Deviation

by Luce d'Eramo

  At each village, with the same ploy, we found hospital care for the wounded men who, unable to bear the hardships of the trip, became delirious or unconscious.

  With the gold that I possessed, and a few bills from the German soldiers, we bought cognac.

  On the fourth night my boyfriend reached for my hand, squeezed it, and blinked repeatedly; his big gray eyes told me that he was dying. The nurse alluded to a concussion. I stroked his hand all night, I kissed him, whispering that I loved him, that he should sleep, I would watch over him; whenever I fell silent he pressed my fingers until I started whispering to him again; by dawn his hand was sweaty, getting colder and colder, his features assuming a certain purity, like that of a child. He was seventeen years old.

  The door was partly open; in the distance, in the hovering mist, the gleam of a lake in the dawn light could be seen. It was the Selbstmörderinnensee, called the lake of suicides because of the vast number of women who had jumped to their deaths during the first months following the end of the war.

  *

  At noon we pulled into the Munich station, where the train ended its run. It was raining under the dark dome of the sky. It was November 23, 1945.

  I was loaded into an ambulance, by myself, without having had time to thank the German Red Cross nurse who had cared for me during the entire trip.

  I hadn’t seen Munich in nearly a year: I watched the city pass by through the window of the ambulance: rubble, chunks of wall, interiors of houses split open like stage sets, neighborhood after neighborhood deserted, even more dismal beneath the heavy, steady downpour that washed the stones.

  X

  It was night and I was still alone in the emergency room of a large modern hospital on the outskirts of the city, in the dark, not having eaten since morning, with an aching, full bladder, bowels on the verge of voiding, exhausted from five agonizing days on the freight train, from being moved painfully on stretchers and ambulances, from the strain of talking and contrived cheerfulness. With no word of my luggage. And Tobik looking at me with the shiny button of the one eye he had left.

  Finally, someone came in, turned on the switch that lit up the white room, and busied himself at a small table where he started opening and closing drawers, leafing through charts. He wore a hospital coat and had a bushy gray mustache.

  I called to him and he rudely told me to wait, not bothering to look at me.

  I kept an eye on him and when he seemed to look up, I smiled slightly, but he didn’t see me. He went out.

  I vented my feelings with Tobik; we were really unlucky, the two of us, but he shouldn’t worry about it. I sensed a presence behind me and twisted my head around: the man who was here before was back in the room without my having noticed. Standing at the head of the wheeled gurney on which I was lying, he was studying me. He smiled, suddenly interested in me, and, pointing to the stuffed dog, asked how he was. Encouraged, I explained that the poor little dog was hungry, cold, and sleepy: he had traveled in a cattle car and was paralyzed as a result of a bombing.

  “Poor thing!” He nodded and, pushing my gurney, said, “Let’s go.”

  Corridors, elevators, courtyards, padded doors that sprang closed on me; my head was spinning, in a daze. I opened my eyes and saw that a chubby nun was now pushing me. Men in white with a knowing air surrounded me, glancing hastily at my papers. A small female figure in a striped robe slipped in front of me and stole the shoes that were lying beside my feet, on the blanket, because in the past month I had become obsessed with shoes and I always kept a pair on hand. In the distance, someone was screaming.

  I was taken into a small, narrow room, crammed full of strange beds with high sideboards on either side, replete with fastenings; they laid me on one of them.

  The fat nun, muttering that I was disgusting, grimy, filthy—wasn’t it time she introduced herself?—set about washing me along with an orderly. They lathered me up, turned me over, and brusquely applied medication to my wounds, not very gently. I cried out, asking them not to be so rough, but they harshly ordered me to be quiet and went on in even more of a rush, cracking my plaster brace.

  Someone tossed a metal bowl on my nightstand.

  Half-asleep, I thought I glimpsed sly, cunning, imbecilic faces moving around me under the greenish glow of the night-light.

  I was dozing when a young nurse with a gracious tone, the first civil voice in that place, bent over me:

  “Is this cute little dog yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Tobik.”

  “Is he paralyzed?”

  “Yes,” I sighed, and added: “Most of all he’s sad, terribly sad.” My eyes wept, watching the gentle face of Schwester Gisela.

  “You’re not crazy,” she whispered in my ear. “Ring this if they bother you,” she said, putting the call button in my hand.

  During the night the person in the next bed moaned voluptuously at first, then began growling, seemingly fighting hand to hand with someone. The high sideboards that separated us prevented me from seeing. All of a sudden someone bent over me, brushing my face with an asthmatic breath. I rang. The nurse came running and turned on the overhead light. My neighbor straightened up: it was a beautiful girl, her eyes bloodshot, foaming at the mouth, her wrists bloody; a firm, rosy breast peeked through her torn gown.

  “Lieber Gott! You got untied again! How did you do it? No, I won’t tie you, no, but you have to be good, come on now.”

  The girl calmed down. Whispering in my ear, the nurse warned me to be careful, she was dangerous, the only one in here who was, they were to transfer her any day, she was syphilitic, an Italian from Milan.

  When the nurse went out, I heard whispering in the back of the room with giggling, sighing, little cries.

