by Primo Levi
Flora brought us bread several times, and delivered it with a distracted air, in the dark corners of the cellar, sniffling and tearful. She felt pity for us, and would have liked to help us in other ways, but she didn’t know how and was afraid. Afraid of everything, like a defenseless animal: maybe even of us, not directly but as inhabitants of that foreign and incomprehensible world that had torn her from her country, thrust a broom in her hand, and banished her underground, to sweep floors already swept a hundred times.
We two were overwhelmed, grateful, and filled with shame. We had become suddenly aware of our wretched appearance, and suffered for it. Alberto, who knew how to find the strangest things because he went around all day with his eyes on the ground, like a bloodhound, found a comb somewhere, and we gave it solemnly to Flora, who had hair; after that we felt tied to her by a sweet, clean tie, and we dreamed of her at night. So we felt an acute uneasiness, an absurd and impotent mixture of jealousy and deception, when the evidence forced us to discover, to admit to ourselves, that Flora had meetings with other men. Where and how, and with whom? In the least elaborate place and in the least elaborate ways: nearby, in the hay, in a secret rabbit hutch organized in a closet under the stairs by a cooperative of German and Polish Kapos. It took almost nothing: a wink of the eye, an imperious nod of the head, and Flora put down the broom and obediently followed the man of the moment. She returned alone, after a few minutes; she readjusted her clothes and began sweeping again without looking at us. After that squalid discovery, Flora’s bread tasted to us like salt; but not for that reason did we stop accepting it and eating it.
I didn’t make myself known to Flora, out of compassion toward her and toward myself. Compared with those ghosts, my self of Buna, the woman of memory and her reincarnation, I felt changed, intensely “other,” like a butterfly before a caterpillar. In the limbo of Starye Doroghi I felt dirty, ragged, tired, heavy, worn out by waiting, and yet young and full of power and facing toward the future; Flora, on the other hand, hadn’t changed. She now lived with a Bergamask shoemaker, not as a spouse but as a slave. She washed and cooked for him, and followed him with humble and submissive eyes; the man, bullish and apelike, watched her every step, and beat her savagely at any suspicious sign. This was the source of the bruises that covered her; she had come secretly to the infirmary, and now she hesitated to leave and confront the anger of her master.
At Starye Doroghi no one required anything of us, nothing pressured us, no force acted on us, we didn’t have to defend ourselves against anything; we felt inert and settled, like the sediment of a flood. In this sluggish and eventless life, the arrival of the Soviet military cinema van signaled a memorable date. It must have been a traveling unit, already in service with the troops at the front or behind the lines, and now it, too, was on the way home; it included a projector, a generator unit, a supply of films, and the staff. It stopped at Starye Doroghi for three days, and showed a film every night.
The projections took place in the theater. It was very spacious, and the chairs removed by the Germans had been replaced by rustic benches, balanced unsteadily on the floor, which sloped upward from the screen toward the balcony. The balcony, also on a slant, was reduced to a narrow strip; the upper part, thanks to a brilliant invention on the part of the mysterious and fanciful architects of the Red House, had been partitioned and subdivided into a series of little rooms, without air or light, whose doors opened toward the stage. There lived the single women of our colony.
The first evening an old Austrian film was shown, in itself mediocre, and of little interest to the Russians, but full of emotion for us Italians. It was a silent film of war and espionage, with titles in German, that recounted an episode on the Italian front during the First World War. It displayed the same candor and the same rhetorical paraphernalia of similar films produced by the Allies: military honor, sacred borders, heroic fighters ready to weep like virgins, bayonet attacks carried out with improbable enthusiasm. Only, it was all upside down: the Austro-Hungarians, both officers and ordinary soldiers, were noble, vigorous characters, brave and gallant; they had the sensitive, spiritual faces of stoic warriors, or the rude, honest faces of peasants, inspiring sympathy at first glance. The Italians, all of them, were a crowd of vulgar scoundrels, all marked by obvious and laughable physical defects: cross-eyed, obese, round-shouldered, knock-kneed, with low, receding foreheads. They were cowardly and ferocious, brutal and shifty-looking. The officers, with faces like depraved weaklings, were crushed under the incongruous mass of the pot-shaped cap familiar to us in portraits of Cadorna and Diaz; the soldiers had piggish or monkey-like scowls, accentuated by the helmet of our fathers, worn on a slant or pulled over the eyes in sinister fashion to hide their gaze.
