by Primo Levi
Dov was comfortable only around Mendel and Sissl. Mendel did his best to cheer him up, but with instinctive discretion he avoided any mention of Dov’s injury and his exhaustion; he tried to keep his mind off his troubles, he asked him for advice and comments on the war’s progress, as if Dov knew any more than what they heard on the radio. Even more restful for Dov was Sissl’s presence. Calm in speech and movement, Sissl would sit at his side and, with hands that were deft but as big as a man’s, peel potatoes or patch trousers and jackets that had already been patched to the brink of desperation. The two of them would sit wordlessly at length, enjoying the relaxed and natural silence that springs from reciprocal trust: when two people share grim experiences they feel no need for talk. Mendel would gladly linger, watching Sissl’s face as she worked intently, by the warm light of the underpowered electric lightbulb. That face contrasted with the woman’s strong, mature body, and it testified to a complicated intermingling of bloodlines. Sissl had fair skin and smooth blond hair that she wore parted down the middle and pulled into a bun at the back of her neck. Even her eyebrows were blond; she had slanted eyes, joined to the bridge of her nose with a faintly Mongol fold of flesh, but the eyes themselves were the gray color you find in Baltic peoples. Her mouth was wide and soft, her cheekbones were high, the chin and jawline prominent but aristocratic in appearance. No longer a young woman, Sissl emanated confidence and tranquility, though not gaiety, all around herself, as if her broad shoulders could have served as a shield against any adverse event.
She never spoke about her father. She had Dov tell her stories about hunting in the forest, the cunning of the lynx, the strategy of wolf packs, ambushes laid by Siberian tigers. In the town where Dov came from, Mutoray, on the Tunguska River, three thousand kilometers away, winter lasted nine months and the soil never thawed below the depth of a meter, but Dov talked about the place nostalgically. There if you weren’t a hunter you weren’t a man. Mutoray was a town unlike any other on earth. In 1908, when he was ten years old, eighty kilometers away a star had fallen, or a meteor, or a comet; scientists had come from all over the world, but no one could clear up the mystery. He still remembered that day clearly: the sky was blue, but there had been an explosion like a hundred thunderbolts, and the forest had caught fire, burning so furiously that the smoke darkened the sun. It left an enormous crater, and for sixty kilometers in all directions the trees were either burned or knocked down. It was summer, and the fire finally died out, just at the edge of the village.
Mendel, Pavel, Leonid, Line, and the men from Ozarichi took part in the marching exercises and target practice as well as the supply expeditions to the surrounding farms and villages. For the most part, these expeditions were carried out without resistance or friction from the peasants; the burden of supplying the partisans with provisions was a tax payable in kind, once an imposition, now accepted. The peasants, even those still disgruntled about collectivization, understood by now which side had won; besides, Ulybin’s partisans defended them from the German roundups, raids to supply the Germans’ endless hunger for men to work in the labor camps.
Pavel returned from one of these expeditions on horseback, putting on boastful airs, with his fur cap clapped on sideways. It wasn’t a riding horse but, rather, a draft horse, majestic and old; Pavel said that he had found it lost in the forest, and starving to death, but no one believed him: the animal wasn’t all that skinny. Pavel considered it to be his by right. He became fond of it and the horse became fond of him; when called, it came running like a dog, at a lumbering, out-of-breath trot. Pavel had never ridden a horse in his life, and in fact the horse’s back was so broad that it forced its rider into an unnatural position, but it was very common to see Pavel in his time off practicing his riding skills around the barracks. Ulybin said that Pavel’s horse ought to take its turn with the other horse turning the dynamo, but Pavel objected, a fair number of the partisans sided with him, and Ulybin, who displayed an inexplicable partiality toward Pavel, let it go.
The commander proved to be less indulgent where Leonid was concerned. He frowned on his relationship with Line, which was, for that matter, the topic of much comment and ribbing on the part of one and all: benevolent or malicious, depending on circumstances. Leonid clung to the young woman with the frantic intensity of a shipwrecked sailor who has found a floating plank. It was as if he wished to envelop her in an all-encompassing embrace, as if he were shielding her from all other human contact, sequestering her from the world. He no longer spoke with anyone, not even with Mendel.
