The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  The Tischler’s Italian was amusingly flawed. It consisted mainly of fragments of opera librettos; his father had been a passionate opera lover. Often, during work, I heard him humming bits of arias—“Sconto col sangue mio” or “Libiamo nei lieti calici.”1 His mother tongue was Yiddish, but he also spoke German, and we didn’t have much trouble understanding each other. I liked the Tischler because he didn’t give in to lethargy. He moved briskly, in spite of his wooden shoes; he spoke with care and precision; and his face was lively, both laughing and sad. Sometimes, at night, he performed in Yiddish, telling stories or reciting long strings of verses, and I was sorry that I couldn’t understand him. Sometimes he sang, too, and then no one applauded; they all looked at the ground, but when he finished they begged him to begin again.

  That almost doglike, four-legged encounter cheered him: maybe it would rain every day! But this was a special day: the rain had come for him, because it was his birthday; he was twenty-five. Now, coincidentally, I, too, turned twenty-five that day—we were twins. The Tischler said that it was a day to celebrate, since it was unlikely that we would celebrate the next birthday. He took half an apple from his pocket, cut off a piece, and gave it to me, and, in a year of prison, that was the only time I tasted fruit.

  We chewed in silence, attentive to the precious acidic taste as if to a symphony. Meanwhile, in the pipe opposite ours, a woman had taken shelter: young, bundled up in black, perhaps a Ukrainian from the Todt Organization.2 She had a broad red face, shiny with rain, and she looked at us and laughed; she scratched with lazy provocation under her jacket, then she loosened her hair, combed it out in a leisurely way, and began to braid it again. In those days we seldom saw a woman close up; it was a sweet, fierce moment, and left me devastated.

  The Tischler noticed that I was looking at her and asked if I was married. No, I wasn’t; he stared at me with comic severity—it’s a pity to be a bachelor at our age. Then, turning, he, too, contemplated the girl for a while. She had finished braiding her hair, and, squatting in her pipe, sang softly, her head rocking back and forth.

  “She’s Lilith,” the Tischler said to me suddenly.

  “You know her? That’s her name?”

  “I don’t know her, but I recognize her. She’s Lilith, Adam’s first wife. You don’t know the story of Lilith?”

  I didn’t, and he laughed indulgently: everybody knows the Western Jews are all Epicureans, apikorsim, unbelievers. Then he continued, “If you had read the Bible carefully, you would recall that the story of the creation of woman is told twice, in two different ways; but of course they teach you a little Hebrew at thirteen and that’s it. . . .”

  A classic situation was emerging, a game I liked, the dispute between the pious man and the unbeliever, who is ignorant by definition, and whose adversary, pointing out his error, “makes him gnash his teeth.” I accepted my role, and answered with the proper impudence: “Yes, it’s told twice, but the second time is just a comment on the first.”

  “Wrong. That’s what you think if you don’t delve below the surface. You see, if you read carefully and think about what you’re reading, you realize that the first story says only ‘God created male and female’: it means that he created them equal, out of the same dust. On the next page, however, it says that God makes Adam, then, deciding that it’s not good for man to be alone, takes a rib from him and from the rib creates a woman, or, rather, a Männin, a man-ess, a female man. You see, there’s no longer equality; indeed, some believe that not only are the two stories different but also the two women, and that the first wasn’t Eve, man’s rib, but Lilith. Now, the story of Eve is written, and it’s well-known; the story of Lilith, on the other hand, is only told, so it’s not well-known—or, rather, stories, because there are a lot of them. I’ll tell you some, because it’s our birthday and it’s raining, and because today my role is to tell and to believe. Today the unbeliever is you.

