by Luce d'Eramo
“I don’t think so,” a girl named Martine had intervened. “If she’d come here to spy on us, she wouldn’t have revealed herself the first day. Instead of introducing herself as a Fascist volunteer, she would have posed as one of those from the Italian Resistance caught in a roundup and we would have swallowed it.”
“Still, she’s one of them,” the girl with the newspapers insisted. “At the factory they assigned her to monitor the machines, like a German.”
“Because of class solidarity,” Martine said. “She’s hardly a worker like us. She’s studying at the university and they take that into account.”
“She’s got you spellbound too, apparently.”
“So tell me something.” Another girl stepped in, hand on hip. “Since you’re always getting on our nerves with your anti-Nazism and your stories about class, I can give it to you straight, right? Seeing as you trust the college girl”—she smiled tightly—“how do you explain the fact that someone who speaks several languages like her doesn’t work in a nice warm office, or sleep on a real mattress in a sturdy house, and instead comes here to get mired down in a barrack with us, huh? You don’t see anything fishy about that? Trust me, sweetheart!” she ended shortly, laughing in her face: “I’m on my guard.”
Martine flushed. In her mid-twenties, she was petite, with a lean body, brown hair cut short, a thin, pointy nose, and lively, penetrating eyes; her thin moist lips traced a red gash in her pale face. With a shrug, she climbed up to her pallet and from up there said, “Fine, let’s do a test.”
The five Italian women in the barrack were more apprehensive. They whispered among themselves, but as soon as Lucia was watching, they fell silent with shifty smiles meant to be ingratiating. They allowed her to get past. They tried to assume a courteous tone when she spoke to them but they never spoke to her first. Two of them, from Bergamo, in their thirties (one of them pregnant), were always together and fought over the same guy: a puny, prim man in his forties who was the only one of the internees to have an umbrella, which he never seemed to part with, not even in the coed lavatory before dawn.
Another inseparable pair was a worker from Sondrio and an apprentice hairdresser from Rome, both sixteen, who shared every crumb and whispered late into the night on their adjacent mattresses, with muffled giggling. The last of the Italians was a gaunt, taciturn young woman, about twenty-five, who slept on the upper level of a corner bunk, facing the door. Raised in an orphanage, she’d been adopted at eight years of age by an old man who’d satisfied his desires with her. When he died, the old man had left all his property to his grandchildren and not even a handkerchief to the little girl. She’d worked as a domestic here and there until she left for Germany as a volunteer; there she’d found a position in the Lager by taking up with a Croatian sous-chef for whom she worked as a dishwasher. She was the only one who had margarine, salami, jam, which she sold at a high price, sometimes for goods but preferably for money, which she counted scrupulously, thoughtfully, as if she regretted not having asked for more. She would retreat up above, on her pallet, hiding her earnings on her person as she pulled out the key to her locker, which she kept around her neck. She refused to open the locker unless all the room occupants withdrew behind the stove, on the other side of the barrack. She would shut the door as soon as one of them took a step forward and stare at the intruder with feverish eyes. With incredibly swift gestures, she would unwrap, cut, and wrap the agreed-upon goods, close the padlock, slip the key around her neck, and suddenly relax, sliding down to the floor, where she handed the buyer a little bundle, her big gray eyes both modest and kindly in her pinched face.
At times Lucia was struck by the “pettiness” of her companions, by their “attachment to the little things,” by their “small-mindedness.” It’s more than miserliness, she thought, it’s meanness. And, almost not admitting it to herself, she thought that her parents weren’t all wrong when they said, “Stay where you belong, forget those pipe dreams. You can’t get too familiar with people of the working classes. They don’t understand, they don’t appreciate things. The only thing you can do is try to educate them a little. Otherwise they’ll turn against you, that’s what you’ll get.”
