by Primo Levi
Then, after this very rapid digression, he returned to taking off shirts, pants, socks, and girdles with gravity and composure, trying in vain to lift the weight. At the end, he stood in his underwear amid a mountain of items of clothing: he took off the mask, and the audience recognized in him the likable and very popular cook Gridacucco, small, thin, hopping, and busy, and fittingly nicknamed Scannagrillo (Cricket Killer) by Cesare. The applause was deafening: Scannagrillo looked around bewildered, then, as if suddenly overcome by stage fright, he picked up the weight, which probably was made of cardboard, stuck it under his arm, and raced off.
The other great success was the song “The Three-Cornered Hat.” This is a song absolutely without sense, which consists of a single quatrain repeated over and over (“My hat has three corners / My hat it has three corners / If it didn’t have three corners / It wouldn’t be my hat”) and sung to a tune so trite and worn by tradition that its origin is unknown. It is characterized by the fact that, at every repetition, one word of the quatrain is silent, replaced by a gesture: the hand concave over the head for “hat,” the fist pounding the chest for “my,” the fingers raised upward to form a cone shape, for “corners,” and so on, until, with all the words eliminated, the stanza is reduced to a mutilated stutter of articles and conjunctions that can’t be expressed by signs, or, in another version, to total silence punctuated by rhythmic gestures.
In the heterogeneous group of “Romanians” there must have been someone who had theater in his blood; in their interpretation, this childish oddity became a sinister, obscurely allegorical pantomime, full of symbolic and disquieting resonance.
A small orchestra, whose instruments had been provided by the Russians, started the tired old tune on low, muted notes. Pitching slowly to the rhythm, three spectral characters came onstage: they were enveloped in black cloaks, with black hoods, and from the hoods emerged faces of a decrepit and corpse-like pallor, marked by deep, livid wrinkles. They entered with unsteady dance steps, holding in their hands three long, spent wax tapers. Still following the rhythm, they reached the center of the stage and bowed to the audience with senile difficulty, bending slowly over arthritic hips, in short weary jerks; to bow and straighten again took two good minutes, which were anguishing for the spectators. Once they had painfully regained an erect posture, the orchestra was silent, and the three phantoms began to sing the silly verses, in tremulous, hoarse voices. They sang, and at every repetition, as the silences accumulated, filled by their shaky gestures, it seemed that life, along with voice, was vanishing from them. Punctuated by the hypnotic pulse of a single, muted drum, the paralysis proceeded slowly and inevitably. The final repeat, with the orchestra, the singers, and the audience in absolute silence, was a harrowing death agony, a mortal spasm.
When the song was over, the orchestra started up again lugubriously: the three figures, with an extreme effort and trembling in every limb, repeated their bow. They managed, incredibly, to straighten up again, and, with the quivering tapers, with terrible, macabre hesitations, but always following the rhythm, disappeared forever into the wings.
The “Three-Cornered Hat” number took your breath away, and was greeted every night with a silence more eloquent than applause. Why? Perhaps because we could perceive, behind the grotesque display, the heavy breath of a collective dream, the dream that emanates from exile and idleness, when work and suffering cease, and nothing places a barrier between man and himself; perhaps because in it we could glimpse the impotence and nullity of our life and of life, and the crooked, hunchbacked profile of the monsters generated by the sleep of reason.
An allegorical play that was organized later was more innocuous, in fact childish and jumbled. It was obvious from the title, The Shipwreck of the Inert; the inert were us, the Italians who had got lost on the way home, and become accustomed to an existence of inertia and boredom; the desert island was Starye Doroghi; and the cannibals were obviously them, the good Russians of the Command. Cannibals down to the last detail: they appeared onstage naked and tattooed, they blathered in a primitive and unintelligible dialect, they fed on raw, bloody human flesh. Their chief lived in a grass hut, he had as a footstool a white slave permanently on all fours, and hanging on his chest was a large alarm clock, which he consulted not for the time but for signs to guide his decisions on governing. The Comrade Colonel in charge of our camp must have been a man of spirit, or extremely tolerant, or foolish, to have authorized such an acerbic caricature of his person and his job: or perhaps it was yet again a matter of the benevolent age-old Russian carelessness, Oblomovian negligence, that emerged at all levels at that happy moment of their history.
