by Primo Levi
“He’d composed lots of other songs, both happy and sad; his best-known song he wrote many years before the Germans came to Poland, in the aftermath of a pogrom. In those days, the peasants took care of carrying out the pogroms. Almost everyone in Poland knows it, not just the Jews, but no one knows that Martin the carpenter composed it.”
Gedale folded the packet and put it back in his pocket.
“That’s enough for now, thoughts like this are not for every day. They’re all right every now and then, but if you live inside them they’ll poison you until you’re no longer a partisan. And keep in mind: I believe in three things only, vodka, women, and the submachine gun. There was a time when I also believed in reason, but not anymore.”
A few days later Gedale decided that they had rested long enough and it was time to start marching again:
“. . . but this is an open band, and anyone who prefers to remain in Russia is free to leave—without his weapons, of course. You can wait for the front lines to reach you, or go wherever you like.” No one chose to leave, and Gedale asked Pyotr:
“Do you know this country?”
“Pretty well,” Pyotr replied.
“How far is the railway?”
“A dozen kilometers or so.”
“Excellent,” said Gedale. “The next leg of the journey, we’ll go by train.”
“By train? But there are guards on all the trains!” said Mendel.
“Oh well, you can always try. You can reason with the guards.” But Gedale took Pavel’s objection seriously:
“But what about the horse? You can’t be thinking of abandoning it. After all, we need it, it carries half our baggage.”
Gedale turned to Pyotr again:
“What kind of trains run on this line?”
“Freight trains, nearly all of them; sometimes there are a few passengers aboard, people working the black market. If the train’s carrying supplies for the Germans, then there are guards, but never very many of them: two men on the locomotive and two at the end of the train. Military transport trains never come through here.”
“What’s the closest station?”
“That’s Kolki, forty kilometers south of here: it’s a small station.”
“Is there a loading dock?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
Dov broke in:
“But why do you want us to take the train?”
Gedale replied impatiently, “Well, why shouldn’t we take the train? We’ve been walking for more than a thousand kilometers; the railroad is close by; and basically I want to enter Polish territory in a way that will make people remember us.”
He thought it over for a moment and added, “Boarding a train in a station is too dangerous. We have to stop it in the open countryside, but then we can’t get the horse on board. All right, we’ll take most of the baggage, after all it’s not far; you, Pavel, go ahead with the horse and wait for us at Kolki.”
Pavel had his doubts:
“What if you don’t get there?”
“If we don’t get there, just come meet us with the horse.”
“But what if there’s no loading dock?”
Gedale shrugged his shoulders: “And what if, what if, what if! Only the Germans anticipate everything, and that’s why they lose wars. If there’s no loading dock we’ll think of something else. We’ll see on the spot, there’ll be a way. Get going, Pavel; remember that you’re a peasant, and don’t let people see you in towns and villages. Around here, the Germans requisition horses.”
Pavel set off at a trot, but he was still within sight when the Thrush settled back into his customary solemn gait. Gedale and his men began marching, and in a little over two hours they were at the railroad. It was a single track, and it cut across the plain from one horizon to the other, straight as a shaft of light.
It’s easy to mistake hope for likelihood. Everyone expected the train to be coming from the north and heading toward the Polish border; after a couple of hours of waiting, however, they saw it arriving from the south. It was a freight train and it was traveling slowly. Gedale positioned armed men behind the hedges lining either side of the tracks, and then, disarmed and in short sleeves, he stood between the rails waving a red rag. The train slowed and came to a halt, and from the engineer’s cab shots were immediately fired. Gedale darted off, and hid behind a hazelnut tree; everyone else started firing back. Mendel, even as he, too, was shooting, trying to hit the locomotive’s narrow windows, admired the Gedalists’ military training. From everything he’d seen up until that point, he would have expected them to be reckless, as in fact they were; what he hadn’t expected, however, was the precision and economy of their shots, and the impeccable technique of their deployment. Tailors, copyists, and cantors, their song said: but they had learned their new trade quickly and well. It’s easy to spot those who are inexperienced and frightened, because they look for massive shelter, a boulder or a huge tree trunk, which will certainly protect you, but which also prevents you from moving or shooting without exposing your head. Instead, they were all crouching behind thick bushes, and they shot through the leaves, moving frequently to disorient their adversaries.
The train’s guards, safe behind metal plate, fired fast and accurately: there had to be at least four men, and they weren’t skimping on ammunition. The last car of the train, however, was defenseless. Mendel saw Mottel suddenly leap out and rush at the train. In an instant he had clambered onto the roof of the last car: up there he was safe, and, besides, they hadn’t seen him from the cab. He had a German hand grenade fastened to his belt, the kind that are shaped like a small club, with a delayed explosion, and he ran toward the locomotive from car to car, leaping over the gaps. When he was on the roof of the first car, they saw him yank the pin out of the grenade and wait a few seconds; then he used the grenade itself to break the cab’s rear window, and dropped it inside.
