by Primo Levi
“This is our lucky star,” said Mendel. “What more could you ask for in a campsite? At least for a few days. Once this plane was the master of the skies, now we are its masters.” It wasn’t hard to pry open the cockpit door; the two men made their way inside, and set about inventorying the contents with cheerful curiosity. There was a rag puppy dog, grease-stained and floppy; someone had wrapped a little collar of dark brown fur around its neck—a failed mascot. A bouquet of artificial flowers. Four or five snapshots, the usual snapshots that soldiers from every nation carry with them: a man and a woman in a park, a man and a woman at a village fair. A German-Russian pocket dictionary: “I wonder why he’d have that if he was flying,” Mendel said. “Maybe he had an idea of what was going to happen,” Leonid replied, “the parachute is gone, maybe he jumped, and he’s somewhere in the vicinity, lost just like us, and the dictionary may have come in handy.” But they inspected the dictionary more carefully and saw that it had been printed in Leningrad, not in Germany: odd.
As the inventory proceeded, the plane became odder still. Two of the photographs depicted a slender young man in a Luftwaffe uniform with a short, plump young woman, with dark braids; the three others, in contrast, featured a young man in civilian clothing, stocky and muscular, with a broad face and high cheekbones, and he was with a different girl as well; she, too, was dark-haired, but her hair was cut short, and she was snub-nosed. In one of these three photographs, the young man wore a shirt stitched with with geometric embroidery, and in the background it was possible to make out a town square and a porticoed building with pointed-arch windows, densely arabesqued: it didn’t look much like a German setting.
The plane’s radio had been ripped out, and there were no bombs in the bomb bay. Instead, there were three stale loaves of rye bread, a number of full bottles, and a leaflet in Belorussian urging the male citizens of White Russia to enlist in the police divisions being organized by the Germans, and the female citizens to report to the offices of the Todt Organization: they would receive a generous salary in the employ of Greater Germany, enemy of Bolshevism and sincere friend to all Russians. There was a fairly recent issue of New Belorussia, the newspaper that the Germans printed in Belorussian in Minsk, dated Saturday, June 26, 1943. The newspaper carried the schedule of Masses at the cathedral and a series of decrees concerning the dismantling of kolkhozes and the redistribution of land to the peasants. There was a chessboard, the work of rough, patient hands, carved out of a broad piece of birch bark: the dark squares had been made by scraping away the white surface layer of bark. There was also a pair of boots, made in a similarly crude manner, which Leonid and Mendel turned over and over, trying to figure out what material they were made of: no, they weren’t leather; the inhabitant of the wrecked airplane had cut away the imitation-leather upholstery from the seats and had then sewn them with oversized stitches, using electrical wire found in the wreckage. It was nice work, Mendel acknowledged, but what to do now, given that their new home was already occupied? “We’ll hide and wait for him: we’ll see what sort of person he is, and then decide.”
The tenant returned toward nightfall, treading cautiously; he was the muscular little man in the photographs. He was wearing military trousers, a sheepskin jacket, and the white-and-black square cap of an Uzbek. Hanging from his powerful shoulders was a rucksack, from which he extracted a live rabbit. He killed the rabbit with a chop of the side of his hand to the nape of its neck, then he gutted it and began to skin it, whistling. Mendel and Leonid were so close that they didn’t dare speak for fear they would be heard. Leonid, who had taken off his knapsack, opened the flap and pointed to the packets of salt; Mendel understood immediately, and in turn pointed to the machine gun—they could reveal their presence.
