The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  The inspection ceremony became a public spectacle, with numerous of the bourgeois citizens of Katowice always present. The inspector arrived around eleven, like a whirlwind; he braked suddenly, with a horrible screech, and, pivoting on his front wheel, skidded the rear wheel in a quarter circle. Without stopping, he advanced toward the kitchen, head lowered like a charging bull; drove up the two steps with frightening jolts; made two rapid figure eights around the pots, the open exhaust blasting away; flew back down the stairs, gave the public a military salute with a radiant smile, leaned forward over the handlebars, and disappeared in a cloud of noise and blue-green smoke.

  The game went smoothly for several weeks; then, one day, neither motorcycle nor captain was seen. The latter was in the hospital with a broken leg; the former in the loving hands of a group of Italian aficionados. But they were soon back in circulation: the captain had made a shelf like a frame, and there he rested his leg in its cast, in a horizontal position. His face’s noble pallor had attained an ecstatic happiness; in that setup, he resumed with scarcely reduced vehemence his daily inspections.

  Only when April came, and the last snows melted, and the mild sun had dried the Polish mud, did we begin to feel truly free. Cesare had already been to various cities, and he insisted that I join him on his expeditions: I finally decided to overcome my inertia, and we left together on a splendid day in early April.

  At the request of Cesare, who was interested in the experiment, we did not leave through the hole in the fence. I went out first, through the main gate; the sentinel asked my name, then asked for my permit, and I showed it to him. He checked: the name corresponded. I went around the corner and passed the rectangle of paper to Cesare through the barbed wire. The sentinel asked Cesare his name; Cesare answered, “Primo Levi.” He asked for the permit; again the name corresponded, and Cesare left in full legality. Not that Cesare cared much about acting legally; but he liked refinements, virtuosities, cheating his neighbor without causing him to suffer.

  We went into Katowice as cheerful as schoolboys on vacation, but at every step our carefree mood clashed with the scene we were entering. At every step we came upon traces of the immense tragedy that had touched us and miraculously spared us. Mute and hurried graves at every intersection, of Soviet soldiers who had died in combat, without a cross but surmounted by a red star. An endless war cemetery in a city park, crosses and stars mixed, almost all bearing the same date: the date of the battle for the streets, or perhaps of the last German extermination. In the middle of the main street, three, four German tanks, apparently undamaged, had been transformed into trophies and monuments. The idealized extension of the gun on one of these led to an enormous hole halfway up the house opposite: the monster had died in the act of destroying. Everywhere ruins, skeletons of concrete, beams of blackened wood, people in rags, with a savage and starving look. At the important intersections street signs had been put up by the Russians, oddly in contrast with the shine and prefabricated precision of the analogous German signs, seen before, and the American ones that we saw later: crude, rough wooden boards, the names scribbled by hand, with tar, in uneven Cyrillic characters. Gleiwitz, Kraków, Częstochowa; or, rather, since the name was too long, “Częstoch” on one board and “owa” on a smaller one, nailed beneath it.

  And yet the city was alive, after the nightmare years of the Nazi occupation and the hurricane passage of the front. Many shops and cafés were open; even the free market was flourishing; the trams were functioning, the coal mines, the school, the cinemas. On that first day, since between us we didn’t have a cent, we were content with a reconnaissance tour. After a few hours of walking in the sparkling air our chronic hunger became acute. “Come with me,” Cesare said. “We’re going to have breakfast.”

  He led me to the market, to the area where the fruit stalls were. Under the malevolent eyes of the fruit seller at the first stall, he took a strawberry, a single, very large one, chewed it slowly, with the air of a connoisseur, then shook his head. “Nyé ddobre,” he said severely. (“It’s Polish,” he explained. “It means they’re no good.”) He passed to the next stall, and repeated the scene; and so on with all until the last. “Well? What are you waiting for?” he said to me then, with cynical pride. “If you’re hungry, just do like me.”

  Of course, it was not with the technique of the strawberries that we would get ourselves settled: Cesare had grasped the situation, which was that it was time to devote ourselves seriously to commerce.