“They’re people like us,” she’d told her father. “Of course,” he’d said, smiling, “poor souls, it’s not their fault if they lack refinement. It’s like being humpbacked! Do you want to become a humpback too?” “Why is it necessary to become a worker,” her mother had insisted, “when you can be much more useful in a ministry office? You’re capable of performing tasks that are beyond the reach of those who are ignorant. Believe me, everyone must keep to his place.”
It was true that the women in the barracks had no dignity: when faced with the Lagerführer and the guards, they assumed a servile expression. And they let themselves be treated like animals. For example, men and women were forced to undress together in common washrooms.
*
Lucia went to the office of the Lagerführer, a tall, robust man in his fifties who always went around in a ski sweater and boots; he carried a whip that he switched through the air as he walked, always followed by two German shepherds.
She requested that he grant the women washbowls, one for each of them, so that they could wash freely in the barrack, away from men’s eyes.
“I would even give you two if you’d like,” the Lagerführer replied, amused, “because you’re a well-bred girl and have a sense of decency. But those women? Dregs, understand? Scum!”
Lucia stubbornly dug in her heels and was given washbasins, if not for all the women in the camp, at least for herself and those in her dormitory. With her arms full of twenty-two enameled basins, she entered her barracks.
“You see?” she cried, victorious. “If you address the situation, you get somewhere,” she told her stunned roommates: “I explained to the Lagerführer that the internees are not animals.”
Both the French and the Italian women were thrilled by that turn of affairs and the following day, when the wakeup call sounded, they set about washing up in the barracks.
“Good for the college girl!” they laughed. “She did well.” “They’re the pigs.” “No dashing out in the cold, just hop out of bed and there you are, a nice wash-up in a warm room.” “A real godsend.” “Filthy swine!”
The twenty-two basins took forever to fill from the trickle of water that dribbled from the single tap in the tiny sink behind the door, from which you could barely drink; and twenty-two women could hardly find room to wash up in the narrow aisles between the two-story bunks that crowded the room. Only about a dozen of them had managed to wash when the muster call rang out from the camp’s loudspeaker, signaling that it was time to assemble in columns for departure to the factory. The notorious basins ended up in a pile outside, behind the barracks, where they remained to peel and rust.
Lucia then realized that at four in the morning, wakeup time, everyone entered the common lavatory with a sullen look and heavy-lidded eyes, their faces dour. They soaped up and rinsed quickly, paying no attention to their neighbor, man or woman. And later, the next month, she thought that even if someone were to make a racy comment or a double entendre, what was so awful about that? It put people in a good mood, it raised their spirits.
But in truth she found it especially revolting to wash with those people who thought nothing of blowing raspberries or clearing their throats to spit in the sinks. It hadn’t been decency that motivated her as much as revulsion for such coarseness. She wouldn’t admit it to herself, but her companions had noticed her disdain. And once the story about the basins spread through the camp, the French and Italian men started calling her “Miss Turned-up Nose!” “Who do you think is looking at you!” “Who wants to see you anyway!” “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Offended, Lucia stood on line in the camp canteen at seven in the evening, in the press of sweaty bodies reeking of machine grease and boiled vegetables; she felt her stomach turn. Afraid of vomiting in public, fil
led with bitterness and contempt, she went outside, forgetting about the camp’s two German shepherds, known for sinking their teeth into anyone who went around alone or stepped beyond the boundaries.
She was running toward the barrack when, about thirty meters in front of her, she saw a dark form emerge from the night and leap toward her in the snow. She was so angry that she stopped abruptly and snarled at the dog in German: “Go on, come a little closer. Try it.”
The animal came to a halt a couple of meters away from Lucia, who could hear him panting. “Lay one paw on me and I’ll strangle you,” she said, her hands like claws in front of the shepherd, who, grinding his teeth, shrank into the shadows, ready to rush forward at the girl’s slightest movement.
“Cowards, all of you,” Lucia muttered as she went past, never taking her eyes off of him. “Swine.”
