The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  “I understand it, because it was the only time in his life that he let himself live a little. Besides, if he hadn’t found German girlfriends who could work the black market and bring him food, he’d likely have ended up with tuberculosis, like so many others, and it would have been worse for my mother and me. As for driving the locomotive, he said it was easier than riding a bike; all you had to do was pay attention to the signals and if there was a bombing attack brake, ditch everything, and run for the fields. There were problems only when it was foggy, or when there were alarms and the Germans made fog on purpose.

  “So when he got to the end of the line, instead of going to the railroad dormitory, he stuffed coal in his pockets, his bag, and his shirt to give to that side’s girlfriend, since he had nothing else to offer, and in return she gave him dinner. Then he’d leave again the next morning. After doing this for a while, he learned that there was another Italian engineer working the same line, also a military prisoner, a mechanic from Chivasso; he drove the freight cars that traveled at night. They only met a few times at the terminals, but, as they were almost from the same place, they became friends just the same. Since the guy from Chivasso wasn’t very organized, and was going hungry because he only ate the stuff the railroad gave him, my father handed over one of the girlfriends, for nothing—just out of friendship—and from that point on they were very close. After they both came home, the Chivassese came to see us two or three times a year, and every Christmas he would bring us a turkey. Over time we all began to think of him as my godfather, because by then my actual godfather, the one who made bushings for Diatto, had died. Anyway, he was indebted to us, to such an extent that many years later he was the one who found me the position at Lancia and persuaded my father to let me go, and later he got me my first rigging job, even though I wasn’t yet a rigger at the time. He’s still alive; he’s not even that old. He’s a bright guy—after the war he started to raise turkeys and guinea fowl and he made a lot of money.

  “But my father went back to work as before, hammering sheet metal in his workshop, a blow here, a blow there, in just the right spot, making sure the whole sheet had the same thickness, and smoothing out the creases—what he called veje, ‘old women.’ He was offered a few good industrial jobs, mostly in body shops, which would’ve been similar work. Every day my mother would tell him to accept one of these offers, because the pay was good—for the health insurance, for the pension, etc.—but he wouldn’t even consider it. He said that the boss’s bread has seven crusts, and that it’s better to be the head of an eel than the tail of a sturgeon—he liked his proverbs.

  “But at this point nobody wanted tin-lined copper pots anymore, because the much cheaper aluminum models had become available in stores, and then they introduced the stainless-steel ones with nonstick coating so your steak doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. He wasn’t making much money, but he wouldn’t hear of changing his ways, so he started making autoclaves for hospitals—the things that are used to sterilize instruments before an operation, made of copper, but plated with silver instead of tin. It was during that time that he and his friends decided to make that monument to the baker that I told you about, and when the town refused it, he was upset and he started to drink a bit more. He worked less and less, because there weren’t many orders, and in his spare time he made other kinds of things, just for the pleasure of doing it, like shelves and flower vases, but he never sold them; he put them in storage or he gave them away as presents.

  “My mother was a good churchgoing woman, but she didn’t treat my father so well. She never got on his case, but she was provincial, and it was clear that she didn’t respect him very much. She didn’t realize that when his trade was gone, he’d be gone, too. He didn’t want the world to change, but since the world changes—and these days it changes faster than ever—he had no wish to keep up with it, so he became depressed and lost all desire to do anything. One day, he didn’t come home for dinner, and my mother found him dead in his workshop. He had a hammer in his hand, as he had always said he would.”

  Wine and Water

  I didn’t expect, this late in September, to encounter such hot weather on the lower Volga. It was Sunday, and the guest rooms were uninhabitable: the Administracija had installed noisy and pathetically inefficient fans in the rooms, and the air circulation was entirely dependent on the little window in the corner, which was no bigger than the page of a newspaper. I proposed to Faussone that we go to the river, walk along it to the ferry house, and take the first boat that showed up. He agreed, and we left.

