by Primo Levi
From then on, he only rarely reappeared in the camp: the girl provided generously for all his needs. At the end of April he disappeared for a whole week. Now, that was not an ordinary end of April: it was the memorable one of 1945.
Unfortunately, we were unable to understand the Polish newspapers, but the type size of the headlines that increased by the day, the names that could be read, the very air that one breathed in the streets, and the Kommandantur made us understand that victory was near. We read, “Vienna,” “Koblenz,” “Rhine”; then “Bologna,” then, with an excitement full of emotion, “Turin” and “Milan.” Finally, “Mussolini” in big block letters, followed by a frightening and indecipherable past participle; and finally, in red ink and on half a page, the conclusive announcement, cryptic and exultant: “Berlin Upadl!”
On April 30, Leonardo and I and a few others who had passes were summoned by Captain Egorov: with a curiously sly and embarrassed expression that was unfamiliar he told us through the interpreter that we would have to give back the propusk; the next day we would receive a new one. Naturally we didn’t believe him, but we had to hand over the paper just the same. The order seemed absurd and slightly repressive and increased our anxiety and expectation, but the next day we understood the reason.
The next day was May 1; on May 3 there was some important Polish rite; on May 8 the war ended. The news, no matter that it was expected, burst like a hurricane: for eight days, the camp, the Kommandantur, Bogucice, Katowice, all of Poland, and the entire Red Army let themselves go in a paroxysm of delirious excitement. The Soviet Union is a gigantic country, and holds in its heart gigantic tumults, among them a Homeric capacity for joy and abandon, a primitive vitality, a pure pagan talent for demonstrations, rites, choral revelry.
In a few hours, the atmosphere had become torrid. There were Russians everywhere, emerging like ants from an anthill: they all embraced as if they knew one another, they sang, they shouted; although many were unsteady on their legs they danced together, and overwhelmed with their embraces anyone they met on the street. They fired their guns into the air, and sometimes, too, not into the air: a young soldier, still beardless, a parashyutist, was brought to the infirmary pierced by a musket shot from the abdomen to the back. Miraculously, it hadn’t damaged vital organs. The child soldier stayed in bed for three days, and submitted tranquilly to the medications, looking at us with eyes as blank as the sea; then, one evening, when a troop of celebrating fellow soldiers passed by in the street, he leaped out from under the covers, completely dressed in uniform and boots and, like a good parachutist, before the eyes of all the other patients, jumped down to the street from the second-floor window.
The already tenuous vestiges of military discipline vanished. In front of the camp gate on the evening of May 1, the sentinel was snoring, lying drunk on the ground, his machine gun over his shoulder; then he was seen no more. It was useless to ask the Kommandantur for anything urgently needed: the person responsible wasn’t there or was in bed sleeping off a hangover, or was engaged in mysterious frantic preparations in the school gym. It was lucky that the kitchen and the infirmary were in Italian hands.
What sort of preparations they were we soon learned. The Russians were organizing a grand celebration for the day of the end of the war: a theatrical presentation with choruses, dancing, and recitations, offered by them to us, the guests of the camp. To us Italians: because, in the meantime, following a complicated movement of other nationalities, we remained a large majority in Bogucice, in fact, almost alone, with a few French and Greeks.
Cesare returned on one of those tumultuous days. He was in worse condition than the first time: muddy up to his hair, ragged, distraught, and afflicted by a monstrous stiff neck. He was carrying a bottle of vodka, new and full, and his first order of business was to find another, empty bottle; then, dark and depressed, he constructed an ingenious funnel with a piece of cardboard, poured out the vodka, broke the bottles into little pieces, gathered the shards in a package, and in great secrecy went to bury them in a hole at the back of the camp.
Something terrible had happened. One evening when he returned from the market to the girl’s house, he had found a Russian: he had seen in the hall the military coat with belt and holster, and a bottle. He had taken the bottle, under the category of partial damages, and had sagely left; but the Russian, it seems, had come after him, perhaps because of the bottle, or maybe driven by retroactive jealousy.
