by Primo Levi
We spent the night dozing restlessly on the bare floor of the carriage. Day came: the engine was smoking, the engineer was in his place and waiting with Olympian calm for the pressure in the boiler to build up. In midmorning, the engine roared, with a marvelous deep metallic voice, shook, poured forth black smoke, the tie rods grew taut, and the wheels began to turn. We looked at one another, almost bewildered. We had endured, after all: we had won. After the year of suffering and patience in the Lager; after the wave of death that followed the liberation; after the cold and hunger and contempt and the ferocious company of the Greek; after the illnesses and misery of Katowice; after the senseless moves, because of which we felt condemned to orbit for eternity through the Russian spaces, like useless spent stars; after the idleness and bitter homesickness of Starye Doroghi, we were climbing back, therefore, traveling up, on the road home. Time, after two years of paralysis, had regained vigor and value, was working again for us, and this put an end to the lethargy of the long summer, to the threat of the coming winter, and made us impatient, greedy for days and miles.
But very soon, from the first hours of the journey, we had to realize that the hour for impatience had not yet arrived; that happy route loomed long and laborious and not without surprises, a small railway odyssey within our greater odyssey. We still needed patience, in unexpected amounts: more patience.
Our train was more than half a kilometer long; the cars were in poor condition, as were the tracks, the speed was laughable, no more than forty or fifty kilometers an hour. The line had a single track; the stations that had available a siding long enough to allow a stop were few, and often the train had to be broken into two or three pieces, and pushed onto sidings by means of complicated and extremely slow maneuvers, in order to allow other trains to pass.
There were no authorities on board, with the exception of the engineer and the escort, consisting of the seven eighteen-year-old soldiers who had come from Austria to get us. These, although armed to the teeth, were ingenuous, kind creatures, with meek and innocent hearts, as lively and carefree as schoolboys on vacation, and utterly without authority or common sense. Whenever the train stopped, we saw them walking up and down the platform, with guns slung over their shoulders and proud, officious looks. They made a show of importance, as if they were escorting a transport of dangerous criminals, but it was all show; we soon realized that their inspections were increasingly focused on the two family cars, in the middle of the convoy. They were attracted not by the young wives but by the vaguely domestic atmosphere that emanated from those traveling Gypsy-like dwellings, and perhaps reminded them of their distant homes and their own childhood, which had scarcely ended; but mainly they were fascinated by the children, so much so that, after the first stops, they fixed their daily residence in the family cars, and withdrew to the one reserved for them only to spend the night. They were polite and useful; they helped the mothers willingly, they fetched water and split wood for the stoves. With the Italian boys they struck up a curious and unsymmetrical friendship. They learned various games from them, including the one in which you shoot marbles along a complicated course. In Italy, it’s understood as an allegorical representation of the Tour of Italy: thus the young Russians’ enthusiasm seemed odd to us, for in their land bicycles are rare, and cycling competitions nonexistent. In any case, it was a discovery for them: at the first stop in the morning, it wasn’t rare to see the seven Russians get out of their sleeping car, hurry to the family cars, open the doors with authority, and lift the still sleepy children onto the ground. Then they got busy digging the course in the dirt with their bayonets, and were rapidly immersed in the game, crouching on the ground on all fours, the guns on their backs, eager not to waste even a minute before the engine whistled departure.