  “The first story is that the Lord not only made them equal but from the clay made a single form, in fact a Golem, a formless form. It was a figure with two backs, that is, the man and woman already joined; then he separated them, but they yearned to be reunited, and Adam immediately wanted Lilith to lie down on the ground. Lilith wouldn’t hear of it: Why should I be on the bottom? Aren’t we equal, two halves of the same material? Adam tried to force her, but they were equal in strength, too, and he couldn’t, and so he asked God for help: He, too, was a male, and would side with him. In fact He did side with him, but Lilith rebelled, equal rights or nothing; and since the two males insisted, she cursed the name of God, became a she-devil, flew away like an arrow, and settled at the bottom of the sea. There are those who claim to know more about it, and they say that Lilith lives, to be precise, in the Red Sea, but every night she rises up and flies around the world, she rustles against the windowpanes of houses where there are newborns and tries to suffocate them. You have to watch out: if she gets in, trap her under a bowl turned upside down, and she can’t do any harm.

  “At other times she enters a man’s body, and the man is possessed; then the best remedy is to take him to a notary or a rabbinical court, and draw up a contract following the correct procedure, under which the man declares that he wishes to repudiate the she-devil. Why are you laughing? Of course I don’t believe it, but I like to tell these stories. I like it when they’re told to me, and I would be sorry if they were lost. Besides, there’s no guarantee that I haven’t added something myself: maybe everyone who tells a story adds something, and that’s how stories get started.”

  We heard a distant clatter, and soon afterward a tractor passed nearby. It was pulling a snowplow, but the plowed mud fused again right behind the machine, like Adam and Lilith, I thought. Good for us: we could stay here resting for a while longer still.

  “Then, there’s the story of the seed. She is gluttonous for man’s seed, and is always lying in ambush where the seed might be scattered, especially between the sheets. All the seed that doesn’t end up in the only permissible place, that is, the wife’s womb, is hers; all the seed that every man has wasted in his life, in dreams or vice or adultery. Of course she gets a lot, and so she’s always pregnant; and she’s always giving birth. Being a devil, she gives birth to devils, but they don’t do much harm, even if they might like to. They’re evil, bodiless little spirits—they spill the milk and the wine, run through the attics at night, and tangle the girls’ hair.

  “But they’re also the children of man, of every man, illegitimate children, and when their father dies they come to the funeral along with the legitimate children, who are their stepbrothers. They flit around the funeral candles like nocturnal butterflies, screeching and demanding their share of the inheritance. You laugh, because you’re an apikor and your role is to laugh; or maybe you’ve never scattered your seed. But it’s possible that you’ll get out of here, you’ll live, and you’ll see that at certain funerals the rabbi, with his followers, circles the dead man seven times; you see, he’s making a barrier around the dead man so that his bodiless children can’t hurt him.

  “But the strangest story remains to be told, and it’s not strange that it’s strange, because it’s written in the books of the Cabbalists, and they were people who had no fear. You know that God created Adam, and right afterward He realized that it wasn’t good for man to be alone, and He set beside him a companion. Well, the Cabbalists said that for God Himself it wasn’t good to be alone either, and so, right from the beginning, He took for his companion the Shekinah, that is, His very presence in Creation; so the Shekinah became the wife of God, and hence the mother of all peoples. When the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, and we were dispersed and enslaved, the Shekinah got angry, left God, and came with us into exile. I’ll tell you that I’ve thought this myself sometimes: that the Shekinah, too, became a slave, and is here around us, in this exile-within-exile, in this house of mud and suffering.

  “So God was left alone, as happens to many of us, and, unable to be
ar solitude or temptation, He took a lover. You know who? Lilith, the she-devil, which was an unprecedented scandal. It seems that it was, in short, like a quarrel, when every insult is met with a more serious insult, and so the quarrel never ends; in fact, it accelerates like a landslide. Because you must know that this indecent affair isn’t over yet, and won’t be over soon: in one sense, it’s the cause of the evil that comes to pass on Earth; in another, it’s the effect of that. As long as God continues to sin with Lilith, there will be blood and suffering on Earth; but one day a power will arrive, the one that all of us are waiting for, and kill Lilith, and put an end to God’s lechery and our exile. Yes, and to yours and mine, Italian: Mazel tov, Buona stella, May your stars be lucky.”