The traitor of traitors, an Italian spy in Vienna, was a weird chimera, half D’Annunzio and half Vittorio Emanuele: ridiculously small in stature, so that he was forced to look upward at everyone, he wore a monocle and a bow tie, and he moved up and down the screen hopping arrogantly, like a young cock. Returning to the Italian lines, he supervised with horrifying coolness the shooting of ten innocent Tyrolese citizens.
We Italians, unaccustomed to seeing ourselves in the role of the “enemy,” odious by definition, and dismayed by the idea of being hated by anyone, got from the film a complex pleasure that was distressing, and yet a source of useful reflections.
On the second evening, a Soviet film was announced, and the place began to heat up: among us Italians, because it was the first we had seen; among the Russians, because the title promised a war story, full of action and shooting. The rumor spread; unexpectedly, Russian soldiers arrived from garrisons near and far, crowding in front of the theater doors. When the doors opened, they burst inside like a river in flood, noisily climbing over the benches, pushing and shoving as they thronged in.
The film was simple and straightforward. A Soviet military plane was forced to land, because of a mechanical failure, in an unspecified mountainous frontier territory; it was a small two-seater, with only the pilot on board. When the malfunction had been repaired, and he was on the point of taking off, a local notable came toward him, a turbaned sheikh with an extremely suspicious look, and with unctuous bows and Turkish-style genuflections begged to be taken on board. Even an idiot would have figured out that he was a dangerous character, probably a smuggler, a dissident leader, or a foreign agent; but anyway the pilot, with foolish tolerance, gave in to his long-winded prayers and settled him in the backseat of the plane.
We saw the takeoff, and some good aerial shots of mountain chains sparkling with glaciers (I think it was the Caucasus). Then the sheikh, with devious, sneaky, venomous moves, drew a revolver out of the folds of his robe, pointed it at the pilot’s back, and ordered him to change course. The pilot, without even turning around, reacted instantaneously and decisively: he pointed the plane’s nose upward, and executed an abrupt loop. The sheikh crumpled up on the seat, in the grip of fear and nausea; the pilot, instead of putting him out of action, continued tranquilly on his way to his intended destination. After a few minutes, and more wonderful scenes of the mountains, the bandit recovered; he crept toward the pilot, again raised the gun, and repeated the attempt. This time the plane did a nosedive, dropping thousands of meters, toward an inferno of steep peaks and abysses; the sheikh fainted and the plane regained altitude. So the flight went on for more than an hour, with repeated attacks by the sheikh and new acrobatics by the pilot; until, after a last order from the sheikh, who seemed to have nine lives, like a cat, the plane went into a spin, clouds, mountains, and ice caps whirled fiercely, and finally it descended, coming in safely on the planned landing field. The lifeless sheikh was handcuffed; the pilot, fresh as a daisy, instead of being questioned, received handshakes from stern superiors, promotion in the field, and a modest kiss from a girl who seemed to have been waiting a long time for him.
The Russian soldiers in the audience had followed the clumsy adventure with clamorous enthusiasm, applauding the
hero and insulting the traitor. But it was nothing compared with what happened the third night.
The third night, the show announced was Hurricane, a pretty good American movie of the thirties. A Polynesian sailor, a modern version of the “noble savage,” a simple, strong and gentle man, is coarsely provoked by a group of drunken white men, and he wounds one of them slightly. Right is obviously on his side, but no one testifies in his favor; he is arrested, put on trial, and, pitifully uncomprehending, condemned to a month in jail. He can stand it only for a few days, not just because of his almost animal-like need for freedom and his intolerance of chains but mainly because he feels, he knows, that not he but the white men have violated justice; if this is the law of the whites, then the law is unjust. He knocks down a guard and escapes in a hail of bullets.
