to ask Johann for his documents.
Shooting me a sarcastic look, Johann handed the Frenchman his papers and waited, legs spread, hands on hips. I insisted on checking for myself: the document seemed in order, complete with stamps and signatures.
Dr. Marder was summoned.
When she saw Johann, she laughed, relieved: he knew very well that I couldn’t be taken away like that!
“Do you know what Luzi did to me? She incited them to throw me in jail, and it’s not the first time.”
Frau Marder didn’t want to know about it; what was between us was none of her business. She judged people on their own merits: “I know each of you individually. You, Janka, are a fine young man who does not want Luzi to die,” she said, reminding him of the day of the surgery.
“Luzi must understand that I’m serious,” he said, already upset.
“From this moment on Luzi will understand that, don’t worry, I myself guarantee it.”
I asked Johann to forgive me; I promised to change my ways with him, to be decent. I wept, partly because of what I was saying, partly due to the fright I had had.
He had to leave that night for Mainz, where, after Olga’s “incursion,” he had enlisted in the Soviet army as a volunteer reservist. When I decided to leave, he would be demobilized, provided he perform military service in Russia in the city where I would be hospitalized. I asked about the captain; he’d been gone for some time, they said he’d been called back to Russia.
The two Russians who had come with Johann, however, would not bend; they had received orders to take me away.
The French demanded a written mandate.
The soldier with the helmet, who was a sergeant, presented it.
The French declared that they had to submit it to their superiors, who were now absent, and that they were not authorized to hand anyone over.
Since I was married to a Soviet soldier, the French really had nothing whatsoever to do with me.
Nevertheless, I was in territory under French jurisdiction from the moment I entered that room, which the Russians had invaded illegally.
The French had initiated these illegal actions the day they’d taken me away from the Russian pavilion.
No, because they had carried me away with my full consent.
But I was a Soviet citizen.
But I had purposely taken refuge with the French to apply for a divorce, which would release me from Russian citizenship.
Johann pricked up his ears: “Good to know.”
Both sides threatened to protest to higher authorities.
The Russian with the helmet put a stop to it, saying that they would return the following day with instructions so clear that no one would dare prevent them from carrying out their orders. He turned to me with contempt:
“And you too, comrade, will have to answer for your conduct. One who has the honor of being Soviet defends it.”
They went out with their sturdy, martial gait. I called out to Janka, who followed them without looking back.
That same afternoon a supervisor from the French Health Bureau arrived: he had received a protest from the Russian Command at the transit camp in Homburg.
The Frenchmen were harshly reprimanded for having arbitrarily abducted me, instead of having me obtain the transfer through regular legal procedures.
In the evening an officer from the French police came to tell me that the diplomatic incident was assuming such proportions that, because the French were in the wrong, they were obliged to hand me back to the Russians with their deep regret.
Finally, at ten in the evening, Jean, one of my friends, informed me that the next convoy to Russia would leave within forty-eight hours; he had just learned, unofficially, that I was on the list and that Janka was assigned to guard me and some Russian SS prisoners, on pain of death.
At midnight, Frau Marder, bundled up in scarf and overcoat, having been informed of everything, came to offer me a solution: before dawn a freight train with two cars of wounded German soldiers would pass through the Homburg station headed toward Bavaria. I could leave with them; the German Red Cross nurse who had assisted me at the Russian pavilion was willing to accompany me. If I wanted to go, I had to prepare quickly, covertly, because the French, having committed to the Russians, were obliged to hinder my escape. She handed me my medical records, but they were labeled with my Russian surname. I told her the story about the false names. It was now two in the morning, and she hurried off as the nurse stealthily entered to pack the suitcases. At three Frau Marder reappeared with a duplicate of the documents labeled with my real name, which I hadn’t used in fifteen months. She also left me the other copies, so that I would have duplicate documents available. “Just in case,” she said.
At five in the morning a German ambulance came to pick me up, along with the nurse and the luggage.
The French soldier on the night shift, Jean, also got in; he stopped by the stockroom, from which he took five cartons of provisions supplied by the Red Cross and gave them to me. The ambulance set off again.
