by Primo Levi
A brief consultation followed, then an old woman, her eyes sparkling with joy and acuity, emerged from the group: she took two steps forward and in a shrill voice uttered, “Kura! Kuritsa!”
She was very proud and pleased that she was the one who had solved the puzzle. From all directions laughter and applause broke out, and voices: “Kuritsa, kuritsa!” And we, too, clapped our hands, captivated by the game and by the general enthusiasm. The old woman bowed, like an actress at the end of the performance; she disappeared and after a few minutes reappeared with a hen, already plucked. She swung it comically under Cesare’s nose, as a double check; and when she saw that he reacted positively, she loosened her grip, picked up the plates, and carried them off.
Cesare, who knew because at one time he had had a stall at Porta Portese, assured me that the curizetta was fat enough and was worth our six plates; we carried it back to the hut, waked our companions, who were already asleep, lit the fire again, cooked the chicken, and ate it in our fingers, because we no longer had any plates.
Old Roads
The chicken, and the night spent in the open, did us good, like a medicine. After a solid sleep, which restored us, even though we had slept on the bare ground, we woke in the morning in excellent health and mood. We were happy because there was sun, because we felt free, because of the good smell that came from the earth, and also partly because two kilometers away were people who were not mean, in fact shrewd and inclined to laughter, who had indeed shot at us but then had welcomed us kindly and had even sold us a chicken. We were happy because that day (we didn’t know about tomorrow: but what may happen tomorrow isn’t always important) we could do things that for too long we hadn’t done: drink water from a well, lie in the sun in the tall, vigorous grass, smell the summer air, light a fire and cook, go into the woods for strawberries and mushrooms, smoke a cigarette looking at a high sky cleared by the wind.
We could do these things, and we did, with childish joy. But our reserves were reaching an end: one cannot live on strawberries and mushrooms, and none of us (not even Cesare, urbanized and a Roman citizen “since the time of Nero”) were morally and technically equipped for a precarious life of vagabondage and agricultural thieving. The choice was clear: either immediate reentry into civilized society or starvation. From civilized society, and that is from the mysterious camp of Starye Doroghi, thirty kilometers of a dizzyingly straight road separated us, however. We would have to do it all at once, and then maybe we would arrive in time for the evening ration; or we could camp along the road again, in freedom, but with empty stomachs.
We made a rapid survey of our possessions. It wasn’t much: eight rubles between us all. It was difficult to establish what their buying power was, at that time and in that place; our previous monetary experiences with the Russians had been erratic and absurd. Some of them accepted with no trouble money from any country, even German or Polish; others were suspicious, afraid of being swindled, and accepted only exchanges in kind or metal coins. Of the latter, the most unexpected types were in circulation, coins from tsarist times, emerging from atavistic family hiding places, British pounds, Scandinavian kroner, even old coins from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By contrast, in Zhmerynka the walls of one of the station latrines were studded with German marks, meticulously pasted to the wall, one by one, with an unmentionable material.
In any case, eight rubles wasn’t much: worth one or two eggs. It was decided collegially that Cesare and I, now accredited as ambassadors, should go back to the village, and see there what could best be bought with eight rubles.
We set off, and along the way an idea occurred to us: not goods but services. The best investment would be to rent from our friends a horse and cart to Starye Doroghi. Maybe the money wasn’t much, but we could try to offer some item of clothing, since it was very hot. So we showed up in the farmyard and were welcomed with affectionate greetings and complicit laughter from the old ladies and by a furious barking of dogs. When silence was restored, I said, fortified by my Michael Strogoff and other long-ago readings, “Telega. Starye Doroghi,” and displayed the eight rubles.
There followed a confused murmur. Strange to say, no one had understood. Nevertheless, my task presented itself as less arduous than that of the night before; in a corner of the farmyard, under a shed, I had noticed a four-wheeled farm cart, long and narrow, with sides rising in a V shape—in other words, a telega. I touched it, a little impatient with the obtuseness of these people: was this not a telega?