  It was mildly cool on the path and we were refreshed by the water’s unexpected transparency and the marshy, musky fragrance it gave off. A light breeze blew over the surface of the river, rippling the water into tiny waves, but every so often the wind would shift direction, and then from the land would come torrid blasts of air, redolent of clay dust; at the same time, as the surface of the water became still again, you could make out the blurry features of submerged farmhouses. This hadn’t happened in some distant era, Faussone explained, nor was it a village of sinners. It was simply the result of a giant dam constructed seven years earlier—we could see the dam now, just past the bend in the river. Above it a lake had formed, or rather a sea, 500 kilometers long. Faussone was as proud as if he’d built the thing himself, but all he’d done was assemble a crane that was used on the job. And there was a story about this crane—he promised he’d tell me it one day.

  We reached the ferry house around nine a.m. It consisted of two sections: a brick building situated on the riverbank and a set of wooden planks, practically a covered raft, floating on the water; these two sections were connected by a bridge, also made of wood, hinged at both ends. No one was there. We stopped to check the schedule, written in beautiful handwriting but full of cancellations and corrections, which was pasted to the door of the waiting room. Shortly afterward we encountered an old lady. She came forward with short, calm steps, not looking at us, because she was absorbed in knitting a garment in two colors; she walked right past us and took a folding chair from the corner of the room, opened it near the schedule, sat down, and, settling the folds of her skirt under her, continued to knit for a few minutes. Then she looked up at us, smiled, and told us that it was useless to consult the schedule, because it had expired.

  Faussone asked her how long ago it had expired, and she gave him a vague response: three days ago, or maybe a week, and the new schedule still hadn’t been determined, but the boats were running anyway. Where did we want to go? With some embarrassment, Faussone said that it didn’t matter, we’d take a boat anywhere, though we had to be back by evening: we simply wanted to go out on the river and get some fresh air. The old lady nodded gravely and informed us that a boat would arrive before too long, and would leave right away for Dubrovka. How far away was that? Not very far, about an hour, maybe two, but what difference did it make? she asked, with another luminous smile. Were we on vacation, by any chance? If so, Dubrovka was the place for us—there were woods and fields, you could buy butter, cheese, and eggs, and her granddaughter lived there. Did we want first-class tickets, or second class? She was the ticket office.

  After talking it over, we decided to opt for first class. The little old lady put down her knitting, disappeared through a doorway, and reappeared behind a ticket window. She rummaged around in a drawer and found us two tickets; they were first class, but they still didn’t cost much. Crossing the sagging bridge, we walked onto the raft and waited. The raft was deserted, too, but before long a tall, thin young man arrived and sat on the bench not far from us. He was modestly dressed, in a threadbare jacket, patched at the elbows, and a shirt open at the chest. Like us, he didn’t have any baggage; he chain-smoked and watched Faussone with a curious expression on his face. “Hmm—he must have realized we’re foreigners,” said Faussone; but after the third cigarette the young man came over and greeted us, and said a few words—in Russian, naturally. After a brief conversation, I saw him gra
b Faussone’s hand and squeeze it warmly, in fact he rotated it energetically, as if it were the crank on one of those old cars that didn’t have starters. “I never would have recognized him,” Faussone said to me. “He’s one of the laborers who helped me assemble the crane for the dam six years ago. But now that I think about it, it seems to me I do remember him, because it was brutally cold and he was unfazed by it; he worked without gloves and was dressed just like he is now.”

