The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  He told me about it later, on a long warm evening, warning me not to tell anyone, since, if it became known, his business reputation would suffer. In fact, the fish hadn’t been violently seized by a fierce Russian, as he had first tried to make us think: the truth was different. He had given the fish as a present, he confessed, filled with shame.

  He had gone to the village and, to avoid customers who had previously been burned, he hadn’t showed up on the main street but had taken a path that went into the woods. After a few hundred meters he had seen a small, isolated cottage, or rather, a hut built of unmortared bricks and sheet metal. Outside was a thin woman in black, and three pale children sitting on the doorstep. He had approached and offered her the fish; she had made him understand that she would like the fish but had nothing to give him in exchange, and that she and the children hadn’t eaten for two days. She had invited him into the hut, and in the hut there was nothing, only beds of straw, as in a kennel.

  At this point the children had looked at him with such eyes that Cesare had thrown down the fish and run away, like a thief.

  The Forest and the Path

  We stayed at Starye Doroghi, in that Red House full of mysteries and trapdoors, like a fairy castle, for two long months: from July 15 to September 15 of 1945.

  They were months of idleness and relative well-being, and therefore full of a penetrating homesickness. Homesickness is a fragile, mild suffering, essentially different, more intimate, more human than the other pain we had endured up to that time: beatings, cold, hunger, terror, destitution, illness. It’s a clear, pure suffering, but insistent: it pervades all the minutes of the day, allows no other thoughts, and urges escape.

  Perhaps for this reason, the forest around the camp exercised a profound attraction on us. Perhaps because it offered, to anyone who sought it, the invaluable gift of solitude: and for how long had we been deprived of that! Perhaps because it reminded us of other woods, other solitudes of our previous existence; or perhaps, on the contrary, because it was solemn and austere and untouched, like no other scenery known to us.

  North of the Red House, beyond the road, extended a mixed terrain, of brush, clearings, and pinewoods, interspersed with marshes and spits of fine white sand; you encountered a few winding, barely marked paths, which led to distant houses. But to the south, a few hundred steps from the Red House, every human trace disappeared. Also every trace of animal life, except for the occasional tawny flash of a squirrel, or the still, sinister eye of a water snake, wrapped around a rotting trunk. There were no paths, no traces of woodcutters, nothing: only silence, abandonment, and tree trunks in every direction, pale trunks of birches, reddish brown of conifers, soaring vertically toward the invisible sky. Equally invisible was the soil, covered by a thick layer of dead leaves and needles and by clumps of wild underbrush up to your waist.

  The first time I ventured into it I learned, to my cost, with surprise and fear, that the danger of “getting lost in the woods” isn’t found only in fairy tales. I had walked for about an hour, orienting myself as well as I could by the sun, visible here and there where the branches were less thick; but then the sky darkened, threatening rain, and when I wanted to return I realized I had lost north. Moss on the trunks? It was on every side. I set out in the direction that seemed to me most right: but after a long and painful walk among thornbushes and brambles I found myself at a point as unknown as the one I had started from.

  I walked again for hours, increasingly tired and worried, almost until sunset: and already I was thinking that even if my companions came to look for me they wouldn’t find me, or only days later, when I was exhausted by hunger, perhaps already dead. When the daylight began to fade, swarms of fat hungry mosquitoes rose, and other insects I wouldn’t know what to call, as big and hard as bullets, which darted blindly among the trunks, hitting me in the face. Then I decided to go straight ahead, approximately north (that is, keeping on my left a stretch of sky slightly more luminous, which must correspond to the west), and to walk without stopping until I encountered the main road, or at least a path or track. I advanced like that in the long twilight of the northern summer, almost until total darkness, now in the grip of an orgasmic panic, the ancient fear of shadows, of the woods, and of emptiness. In spite of my weariness, I felt a violent impulse to start running, in any direction, and to run as long as I had strength and breath.

  Suddenly I heard the whistle of a train. So I had the railroad on my right, while, according to the plan I had made, it should have been far to the left. I was therefore going in the wrong direction. Following the sound of the train, I reached the tracks before night, and following the shining rails in the direction of the Little Bear, which had reappeared among the clouds, I arrived safely first in Starye Doroghi, then at the Red House.

