by Luce d'Eramo
Even my laborious walking with him became something normal, as if it were nothing, where the issues were purely technical.
At times he came to see me in the gym when I was between the parallel bars, completely focused on standing up straight and trying to take my first steps (still with cardboard tubes on my knees).
He would lean against the bar, standing in front of me, watching me. After a while, he shook his head. “You’re not doing it right.”
“What do you mean?” I laughed. “I always check myself in the mirror!”
“That’s your mistake,” he said, inhaling smoke, his eyes on his cigarette. “You look like one of those little Chinese girls whose feet are bound.”
“I see myself the way others see me, you know,” I told him one day. “I don’t want to look like an automaton.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” he said, turning his face to study me better. “You’re pretty well formed, even if your rear end is a bit low,” he mused thoughtfully. “Your legs should maybe be a bit longer, but your waist is slender, your breasts erect, and you have beautiful shoulders, beautiful arms too,” he said, appraising the one close to him with the eye of a connoisseur. “You have an agile body, so you’re right to not rely solely on your arms. But you should activate the lumbar muscles even more.”
We got married without a penny, bread and mortadella our main course at dinner along with a carafe of wine (I, however, devoured a kilo of sugared almonds on my own).
For years afterward I relied in every way on the animal warmth and languor of an orderly life as a couple, with clear-cut roles, letting myself be led by emotional, sexual, trifling appetites.
What with the pregnancy, giving birth, nursing, weaning, and raising a child, between university exams (him to graduate in law and me in humanities) and working to earn a living (translations, private tutoring, and grant competitions), in addition to treatments and exercise, outdoor walks, household chores, and all those little things that fill the days, there was certainly no room for the past.
And then I wondered where the repression of the Lagers had come from and why it had lasted so long. Now the opposite surprised me: After burying it for so long, in deep, extensive layers, how come my Germany came back to me again? Though only in brief glimpses, at intervals. “Purged” …
*
In fact, nearly a lifetime went by, in which only fragmented memories of the camps and hospitals emerged, and always in very specific circumstances—a forced choice on the part of my consciousness—which cluster around only two periods: the years ’53–’54 and ’60–’61.
That too. Why the devil did my German experience resurface only in periods of extreme difficulty, of absolute urgency in my eyes, where what was at stake was my life viewed as an encumbrance (whether my continuing to live was justified), and never when I was making progress during the brief but steady periods of recovery, which quickly comforted me?
The first time my thoughts went back to my Germany was when differences with my husband led us to break up, toward the seventh year of marriage.
I remember that night in ’53, early in the year; I no longer recall the date but I can picture the scene in which I spoke of it for the first time. We were already at loggerheads over how to raise the child. “Stop being so controlling,” I told him, “you’ll make him into a slave.” “And you’ll turn him into a maladjusted misfit,” he shot back. Then his infidelities had started, and between hissed insults (“A Don Juan you are, you’re just like my father, a shitty womanizer!”) and tears, I’d begged him to spare me that shame, and he, laughing, replied, “You have too much imagination.” Or with a frown on his handsome face, he’d come back with, “Pride will kill you,” as he lit a cigarette with studied calm.
“You know, Domenico,” I began, “I really think we should leave each other.”
It was after dinner at the end of a chess game that he had won as usual. With his head lowered, the brown hair falling over his forehead, and his golden eyes narrowed on mine, he listened without interrupting me; his features tightened, and I saw him sharpening his response as he stood up:
“I didn’t think you were so prosaic,” he said, and walked out.
The next day I made another attempt.
“You want war? You’ll have war,” he replied, and the same evening he brought home a young colleague, whom I’d accused him of sleeping with, to complete some urgent work (he said) inside, in the study.
I turned to a lawyer, who served him notice of my request for a consensual separation.
“You’re not a wife, you’re an enemy,” he muttered through clenched teeth.