  The Russian was so happy you would’ve thought he had run into his long-lost brother; Faussone, however, kept up a reserve, and listened to the man’s long-winded monologue as if he were listening to the radio weather report. The man spoke with enthusiasm and I found it difficult to follow him, but I could tell that the word ràsnitsa recurred with some frequency in his speech. It is one of the few Russian words I happen to know; it means “difference.” “It’s his name,” Faussone explained to me; “Difference is actually his name, and he’s telling me that he’s the only person in the entire lower Volga with that name. He’s something else, this guy.” Difference, after rummaging in his pockets, found a crumpled, greasy ID card, and he showed Faussone and me that the man pictured in the photo was him, and the name was Nikolai M. Ràsnitsa. Right after this he declared that we were his friends, or, rather, his guests: in fact, by a lucky coincidence, that day was his birthday, and he was preparing to celebrate it with a ride down the river. Very well, we’d go together to Dubrovka; he was waiting for the same boat, and on it were two or three of his buddies who were going with him to the party. The prospect of a real Russian encounter, somewhat less formal than the interactions we had at work, was not unappealing to me, but I saw a veil of suspicion settle over Faussone’s face, which was usually so inexpressive. A little later, out of the corner of his mouth, he whispered, “This isn’t going to end well.”

  The boat arrived, coming from the direction of the dam, and we took out our tickets for inspection. Difference, annoyed, told us that we shouldn’t have bought the tickets, especially not the first class and round-trip fares—weren’t we his guests? He would have taken care of it: he was friends with the captain and the whole crew, and neither he nor his guests ever had to buy a ticket. We embarked and saw that the boat was empty as well, with the exception of Difference’s two buddies, who were sitting on one of the benches on the deck. They were both giants, with faces like criminals: they looked like no one I’d ever seen before, not in Russia or anywhere else, except maybe in one of those spaghetti Westerns. One was obese, and his pants were held in place by a belt cinched tight beneath his belly; the other wasn’t as heavy, but his face was ravaged by smallpox, and he had an underbite, a peculiarity that conferred on him the aspect of a mastiff and contrasted with his eyes, which were also vaguely canine, but of a soft hazel color. Both of them were drunk, and reeked of sweat.

  The boat set off again. Difference explained to his friends who we were, and they said that it was fine if we came along—the more the merrier. They made me sit between the two of them, and Faussone sat next to Difference on the bench opposite. The obese one had a parcel of newspapers with him, bound with string; he untied it and inside were several loaves of peasant bread stuffed with lard. He offered them around and then he went somewhere belowdecks. When he came back up, he was holding by the handle a tin bucket, evidently a discarded can of paint; he took an aluminum cup out of his pocket and filled it with whatever liquid was in the can, and offered me a drink. It was a very strong, sickly-sweet wine, similar to Marsala, but more pungent, and it had an edge to it; to my palate it tasted unspeakably bad, and I saw that Faussone, who is a connoisseur, was not enthusiastic, either. But these two fellows were determined: the can held at least three liters of the concoction, and they announced that we had to finish the whole thing during the trip, otherwise what kind of birthday would it be? And then, niè strazno—don’t worry—we’d find some even better stuff in Dubrovka.

  In my poor Russian I tried to defend myself, saying that the wine was good but I’d had my fill, I wasn’t accustomed to it, and I was seriously ill, in the liver, in the stomach; but there was no way out of it. The two of them, now joined by Difference, displayed a compulsive conviviality that was quite menacing, and I had to drink and drink some more. Faussone drank, too, but he was in less danger than me, because he can hold his liquor and because, being a more proficient speaker of Russian, he was able to make more articulate excuses or change the subject. He didn’t show any outward sign of discomfort; he kept talking and drinking, and every so often my eye, which was becoming increasingly cloudy, caught his clinical gaze, but whether he was distracted or was making a deliberate effort to act superior, not once during the course of the whole trip did he make any effort to come to my rescue.

  Wine has never agreed with me. That wine, especially, plunged me into an unpleasant condition, in which I felt humiliated and impotent: I hadn’t lost my mental clarity, but I felt that I was losing my ability to stand, so I dreaded the moment when I would have to get up from the bench. I felt my tongue getting tied, and, above all, my field of vision was frustratingly reduced; I watched the solemn winding of the two riverbanks as if through a screen, or, rather, as if I were looking through a pair of those tiny opera glasses common in the last century.