In fact, we were struck at least once by the suspicion that the Russians of the Command had not fully digested the satire, or regretted it. After the première of The Shipwreck, an uproar broke out in the Red House in the middle of the night: shouts throughout the dormitories, doors kicked in, commands in Russian, Italian, and bad German. We who came from Katowice, and had witnessed a similar pandemonium, were only half frightened; the others lost their heads (especially the “Romanians,” who were responsible for the script), the rumor of a Russian reprisal immediately spread, and the more apprehensive were already thinking of Siberia.
The Russians, through the intermediary of the Lieutenant, who in the circumstances seemed more wretched and contemptuous than usual, made us all get up and dress in a hurry, and lined us up in one of the mazelike corridors of the building. Half an hour passed, an hour, and nothing happened; the line, in which I occupied one of the last places, couldn’t understand where the head was, and didn’t advance a step. In addition to the rumor of reprisal for The Shipwreck, the wildest hypotheses ran from mouth to mouth: the Russians had decided to look for Fascists; they were looking for the two girls in the woods; they were going to examine us for gonorrhea; they were recruiting people to work on the collectives; they were looking for specialists, like the Germans. Then an Italian came by, all cheerful. He said, “They’re giving us money!” and he waved a bunch of rubles. No one believed him; but a second passed, then a third, and they all confirmed the news. The affair was never well understood (but anyway, who ever understood fully why we were in Starye Doroghi, and what we were doing there?); according to the most knowledgeable interpretation, we were to be considered equivalent to prisoners of war, by at least some Soviet officers, and so were due some recompense for days devoted to work. But on what principle these days were calculated (almost none of us had ever worked for the Russians, in Starye Doroghi or before); why even the children should be remunerated; and, principally, why the ceremony should happen so tumultuously between two and six in the morning—all this is fated to remain obscure.
The Russians distributed compensation varying from thirty to eighty rubles a person, according to inscrutable or random criteria. The sum was not enormous, but it gave pleasure to everyone; it was equivalent to several days of extra food. We returned to bed at dawn, commenting variously on the event; and no one understood that it was a lucky omen, a prelude to returning home.
But from that day on, even without any official announcement, the signs multiplied. Tenuous, ill-defined, timid signs, but enough to promote the sensation that something was finally moving, something was about to happen. A platoon of young Russian soldiers arrived, beardless and out of place; they told us that they had come from Austria, and were supposed to leave again soon, escorting a convoy of foreigners; but they didn’t know where. After our months of futile begging, the Command distributed shoes to all those who had need of them. Finally, the Lieutenant disappeared, as if taken up to heaven.
It was all extremely vague and not a little ambiguous. Even given that a departure was imminent, who could assure us that it would be to our own country, and not a new transfer somewhere or other? The long experience we had gained by now of the Russians’ methods counseled us to temper our hope with a healthy quotient of doubt. The season, too, contributed to our anxiety: in the first ten days of Septemb
er, the sun and the sky darkened, the air became cold and damp, and the first rains fell, reminding us of the precariousness of our situation.
Road, meadows, and fields turned into a desolate swamp. Water leaked copiously through the roof of the Red House, dripping pitilessly at night on our bunks; more water came in through the windows, which had no glass. None of us had warm clothing. In the village the peasants could be seen returning from the woods with cartloads of sticks and logs; others patched up their houses, repaired the straw roofs; all, even the women, wore boots. The wind carried from the houses a new, alarming odor: the bitter smoke of damp wood burning, the odor of the coming winter. Another winter, the third: and what a winter!
But the announcement came, finally: the announcement of return, of salvation, of the conclusion of our long wanderings. It came in two new and unusual ways, from two directions, and was convincing and open and dissipated every anxiety. It came in the theater and through the theater, and it came along the muddy road, brought by a strange and distinguished messenger.