  The stars were lucky enough for me, not for the Tischler. But many years later I happened to be present at a funeral that unfolded as he had described, with the protective dance around the bier. And I can’t explain why destiny has chosen an apikor to repeat this tale, which is both pious and impious, full of poetry, ignorance, bold wisdom, and the incurable sadness that grows over the ruins of lost civilizations.

  1. “I’ll pay with my blood” (Il Trovatore); “Let us drink from the goblets of joy” (La Traviata).

  2. A German civil and military engineering firm founded by Fritz Todt.

  A Disciple

  The Hungarians arrived among us not a few at a time but en masse. Within two months, May and June of 1944, they had invaded the camp, convoy upon convoy, filling the void that the Germans had not failed to create by a series of diligent selections. They caused a profound change in the fabric of all the camps. At Auschwitz, the wave of Magyars reduced all other nationalities to minorities, without, however, touching the “cadres,” which remained in the hands of the German and Polish common criminals.

  All the barracks and all the work squads were flooded with Hungarians, around whom, as happens to new arrivals in all communities, an atmosphere of derision, gossip, and vague intolerance rapidly condensed. They were strong, simple workers and peasants, who did not fear manual labor but were used to plenty of food, and so in a few weeks they were reduced to pitiful skeletons. Others were professionals, students, and intellectuals who came from Budapest or other cities; they were meek individuals, slow, patient, and methodical, and hunger was not so hard on them, but they had delicate skin, and were soon covered with wounds and bruises, like ill-treated horses.

  At the end of June a good half of my squad was made up of capable men who were still well nourished, still full of optimism and good humor. They communicated with us in a curious sung, drawled German, and among themselves in their exotic language, which is bristling with unusual inflections and seems to consist of interminable words, all pronounced at an irritatingly slow pace, and with the accent on the first syllable.

  One of them was assigned to me as a mate. He was a robust, rosy young man, of medium height, whom everyone called Bandi—the diminutive of Endre, that is, Andrea, he explained to me, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Our job, that day, was to carry bricks on a kind of crude wooden stretcher, equipped with two shafts in front and two behind—twenty bricks per trip. Halfway along the route was a superintendent, who made sure that the load was in order.

  Twenty bricks are heavy, so on the way we didn’t have (or at least I didn’t) much breath for talking; but on the way back we spoke, and I learned many likable things about Bandi. I couldn’t repeat all of them today: all memories vanish, and yet I hold on to the memories of this Bandi as to something precious, I am content to set them down on a page, and I wish that, by some not impossible miracle, this page would reach him in the corner of the world where perhaps he is still living, and that he would read it, and would find himself in it.

  He told me that his name was Endre Szántó, a name that’s pronounced approximately like santo, or saint, in Italian, which reinforced in me the vague impression of a halo encircling his shaved head. I said this to him; but no, he explained laughing, Szántó means “plowman,” or more generically “farmer”; it’s a very common last name in Hungary, and anyway he wasn’t a plowman but worked in a factory. The Germans had captured him three years earlier, not as a Jew but because of his political activity, and had assigned him to the Todt Organization and sent him to cut wood in the Ukrainian Carpathians. He had spent two winters in the woods, cutting down pine trees with three companions; it was hard work, but he had got on well there, almost happily. Indeed, I soon realized that Bandi had a unique talent for happiness: oppression, humiliation, work, exile seemed to slide over him like water over a rock, without corrupting or wounding him, in fact purifying him, and heightening in him an inborn capacity for joy, as in the story of the innocent, happy, pious Hasidim whom Jirí Langer describes in Nine Gates.1

  He told me about entering the camp: when the train arrived, the SS had forced all the men to take off their shoes and hang them around their necks, and had made them walk barefoot on the gravel of the track bed, for the seven kilometers that separated the station from the camp. He recounted the episode with a timid smile, not looking for pity but, rather, with a trace of childish, playful vanity in having “made it.”

