by Primo Levi
Upon his return, Jozek saw at least half of the band lined up along the riverbank, in silence; Gedale was sitting on a log, with his feet in the water and his violin held high, while Izu, one of the men from Blizna, hairy as a bear and stark naked, was wading very slowly, step by step, toward an outcropping of rock in the middle of the river. They were all watching him, and he gestured to them not to move or speak. When he was at the foot of the outcropping, he sank entirely into the water, again with extreme caution; the water swirled for a moment, and then Izu emerged with a large fish struggling in his hands. He bit it right behind the head, and the fish went limp: it was two handsbreadths in length, and its bronze scales glittered in the sunlight.
“What did you catch, Izu?” Gedale asked.
“I thought it was a trout, but it’s a sazan!” Izu replied proudly, climbing up the bank. “That’s funny, in such shallow water.” He crouched down near a flat stone, gutted the fish, washed it in the river current, sliced it along its back with his knife, and started pulling flesh off its sides and eating it.
“What, aren’t you going to cook it?”
“Cooked fish loses all its vitamins,” Izu replied, and went on chewing.
“Still, it tastes better. Plus it has phosphorus, and phosphorus makes you intelligent. Clearly, you men of Blizna always eat your fish raw.”
Gedale waved at Jozek from a distance, greeting him: “Good work, Jozek, with that we’re set for a week.” Then he went back to playing his violin: he’d stripped down to his belt, and he had an ecstatic expression on his face, though it wasn’t clear whether it was because of the music or because his feet were soaking in the water. Still, Bella was giving him no peace. Of the three women who had arrived in Turov with the band, it seemed that Bella was closest to Gedale, that she considered herself his legitimate and definitive female companion, and that Gedale had different ideas, or at least that he did not care enough to settle the matter. Bella, with a few others, was pitching a military tent, but she kept interrupting her own work, and interrupting Gedale, too, shouting into his ear as if he were deaf; Gedale would answer her patiently and resume playing, and once again Bella would interrupt him with her complaints:
“Stop playing that violin. Why don’t you come give us a hand!”
“Hang it on a willow tree, Gedale!” Dov shouted from a distance.
“We may not be in Jerusalem yet, but we’re no longer in Babylon,” Gedale replied, and resumed playing. Bella was a small slender blonde with a long, pouty face. She looked about forty, while Gedale couldn’t have been any older than thirty; she frequently handed out criticisms and rebukes, and issued orders that no one obeyed, though she gave no sign of resenting the fact. Gedale treated her with a tenderness just tinged with irony.
Late that morning, the sentinels sighted a man, all alone, shouting from a distance, “Don’t shoot!”; they let him draw near, and it was Pyotr. Gedale welcomed him without any display of astonishment:
“Good work, I’m glad you came with us. Sit down, we’re about to eat.”
“Comrade commander,” said Pyotr, “I have only my revolver, I left my submachine gun with Ulybin’s men.”
“If you’d brought it with you, that would’ve been better, but it doesn’t matter.”
“You see, I know that I’ve done wrong, but I quarreled with Ulybin. He was too harsh, not just with me but with everyone. And one night we had a very serious discussion . . . a political discussion.”
“And you talked about the Gedalists, didn’t you?”
“How did you guess?”
Gedale said nothing in reply, but in his turn asked, “Won’t he come looking for you? Because, believe me, we don’t want any trouble with Ulybin.”
“He won’t come looking for me. He was the one who told me to leave. He told me to lay down my gun and go. He told me to come here with you.”
“He must’ve spoken in anger. Or drunkenness—maybe he’ll think better of it later.”
“He was angry, but he wasn’t drunk,” Pyotr said. “And in any case they’re four or five days’ march away now. And I’m no deserter. I didn’t come to you out of fear; I came to you to fight.”
That night, for no particular reason, they celebrated in Gedale’s camp: perhaps because that was their first day out of the marshes and out of danger, and the first day of full-blown spring; perhaps because Pyotr’s arrival had cheered everyone up; or perhaps simply because, among the other provisions piled high on the Thrush’s back, Jozek had also brought a small keg of Polish vodka. They’d lit a fire between two sand dunes and were sitting around it in a circle; Dov told Gedale that it might be risky, so Gedale put out the fire, but the glow of the embers warmed their hearts all the same.
