The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  “All of you into the huts, you stupid good-for-nothings!” shouted Ulybin. “If it drops below the clouds it’ll strafe us all.” In fact, the plane suddenly appeared, barely clearing the treetops: it was heading straight for them. The two men holding the machine gun maneuvered to get the plane in their sights, but a number of voices rang out, shouting: “It’s one of ours, don’t shoot!” And in fact it was a small fighter plane, bearing the insignia of the Soviet Air Force under its wings; it veered over the huts and an arm appeared, waving a greeting. All the men on the ground waved their arms, pointing the plane toward the drop field, and it took off in that direction, vanishing behind the screen of trees.

  “Will it be able to land?”

  “It has skids, not landing gear; if it heads in the right direction it will.”

  “Come on, let’s follow it.” But Ulybin asserted his authority: only he, Maksim, and two others put on skis and set out, first cautiously following the zigzag path that led around the minefields, then straight, with the lengthy agile stride of cross-country skiers.

  They were back an hour later, and they weren’t alone. With them were a Red Army lieutenant and captain, young, clean-shaven, smiling, sheathed in magnificent padded overalls and gleaming leather combat boots. They greeted everyone cordially, but immediately withdrew with Ulybin to the little room he used as a headquarters. They remained in conference for many hours; every so often, Ulybin sent for bread, cheese, and vodka.

  In the camp, the arrival of the two unexpected messengers was the subject of much commentary, mixed with friendliness, hope, fear, and a pinch of ridicule. What were they bringing from the Great Land? Information, no doubt; new instructions; orders. And why had they arrived so suddenly, without any warning by radio? It’s the same as in the army, someone replied: inspections are never announced in advance, if they were they wouldn’t be inspections. “They’re living the good life, the gentlemen from the Great Land,” said a third person. “I’ll bet you they spent the night in their own beds, with pillows and sheets, and maybe even with their wives. I wonder if, along with the propaganda, they brought shaving soap, too!” Because the partisans of all times and places have much in common: they respect the central authorities, but they would gladly do without them. As for shaving soap, this item was in the front line in the general inventory of camp jokes. In Turov, wearing a beard was not advisable; in other bands it was explicitly forbidden, because a young man with a beard was too easily identified as a partisan. Nonetheless, in defiance of prohibitions and danger, many of the men in the forests and the marshes wore thick beards. The beard had become a symbol of partisanzchina, the freedom of the forest, the outlaw life, and the triumph of independence over discipline. At a more or less conscious level, the length of the beard was considered proportional to the seniority of the partisan, as if it were a title of nobility or a hierarchic rank. “Moscow doesn’t want us to wear beards, but Moscow doesn’t send us shaving soap and razors. What are we supposed to use to shave with? With hatchets, with bayonets? No soap, no shaving—we’ll keep our beards.”

  “It’s all stuff that couldn’t hurt a soul,” Pyotr came to announce; he’d been assigned to sort through the matériel brought by the two officers. “No weapons, no ammunition, just printed paper and anti-scabies ointment. No, there’s no shaving soap. There’s no laundry soap, either.” On his own initiative, he went to take the news to the two women, busy in the laundry hut: “You’ll just have to be patient, ladies. Keep on using ash and lye, as our grandmothers did. The important thing is to kill the lice. Anyway, the war’s about to end.”

  The officers departed the same evening. While the two men, already dressed in their flying suits, looked out of the small window with an ostentatious display of patience, Ulybin took Dov aside and spoke to him in an undertone. Then Dov was seen stuffing his few possessions into a knapsack. He bid everyone farewell somberly; his eyes welled over with tears only when he took leave of Sissl, with a brief embrace. Limping, he left the room with the two messengers and a partisan suffering from a fever, and with them vanished into the livid light of sunset. Pyotr said, “You needn’t worry. They’ll take them to a hospital in the Great Land: they’ll be better off there than here, and they’ll have a chance to recover.” Mendel slapped him on the shoulder with one hand, but said nothing.