Here his account became more obscure and less credible. He had tried in vain to escape and had become convinced that the entire Red Army was on his heels. He had ended up at the amusement park, but there, too, the hunt had continued—all night. The last hours he had spent trapped under the public dance floor, while all Poland danced on his head: but he had not left the bottle, because it represented all that remained to him of a week of love. He had destroyed the original receptacle out of prudence, and insisted that the contents be drunk immediately by us, his friends. The drinking was melancholy and silent.
May 8 arrived: a day of elation for the Russians, of distrustful vigil for the Poles, for us of joy deeply veined with homesickness. From that day, in fact, our homes were no longer forbidden, no front of war any longer separated us, no concrete obstacle, only papers and offices; we felt that homecoming was now owed to us, and every hour spent in exile weighed on us like lead; the utter lack of news from Italy weighed on us even more. We went anyway, all together, to see the Russian performance, and it was a good thing.
The theater had been improvised in the school gym; for that matter, everything was improvised, the actors, the seats, the chorus, the program, the lights, the curtain. Conspicuously improvised was the tailcoat worn by the MC, Captain Egorov himself.
Egorov appeared onstage completely drunk, wearing immense trousers whose waist came up to his armpits, while the tails brushed the floor. He was in the grip of an inconsolable alcoholic sadness, and announced in a sepulchral voice the various comic or patriotic numbers on the program, between deep sobs and outbursts of tears. His balance was dubious: at crucial moments he clung to the microphone, and then the noise of the audience was suddenly suspended, as when an acrobat jumps from a trapeze into the void.
Everyone appeared on the stage: the entire Kommandantur. Marya as director of the chorus, which was excellent, like all Russian choruses, and sang “Moyà Moskvà” (“My Moscow”) with marvelous momentum and harmony, and undisguised good faith. Galina appeared by herself, in a Circassian costume and boots, performing a dizzying dance in which she revealed fantastic and unsuspected athletic gifts: she was inundated with applause, and she thanked the audience, emotionally, with innumerable eighteenth-century-style bows, her face as red as a tomato and her eyes shining with tears. Dr. Dancenko and the mustachioed Mongol were an equally good duo, who, although full of vodka, performed one of those diabolical Russian dances in which the dancers leap into the air, squat, kick, and pirouette on their heels like a spinning top.
Then came a singular imitation of Chaplin’s Tramp, impersonated by one of the vigorous girls of the Kommandantur, with a large bosom and rear, but scrupulously faithful to the prototype, in bowler hat, mustache, old shoes, and cane. And finally, announced by Egorov in a mournful voice, and greeted by the Russians with a wild shout of acclaim, Vanka Vstanka appeared on the stage.
Who Vanka Vstanka is I couldn’t say precisely: maybe a popular Russian stock character. In this case, he was a shepherd, a timid fool in love, who wants to declare himself to his sweetheart and doesn’t dare. The sweetheart was the giant Vassilissa, the raven-haired brawny Valkyrie responsible for the dining hall, who was capable of knocking down with the back of her hand a disorderly diner or an importunate suitor (and more than one Italian had had proof of it). But on the stage who would have recognized her? She was transfigured by her role; the gray-haired Vanka Vstanka (in reality one of the old lieutenants), his face plastered with pink and white powder, wooed her from a distance, in the courtly manner of Arcadia, for
twenty melodious stanzas, unfortunately incomprehensible to us, holding out toward his beloved trembling supplicant hands, which she rebuffed with smiling but determined graciousness, warbling politely mocking replies. But little by little the distance diminished, while the noise of the applause increased proportionately; after many skirmishes, the two shepherds exchanged modest kisses on the cheek and ended by vigorously, voluptuously rubbing against each other, back-to-back, to the uncontainable enthusiasm of the audience.
