The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  “Then what was the first?”

  “Dam, blood,” Mendel replied.

  “Well, we’ve already had blood,” Leonid said, pensively. “What about the others? the plagues that came afterward?”

  To aid his memory, Mendel started reciting the nursery rhyme that was used on Passover to amuse the children: “Dam, Tzfardeia, Kinim, Arov . . .” Then he translated into Russian: blood, frogs, lice, wild animals, plague, boils, hail, locusts . . . But he broke off before finishing the list to ask Leonid: “When you were a child, didn’t you celebrate Passover?”

  He was immediately sorry that he had asked the question. Though he kept on eating, Leonid had turned his face away from him, and his gaze had become fixed and sullen. After a few minutes, in an apparent non sequitur, he said, “When they sent my father to the Solovetski Islands, my mother didn’t wait for him. She certainly didn’t wait for him long. She put me in an orphanage, she went to live with another man, and she stopped caring about me. She came to see me two or three times a year, with that other man. He worked on the railroads, too, and he always spoke in an undertone. Maybe he was afraid of being sent to the islands, too; he was afraid of everything. As far as I know, they’re still together. And now I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of walking toward who knows what. I’ve had enough of blood and of frogs, and I’d like to stop, and I’d like to die.”

  Mendel said nothing: he realized that his companion wasn’t one of those people who can be healed with words; perhaps no one burdened with a story like his could be healed with words. And yet he felt he was in debt toward him, at fault, had failed, as if he were seeing someone drowning in shallow water, who fails to call for help, and because he doesn’t call for help you let him drown. To help him, he needed to understand him, and to understand him, he needed him to talk, and Leonid practically never talked, just a few words and then silence, his eyes refusing to meet Mendel’s. He was quick to wound and quick to be wounded. What if Mendel were to try to force the situation? That could prove dangerous: as when you set a screw off-kilter into a bolt and you can sense the resistance; if you force it with a screwdriver, it strips the thread and the screw is no good anymore. But if you’re patient and you start over, then you can screw it into the bolt easily, and it remains good and tight. Patience is what’s required, even with someone who lacks it entirely. Especially with someone who lacks it entirely. Someone who’s lost patience. Someone who never had it in the first place. Someone who never had the time and the clay to shape it for himself. He was about to respond, “If you really want to die, you’ll have plenty of chances”; but instead he said, “Let’s sleep. At least tonight our bellies are full.”

  By the ninth day the trail had almost completely vanished: it was possible to see it here and there, on the sand spits that wound around the ponds, which were becoming more and more extensive and flowing into one another. The forest had dwindled to isolated patches here and there, and the horizon that surrounded them had never been so vast, in all their journey. Vast and dreary, steeped in the intense and funereal odor of the reed beds; the round, white, motionless clouds in the sky were reflected clearly in the motionless water. At the sound of the two men’s splashing footsteps the occasional duck would fly, quacking, out of the reed beds, but Mendel refused to shoot, reluctant to waste ammunition or to give away their location. A wooden building came into view. When they reached it, they saw that it was a water mill, abandoned and partly in ruins; the rusted waterwheel dipped into a pool of slimy water that meandered through the marshes. It must be the Ptsich: Novoselky couldn’t be far away.

  On the other side of the river the earth was firmer: they could make out in the distance a small rise covered with dark trees, oaks or alders. They found an old woodsman’s trail, overgrown with thornbushes and covered with dead leaves. Mendel put his boots back on, Leonid remained barefoot, with nothing but foot wraps to protect his feet from thorns. After another half hour of walking, he exclaimed: “Hey! come see this!” Mendel turned and saw him with a doll in his hand: a miserable little pink doll, naked, missing one leg. He held it up to his nose, and caught a whiff of childhood, the odor of camphor, of celluloid; for an instant, it evoked with brutal violence his sisters, his sisters’ friend who would one day become his wife, Strelka, and the mass grave. He fell silent, swallowed, and then said to Leonid in a low voice: “These aren’t things you find in the forest.”