  He explained his feeling: he was my friend, and didn’t ask anything. If I wanted I could go to the market with him, maybe even give him a hand and learn the trade, but it was indispensable for him to find a true partner, who had available some initial capital and a certain experience. In fact, to tell the truth he had already found him, a fellow named Giacomantonio, an old acquaintance of his from San Lorenzo who had the face of a jailbird. The form of the partnership was very simple: Giacomantonio would buy, he would sell, and they would divide the proceeds into equal parts.

  Buy what? Everything, he said—whatever he came across. Cesare, although he was barely over twenty, boasted a surprising education in commodities, comparable to the Greek’s. But, beyond the superficial analogies, I soon realized that between him and the Greek was an abyss. Cesare was full of human warmth, always, in all the hours of his life, not only outside working hours, like Mordo Nahum. For Cesare “work” was at times an unpleasant necessity, at times an amusing opportunity for encounters, and not a cold obsession, or a Lucifer-like affirmation of himself. One was free, the other a slave to himself; one miserly and reasonable, the other generous and inventive. The Greek was a lone wolf, eternally at war with everyone, old before his time, enclosed in the circle of his bleak ambition. Cesare was a child of the sun, a friend of the whole world. He didn’t know hatred or scorn, he was as varying as the sky, joyful, sly, and ingenuous, reckless and cautious, very ignorant, very innocent, and very civilized.

  I didn’t want to enter into the arrangement with Giacomantonio, but I willingly accepted Cesare’s invitation to go with him to the market on occasion, as an apprentice, interpreter, and porter. I accepted not only out of friendship and to escape the boredom of the camp but above all because to watch Cesare’s undertakings, even the most modest and trivial, was a unique experience, a vivid and bracing spectacle, which reconciled me to the world and rekindled the joy in life that Auschwitz had extinguished.

  A virtue like Cesare’s is good in itself, in an absolute sense; it confers nobility on a man, redeems many possible defects, saves his soul. But equally, and on a more practical level, it constitutes a precious store for one who intends to engage in commerce in the public squares; in fact, no one was insensitive to Cesare’s charm, neither the Russians of the Command, nor his assorted companions in the camp, nor the citizens of Katowice who frequented the market. Now, it’s equally clear that, by the harsh laws of commerce, what is an advantage to the seller is a disadvantage to the buyer, and vice versa.

  April was coming to an end, and the sun was already hot and bold, when Cesare came to get me after the clinic closed. His sinister partner had pulled off a series of brilliant coups: for fifty zloty altogether he had bought a ballpoint pen that didn’t write, a stopwatch, and a woolen shirt in reasonably good condition. This Giacomantonio, with the expert nose of the fence, had had the excellent idea of keeping watch at the station in Katowice, waiting for the Russian convoys returning from Germany: those soldiers, by now demobilized and on the way home, were the most carefree clients imaginable. They were joyous, easygoing, loaded with booty, they didn’t know the local prices, and they needed money.

  Besides, it was worthwhile to spend a few hours at the station outside of any utilitarian purpose, just to see the extraordinary spectacle of the Red Army returning home: a spectacle at once as choral and solemn as a Biblical migration and as vagabond and colorful as a circus parade. Long convoys of freight cars, used as troop trains, stopped in Katowice: they were equipped t
o travel for months, maybe even to the Pacific, and they housed randomly, by the thousands, soldiers and civilians, men and women, former prisoners, Germans now prisoners themselves, and, in addition, freight, furniture, animals, dismantled industrial installations, provisions, war matériel, pieces of junk. They were moving villages: some cars contained what appeared to be a family nucleus, one or two double beds, a mirrored closet, a stove, a radio, chairs, and tables. Between one car and the next, makeshift electrical wires were hung, coming from the first car, which contained a generator; they were used for lighting, and also to hang out the laundry to dry (and get covered with soot). When in the morning the sliding doors opened, men and women appeared against the background of these domestic interiors, half dressed, with broad sleepy faces: they looked around in bewilderment, without knowing what part of the world they were in, then they got out to wash in the cold water of the hydrants, and offered tobacco and pages of Pravda for rolling cigarettes.

  So I left for the market with Cesare, who proposed to resell (maybe to the Russians themselves) the three objects described above. The market had by now lost its primitive character as a fair of human miseries. Rationing had been abolished, or rather had fallen into disuse; from the rich surrounding countryside arrived the peasants’ carts with quintals of lard and cheese, eggs, chickens, sugar, fruit, butter: a garden of temptations, a cruel challenge to our obsessive hunger and our lack of money, an imperious incitement to get some.