“Tyelyega!” the bearded man corrected me, with paternal severity, outraged by my barbaric pronunciation.
“Da. Tyelyega na Starye Doroghi. We pay. Eight rubles.”
The offer was laughable: the equivalent of two eggs for thirty plus thirty kilometers on the road, twelve hours of travel. But the bearded man put the rubles in his pocket, disappeared into the barn, returned with a mule, tied him between the shafts, made a sign to us to get in, loaded in some sacks, still silently, and we departed toward the main road. Cesare called the others, and we didn’t miss the chance to act important in front of them. We would have a comfortable journey in the telega, or rather in the tyelyega, and a triumphant entry into Starye Doroghi, all for eight rubles: that’s what knowledge of languages and diplomatic ability meant.
We later realized (and, unfortunately, so did our companions) that, in reality, the eight rubles had been practically wasted: the bearded man had to go to Starye Doroghi anyway, on his own business, and maybe he would have taken us for nothing.
We got on the road around midday, lying on the sacks, which were not too soft. However, it was much better than walking; among other things, we could enjoy the countryside at our ease.
This was unusual for us, and wonderful. The plain, which the day before had oppressed us with its solemn emptiness, was no longer strictly flat. It was rippled by slight, barely perceptible undulations, perhaps ancient dunes, no more than a few meters high, but just enough to break the monotony, rest the eye, and create a rhythm, a measure. Between one undulation and the next lay ponds and marshes, large and small. The exposed earth was sandy, and bristling here and there with wild thickets of brush; elsewhere were tall trees, but rare and isolated. On both sides of the road lay shapeless rusty relics, artillery, carts, barbed wire, helmets, oil drums: the remains of the two armies that for so many months had confronted each other in those places. We had entered the region of the Pripet Marshes.
The road and the land were deserted, but just before sunset we noticed that someone was following us: a man who walked vigorously in our direction, black against the white dust. He was gaining ground slowly but continuously: soon he was in shouting distance, and we recognized in him the Moor, Avesani from Avesa, the big old man. He, too, had spent the night in some hiding place, and now was marching toward Starye Doroghi at a tempestuous pace, his white hair windblown, his bloodshot eyes staring straight ahead. He advanced as steady and powerful as a steam engine: tied to his back was the famous heavy pack, and, hanging from it, his ax flashed, like the scythe of Kronos.
He prepared to pass us as if he didn’t see us or recognize us. Cesare called to him and invited him to get in. “The dishonor of the world. Nasty inhuman pigs,” the Moor promptly replied, giving voice to the blasphemous litany that constantly occupied his mind. He passed us, and continued his mythic march toward the horizon opposite the one he had arisen from.
Signor Unverdorben knew much more about the Moor than we did; we learned then that the Moor was not (or was not only) an old lunatic. The pack had a reason, and so, too, had the wandering life of the old man. A widower for many years, he had a daughter, only one, now nearly fifty, and she was in bed, paralyzed; she would never be cured. For this daughter the Moor lived. Every week he wrote her a letter destined not to arrive; for her alone he had worked all his life, and had become dark as the wood of the walnut and hard as stone. For her alone, the Moor, wandering the world, put in his sack whatever he happened on, any object that offered even the sl
ightest possibility of being enjoyed or exchanged.
We met no other living beings until we reached Starye Doroghi.
Starye Doroghi was a surprise. It wasn’t a village; rather, a tiny village did exist, in the middle of the woods, some distance from the road; but we learned that later, and then we also learned that the name means “Old Roads.” Instead, the quarters meant for us, for all fourteen hundred Italians, was a single giant edifice, isolated on the edge of the road amid untilled fields and outgrowths of the forest. It was called Krasny Dom, the Red House, and in fact it was abundantly red, inside and out.