The first to perform was Pavel. No one had called on him, but he got proudly to his feet and stood by the embers, picked up a piece of charcoal, and drew a mustache on his upper lip, pulled a shock of wet hair over his forehead, saluted the crowd with his arm held out straight before him at eye level, and began to hold forth. At first he spoke in German, with a swelling wave of anger: it was an improvised speech, and the tone mattered more than the content, but they all laughed when they heard him addressing the German soldiers, inciting them to fight to the last man, and labeling them, variously, heroes of Greater Germany, sons of bitches, dogs of heaven, defenders of our blood and soil, and assholes. Gradually, his fury became white-hot, until his words were suffocated into a doglike snarl broken now and again by outbursts of convulsive coughing. Suddenly, as if an abscess had burst, he stopped talking in German and went on in Yiddish, and everyone bent double with laughter: it was extraordinary to hear Hitler, in the throes of his ranting, using the language of the outcasts to incite someone to slaughter someone else; it wasn’t clear whether he was calling on the Germans to slaughter the Jews or the other way around. They clapped frantically, they called for an encore, and Pavel, with great dignity, instead of reprising his routine (which, he explained, he’d first tried out in 1937 in a Warsaw cabaret), sang “’O sole mio,” in a language that no one understood and which he claimed was Italian.
Then Mottel the Cutthroat took the stage. Mottel was a little man with short legs and extremely long arms, agile as an ape. He grabbed first three, then four, then five glowing brands, and sent them flying in all directions, over his head, under his legs; against the background of the violet sky they described an ever-changing tangle of shimmering trajectories. He was applauded, and he thanked the audience with a bow to each of the four points of the compass, whereupon he withdrew, imitating the lopsided stride of the orangutan. Why the Cutthroat? They explained to Mendel that Mottel was not just some nobody. He was from Minsk, he was thirty-six years old, and he was twice a cutthroat. In the first half of his career he had been a respectable cutthroat: for four years he had been the shokhet, the ritual butcher of the Jewish community. He had passed the requisite exam, had been issued a license, and was considered to be an expert in the art of keeping the knife sharp and slicing with a single blow through the animal’s trachea, esophagus, and carotid arteries. But then (because of a woman, it was whispered) he’d gone to the bad: he’d left his wife and home, he’d fallen in with the local underworld, and, while never forgetting his previous profession and his theoretical preparation, he’d also become adept at snatching purses and scaling balconies. He kept his long, blunt-tipped ritual knife; yet, as an emblem of his new direction, he’d snapped off the end at an oblique angle, giving the knife a sharp tip. Thus modified, it lent itself to other uses.
“A woman! Bring on a woman!” someone shouted in a voice made hoarse by vodka. Bella stepped forward, smoothing her tow-blond hair, but Pavel, lurching like a bear, bumped her with one hip and knocked her back into the circle of spectators, resuming his place. He wasn’t done yet, and it was unclear whether he was drunk or just pretending. This time he was a Hasidic rabbi; drunk, of course, pouring forth the Sabbath prayers in pretend Hebrew that was actually whorehouse Russian. He prayed until he w
as breathless, at dizzying speed, because (he explained in an aside) the little pig mustn’t slip between one picket and the next: a profane thought must not be able to make its way between one sacred word and the next. This time the applause was more restrained.
Bella hadn’t given up. She stepped over to the embers, raised her left hand in a graceful gesture, placed her right hand on her heart, and began to sing an aria, “Sì me ne andrò lontana,” “I will go far away,” but she didn’t get very far, because after a few bars her voice cracked and she burst into tears. Gedale came, took her by the hand, and led her aside.