On the evening of the 16th we reached Bobruysk, the evening of the 17th Ovruch; and we realized that we were repeating backward the stations of our last journey north, which had taken us from Zhmerynka to Slutsk and Starye Doroghi. We spent the endless days sleeping, chatting, or watching the majestic, deserted steppe unfold. Right away, our optimism lost a little of its brightness; this journey of ours, which to all appearances seemed likely to be the last, had been organized by the Russians in the vaguest and most muddled way imaginable. Rather, it seemed not to have been organized at all, but decided by who knows who, who knows where, with a simple stroke of the pen. In the whole convoy there existed only two or three maps, relentlessly argued over, on which we had trouble following our problematic progress: we were unquestionably traveling south, but exasperatingly slowly and fitfully, with incomprehensible detours and stops, sometimes covering only a few dozen kilometers in twenty-four hours. We often went to question the engineer (as for the escort, they seemed happy just to be traveling by train, and it didn’t matter to them at all to know where we were and where we were going); but the engineer, who emerged like a lower-world god from his burning-hot cab, spread his arms, shrugged his shoulders, swept his hand in a semicircle from east to west, and answered every time, “Where are we going tomorrow? I don’t know, my dears, I don’t know. We’re going wherever we find tracks.”
The least tolerant of uncertainty and forced idleness was Cesare. He sat in a corner of the car, hypochondriac and bristling, like a sick animal, and didn’t so much as look at the country outside or at us inside. But it was an apparent inertia: those who have need of activity find the opportunity everywhere. As we were passing through an area scattered with small villages, between Ovruch and Zhitomir, his attention was attracted by a small brass ring on the finger of Giacomantonio, his unreliable former ally in the market square in Katowice.
“Will you sell it to me?” he asked.
“No,” Giacomantonio answered plainly, to all intents.
“I’ll give you two rubles.”
“I want eight.”
The negotiation continued for a long time; it seemed clear that both found in it a diversion and a pleasant mental exercise, and that the ring was only a pretext, a starting point for a sort of friendly game, for a practice negotiation, in order not to get out of shape. But that wasn’t the case: Cesare, as usual, had conceived a precise plan.
To the amazement of us all, he gave in quite soon, and acquired the ring, which he seemed very attached to, for four rubles, a sum grossly disproportionate to the value of the object. Then he withdrew into his corner, and for the whole afternoon devoted himself to mysterious activities, chasing off with angry growls anyone who asked him questions (the most insistent being Giacomantonio). He had taken out of his pockets scraps of cloth of different quality, and he polished the ring carefully, inside and out, every so often breathing on it. Then he took out a packet of cigarette papers, and, using those, continued the work painstakingly, with extreme delicacy, no longer touching the metal with his fingers. Occasionally, he held the ring up to the light of the window, and observed it, turning it slowly as if it were a diamond.
Finally the moment that Cesare was waiting for arrived: the train slowed down and stopped at the station in a village, not too large and not too small; the stop promised to be short, because the train remained undivided on the main track. Cesare got out and began to walk up and down the platform. He held the ring half hidden against his chest, under his jacket; with a conspiratorial air, he approached one at a time the Russian peasants who were waiting, stuck it out partway, and whispered nervously, “Tovarishch, zoloto, zoloto!” (“Gold”).
At first the Russians paid no attention. Then an old man observed the ring close up and asked for a price. Cesare, with no hesitation, said, “Sto” (“A hundred”): a quite modest price for a gold ring, criminal for a brass one. The old man made a counteroffer of forty, Cesare acted indignant and turned to someone else. He tried this with several customers, taking his time, and looking for the one who would offer the most. Meanwhile, he listened intently for the whistle of the engine, so as to conclude the business and jump on the moving train right afterward.
While Cesare was show
ing the ring to this one and that one, others could be seen whispering together in little groups, suspicious and excited. Just then, the locomotive whistled; Cesare gave up the ring to the latest offer, pocketed fifty rubles, and quickly got on the train, which was already moving. It traveled one meter, two, ten meters; then it slowed again, and stopped, with a great screeching of brakes.
Cesare had closed the sliding doors, and he peeked out through the crack, at first triumphant, then worried, finally terrified. The man with the ring was showing the acquisition to his fellow villagers, who passed it from hand to hand, turned it in every direction, and shook their heads with an air of doubt and disapproval. Then we saw the incautious buyer, evidently repenting, raise his head and set off resolutely alongside the convoy, in search of Cesare’s hiding place: an easy search, since ours was the only car with the doors closed.