  But there were some who moved to the forest and lived there. The first was Cantarella, one of the “Romanians,” who discovered the vocation of hermit. Cantarella was a taciturn and misanthropic Calabrian sailor who was very tall and of an ascetic thinness. He built a cabin of trunks and branches half an hour from the camp, and lived there in savage solitude, dressed only in a loincloth. He was a contemplative, but not idle: he practiced a strange priestly activity.

  He had a hammer and a kind of crude forge, which he had constructed out of war surplus and set in a stump; using these tools, and old tin cans, he fashioned pots and pans with great skill and religious diligence.

  He made them on commission, for new families. When, in our variegated community, a man and woman decided to make a common life, and so felt the need for a minimum of equipment in setting up house, they went to Cantarella, hand in hand. Asking no questions, he got to work, and in little more than an hour, with expert hammer blows, he bent and beat pieces of metal into the shapes that the couple desired. He asked for no compensation, but accepted gifts in kind, bread, cheese, eggs; thus the marriage was celebrated, and thus Cantarella lived.

  There were other inhabitants of the wood as well. I discovered it one day, following by chance a path I hadn’t noticed before, which penetrated toward the west, straight and well marked. It led to a particularly thick area of the wood, entered an old trench, and ended at the door of a log blockhouse, almost completely underground: only the roof and a chimney stuck out of the ground. I pushed on the door, which yielded; there was no one inside, but the place was evidently inhabited. On the bare dirt floor (but swept and clean) there was a small stove, some plates, a military mess tin; in a corner, a bed of straw; hanging on the walls, women’s clothes and photographs of men.

  Returning to the camp I learned that I was the only one who didn’t know about it: in the log house, notoriously, lived two German women. They were auxiliaries of the Wehrmacht, who hadn’t managed to follow the Germans in retreat and had remained cut off in Russian territory. They were afraid of the Russians and hadn’t surrendered; they had lived precariously for months, on petty thefts, grasses, occasional, stealthy prostitution with the English and French who had occupied the Red House before us, until the settlement of the Italians had brought them prosperity and security.

  The women in our colony were few, no more than two hundred, and almost all had quickly found a stable arrangement: they were no longer available. Therefore, for an imprecise number of Italians, going “to the girls in the woods” had become a habit, and the only alternative to celibacy. An alternative filled with a complex fascination: because the matter was secret and vaguely dangerous (much more for the women than for them, in truth); because the girls were foreign and half wild; because they were in a state of poverty, and so one had the uplifting impression of “protecting them”; and because of the fairy-tale-exotic scene of the encounters.

  Not only Cantarella but also the Velletrano had ended up in the woods. The experiment of transplanting a “wild man” into civilization has been attempted many times, often with a good outcome, to demonstrate the fundamental unity of the human species. In the Velletrano the opposite experiment took place; he
was a native of the overcrowded streets of Trastevere, who had been retransformed into a wild man with admirable ease.

  In reality, he was probably never very civilized. The Velletrano was a Jew of thirty, a survivor of Auschwitz. He must have presented a problem for the Auschwitz official assigned to the tattooing, because both his muscular forearms were already thickly covered with tattoos: the names of his women, as Cesare, who had known him for a while, explained to me, and also explained that the Velletrano wasn’t named Velletrano, nor had he been born in Velletri, but had been put out to nurse there.

  He almost never spent the night at the Red House: he lived in the forest, barefoot and half naked. He lived like our distant ancestors; he set traps for hares and foxes, he climbed trees for the nests, he killed turtledoves with stones, and didn’t disdain the chicken coops of the more distant farmhouses. He gathered mushrooms and berries generally considered inedible, and at night you’d often encounter him near the camp, squatting on his heels in front of a big fire, on which, singing hoarsely, he was roasting the day’s prey. He then slept on the bare earth, bedding down beside the coals. But, since he was still a son of man, he pursued in his way virtue and knowledge, and perfected day by day his skills and his tools; he made a knife, then an assegai and a hatchet, and if he had had time I don’t doubt that he would have rediscovered agriculture and sheep farming.