It was night, it was raining, and in the crowded sloping hall (what else could one do in the evening, before slipping under the damp blankets?) The Shipwreck of the Inert was playing, perhaps for the ninth or tenth time. This Shipwreck was a shapeless but inventive mishmash, vivid because of the witty, good-humored allusions to our everyday life; we had all been present at all its performances, and now we knew it mostly by heart, and at every repeat we laughed less at the scene in which a Cantarella even more savage than the original fashioned an enormous tin pot commissioned by the man-eating Russians, who intended to cook in it the chieftains of the inert; and the final scene, in which the ship arrived, was more and more heart-wrenching.
Because there was, as obviously there should be, a scene in which a sail appeared on the horizon, and all the shipwrecked men and women, laughing and crying, rushed to the inhospitable beach. Now, just as the oldest among them, white-haired and bent by the interminable wait, extended one finger toward the sea and shouted, “A ship!” and while all of us, with a lump in our throat, prepared for the happy ending of the last scene, then to retire yet again into our dens, we heard a sudden crash, and the cannibal chieftain, a true deus ex machina, plummeted upright onto the stage, as if he had fallen from the sky. He tore the alarm clock from his neck, the ring from his nose, the helmet of feathers from his head, and shouted in a thunderous voice, “Tomorrow we depart!”
We were taken by surprise, and at first we didn’t understand. Might it be a joke? But the savage pressed on: “I’m telling the truth, it’s not the play, this is it! The telegram arrived, tomorrow we’re all going home!” This time it was we Italians, actors, spectators, and extras, who instantly overwhelmed the frightened Russians—they understood nothing in that scene that wasn’t in the script. We came outside in a disorderly fashion, and at first there was a breathless overlapping of questions without answers; but then we saw the Colonel, amid a circle of Italians, nodding yes, and then we knew that the time had come. We lit fires in the woods and no one slept; we passed the rest of the night singing and dancing, telling one another our past adventures and recalling our lost companions: since mankind is not permitted to experience joys untarnished.
The next morning, while the Red House was buzzing and teeming, like a beehive preparing for the swarm, we saw a small automobile coming along the road. Very few cars passed, so the fact roused our interest, especially since it wasn’t a military vehicle. It slowed in front of the camp, swerved, and turned in, jolting over the rough ground in front of the strange façade. Then we saw that it was a vehicle familiar to all of us, a Fiat 500A, a rusty, beat-up Topolino, with its suspension pitifully misshapen.
It stopped in front of the entrance and was immediately surrounded by a crowd of the curious. An extraordinary figure emerged from it, with great effort, as if he would never finish getting out. He was a very tall, corpulent, ruddy man, in a uniform we had never seen before: a Soviet general, a high-ranking general, a field marshal. When he was completely out of the door, the tiny auto body rose a good few inches, and the suspension seemed to breathe. The man was literally larger than the car, and it was incomprehensible how he could have got into it. His dimensions were further enlarged and accentuated; he took a black object out of the car and unfolded it. It was a cloak that hung to the ground from two long rigid epaulets, of wood; with a casual gesture, attesting to a great familiarity with that equipment, he whirled it around and unfolded it over his back, so that his outline, which had been rounded, became angular. Seen from behind, the man was a monumental black rectangle of one meter by two, who advanced toward the vault of the Red House with majestic symmetry, between two lines of puzzled people whom he towered over by an entire head. How would he get through the door, wide as he was? But he folded back the two epaulets, like wings, and entered.
That heavenly messenger, who traveled alone through the mud in an ancient, disintegrating small car, was Marshal Timoshenko in person, Semyon Konstantinovich Timoshenko, the hero of the Bolshevik Revolution, of Karelia and Stalingrad. After his welcome by the local Russians, which for that matter was singularly sober and lasted only a few minutes, he came out of the building again and chatted informally with us Italians, like the rough Kutuzov in War and Peace, on the field, amid the pots of fish cooking and laundry hung out to dry. He spoke Romanian fluently with the Romanians (since he was, rather is, originally from Bessarabia), and even knew a little Italian. The damp wind stirred his gray locks, which contrasted with his ruddy, tanned complexion, the complexion of a soldier, and of a hearty eater and drinker. He told us that yes, it was really true: we would be leaving soon, very soon; “war over, everybody home”; the escort was ready, also the provisions for the journey, the papers were in order. In a few days the train would be waiting for us in the station in Starye Doroghi.