There was an explosion and the firing stopped. In the cab they found that there had been only three German guards; one of them was still alive, and Gedale finished him off without hesitation. The fireman and the engineer were also dead; too bad, said Gedale, they weren’t at fault and they would have been useful to us: oh well, if you serve the Germans you’re running a risk and you know it. He pouted like a child. Mottel’s initiative had been brilliant but it had spoiled his plans:
“Now who’s going to drive this thing? Who knows how much damage your bomb did to the controls; most important of all, we have to put it into reverse.”
“Commander, you’ve got a hard head and you’re never happy,” said Mottel, who’d been expecting high praise. “I bring you a train and you criticize me. The next time I’ll let you attack and I’ll sit back smoking my pipe.”
Gedale paid no attention to him, and told Mendel to climb up into the cab and see whether he was able to get the train moving. In the meanwhile, other men were inspecting the rest of the train. They came back disappointed: the train wasn’t carrying valuable merchandise, only bags of cement, lime, and coal. Gedale had them toss all the cement out of two boxcars, to make room for the men and for the horse: he still hadn’t given up on his idea of a railroad excursion. He was very excited; he ordered them to cut all the bags with a knife, then reconsidered and had them stack a considerable number between the tracks in front of the locomotive:
“If we weren’t in such a hurry, we could’ve done a better job; but even this way, with a little rain and a bit of luck, it’ll make quite a blockade.” Then he climbed up into the cab next to Mendel:
“Well? What can you tell me?”
“A locomotive isn’t a watch,” Mendel replied in some annoyance.
“Nu, they’re both mechanisms, and you haven’t answered my question. A locomotive isn’t a watch, and a watchmaker isn’t an engineer, and an ox isn’t a pig, and someone like me isn’t the leader of a partisan band, but he tries to be the leader of a partisan band, and he does the best he can at it; in fact, he becomes the leader of a band of
partisan bandits.” Here Gedale laughed, with that easy laugh of his that cleared the air in an instant. Mendel laughed, too:
“All right, get out, and we’ll give it a try.”
Gedale climbed down and Mendel fiddled with the controls. “Careful, I’m going to give it some steam.” The smokestack puffed, the couplings groaned, and the train moved backward a few meters; everyone shouted, “Hurrah!” but Mendel said, “There’s still some pressure in the boiler, but it won’t last long. Having an engineer isn’t enough, you also need a fireman.”
Efficient as the Gedalists might be when it came to fighting, they were equally chaotic when it came to peacetime choices. No one wanted to be the fireman; after an involved discussion, Mendel was assigned a woman assistant, though she was as strong as any man: Rokhele the Black, who was being punished because a few days before, while they were cleaning their weapons, she had lost a rifle spring. She was called Rokhele the Black to distinguish her from Rokhele the White: her face was as dark as a gypsy’s, she was thin and agile. She had exceedingly long legs, and a long neck, too, atop which sat a small triangular face, lit up by laughing slanting eyes. She wore her black hair gathered in a bun. She, too, was a veteran of Kosava, though she was barely twenty. Rokhele the White, on the other hand, was a simple, meek creature who almost never spoke, and, when she did, spoke in a voice so low that it was almost impossible to hear her. For those reasons, nobody knew anything about her, nor did she seem interested in having anyone know anything: she passively followed the band as it marched, obeyed everyone, and never complained. She came from a remote village in Ukrainian Galicia.
Mendel showed the Black what she’d have to do in order to feed the boiler, everyone else climbed into the two free cars, and the train began to move, pushed instead of pulled. Mendel set the steam throttle for a very low speed, because from the cab he couldn’t see the way. Jozek had taken up a position with his submachine gun in the brakeman’s cubby, on the last car, which was now the first, and was acting as a lookout; every so often they both leaned out, and Jozek signaled to Mendel whether the tracks ahead were clear. The firewoman laughed as if she were playing a game and shoveled coal with childish glee; it wasn’t long before she was dripping with sweat from head to foot, and black for real now, so black that her eyes and teeth glittered like headlights in the darkness. Mendel, on the other hand, was having no fun at all. His satisfaction at having tamed that huge mechanical beast soon waned; the blood on the metal floor made him uneasy, he wasn’t happy driving practically blind, and the whole enterprise struck him as a gratuitous folly and extremely foolhardy. He couldn’t grasp what farsighted intentions Gedale might have.
Midway, he was forced to admit that Gedale rarely had distant intentions, and instead preferred to improvise: he’d leaned out of the boxcar and was waving for him to stop the train. He did, and they both got out.
“Listen, watchmaker, it strikes me that the best thing would be to damage this train as badly as we can. What do you recommend?”
“Here, nothing at all,” Mendel replied. “If we were traveling forward instead of backward, we could uncouple the cars and do something to keep them from moving. But this way is a whole different matter. As it is, the only thing we can do is to let down the sides of the flat cars; that way, with all the bumps and jerks, the lime and coal will wind up scattered along the embankment.”
“What about the cars themselves and the locomotive?”
“We’ll think about that later,” said Mendel. “Once you’ve had enough fun.”
