Deviation

by Luce d'Eramo

  “I was starving, don’t you understand? Three days of traveling, numb with cold, with nothing to eat.”

  “Go on. You said yourself the food here seemed more than adequate, I heard you myself, you know, with my own ears.”

  “That’s right, I thought it would be worse, so? At home we got by solely with the ration card because my mother was against the black market. She made me focaccias with bran and I devoured them, okay?”

  “Stingy too, your dear mama.”

  “No, my mother did it out of patriotic love.”

  “Then you’re also a fool,” Martine said curtly.

  “Don’t try to sidestep the issue again,” Lucia parried. “Do you know that my father is undersecretary of state for the Republic of Salò? If I wanted privileges I wouldn’t be here now.”

  “Good to know. So why did you come?”

  “To find out the truth.”

  “And did you find it?”

  “I’m doing that, and at my own risk, without taking advantage of my status.”

  “That’s what you say. If you must know, your foreman at the Ch 89 is up to his ears in demands the Germans make on your behalf. But he has orders from above to ‘let you adapt,’ to cut you some slack. If anyone else took the little strolls you take through IG Farben, he wouldn’t get away with it like you do. And your ridiculous little washbasins, if one of us had asked for them, do you think she would have gotten them? A slap in the face, that’s what she’d have gotten. So shut your mouth and go peddle your philanthropic bullshit to someone else. Why do you try to excuse yourself? You are who you are.”

  “I’m not a collabò.”

  “Then why do you keep pictures of Hitler and Mussolini at the bottom of your duffel bag?”

  “So you went through my locker. And I’m supposed to be the spy, right? Thieves and spies, that’s what you all are.”

  “Report me to the Lagerführer.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Martine climbed up to her pallet, pulling the covers over her face.

  *

  Lucia tossed and turned all night. She had completely forgotten those pictures in her bag (how could she have?). She couldn’t sleep, in part because of hunger. Almost all her roommates had secret supplies they managed to get somewhere, but she ate only the food that was doled out at the canteens. And at first she had even relished it. After only two weeks, the more she wolfed down, the hungrier she remained, despite even finishing the chickpea purées and the turnip and potato soups that Martine left in her plate. It occurred to her that during the argument with Martine the other French women had not intervened with their usual sarcastic remarks. They’d listened in silence.

  III

  The following morning she felt sick at heart. I’m eighteen years old, she thought, and the only ones who understand me are German shepherd dogs who obey Nazis.

  She was walking to the factory in a column and realized that only in the shop did she have any peace. As she approached the IG Farben plant, she noticed that the burnished bricks gave her a sense of familiarity, and she stepped up her pace toward the plumes of smoke billowing from the smokestacks. Inside Höchst, the column slowed up as it moved along the buildings; the smell of minerals filled the air as engines purred. Groups peeled off to report at their specific gate.

  In front of an open area, between massive apartment houses from the early twentieth century, Lucia passed through an imposing, iron-plated double door, followed by the eyes of two guards in glass watchtowers, and punched the factory card, heading for the shop.

  That morning she didn’t leave her workplace for a minute.

  But at noon, as she was walking to the usual canteen, the idea of being back among those harsh faces made her hesitate. She decided to go and eat at the canteen with the people from Bergamo, an entire community of laborers and unskilled workers who never split up. She was already on her way there when she convinced herself that she would be subjected to the same rejection all over again by the new group. Suddenly she decided to join the Russians. She would show the Italians and the French that she was more democratic than them. They snub the Russians, she thought, they think they’re more evolved than the Russians. I’ll show them.

  She didn’t know that any association between the two groups of people—those from the East, including the Slovenians, and those from the West—was severely prohibited by the authorities. She set out behind the factories and entered one of the canteens for Russians and Poles, finding herself among hundreds of bundled-up bodies, loud male voices, women’s shrill cries, and hands offering bowls.