The Uzbek, when he saw them emerge from the bushes, gave no sign of surprise. He put down the rabbit and the knife and welcomed them with ceremonious caution. He wasn’t as young as he appeared in the photographs; he must have been forty or so. He had a pleasant bass voice, gentle and courteous, but he spoke a halting and ungrammatical Russian, and at a maddeningly slow pace. It wasn’t that he hesitated, searching for the correct word: he stopped the conversation at the end of every sentence, or half-sentence, without tension or impatience, as if the conversation itself had ceased to interest him and he felt no need to bring it to a conclusion; then, disconcertingly, he’d start talking again. Peyami was his name: Peyami Nazimovich. Pause. A strange name, to be sure, but his country was also strange. Pause. Strange for the Russians, and the Russians were strange for the Uzbeks. Long pause, that gave no sign of ending. A missing soldier? Certainly, he, too, was missing, a soldier in the Red Army. He’d been missing for more than a year, for almost two years. No, he hadn’t been in the airplane the whole time: moving around from one peasant izba to another, sometimes working in the kolkhozes, sometimes with this or that group of deserters, sometimes with a girl. The girl in the picture? No, that was his wife, far, so far away, three thousand kilometers away, on the other side of the front, beyond the Caspian Sea, beyond the Aral Sea.
Was there room in the plane? They could judge for themselves: there wasn’t a lot. For a night, yes, if they crowded in; maybe even two, out of courtesy, out of hospitality. But three people couldn’t stay there comfortably. Leonid spoke rapidly to Mendel in Yiddish: there was a quick way to settle the matter. No, Mendel replied without moving his head or changing his expression: he wasn’t willing to kill the man, and if they kicked him out, he could report them. And for that matter, a downed airplane was hardly an ideal or long-term place to stay.
“I’ve already done too much killing. I’m not going to kill a man for a seat in an airplane that won’t fly.”
“Would you kill him if the plane could fly? If it could take you home?”
“What home?” Mendel replied. Leonid said nothing.
The Uzbek hadn’t understood the conversation, but he had recognized the harsh music of Yiddish:
“Jews, right? It’s all the same to me, Jews, Russians, Turks, Germans.” Pause. “One man doesn’t eat more than another when he’s alive, and he stinks no worse than another when he’s dead. There were Jews where I come from, too, good at business, a little less good at waging war. The same is true of me, for that matter; so what reason would there be for us to make war on each other?”
By now the rabbit had been skinned. The Uzbek set aside the skin, split open the animal with his bayonet, placing it on a stump, and then began browning it on a piece of sheet metal from the plane that he’d rudely fashioned into the shape of a pan. He’d added neither grease nor salt.
“Are you going to eat the whole thing?” asked Leonid.
“It’s a skinny rabbit.”
“Could you use some salt?”
“I could use some.”
“Here’s the salt,” said Leonid, pulling a packet out of his backpack, “salt in exchange for rabbit: a good deal for all of us.”
They haggled for a long time over how much salt half a rabbit would buy. Peyami, without ever losing his temper, was a tenacious negotiator, always with some new argument at the ready: he enjoyed bargaining for its own sake and it thrilled him as an exercise in jousting. He pointed out that a rabbit was nourishing with or without salt, while salt was nutritionally worthless without rabbit. That his rabbit was lean, and therefore more valuable, because rabbit fat was bad for the kidneys. That he was temporarily out of salt, but that the price for salt in the region was low, and there was plenty of it, because the Russians were air-dropping it by parachute to the partisan bands: that the two of them shouldn’t try to exploit the shortage that he happened to be suffering just now, because if they continued in the direction of Gomel, they’d find salt in all the izbas, at disastrously low prices. Last of all, purely out of cultural interest and curiosity about how others did things, he inquired:
“So you eat rabbit? The Jews in Samarkand don’t eat it—they consider it to be like pork.”
“We’re special Jews; we’r
e hungry Jews,” said Leonid.
“I’m a special Uzbek, too.”
Once they’d struck their bargain, out of a hiding place came apples, slices of roast turnip, cheese, and wild strawberries. The three men ate together, bound by the surface friendship that springs out of haggling; when they were done Peyami went inside the plane to get the vodka. It was samogon, he explained: wild vodka, homemade, distilled by the peasants; much more potent than state vodka. Peyami made a point of explaining that he was a special Uzbek because, even though he was a Muslim, he liked vodka very much; also because, even though the Uzbeks are a very bellicose people, he had no desire to make war:
“If no one comes looking for me, I’ll just stay here trapping rabbits until the war ends. If the Germans come, I’ll go with the Germans. If the Russians come, I’ll go with the Russians. If the partisans come, I’ll go with the partisans.”
