The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  They were in fact returning home, a few at a time, slowly, and, to judge by appearances, in extreme disarray. The spectacle of the Russian demobilization, which we had earlier admired at the station in Katowice, continued now in another form before our eyes, day by day; not by train but along the road in front of the Red House, shreds of the conquering army passed, from west to east, in tight-knit or scattered groups, at all hours of the day and night. Men passed walking, often barefoot, carrying their shoes over their shoulders to save the soles, because the road was long; in uniform or not, armed or disarmed, some singing lustily, others ashen-faced and exhausted. Some carried sacks or suitcases on their back; others, the most disparate objects—an upholstered chair, a standing lamp, copper pots, a radio, a grandfather clock.

  Others passed in carts, or on horseback; still others on motorcycles, in droves, drunk on speed, with an infernal noise. American-made Dodge trucks passed, crammed with men even on the hood and the bumpers; some hauled a trailer, just as full. We saw one of these trailers traveling on three wheels; in place of the fourth a pine tree had been fastened as securely as possible, on an angle, so that one end rested on the ground, dragging along it. As this was worn down by the friction, the trunk was pushed lower, thus keeping the vehicle balanced. Almost in front of the Red House, one of the three surviving tires went flat; the occupants, twenty or so, climbed out, tipped the trailer over on the side of the road, and got on the already crowded truck, which took off in a cloud of dust as they all shouted, “Hurray!”

  Other unusual vehicles also passed by, all overloaded: farm tractors, mail trucks, German buses formerly used on city routes, which still had the signs with the terminus names in Berlin, and some of which, already broken down, were hauled by other vehicles or by horses.

  Around the beginning of August, the nature of this many-faceted migration began to change, almost imperceptibly. Little by little, horses began to dominate over vehicles; after a week, one saw nothing but horses, the road belonged to them. They must have been all the horses in occupied Germany, tens of thousands a day. They passed interminably, in a blur of flies and horseflies and a sharp animal odor, tired, sweaty, hungry, driven and goaded by girls, one every hundred or more animals, with shouts and lashes of the whip; they, too, were on horseback, without saddles, bare-legged, hot, and disheveled. At night, they drove the horses into the fields and woods on the side of the road to feed in freedom and rest until dawn. There were draft horses, racehorses, mules, mares suckling foals, old arthritic nags, asses; we soon realized that not only were they not counted but that the herders didn’t care at all about the beasts that went off the road because they were tired or sick or lame, or about those which wandered off during the night. The horses were so many: what importance could it have if one more or less reached its destination?

  But for us, nearly starved of meat for eighteen months, a horse more or less had an enormous importance. The one who opened the hunt was, naturally, the Velletrano: he came to wake us one morning, bloody from head to foot, still holding in his hand the primitive weapon he had used, the fragment of a grenade attached with leather thongs to the top of a forked cudgel.

  From the inspection we made (since the Velletrano wasn’t very good at explaining in words) it seemed that he had given the deathblow to a horse that was probably already dying: the poor animal had a highly equivocal look, a swollen stomach that sounded like a drum, foam at its mouth; and it must have been kicking all night, suffering who knows what torments, since, lying on its side, it had dug two deep semicircles of brown earth in the grass with its hoofs. But we ate it anyway.

  Later, several pairs of specialized hunter-butchers established themselves, who, no longer content with killing sick or lost horses, chose the fattest, drove them purposely out of the herd, and killed them in the woods. They preferred to act at the first light of dawn; one covered the animal’s eyes with a rag, and the other delivered the mortal (but not always) blow to the neck.

  It was a period of absurd abundance: there was unlimited horse meat for all, free; at most, the hunters asked, for a dead horse, two or three rations of tobacco. All over the woods, and, when it rained, even in the corridors and the stairwells of the Red House, you saw men and women busy cooking enormous steaks of horse meat with mushrooms, without which it would have taken us survivors of Auschwitz many more months to regain our strength.