  She made her way to a table and, from the first spoonful, noticed a rotten taste in her mouth: there was no comparison with the soup they gave to Westerners. It was all mashed turnips without a hint of potato. And the dark bread was so gummy it stuck to the fingers.

  She left the soup there and headed for the factory administrative center to complain. She demanded to see the director himself. The clerks were taken aback by her assurance. After being shown to a waiting room, she was taken to a large, bright, comfortably plain office. She walked toward the gentleman sitting behind the glass desk; dressed in light colors, he was thin with closely cropped red hair and sunken eyes behind thick-lensed glasses. Enunciating the words clearly, she told him that the food given to the Russians was inedible. Director Lopp just looked at her.

  “I understand,” the girl continued. “You can’t believe it. Come see for yourself,” she insisted.

  Herr Lopp’s expression was more and more puzzled. When he rose to his feet, he seemed thinner and younger than when he was sitting down.

  “You speak German properly,” he said. “Where are you from?”

  Lucia explained: “I studied it in school, and as a child I used to spend vacations in the Tyrol and in the Black Forest.”

  “What did you study?”

  “Humanities and philosophy at the University of Padua. My family moved north following Mussolini’s government.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen and a half.”

  “So young and in college?”

  “I skipped two grades, in elementary school and high school.”

  “Good for you.” Then with a brief bow: “And now you may go.”

  “Oh no.” Lucia stood her ground. “I came about the Russians’ food. The soup is a disgrace, it contradicts the Nazi-Fascist promises of civility.”

  “How long have you been in Germany?”

  “It will be two weeks tomorrow.”

  “Achso,” he replied, “I see.” He sat down again behind his desk: “I will take care of it,” he said, and waved his hand for her to leave.

  “Director,” Lucia said excitedly, “as you know, only the equality of peoples can construct a thousand-year peace.”

  Herr Lopp pressed a button on his desk and, when a clerk appeared at the door, pointed his chin at the girl. The man, his posture stiff, touched her arm, ushering her out. They passed modest offices, one after another, with long tables and built-in bookcases of unfinished maple. The clerk led her to the service exit, a spiral staircase at the back of the building.

  As payback, the day after her complaint to the management, Lucia again showed up at the canteen for Russians and Poles.

  Men and women sat at the tables with the rancid turnips, their unwashed bodies and clothing crowded together; letting her eyes slide over the long rows, she spotted a pair of deportees’ jackets folded up on a bench in a corner.

  She tore the cloth triangle that said OSTEN off of one of them—the label the Russians had to wear in their lapel—and later pinned it to the jacket of her coveralls.

  On the fourth day she ate with the Russians and Poles—where she met Johann—Lucia was picked up and taken to the director’s office. Herr Lopp shot up. Motioning to the guard to leave, he approached the girl and told her that she was in danger of going to Dachau if she didn’t settle down.

  Lucia replied that threats were not necessary, what was
needed was justice for all foreign workers hosted by the Third Reich. She walked out on her own initiative, satisfied that she had beaten him to it. She ran to the canteen, but was immediately stopped and brought back to her shop, without eating. The foreman informed her that she’d been transferred to the ground floor outside the factory; there she was to load and unload blocks of sulfuric acid frozen at seventy-eight degrees below zero, together with the Russian prisoners and the Warsaw insurgents.

  He added, “Since you love them so much, go work with them.”

  *

  Not a week passed before Lucia’s hands were cracked and covered with lacerations that stung day and night; she also had lesions on her chest from carrying the big blocks of sulfuric ice that seeped through her clothing and rubberized canvas gloves. Her feet were scraped raw, inside the wooden-soled felt boots, and oozed a foul-smelling fluid. The chafing at each step made the pain unbearable.

  It was cold and wet, early March ’44. Russian soldiers, Polish partisans, and Lucia loaded and unloaded in the rain.