We left the theater slightly dazed, but almost moved. The show had satisfied us inwardly. It had been improvised in a few days, and that was obvious; it had been a homemade show, without pretenses, plain, often childish. Yet it assumed something that was not improvised but ancient and strong: a youthful, innate, intense capacity for joy and expression, a loving and friendly intimacy with the stage and with the audience, far from empty display and cerebral abstraction, from convention and a lazy imitation of models. So in its limited way it had been a warm, vivid show, not vulgar, not ordinary, full of freedom and affirmation.
The next day everything returned to order, and the Russians, apart from some faint shadows around their eyes, had assumed their usual faces. I met Marya in the infirmary and told her that I had had a very good time, and that all of us Italians had greatly admired the theatrical talents of her and her colleagues: which was the pure truth. Marya was, by habit and by nature, a not very methodical but very concrete woman, solidly fixed within the tangible outline of the round of the clock and the domestic walls, a friend to men in the flesh and hostile to the smoke of theories. But how many human minds are capable of resisting the slow, fierce, incessant, insensibly penetrating force of rhetoric?
She answered with didactic seriousness. She thanked me officiously for the praise, and assured me that she would share it with the rest of the Command. Then she informed me in very pompous terms that dancing and singing are subjects taught in school in the Soviet Union, as is performance; that it is the duty of a good citizen to try to improve all his abilities or natural talents; that the theater is one of the most valuable instruments for collective education; and other pedagogical platitudes, which sounded absurd and vaguely irritating to my ear, still bursting with the previous night’s great wind of vitality and comic force.
For that matter, Marya herself (“old and crazy,” in the judgment of the eighteen-year-old Galina) seemed to possess a second personality, very distinct from the official one, since she had been seen the evening before, after the theater, drinking like a bottomless pit and dancing like a bacchante late into the night, tiring out innumerable partners, like a furious rider who breaks beneath himself horse after horse.
Victory and peace were celebrated in another way, too, which almost, indirectly, cost me very dearly. In mid-May a soccer match took place between the team from Katowice and a delegation of us Italians.
It was in fact a rematch: a first, not very serious match had been held two or three weeks earlier, which the Italians had won by a wide margin against an anonymous pickup team of Polish miners from the outskirts.
But for the rematch the Poles came up with a first-class team; the rumor was that some players, including the goalie, had been brought for the occasion from Warsaw, no less, while the Italians, alas, were not able to do likewise.
This goalie was a nightmare. He was a tall, lanky, fair-haired man, with an emaciated face, a concave chest, and lazy Apache-like movements. He had none of the snap, the emphatic contractions, or the neurotic unease of the professional; he stood in the goal with insolent condescension, leaning on a post as if he were merely watching the game, with a look at once outraged and outrageous. And yet the few times the ball was kicked into the goal by the Italians he was in its path, as if by chance, but without ever making an abrupt movement. He extended a long arm, just one, which seemed to come out of his body like the horns of a snail and had the same invertebrate and sticky quality. Indeed, the ball clung to him solidly, losing all its living force; it slid over his chest, then down along his body and leg to the ground. The other hand he never even used: he kept it ostentatiously in his pocket during the entire match.
The game took place on a field on the city’s outskirts quite far from Bogucice, and, for the occasion, the Russians authorized a free pass for the entire camp. The match was bitterly fought not just between the two contending teams but between both of these and the referee, because the referee—guest of honor, occupant of the authorities’ box, director of the competition, and linesman at the same time—was the captain from the NKVD, the ineffectual inspector of the kitchens. Now, with his fracture perfectly healed, he seemed to follow the game with intense interest, but not of a sporting nature: it was a mysterious interest, perhaps aesthetic, perhaps metaphysical. His behavior was irritating, in fact exhausting, to judge from the many experts present among the spectators; in another way it was hilarious, and worthy of a comic of the great school.