The dog padded slightly behind her, with silent steps. They kept an eye on each other. Lucia walked slowly, constantly glancing back at him: fur bristling, teeth and pupils glinting, ears flattened back, he kept growling and wagging his tail. Still watching him out of the corner of her eye, she slowly entered the barrack and, once inside, glued her face to the window. The dog immediately rose up and showed his fangs, wrinkling his nose in anger. Seized with fury, she shot out the door. “Beat it,” she ordered the animal, again in German. “Shame on you, you’re just like them. Taking it out on a helpless girl. I could use a whip, raus, get out of here.” And she added more softly: “Go bite your masters.” With tears in her eyes, no longer looking at the dog, she went back into the barrack, starving, and realized that she had pissed her pants.
II
Indeed, the protagonist of this story had been assigned light work on the fourth, topmost floor of the Ch 89. All she had to do was monitor various kinds of thermometers placed in a machine with cylinders, pistons, and looping tubes, and record the temperatures every hour on a nearby blackboard. If the mercury rose past a certain red line, she had to lower a switch applied to the thermometer, which turned on a light in a panel exposed in a long glass-enclosed booth suspended over the equipment as if on stilts in which the foreman sat. The latter would then join the girl and turn some cranks, explaining their function.
The ground floor of the factory held huge, greasy black machines, whereas on the upper floors—galleries accessed via small iron staircases—the machinery grew smaller, more complex, and cleaner as you gradually made your way to the top.
From the fourth floor, leaning against the railing, Lucia often looked out onto the dissonant, diverse screeching of the assorted gears and equipment, watching the workers on the ground floor. They labored under faint electrical lighting in a building whose windows were permanently darkened, and Lucia had to get used to the dim light to make out what the men below were doing. At times, when her eyes tired from the effort, she would lose herself in contemplation of the metal beams that supported the black sloping glass roof. Every so often a glass pane glittered among the window coverings, stirred by a silent breeze amid the din of the engines.
When she got too bored between one temperature check and another, the girl pretended to go to the toilet and would sneak out of the shop and wander aimlessly among the factory shops. She watched the French prisoners who worked at the lathe in a hall smeared with pitch, adjacent to the Ch 89, where she was employed. She lingered to watch Soviet prisoners carrying huge sacks on their backs, Russian women rolling heavy bins to the tracks of the internal railway. One afternoon she ventured a bit farther and had to ask a guard on a bike how to find her way back to her shop. When she returned to her post, there was no German there to question her. Moreover, Lucia noticed that the Germans greeted her politely, but seemed to avoid her. The foreigners instead looked her up and down scornfully, even though she greeted them with a smile whenever she stopped to watch them work. The French prisoners spread the word when they saw her coming: “Les collabos se baladent,”* someone snickered. The Italians from the next barrack became especially animated: “Enameled washbowls!” one sang out, as a peddler would, or “washbasinnns!” another called. The only ones who didn’t deign to look at her, as if she were transparent, were the Russians and the Poles, those wearing a triangle that read OSTEN or P in the buttonhole of their coveralls.
The first days of her stay at the Lager, Lucia was nauseated by the way the workers ate, noisily slurping up the soup from the spoon, spilling it on themselves, licking the mess-tin, jokingly pretending to belch as if they were full, telling vulgar jokes. “Ill-mannered” people, as her paternal uncle used to say; he was chief engineer at the land reclamation works in the Pontine marshes and, to hear him tell it, had taught hundreds of unskilled laborers and peasants to “behave properly at the table.”
Hundreds of workers took turns at the IG Farben canteens, which during the midday break had three staggered, one-hour shifts from eleven to two, but friends would agree to eat together at the same shift and couples met up on the same bench.
The canteens fell into two distinct groups. The buttonhole-triangles, the Russians and the Poles, to whom the Slovenians had been added, ate in the canteens of the Slavs, behind the factories along the canal. Perpendicular to the canal, along the internal railway, were the canteens for “Westerners”: Italians, French, Belgians, and Croatians. At the time everyone thought in terms of nationality and internees tended to congregate with their fellow countrymen, but everyone ended up going back to the canteen he’d happened to go to the first time, together with those from his work shift. Little by little the nationalities mingled, though the division between peoples of the East and West was a given.