  After that visit, Ulybin became even more laconic and irritable than before. As if he were trying to reduce all contact to a minimum, he selected a lieutenant of sorts from among the partisans, Zachar, who was tall and skinny as a beanpole and even less talkative than he was. Zachar conveyed orders in one direction, complaints in the other, and served as an intermediary in both directions. No longer very young, and practically illiterate, he was a Cossack from Kuban who raised rams for a living. Zachar was a born diplomat, and from the outset he proved skillful at settling disputes, assuaging frustrations, and maintaining both discipline and esprit de corps. Word got around that Ulybin was getting drunk in his little headquarters room; Zachar denied it, but the steady stream of full and empty bottles was hard to conceal.

  The false drop field was ready, all the men were ready, but the order to act didn’t come. The entire month of March went by virtually without action, which was bad for one and all, not merely for the commander who no longer had anything to command. Hunger was making itself felt: not the piercing hunger that Leonid and others had experienced in German prisoner-of-war camps behind the lines, but a sort of sentimental hunger, a muffled yearning for fresh vegetables, fresh baked bread, food that might be simple but chosen on the whim of the moment. A yearning for home was making itself felt as well, painful for everyone, heartbreaking for the group of Jews. For the Russians, the longing for home was a reasonable hope, in fact likely: a desire to return, a call. For the Jews, the yearning for their homes was not hope but despair, hitherto buried beneath heavier and more urgent sorrows, but still lurking. Their homes were gone: they had been swept away, burned by warfare or massacre, bloodied by the squadrons of manhunters; tomb-houses, better not to think about them, houses of ashes. Why go on living, why go on fighting? For what home, for what homeland, for what future?

  Fedya’s home, on the other hand, was too close. Fedya was turning seventeen on March 30, and he got permission from Ulybin to spend his birthday at home, in the village of Turov, but he didn’t come back. After three days, Ulybin sent word through Zachar that Fedya was now a deserter: two men were to go and find him and bring him back to the band. They had no difficulty finding him; he was at home, and it had never crossed his mind that being away for three days during a time of inactivity was such a serious transgression. But that wasn’t the worst of it: Fedya publicly confessed that while he was at home he had gotten drunk with other young men, and that while drunk he had talked. About what? About the barracks? About the false drop field? Gray-faced, Fedya said that he didn’t even know; that he couldn’t remember; that probably no, he hadn’t talked about secret matters; that he absolutely hadn’t talked about them.

  Ulybin had Fedya locked up in the woodshed. He sent Zachar to bring him food and tea, but at dawn they all saw Zachar walking barefoot back to the woodshed, and they all heard the pistol shot. It fell to Sissl and Line to undress the boy’s body and recover his clothes and boots; it fell to Pavel and Leonid to dig a grave in the dirt soaked with water from the thaw. Why Pavel and Leonid in particular?

  A few days later, Mendel noticed that Sissl was uneasy. He questioned her: no, this wasn’t about Fedya. Zachar had called her aside and had told her: “Comrade, you should take care. If you get pregnant, that’s a problem; this is no clinic, and airplanes from the Great Land don’t come every day. Tell your man.” Zachar had delivered the same lecture to Line, but Line just shrugged. In the same period, an order of the day was posted on the bulletin board, written in a fine hand and in pencil, and signed by Ulybin: soon the thaw would begin, it was urgent to dig a runoff canal around the barracks in order to keep them from being flooded. This was an important j
ob and took absolute precedence, and so the makeup of the two teams that for the past month had been ready for the drop-fields mission was changed. Leonid and Mendel were taken off the teams, and had to put down their rifles and take up a pick and shovel. Not Pavel: Pavel remained a member in good standing of the first team, the one that was to put out the German fires. Mendel, Leonid, and four other men began the excavation work. Snow and dirt both froze during the night, only to thaw into a sticky reddish mud during the warmest hours of the day. As if their curiosity had been roused, large crows landed on the branches of the fir trees to supervise the work, growing constantly in number, pressed one against the other; suddenly their weight would bend the branch, and then they all took flight, cawing and cackling, only to settle on another branch.

