by Primo Levi
“That’s fine, old man. Let’s get to the point. How much will you give us for what you see? For a hundred kilos of flour and the horse?”
The old man scratched his head, pushing his hat forward over his eyes:
“Hmm, we’d best not talk about the horse. It’s worthless, you couldn’t even butcher it for meat. Maybe just the hide, if you tanned it properly. As for the flour, we don’t know where it comes from. You never told me, though you could tell me now, and I might believe you or I might not; people who do business have the right to tell lies. It could be Russian or German, bought or stolen. I don’t want to know anything about it, and I offer you in trade eight kilos of lard and a piece of pigtail tobacco, take it or leave it; it’s stuff that doesn’t weigh much, you can carry it without difficulty.”
“Let’s make it ten,” said Mendel.
“Ten kilos, but without the tobacco, then.”
“Ten kilos, and the tobacco for the horsehide.”
“Nine kilos and the tobacco,” said the old man.
“Fine. And how much will you give us for the stuff you can’t see? Two hundred kilos of flour and the wagon?”
The old man pushed his hat forward still further:
“I won’t give you a thing. The stuff you can’t see might as well not exist. If it does, we’ll find it even if you won’t tell us; and even if you do tell us, and you tell us the truth, we still might go and find it’s not there anymore. There’s lots of people wandering around the forest, and not just people but foxes, mice, and crows: you said it yourself, someone could find it. If I made you an offer, they’d laugh at me in the village.”
Mendel had an idea:
“Let me make you a proposal: one piece of information for another, something you can’t see for something else you can’t see. We’ll tell you where the wagon is and you tell us . . . well, how to put this, along the way we heard certain rumors, that in Nivnoye, or near Nivnoye, or in the marshes, there are or were certain people. . . .”
The old men lifted the visor of his hat and looked Mendel right in the eye, something he hadn’t once done until then. Mendel persisted:
“It’s a good deal, isn’t it? It doesn’t cost you a thing. It’s as if we’d given you the wagon and the flour outright; because it’s all there, I’m not trying to trick you, you have my word as a soldier.”
To Mendel and Leonid’s surprise, the village elder loosened up, becoming almost talkative. Yes, there was a group, or there had been: a band. Fifty men, or perhaps even a hundred, from the area and from elsewhere. Some of them, half a dozen or so, were young men from his village—better to go into hiding than wind up in Germany, right? Armed, yes, and pretty clever, sometimes a little too clever. But they’d left, a few days ago, taking their weapons, baggage, and a few head of livestock with them. And it was better for everyone that they were gone. Where had they gone? No, that he couldn’t say with certainty, he hadn’t seen anything; but a few people had seen them marching away, and it seemed that they’d been heading toward Gomel or Zhlobin. If the two of them took the path to Zhurbin, it was a shortcut; they might be able to catch up with them. He left, and returned half an hour later with the lard, the tobacco, and a steelyard scale, so that the two men could see that the weight was fair. When they’d checked everything, Mendel explained exactly where the wagon was hidden. Unexpectedly, the old man pulled a dozen hard-boiled eggs out of his rucksack: he said that it was an extra, a gift he was giving them, because he liked them; and also in compensation for the fact that he ought to have extended hospitality to them and offered them a place to sleep, but the village council had opposed it. He led them to the path and waved goodbye, leading away the horse with the two sacks of flour.
“If they hadn’t recognized us as Jews, we would have slept in a bed tonight,” Leonid grumbled.
“Maybe so, but even if he’d made the offer, it’s not obvious that we would have been wise to accept it. We don’t know anything about this village, about the people who live there, their views on things, whether they’re just afraid or if they work for the Germans. I don’t know, it’s only an impression, but I’d have trusted the little old lady more than I do this elder: more than a friend, he struck me as half a friend. He was in a hurry to get rid of us; that’s why he gave us the eggs and told us which way to go. And anyway, by now we’ve made a decision, haven’t we?”
“What decision?” asked Leonid in a hostile voice.
“About catching up with the band, no?”
“That’s a decision you’ve made. You never asked me a thing.”
