Deviation

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Deviation Page 36

by Luce d'Eramo


  I’d erased him from my memory, and only in Frankfurt-Höchst, the following March, a few weeks after my arrival in the Lager, when I’d received the first two letters from my mother and tore up the aerogram allotted to me for the next two weeks, isolated by my companions, shunned by the internees, as I loaded and unloaded the frozen blocks of sulfuric acid—only then did I remember his face lighting up when he saw me, his apprehension for me, the intensity with which he had implored me to stay. I’d bought another aerogram from a companion and written to him in Rome, begging him to come; I was lost and I needed his help. At the end of the same month, March ’44, I’d written to him again, saying, if he came, he should bring me a pair of boots, and not to forget food (I specified: salami, oil, sugar). Then, one evening, returning from the factory, I thought I saw his figure standing in front of the Lager. For a while I kept waiting for a letter. In the end I buried him again, so deeply that he was the last person whose name I would have thought of that afternoon in Merano.

  Seeing him there, agitated as I was at the thought of meeting my father again (the tender feelings for my parents, which I’d had in Homburg when I’d thought of going to live in the Soviet Union, had vanished into thin air), I felt a surge of affection for that forgotten young man who’d been the first to rush to welcome me.

  We cried, laughed, remembered, and we got back together. He slept on a cot next to my bed.

  A couple of days later, I asked him (swallowing hard), “Did you ever receive my letters from the Lager?” He said yes with his eyes and, his face red, went to rummage in his suitcase. Meanwhile, he spoke hurriedly, in broken sentences. He seemed to have been waiting nervously for this question.

  He had received my aerograms and now handed me his replies, a hundred or so letters that he’d written to me without ever sending them, a stack of pages arranged in a folder, in date order, sequentially numbered, and seeing them so well organized had a curious effect on me. I glanced through them perhaps a bit too negligently and put them on the nightstand.

  “I’ll read them later,” I said with a smile. But out of the corner of my eye I saw that he darkened (in his own way, a shadow). I picked them up again. He immediately put a sonata on the gramophone that he’d brought me, in F-sharp he said. I dove into his whimsical but clear handwriting, the serpentine s, the rounded a.

  In those letters he’d never sent me, he reminded me of our discussions during our last days together, when he’d tried to make me face my inconsistencies, for example, between the accusations I’d made against my parents and my decision to follow them up north. I’d told him (I hadn’t remembered it) that my mother had become “rarefied” due to excessive virtue but that at least she was capable of dedication, whereas my father was “arid”; although he seemed so cordial, it was all a smokescreen: he was merely sentimental as cynics always are, just read Dostoyevsky. To some extent I was intrigued by the judgments (facile for that matter) that I had formed when I had no experience whatsoever, which Gheorg had scrupulously preserved in his letters. Yet I was a little uncomfortable, because even now Gheorg’s arguments didn’t convince me that it had been a venture doomed to perdition, that a thirst for the depths had attracted me, that I had gone to Germany out of nihilism (as I read, he paced around me to see where I was up to, if I would say anything).

  That may have even been so, I thought, but it was also significant that I had not enlisted in a women’s auxiliary corps or some other group with a “lust for war,” as he wrote, but had gone directly to the Lagers, where there was nothing heroic, no noble death, just the prospect of working in a factory, “Hilfsarbeiterin” (laborer) was written on my employment card, so I had gone there to be a worker, hadn’t I? Why wouldn’t he admit that was what I’d wanted even if the shock had been greater than expected? He himself knew how many offers I’d already had in Rome to be an interpreter, given that I spoke French, Italian, and German equally well. I had even explained to him why I wasn’t interested, after I was personally received by Alessandro Pavolini in late September ’43, when the new Republican Fascist Party was established. I wanted to leave that elite world, not look down on things anymore. Why did he keep repeating in the letters what he’d already told me a thousand times between one embrace and another, to the point that I remained unresponsive, indifferent.

