Deviation

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Deviation Page 25

by Luce d'Eramo


  “Grùscenka,” I called, “Grùscenka.” She didn’t answer.

  Martine was swallowed up at the next door. Then it was my turn. The ward I entered contained nine cages, four on the wall where the door opened, and five in front of the unbroken wall, at the top of which a long, narrow window allowed daylight to shine down on the metal outlines of the cells.

  I was locked up in a cell against the wall, facing the door, which held a pregnant woman with a high protruding belly.

  I won’t describe those ten or so days. I had to settle for the floor because the woman kicked me as soon as I tried to sit down on the plank. Brown-haired, with undefined features, she avoided me with disgust. I was sorry I hadn’t changed my clothes. Just the night before, three parcels had arrived from Italy at the same time (from my mother) and I was so agitated that I had put off dividing up my goodies until the next day. There were socks, underwear, three dresses, two sweaters, a pair of shoes, and the boots I’d asked for, boxes of canned and powdered milk, jars of jam, biscuits. If only I had gorged all night. I kept seeing in my mind the articles of clothing I could have worn. My mistake had been to want to disinfest myself first (I was infested with crabs as well as head and body lice). Meanwhile, my cellmate spat up a mouthful of yellowish fluid whenever she accidentally crushed a bedbug with her hand. She’d told me her story in a nutshell when they’d first locked me up with her.

  “What did you do?” she asked me indifferently.

  “I’m accused of theft at the factory, but I didn’t steal.”

  “I did, more than a hundred parcels.”

  She was German, and had managed a post office (I think in Okriftel) with her husband. Both of them had stolen parcels meant for German soldiers at the front; the more lavish ones were for the Russian front, coffee, chocolate, cold cuts, everything you could wish for, wonderful months, years. Investigation time had come. Tried by martial law, her husband had been shot immediately; she would be executed right after she gave birth.

  “The war might end in the meantime,” I replied, not understanding how I felt. My words must have upset her. She didn’t speak to me again, didn’t hear me if I said anything to her. I myself was happier with that silent hostility. At night, wrapped in my blanket on the floor, I heard her muttering off and on, huddled up on the plank with her face to the wall, “Dreckausländer”* and other hateful words.

  I spent my days with my face against the grille, talking to the people in the cells around me. The iron partitions that separated us made the prisoners invisible to me. Thieves, prostitutes, a murderer, all foreigners speaking loudly in unconstrained pandemonium, intent on planning a collective fart each time the jailers entered. They would announce to one another that they were about to fart and were urged to hold it in, soup time was coming.

  “Y a les chleux,” here come the Krauts, I warned them as soon as a jailer’s eye appeared in the peephole of the door opposite my cell.

  And when the two jailers entered with the “swill,” the concert of blasts and splutters started up with such a stench that we didn’t breathe, letting it fill the guards’ noses.

  My cellmate, the only German in that place, was overcome by nausea, bent over her belly. When she very slowly recovered, she would feel her abdomen, listening with her hands, a secret smile in her eyes.

  *

  One night I woke up and saw her standing on the plank. In the shadows she was fumbling with the grating that served as the cell’s ceiling. I realized that she was tying something to it (her stockings, I thought right away, since every evening she caressed and kissed them after taking them off). When she then slipped her head into the noose, I leaped up and grabbed her legs. Her hands clutched the grating above her and she tried to kick. Standing, I held tight to her knees, my cheek against her belly. I felt the fetus stirring gently through the cloth and taut flesh.

  “Don’t touch me,” she croaked, gagging with disgust, spitting up a watery, acidic vomit that ran down my hair and forehead toward my mouth; it seemed like liters and liters.

  All at once it occurred to me that I could shout. “Help,” I yelled, “au secours!” more and more frantically.

  The adjacent cells awakened slowly. The woman above me was pleading with me: “Thank you, you saved me, now please be quiet.” Her sweet voice was striking. “It was a moment of confusion, but be quiet now, stop screaming.” Shocked by such a capacity for gentleness, I stopped shouting and heard her say: “Help me put my feet back on the plank, be quiet, okay … that’s it.”