He constantly interrupted the game, at random, with aggressive whispering and with a sadistic preference for the moments when the action was taking place at the goal. If the players didn’t pay attention to him (and they soon stopped paying attention, because the interruptions were so frequent), he climbed over the edge of the box with his long, booted legs, plunged into the fray, whistling like a train, and kept trying, in every way possible, until he got possession of the ball. Then sometimes he held it in his hand, spinning it in all directions with a suspicious air, as if it were an unexploded bomb; at other times, with imperious gestures, he had it placed in a specific spot on the ground, then, unsatisfied, approached it, moved it a few inches, walked around it thoughtfully for a while, and finally, as if convinced of who knows what, signaled for the game to continue. At still other times, when he managed to get the ball between his feet, he made everyone move away, and he kicked it at the goal with all his might; then he turned radiantly to the spectators, who were bellowing with rage, and gave a long salute, clasping his hands over his head like a victorious prizefighter. He was, however, strictly impartial.
In these conditions, the game (which was deservedly won by the Poles) dragged on for more than two hours, until six in the evening, and would probably have been extended until night if it had depended only on the captain, who wasn’t at all worried about the time, acted on the field like the Master after God, and seemed to get a mad and inexhaustible pleasure from his misunderstood function as referee. But around sunset the sky rapidly darkened, and when the first drops of rain fell the whistle blew, signaling the end.
The rain soon became a deluge: Bogucice was far, there was no shelter on the way, and we returned to the barracks soaked. The next day I was sick, with an illness that remained mysterious for a long time.
I couldn’t breathe freely. It seemed that in the working of my lungs there was a blockage, a sharp pain, a deep stabbing, situated somewhere above the stomach but behind, near the back; and this prevented me from taking in air beyond a certain point. And this point diminished, from day to day, from hour to hour; the ration of air allowed me was reduced in a slow, constant, terrifying progression. The third day I could no longer move; the fourth, I lay supine on my cot, motionless, with my breath very short and fast, like that of a very hot dog.
4. The American and British soldiers of the Allied armies in Italy said “segnorina” instead of “signorina.”
The Dreamers
Leonardo tried to hide it from me, but he couldn’t understand the illness, and he was seriously worried. What it was exactly was difficult to establish, since his entire professional arsenal was reduced to a stethoscope, and to get the Russians to admit me to the civilian hospital in Katowice would be not only difficult but inadvisable; from Dr. Dancenko there was not much help to be hoped for.
So for several days I lay motionless, swallowing a few mouthfuls of broth, since with every movement I tried to make, and every solid mouthful I tried to swallow, the pain reawakened angrily and cut off my breath. After a week of tortured immobility, Leon
ardo, by tapping my back and my chest, managed to distinguish a sign: it was a dry pleurisy, nesting treacherously between the two lungs, against the mediastinum and the diaphragm.
He then did much more than you normally expect from a doctor. He became a clandestine merchant and smuggler of medicines, valiantly helped by Cesare, and he traveled on foot dozens of kilometers through the city, from one address to another, in pursuit of sulfonamides and intravenous calcium. In terms of medicines he didn’t have much success, because the drugs were scarce and could be found only on the black market and at prices inaccessible to us; but he found something better. He discovered in Katowice a mysterious brother, who had available a not exactly legal but well-equipped office, a medicine cabinet, a lot of money, and free time, and who was, finally, Italian, or almost.
In truth, everything about Dr. Gottlieb was wrapped in a thick fog of mystery. He spoke Italian perfectly, but German, Polish, Hungarian, and Russian just as well. He came from Fiume, from Vienna, from Zagreb, and from Auschwitz. He had been in Auschwitz, but in what capacity and condition he never said, nor was he a man whom it was easy to question. Nor was it easy to understand how he had survived in Auschwitz, since he had an ankylosed arm. And it was even harder to imagine by what secret pathways, and by what fantastic arts, he had managed to stay together with a brother and an equally mysterious brother-in-law, and to become in the few months after leaving the Lager, and in defiance of the Russians and the laws, a wealthy man and the most esteemed doctor in Katowice.