Mendel would have liked to know something more about the partisans and the bands for whom the Russians were air-dropping salt. In vain he tried to pry more information out of the Uzbek, but by now he’d had too much to drink, or he’d decided it was unwise to talk about the subject, or he really didn’t know anything more about it. For that matter, the samogon really was powerful, practically a narcotic. Mendel and Leonid, who weren’t big drinkers, and who hadn’t had any alcohol in a long while, stretched out in the cabin of the airplane and fell asleep before it got dark. The Uzbek stayed outdoors longer; he washed the dishes (that is, his nonregulation frying pan), first with sand and then with water, he smoked his pipe, he had some more to drink, and at last he lay down, too, shoving aside the two Jews, who didn’t wake up. At eleven o’clock, the sky in the west was still faintly luminous.
At three in the morning, it was already light: a profusion of sunlight poured in, not only through the two portholes but also through the cracks in the sheet metal that had been smashed by the plane’s impact against the trees and the ground. Mendel was painfully awake: his head hurt and his throat was dry. The samogon’s fault, he thought, but it wasn’t just the samogon. He couldn’t get his mind off the bands hiding in the woods that the Uzbek had mentioned. Not that this was really news to him: he’d heard people talk about them, and more than once; he had seen German posters, in two languages, tacked to cabins in the villages, offering a cash reward to anyone who turned in a bandit, and threatening punishment to anyone who abetted them. He had also seen, more than once, the frightful victims of hanging, young men and women, their heads brutally twisted by the jerk of the noose, eyes glassy and hands tied behind their backs: they had signs on their chests written in Russian, “I’ve gone back to my hometown,” or other mocking words. He knew all this, and he also knew that a Red Army soldier, which is what he was, and which he was proud to be, if separated from his unit had the duty to take to the woods and go on fighting. At the same time, he was tired of fighting: tired, hollowed out, stripped of wife, town, and friends. He no longer felt in his chest the vigor of a young man and a soldier; instead, he felt weariness, emptiness, and a yearning for a blank, untroubled nothingness, like a winter blizzard. He had felt a thirst for vengeance, he had not satisfied it, and the thirst had dwindled until it died out. He was sick of war and sick of life, and he could feel running through his veins, instead of the red blood of a soldier, the pallid blood of the people from whom he knew he descended, tailors, shopkeepers, innkeepers, village violinists, mild-mannered prolific patriarchs, and visionary rabbis. He was also tired of walking and hiding, tired of being Mendel: which Mendel? Who is Mendel, the son of Nachman? Mendel Nachmanovich, as he was listed, in the Russian style, on his platoon’s roster, or Mendel ben Nachman, as the rabbi with the two clocks had written, when he was born, in 1915, in the village registry of Strelka?
And yet he felt that he couldn’t go on living like this. Something in the Uzbek’s words and gestures made Mendel guess that he knew more about the partisans in the woods than he chose to let on. He did know something, and Mendel felt deep in his soul, in some relatively unexplored corner of his soul, an urge, a twinge, something like a compressed spring: something he needed to do, and do immediately, before the end of that day whose light had already pried him out of his samogon-induced sleep. He needed to hear from the Uzbek just where these bands were and who was in them, and he had to make up his mind. He had a choice to make, and it was not an easy one: on the one hand there was his thousand-year-old weariness, his fear, his revulsion at the weapons he’d admittedly buried and carried with him; on the other hand there wasn’t much. There was that small, coiled spring, which might be what Pravda referred to as a “sense of honor and duty,” but which he might more appropriately describe as a mute need for decency. He discussed none of this with Leonid, who had woken up in the meantime. He waited for the Uzbek to wake up and, when he did, he asked him some very specific questions.
The Uzbek’s answers were not very specific. Sure, there were bands: or there had been; bands of partisans or bandits, he couldn’t really say which, no one really could. Armed, certainly, but armed against whom? Ghost bands, cloud bands: here today blowing up a railroad line, tomorrow forty kilometers away, plundering the silos of a kolkhoz, and never the same faces. Faces of Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and Mongols come from who knows where; even Jews, yes, a few; and women, and a pinwheel array of uniforms. Soviets dressed as Germans, wearing police uniforms; Soviets in rags, in the uniform of the Red Army; even a few German deserters. . . . How many? Who knows! Fifty here, three hundred there, groups forming and dissolving, alliances, quarrels, and the occasional bursts of gunfire.