  As I went on reading, I realized that, no, he took my being a worker into account, citing from two of my letters, in which I wrote: “I’m learning what I wanted to know, if you come and be a worker with me, you too will understand. Maybe I’m afraid to find out too much, by myself I’m afraid, I have no one to turn to except you, who once said you loved me.” And: “We lived in Limbo. Don’t stay there sheltered, come.” He replied that I was discovering what he already knew, which he’d so desperately expressed in our final meetings—violence, cruelty, poverty, injustice—and that it was folly to go looking for them. But at the same time he tormented himself, picturing my life in the camps; he described it to me—very close to what it actually was—and you could tell he lived through it personally day and night. He would make up his mind to come and join me, but, when he got to the offices of the Todt, when the moment came to submit an application to the Nazi officer, he felt faint and turned back; then he’d start writing to me again, during the night or at a table in the bar where he had waited for my irregular appearances, at the time when we were happy together.

  And page after page he told me how much he loved me, how he couldn’t live without me, and how he couldn’t come and join me. At times he resolved to send me the letter he was writing, but he feared the censors, he was already an exile, barely tolerated, what if they were watching him? What if they found these letters? Even without sending them to me, he lived in terror of being discovered, he would abruptly break off a sentence, then resume writing to apologize, he’d heard footsteps outside the door, he’d hidden everything under the mattress …

  I had already tired of reading but I didn’t dare stop, I felt him pacing anxiously around me. I’ll read as far as the liberation of Rome, I thought, that way at least when the Americans have come he’ll have gotten over his fears. I flicked through the sheets furtively to see the dates, but there were still quite a few pages to go. I was only at the end of April ’44 and I had to get to June!

  “I must seem ridiculous to you,” I heard him murmur finally. He was sitting on the cot beside me, elbows on his knees, pinching the backs of his hands: a gesture of distress that I had also seen him do back when it was clear that we would separate.

  “No,” I laughed. “But if you’d sent me a parcel of food it would have been better.” He didn’t find it funny, though; his lips were quivering. I couldn’t let him see that his inner drama left me unmoved: “It wasn’t your concern,” I told him, “I was wrong to write to you, that was quite a demand I made!”

  “What are you saying?” he cried as if I’d slapped him.

  “Look, Gheorg, now it’s as if you had come,” I consoled him.

  During my absence, he’d obtained a degree in humanities, published essays and poems, and was now a lecturer in contemporary literature at the University of Rome.

  “A lifetime ahead of us,” he laughed contentedly.

  *

  In early January, we went together to Bologna, to the military orthopedic center, which I’ve already written about, where Gheorg himself had managed to have me assigned, even going to pull some strings at the prefecture in Merano.

  To stay with me in Bologna he obtained permission to sleep on a mattress on the floor in the hallway, outside my room. Every night, for months, he went to get it from the storage room in our ward and every morning he rolled it up again and went to put it back. Then in the spring we left each other, for reasons inherent to our relationship itself.

  He kept thinking of me exactly the way he’d thought of me before we met again. Hours and hours of new confidences had not affected his judgment. He saw me as a lively, proud girl who doesn’t look back; and this quality, which he att
ributed to a ruminant like me, intrigued him and attracted him sensually. This hurt me because I felt an emotional framework being re-created around me that negated who I was; being with him made me feel as though he loved a different person. And yet we did not leave each other because of a quarrel over the past but over the future. He wanted us to move to the United States as soon as we were married, where he had been offered a three-year term at a college. He described the life that we would have: wide-ranging, well-off, interesting, among cultured people. Whereas I, having just returned to Italy after so much doubting and reflection, was determined to stay.

  They were pressing weeks. We didn’t leave each other for a moment. In the evening we would go to a shed at the back of the grounds and lie on the straw.

  “Forget those vain passions,” he said, “or they’ll consume you again.”

  Meticulously, stubbornly, I reconstructed my line of thinking to explain my behavior to him and to derive some direction for myself as well, until he gave up, defeated.

  “Here you can’t do anything. Are you afraid of happiness? Your mind is still in a Lager. Open your eyes, Lucina, the war is over, the world is ours.”