It was a truly singular construction, which had expanded at random in all directions like a lava flow; it was impossible to figure out if it was the work of many contradictory architects or of a single crazy one. The oldest part, now overpowered and suffocated by wings and rooms built later, haphazardly, consisted of a three-story block, subdivided into small rooms perhaps formerly given over to military or administrative offices. But around this block there were all sorts of things: a room for lectures or meetings, a series of school classrooms, kitchens, washrooms, a theater with at least a thousand seats, an infirmary, a gym; and, next to the main entrance, a storeroom with mysterious brackets, which we interpreted as a repository for skis. But in Starye Doroghi, too, as in Slutsk, nothing or almost nothing remained of the furniture and the fixtures; there was not only no water but even the pipes had been removed, as had the stoves in the kitchens, the seats in the theater, the desks in the classrooms, the banisters of the stairs.
The stairs were the most obsessive element of the Red House. There was a profusion of them in the vast building: grand, lengthy staircases that led to absurd cubbyholes full of dust and rubbish; others that were narrow and uneven, interrupted halfway by a column erected quickly to prop up a dangerous ceiling; fragments of lopsided, forked, anomalous stairs connecting the floors of adjacent rooms that were on different levels. Memorable among all of them was a mammoth stairway along one of the façades whose steps, three meters wide, rose fifteen meters from a courtyard invaded by weeds, and led nowhere.
Around the Red House there was no fence, not even a symbolic one, as at Katowice. There was not even a real system of surveillance; often a Russian soldier, usually a very young one, was stationed at the entrance, but he had no duties regarding the Italians. His task was only to keep other Russians from coming at night to bother the Italian women in their dormitories.
The Russians, officers and soldiers, lived in a wooden barrack not far away, and others, passing through on the road, occasionally stayed there; but they seldom concerned themselves with us. Those who were concerned with us were a small group of Italian officers, former prisoners of war, rather arrogant and rude; they were deeply conscious of their status as military men, they displayed contempt and indifference toward us civilians, and, a thing that didn’t fail to amaze us, they maintained good relations with the Soviets of equal rank in the barrack nearby. In fact, they enjoyed a privileged situation not only with respect to us but also with respect to the Soviet troops: they ate at the Russian officers’ mess, wore new Soviet uniforms (without ranks) and good military boots, and slept in camp beds with sheets and blankets.
But there was no reason for complaint on our part, either. We were treated exactly like the Russian soldiers in terms of food and lodging, and were not subjected to any particular obedience or discipline. Only a few Italians worked, those who had volunteered spontaneously for kitchen or bathroom duty, or the electrical power unit, and Leonardo as a doctor, and I as a nurse; but by now, with the good weather, the sick were very few, and our job was a sinecure.
Anyone who wanted to could leave. Many did, some out of pure boredom or a spirit of adventure, others in an attempt to cross the borders and return to Italy; but they all came back, after a few weeks or months of wandering, for, if the camp was neither guarded nor gated, the distant frontiers were, and heavily.
No ideological pressure was brought to bear by the Russians, or, rather, no attempt to discriminate among us. Our community was too complicated. Former soldiers of the Armir, former partisans, former Häftlinge from Auschwitz, former workers in the Todt, former common criminals and prostitutes from San Vittore, whether we were Communists or monarchists or Fascists—toward us the Russians cultivated the most impartial indifference. We were Italians and that was enough: the rest was vse ravno, all the same.
We slept on wooden planks covered with sacks of straw: fifty centimeters per man. At first we protested, because it seemed very little: but the Russian commander politely pointed out that our claim was unfounded. At the head of each plank the names of the Soviet soldiers who had occupied these places before us could still be read, scribbled in pencil; we might judge for ourselves, there was a name every fifty centimeters.
The same could be said, and was said, of the food. We received a kilo of bread a day: rye bread, almost unleavened, moist and acid, but it was a lot, and it was their bread. And the daily “kasha” was their “kasha”: a small dense block of lard, millet, beans, meat, and spices, nourishing but fiercely indigestible; after several days of experimenting we learned to make it edible by boiling it for several hours.
