The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Leonid stood up and began putting his boots back on, but Mendel stopped him. “No, not in the river. You can never tell, and it’s too far away. Here, right behind the barn.” He showed Leonid the facilities: a plank hut, a tin tank perched atop the roof where the water could warm in the sunshine, a small stove for use in winter, made of fire-hardened clay. There was even a showerhead, which Mendel had crafted out of an empty tin can with holes punched in the bottom, connected to the water tank by a metal pipe. “All made with my own hands. Without spending a ruble, and without help from anyone.”

  “Do the villagers know you’re here?”

  “They know and they don’t know. I go to the village as little as possible, and when I go, I always arrive from a different direction. I repair their machinery, I try to say as little as I can, I take payment in bread and eggs, and I leave. I leave after dark: I don’t think anyone has ever followed me. Go ahead, take off your clothes. I don’t have any soap, at least not for now. I get by with ashes, right there in that can, mixed with river sand. It’s better than nothing, and I hear that it kills lice better than the medicated soap they give you in the army. Now that I mention it . . .”

  “No, I don’t have lice, don’t worry. I’ve been traveling alone for months.”

  “All right, take off your clothes and give me your shirt. There’s no reason to take offense. You must have slept in a haystack or a barn, and the louse is a patient animal, it knows how to wait. Just like us, if you think about, with all the distinctions between men and lice.”

  Mendel examined the shirt carefully, stitch by stitch, with an expert air. “Good, it’s kosher, you’re clean, no question about it. You’d have been welcome anyway, but without lice you’re all the more welcome. You can go ahead and have the first shower: I already showered this morning.”

  He observed his guest’s skinny body more closely: “How come you’re not circumcised?”

  Leonid avoided the question:

  “And how did you figure out that I’m Jewish, like you?”

  “‘You can’t wash off a Yiddish accent with ten baths,’” Mendel quoted. “In any case, you’re very welcome, because I’m sick of being alone. Stay if you like, even if you’re from Moscow, and you’ve studied, and you stole a watch, and you don’t want to tell me your story. You’re my guest. And it’s lucky that you found me. I should have put four doors in my house, one for each wall, just as Abraham did.”

  “Why four doors?”

  “So that wayfarers would have no difficulty finding the way in.”

  “Where did you learn these stories?”

  “That’s in the Talmud, someplace in the Mishnah.”

  “So, you see, you’ve studied, too!”

  “When I was a boy, I was a pupil of the rabbi I told you about. But now he’s in the mass grave with the rest of them, and I’ve forgotten almost everything. All I remember is the proverbs and the fables.”

  Leonid fell silent for a while; then he said, “I didn’t say I don’t want to tell you my story. I only said that I’m tired and I’m hungry.” He yawned and walked toward the shower hut.

  At four in the morning it was already daylight, but neither of the men woke until two or three hours later. During the night, the sky had clouded over, and it was drizzling; long gusts of wind came out of the west, like ocean waves, heralded at a distance by the rustling of leaves and the creaking of branches. They woke up rested and refreshed. Mendel didn’t have much else to hide:

  “Certainly. I was separated from my unit, I’m not a deserter. I’ve been missing since July of 1942. One of a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand missing soldiers: is that something to be ashamed of? Can those who are missing be counted? If they had any choice in the matter, they’d never have gone missing; you can count the living and the dead, but those missing in action are neither living nor dead and cannot be counted. They’re like ghosts.