“There was no need to ask. We’ve been talking about it for days, and you never said a word.”
“Well, now I’m going to say something. If you want to go join the band, you’ll do it on your own. I’ve had my fill of war. You have the weapons and I have the lard: and that’s fine with me. I’ll head back to the village, and I’ll find a bed there, and not for just one night.”
Mendel turned and stopped short. He wasn’t ready to deal with a burst of wrath, much less the wrath of a weakling, and in Leonid he sensed weakness. Nor was he ready for the storm of words that Leonid, until then so silent, was blowing into his face.
“Enough, enough! I may have met you in the forest, but I’m not married to you. I thought that you were as sick of war as I am. I was wrong, too bad. But I’ve had it, I’m not taking another step. You go into the marshes: you were afraid to sleep in the village, and now you want to take me off with people even though you don’t know what language they speak, whether they want us around, where they come from and where they’re going. I’m from Moscow, but I have strong arms and my head screwed on straight; I’m not going to starve to death, I’ll go work on a kolkhoz first, or in the German factories. I’m not taking another step or firing another shot, never again. It’s not right, it’s not right that someone . . . And after all, even you don’t know what you want: I already told you, you think you know, but you don’t. You act like a hero, but you want the same thing I do, a house, a bed, a woman, a life that makes some sense, a family, a town to live in that’s your town. You want to go with the partisans, or you think you do, but you don’t know what you want or what you’re doing, I realized it after what happened with the horse. You’re someone who’s telling himself lies. You’re just like me. You’re a nebbish, a loser, and a meshuggener.” Leonid slowly folded over and sat down on the ground, as if he’d spat out his soul and no longer had the strength to stand upright.
Mendel stood there, more curious and surprised than angry. He realized that he had been expecting this outburst for a while now. He gave Leonid time to calm down a little, then he sat down next to him. He touched his shoulder, but the young man recoiled as if he’d come into contact with a piece of red-hot metal. A nebbish is a good-for-nothing, helpless, useless, a man to be pitied, almost a non-man, and a meshuggener is a lunatic, but Mendel didn’t feel offended, nor was he in the mood to return the insult. Instead, he was wondering why Leonid, whose mother tongue was Russian, had used Yiddish, which he barely spoke, on that occasion. But Yiddish, of course, is an immense reservoir of insolent remarks, picturesque, ridiculous, or bloody, each with its own specific nuance: that might be an explanation. “A Jew will punch you in the nose and then cry help,” he thought, but he kept the proverb to himself. Instead, he said, in a voice so calm that even he was surprised, “Understandable: it wasn’t an easy decision for me, either, but I think it’s the right one. A man should consider his decisions carefully.” And he added, with meaning: “. . . as well as his words.” Leonid said nothing.
It was almost dark; Mendel would have preferred to walk by night, but that path was rough and poorly marked. He suggested camping on the spot, since it was a warm evening and the night would be short; Leonid accepted the suggestion with a nod. They wrapped themselves in blankets, and Mendel was practically asleep when Leonid suddenly started talking, as if he were continuing a conversation begun some time ago:
“My father was a J
ew, but he wasn’t a believer. He worked for the railroad, and then he was accepted into the Party. He fought in the 1920 war against the White Russians. Then he brought me into the world, then they sent him to prison, and from there to the Solovetski Islands, and he never came home. That’s the way things stand. He’d already been in the tsarist prisons, before I was born, but from there he came home. Then they sent him to the Solovetski Islands because they claimed that he’d sabotaged the railroad: that it was his fault the trains weren’t running on time. There you have it.”
After saying all this, Leonid rolled over on his other side, turning his back on Mendel, as if the subject were finished. Mendel thought that was an odd way of apologizing, and immediately decided in his mind that all the same it was a way of apologizing. He let a few minutes go by, and then he timidly asked Leonid, “And what about your mother?” Leonid grunted, “Now leave me alone. Please leave me alone. That’s enough for now.” He fell silent and lay motionless, but it was clear to Mendel that he wasn’t sleeping; he was just pretending. To go on trying to get him to talk would be useless, and even harmful, like picking a freshly sprouted mushroom. You keep it from growing, and you don’t take anything home.