  Cesare sold the pen immediately, for twenty zloty, without negotiation. He did not need an interpreter; he spoke only Italian, or, rather Roman, or, rather the dialect of the Roman ghetto, sprinkled with mangled Hebrew words. Certainly he had no other choice, since he didn’t know other languages: but, unknown to him, this ignorance worked strongly in his favor. Cesare “was playing on his home field,” to put it in sports terms. His clients, on the other hand, straining to interpret his incomprehensible speech and his unfamiliar gestures, were distracted from the necessary concentration; if they made counteroffers, Cesare didn’t understand them, or stubbornly pretended not to understand them.

  The art of the charlatan is not so widespread as I thought; the Polish public seemed ignorant of it, and was fascinated by it. Cesare, besides, was a first-class mime: he waved the shirt in the sun, holding it tight by the collar (there was a hole under the collar, but he held it just in the place where the hole was), and proclaimed its praises with torrential eloquence, with novel and inane additions and digressions, calling on this or that person among his listeners with an obscene nickname that he invented on the spot.

  He broke off abruptly (he knew by instinct the oratorical value of pauses), kissed the shirt affectionately, and then, in a resolute yet emotional voice, as if it would grieve his heart to be separated from it, and he could be induced to only for love of his neighbor, said, “You, fatso, how much would you give me for this cosciuletta?”

  The fatso was bewildered. He looked at the cosciuletta with longing, and out of the corner of his eye glanced to either side, half hoping and half fearing that someone else would make the first offer. Then he advanced hesitantly, held out an uncertain hand, and muttered something like “Pingísci.” Cesare drew the shirt to his breast, as if he had seen an asp. “What did he say, that fellow?” he asked me, as if suspecting he had received a mortal insult; but it was a rhetorical question, since he recognized (or guessed) the Polish numbers more quickly than I did.

  “You’re nuts,” he said then, peremptorily, pointing an index finger at his temple and spinning it like a drill. The public roared and laughed, obviously rooting for the fantastic foreigner, who had come from the ends of the earth to work wonders in their squares. The fatso stood gaping, rocking like a bear from one foot to the other. “Du ferík,” Cesare resumed pitiless (he meant to say “verrückt”); then, to clarify, he added, “Du meshugge.” A hurricane of wild laughter exploded: this they had all understood. The Hebrew meshugge, which survives in Yiddish, is universally understood in all of Central and Eastern Europe: it means “crazy,” but it contains the secondary idea of vain, melancholy, foolish, lunar madness.

  The fatso scratched his head and pulled up his pants, filled with embarrassment. “Sto,” he said then, looking for peace. Sto zlotych, a hundred zloty.

  The offer was interesting. Cesare, somewhat tamed, turned to the fatso as man to man, in a persuasive tone, as if to convince him of an involuntary yet gross error. He spoke for a long time, openheartedly, with warmth and familiarity, saying, “You see? You understand? You don’t agree?”

  “Sto zlotych,” the man repeated, stubbornly.

  “This fellow is from Capurzio!” Cesare said to me. Then, as if suddenly tired out, and in an ultimate attempt at agreement, he put a hand on the man’s shoulder and said maternally, “Listen. Listen, friend. You haven’t understood me well. Let’s do like this, let’s come to an agreement. You give me so much”—and he drew 150 with his finger on his stomach—“you give me sto pingisciu, and I put it on your back. All right?”

  The fatso snorted and shook his head no, with his eyes down; but Cesare’s clinical eye had caught a sign of capitulation—an imperceptible movement of the hand toward the back pocket of the pants.

  “Come on! Cough up those pignonze!” Cesare pressed him, beating the iron while it was hot. The pignonze (the Polish word, which was hard to spell but whose sound was so oddly familiar, fascinated Cesare and me) were finally coughed up, and the shirt handed over; but Cesare energetically tore me away from my ecstatic admiration.

  “Hey, friend. Let’s clear off; otherwise he’ll figure out about the hole.” Thus, out of fear that the client would prematurely notice the hole, we cleared off (or rather took our leave), giving up on the unsalable stopwatch. We walked at a dignified pace to the nearest corner, then sneaked away, as fast as our legs would carry us, and returned to the camp by back streets.