  For all these reasons, I haven’t retained a very clear memory of the journey. At Dubrovka, things improved a little. The wine was finished and a nice refreshing wind was blowing, carrying with it the scent of hay and of stables, and, after a few initial shaky steps, I felt somewhat reassured. It seemed that everyone was related up there: the ticket seller’s niece, we learned, was the pockmarked sidekick’s sister. It was now lunchtime and she insisted that everybody—us included—should come and eat at her house. She lived with her husband near the river, in a small wooden cottage, painted a pale blue, with carved gables over the doors and windows. In front there was a vegetable patch of green, yellow, and violet cabbages, and the whole thing made one think of a fairy’s home.

  The interior was scrupulously clean. The windows, as well as the doors between rooms, were covered by lace curtains that fell from the ceiling to the floor, but the ceiling couldn’t have been more than two meters high. On one wall there hung, side by side, two cardboard icons and a photograph of equal size showing a boy in an army uniform, with an array of medals across his chest. The table was covered by an oilcloth, on which sat a steaming tureen of soup, a large loaf of rye bread with a dark, rough crust, four place settings, and four hard-boiled eggs. The niece was a robust peasant woman of about forty, with coarse hands and a gentle face; her brown hair was covered by a white head scarf tied under her chin. Next to her sat her husband, an elderly man with short gray hair that stuck to his head with sweat from the day’s work; he had a thin, tanned face, but his forehead was pale. Opposite them sat two blond children, apparently twins, who seemed impatient to start lunch, but they were waiting for their parents to take the first bite. They hurried to set four more places for us, which made things a bit crowded.

  I didn’t have any appetite, but to be polite I tried some soup. Our hostess reproached me with maternal severity, as if I were a spoiled child: she wanted to know why I was such a “bad eater.” Faussone, in a quick aside, explained to me that in Russian, eating badly means not eating very much, the same way that we might say eating well instead of eating a lot. I excused myself as best I could, with gestures, facial expressions, and various mumblings, and the woman, who was more discreet than our traveling companions, didn’t insist.

  The boat was to leave again around four. Other than our group, there was only a single passenger on board. I don’t know where he came from; he was a small, lank man dressed in rags, of an indeterminate age, with a short, sparse, but unkempt beard; he had clear, deranged eyes and only one ear: the other had been reduced to an ugly, fleshy hole, from which a scar descended all the way down to his chin. He, too, was a close friend of Difference and the other two, and to Faussone and me he displayed an exquisite sense of h
ospitality: he insisted on showing us the whole boat, from prow to stern, without neglecting the bilge, with its suffocating stink of mold, or the latrines, which I’d rather not describe. He seemed absurdly proud of every detail, and we deduced that he must have been a retired seaman, or perhaps a former employee of the shipyard; but he spoke with a somewhat unusual accent, with such a prevalence of os for as that even Faussone stopped asking him questions, because he wouldn’t have understood the answers anyway. His friends called him Grafinya—“Countess”—and Difference explained to Faussone that he was actually a count, and that during the Revolution he escaped into Persia and changed his name, but his story seemed to us neither clear nor convincing.

  It began to get hot again and the left bank of the river, which the boat was following, was thronged with swimmers. They were families, for the most part, eating and drinking, splashing about in the water or baking in the sun on blankets spread out along the dusty shore. Some, both men and women, wore modest bathing suits that covered them from their necks to their knees; others were completely nude, and roamed through the crowd with ease. The sun was still high; there was nothing to drink on board, not even water, and our companions’ pitiful wine was gone. The count had disappeared, and the three others were snoring, sprawled out on the benches. I was parched and hot; I proposed to Faussone that, once we had disembarked, we should look for an isolated beach, undress, and go for a swim ourselves. Faussone was silent for a few seconds; then, in a sulk, he responded:

  “You know I can’t swim. I told you that when I was telling the story of the derrick and Alaska. Water makes me anxious. And you don’t want me to start learning here, in this water—it might be clean but it’s got strong currents, and there’s not even a lifeguard, and besides I’m not that young anymore.