They walked for two weeks, sometimes by day and sometimes by night, in the rain and in the sun. Leonid had just stopped talking, and he neither told stories nor argued: he grimly accepted Mendel’s decisions, like an unwilling servant. They met few people, saw a burned village, and found increasingly abundant traces of the band that was moving ahead of them: the ashes of campfires alongside the track, footprints in dried mud, leftovers from cooking, the occasional shard and the occasional rag; those people weren’t taking many precautions to avoid notice. On the site of one stopping place they even noticed a tree riddled with bullets: someone must have done some target practice, perhaps they even held a contest. Only rarely were they forced to ask the locals for directions; yes, they’d come through here, heading in that direction. They were stragglers, or deserters, or partisans, or bandits, depending on the point of view; in any case, and according to everyone, they were people who went their way without causing too much trouble or demanding too much from the peasants.
They caught up with them one night: they saw them and they heard them at practically the same time. Mendel and Leonid found themselves atop a hill: they saw the lazy meanders of a big river, no doubt it was the Dnieper, and not far from the riverbank, three or four kilometers away, the glow of a fire. They started downhill, and heard shooting, chaotic pistol and rifle fire; they saw red flashes, followed by the more muffled thuds of hand grenades. Was it combat? If so, against whom? And then why the fire? Or was it a brawl, a feud between two factions? But during a break in the shooting they were able to make out the sound of an accordion, and happy shouts and exclamations: this was no battle, this was a party.
They approached cautiously. There were no sentries; no one stopped them. Around the fire were thirty or so bearded men, some young, some less young, dressed in many different styles, but unmistakably armed. The accordion was playing a song with a lively rhythm, and some were clapping along, while others danced furiously, with all their weapons, spinning on their heels, standing up and squatting down. Someone must have seen them. A slurred but thunderous voice called out, absurdly, “Are you Germans?”
“We’re Russians,” the two men replied.
“Then come ahead. Eat, drink, and dance! The war is over!” There followed, serving as an exclamation mark, a long burst of heavy gunshots, strung out against the sky reddened by fire and smoke. The same voice, suddenly irate, was aimed in the opposite direction, resuming: “Styoh-oh-opka, you idiot, you son of a crow, bring bottles and mess kits, can’t you see we have guests?”
It was dark by now, but they could make out that the encampment, rudimentary as it was, was arranged around three focal points: the fire, where there was a noisy coming and going of men celebrating; a large tent, in front of which two horses tied to stakes were dozing; and, off to one side, three or four silent young men who were busily working on something.
The man with the booming voice came toward them with a bottle of vodka in one hand. He was a fair-haired young colossus, with a crew cut and a curly beard extending halfway down his chest. He had a handsome oval face with symmetrical features, but deeply marked, and he was so drunk he could barely stay on his feet. There were no signs of rank on the Red Army uniform he was wearing.
“To your health,” he said, taking a swig from the mouth of the bottle. “Good health to you, whoever you may be.” Then he handed the vodka to the two men, who drank, toasting his health in turn. “Styopka, you fool, you old slug, are you coming with this soup?” Then he went on, turning to them with a candid and radiant smile: “You must forgive him, perhaps he’s had a little too much to drink, but he’s a good comrade. He’s courageous, too, considering that he’s a cook; but he’s not quick on the uptake, oh no, he’s none too quick. Ah, here he is now. Let’s just hope that the soup hasn’t got cold on the way. Come on, eat up, then we’ll go find out if there’s any more news.”
In contrast with the colossus’s opinion, Styopka seemed neither all that slow nor all that foolish. “No, Venyamin Ivanovich, we can’t get it to work. Just about everybody’s taken a turn at it, but the voice keeps getting fainter and fainter. You can’t understand a thing, all you can hear is static.”