One day Ulybin stopped Mendel. “I don’t have anything against women, and none of this is any of my business; but I’m afraid that your friend is going to get himself into trouble and possibly get someone else into trouble with him. Monogamous couples are fine during peacetime: but things are different here. We have two women and fifty men.”
Mendel was about to answer him the way he’d answered Dov in September at Novoselky, that is, that he was not responsible for Leonid’s actions, but he sensed that Ulybin was made of sterner stuff than Dov: he restrained himself, and replied vaguely that he would speak to him, but he knew he was lying. He would never dare say a word to Leonid; he felt a tangle of conflicting emotions when it came to Leonid’s relationship with Line, which he had been trying in vain to unknot ever since he’d been at Turov.
He was envious: about that he had no doubts, and in fact he was a little ashamed. It was an envy, with a hint of jealousy, for Leonid’s youth, his nineteen years, for that hasty and innate love that so painfully reminded him of his own love affair, six years earlier (or had it been sixty, or six hundred?), a love affair that had thrown him impetuously into the arms of Rivke the way an arrow goes to its mark: Rivke! There was also envy for the good luck that had guided Leonid into the force field that radiated from Line: a boy like him could have stumbled into any trap, but Line did not seem to be a trap of a woman. What could Line have seen in Leonid? Mendel asked himself. Perhaps nothing more than a shipwrecked sailor: there are women who are born to rescue others, and perhaps Line was one of them. I am a rescuer myself, thought Mendel, a consoler. A fine calling, to console the afflicted in the midst of the snow, the mud, and weapons at the ready. Or maybe it’s something different; Line isn’t looking for a shipwrecked sailor to rescue, but the opposite: she is looking for a humiliated man so that she can humiliate him further, climb up on his shoulders the way you climb up on a podium, to be a little taller and see a little farther. There are people like that: they do harm to others without even realizing it. Leonid should beware. I envy him but I’m also afraid for him.
At Turov the days of respite followed one upon the other, and Mendel and Sissl became lovers. Words were unnecessary; it was as natural and inevitable as in the Garden of Eden, and at the same time hasty and uncomfortable. The sun was shining, and all the men were outdoors beating their blankets and oiling their weapons. Mendel went in search of Sissl in the kitchen, asked her, “Will you come with me?” and Sissl stood up and said, “I’m coming.” Mendel led her to the woodshed, which also served as a stable for the two horses, and from there up the ladder mounted on the wall, to the hayloft. It was cold, they undressed only partly, and Mendel was stunned by Sissl’s womanly odor and by the gleam of her flesh. Sissl opened up like a flower, docile and warm; Mendel felt his groin explode with the power and desire that had lain silent for two years. He plunged into her, but without abandonment, in fact, wholly intent and vigilant: he wanted to savor it all, waste nothing, engrave it deep within himself. Sissl took him in trembling slightly, eyes closed, as if she were dreaming, and it was over immediately: they heard voices and footsteps nearby, and Mendel and Sissl slipped out of their embrace, brushed off the straw, and got dressed again.
After that, they didn’t have many opportunities to be together again. They managed to maintain discretion, but not secrecy; when the partisans spoke to Mendel about Sissl they referred to her as “your woman,” and Mendel was content. In Sissl he found p
eace and comfort, but he wasn’t sure that he loved her, because his soul was overburdened, because he felt as if he’d been cauterized, and because the presence of Line disturbed him. With Line, Mendel could not escape an impression of a rare and precious human substance that was, at the same time, unsettled and unsettling. Sissl was like a palm tree in the sun, Line was a tangled, nocturnal ivy. She could not be more than a few years older than Leonid, but the privations that she had experienced in the ghetto had wiped her face clean of all youthfulness, her skin appeared opaque and weary, marked by untimely wrinkles. Her eyes were large and wide-set, with ashy shadows under them, her nose was small and straight, and she had the minute features of a cameo, which gave her an expression that was at once sad and resolute. She moved quickly and confidently, at times with rude haste.