The business took a bad turn: the Russian, who couldn’t have been too bright, might not have succeeded in identifying the car by himself, but already two or three of his comrades were energetically pointing out to him the right direction. Cesare jumped back from the peephole, and resorted to extreme measures: he squatted in a corner of the car, and rapidly had himself covered with all the available blankets. In a moment he had disappeared under an enormous mass of blankets, quilts, sacks, jackets; listening intently, I seemed to hear words of prayer wafting from it, weak and muffled, and blasphemous in the context.
The Russians were shouting outside the car, and beating with their fists on the wall, when the train started off with a violent jerk. Cesare reemerged, pale as death, but he cheered up immediately: “Now they can come and look for me!”
The next morning, under a radiant sun, the train stopped in Kazatin. That name sounded familiar to me: where had I read or heard it? Maybe in the war news? And yet I had the impression of a closer and more present memory, as if someone had talked about it recently, and at length—after, and not before, the caesura of Auschwitz, which broke in two the chain of my memories.
And there, standing on the platform, just outside our car, was the embodiment of the memory: Galina, the girl from Katowice, the translator-dancer-typist of the Kommandantur, Galina of Kazatin. I got out to greet her, filled with joy and wonder at the unlikely meeting: to find my only Russian friend in that endless land!
She didn’t seem much changed; she was a little better dressed, and was sheltered from the sun by an ostentatious parasol. Nor was I much changed, at least on the outside: a little less undernourished and weak, and just as ragged. But I was newly rich: with the train behind me, the slow but sure engine, Italy closer every day. She wished me a good journey; we exchanged a few hurried and awkward remarks, in a language neither hers nor mine, in the cold language of the invader, and parted immediately, for the train was starting up. As the car bumped along toward the border, I sat sniffing on my hand her cheap perfume, happy to have seen her again, sad at the memory of the hours passed with her, the things not said, the opportunities not taken.
We passed through Zhmerynka again, suspicious, mindful of the days of anguish we had spent there a few months earlier; but the train continued without hindrance, and on the evening of September 19, having crossed Bessarabia quickly, we were at the Prut River, the border. In the thick darkness, by way of farewell, the Soviet border police carried out a tumultuous and disorganized inspection of the train, in search (they told us) of rubles, which it was illegal to export; in any case, we had spent them all. We crossed the bridge and slept on the other side, in the stopped train, eager for the light of day to reveal the Romanian landscape.
It was in fact a dramatic revelation. When we opened the doors in the early morning, a surprisingly domestic scene appeared before our eyes: no longer the deserted, geological steppe but the green hills of Moldavia, with farmhouses, haystacks, rows of vines; no longer enigmatic Cyrillic inscriptions but, right in front of our car, a small, tumbledown cottage, the pale blue of verdigris, and written clearly on it the words “Paine, Lapte, Vin, Carnaciuri de Purcel” (Bread, Milk, Wine, Pork Sausages). And in front of the cottage stood a woman, and she was pulling a long sausage out of a basket at her feet, measuring it by the arm’s length as one measures string.
There were farmers like the ones at home, with sunburned faces and pale foreheads, dressed in black, with jacket and vest and watch chain across the stomach; girls on foot or on bicycles, dressed almost like the girls at home, who could have been taken for girls from the Veneto or Abruzzo. Goats, sheep, cows, pigs, hens. But then we saw, stopped at a grade crossing, a camel—a brake on every precocious illusion of home—which drove us back into the elsewhere: a worn-out, gray, woolly camel, loaded with sacks, exhaling arrogance and foolish solemnity from its prehistoric leporine snout. The language of the place sounded equally double-edged to our ears; there were known roots and endings, but millennia of intermingling had entangled and corrupted them with others of a strange, savage sound: a speech familiar in its music, hermetic in meaning.