  The order came through when no one any longer expected it: German radio signals had been intercepted indicating that a parachute drop was imminent. Evidently it would be an important drop, too, because the signals were repeated more than once. Then, on April 12, the final announcement came: the drop was scheduled for that night. The two teams set out immediately; Pavel, mindful of the risks that awaited him, asked Leonid to look after his horse, which for some reason he had named Drožd, the Thrush.

  The rest of the camp readied itself for the coming night; there were no special orders, but they were all on the alert, especially Mikhail, the radio operator, and Mendel, who alternated shifts with him so that he could get a few hours of rest. The reception was terrible, broken up by buzzing and static; the few messages that they managed to intercept were frantic and repeated several times, but were almost indecipherable, even though both Mikhail and Mendel understood German reasonably well.

  At two in the morning, the roar of engines was heard to the west, and they were all on their feet. It was a clear moonless night; the roar grew louder and more intense, modulated by a steady beat, as when different musical chords vibrate together but not in sync. This was certainly not a single aircraft; there must be at least two, perhaps three. They went by overhead, invisible, to the north of the barracks, then the roar faded and vanished.

  An hour later one of the partisans from the second team arrived, out of breath. Everything had gone perfectly: fires were lit at just the right time, there were four airplanes, there were thirty parachutes, or forty, or maybe even more, many of them landing on the drop field, others among the trees, some caught in the branches. They should immediately send reinforcements and a sled, there was a great deal of matériel. Everyone wanted to go, but Ulybin was indifferent to their pleas. He went himself, with Maksim and Zachar; he refused even to let the messenger who had brought the news go back with them. For the first time in his career as a partisan horse, the Thrush made himself useful: Ulybin had him harnessed to a sledge that set out across the snow, made compact by the thaw, and covered by a fragile crust of nocturnal ice.

  In the meantime the first team had returned as well, all accounted for, just one man with a wounded arm. For the most part, the mission had gone very well, Pyotr and Pavel told them. They had taken up positions near the barrack and heard the roar of the planes, and they’d seen three Germans emerge with jerricans full of gasoline to pour on the stacks of wood. They killed them before they could light the fires, and at the same time a partisan who had climbed onto the barracks roof dropped a hand grenade down the stovepipe. Some of the Germans must have been killed, but others emerged from the devastated barracks and opened fire. One partisan had been wounded and a German was killed; two or three others managed to get a motorcycle with a sidecar started, but they, too, were killed as they were escaping. In the hut, aside from some light weaponry and an assortment of canned foods, they hadn’t found anything interesting. There was a radio, but it had been destroyed by the explosion. They took up positions along the sides of the road, because they expected a truck to arrive from the city to collect the matériel that had been dropped, but by midmorning nothing had been sighted and so they returned to the camp.

  The sledge came back fully loaded, though the messenger must have exaggerated: no more than twenty packages had been dropped. Ulybin wouldn’t let anyone touch them. He had them all stacked in his room, and he opened them himself, with Zachar’s help, letting the others inventory the contents only after he had looked. There was a little of everything, as in a charity raffle: precious stuff, useless stuff, mysterious stuff, and ridiculous stuff. Luxuries that Mendel and his friends had never seen before: made-in-Russia chocolate eggs for the coming Easter, more large chocolates in the shape of sheep, scarabs, and little mice. Cigars and cigarettes, brandy and cognac in cans: could this be special packaging designed by German technicians to withstand the impact with the ground? Terra-cotta foot warmers, evidently meant to be used by sentinels standing guard. A box full of combat medals and assorted decorations, along with certificates to go with them. There were packs of newspapers and magazines, a pack of portraits of the Führer, a sheaf of private correspondence intended for the various garrisons of the district, another sheaf of official correspondence that Ulybin ordered set aside. Two crates were full of ammunition for Wehrmacht Maschinenpistole, two other crates contained clips for a kind of machine gun that nobody was able to identify. In one crate was a typewriter and various types of stationery. Other crates contained six specimens of a device that no one at Turov had ever seen before and whose purpose no one knew: a flattened cylinder, the size of a frying pan and equipped with a long handle, broken down into sections. “This stuff’s for you, watchmaker,” Ulybin said to Mendel. “Study it and tell us what it’s good for.”