Even in the uninterrupted flow of men and women who lined up at the counters, bumping and colliding with one another in the narrow aisles between the tables before reaching the desired spot, the diners always noticed when a newcomer appeared. Knowing glances as, one by one, heads turned toward the intruder.
Lucia had not gone unnoticed. “Spy,” someone would hiss, blocking her way, or “provò” (for provocateur), but in general they merely kept their distance, leaving a certain vacuum around her. Only Martine sat beside her, pretending not to hear the stentorian voice of Etienne calling across the canteen, “Martine!” Etienne, a war prisoner, was her boyfriend; a stocky young man with an alert face, like her he was from the outskirts of Paris. To follow him, Martine had come to work as a volunteer in Germany.
After a couple of futile calls, Etienne decided to come to their table. Lucia tried to talk with him, but the young man gulped down his soup without saying a word, raising his lively brown eyes to Martine every now and then with a look that was both questioning and challenging.
Word had just spread about the “washbowl crusade” when a smelly, hairy old French vagrant—crawling with lice, with snot in his nose—sat down beside Lucia in the factory canteen. Martine was not there.
Lucia changed her seat and the vagrant, dispiritedly shuffling his feet, followed her, sitting close beside her again. The nearby tables fell silent as heads turned to watch.
The next day, at the same French-Italian canteen, sitting down at a table with a full bowl, Lucia saw that the lice-ridden man wasn’t following her. She suppressed a sigh of relief and reached into her jacket pocket to get her spoon. But it wasn’t there. She rummaged through the other pockets of her jacket and thick twilled trousers, growing more and more anxious, until, looking at the table to see if she hadn’t already put the spoon there, she sensed an unusual silence. All eyes were on her. Bastards, she thought, they stole it from me. As courteously as possible, she asked a man if she could borrow his spoon. He shook his head no and kept looking at her. The same refusal from a woman, then from another. An Italian man came forward to offer his spoon and was shoved back. A wall of men in coveralls blocked him from view. The tramp, who was sitting at a table across the way, got up with a toothless smile. After hawking and spitting on the floor, he mumbled, “Want mine?” and held the spoon out to her. “Thank you,” Lucia said, smiling at him, and, grabb
ing the spoon that she could see was filthy, dipped it into the soup. She tried not to touch the spoon with her lips, while at the same time nonchalantly bringing it to her mouth and swallowing.
When she finished eating, she rubbed the spoon with sand under the tap at the back of the canteen; it was so encrusted with dried particles that no matter how hard she scoured it they wouldn’t come off. She nearly vomited the soup that surged up in her mouth, swallowing it all over again. She made her way back to her table and returned the spoon to the tramp with a beaming smile: “If you lose it someday,” she told him, “I’ll give you mine.” And in a sudden fit of hatred she turned to the others: “Shit-faced bastards!” she shouted.
“Same to you, Fascist,” Etienne muttered under his breath.
“Hey now!” Alain scolded her; a French prisoner of war, around forty years old, he normally never spoke. “You shouldn’t swear, missy. What would your mother say?”
The others snickered. They had formed a circle around her. Lucia began elbowing and shoving her way through and Alain grabbed her arm. “Or,” he said with a straight face, “are you by chance becoming a human being?”
But Lucia tore away from his grasp and, with tears of hatred in her eyes, said scornfully as she went past him: “If I don’t submit to the dogs, I won’t give in to you either.”
That evening she ran into Martine in the barrack: “You ducked out today. You all hate me, you want to crush me. You’re the collabòs.”
“It’s gnawing at you, huh?” Martine replied grudgingly, red in the face. “You want the privileges of being a Fascist student without the drawbacks. Fancy that, look how crafty this mama’s darling is!”
“What privileges? Don’t I live like the rest of you? Don’t I work in the factory like you? Don’t I eat the same slop?”
“What! You liked it so much! The first two nights, you even got a second helping. You savored it as if it were caviar.”