At the station I was carried onto a cattle car and settled on the straw in my plaster bed, surrounded by wounded Germans, by the stench. It was still night when the train left, with a screech of clanking iron. I had not said goodbye to my friends, not even Frau Marder, no one, and they had all aided and supported me with no questions asked, without a word of thanks.
IX
The first morning in the cattle car, in the hovering stench of rotting flesh, ointments, and urine-soaked straw, interrupted by waves of cold seeping through gaps in the floorboards, in the dim light, among the skeletal features of the wounded on their backs and the listless faces of those seated against the walls, swaying as the train rattled along, in that lifeless silence broken only by moans and cries for help, I thought I might die.
Each lurch of the train reverberated in a stabbing pain in my back and legs, and I clutched Tobik tighter to my chest.
This was my second time traveling in a cattle car. Back then I was hale and hearty, the thought of pain did not defeat me, and my companions, though emaciated and enterocolitic, had an intense resilience about them as a result of the unjust offense, an aggressive look, a scornful twist to their lips. Now I was broken, no longer rebellious but anxious and fretful, and my new companions were destroyed inside. I will always be with those who are suffering, I thought.
Someone begged for a cigarette, and I remembered Jean’s cartons. I asked a little man in a shirt, who was leaping about spryly among the bodies, to divide the contents among the soldiers. The distribution sparked a brief animation that quickly faded.
A handsome young man, his head wrapped in bloodstained bandages, who lay beside me on the straw, turned his feverish eyes to me and stretched his mouth in a grimace: finally I realized that he was smiling at me.
At a rural station two German girls in a uniform I’d never seen before stormed into the car. Supporting the wounded men’s heads, the girls helped them drink, their faces so intent that it seemed not a drop of the watery broth would be lost.
A French soldier looked in and the nurse, wedged among the bodies, shouted at him: “Italienerin! Italienerin!”
I spoke in French and got a food parcel.
I wanted to share it, but someone called out, “It’s a long trip, you’ll get hungry, keep it for yourself.”
The others agreed. The train creaked along on the rails. With a small voice that rang out crystal clear in the din, I ordered the nurse to throw the parcel out the door, into the fields. They protested.
From then on, at every godforsaken station, I had them carry me out of
the car on a stretcher and take me to the first-aid office, where I demanded food and medicine by presenting my Italian papers (the Russian ones were hidden at the bottom of the trunk).
By the second day of the trip we had come to know one another, as well as the wounded in the other car, to whom we sent part of our haul.
To have some fun, I began speaking in the Rhine dialect, acting the part of a peasant girl from “Menz am Rhoin,” Mainz on the Rhine. The bloodied young man next to me was my boyfriend; the nurse, my rival, had shot him out of jealousy; there was a mayor, a parish priest, and other characters as the wounded men gradually joined in the performance, each of them passionately playing his role.
The situations became so convoluted and comical that we had to lower the curtain to catch our breath.
In the evening we sang in unison for a long time:
Wo die Nordseewellen rauschen an den Strand,
wo die gelben Blumen blühn im grünen Land
und die Möwen schreien grell im Sturmgebraus,
da ist meine Heimat, da bin ich zu Hans.*
When we paused and particularly when the train stopped, we heard, like a response, from the adjacent car:
Im grünen Wald, dort, wo die Drossel singt,
und im Gebüsch das muntre Rehlein springt,
wo Tann’ und Fichten stehn am Waldessaum,
verlebt’ich meiner Jugend schönsten Traum.*
Absorbed in intoning the spacious words of sea and forest, we forgot the cramped car, the jolts, the festering wounds, the hunger, the shivering.
The third morning a wounded man went into a coma and died. In the afternoon, another one had a seizure.
At the first stop I had them call an ambulance, saying I didn’t feel well. I got in with the German in crisis. At the hospital in town they assigned me a bed that I gave to him. The doctor objected, it could not be done.
Why not? What could happen?
He could lose his job.
“That’s why you crushed a defenseless people,” I said, “so as not to lose your job.”
Because the order, which he made me put in writing, was from a foreigner who seemed so confident, the doctor accepted my protégé.