  “I don’t know if you paratroopers got training in jumping out of a plane. They taught us everything, every artillery piece in the Red Army, from the biggest to the smallest, starting with diagrams and photographs, as if you were back in the schoolroom, and then in real life, huge beasts that’d put fear in your heart. Well, when they sent me up to the front with my company everything was different, nothing made sense: there weren’t any two pieces the same. There were Russian guns from the First World War, German guns, Austrian guns, there were even some from Turkey, and you can imagine the confusion over the shells. It was exactly a year ago: my position was up in the hills, midway between Kursk and Kharkov. I was the head gunner, even though I was a Jew and a clockmaker, and the gun wasn’t from the First World War, it was from the Second World War, and it wasn’t Russian, it was German; that’s right, it was a Nazi 150/27 that had been sitting there, who knows why, maybe it had broken down—since October 1941, when the Germans made their big advance. You know, once it’s in position, a monster that size is hard to move. They put me in charge of it at the last minute, when all around us the ground was already starting to shake and the smoke was blocking out the sun, and it took courage—I’m not even saying to shoot straight, just to stay there. And how can you shoot straight if no one gives you the aiming coordinates, and you can’t ask for them because your field telephone is out of action, and anyway who would you ask, when you can see that everything is lost in confusion, and the sky is so dark that you can’t tell if it’s day or night, and the ground is exploding all around you, and it feels as if an avalanche is about to bury you, but no one will tell you where it’s coming from, so you don’t even know which way to run.

  “The three gunners had run away, and maybe they did the right thing, I couldn’t say because I never saw them again. I stayed: I didn’t want to be captured, but it’s a rule that an artilleryman should never abandon his gun to the enemy; so, instead of running away, I stayed by my gun, trying to figure out the best way to sabotage it. No question, breaking a machine is easier than fixing it, but it takes intelligence to break a gun so that you can’t fix it, because every artillery piece has its weak point. I just didn’t like the idea of running away. It’s not that I’m a hero—the idea of being a hero never crossed my mind—but you know how it is, a Jew among Russians has to be twice as brave as the Russians, or they’ll immediately tell him he’s a coward. And I also thought that if I couldn’t sabotage the piece, the Germans would turn it around again, and start shooting at us.

  “Luckily, they took care of matters for me. While I was working on the gun, with my head thinking about sabotage and my legs arguing in favor of running away, a German shell arrived, landing in the soft dirt right under the gun barrel, and blew up. The gun leaped into the air and fell over on one side, and I can’t imagine anyone will ever get it right side up again. And I believe that the gun saved my skin, because it blocked all the shrapnel fron the shell. Somehow, only one fragment grazed me, right here, you see? on my forehead and right down the middle of my hair. It bled a lot, but I didn’t faint, and the wound eventually healed on its own.

  “So I started walking—”

  “In which direction?” Leonid broke in. Mendel replied with annoyance, “What do you mean ‘In which direction’? I tried to join back up with our side; and you’re not a military tribunal, anyway. I already told you, the sky was black with smoke, and it was impossible to tell which way you were going. War is chaotic above all, in the field and in a person’s head. Most of the time you can’t even tell who’s won and who’s lost—that gets decided later by the generals and the people who write history books. That’s what it was like, it was all chaotic. I was confused, too. The shelling continued, and then it got dark. I was half deaf and covered with blood, and I thought my injury was a lot worse than it really was.

  “I started walking, and I thought I was going in the right direction, that is, that I was heading away from the front and toward our lines. And in fact the farther I went, the less noisy it became. I walked all night long, at first I saw other soldiers walking, and then I di
dn’t anymore. Every so often you could hear the whistle of an incoming shell, and I’d throw myself flat on the ground, in a rut, behind a rock. You learn fast at the front, you can make out a hollow where a civilian can see only a field as flat as a frozen lake. Day was dawning, and then I started to hear a new noise, and the ground began to shake. I couldn’t figure out what it was—it was a vibration, a continuous rumbling. I looked around for a hiding place, but there was nothing but harvested fields and barren earth, not a shrub, not a wall. Instead of a place to take shelter I saw something I’d never seen before, even though I’d been at war for a year. Running parallel to the way I’d been walking was a railroad, I hadn’t noticed it before, and running along the tracks was something that at first I thought was a line of barges, like you’d see on a river. Then I understood, I’d walked in the wrong direction, I was behind the German lines, and that was a German armored train. It was heading for the front, and instead of a train made up of railroad cars it looked to me like a train of mountains; and you may think it strange, you may think it stupid, or you may even think it an obscenity, I don’t know how you think about this kind of thing, but what came into my mind was the blessing that my grandfather used to say whenever he heard thunder, ‘Your strength and power fill the world.’ Eh, these things are impossible to understand, why the Germans made armored trains, but God made the Germans; and why did He make them? Or why did He allow Satan to make them? for our sins? What if a man hasn’t sinned? or a woman? And what sins had my wife committed? Or does a woman like my wife have to die and lie in a grave with a hundred other women, and with children, for the sins of someone else, maybe even for the sins of the very same Germans who machine-gunned them down on the edge of the grave?