  When the day had been good, he became sociable and friendly; through Cesare, who willingly offered to present him as a circus phenomenon and to recount his earlier, legendary adventures, he invited everyone to Homeric feasts of roasted meat, and if someone refused he turned mean and pulled out his knife.

  After some days of rain, and some of sun and wind, the mushrooms and blueberries in the woods grew in such abundance that they became of interest no longer in the purely georgic and sporting guise but also the utilitarian. All of us, having taken the proper precautions not to get lost on the way home, spent entire days harvesting. The blueberries, on bushes much taller than ours, were almost as big as walnuts, and flavorful; we brought them to the camp by the kilo, and even tried (but in vain) to ferment the juice into wine. As for the mushrooms, there were two varieties: some were normal porcini, tasty and certainly edible; the others were similar in shape and smell but larger and woody and of slightly different colors.

  None of us were sure that these were edible; on the other hand, could one leave them to rot in the woods? One could not: we were all malnourished, and, besides, the memory of hunger in Auschwitz was still too recent, and had become a violent mental stimulus, which obliged us to fill our stomachs as full as possible, and imperiously prevented us from giving up any occasion to eat. Cesare gathered a good quantity and boiled them following prescriptions and precautions unknown to me, adding to the mixture vodka and garlic bought in the village, which “kill all poisons.” Then he himself ate some, but only a little, and he offered a little to many people, so as to limit the risk and have an abundance of case histories available the next day. The next day he made the rounds of the dormitories, and had never been so polite and solicitous: “How are you, Sora Elvira? How’s it going, Don Vincenzo? Did you sleep well? Did you have a good night?” and meanwhile he looked them in the face with a clinical eye. They were all fine, the strange mushrooms could be eaten.

  For the laziest and the wealthiest, it wasn’t necessary to go into the woods to find “extra” food. The commercial dealings between the village of Starye Doroghi and us guests of the Red House soon became intense. Every morning peasant women arrived with baskets and buckets; they sat on the ground, without moving, for hours as they waited for customers. If a rain shower came, they didn’t move from their spot but only folded their skirts over their heads. The Russians made two or three attempts to expel them, putting up two or three bilingual signs that threatened the parties with punishments of senseless severity; then, as usual, they lost interest in the matter, and the trading continued undisturbed.

  There were old women and young: the former dressed in the traditional way, with embroidered and quilted jackets and a kerchief tied over their heads; the latter in light cotton dresses, most of them barefoot, free, bold, and ready to laugh, but not impudent. Besides mushrooms, blueberries, and raspberries, they sold milk, cheese, eggs, chickens, vegetables, and fruit, and accepted in exchange fish, bread, tobacco, and any item of clothing or piece of fabric, even the most torn and threadbare, and also rubles, naturally, from those who still had some.

  Cesare soon knew them all, especially the young ones. I often went with him to the Russian women, to help with their interesting negotiations. I don’t mean to deny the usefulness of speaking the same language in a business matter, but, from experience, I can state that it is not strictly necessary. Each of the two parties knows perfectly well what the other wants; initially he doesn’t know the intensity of the desire, to buy and to sell, respectively, but he deduces it with excellent approximation from the other’s facial expression, from his gestures, and from the number of his replies.

  Here’s Cesare, showing up early at the market with a fish. He looks for Irina and finds her; she’s his contemporary and friend, whose liking he won some time ago by baptizing her Greta Garbo and giving her a pencil; Irina has a cow and sells milk, moloko, and in fact often, in the evening, returning from the fields, she stops at the Red House and milks directly into the containers of her customers. This morning it’s a matter of agreeing how much milk Cesare’s fish is worth. Cesare displays a two-liter pot (it’s one of Cantarella’s, and Cesare got it from a “ménage” that dissolved because of incompatibility) and makes a sign with outstretched hand, palm down, which means full. Irina laughs, and answers with lively, harmonious words, probably insults; she pushes Cesare’s hand away with a slap, and with two fingers points halfway up the side of the pot.