  Not even to this pillaging did the Russians of the Command devote the least thought. There was only one Russian intervention and a single punishment: toward the end of the passing of the horses, when horse meat was growing scarce and the price began to rise, someone from the San Vittore group had the impudence to open a real butcher shop, in one of the many crannies of the Red House. This initiative the Russians didn’t like—it wasn’t clear if for hygienic or moral reasons. The guilty man was publicly reprimanded, declared “chort (devil), parazit, spekulyant,” and put in a cell.

  It wasn’t a very severe punishment: for obscure reasons, perhaps out of a long-ago bureaucratic atavism holding that prisoners had to be three in number, the cell was entitled to three food rations a day. Whether the detainees were nine, or one, or none, it didn’t matter: there were always three rations. So, after ten days of overeating, the illegal butcher came out of the cell at the end of his punishment as fat as a pig and filled with joie de vivre.

  Vacation

  As always happens, the end of hunger exposed and made perceptible in us a more profound hunger. Not only the yearning for home, which in a certain sense was taken for granted and projected into the future, but a more immediate and urgent need for human contact, for mental and physical work, for novelty and variety.

  The life of Starye Doroghi, which would have been little less than perfect if understood as a break for vacation in a busy existence, began to weigh on us because of the very idleness that it imposed. In those conditions, many left, to seek life and adventures elsewhere. It wouldn’t be right to speak of flight, since the camp was neither enclosed nor guarded, and the Russians didn’t count us, or didn’t count us carefully; simply, they said goodbye to their friends and headed off into the fields. They got what they sought: they saw towns and people, they ventured far away, some as far as Odessa and Moscow, others as far as the borders; they encountered the jail cells of remote villages, the Biblical hospitality of the peasants, vague loves, dutifully senseless interrogations by the police, new hunger and solitude. They almost all returned to Starye Doroghi, since, if there was not a trace of barbed wire around the Red House, they found the legendary border to the west that they were trying to break open shut tight.

  They returned, and resigned themselves to that regime of limbo. The days of the northern summer were extremely long: it was already dawn at three in the morning, and the sunset dragged on tirelessly, until nine or ten in the evening. Excursions into the woods, meals, sleep, risky swims in the swamp, the endlessly repeated conversations, plans for the future were not enough to shorten the time of that wait, or to lighten the burden of it that day by day increased.

  We tried to approach the Russians, with scant success. Toward us, the more sophisticated (who spoke German or English) appeared courteous but distrustful, and often abruptly broke off a conversation, as if they felt guilty or were being watched. With the simpler Russians, the seventeen-year-old soldiers of the Command and the local peasants, the difficulties of language obliged us to truncated and primitive relationships.

  It’s six in the morning, but the light of day has some time ago put sleep to flight. With a pan of potatoes organized by Cesare, I’m heading toward a grove of trees where a brook flows. Since there is water and wood here, it’s our favorite place for cooking operations, and today I have the job of washing the dishes and the cooking that follows. I light a fire among three rocks; and, look, there’s a Russian a little ways off, small but muscular, with broad Asiatic features, busy with preparations similar to mine. He doesn’t have matches; he approaches, and seems to be asking for a light. He is
bare-chested, wearing only a pair of military trousers, and he doesn’t inspire confidence. He carries a bayonet at his waist.

  I offer him a lighted twig; the Russian takes it, stands there looking at me with suspicious curiosity. Does he think my potatoes are stolen? Or is he thinking of taking them away from me? Or has he mistaken me for someone he doesn’t like?

  No: what disturbs him is something else. He has realized that I don’t speak Russian, and this irritates him. The fact that a man, adult and normal, doesn’t speak Russian—that is, doesn’t speak—seems to him an attitude of insolent aggression, as if I had openly refused to answer him. His intentions are not bad; rather, he would like to give me a hand, to lift me out of my guilty condition of ignorance. Russian is so easy, everyone speaks it, even children who can’t walk yet. He sits beside me; I continue to fear for the potatoes, and keep an eye on him, but he, from all appearances, is determined only to help me regain lost time. He doesn’t understand, he doesn’t accept my position of refusal; he wants to teach me his language.