Now the gentle sailor has become a real criminal. He is hunted throughout the whole archipelago, but there’s no need to look far; he has returned peacefully to his village. He is captured, and sent to a remote island, to a prison: hard labor and lashes. He flees again, jumping off a high cliff into the sea, steals a canoe, and sails for days toward his land, without eating or drinking; he is approaching, exhausted, just as the promised hurricane of the title looms. Suddenly the hurricane erupts in a fury, and the man, like a good American hero, struggles alone against the elements, and saves not only his wife but the church, the minister, and the faithful who had vainly sought shelter there. Thus rehabilitated, he sets off toward a happy future, with the girl at his side, as the sun appears amid the last, vanishing clouds.
This story, typically individualistic, elemental, and well told, unleashed among the Russians a seismic excitement. An hour before it started, a tumultuous crowd (attracted by the poster, which bore an image of the magnificent, scantily clothed Polynesian girl) was beating on the doors; it was made up almost entirely of very young, armed soldiers. It was obvious that in the “sloping hall,” big as it was, there wouldn’t be room for everyone, even standing room; precisely for that reason they fought stubbornly, elbowing their way in. One fell, was trampled, and came the next day to the infirmary. We thought we would find something broken, but he had only a few bruises: these were people with strong bones. In short order, the doors were bashed in, shattered, and the pieces were seized like clubs: the crowd that swarmed into the theater was highly excited and bellicose.
For them it was as if the characters in the film were not shadows but flesh-and-blood friends or enemies, within reach of their hands. The sailor was cheered at every undertaking, greeted with noisy hurrahs, with machine guns brandished dangerously over the spectators’ heads. The police and the prison guards were grossly insulted, met with cries of “Get out,” “Die,” “Down with you,” “Leave him alone.” When, after the first escape, the fugitive, exhausted and wounded, is again in chains, mocked and derided by the sardonic and asymmetrical features of John Carradine, pandemonium broke out. The audience rose up shouting, in generous defense of the innocent man; a threatening wave of avengers moved toward the screen, in turn insulted and restrained by those who were less inflamed or more eager to see how it would end. Rocks flew at the screen, clods of earth, fragments of the demolished doors, even a regulation boot, hurled with furious precision between the odious eyes of the great enemy, dominating an enormous foreground.
When the film arrived at the long, powerful hurricane sequence, the tumult became a witches’ sabbath. Sharp cries were heard from the few women who remained trapped in the crush; a stake appeared, then another, passed from hand to hand over the heads, amid deafening shouts. At first it was hard to understand what the stakes were to be used for, then the plan became clear: a plan probably thought up by those who had been excluded and were clamoring outside. They were trying to climb up to the balcony women’s rooms.
The stakes were positioned upright and leaned against the balcony, and several of the thugs, pulling off their boots, began to climb, the way one might climb a greased pole at a village fair. Immediately, the spectacle of the ascent supplanted all interest in the spectacle that was continuing on the screen. As soon as one of the contenders succeeded in getting above the sea of heads, he was grabbed by the feet and brought back to earth by ten or twenty hands. Groups of supporters and adversaries formed; a bold climber was able to get free of the crowd and pull himself up with strong arm strokes, another followed on the same pole. Almost at the level of the balcony they struggled for a few minutes, the one below grabbing the heels of the other, the latter kicking blindly to defend himself. At the same time, the heads of a group of Italians, looking out from the balcony, were visible; they had rushed up the winding stairs of the Red House to protect the besieged women. The pole, pushed back by the defenders, wavered, hovered for a long instant in a vertical position, then crashed into the crowd like a pine felled by woodcutters, with the two men clinging to it. At this point, I don’t know if accidentally or thanks to some wise intervention by the authorities, the lamp of the projector went out, everything was plunged into darkness, the noise of the audience reached a frightening intensity, and everyone cleared out into the moonlight, amid shouts, curses, and cheers.