  My neighbor had set her sights on me:

  “Wer sein du?” Who are you, she asked in German, in a guttural voice.

  I replied in Italian. She didn’t understand. She spoke only a mutilated German with all verbs in the infinitive. But the Italian sounds must have pleased her; she remained kneeling on her bed until the early hours, gazing at me and listening to me.

  I spent the following days trying to convince the doctors that I was not insane. They listened to me smoothly, complacently, they petted my stuffed dog, pursed their lips, pinched my chin, tugging it this way and that, then quickly went away.

  During a medical examination, irritated, I pulled a doctor’s chin myself, asking, in his own absent tone, how was he, hmm? poor thing.

  I planted my eyes on those of the fat nun and the disagreeable orderly, and gave them instructions in a calm, arrogant voice, staring at them the entire time they stayed around me; they became more gentle, their expressions softened.

  But I got along better with the crazies. They loved me with a primitive love, awestruck, jealous of one another. I had to take care not to give the impression that I had favorites, when in fact I favored my impetuous neighbor, who punched everybody and dominated them with her unbridled vitality. Yet all I had to do was call her in Italian and she settled down docilely. They had a need for human kindness, for consideration, for affection, that gripped my heart. There were a few who were treacherous, with a bestial gleam in their shifting eyes. All nine of the women were cunning, scornful, lewd, and very belligerent. They didn’t understand my words, but they sensed the spirit behind them. I had to stay alert, like an animal trainer with his tigers. They demanded justice from me and resorted to my judgment for every little tiff; they did nothing but squabble heatedly.

  I remember a Romanian Jew, a loner who didn’t bother with the others, who would constantly talk to herself about the Nazis and the gas chambers. As soon as the doctors entered followed by the aides wielding syringes, her whole body began to tremble and she would back away and hide under her bed, giving out earsplitting screams. A nurse had to inject her with something to knock her right out; they would then drag her out, inert, throw her on the bed, and put a straitjacket
on her. This scene was repeated twice a day. The doctors watched the operation with a shrug, ill at ease but indifferent.

  One morning I couldn’t resist and told them that they should be ashamed, that the crazy women were better than they were. Demented as they were, at least they weren’t killing me. In fact, they protected me.

  The syphilitic girl put her hand over my mouth, terrified. I pushed her hand away. “Let me talk, honey, I know what I’m saying.”

  Whereas the high and mighty doctors, in their lucidity, have no conscience, they think they’re superior owing to that glimmer of reason that they can’t even use with humility; a fine feat on their part, terrorizing a frightened woman.

  My eight loonies had formed a close circle around my bed and were silent, lying in wait.

  Let the doctors try to deny that since I’d been in the ward the madwomen were calmer; the nun herself had acknowledged it, and it had only been six days so far.

  A short time after the doctors left us, there was a knock at the door and Johann appeared, emaciated and dusty. He came around and hugged me:

  “Look where you are! What they’ve done to you!”

  I kissed him back, my savior. “You found me! How are you?” I said, touching his face; it was really him.

  On the morning of November 20 he had returned to Homburg, to the French pavilion, to take me away and had learned of my escape. He had abandoned his Soviet uniform and left to follow me. He’d looked everywhere: when he heard about me by chance from the station master, he’d been able to narrow his search. He’d been in Munich for three days, visiting all the hospitals, this was the last one, he’d been going from ward to ward, presenting his Soviet military papers, and here I was.

  I hugged him to me, closing my eyes.

  When we’d calmed down, we considered the future. The afternoon was advancing and, increasingly distraught and resolute, I realized that I was seeing him for the last time; the more he talked, the more difficulties and complications crowded into my mind: the impossibility of it. I would never marry. But I didn’t dare tell him so. Enthusiastically he described our life together in Italy. He darkened only when he mentioned that he would be forced to remain Russian until the day he died, bound by false names. That observation gave me my chance: he absolutely had to return to Mainz, making sure he didn’t get arrested by the Russians for desertion, and obtain his Polish identity certificate at the German registry office; he could use the landlord at the hotel where we’d worked together as a witness—a man whose warty nose quivered like a rabbit’s and who, for money or for fear, would get him any document he wanted. We would travel to Italy as Russian spouses, so that he could cross the border, but once there, we would be married with our real names.

  He was reluctant, however, and we argued about it all night. Finally, he estimated that he could make it there and back in two days. He wanted me to caress him at least, but I begged him not to insist.

  “Afterward, though, we’ll work out a way to make love. Promise me?” he said.

  “I promise.”

  “Another separation for forty-eight hours, but it’s the last.”

  “Yes, the last one.”

  “Why do you say it that way? Are you falling for me? Does it bother you that much that I’m going away?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sorry that I’m leaving,” he repeated contentedly. “Now do you believe that we’re good together?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked at him, and at the crazy women wandering around on tiptoe waiting for a sign from me; every now and then I called one of them over and kissed her. Johann’s face tightened.

  Finally, he left.

  Shortly afterward two men came to lead my neighbor away. The girl sensed something; she grabbed the bedside table and hurled it at a nurse, kicking. She jumped on me: “Mama!” she shouted, sobbing, clutching me: “Ma-maaa!” And she bit me.