  To the right of the track there was a clearing, and in the clearing they saw a man. He was tall, thin, pale, and narrow-shouldered; when he noticed them he awkwardly tried to run away or hide: they called out to him and he let them come closer. He was dressed in rags and on his feet he had a pair of sandals made of automobile tires; in one hand he held a bundle of herbs. He didn’t look like a peasant. They asked him:

  “Is this the town of the Jews?”

  “There’s no town here,” the man replied.

  “But aren’t you a Jew?”

  “I’m a refugee,” he said; but his accent gave him away.

  Leonid showed him the doll: “And this, where does this come from?”

  The man’s gaze shifted slightly, a minimum angle: someone was coming toward them, behind Leonid’s back. It was a girl, dark and tiny; she took the doll from his hands, saying very seriously, “She’s mine. I’m glad you found her.”

  3

  August–November 1943

  It really wasn’t a town: it was a “republic of the marshes,” the man explained to Mendel, not without a certain pride. It was, rather, an encampment, a shelter, and a fortress, and the two of them would certainly be welcome, because there were never enough strong arms willing to work, and there were even fewer men who knew how to use weapons. His name was Adam; because night was falling, he called to the children who were out looking for herbs along the edge of the clearing, and he invited Mendel and Leonid to come with him. There were a dozen children, boys and girls, ranging in age from five to twelve, and each had gathered a small bundle of herbs split up into sheaves. “Around here, everyone has to do his part, even the children. There are herbs to cure illnesses, there are others that are good to eat, raw or cooked: herbs, berries, and roots. We’ve taught them to tell the difference; eh no, we don’t teach them much else here.”

  They began walking again. The children watched the two soldiers with mistrustful curiosity: they asked them no questions, nor did they even talk among themselves. They were shy, feral little animals, with uneasy eyes; without Adam telling them to, they fell spontaneously into double file and started walking toward the hillock, following a path they seemed to know well. They, too, were wearing sandals made from rubber tires; their clothing consisted of old military uniforms, tattered and oversized. The little girl who had been reunited with her doll held it pressed to her chest as if to defend it, but she neither spoke to it nor even looked at it: she glanced to either side, with nervous birdlike jerks of her head.

  Adam, on the other hand, was only too eager to talk and to listen. He was fifty-five, the oldest man at the camp, which was why he was assigned to taking care of the children: there were women, but they were few, and capable of doing harder work; one of them was his daughter. Before answering questions, he insisted on learning the history of the two new arrivals. Mendel satisfied him willingly and expansively, while Leonid got off with a few words. He, Adam, came from far away: he’d been a textile worker in Minsk, he’d been active in the Bund, the Jewish labor organization, ever since he was sixteen. He had had an opportunity to get a taste of the tsar’s prisons, though that hadn’t spared him the front during the First World War. But a Bundist is a Menshevik, and as a Menshevik he had been put on trial and once again imprisoned, in 1930: that hadn’t been pretty, they’d put him in icy cells and other, overheated cells, without water; they wanted him to confess that he’d been corrupted by foreigners. He’d withstood two interrogation sessions and then he’d slit his wrists. They’d stitched him back up again because they wanted him to confess: they’d kept him two w
eeks without letting him have an hour’s sleep, and then he’d confessed everything the judges asked him to. He’d served another couple of years in prison and three more after that in exile, at Vologda, midway between Moscow and Arkhangelsk: it was better than being in prison, he worked on a kolkhoz, and in fact that was where he had learned to recognize edible plants. There are many more of them than city folk generally know: and so you see that something good can come even out of exile. In the summer, it’s important to get plenty of greens, they’ve got some nutritional value, even if you eat them plain. Of course, winter is another matter entirely: best not to think about winter.

  When his term in exile expired, he was sent home, but then the war came and the Germans reached Minsk in just a few days. Now here Adam felt a weight on his conscience because he, and veterans like him who had known the Germans in the last war, had done their best to reassure the others: the Germans were good soldiers but civilized people, why should they go into hiding or run away? At most, they would give the land back to the peasants. But, instead, in Minsk these Germans did something that he couldn’t talk about. He couldn’t and he wouldn’t and he shouldn’t. “It’s the first rule of our republic. If we kept on telling one another the things we’ve seen, we’d lose our minds, and instead we necessarily have to be clearheaded, all of us, even the children. Along with recognizing herbs, we teach them to tell lies, because we have enemies all around us, not only the Germans.”