“Those good-for-nothings, to hell with the lot of them! Today of all days they decide to break the radio! You tell me: the war ends, any minute now we’re expecting Stalin to come out and say that everyone can go home, and these sons of bitches pick this moment to make the radio go kaput. . . . What, you haven’t heard the news? The Americans have landed in Italy, we’ve retaken Kursk, and Mussolini is in prison. He’s in prison, that’s right, like a blackbird in a cage; the king put him in prison. Come, comrades, take another drink. To peace!”
Leonid drank, Mendel made a show of drinking, then they followed Venyamin to the radio. “This is definitely the Uzbek’s radio!” Mendel said to Leonid; by the light of the lanterns he’d seen the plates on the device. “But it’s clear that with batteries like these it couldn’t go on working for very long. It’s a miracle that it lasted up to now.” Mendel managed to get between Venyamin, who continued to rain down insults and empty threats, and the three young men in charge of receiving messages. A chaotic technical argument arose and dragged on for many long minutes, frequently interrupted by the heated outbursts of Venyamin and other bearded men who’d come to watch and give their opinions. “I don’t know much about radios, but these guys definitely know nothing,” Mendel muttered to Leonid. In the end, the idea took shape of replacing the batteries’ electrolytes with water and salt. Venyamin immediately adopted it as his own, summoned Styopka, and issued confused orders: the water and salt were brought, the operation was carried out before rapt faces and in an atmosphere of religious expectation, and the batteries were once again hooked up, but the radio broadcast only a stupid piece of popular music for a few seconds, and then fell silent for good. Venyamin was now in a bad mood and took it out on everyone. He turned to Leonid, and addressed him as if he’d never seen him before:
“And the two of you, where do you come from? Russians? You hardly strike me as Russians; but for today we can let that ride, even if you broke the radio, because today we’re celebrating.” Mendel said to Leonid: “We’ll see how things look tomorrow, when he’s sobered up, but it doesn’t look too promising to me right now.”
They were awakened the next morning by the peaceful sounds of the camp. Horses were grazing along the riverbank, naked men were washing or splashing in the shallow water, others were mending or washing clothes, still others were stretched out in the sunlight, and no one seemed to be paying the two of them any mind. For the most part, they were Russians, but shouts and songs could also be heard in languages that Mendel was unable to identify.
Late that morning, Styopka came looking for them: “Would you help me? There’s a man who
’s sick, over there, in that tent; he’s moaning, he has a fever, and I don’t know what to do. Will you come with me?”
“But neither of us is a doctor. . . ,” Leonid objected.
“I’m not a doctor, either, I’m not even a nurse, but I’m the oldest member of the band; and then I lost my weapons when we attacked the Klintsy station, so now they let me do just about everything, but they won’t send me into battle anymore. I’m a guide, too, because I know this area well, better than anyone else, better even than Venya himself; I was a guide back in 1918, too, for the Red partisans, in this same area, and there’s not a trail, a ford, or a road that I haven’t traveled dozens of times. In short, they let me take care of the sick, too, and I need you to help me: he has a fever, and his belly’s as hard as a wooden board.”
Mendel said, “I don’t understand why you keep insisting on us helping you. I don’t know any more about it than anyone else.”
A look of embarrassment came over Styopka’s face.
“It’s because . . . they say that you people, from ancient times, have always been clever about . . .”
“We people are no different from you people. Our doctors are just as good as your doctors, no better and no worse, and a Jew who’s not a physician but sets out to care for a sick man is as likely to kill him as a Christian. All I can tell you is that I’m a gunner, and I’ve seen more than my share of people with their bellies split open, after bombardments, and someone with a belly split open shouldn’t drink anything. But that’s another matter.”
Leonid broke in:
“It seems to me that your leader is a capable sort—why don’t you let him take care of it? There must be a town or a village around here; take the sick man there, he’ll certainly do better than here in the camp, and eventually you’ll find a doctor.”
Styopka shrugged his shoulders.
“Venyamin Ivanovich is capable when it comes to other things. He’s courageous as a demon, he knows plenty of tricks and can come up with more of his own, he knows how to inspire respect and even fear, he never loses heart, and he’s strong as a bear: but all he’s good for is battle. Plus, he likes to drink, and when he drinks his mood changes from one moment to the next.”