“And you’re a coward.” I had started murmuring that word as a sigh, I knew it wounded him; an officer in the bersaglieri, he’d been decorated for bravery in the field in ’42, at age twenty.
He blanched: “I’ll knock some sense into you,” he said softly, confirming it with his eyes. His gaze lingered on my figure in a wheelchair: “You’re pathetic.”
“You tried to crush me!” I laughed, struggling to control my rage.
IX
I fell ill with one of my then recurring bone inflammations, osteomyelitis in my right hip. I had persistent shivers from the fever that came in waves and I was (secretly) hurting.
I heard joking and laughter at all hours from in there, in the study, uncertain whether the voices were imaginary. I started slipping noiselessly from the bed to the wheelchair; moving stealthily as a wolf, holding my breath, I made my way down the hallway in the dark, keeping my hands between the front wheels and the walls after each small push I gave myself, to make sure that I was going straight ahead and wouldn’t bump into a wall.
I covered what seemed like an infinitely long distance (six meters) from the bedroom to the door of the study. I stationed myself there, heart pounding, listening to the suppressed voices, trying to glimpse a corner of the couch through the keyhole, waiting for the panting silences.
An abrupt sound made me straighten up, terrified that the door might suddenly open. Sometimes I would retreat slowly, taking the same precautions as before; other times I fled blindly down the hall to the bathroom, where I noisily locked myself in. Then I very slowly opened the door a crack and stayed there spying, although the bathroom door slit wasn’t aligned with the entryway. The dining room door was ideal, however. I moved my surveillance post. I went into the dining room at night, as always paying attention to the distance between the wheels and the walls, and, quietly, with my eye at the door crack, waited to see them go out on tiptoe, their figures illuminated a moment by the night-light on the landing before an arm pulled the door behind it, erasing them from my view. I remained there a little longer, lurking idly, my mind a blank, nodding at the confirmation until the pain in my bones called me back to my body; and with a crick in my neck, I hurried to inject a sedative. So I told myself. In fact, though I denied it to myself, I took drugs with the excuse that my heart couldn’t take the severe pain in my bones. I’d started by ingesting analgesics and went on to injecting sedatives, then opium and pure papaverine, increasingly stronger narcotics with therapeutic names. I had become friends with half a dozen young doctors, chosen because they didn’t know one another; I cultivated them separately, careful not to ever let them run into one another at my house. Each of them gave me the prescriptions I needed, thinking he was the only one providing me with them. Then there was the regular flow of those designated to pick up the ampules at the pharmacy for me, friends who also didn’t communicate with one another. I got to the point of giving myself four injections a day. The fact that I didn’t inject myself intravenously but only subcutaneously may be due to my recollection of the morphine addict screaming in the morgue at the hospital in Mainz, or rather of the foaming at the mouth I experienced the first night without morphine in my blood, in that chamber of death. I was later left, however, with small subcutaneous lumps and nodules on my upper buttocks and on my thighs, which still feel knotty despite plenty of massages.
In practical terms, I schemed day and night to arrange memorable talks with my suspected rivals, whom I would phone behind Domenico’s back and have come to the house when he was at work.
The responses I regularly received were astounding. It wasn’t at all true. How could such an outrageous suspicion have occurred to me? I presented facts, displayed evidence, I wept (it was then that I thought of playing the card of the Lagers), I became emotional, and the more I bared myself, the more they covered themselves by being offended. I always ended up begging them to forgive me. I abandoned that route.
Meanwhile, Domenico had fallen into the habit of singing under his breath (off-key) a refrain that was then popular:
A me piaccion gli occhi neri,
a me piaccion gli occhi blu,
ma le gambe, ma le gambe
a me piacciono di più.
“I love dark eyes, I love blue eyes, but legs, legs I love the most.” As he repeated “ma le gambe” he looked at me and spread his hands slightly.
I locked myself in the bedroom. He came home late at night and I heard him trying the handle. He moved off down the hall whistling that tune.
“You’re so transparent,” I told him.