  The more he argued, the more I clung to Martine, Grùscenka, Alain, Lulù, the Flemish girl, Louis, Jeanine.

  “You’re mentally distancing yourself, I can feel it,” he said, pulling me to him, while I told myself to deny it. Meanwhile, I thought back to the individuals behind the desks at the partisans’ association, at the Resistance committee: “Give me another chance, like at the Ch 89, hire me, please.”

  “Don’t you see that these things sadden you? You’re eating yourself up and you want me to just stand by and watch?” Gheorg went on, trying to shake me out of it.

  “If you shared in it, it would be different,” I murmured.

  “My father used to say that fanaticism is a plebeian passion. And you’re infected with it,” he said. Then, fearful of having offended me, he quickly went back to declaring his love.

  “All right, we’ll stay in Italy,” he finally said one day when we were sitting in the hospital garden, just when I had convinced myself the night before that this relationship was a mistake.

  “Gheorg, why are we pointlessly tormenting ourselves? At the end of the day even you always knew that we two would never live together,” I said, suddenly drained, unable to hold back tears.

  I saw him flush, a tremor on his lips, his eyes moist. He noticed that the back of the wheelchair was too vertical: “I’ll tilt it back a little.”

  He wouldn’t give up: “I backed away once, not twice.” We were having supper in the ward, in the usual awkward way, he with his soup plate on his knees and I beside him in the bed, the bowl resting on the blanket. He demonstrated to me that I was wrong, that I was driven by a self-destructive instinct. “And then you talk about a sense of reality.” His green eyes bored into mine. “As you wish, we’ll destroy ourselves together,” he concluded, as if I were leading him before the firing squad (I thought).

  It was I who by then no longer wanted to reason but only caress him, embrace him, seeing his narrow shoulders, the chest of an adolescent, only his legs muscular, robust, and it was he who pulled back. He twisted his full lips, rubbed his fingertips.

  At night, even after the shed, Gheorg came into the ward barefoot and we whispered together, or else he would fall asleep sitting up, his head resting on my bed, in the crook of his elbow, his other arm around me. Even on the weekend when my mother was there, he no longer went into the city, to the library or elsewhere as he had before, but remained beside me as if glued there, always finding ways to touch me as he read or studied, holding my hand, resting his elbow against mine on the chair arm, putting his leg next to mine on the footrest of the wheelchair, sitting on the bed propped against my lap. We were bound together by the anguish of leaving each other.

  The wedding date, set for March, with the banns already published, had passed. In the evening, at the shed, I felt cold. Staying too long on that straw, aching all over, was hard, the stalks were sharp. Even at twenty-five, Gheorg’s mind was too programmed to change. I slowly moved away from him and turned on the flashlight, projecting it around the shed. The tools, pitchforks, shovels, and other things leaning in a corner cast out irregular, toothed, hook-shaped shadows that shrank, lengthened, and twisted depending on the movements of my beam. How ridiculous. In April we split up.

  Perhaps I never felt the pointlessness of my experience in the Lagers with anyone as I did with Gheorg (with my father I expected it). Yet God knows how much I vacillated before adjusting to the idea of breaking up with him. But the Lucia whom he loved made it hard for me to breathe, gently obliterating all that I had gone to look for in Germany.

  Maybe discovering the impossibility of that union opened the first chink in my memory. But the cost of not repudiating my Germany (losing Gheorg) had been so high that I began to fear it. Shortly afterward I met Domenico.

  Besides, there was nothing left to explain, everyone already had a well-formed opinion of what I had gone through, even before I began to speak. They all saw me with the same eyes as Gheorg: the people I shrank from had a high regard for me, but those I preferred were wary of me.