  Unfortunately, he is not much of a teacher; he lacks both method and patience, and in addition he is relying on the mistaken assumption that I can follow his explanations and his comments. As long as it’s a matter of vocabulary, it goes well enough, and basically I don’t dislike the game. He points to a potato and says, “Kartofel’,” then he grabs me by the shoulder with his powerful paw, sticks his index finger under my nose, cocks an ear, and waits. I repeat, “Kartofel’.” He makes a face of disgust: my pronunciation isn’t right—not even pronunciation! He tries again two or three times, then he gets tired of it and changes the word. “Ogon’,” he says, pointing to the fire; here things go better, my repetition seems to satisfy him. He looks around in search of other pedagogic objects, then stares at me intently, slowly stands up, still staring at me, as if he wanted to hypnotize me, and suddenly, instantaneously, he draws the bayonet out of the sheath and waves it in the air.

  I jump to my feet and run away, toward the Red House: so much for the potatoes. But after a few steps I here an ogre-like laugh resounding behind me; the joke was a success.

  “Britva,” he says to me, flashing the blade in the sun; and I repeat it, not feeling very comfortable. He, slashing like a paladin, cuts off a branch from a tree; he shows it to me and says, “Derevo.” I repeat, “Derevo.”

  “Ya russkiy soldat.” I repeat as well as I can, “Ya russkiy soldat.” Another laugh, which sounds contemptuous: he is a Russian soldier, I’m not, and that’s a big difference. He explains in a confused way, with a sea of words, pointing now to my chest, now his, and going yes and no with his head. He must think me a terrible student, a hopelessly obtuse case; to my relief, he returns to his fire and leaves me to my barbarity.

  Another day, but at the same time and in the same place, I come upon an unusual sight. There is a little knot of Italians gathered around a very young, tall Russian sailor, whose movements are rapid and eager. He is “telling” a war story; and since he knows that his language is not understood, he expresses himself as he can, in a way that to him is evidently as instinctive or more so than words. He expresses himself with all his muscles, with the precocious wrinkles that mark his face, with the flash of eyes and teeth, with leaps and gestures, and from it emerges a fascinating, powerful solo dance.

  It’s night, noch’: he slowly spins his hands in a circle with the palms facing down. All is silence: he utters a long “sst” with his index finger next to his nose. He narrows his eyes and points to the horizon: there, far far away, are the Germans, nemtsy. How many? Five, he signals with his fingers; “Finf,” he adds, in Yiddish, to clarify further. With his hand he digs a small round hole in the sand, and places five sticks in it, lying down, these are the Germans; and then he adds a sixth stick, on a slant, it’s the mashina, the machine gun. What are the Germans doing? Here his eyes light up with wild delight: spat’, they’re sleeping (and he snores quietly for a moment); they are sleeping, the fools, and they don’t know what’s in store for them.

  What did he do? Here’s what he did: he approached, cautiously, downwind, like a leopard. Then, suddenly, he jumped into the nest, drawing his knife; and he repeats, now completely absorbed in his staged rapture, his actions at the time. The ambush, and the quick, atrocious fight, here he is, re-creating it before our eyes. The man, his face transfigured by a tense and sinister laugh, becomes a whirlwind; he jumps forward and back, he strikes in front, to the sides, high, low, in an explosion of death-bearing energy. But it’s a lucid fury, his weapon (which exists, a long knife that he has pulled out of his boot) pierces, slices, rips fiercely and yet with tremendous skill, practically in front of our faces.

  All of a sudden the sailor stops, slowly straightens up, the knife falls from his hand; his chest is heaving, his gaze is spent. He looks at the ground, as if amazed not to see corpses and blood; he looks around bewildered, vacant; he notices us, and gives us a timid, childlike smile. “Koncheno,” he says: it’s over. And he slowly walks away.