On all sides, voices called out Dov’s name. “Come out, Siberian,” Pyotr called to him, “and tell us the things you saw in the Great Land.” Pavel followed, having taken on the role of master of ceremonies: “And now, here for your enjoyment, David Yavor, the wisest of us all, the oldest, and the best beloved. Come forth, Dov, everyone wants to see you and hear you.” The moon had risen, and it was almost full; it lit up Dov’s white hair as he reluctantly headed to the center of the arena. He laughed shyly and said:
“What do you want from me? I don’t know how to sing or dance, and what I saw in Kiev I’ve already told you about far too many times.”
“Tell us about your grandfather the nihilist.” “Tell us about hunting bears where you come from.” “Tell us about that time you escaped from the German train.” “Tell us about the comet.” But Dov fended off the requests: “These are all things I’ve already told you, and nothing could be more boring than to repeat oneself. Let’s have a game, instead; or a contest.”
“Wrestling!” said Pyotr. “Who wants to take me on?”
For a few moments no one moved; then there was a short argument between Line and Leonid. Leonid intended to accept the challenge, and Line, for some reason, was trying energetically to change his mind. In the end, Leonid escaped her grasp; the two contenders slipped off their jackets and boots and waited, warily, for the bout to begin. They grabbed each other by the shoulders, each trying to flip the other with footwork; they circled repeatedly, then Leonid tried to wrap his arms around Pyotr’s waist, unsuccessfully. The band’s two dogs barked uneasily, snarling and bristling. Pyotr not only was stronger than Leonid but also had the advantage of longer arms. After a confused and somewhat unfair skirmish, Leonid tripped and fell and Pyotr was on him immediately, pinning his shoulders to the ground. Pyotr took the audience’s cheers with both hands raised, and turned around to see Dov.
“What do you want, uncle?” Pyotr asked. He was practically a full head taller than Dov.
“To wrestle with you,” Dov replied, and he squared off, but lazily, his hands dangling loosely from his wrists, in the stance he usually took when he was relaxing. Pyotr waited, perplexed. “Now let me teach you something,” said Dov, and went into a crouch. Pyotr backed up, keeping a cautious eye on him. Dov’s movement, in the pale glow of the moonlight, wasn’t at all clear; they saw him stretch out one hand and a knee, dropping slightly, and then Pyotr teetered off balance and fell onto his back. He got up and brushed off the dust. “Where did you learn these moves?” he asked in an offended tone. “Did they teach you in the army?” “No,” Dov replied, “my father taught me.” Gedale said that Dov should teach the whole band to fight that way, and Dov replied that he would be glad to, especially the women. Everyone laughed, and Dov added that that was Samoyed wrestling: a number of Samoyed families had been deported to the town where he was born.
“It was the Russians who came up with that name, because they thought they ate human flesh. ‘Samo-yed’ means ‘self-eating,’ but they don’t like that name. They’re good people, and you can learn a lot of things from them; how to light a fire when the wind is blowing, how to shelter yourself from a storm under a pile of sticks. And how to drive a dogsled.”
“That’s probably something that won’t come in handy for us,” Pyotr pointed out.
“But here’s something you might find useful,” said Dov. From the belt that Pyotr had set down on the ground next to his jacket, he pulled a knife; holding it by the tip between two fingers, he balanced it for a moment as if taking aim, and then hurled it toward the trunk of a maple tree, some eight or ten meters away. The knife went spinning through the air and drove deep into the wood. Others tried, Pyotr, astonished and jealous, first among them, but no one succeeded, not even when they stood only half as far away from the tree: in the best cases, the knife hit the tree with its handle or flat-on and fell to the ground. Gedale and Mendel weren’t even able to hit the tree trunk.
“Too bad that it wasn’t Dr. Goebbels instead of a maple tree,” said Jozek, who had taken part in neither the shows nor the games. Dov explained that if you wanted to kill a man no ordinary knife would do; you had to use a special knife, slender but heavy, and well balanced. “Understood, Jozek?” said Gedale. “Keep that in mind, the next time you go to the market.”
Some of the men were already asleep when Gedale picked up his violin and started to sing; but he wasn’t singing for applause. He sang softly, he who was such a loud talker; other Gedalists joined in, some of the voices in the chorus were harmonious and others less so, but all were filled with conviction and resentment. Mendel and his men listened in astonishment to the rhythm, which was vigorous, practically a march, and the words, which ran as follows:
Do you know us? We’re the sheep of the ghetto,
Shorn for a thousand years, resigned to injury.