  Now it’s Cesare’s turn to be indignant. He waves the fish (not tampered with), holding it in the air by the tail with enormous effort, as if it weighed twenty kilos, and says, “This is a ribbona!” then runs it under Irina’s nose for its full length, closing his eyes and breathing in deeply as he does so, as if intoxicated by its fragrance. Taking advantage of the instant when Cesare has his eyes closed, Irina, quick as a cat, grabs the fish, cleanly detaches the head with her white teeth, and throws the flaccid mutilated body in Cesare’s face, with all of her remarkable strength. Then, in order not to ruin friendship and negotiation, she touches the pot three-quarters of the way up: a liter and a half. Cesare, partly stunned by the blow, mumbles in a hollow voice, “Yeees, and you’d like to get by with so little?” and other obscene gallantries suitable for restoring his manly honor; then, however, he accepts Irina’s last offer, and leaves her the fish, which she devours on the spot.

  We were to find the voracious Irina later, on several occasions, in a context that was rather embarrassing for us Latins, if completely normal for her.

  In a clearing in the woods, halfway between the village and the camp, were the public baths, which every Russian village has, and which at Starye Doroghi functioned on alternate days for the Russians and for us. A big wooden shed, with two long stone benches inside, had zinc tubs of various sizes scattered around. On the wall were faucets with hot and cold water, as much as you wanted. Soap, however, was not as much as you wanted, but was distributed very sparingly in the dressing room. The bureaucrat assigned to dispensing the soap was Irina.

  She sat at a table with a small block of stinking grayish soap on it, and held a knife in her hand. You took off your clothes, handing them over to be disinfected, and got in line, completely naked, in front of Irina’s table. In these duties as a public official, the girl was serious and incorruptible: her forehead wrinkled in concentration and her tongue childishly caught between her teeth, she cut a slice of soap for anyone aspiring to a bath: a little thinner for the thin, a little thicker for the fat, I don’t know if she was ordered to or if she was moved by an unconscious requirement of distributive justice. Not a muscle of her face twitched at
the impertinent remarks of the more vulgar clients.

  After the bath, you had to retrieve your own clothes in the disinfection room: and here was another surprise of the regime of Starye Doroghi. The room was heated to 120° Celsius; the first time they told us that we had to go in ourselves to get our clothes, we looked at one another in bewilderment. The Russians are made of bronze, we had seen it on many occasions, but we weren’t, and would have been roasted. Then someone tried, and saw that the undertaking wasn’t as terrible as it seemed, provided the following precautions were adopted: enter very wet; know in advance the number of your own hook; take a deep breath before going through the door and then don’t breathe again; don’t touch any metal object; and above all do it rapidly.

  The disinfected clothes presented interesting phenomena: corpses of exploded lice, strangely deformed; ebonite fountain pens, forgotten in the pocket of some well-off person, twisted and with the head fused; candle stubs melted and soaked into the fabric; an egg, left in a pocket for experimental purposes, cracked and dried into a horny mass, yet still edible. The two Russian attendants went in and out of the furnace indifferently, like the salamanders of legend.

  The days in Starye Doroghi passed like that, in an interminable, sleepy, beneficial indolence, like a long vacation, broken at intervals only by painful thoughts of our distant home, and by the enchantment of nature rediscovered. It was pointless to ask the Russians of the Command to find out why we weren’t going home, when we would go, by what route, what future awaited us; they didn’t know any more than we did, or, with polite candor, they bestowed on us fantastic or terrifying or absurd answers. That there were no trains; or that war was about to break out with America; or that they were soon sending us to work on collective farms; or that they were waiting to exchange us with Russian prisoners in Italy. They announced these or other enormities without hatred or mockery, in fact with an almost affectionate solicitude, as one speaks to children who ask too many questions, to quiet them. In truth, they didn’t understand our hurry to get home: didn’t we have food and a place to sleep? What was missing, at Starye Doroghi? We didn’t even have to work; and were they, soldiers of the Red Army, who had fought four years of war, and had won, complaining that they hadn’t yet returned home?