“Right,” he said, eyes flashing behind the cigarette smoke. “Ridiculous, isn’t it?” He smiled thinly. “For better or for worse, thoroughly candid.” (Years before I had accused him of this as well.)
Sometimes he would come home as if we had left each other on good terms, which to me seemed like his most subtle cruelty. But if it was me who mildly tried to start a friendly conversation, “a frank clarification,” I’d tell him, I felt him slither over the subjects on which he said I wanted to nail him.
“You’re so transparent,” I repeated (distraught, I could hear my mother’s noble tones in my voice).
*
The evidence of his cheating was never sufficient. I accumulated it hoping for some unspecified clarification. Once it became known that negotiations for a legal separation had begun, several of my rivals—the most scrupulous ones who didn’t want to feel responsible for the destruction of a family—came forward spontaneously to confess their affair with my husband. To prove to me that there hadn’t been anything serious between them, that it had all been a “tempest in a teapot” that quickly fizzled, they told me the circumstances and manner of their “teapot tempests” along with all the “painful” details, to which I listened avidly as I tried to soothe their remorse; later, after they left, I felt ashamed at having been such a worm as to comfort my husband’s lovers.
My husband too was relieved. He had stored up so many offenses against me that the separation, though his fault, was no longer a disgrace he had to wash away.
“The process takes a long time,” he said, looking affectionately at my haggard face with its moist eyes and dilated pupils. He pointed it out to me: “Always on the verge of tears, you are, and that vague expression…” He didn’t suspect that I was taking drugs. He was all for facing pain with stoicism; he even begrudged me aspirin—imagine if he’d known. Just the thought of it made me tremble with fear, and I imposed an elaborate measure of complicity on the friends who helped me.
He’d attempt to stroke my hair and, in the commiserate lucidity of the drug, it seemed to me that everything could be cleared up and I started to tell him … because in fact …
“No,” he cut me short, patiently, raising his open hand in front of me, “no discussion, no bargaining, Lucia. Take it or leave it. If you want me, accept me as I am. Otherwise leave.” Then in a tender tone, he added, “You’ll see, I’ll make you give in,” and he stole a glance at me. He smoked constantly, slowly inhaling countless cigarettes that glowed red, until white puffs of smoke came out of his mouth along with the words, rising before his face in a blurry haze that hid his eyes. “The process takes a long time,” he repeated, “it can take years. As far as I’m concerned, it’s fine that way. If you want to split up before then, you’re free to go, no one is holding you back. Just be aware,” he added after a pause, with a practiced smile, “that if you abandon the marital roof, you lose your son. Don’t say afterward that I didn’t warn you.”
“You know very well,” I replied, “that wrongs have been committed, and even perpetuated, under that marital roof. I have proof of it, confessions, and if…”
He shook his head, amused. The law was his profession, and he knew the effect of his words on me. “You lack a legal mentality,” he said, as if thinking out loud.
*
That’s the context in which I resurrected the buried German experience for the first time. A time when it seemed to me I needed to make a clean break with my present life. No longer physically fit, however, and with a young son to raise, I couldn’t bring myself to decide. Unable to run away as I’d done then, held captive by paralysis, by fever, by drugs, by the betrayals, and by my jealousy, what else could I do but look for a less imprisoned version of myself? It was natural for me to recall the escape from Dachau, in October ’44, the previous months having vanished.
Starting from the moment I bolted, I began remembering, in great detail, the events that had led me almost from one end of the Third Reich to the other, from Munich in Bavaria to the collapse of the wall in Mainz am Rhine.
It seemed like the happiest time in my life, when I was free, on my own, with no papers, no identity, nowhere to take shelter, living day by day, never knowing when and how I would eat or where I would sleep wherever I landed next.