  “Sorry, forgive me, I got carried away, but, you see, I’ve been chewing these things over for almost a year and I can’t get over it; it’s been almost a year since I’ve spoken with another human being, because if you’re a missing soldier you’re better off not saying anything. You can only talk with another missing soldier.”

  The drizzling rain had stopped, and from the unsown soil rose a faint scent of mushrooms and moss. The music of peace resounded in the drops of rain falling from one leaf to another, and from the leaves to the earth below, as if there were no war and never had been. Suddenly, over the music of falling drops a different sound arose: a human voice, a sweet childish voice, the voice of a little girl singing. They hid behind a clump of bushes and saw her: she was lazily driving a small flock of nanny goats before her, she was barefoot and skinny, bundled in a field tunic that hung down to her knees. She had a handkerchief knotted beneath her chin and an emaciated, kind little face, browned by the sun. There was a note of sadness in her singing, in the nasal and contrived style of peasant song, and she was walking aimlessly toward them, following her goats rather than guiding them.

  The two soldiers exchanged a glance: there was no way around it, if they left their hiding place the girl would see them; and she’d see them anyway, because she was heading straight toward them. Mendel got to his feet and Leonid followed suit; the girl stopped short, astonished more than frightened, and then broke into a run, overtaking her goats, herding them together, and then driving them back toward the village. She’d never said a word.

  Mendel said nothing for a few moments. “That’s it; nothing to do about it. This is what it means to live like wolves. It’s a shame, when you had just arrived; now, though, it’s worse because there are two of us. Nothing like this has happened in months. A child, and it’s all over. Maybe she was frightened at the sight of us, even though we’re no threat to her. In fact, she’s a danger to us: she’s a child, and she’ll talk. Even if we threatened her and told her to say nothing, she’d talk all the more. She’ll talk, and she’ll say that she saw us, and the Germans from the garrison will come looking for us: in an hour, or a day, or ten days, but they’ll come. And if the Germans never come—or else before the Germans can get here—the peasants will come, or else the bandits. Too bad, comrade. You showed up at the wrong time. Come on, lend a hand, we’ve got some packing to do. It’s a pity, I’d done a lot of work to set this place up. We’ll just have to start over. It’s a good thing it’s summer.”

  There wasn’t a lot to pack; all Mendel’s possessions fit comfortably in his military rucksack, including his provisions. But when the packing was done, Leonid noticed that Mendel seemed reluctant to set off: he was dawdling, as if hesitating between two options.

  “What’s wrong? Did you forget something?”

  Mendel didn’t answer: he’d sat down again on a tree stump and was scratching his head. Then he stood up with determination, pulled a short spade out of his knapsack, and said to Leonid: “Come on, follow me. No, we’ll leave our rucksacks here, they’re heavy, we’ll come back for them.”

  They set off through the woods, at first following a well-marked trail, and then through heavy underbrush. Mendel appeared to navigate by landmarks known only to him, talking as he walked, without turning to look back, without checking to see if Leonid was following him or listening to him.