  That night, Ulybin let them celebrate their achievement with a modest party. Then he secluded himself with Pavel to examine the documents that they had found: they weren’t in code, none of the material was sensational, it was only detailed lists, invoices in multiple copies, a quartermaster’s accounting documents. Ulybin soon grew tired, and started asking Pavel to translate the private letters to him, for they were more interesting; they were written in language that was meant to be impenetrable and allusive, but were so ingenuous that even an outsider like Pavel had no difficulty in deciphering them; it was clear, the bad weather that all the fathers and mothers were complaining about was the “nonstop offensive” of Allied bombing, and the drought was famine. It was inadvertent defeatist propaganda: Ulybin told Pavel to translate a number of passages publicly.

  Pavel was reading, in Russian, with a deliberately exaggerated German accent that made everyone laugh. Then suddenly from the dark sky they heard the same musical hum as the night before, coming in waves.

  “Hurry!” shouted Ulybin. “Second team, put on your skis and get moving, light those fires: these idiots are going to give us a second drop!” The six team members rushed out, and Ulybin looked at his watch: if they were fast enough, they could be on the site in fifteen minutes, before the airplanes got tired of looking for the drop field in the dark. In fact, they were searching: the roar of the engines drew near and then moved away; at a certain point, the squadron passed directly overhead, then moved off again. Exactly twenty minutes had gone by according to Ulybin’s watch when they heard a salvo of explosions. They all went outside, baffled: the blasts were too distant and too deep to be coming from the minefields around the barracks. They could see the flashes, to the northeast: after each flash they heard the report, with a delay of six seconds. No doubt about it, those were bombs falling on the false drop site. The Germans had understood and they were taking revenge.

  The team returned: just four men. The team leader told what had happened in a broken voice. They had arrived in record time, just as the aircraft were cruising overhead. They had set fire to the first stack of wood, and bombs came raining down immediately: big ones, at least 200 kilos. If the ice had been as thick as it was in January, perhaps it could have withstood the impact; but it was weakened by the thaw, the bombs punched through it, and exploded from underneath, hurling slabs of ice into the air. The two missing men had vanished, swallowed up by the marshes: the
re was no point in going to look for them.

  For the men of Turov this marked the start of a hard time. The thaw had begun, and it was worse than the winter. Ulybin had sent men to check the conditions of the false drop field: it was unusable; no airplane could ever hope to land there, nor would it even be possible to ask for further drops. The thick winter ice had been shattered by the explosions: it formed again during the night, but was so thin that it would not support the weight of a man. On the other marshes, the ice was in better shape because the snow had protected it from the direct rays of the sun, but the snow itself had been altered by the thaw and the wind: it had become a tough, corrugated crust, upon which a normal airplane, even if equipped with skids, would be unable to land without flipping over.

  Ulybin was forced to impose radio silence, because the exploit of the diverted parachute drop seemed to have awakened the German air force to action. All winter its operations had been minimal and apparently guided by chance. Now, however, a clear day rarely went by without a scout plane being seen in the area, and there were plenty of clear days. The deluxe provisions from the parachute drop had been quickly consumed, and flour, lard, and canned foods were beginning to run out. Ulybin established a system of rationing, and morale began to drop. Hunger, the specter of the preceding winters, was about to return, as if time had retreated to the terrible months at the beginning of the partisan war, when everything—food, weapons, barracks, action plans, and even the courage to fight and to go on living—was the product of the desperate initiative of just a few. The men insisted on resuming the provisioning expeditions into the villages; they far preferred hard work and risk to hunger, but Ulybin refused to let them. There was still too much snow; it was hard even to imagine that the scout planes hadn’t yet located the huts. It was obvious that they were looking for them; the huts were well camouflaged and it was still possible that they would not be found, but the Germans were certain to notice fresh tracks.