From Starye Doroghi to Iasi
That the departure was not to be expected “tomorrow” in the literal sense, as the savage had said in the theater, did not really surprise anyone. Already on several occasions we had been able to observe that the corresponding Russian term, through one of those semantic slippages that are never without explanation, has a much less definite and peremptory meaning than our “tomorrow,” and, in accord with Russian habits, has the value, rather, of “one of the next few days,” “at some time or another,” “in the not too distant future”: in other words, the precision of temporal calculation there is slightly moderated. It didn’t surprise us, and it didn’t upset us excessively. When departure was certain, we realized, with the same wonder, that that boundless land, those fields and woods that had seen the battle to which we owed our salvation, those untouched and primordial horizons, that vigorous and life-loving people, were in our hearts, had penetrated us, and would long remain there, glorious and vivid images of a unique period of our existence.
Not, therefore, “tomorrow” but a few days after the announcement, on September 15, 1945, we left the Red House in a caravan and arrived at the station in Starye Doroghi in a mood of celebration. The train was there, it was waiting for us, it wasn’t an illusion of our senses. There was coal, also water, and the locomotive, enormous and majestic as a monument in itself, was at the right end. We hurried to touch its side: alas, it was cold. There were sixty cars: freight cars, rather dilapidated, parked on a siding. We invaded them with jubilant fury, and without quarreling; we were fourteen hundred, that is to say twenty to twenty-five per car, which, in the light of our many earlier railway experiences, meant a comfortable and relaxing journey.
The train did not leave right away; in fact it did not leave until the day after. It was pointless to ask questions of the stationmaster in the little station; he knew nothing. In that interval only two or three trains passed through, and none stopped; they didn’t even slow down. When one of these trains approached, the stationmaster waited for it on the platform, holding high up a wreath made of branches, from which a small bag hung; the engineer leaned out of the moving locom
otive, his right arm bent like a hook. He hooked the wreath as he went by and immediately afterward threw to the ground another one just like it, also with the sack attached: this was the postal service, the only contact between Starye Doroghi and the rest of the world.
All else was immobility and silence. Around the station, which was slightly elevated, stretched interminable plains, limited only to the west by the black line of the forest, and cut by the dizzying ribbon of the tracks. There were herds grazing, few and far apart, the only breaks in the monotony. In the long evening before departure, the songs of the shepherds could be heard, faint and measured; one began singing, a second answered from kilometers away, then another and yet another, from all the points of the horizon, and it was as if the earth itself were singing.
We got ready for the night. After so many months and moves, we were now an organized community, so we had not arranged ourselves randomly in the cars but, rather, in natural groups with common bonds. The “Romanians” occupied some ten cars; three fell to the thieves from San Vittore, who didn’t want anyone and whom no one wanted; another three were for single women; four or five held the couples, legitimate or not; two, divided into two stories by a horizontal partition, and noticeable for the laundry hung out to dry, belonged to the families with children. Most impressive was the orchestra car, where the entire theater company of the sloping hall resided, with all their instruments (including a piano), graciously presented by the Russians at the moment of departure. Ours, through Leonardo’s initiative, had been declared the infirmary car: a presumptuous and wishful denomination, since Leonardo had at his disposal only a syringe and a stethoscope, and the wooden floor was just as hard as that of the other cars; but then in the whole convoy there wasn’t a sick person, nor did any client appear for the entire journey. About twenty of us lived there, among whom were, naturally, Cesare and Daniele, and, less naturally, the Moor, Signor Unverdorben, Giacomantonio, and the Velletrano; in addition, there were some fifteen former military prisoners.