Several particulars flowed from my pen that at the time seemed inconsequential: superfluous. For example, I remember quite clearly feeling a bizarre elation at the fact that I was always able to get by during the time I wandered around. I felt invulnerable when, right after a bombing, I would go into a burning house and steal food and clothing, at the risk of being shot on the spot, the fate which awaited vultures; that is, looters. Taking advantage of the bombings to ransack homes was the only crime that united Germans and foreigners alike, all of them punished by death, standing in a hole they had to dig themselves at the scene of the crime, their torsos exposed to the penitential rifle blasts, without racial distinction.
I tore up those pages that were oppressive and instead described walks in the snow, through fields or at the edge of a forest, from village to village, hiding from view as soon as I sensed a threat. I could tell from afar the people who could harm me by the way they walked, by their behavior in the fog. I agonized retroactively for the children of the Osten and Jews whom I could see clustered behind the barbed wire when I skirted the transit camps in search of shelter, and who, in my distorted memory, stared at me with the dark eyes of my son. Many times I’d caught them rolling around in the trash; out of sight of the adults, they ran wild, erupting into small happy cries, though abruptly settling down if a parent called or appeared. Then they put on a sad, irritable face and started whimpering again. If a Nazi soldier scattered them, they accused one another, scowling. Afterward, as soon as the adults turned their backs, they returned to their games.
Once, three little boys covered in rags, their faces scabby with crusts, were playing a game: peeing into a rubber tube to see who could squirt his stream the farthest. The trick was not to waste all your piss in one go, but to pass the tube from one small penis to another, several times over. They were so engrossed in their competition behind a shed, their faces happy, u
ntroubled, that they hadn’t noticed their mothers coming. As mangy and tattered as the boys, the women yelled at them, “Filthy little pigs, worse than animals!”
I realize now that all those nights when I spied on Domenico from behind the dining room door, as my health gradually worsened and I injected the drugs at shorter and shorter intervals, telling myself stories about escape was my way of secretly laughing. I remembered the foreigners who had let me stay in their barracks, the brief, intense friendships, a succession of encounters and isolated bondings, unrelated to one another, linked solely by my wanderings. And I felt free and light.
I even felt like I was producing something useful, making a historic contribution. I had also started reading every possible publication about the Nazi Lagers, and it surprised me that no one had ever written about the escapees, at least three million of them, circulating around in the Third Reich, exchanging information and changing identities at will. We recognized one another by a gesture, a mere hint, and confidences hesitantly seeped out: places to avoid, the fact that the records of such-and-such factory in this-or-that city had been burned. The files of the local Labor Bureau had been blown up. All you had to do was appear at an adjacent Kommandantur and say you came from that factory. Impossible to check. The Nazis were actually relieved that you showed up of your own accord. There were always foreigners with proper papers ready to attest to you. Between one incinerated Ausweis and another, I was a Belgian Walloon from Namur and a Lithuanian from Wilno. I had gone to Namur on vacation with my parents since I was a child, and Johann and Stanislaw had talked about the streets and squares of Wilno, being natives there (Stanislaw had even drawn a sketch of his neighborhood, one day when we were lying on the canal bank of IG Farben); so I could hold my own in any eventual interrogation. As the Belgian, I was a cleaning woman (Putzfrau) in the stone house behind the BMW camp in Munich, where a contingent of American prisoners was lodged, sleeping on cots with checkered netting, mattresses, sheets and pillowcases. With plenty of provisions, they threw stale bread and half-smoked cigarette butts away. I hated them so much for their prosperity and comforts and the camaraderie they enjoyed as equals with the SS who guarded them—I couldn’t help comparing it to the treatment given to the European dregs—that one day I slashed the mattresses and sheets under the tightly tucked covers, and I was forced to flee. Farther on I tagged onto a convoy of Lithuanian farmers, after getting friendly with their interpreter, who had me hired as an errand girl on a farm on the outskirts of Donauwörth, in Swabia. The Germans, however, were quick to realize that I didn’t understand a word of what my fellow countrymen said, and when my Lithuanian claim aroused the interest of the local police, I barely had time to slip away, headed for the Rhine.