  “You see, not having any alternative can be a good thing. I have no alternative: I have to trust you, whether or not I want to, and anyway I’m tired of living alone. I’ve told you my story, you don’t feel like telling me yours. All right, you may have very good reasons. You escaped from a concentration camp: I can imagine that you don’t feel like talking about it. To the Germans, you’re a fugitive, besides being a Russian and a Jew. To the Russians, you’re a deserter, and you’re are also suspected of being a spy. Maybe you are a spy. You don’t look like a spy, but if spies all looked like spies, they couldn’t be spies, could they? I have no alternative, I have to trust you, so I’m going to tell you that down there to the left is a big oak tree, the one you can just see in the distance; next to the oak tree is a birch, hollowed out by lightning; and buried amid the roots of the birch are a machine gun and a pistol. It’s not a miracle: I buried them there. A soldier who lets his weapons be taken from him is a coward, but a soldier who carries his weapons with him behind German lines is a cretin. All right, this is the place, you can dig, since you’re younger than me. Oh, and sorry about the ‘coward,’ that wasn’t meant for you; I can imagine for myself what it means to be parachuted behind enemy lines.”

  Leonid dug in silence for a few minutes, and the weapons emerged from the soil, wrapped in a piece of oil-soaked tent cloth.

  “Should we wait here until it gets dark?” he asked.

  “I don’t think we should risk it, someone might come and take our rucksacks.”

  They went back to the barn and Mendel dismantled the machine gun so it would fit in the rucksack. They napped until nightfall, then they set off westward.

  They halted for a rest after three hours of hiking.

  “Tired, aren’t you, Muscovite?” Mendel asked. Leonid denied it, but halfheartedly. “It’s not that I’m tired, it’s just that I’m not used to your pace. In boot camp, we hiked, and they told us how to survive in the forest, how to find our way, moss on tree trunks, the north star, how to dig a foxhole: but it was all theory, the instructors were Muscovites, too. And I’m not used to walking cross-country.”

  “Well, this is where you’ll learn. I wasn’t born in the woods, either, but I managed to learn. The only forest in the history of Israel is the Garden of Eden, and you know how that ended. That was it, for six thousand years. Yes, in wartime everything’s different, we have to accept that we’re going to become different, too, and it might not do us any harm. And, after all, in the summer the forest is our friend, it has leaves to conceal us, and can even give us something to eat.”

  They resumed their hike, continuing westward. Those were Moscow’s orders, and both of them knew it: soldiers lost behind enemy lines were to avoid being captured, move deeper into German-occupied territory, and hide. They walked and walked, at first in dim starlight, after midnight by the light of the moon. The ground was both firm and yielding; th
eir footsteps made no noise but the footing was solid. The wind had died down, not a leaf was stirring, and there was absolute silence, broken only intermittently by the whirring of a bird’s wings or the melancholy notes of a distant night bird. As dawn approached, the air freshened, saturated with the moist breath of the sleeping forest. They forded two streams and crossed a third over a providential but inexplicable footbridge: all night they had seen no trace of human presence. They found one as soon as day broke. A low milky fog, almost slimy, had arisen: in some places it was barely knee-deep, but it was so dense that it hid the ground, and the two men felt as if they were wading through a marsh; elsewhere it rose over the tops of their heads, and caused them to lose all sense of direction. Leonid stumbled over a fallen branch, picked it up, and was astonished to see that it had been severed cleanly, as if by an ax. A little farther along they noticed that the earth was littered with scraps of bark and pieces of leaves and wood. Overhead, the forest seemed to have been brutally pruned, branches and foliage sliced away as if with a single blow of a gigantic scythe; the farther they walked, the closer the level of the cut was to the ground. They saw saplings cut in half, sheet metal and wreckage, and then the monster itself, fallen from the sky. It was a German bomber, a twin-engine Heinkel, lying on its side amid the ravaged trees. The plane had lost both wings, but not its undercarriage, and the two propellers displayed blades that were twisted and deformed as if made of wax. Painted in black on the tail was a swastika, proud and horrible, and next to it, stacked vertically, eight silhouettes that Leonid was able to interpret easily: three French fighter planes, a British scout plane, and four Soviet cargo planes, all enemies that the German had shot down before being downed in turn. The plane must have crashed many months ago, because the plants and shrubs of the understory had already begun to sprout in the furrows that it had plowed through the soil.