  “First take your head out of the noose,” I told her softly, feeling vulnerable.

  “Ja, natürlich, but if you don’t loosen your grip I can’t, you’re holding me so high that my head is squashed, the grating is cutting into me, please,” she implored, still sounding grateful to me. “You have to prop me up by the feet. Go on, sit on the plank, I’ll support myself with my hands and put my feet on your shoulders.”

  “I don’t trust you.”

  “Grip my ankles.”

  The other cells strained to hear. “Lucia,” they called with unusual wariness, “what’s going on?” I heard their alert breathing around our forms clinging in the shadows. My companion kept whispering to herself, “Thank you, thank you, what was I about to do to you, my son,” her body increasingly limp against me.

  Then, bracing my forehead against her legs, which I continued to grip with my left arm, I liberated my right arm to grab one of her ankles. But her knee shoved me sharply under the chin and made me waver; immediately another thrust caught me right in the face. I instinctively put my free hand up to my bleeding nose and a kick in the throat from her released foot almost made me fall backward onto the plank. I nearly hung her myself, pulling her with me as I fell. But by some reflex I managed not to lose my balance, my arm wrapped around her right thigh like a claw, so that even bending that knee she couldn’t strangle herself. As I focused on not loosening that hold and on trying to stop her other leg that was kicking out wildly, another blow caught me on my once-again exposed nose. I could no longer tell what was hitting me. I remember that when the foot I couldn’t grab lost its shoe, inside I reveled in the scuffle, in the need to grapple for the sake of grappling, to ease my cramped hands. But that instant cost me the sole of her foot pressed against my face, toes in my eyes, clinging like a suction cup, as though we were one flesh. In a flash I thought of biting her and twisted my mouth. What if I licked the foot? Tickling it with my tongue would make her loosen her hold. To do that I had to slacken my other arm, and a hail of kicks, knee thrusts, and curses rained down on me; however, I had managed to grab the ankle of the foot that was in my face and to bend her calf under her thigh, keeping her sitting in air, like a Buddha.

  “Filthy bedbug!” she hissed, her voice piercing. “What business is it of yours? Who are you? What do you want? How dare you, how dare you? What do you want from me, it’s my life,” she screeched, panting, “filthy bitch … my life! How dare you!” And thrashing about, she made the grating snap. The sharp wrenching sound softened into the plop of her dangling body and me knocked to the floor. Only then did I hear the deafening racket of mess-tins and rhythmically pounding feet from my neighboring cellmates, who were hoarsely shouting for the jailers.

  *

  The interrogation, that same day, was strangely undemanding. I was led to what turned out to be the courthouse, to a room I couldn’t see, where men in plainclothes sat behind a table. My battered face was meticulously described in the minutes: swellings and bruises on my forehead were enumerated, scratches on my cheeks, neck, and hands were measured with a centimeter-rule (I couldn’t explain the scratches), a cracked incisor tooth was listed, nasal bleeding noted. Not only did they exonerate me of any responsibility for the suicide of the “pregnant prisoner,” but they also commended me for trying to save the unborn child for the Third Reich, snatching him away from the demented perpetrator of infanticide. As a result I was granted probation. I was allowed to go back to the Lager. I would be su
mmoned for information related to my arrest and that of the other foreigners. My conduct in jail was a sure indicator of having reformed. Nazi justice did not doubt my will to cooperate.

  My barrack was still empty. My companions would soon return, however. Hunger dehumanized me. I ran to my locker. The padlock was forced, the shelves empty except for the floppy duffel bag with my mother’s letters in a pocket, next to the packets of rat poison that Grùscenka had given me: she’d taken them from her supply of disinfectants for the toilets when I told her I saw two sewer rats pawing through the bins behind the barrack. In a fragment of mirror I saw hateful eyes watching me and turned around slowly, terrified. There was no one. I buried those eyes back in the mirror.