Gedale ignored his mocking tone, sent three men to lower the sides of the flat cars, and the train took off, cheerfully scattering construction material along both sides of the track. They arrived in Kolki in the early afternoon, and the cars were almost empty: Pavel was waiting with his horse on the loading dock. There was nobody in the tiny station, except for the stationmaster, and when he saw the machine gun in Jozek’s hands, he gave a sort of military salute and withdrew. Mendel braked the train to a halt, loaded Pavel and the Thrush in a flash, and took off again. Gedale was happy, and he waved for Mendel to go on, and to go faster: “To Sarny! To Sarny!” Over the roar of the engine, Mendel could hear shouts and singing from the two boxcars, along with the Thrush’s frightened whinnying.
Shortly thereafter, it was Mendel who, of his own initiative, halted the train by a small river running over the uninhabited steppe. It wasn’t only so that he could get a rest and so that Rokhele could wash up a little, but also to inform the others that the boiler was about to run out of water. Everyone set to work, forming a bucket brigade from the river with the few available containers: several cooking pots and a pail that they found in the locomotive. The operation dragged on, and Mendel took advantage of the opportunity to listen to Pavel, who was telling what he had seen at Kolki.
“We were in no danger, neither the horse nor I. No one paid any attention to us, and no one spoke to us, and yet I doubt that anyone took me for a peasant. I saw no Germans; and yet they must have been there, because they had their propaganda posters outside the town hall. Still, I saw none in the streets. The people are no longer afraid to talk, or less so than in the past. I went into a tavern, the radio was playing, and I recognized the voice of Radio Moscow: it was saying that the Russians have retaken Crimea, that all the German cities are being bombed day and night, and that in Italy the Allies are at the gates of Rome. Oh, how wonderful it is to walk through the streets of a town, to see the balconies with potted flowers, the shop signs, the windows with their curtains! Look what I brought you: I took it off the wall, there’s one on every corner.”
Pavel showed everyone a poster, printed in large letters on ugly yellowish paper, in Russian and in Polish.
It said: “Don’t work for the Germans, don’t give them information. Anyone who supplies the Germans with wheat will be killed. Reader, we’re watching you; if you tear this poster off the wall, we’ll shoot you.”
“And you tore it off the wall?” Mottel asked.
“I didn’t tear it off the wall, I took it off the wall: that’s another thing entirely. I took it off carefully, anyone could see that I was taking it away to show it to someone; and in fact they didn’t shoot me. You see? It’s signed Red Star Regiment: that’s who’s in charge around there.”
“We’re in charge, too,” Gedale interrupted impetuously. “We’ll make our own entrance into Sarny: an entrance they won’t soon forget. Who here knows Sarny?”
Jozek knew the place, he’d done his military service in the Polish Army there: a modest little city, with a population of perhaps twenty thousand. A few factories, a spinning mill, and a workshop to repair railroad rolling stock. The station? Jozek knew it very well indeed, because he’d been on guard there shortly before the war broke out; Sarny was the last Polish city before the border, the Russians entered Sarny without fighting, immediately after the outbreak of hostilities. It was a fairly important station, because the line for Lublin and Warsaw ran through it, and because of the repair shop. There was a big train shed and a turntable, which they used to send locomotives to the repair shop, in fact. Gedale’s face lit up, and he said to Mendel, “Your locomotive will die a glorious death.” Mendel said he hoped that he wouldn’t, too.
Gedale ordered the train to halt at night, at the entrance to the marshaling yard, and had everyone get out of the cars. The horse, frightened of the dark, balked: it refused to get out, it tried to rear up, it neighed convulsively and kicked at the boxcar’s far wall. They hauled on it and shoved it from behind, and in the end it made up its mind to leap, but it landed awkwardly and broke its front leg; Pavel walked away without a word and Gedale finished off the horse with a bullet to the back of its head. The Sarny station seemed deserted, too: no one reacted to the gunshot. Gedale told Mendel to push the rest of the cars onto a side track, and Jozek and Pavel to go ahead cautiously, and to set the switches toward the turntable; they came back when they were finished and reported that the turntable tracks were set sidewa
ys with respect to the main line in: excellent, said Gedale. He was going to send the locomotive crashing down into the pit beneath the turntable, and the repair shop would be out of commission for at least a month.
“Do you have your doubts, watchmaker? You’ve become fond of your machine, eh? Me, too, a little bit, but I don’t feel safe going on like this, and I don’t want to give the locomotive to the Germans. And I’ll tell you one thing that I’ve learned in the woods: the exploits that turn out best are the ones that your enemy would never believe you could pull off. Come on, push the cars away, start up the engine, and jump off.”
Mendel obeyed. The locomotive without its crew vanished into the darkness, visible only because of the sparks that billowed out of the smokestack. They waited, holding their breath; a few minutes later they heard a clatter of crushed metal, a thunderous roar, and a high-pitched hiss that slowly died away. An alarm siren wailed in the night, excited voices could be heard, and the Gedalists fled silently into the countryside. As Mendel groped his way through the darkness of the blackout, stumbling over tracks and cables, the words of the blessing of the miracles buzzed, incongruously, in his head: “Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the universe, Who did for me a miracle in this place.”