Line had insisted to Ulybin that she be allowed to take part in the training exercises: she was a partisan, not a refugee. Mendel had admired her skill with weapons at Novoselky and also, during the march through the snow, her stamina, at least equal to Leonid’s. This is not a natural quality, he thought: it’s a reserve of courage and strength that must be reconstituted every day, and we all ought to do as she does. This girl knows how to impose her will; she may not always know what she wants, but when she does, she gets it. He envied Leonid, and at the same time he was worried for him. He seemed to have been taken in tow by Line, and the tow cable was straining. A strained cable can snap, and what then?
Line didn’t talk much, and never pointlessly: a few unemphatic, carefully thought-out words, spoken in a low and slightly husky voice, eyes fixed on her interlocutor’s face. She had a way about her unlike that of the women, Jewish and non-Jewish, whom Mendel had met in his life. She displayed neither timidity nor false modesty, she was never theatrical or capricious, but when she did speak with people she approached them face-to-face, as if to observe their reactions from a close distance; often she also laid her small strong hand, with its gnawed fingernails, on their shoulder or arm. Was she aware of the feminine charge conveyed by this gesture of hers? Mendel sensed her intensity, and was hardly surprised that Leonid followed Line the way a dog follows its master. It might be the effect of long abstinence, but when Mendel looked at Line he was reminded of Rahab, the seductress of Jericho, and all the other temptresses of Talmudic legend. He’d found evidence of them in an old book that belonged to his teacher the rabbi: a forbidden book, but Mendel knew where it was hidden, and he had furtively leafed through it more than once, with all the curiosity of a thirteen-year-old boy, whenever the rabbi napped in the heat of the afternoon, in his high-backed chair. Michal, who charmed anyone who saw her. Yael, the murderous partisan of times gone by, who drove a nail through the temple of the enemy general but seduced all men with the mere sound of her voice. Abigail, the wise queen, who seduced anyone who thought of her. But Rahab was superior to all of them; any man who so much as uttered her name instantly spilled his seed.
No, Line’s name possessed none of these virtues. Everyone in Novoselky knew the story of Line and her name, which was neither Russian nor Yiddish nor Hebrew. Line’s parents, both of them Russian Jews and philosophy students, had brought her into the world without giving the matter much thought during the white-hot years of the revolution and civil war. Her father had volunteered for the army and had gone missing in Volynia, fighting against the Poles. Her mother had found a job in a textile factory. Earlier, she had taken part in the October Revolution, because she viewed it as the path to her own liberation, both as a Jew and as a woman; she had organized demonstrations in public squares and had spoken in the soviets: she was a follower and an admirer of Emmeline Pankhurst, the kind and indomitable lady who in 1918 had won English women the right to vote, and she was happy to have given birth to a baby girl just a few months later, because it allowed her to name the child Emmeline, a name that everyone, beginning in nursery school, had shortened to Line. But Line’s maternal grandmother, Anna Kaminskaya, had not been a woman who dedicated her life to cooking, children, and church, either. She was born in 1858, in the same year and on the same day as Emmeline Pankhurst; she had run away from home to study economics in Zurich, and, once she completed her studies, she returned to Russia, where she preached the renunciation of all worldly goods and of marriage, along with the equality of all workers, whether Christians or Jews, women or men. For her troubles she was exiled to Omsk, where Line’s mother was born. In the tiny room where Line and her mother lived, in Chernigov, Line remembered a photograph of Mrs. Pankhurst that her mother had cut out of a magazine, framed, and hung on the wall behind the stove: arrested in 1914, the tiny revolutionary in her long skirts and ostrich-plumed hat was dangling in midair, suspended several feet over a London sidewalk glistening with rain, dignified and impassive, in the paws of a British policeman who was pressing her slender back against his own colossal gut.