  Victory Day

  Life in the camp at Bogucice, in the clinic and the market, rudimentary human relations with Russians, Poles, and others, rapid alternations of hunger and a full stomach, of hopes for return and disappointments, expectation and uncertainty, regimentation and improvisation—like a pallid form of military life in a temporary, foreign environment—roused in me uneasiness, homesickness, and chiefly boredom. It was on the other hand consonant with Cesare’s habits, character, and aspirations.

  At Bogucice, he flourished, visibly, from day to day, like a tree in which the spring sap is rising. He now had a fixed place in the market and a loyal clientele, conjured by him out of nothing: the Bearded Lady, Skin and Bones, Redneck, at least three Big Butts, Travel Order, Franchestein, a Juno-like girl he called Lady Courtroom, and various others. In the camp, he enjoyed an unquestioned prestige: he had quarreled with Giacomantonio, but many others gave him goods to sell, with no contract, out of pure trust, so he always had money.

  One evening he disappeared: he didn’t show up at the camp for dinner, or in the room to sleep. Naturally, we reported nothing to Rovi, not to mention the Russians, in order not to cause trouble; yet when his absence extended for three days and three nights, even I, who by nature am not very apprehensive, and was even less so about Cesare, began to feel a slight anxiety.

  Cesare returned at dawn on the fourth day, battered and surly, like a cat returning from a witches’ ride over the roofs. He had shadows under his eyes, but in their depths flashed a proud light. “Leave me alone,” he said as soon as he came in, although no one had asked him anything, and the majority were still snoring. He dropped onto his cot, making a show of extreme exhaustion; but after a few minutes, unable to resist the pressure of the great news that was gnawing at him inside, he came over to me, though I was barely awake. Hoarse and grim, as if he’d been dancing with the witches for three nights, he said, “We’re there. I’m set. I got myself a pagninca, a girl.”

  To me the news didn’t seem particularly exciting. He certainly wasn’t the first: already several other Italians, especially among the soldier
s, had got a girl in the city. Pagninca—the Polish panienka—is the exact equivalent of segnorina for signorina, and equally disfigured in sound.4

  It wasn’t a very arduous undertaking, because men were scarce in Poland, and many of the Italians had “settled” themselves, driven not only by the national myth of the Italian lover but also by a more profound and serious need, by nostalgia for a home and affection. As a consequence, in some cases the dead or distant spouse was replaced not only in the heart and bed of the woman but in all his duties, and you could see Italians going down into the coal mines with Poles to take “home” the pay envelope, or serving at the counter in a shop, and, on Sunday, strange families decorously walked on the ramparts, the Italian arm in arm with the Pole, and holding a child too fair by the hand.

  But, Cesare explained, his case was different (they’re all different, always, I thought, yawning). His pagninca was beautiful, unmarried, refined, clean, in love with him, and so also economical. She was experienced as well; her only defect was that she spoke Polish. So, if I was his friend, I had to help him.

  I wasn’t able to help much, I explained, wearily. In the first place, I didn’t know more than thirty words of Polish; in the second, I was absolutely ignorant of the sentimental language that he needed; in the third, I didn’t feel in the right mood to go along with him. But Cesare wouldn’t give in; maybe the girl understood German. He had in mind a very precise program; so would I do him a favor and not be obstructionist, and explain to him how you say this in German, and that, and this other thing.

  Cesare overestimated my linguistic knowledge. The things he wanted to know are not taught in any German course, much less had I had occasion to learn them in Auschwitz; besides, they were subtle and idiosyncratic questions, making me suspect that these things don’t exist in any language but Italian and French.

  I expressed my doubts, but Cesare looked at me in vexation. I was sabotaging him, it was clear: it was all envy. He put his shoes back on and left muttering curses. He returned after midday and threw down in front of me a pocket Italian–German dictionary, bought for twenty zloty at the market. “This has everything,” he said, with the air of someone who will not admit further discussion or quibbles. It didn’t have everything, unfortunately: it lacked even the essential, that which a mysterious convention expunges from the universe of printed paper—a waste of money. Cesare went out again, disappointed in culture, friendship, and printed paper itself.