  I tried to force my roommates’ padlocks. Unsuccessfully. I peeked through the slits in the locker doors to see if I could make out my stuff and sniffed the scents. Pausing awhile with one eye glued to a vent in Jacqueline’s locker door (my palm over the other eye), I glimpsed a pale blue color. Aha, it was the little cotton dress, shirred at the waist, the jauntiest one, that my mother had sent me. Nasty bitches. Silent tears flowed as outrage clouded my thoughts. I sat down to wait for my roommates, legs apart, hands in my pockets, leaning against the bunk in front of the door, the one whose upper pallet had been Martine’s.

  They arrived singly or in pairs, glanced briefly at me, and walked past, keeping to one side (hurriedly, however). I began with Jacqueline, the only one who had looked at me with an “Ooh” of surprise that seemed affectionate, almost happy.

  “I want my stuff back,” I managed to get out. “I want my food back.”

  “Oh yeah?” The other women who had dodged me turned around slowly and approached me. I glared at them.

  “Thieves,” I hissed.

  “You sold out the others,” one of them said, shrugging. “That’s how come you’re here.” She turned her back to me.

  “Yeah,” another one came forward, “the Nazis were right. ‘The student talked,’ they said. Just look at her, that hateful face. And we didn’t want to believe it!”

  “No!” I couldn’t speak. I rushed at them, punching and jabbing.

  “You spilled your guts, you slut, you sold out.” They were all talking at once.

  I went for the lockers. Tip them over, I thought. They realized it. Each one ran to protect her locker door, ready to defend it with her life.

  “Filthy bitches, you wanted me dead,” my brain was screaming, but no words came out. Dully I kept repeating: “I want my things back. I want my food back.”

  “And what about Martine? And Carla? How come you’re here alone?” The voices came thick and fast as they grouped in front of the lockers. “They weren’t traitors, they stood up to the beatings, the torture.”

  “No,” I started moaning again, “no, no.” The pain was impossible to control. I had to do something, do what? and who would be first? “That’s right,” I started yelling. “I sold you out but good! You’ll all end up in jail,” I laughed.

  In the brawl that followed, amid the fray of bodies and voices—“Bitches,” “traitor,” “you’ll give it all back, every last crumb,” “Nazi swine”—the stove rolled to the floor, belching puffs of black smoke that filled the room. We didn’t even notice that the door had been thrown open. It was the crack of the Lagerführer’s whip, thrashing us, that called us back to the situation. Slowly we straightened up; as I crawled out from under the others, I saw a strand of my hair in someone’s hand.

  “They stole my stuff,” I said, breathing hard in the absolute silence. Only then did I realize that I too clutched a hank of black curly hair between my fingers. I stared at my speechless companions one by one and victory died in my soul.

  “What did they steal from you?” the Lagerführer asked me with patent understanding.

  “She’s the thief,” the women blurted out, huddling together. “She stole alcohol at the factory.”

  “My stuff,” I repeated.

  “She left the machinery unattended.”

  “My things, my food.”

  “Sabotage,” they threw out chaotically, “she’s guilty of sabotage…” A trembling voice rose: “She wanted us to strike.”

  All eyes turned to look coldly at the older woman who’d uttered the unspeakable and in a faint voice stammered, “She wanted to provoke us, to put us to the test, but we didn’t…”

  “What did they steal from you?” the Lagerführer repeated kindly. The kindness only cruelty can give you, I thought.

  “A box of powdered milk,” I said blankly.

  “Is that all??” the Lagerführer asked with amiable irony.

  “Yes,” I said firmly.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  I nodded.

  “Fine. I’ll have the lockers searched. Take out your things, everything will be checked against the contents of the packages that you signed for when you picked them up. And if they stole anything else from you, don’t worry, you’ll get justice. They won’t lay a finger on you.”

  Turning to my roommates, he said, “A report will be prepared. You will sign your accusations.”

  “What accusations?” The women crowded around. They knew nothing. Rumors, hearsay, nothing.

  Jacqueline spoke up. “Her father came looking for her, he’s a government official, you can’t charge her.”

  “We’ll see about that.” The Lagerführer strode out, leaving two armed guards outside the barrack. The dogs were whining.

  “My father came for me?” I whispered to Jacqueline.

  “Like hell. Who’d be looking for you?”