In Chernigov, and later in Kiev, where she had moved to study to become a schoolteacher, Line had frequented Zionist organizations and, at the same time, the local Komsomol: she saw no contradiction between Soviet communism and the collective farming preached by the Zionists; but, from 1932 on, Zionist organizations had an increasingly hard time, until they were officially disbanded. To those Jews who wished to have a land of their own, where they could settle and live according to their traditions, Stalin had offered a grim patch of territory in eastern Siberia, Birobidzhan: take it or leave it, those who want to live as Jews can go to Siberia; if they rejected Siberia, that meant they preferred to be Russian. There was no third option. But what must and can a Jew who wants to be a Russian do, if the Russians forbid him to attend the university, call him zhid, unleash pogroms against him, and form alliances with Hitler? There is nothing he can do, especially if that Jew is a woman. Line stayed behind in Chernigov, the Germans came and locked all the Jews in the ghetto: in the ghetto she had met up again with some of her Zionist friends from Kiev. With them, and, this time with the help of the Soviet partisans, she had purchased weapons, few and inadequate, and had learned to use them. Line had no propensity for the theoretical; in the ghetto she’d suffered hunger, cold, and exhaustion, but she had felt her many souls merge into one. The woman, the Jew, the Zionist, and the Communist had all condensed into one Line and she had only one enemy.
In late February they received the radio message that they had been expecting for so long, and the camp was immediately thrown into a hubbub. Near David-Gorodok, on the Stviga marshes, which had been frozen for four months, the Germans had equipped a field for nocturnal parachute drops: it was actually nothing more than a field of snow bounded by three fires at the tips of an elongated triangle; the fires, simple stacks of branches, were lit whenever the radio transmitted a predetermined signal. Ulybin’s men were given the job of preparing a drop field just like that one, not far from the Turov camp, and ten kilometers from the German camp; it was up to Ulybin to decide exactly where. When the warning signal came in over the radio, a team would be assigned to light the fires of the false drop field; another team would be assigned to distract the Germans and put out the fires of the real drop field. In the uniform expanse of the steppe, the German aircraft would have no other indication guiding them than the fires of the drop field prepared by the partisans, and they’d drop their parachutes onto that one. Provisions, winter clothing, and light weapons were expected to be dropped.
Ulybin sent two men on skis, by night, to take note of the size and orientation of the German triangle. They weren’t gone long: everything corresponded perfectly to what the radio had told them. The drop field had already been laid out, with the three stacks of wood at each tip of the triangle, oriented from west to east; a country road ran past it, and had been cleared with a snowplow. On the road were tracks, both recent and old, of horses, wagon wheels, and tires. Between the road and the drop field there was a small wooden barrack, with a smoking stovepipe: no more than ten or twelve men could fit in it. Most likely, the matériel being dropped was intended not only for the garrison o
f David-Gorodok but for all the German garrisons scattered across Polesie and in the Pripet marshes: in those areas the partisan presence was making itself felt, and aerial drops were both the quickest way of delivering provisions and the most secure.
Finding a field that resembled the one prepared by the Germans wasn’t hard: it would have been difficult to find one that was different. Ulybin chose a large marsh about twenty minutes’ march from the field; it, too, was parallel to a passable road, and he had a board hut built in roughly the same position as the one the Germans had: there was no chance of the Germans making drops by day, but they might well send a scout plane to take pictures of the ground. After that, while awaiting the German radio signal, he named the two teams. The first team, assigned to provoke the Germans and put out the fires on their drop field, included nine men, among them Leonid, Pyotr, and Pavel. The second team, which had the task of lighting the fires on the false drop field, was made up of six men, including Mendel. Everyone else was instructed to stand by. When the work was done, the report was sent by radio to the partisan operative command.
The weather continued cold. Around March 5 it snowed again, a dry powdery snow that came down in fine, intermittent gusts; between one snowfall and the next, the sky remained covered with mist. For the parachute drops, the Germans would certainly wait for the sky to clear entirely. Nonetheless, one morning the roar of an airplane was heard: it came and went, flying not very high but still above the clouds, as if in search of a landing field. It seemed too low to be able to make a drop, and for that matter there had been no warning message on the radio. Ulybin gave orders to set up the heavy machine gun: it was mounted on a sled, but the men unbolted it and aimed it at the sky by hand. The airplane kept flying back and forth, but the noise was growing fainter. The partisans came out of the barracks to look up at the luminous but impenetrable sky; every so often the sun could be glimpsed, surrounded by a halo, but it vanished immediately.