  As he went on talking like that, they reached the encampment. Actually, it would have been hard to describe the place with a single word, because it was unlike anything Mendel had ever seen, nor would he have believed such a thing possible; in any case, it was much more of a nursery school than a fortress. On the hilltop that they had glimpsed from a distance, and which rose no more than twenty meters or so above the surrounding plain, stood an ancient monastery, concealed in a dense stand of trees. It consisted of a brick building enclosing a square on three sides and rising two stories above the ground; at the two corners stood two stubby turrets, one of which supported the remnants of a belfry, while the other, ruined and rebuilt in wood, must have been used as a guard tower. At a little distance, facing the open side of the square, was the monastery’s shed, a structure built of rough-hewn logs, with a broad carriage gateway and tiny windows.

  The monastery was not so much concealed by the trees as, it seemed, besieged by them. Of its three wings, only one was intact; the other two bore signs of destruction both ancient and recent. The roof, originally covered with terra-cotta tiles, had collapsed in more than one place and had been roughly repaired with reeds and straw; the outer walls, too, displayed large gaps through which it was possible to see the rubble-cluttered interiors. The whole place must have been abandoned for dozens of years now, perhaps ever since the civil war, because alders, oaks, and willows had grown up against the walls, and some were even growing inside, sinking roots into the piles of rubble and seeking the light through the holes in the roof.

  By now it was practically dark. Adam told the two men to wait outside, in the courtyard overrun by trampled weeds. After a short while he came back and escorted them into a dormitory whose floor was covered with straw and sunflower stalks; a great many people were already waiting, some sitting, others lying down. The children came in, too, and in partial darkness everyone was served a soup of greens. There were no lights; two women got the children ready for bed; then Adam came back and told the two new arrivals to remember not to light matches. Mendel and Leonid felt safe and cared for. They were tired; only for a few minutes were they aware of their neighbors’ quiet whispering, then they dropped off into the oblivion of sleep.

  Mendel woke up the next morning with the happy-unsettled impression of finding himself in another world and another time: perhaps in the middle of a desert, marching for forty years toward the promised land, perhaps within the walls of Jerusalem under Roman siege, or perhaps even in Noah’s ark. There was no one left in the dormitory, aside from the two of them, two men, and a woman, all three of them middle-aged and apparently sick: they spoke neither Russian nor Yiddish, but instead some dialect of Polish. Children, perhaps the same ones as the night before, poked their heads in the door, inquisitive but silent; a young woman came in, small and thin, with a submachine gun slung around her neck, saw the two outsiders, and immediately left without a word. All around them they could hear a subdued rustling, like the sound of mice in the attic: voices calling out briefly, the banging of hammers, the creaking of a chain in a well, the raucous song of a bantam rooster. The breeze that pushed in through the open windows, along with the damp breath of marshes and forest, dragged other harsh and unaccustomed scents with it, of a grocer’s shop, something burned, storerooms, and poverty.

  Adam came in a short while later and told them to follow him: Dov, the leader, was waiting. He was waiting for them at Headquarters, Adam specified with pride, that is, in a little room whose walls were lined with fir planks, half the space occupied by a masonry stove, in the heart of the oversized shed that had been the monastery’s barn. On the stove and next to it stood three pallets, next to the door was a table nailed together out of rough boards: there was nothing else. Even the chair Dov was sitting in appeared solid but crude, the work of skilled hands that lacked adequate tools. Dov was middle-aged, short, but strong-boned and broad-shouldered: although he wasn’t actually hunchbacked, his shoulders were bent and his head hung low as if he were carrying a heavy burden, and so he looked up at his visitors from below, as if peering over the rims of nonexistent glasses. His hair, which must once have been blond, was almost white but still thick: he wore it carefully combed, with a straight part. His hands were large and powerful; when he spoke he held them motionless, dangling from his forearms, and looked down at them now and again as if they belonged to somebody else. He had a square face, unwavering eyes, and honest, worn, energetic features, and he spoke slowly. He invited the two men to take a seat on the pallet next to the stove and said:

  “I would have welcomed you in any case, but it’s a good thing you’re soldiers: we already have far too many who’ve come to us seeking protection. They come from great distances, in search of safety. I can’t blame them, this is the safest place a Jew can find for a thousand kilometers in all directions, but that doesn’t mean it’s a particularly safe place. In fact, it’s not safe at all: we’re weak, we’re poorly armed, and we’re in no condition to put up a defense against any real attack. And there are too many of us; in fact, we don’t even know how many, at any given moment. Every day people arrive and others leave. Today we’re fifty or so; not all are Jews, there are also two or three families of Polish peasants—the Ukrainian nationalists stole their provisions and their livestock and burned their houses. They were terrified and came to us. The Jews come from the ghettos, or else they’ve escaped from German labor camps. Every one of them has a horrifying story to tell; there are old people, women, children, and invalids. Only a dozen young people know how to use weapons.”

  “What kind of weapons do you have?” asked Mendel.

  “Nothing much. A dozen hand grenades, a few pistols and submachine guns. A heavy machine gun with enough ammunition to fire for about five minutes. Lucky for us, so far the Germans haven’t been seen around here much; their best troops have been pulled off to the front, which is hundreds of kilometers away. In this area there are only a few scattered garrisons, requisitioning provisions and workers and patrolling roads and railroads. The Ukrainians are more dangerous; the Germans drafted them and armed them, and they’ve indoctrinated them, too: as if they needed indoctrinating! They’ve always considered Poles and Jews to be their natural enemies.

  “The best protection the camp has is the marshes. They stretch for dozens of kilometers, in all directions, and you need to know your way if you want to get through them: in some, the water’s knee-deep, but in others you’d be in over your head, and the shallows are few and hard to find. The Germans don’t like them, because they can’t launch
a blitzkrieg in the marshes. Even tanks get bogged down in them; the heavier they are the worse it is.”

  “. . . But in the winter they’ll freeze over!”

  “The winter is terror. In the winter, forest and marsh become our enemies, the worst enemies for people in hiding. The trees lose their leaves, and it’s as if we’d been stripped naked: reconnaissance planes can see everything that happens. The marshes freeze over and no longer serve as a barrier. They can track our footprints in the snow. And the only thing that can protect us from the cold is fire, but every fire makes smoke, and smoke can be seen from miles away.

  “And I haven’t even told you about food. We live in uncertainty where food is concerned, too. We get a little something from the peasants, cadged with good manners, or otherwise; but the villages are poor and distant, and both Germans and bandits take care of ransacking them. We get a little something from the partisans, but in the winter they have the same problems we do: still, they sometimes have supplies dropped by parachute, and then something comes to us. Last of all, we get a little something from the woods: herbs, frogs, carp, mushrooms, berries, but only in the summer; in the winter, nothing. The winter is terror and starvation.”

  “Isn’t there any way of establishing better communications with the partisans?”

  “Till now we’ve had only irregular contacts. For that matter, what could be more irregular than the partizanka? I was with them until last winter: then they deemed me unfit, because they thought I was too old, plus I’d been wounded and I couldn’t run anymore. The bands in this district are like so many drops of mercury: they merge, they split up, they reunite; they’re destroyed and new ones spring up. The biggest and most durable ones have radios and stay in contact with the Great Land—”

  “What’s the Great Land?”

  “That’s what we call it, too: it’s all the Soviet territory on the far side of the front, the land not occupied by the Nazis. The radio is like blood; through the radio they are able to receive orders, reinforcements, instructors, weapons, and provisions. And not by parachute alone; when possible, airplanes from the Great Land set down on partisan territory, unload men and cargo, take on the sick and the wounded, and take off again. Here things go much better in the winter, because for airplanes you need an airport, or at least a strip of clear flat land; but land like that is plainly visible from the air, and as soon as the Germans see it, they waste no time dropping bombs and rendering it useless to us. In the winter, on the other hand, any lake or marsh or river will serve the same purpose, as long as the ice is sufficiently thick.