Mendel kept pushing: Peyami did know something after all. He knew and he didn’t know, Peyami replied; these were things that everyone knew. He’d had only a single contact, months earlier, with a band of relatively respectable people. In Nivnoye, surrounded by marshes, on the border with White Russia. It was for business: he’d sold them the airplane’s radio, and, as far as he was concerned, he’d gotten the better of the deal, because the equipment was in pieces and he doubted those people would be able to get it working again. They’d paid generously, with two wheels of cheese and four boxes of aspirin, which he needed because it was still winter and he suffered from rheumatism. He’d made the trip a second time in April: this time with the dead German’s parachute. That’s right, when he first found the plane, the pilot was still there, who knows how many days he’d been dead, already chewed up by crows and mice; it had been nasty work to clean up the cockpit and restore a little order. He’d taken the parachute with him, but this time he ran into different people in Nivnoye, different faces, different leaders, who weren’t that interested in fair dealing, they’d taken the parachute and paid him in rubles. That was a joke; what was he supposed to do with a handful of rubles? And to think: you could have made at least twenty shirts out of that parachute. In short, a disastrous deal, not to mention the trip itself: because it was a good three- or four-day hike to Nivnoye. No, he’d never gone back; and in part it was because they’d told him they were moving out, he had no idea where, they hadn’t even decided themselves, or they’d preferred not to let him know. They were the ones who’d given him the German dictionary: they had a whole box of them, evidently more than enough had been printed in Moscow.
There, that was everything he knew about the bands, along with the matter of the salt, of course. They had plenty of salt, salt was air-dropped to them by parachute, and not just salt; in fact, that’s exactly why they assigned so little value to the German’s parachute, even if it was made of a finer fabric. No doubt about it, going into business is always a risk, but it becomes a serious risk when you know nothing about market conditions; and what kind of market is a forest, where you don’t even know whether you have neighbors, and, if so, what kind of people they are, and what they need?
“In any case, you’re my guests. I doubt you’re interested in continuing your march right away; stay here, make your plans, and you can start again tomorrow without haste. That is, as long as you have no rea
son to be in a hurry. Spend the day with me: you can get some rest, and for a day I won’t be alone.”
He took them on a tour of the forest, along barely marked trails to check his traps, but there were no rabbits. There was a weasel, half throttled by the noose but still alive; in fact, so convulsively alive that it was hard to keep from being bitten. The Uzbek took off his trousers, rolled them up to double the thickness of the cloth, and slipped his hands into the legs as if into a pair of gloves, and set the creature free: it shot away through the underbrush, wriggling like a snake. “If you’re really hungry, then you can even eat weasels,” Peyami said sadly. “Where I come from, we never had these problems; even the poorest of us had plenty of cheese to eat, at least, every day of the week. We never experienced famine, not even during the darkest years, when in the cities people were eating rats. But it’s different here, it’s hard to get enough to cut your hunger; depending on the season, you can find mushrooms, frogs, snails, migratory birds, but not all seasons are plentiful. Sure, you can go into the villages, but not empty-handed; and you have to be careful, because they’re quick on the trigger.”
A hundred meters or so from the airplane he showed them the German’s grave. He’d done a good job, he’d dug a hole a little more than a meter deep, no rocks because you couldn’t find them in this part of the country, but a layer of small logs to cover the grave, a mound of pounded earth, and even a cross with his name carved into it, Baptist Kipp: he’d copied it off his dog tags.
“Why so much effort to bury an infidel? And, worse, a German?” Leonid asked.
“To keep him from coming back,” the Uzbek replied. “And also because the days are long, and I need something to fill my time. I like to play chess, and I’m pretty good at it. Back home, no one could beat me. Well, here I’ve carved myself all the pieces out of wood, and a chessboard in birch bark, but it’s no fun to play against yourself. I make up chess problems, but it’s like making love by yourself.”