We’re the tailors, copyists, and cantors
Withered in the shadow of the Cross.
Now we’ve learned the pathways in the forest,
We’ve learned to shoot, and our aim is straight.
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If not like this, then how? And if not now, when?
Our brothers have risen to heaven
Through the chimneys of Sobibór and Treblinka,
They’ve dug themselves a grave in the air.
Only we few live on
To honor our drowned people
By revenge and by witness.
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If not like this, then how? And if not now, when?
We are the sons of David and the intransigent of Masada.
Each in his pocket has the stone
That broke Goliath’s forehead.
Brothers, away from the Europe of graves:
Let’s climb together to the land
Where we’ll be men among men.
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If not like this, then how? And if not now, when?
When they stopped singing, they all fell asleep wrapped in their blankets; only the sentinels remained awake, perched high in the tree branches at the four corners of the encampment. In the morning, Mendel asked Gedale:
“What were you singing last night? Is that your anthem?”
“You can call it that if you want; but it’s not an anthem, it’s only a song.”
“Did you compose it?”
“The music is mine, but it’s always changing, little by little, month by month, because it’s not written down anywhere. But the words aren’t mine. Here they are, look, they’re written right here.”
From his inside jacket pocket, Gedale pulled out an oilcloth packet tied with a piece of twine. He unfolded it and extracted a sheet of graph paper, wrinkled, dated 13 Juni, Samstag. It had been torn roughly from a notebook, and it was densely covered with Yiddish letters scratched out in pencil. Mendel took it, examined it carefully, then handed it back to Gedale:
“I can barely read printed characters, and I can’t read script at all. I’ve forgotten how.”
Gedale said, “I learned to read it late, in 1942, in the Kosava ghetto: one time we used it as a secret language. Martin Fontasch was there with us in Kosava. By trade he was a carpenter, and he earned his living that way right up until the end, but he had a passion for writing songs. He did it all himself, words and music, and he was renow
ned throughout Galicia; he accompanied himself on the guitar, and he sang his songs at weddings and country fairs; sometimes he’d even play in the cafés chantants. He was a peaceful man and he had four children, but he was with us in the ghetto revolt, he escaped with us and came into the forest, all alone, no longer young: his whole family had been killed. Last year, in the spring, we were around Novogrudok and there was a brutal roundup; half of our men died fighting, Martin was wounded and fell prisoner. The German who searched him found a flute in his pocket: it wasn’t really a flute but a pennywhistle, a cheap toy that Martin had made for himself by whittling an elderwood branch. Now, the German was a flute player: he told Martin that they hanged partisans and shot Jews, he was a Jew and a partisan, so he could take his pick. But he was also a musician, and since he was a German who loved music, he had decided to grant him one last wish: as long as it was a reasonable wish.
“Martin asked to be allowed to compose one last song, and the German gave him half an hour, handed him this sheet of paper, and locked him in a cell. When the time was up, he came back, took the song, and killed him. It was a Russian who told us the story; at first he’d collaborated with the Germans, then the Germans suspected him of being a double agent and locked him up in the cell next to Martin’s, but he managed to escape and spent a few months with us. Apparently the German was proud of Martin’s song; he showed it around as a curiosity and said he was going to get it translated at the first opportunity. But he never had the chance. We kept an eye on him, we followed him, we figured out where he lived, and one night we crept barefoot into the requisitioned izba where he was staying. I’ve got a taste for justice and I would have liked to ask him if he had one last wish, but Mottel was hurrying me, so I strangled him in his bed. Among his personal effects we found Martin’s flute and the song: it didn’t bring him much luck, but it’s been a talisman for us. Here, look at this: down to here are the lyrics that you heard us sing, and these words at the bottom say, ‘Written by me Martin Fontasch, who am about to die. Saturday 13 June 1943.’ The last line isn’t in Yiddish but in Hebrew; they’re words that you know well, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.’