  XII

  In April ’45, my father had managed to escape arrest at the time of the days of reckoning, in the wake of Liberation, by hiding with a lover who had Resistance merits. So he had only been arrested later on, when he turned himself in. The trial had established summarily that, in his duties as undersecretary to the Ministry of Propaganda in the Aviation Division, my father had never performed military actions but only administrative functions. A dossier of documents had made a good impression on the prosecutor. They included public statements in which he deplored the civil war, claims in which he asserted the autonomy of the repubblichine forces from Nazi control, and testimonies of partisans whom he had helped to hide and escape.

  A month after my return to Italy, he was fully acquitted and went into business. Then he gradually resumed editing a series of publications, first on shows and nightlife, and a few years later on aeronautic propaganda again.

  His brother, my uncle the engineer, who, as a high-ranking Fascist Party leader, had presided over the reclamation works in the Pontine Marshes, had also fared well: he had joined Confindustria, the General Confederation of Italian Industry, where he soon attained a high-level post.

  Now, it’s not as if I wanted to see these two people pilloried in ’46: my father truly did deplore the civil war, and had indeed aided the partisans, and my uncle was a highly skilled engineer whose talents it would have been foolish to waste. But what stuck in my craw were the social circumstances that enable certain people to pass through the history of their time unscathed, while others find themselves bearing the full weight of it on their backs.

  I looked around the military hospital where I’d been admitted, a very large building, perhaps a former monastery, rising on top of a hill from which it towered over the city of Bologna. It was full of men, veterans from all the fronts, bedridden patients even in the corridors and on the landings, except for the big square room on the top floor that only housed about a dozen women, myself included. Among the hundreds of convalescent soldiers, there were about thirty partisans who occupied a ward on the ground floor behind the gym.

  More or less the same number of repubblichini soldiers filled a ward on the top floor, opposite our door, through which their songs, belted out at the top of their lungs, reached us at times:

  Le donne non ci vogliono più bene

  perché portiamo la camicia nera,

  ci hanno detto che siamo da galera

  ci hanno detto che siamo da catene.

  “Women don’t love us anymore because we wear black shirts, they say we should be jailed, they say we should be in chains.”

  Two boys in particular made an impression on me, a sixteen-year-old, on crutches, with one leg amputated up to his thigh, and another, around twenty, in a wheelchair, who, on leavin
g the gym, invariably stopped in the hallway in front of the open door of the partisans’ ward and sang:

  L’amore coi fascisti non conviene

  meglio un vigliacco che non ha bandiera

  uno che salverà la pelle intera,

  uno che non ha sangue nelle vene.

  “You shouldn’t make love with Fascists, better a coward with no flag who will save his skin, one who has no blood in his veins.”

  The Resistance volunteers would slam the door in their faces. “Come on out if you dare!” The sixteen-year-old hopped on his only foot, poking a crutch against the closed door that suddenly swung open: “I won’t fight with a remnant of a man,” a deep voice boomed.

  “Lily-livered cowards,” the gaunt twenty-year-old in the wheelchair shouted in a shrill, trembling voice.

  Then, with the alternating sound of the tapping of crutches and steps, another guy, rosy-faced, eyes bloodshot under long lashes, who’d also had a leg amputated, came out and rushed at the sixteen-year-old. Dropping their crutches, they grappled hand to hand until two orderlies ran to separate them.

  The officers, on the other hand, did not come to blows. For one thing, they were not divided: both those of the Liberation army and those of the Republic of Salò were on the first floor, which was reserved for them, near the operating rooms and the administrative offices. They were sorted by rank, not by political stripe. Rooms with a few beds held lieutenants, others captains, while high-ranking officers were given single rooms. Sometimes their raised voices could be heard in the dining room set aside for them, but usually they avoided one another civilly. I had the same feeling I’d had in Germany, that the utmost would be done to keep the social hierarchies intact after so much liberation. Ideological crusades were proclaimed so as to better conceal everything that hadn’t changed. At that time I realized that a war isn’t enough to banish prejudices, but I didn’t understand that a war isn’t enough to overthrow a social structure unless the elements of its dissolution are already contained within it. Was that what I was afraid to say, hiding behind the shield of paralysis? Was recognizing that I had been so ingenuous in ’46 what was weighing on me?

 

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