Then, three or four times a week, fish was distributed, ryba. It was a large raw, unsalted river fish, of dubious freshness and full of bones. What to do with it? Few of us could get used to eating it as it was (as many Russians did); as for cooking it, we lacked pans, condiments, salt, and skill. Soon we were convinced that the best thing to do was sell it back to the Russians themselves, to the peasants in the village or the soldiers passing through. This meant a new career for Cesare, who soon arrived at a high degree of technical perfection.
On the morning of the fish days, Cesare made the rounds of the rooms, equipped with a piece of wire. He collected the “ribba,” strung them eye to eye on the wire, put the foul-smelling garland over his shoulder, and disappeared. He returned many hours later, sometimes in the evening, and distributed equally among those who had commissioned him rubles, cheese, quarter chickens, and eggs, to everyone’s advantage but principally his own.
With the first profits of his commerce he bought a steelyard scale, as a result of which his professional prestige increased notably. But to bring to completion a certain plan he had he needed another instrument, of less obvious usefulness: a syringe. There was no hope of finding one in the Russian village, and so he came to me in the infirmary, to ask if I could lend him one.
“What do you want to do with it?” I asked.
“What do you care. A syringe. You’ve got a lot here.”
“What size?”
“The biggest you have. Even if it’s a little beat up, it doesn’t matter.”
There was one, in fact, of twenty cubic centimeters, splintered and practically unusable. Cesare examined it carefully, and declared that it would do.
“But what do you need it for?” I asked again. Cesare looked at me grimly, irritated by my lack of tact. He told me that it was his business, an idea he had, an experiment, and that it might go well and might not, and who did I think I was, sticking my nose in his private affairs. He wrapped up the syringe carefully and went off like an insulted prince.
Yet the secret of the syringe didn’t last long: life at Starye Doroghi was too idle for gossip and interference in other people’s affairs not to proliferate. In the days that followed, Cesare was seen by Sora Litizia going for water with a bucket and carrying it into the woods; he was seen by the Stellina in the woods itself, sitting on the ground with the bucket in the middle of a circle of fish, which “he seemed to be feeding”; and finally he was met in the village by Rovati, his competitor: he was without the bucket and was selling fish, but they were very strange fish, fat, hard, and round, not flat and soft like the ones in our ration.
Like many scientific discoveries, the idea of the syringe had originated in a failure and a chance observation. A few days before, Cesare had traded fish in the village for a live chicken. He had retu
rned to the Red House convinced that he had done some excellent business: for only two fish he had gotten a fine hen, no longer young and with a slightly melancholy look, but extraordinarily large and fat. But, after he had killed and plucked it, he realized that something was wrong; the hen was asymmetrical, her stomach was all on one side, and offered to the touch something hard, mobile, and elastic. It wasn’t an egg: it was a large watery cyst.
Cesare, naturally, had taken remedial action, and had managed to resell the animal right away to no less than accountant Rovi, earning still more: but then, like a Stendhalian hero, he had thought about it. Why not imitate nature? Why not try with fish?
At first he had tried to fill them with water using a straw, through the mouth, but it all came out. Then he had thought of the syringe. With the syringe he noticed some progress in many cases, but it depended on the point where he gave the injection: according to this, the water came out again, right away or soon afterward, or it stayed inside indefinitely. Then Cesare had dissected several fish with a knife, and had established that, to have a permanent effect, the injection had to be given in the air bladder.
In this way the fish, which Cesare sold by weight, earned from 20 to 30 percent more than the normal ones, and they also had a much more attractive appearance. Certainly, ribba so treated could not be sold twice to the same customer; but one could easily sell them to the demobilized Russian soldiers who passed along the road straight to the east, and who would realize the business of the water only when they were many kilometers away.
But one day he returned with a grim expression; he was without fish, without money, and without goods: “I got caught.” For two days there was no way to speak a word to him, he was huddled on his bed, bristling like a porcupine, and he came down only for meals. He had had an adventure different from the usual kind.