  We did three trips together, during which, bit by bit, I tried to explain to him that the place he had ended up in was not for nice people or for quiet people. I tried to convince him of some of my recent discoveries (in truth, not yet well digested): that here, in order to get by, you had to be active, arrange for illegal food, avoid work, find influential friends, hide yourself, hide your thoughts, steal, lie; that those who didn’t behave like that soon died; and that his sanctity seemed to me dangerous and out of place. And since, as I said, twenty bricks are heavy, on the fourth trip, instead of picking up twenty bricks, I picked up seventeen, and showed him that if you arranged them on the stretcher in a certain way, with a space in the bottom layer, no one would suspect that there were not twenty. This was a trick I thought I had invented (though I later learned that it was in the public domain); I had performed it several times successfully, while other times I had been hit, but it seemed to me that it lent itself well to the pedagogic purpose, as an illustration of the theories that I had set forth a little earlier.

  Bandi was very sensitive to his situation as Zugang, or new arrival, and the social subjection that derived from it, and so he didn’t resist; but he wasn’t at all enthusiastic about my discovery. “If there are seventeen, why should we make them think there are twenty?” “But twenty bricks weigh more than seventeen,” I replied impatiently, “and if they’re arranged right no one notices; anyway, they’re not being used to build your house or mine.” “Yes,” he said, “but still they are seventeen and not twenty.” He wasn’t a good disciple.

  We worked for some weeks on the same squad. I learned from him that he was a Communist, a sympathizer, not enrolled in the Party, but his language was that of a proto-Christian. At work he was skilled and strong, the best on the squad, but he didn’t try to take advantage of his superiority, either to place himself in a favorable light with our German masters or to give himself airs with us. I told him that, in my view, working like that was a useless waste of energy, and it wasn’t even politically correct, but Bandi gave no sign of having understood. He didn’t want to lie; in that place we were supposed to work, therefore he worked as well as he could. Bandi, with his radiant, boyish face, with his energetic voice and his awkward gait, soon became very popular, a friend to all.

  August arrived, with an extraordinary gift for me: a letter from home—an unheard-of event. In June, with a terrifying lack of awareness, and using a “free” Italian mason as my intermediary, I had written a message to my mother, who was in hiding in Italy, and had addressed it to a friend of mine named Bianca Guidetti Serra. I had done all this as one observes a ritual, without true hope of success; but my letter had arrived without a hitch, and my mother had answered by the same route. The letter from the sweet world burned in my pocket. I knew it was elementary prudence to be silent about
it, and yet I couldn’t not speak of it.

  At that time we were cleaning cisterns. I went down into my cistern, and with me was Bandi. In the weak lamplight, I read the miraculous letter, translating it quickly into German. Bandi listened attentively: he certainly couldn’t understand much, because German wasn’t my language or his, and then because the message was spare and reserved. But he understood what was essential to understand: that that piece of paper in my hands, which had reached me so precariously, and which I would destroy before evening, was nevertheless a breach, a gap in the black universe that crushed us, and that through it hope could pass. Or at least I think that Bandi, although Zugang, understood or intuited all this, because, when I had finished reading, he came over to me, dug in his pockets for a long time, and finally extracted, with loving care, a radish. Blushing intensely, he gave it to me, and said, with timid pride, “I’ve learned. This is for you: it’s the first thing I ever stole.”

  1. Jirí Langer (1894–1943) was a Jewish poet and scholar; his book Nine Gates to the Hasidic Mysteries described his experiences among the Hasidim of eastern Galicia.

  Our Seal

  In the morning here things go like this: when the wake-up sounds (and it’s still the dead of night), the first thing we do is put on our shoes, otherwise someone steals them, and it’s an unspeakable tragedy; then, amid the dust and the crowd, we try to make our beds according to the rules. Immediately afterward we run off to the latrines and the washhouse, hurry to get in line for bread, and finally rush to assemble for the roll call, line up with our work squad, and wait for the roll call to end and the sky to begin to lighten. One by one, in the darkness, the ghosts who are our companions approach. Our team is a good one: we have a certain esprit de corps, there are no clumsy, whining novices, and among us is a crude friendship. In the morning, it’s our custom to greet one another politely: Good day, Doctor, greetings, Mr. Lawyer, how was your night, Mr. President? Did you like your breakfast?