  In a silence empty of thought, Lucia felt at peace when passing a block from hand to hand; it seemed like a gesture of solidarity. She was finally accepted. Though every so often a Russian prisoner motioned for her to take that OSTEN off her jacket.

  The blocks were stacked on a truck or sometimes on a wagon drawn by two prisoners, as though they were horses.

  Afterward the workers had to go and unload them from the trucks in the little station fronting the canal, and carry them in their arms to some factory that always seemed to be on the opposite side.

  Lucia sometimes had to walk more than a kilometer with sulfuric ice against her breasts before reaching the intended shop. Accompanied by the clanking of the machinery, she ran among the IG Farben plants, blackened buildings that seemed to turn their backs to the deserted streets.

  From time to time a group of ragged people appeared and disappeared, sucked into a dark doorway.

  Some days, when the siren for meal time had sounded and Lucia rushed off to eat, away from the area where the canteens for the French and Italian workers were, where she had eaten at the beginning, she felt like heading over that way and would slow up. But she kept going, ordering herself not to turn around. Let the soldiers on guard duty see that she didn’t give a fig about not being able to enter. Actually, she had tried, but the Nazi officer had denied her access, threatening to transfer her from her Lager to that of the Osten.

  Out of sight, Lucia stopped to stare at the murky, oily water of the canal that slowly swept IG Farben’s discharges to the river. Viscous clots floated on the surface. She told herself that perhaps she should break all ties with the “Westerners” and move to the Osten, even though their camp was so jam-packed that they slept thirty or forty to a dorm. The Italians and the French would realize that they had wronged her with their pranks. But the Osten’s camp was even farther away, and three more kilometers worried her when the five kilometers that separated her camp from the factory already seemed endless.

  Sometimes the French prisoners called to her when she passed by their factory, empty-handed, on the way back from transporting some sulfuric ice. But Lucia turned her head.

  At the end of her shift she felt almost sorry to leave IG Farben. As they formed into columns outside the plants, she sniffed the pungent odors of the damp night; all she could hear was a muffled hum after the deafening rumble of the machinery that lingered in her ears.

  Six weeks had passed since her departure for Germany when she finally received two letters from her mother at the same time. In the evening, after returning to the camp, they were handed to her by the Lagerführer during roll call.

  The Freiarbeiter* were allowed to write a note to their families every fifteen days, on an aerogram obtained at a window at the camp canteen, and then mailed, open, in the mailbox provided. The delivery was recorded, and if the note happened to get lost, that mail opportunity was missed.

  As soon as she’d arrived at Höchst, Lucia had written to her parents telling them not to worry about her, the food was sufficient and the barrack well heated. She had then bought, in exchange for her scarf, two aerograms from the pregnant Bergamo woman; in those notes she had alluded that she was learning a lot from the experience, said that her shoes had fallen apart, and asked them to please send her the pair of mountain boots that she’d left at home. In another aerogram that she was later allowed, she begged them to hurry up and send her shoes and boots and stuff to eat, adding that it was impossible to understand things from a distance.

  Glancing at the postmark for the date it had been sent, Lucia opened the first letter from her mother. In her slanted, effusive handwriting, her mother replied that she was glad to hear from her. She had never doubted that what was said about the Nazi concentration camps was slander, “so it seemed pointless for you to endanger yourself this way to verify truths that were not in question.” She had spent “atrocious days” since her daughter had run away from home without saying goodbye, leaving only a farewell note on the empty bed, until she’d received the first sign of life from her. “Now that I know where you are,” she wrote, “I’m a bit calmer.” Worried most of all about the bombings but also about the cold, she added, “My dear daughter, bundle up when you go out.” And “I urge you, Lucia,” she concluded, “uphold your dignity.”

  The letter was signed “your mother, anxious about you.”

  Only late that night did Lucia decide to open the second letter from her mother.