At the border the painful, complex ceremony of transfer from the broken-down Soviet-gauge cars to equally broken-down Western-gauge cars took place; and soon afterward we entered the station in Iasi, where the convoy was laboriously separated into three pieces: a sign that we would be stopped there for hours.
In Iasi two notable things happened: the two German women of the woods reappeared out of nowhere, and all the married “Romanians” disappeared. The smuggling of the two German women across the Soviet border must have been organized with great daring and skill by a group of Italian soldiers. The details were never known precisely, but the rumor was that the women had spent the critical night of the border crossing hidden under the floor of the car, flattened between the tie rods and the springs. We saw them walking on the platform the next morning, carefree and insolent, bundled up in Soviet military outfits and grimy with mud and grease. At last they felt safe.
At the same time, we saw violent family quarrels explode in the cars of the “Romanians.” Many of these, who had formerly belonged to the diplomatic corps and had been demobilized or self-demobilized by the Armir, had settled in Romania and married Romanian women. At the end of the war, almost all had chosen repatriation, and the Russians had organized a train that was supposed to take them to Odessa, to be put on ships; but at Zhmerynka they had been added to our wretched convoy, and had followed our fate; no one ever knew if that had happened by plan or by confusion. The Romanian wives were furious at their Italian husbands; they had had enough of surprises and adventures and convoys and camps. Now they had returned to Romanian territory, they were home, they wished to stay there and wouldn’t listen to reason. Some argued and wept, others tried to drag their husbands off the train, the most unrestrained hurled baggage and household goods out of the cars, while the children, frightened, ran around shrieking. The Russians of the escort hurried over, but they didn’t understand and stood watching, inert and indecisive.
Since the halt at Iasi threatened to extend for the whole day, we left the station and wandered through the deserted streets, among low mud-colored houses. A single tiny, archaic tram went back and forth from one end of the city to the other; at one terminus was the ticket seller, who spoke Yiddish, and was Jewish. With some effort we managed to understand each other. He told me that other convoys of veterans had already passed through Iasi, people of all races, French, English, Greeks, Italians, Dutch, Americans. There were also among them many Jews in need of help, and so the local Jewish community had established a center for assistance. If we had an hour or two, he advised us to go as a delegation to that center; we would get advice and help. In fact, since his tram was about to leave, we should get on, he would tell us where to get out, and he would take care of the ticket.
Leonardo, Signor Unverdorben, and I went: passing through the worn-out city we reached a dirty, crumbling building, its doors and windows replaced by temporary boards. In a dark, dusty office we were welcomed by two old patriarchs, whose appearance was scarcely more prosperous and healt
hy than ours; but they were full of affectionate solicitude and good intentions, they had us sit on the only three available chairs, they overwhelmed us with kindness, and in a rush recounted, in Yiddish and French, the tremendous ordeals that they, and few others, had survived. They were quick to tears and to laughter; at the moment of farewell, they invited us peremptorily to drink a toast of terrible rectified alcohol, and handed us a basket of grapes to distribute among the Jews of our convoy. Emptying all the drawers and their own pockets, they also scraped together a sum in lei that on the spot appeared to us astronomical; but, once we had divided it, and taken into account inflation, we realized that its value was mainly symbolic.
From Iasi to the Line
Through a countryside still in summer, through cities and villages with barbaric-sounding names (Cirea, Scantea, Vaslui, Piscu, Braila, Pogoanele), we continued south for several days, by tiny stages: on the night of September 23 we saw the fires of the oil wells of Ploieşti blazing. After that, our mysterious pilot turned west, and the next day, from the position of the sun, we realized that our route was reversed: we were again traveling north. We admired, without recognizing it, the castle of Sinaia, a royal residence.
In our car we had by now used up our liquid cash, and had sold or traded everything that might have any commercial value, even the slightest. Therefore, except for occasional strokes of luck or outlaw actions, we ate only what the Russians gave us; the situation wasn’t terrible, but it was confused and nerve-racking.