To the regret of all, the cinema caravan left the next morning. The following night, a renewed and daring Russian attempt to invade the women’s quarters took place, this time by means of the roofs and eaves, following which a system of night guards was instituted, supervised by Italian volunteers. Later, out of greater prudence, the women of the balcony moved out, and joined the bulk of the female population, in a collective room: a less private but more secure arrangement.
Theater
Toward the middle of August, however, common ground with the Russians was found. Despite trade secrecy, the whole camp learned that the “Romanians,” with the consent and support of the authorities, were organizing a revue; the rehearsals took place in the sloping hall, whose doors had been repaired as well as possible, and were guarded by pickets who kept all outsiders from entering. Among the numbers in the revue was a heel-and-toe dance; the performer, a very conscientious sailor, practiced every night, with a small circle of experts and consultants. Now, this exercise is by nature noisy: the Lieutenant passed that way, heard the rhythmic din, forced his way through the blockade with a clear abuse of power, and entered. He watched two or three sessions, to the discomfort of the bystanders, without emerging from his habitual reserve and without softening his cryptic scowl; then, unexpectedly, he made known to the organizing committee that in his free time he was a passionate dance fan, that in fact he had long wanted to learn heel-and-toe dancing, and that the dancer was therefore invited, or rather ordered, to give him a series of lessons.
The spectacle of these lessons interested me so much that I found a way of watching them, slipping through the strange labyrinths of the Red House and flattening myself in a dark corner. The Lieutenant was the best student that can be imagined: serious, eager, tenacious, and physically well endowed. He danced in his uniform, with his boots, for exactly an hour a day, without granting a moment’s rest to the teacher or to himself. He made rapid progress.
When the revue was performed, a week later, the heel-and-toe number was a surprise for everyone. Teacher and student danced, faultlessly, in perfect step and perfect time: the teacher, winking and smiling, wearing a fantastic Gypsy costume fashioned by the women; the Lieutenant, his nose in the air and his eyes fixed on the ground, gloomily, as if he were performing a sacrificial rite. In uniform, naturally, and with the medals on his chest and the holster at his side dancing with him.
They were applauded; various other, not very original numbers were likewise applauded (some Neapolitan songs from the classic repertory; “The Firemen of Viggiù”; a sketch in which a lover wins the heart of the girl with a bouquet not of flowers but of ryba, our stinking daily fish; the “Montanara” sung by a chorus, with Signor Unverdorben the chorus master). But two less ordinary numbers had enthusiastic, and well-deserved, success.
A large fat character, masked, padded,
and bundled, like Michelin tires’ famous Bibendum, stumbled onto the stage, legs wide apart. He greeted the audience like an athlete, hands clasped above his head; meanwhile, with great effort, two stagehands rolled in next to him an enormous piece of equipment consisting of a bar and two wheels, like those used by weight lifters.
He bent over and grabbed the bar, straining all his muscles: nothing, the bar didn’t move. Then he took off his coat, folded it carefully, placed it on the ground, and prepared for a new attempt. Since the weight didn’t leave the ground this time, either, he took off a second coat, placing it beside the first; and so on through various coats, civilian and military, raincoats, cassocks, overcoats. The athlete diminished in volume before your eyes, the stage filled with garments, and the weight seemed to have put down roots.
When the coats were gone, he began to take off jackets of all kinds (among them a striped Häftling jacket, in homage to our minority), then an abundance of shirts, and every time, after every item that he put down, he tried with punctilious solemnity to lift the contraption, and gave it up without the least sign of impatience or surprise. Then, while he was taking off the fourth or fifth shirt, he stopped suddenly. He examined the shirt attentively, first at arm’s length, then more closely; he searched in the collar and the seams with agile apelike movements and, lo and behold, extracted with thumb and index finger an imaginary louse. He looked at it with eyes dilated in horror, placed it delicately on the floor, drew a chalk circle around it, with one hand snatched the bar, which for the occasion had become light as a reed, off the floor, and squashed the louse with a sharp, precise blow.