  I kissed her like a daughter. As they brutally tore her away from me, I screamed worse than her and thought I would faint.

  But I had no time to faint. Johann would be back in two days; I had to get away before then, flee again.

  I was summoned to an interview at the ward doctor’s office.

  A doctor and a lady from the bureau were there. We talked a long time. They were outraged over the error; traumatic paraplegia; the misunderstanding of the stuffed dog was clarified.

  Without explaining anything, I told him that for personal reasons it was essential that I leave within twenty-four hours. The woman seemed to hear me with emotion. The next day she informed me that a “white” train of Italian prisoners coming from Russia, stopping in Munich, would be departing for Italy that very night. She had booked a place for me.

  That night an ambulance brought me, with what little baggage I recovered, to the hospital train. I was settled in a bed in the infirmary car. I was the only woman among the travelers and male Red Cross staff. Throughout the trip, war veterans from Russia came by to greet me. They elected me their mascot.

  The following morning, on December 4, 1945, we crossed the Brenner Pass. The veterans in my car had hung Tobik from the ceiling as a lucky charm, and stuck a lit cigarette in his mouth.

  Rome, 1961

  PART 3

  FIRST ARRIVAL IN THE THIRD REICH

  IN THE CH 89

  Gradually I had developed a curious image of myself. I thought I’d been a slender girl, with delicate wrists and ankles, who had gone through hell without changing her appearance. But I also saw myself as having a button nose in a rather round face, my features somewhat jovial despite the thin lips and sunken eyes.

  If I recalled scenes of anger or terror, I pictured myself as a small, restrained figure amid a mob of frenzied people.

  Perhaps I carried this easygoing girl in my mind so that she might transform, seamlessly, into the “half woman, half mermaid” creature I now believed I had to turn into.

  But the face that appears in the photograph of a factory badge and on the last fake ID card that was issued to me in Mainz, before the wall collapsed on my back, is a different one: a sturdy face, heavier, not given to dreams. In that smooth face of an eighteen-year-old, with her childish cheeks and wiry hair, there is a willfulness discernible in the downward turn of the tight lips, in the dark eyes staring starkly at the lens.

  Looking at those photos, I reviewed in my mind the circumstances in which the student from a good family had become that disillusioned, stubborn girl during the first months of living in a Lager, as a worker at IG Farben.

  I

  The first few days, Lucia felt relieved: life in a camp was less harsh than what it was rumored to be. True, the nine-by-five-meter barrack housed twenty-two women, but it was used only for sleeping, from eight in the evening until four in the morning. The rest of the time was spent in the factory, in the canteens, in the street. If her barrack mates had been a little more well-bred, they could have adapted even in such a cramped space.

  The two-story bunks, paired side by side lengthwise like double beds, faced each other in two rows, with the heads against the walls and the feet toward the center of the room. Six bunks were lined up two by two along one entire wall and five on the opposite wall, at the end of which was the door. Stacked against the wall, between the heads of the beds, were metal lockers in which each internee placed her stuff, padlocking it protectively. The space between each pair of bunks was one meter wide. Quarrels broke out continuously between the women on the mattresses below and those on the upper pallets, to appropriate the space from which to get to the lockers. The women below argued that those above could open their top lockers while lying on their beds, without blocking the aisle. The women above argued that the aisle belonged to everyone and that they intended to come and go from the lockers to the stove without having to climb up and down each time. Squabbles also arose over the stove in the middle of the room, in the roughly nine-meter-long aisle between the two rows of bunks. Someone had a roasting potato stolen, another a strip
of paper she’d left to dry for rolling a cigarette, another a mess-tin of water being heated; no one wanted to move away from the stove lest some roommate carry off her property.

  Other scenes took place over the small sink behind the door. It was impossible to go to sleep before ten o’clock at night as long as the bright overhead light was shining on the eyelids of the women in the upper bunks, not to mention—at varying times—the intrusion of a night guard pointing his flashlight in your face, the barking of the two German shepherds who roamed around on the gravel between the barracks all night, and the frequent air raids.

  At four in the morning people would get up more tired than when they went to bed.

  Lucia couldn’t manage to get to sleep, especially thinking about the long predawn walk to the factory, five kilometers from the camp.

  Since the second day she’d developed two open sores on the big toe of her left foot and one behind the heel of her right foot, caused by chafing from the wooden-soled felt boots whose scratchy seams protruded on the inside, rubbing the flesh raw at every step. The chamois leather shoes with the cork lifts, with which she’d left home, had become riddled with holes while traveling; they’d fallen apart completely in Villach, on the Yugoslav border, the day she’d spent nine hours standing in the snow, along with hundreds of volunteers and those seized in roundups, waiting outside the station for a train that would enable them to continue on.

  Her companions wrapped their feet in sheets of newspaper, but they wouldn’t give her a piece even when she asked them nicely.

  “I got them for a fuck,” a French girl told her, waving two newspapers under her nose. “You’ll just have to earn them yourself, my dear miss, using this,” and she’d patted her on the behind, substituting the gesture for the word.

  “Watch what you say,” another French girl said, nudging the first. “She’s one of them.”