  Bruised, scratched, bleeding from the nose and mouth, we assembled my stuff on my pallet while four of the women on sentry duty at the window covered our movements from the guards. Several things that had been eaten or traded during my absence were missing. Each woman took out one of her garments, a lump of sugar, a pinch of tobacco, until we thought we had put together a plausible equivalent of the three parcels. There remained the disparity I’d complained of, the box of powdered milk: it was gone. We agreed to blame the pregnant Bergamo woman for the theft, since she’d been repatriated for the birth and couldn’t be prosecuted. We took heart at the thought that whatever charge might be made against me I had only to assign the blame to her. Having cooled off, in part due to exhaustion, we sat down to await the inspection. The minutes ticked by.

  *

  “I’m hungry,” I said.

  “So eat. With all the food you have! Look, it’s all yours, what more do you want?” a voice said from her pallet.

  “You want us to stop breathing?” another voice piped up.

  “Us too?” a third voice chimed in (could it have been Jacqueline?).

  I huddled at the head of my bunk, in front of the stuff, not tasting so much as a crumb of bread. So it was just an apparent truce. They believed the Nazis. I would never convince them. I would never convince anyone. My parents? I laughed to myself. The hours passed in silence.

  Occasionally a woman got up to sneak a bite from her locker. Hiding it from me as she glanced at me out of the corner of her eye (I could tell). After all, I had reported them. No, I couldn’t convince anyone. Essentially I couldn’t even convince myself. Too much effort.

  Half-asleep, sitting on my pallet with my knees pressed against my chest and my sore cheek resting on them as I kept an eye on the bread and sugar beside me, I remembered the packets of rat poison. Relief knocked the breath out of me. How could I not have thought of it before?

  I took my time thinking about it. Still, I had to make up my mind if I didn’t want to be rescued when my roommates awoke. It must have been at least 11:00 p.m., maybe even midnight. Let’s see. I returned to the Lager around five. The women showed up about six-thirty or seven, stopping by the barrack before going to the camp canteen (they even missed supper tonight, or rather the watery soup). Not more than an hour must have passed before the Lagerführer showed up. I wondered if the
guards were still outside. I thought of going out to pee. No, don’t change the subject. I was saying: Had it all been over by nine o’clock? Each woman in her bunk? More likely by ten. Don’t get bogged down in details. Take things in order. Surely it was later than I thought, could it be 1:00 a.m.? Soon, no hurry. What did I have to lose by dying? They say that, but it’s routine. I’d learned Latin (I laughed). And tomorrow?

  At the thought of tomorrow and the days to come, I made up my mind. Everything that would follow rose up against me, crushing me all at once: What would I do with what I’d experienced here? Suddenly I saw the mahogany furniture, the fine china, the English silverware in my family’s home, and I laughed with delight. A satisfaction filled me as I pictured them and erased them, presto, gone, all gone. Feverishly I took off my shoes and slid to the floor, unsteady because of my numb, tingling legs; slipping a hand into the pocket of the duffel bag, I felt around for the packets beside my mother’s letters. I pulled them out, heaving a thankful sigh, and counted them; whatever lives dies—there were sixteen of them. I felt light.

  I took my aluminum cup and, on tiptoe, went to the sink to fill it. The trickle of water on the metal was a refreshing sound to my ears. I poured eight packets into the first cupful of water, stirred it with my finger, and, closing my nostrils, drank it down in one gulp. Hurriedly, I emptied the other packets into a second cup of water and, holding my nose again, tried to swallow without breathing but I couldn’t do it. I counted thirteen sips. Half a cup of clear water on top of it, to make sure everything went down. I felt a great peace. Maybe I should walk back and forth like Socrates. It took so little. I paused in front of my bunk. No, I would die on Martine’s pallet. Martine wouldn’t have believed what the Nazis said about me. I climbed up slowly so as not to wake the woman below. I lay supine, molding myself to Martine’s straw mattress. I was done. Martine would have believed me, Alain too, and Etienne and Grùscenka as well, already so distant. They would have believed me. I could let myself go. Finally. I slipped into a drowsy trance.

 

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