  The writing was more imperative (the bars crossing the t’s, the accent marks, small clues). “My dear daughter,” it began, “you are not being well treated. Why don’t you come home? Meanwhile, you have only to go to the Italian consulate in Frankfurt and talk to the consul himself about getting you a more suitable job. The consul will understand.” The letter ended with: “Let’s at least hope that this experience has served to make you see that everyone must keep to his own kind. In the words of Manzoni, ‘experience human affairs sufficiently enough so as not to attach too much importance to them.’ See you soon, your mother who is waiting for you.”

  (Later her mother resigned herself to her daughter’s “stubbornness” and sent her one package after another, after the events of this story had already taken place.)

  Lucia tucked the two letters in her duffel bag. She tore up the third aerogram she was allowed, which she had picked up the night before. At dawn she got dressed without washing and, arriving earlier than the other internees, waited for them in the open space to form a column to walk to the factory.

  By now she kept to herself in the barrack. She no longer spoke to her roommates. In the canteen she quickly gulped down her portion, and even finished her neighbor’s soup, paying no attention to whether the individual was filthy or clean. She herself had become slovenly by now and she didn’t wash anymore. When she unwrapped her feet before going to bed (a Russian had given her woolen bandages), she welcomed the stink as retaliation. A woman might give her a piece of bread and Lucia would snatch it without saying thank you. Jacqueline, the French girl who had refused her a sheet of newspaper, was the most generous with her.

  Lucia began to distinguish the sixteen French women in her dormitory, only four of whom she saw regularly, since the others had different work shifts (they were in the barrack when she was not there). Above all, she was careful not to meet Martine’s eye, even accidentally, though she felt her presence. Some nights she would leave the barrack, pressing her hands on her chest to ease the sting of the acid on her flesh; followed by the German shepherds, she would stop near the barbed wire fence and think about taking her life.

  On nights when there were bombings, when the blasts exploded deafeningly in their heads, the internees never able to judge their distance in the darkness, she lay on her pallet, or wandered among the barracks. She’d gradually come to hate the Lager’s air-raid shelter. To Lucia this subterranean concrete tunnel of about a hundred meters, which could hold only a thousand or so of the thre
e or four thousand internees, standing or sitting on the ground, seemed like a long snaking intestine that made the ground bulge slightly as it wound between the rows of barracks; walking over it, the gravel crunched with a screech that made you clench your teeth at every step, while the empty cavity reverberated.

  When everyone pushed and shoved “to stuff themselves into that bowel,” crowding in from both ends since there was no access in the middle, Lucia told herself that she wasn’t afraid of death, but she didn’t want the bombs to fall on the exits and bury her in that tunnel-coffin, asphyxiated with the others before the rescuers could clear the obstructed openings. Let them all die, it was immaterial to her.

  One night she huddled on the ground outside her dormitory, letting the March rain soak her. Wrapped in a blanket, her arms around her legs that were tightly drawn against her chest, she listened to her heart hammering. She leaned her back against the rough planks of the back wall of her barrack, which she thought would shatter at each explosion. In the pitch-darkness of the camp, she watched the blazes that burst out on the horizon despite the rain falling from the sky; though subsiding, the booms continued to echo in the distance for quite some time. Until finally she heard the all-clear, and the excited voices of her companions returning from the shelter.

  When the wakeup call sounded, she could feel she had a high fever. She couldn’t stop coughing. She would not come down from her bunk: “I’m reporting sick,” she told the guard.

  “If you take the OSTEN off your collar, okay, you can go to the infirmary. Otherwise raus, get to work.” Lucia dragged herself up and went to the factory.

  After eating, during the lunch break, Lucia joined the Osten and P. When it wasn’t raining, they lay on the bank of the canal behind the factories, under the pale rays that broke through the milky sky, snuggling close to one another to keep warm.

  Lucia stretched out beside Grùscenka. They had met at the Ch 89, where the Russian girl tended to the underground toilets, a strategic place, she explained, that allowed her to study the workers’ moods.