  Very different, and mysterious then, as now, was the case of the Lieutenant. The Lieutenant (we never, and perhaps not coincidentally, learned his name) was a slim olive-skinned young Russian, who wore a constant frown. He spoke Italian perfectly, with a Russian accent so slight that it could have been mistaken for some Italian dialect intonation; but, unlike all the other Russians of the Command, he demonstrated little cordiality and kindness toward us. He was the only one we could question: How in the world had he come to speak Italian? Why was he here? Why were they keeping us in Russia four months after the end of the war? Were we hostages? Had we been forgotten? Why couldn’t we write to Italy? When would we return? . . . But the Lieutenant responded to all these questions, which were as heavy as lead, in a cutting and elusive way, with a confidence and authority that did not fit his rather low rank. We noted that even his superiors treated him with odd deference, as if they feared him.

  He maintained a surly detachment both from the Russians and from us. He never laughed, he didn’t drink, he didn’t accept invitations, or even cigarettes; he spoke little, and seemed to weigh his words, cautiously, one by one. When he first appeared, it seemed natural for us to think of him as our interpreter and delegate to the Russian Command, but it was soon clear that his responsibilities (if he really had any, and if his behavior was not merely a complicated way of making himself appear important) must be different, and we preferred to be silent in his presence. From some of his reticent remarks we discovered that he was well acquainted with the topography of Turin and of Milan. Had he been to Italy? “No,” he answered dryly, and gave no other explanations.

  The public health was excellent, and the clients of the infirmary were few and always the same: someone with boils, the usual hypochondriacs, some skin diseases, some colitis. One day a woman showed up with various vague complaints: nausea, backache, dizziness, hot flashes. Leonardo examined her; she had bruises everywhere, but she said not to pay attention to that, she had fallen down the stairs. With the means at our disposal it wasn’t easy to make a very in-depth diagnosis, but, by ruling things out, and also given the numerous precedents among our women, Leonardo declared to the patient that very likely it was a pregnancy, in the third month. The woman displayed neither joy nor anguish nor surprise nor indignation; she accepted the news, and thanked him, but didn’t leave. She went back and sat down on the bench in the hallway, quiet and tranquil, as if she were expecting someone.

  She was a small dark girl, about twenty-five, with a homely, withdrawn, dreamy look; her face, which wasn’t very attractive or very expressive, didn’t seem new to me, nor did her speech, with its slight Tuscan inflections.

  Certainly I must have met her, but not at Starye Doroghi. I felt a fleeting sensation of dislocation, a transposition, an important inversion of relations, but I couldn’t define it. Vaguely yet insistently, I associated with that female image a knot of intense feelings: humble and distant admiration, recognition, frustration, fear, even abstract desi
re, but mainly a deep and indefinable anguish.

  Since she continued to sit on the bench, quiet and still, without any sign of impatience, I asked if she needed something, if she still wanted us; the clinic was over, there were no other patients, it was time to close. “No, no,” she answered. “I don’t need anything. I’ll go now.”

  Flora! The dim memory abruptly took shape, coagulated into a precise, well-defined picture, rich in details of time and place, colors, retrospective states of mind, atmosphere, smells. She was Flora: the Italian woman in the cellars of Buna, the woman of the Lager, object of my dreams and Alberto’s for more than a month, unconscious symbol of lost freedom, no longer hoped for. Flora, whom I had met a year earlier, and it seemed a hundred.

  Flora was a provincial prostitute, who had ended up in Germany with the Todt Organization. She didn’t know German and she had no skills, so she had been assigned to sweep the floor at the Buna factory. She swept all day, wearily, without exchanging a word with anyone, without raising her eyes from the broom or from her endless task. No one seemed to pay any attention to her, and she, as if she feared the light of day, went as seldom as possible to the upper floors; she swept the cellars interminably, from one end to the other, and then she started again like a sleepwalker.

  She was the only woman we had seen for months, and she spoke our language, but we Häftlinge were forbidden to talk to her. To Alberto and me she seemed beautiful, mysterious, ethereal. In spite of the prohibition, which in some way increased the enchantment of our encounters, adding to them the sharp taste of the illicit, we exchanged some furtive words with Flora; we made ourselves known as Italians, and asked her for bread. We asked a little reluctantly, conscious of debasing ourselves and the quality of that delicate human contact; but hunger, with which it’s difficult to compromise, impelled us not to waste the opportunity.