by Primo Levi
And that was how Gedale’s band announced its entrance into the inhabited world.
7
June–July 1944
“I’m sorry for you, Pavel, but for a few weeks we’d better stay far away from the windows with their curtains and the balconies filled with flowers; and especially from the railroads.” That was what Gedale had said, while he was leading the band to shelter in the thick of the forest. All the same, just three days after they set up camp, Gedale put on a suit of approximately civilian clothing, laid down his weapons, told them to wait for him without doing anything on their own initiative, and left by himself. The others set about coming up with hypotheses, ranging from the most idle ones to the most elaborate, until Dov told them to stop:
“Gedale likes to play, but he’s a good player. If he left without saying anything it means he had his reasons. Now get busy; in a camp, there’s always work to be done.”
They spent several days in a blend of laziness, anxiety, and the ordinary occupations of an encampment, which may be dull but help to pass the time. Gedale returned on June 10, calmly, as if he’d gone for a pleasant walk in peacetime. He asked for something to eat, he lay down to nap for half an hour, he woke up, he stretched, and he went a little distance away to play the violin. But it was clear that he was dying to tell them: he was just waiting for someone to give him an excuse. Bella provided it; although she had received no official appointment, she felt herself to be in charge of provisions. When Bella talked, it was as if she were pecking, a series of sharp but not painful jabs, like a small sparrow:
“You just up and leave without a word, pursuing your own thoughts or who knows what, and you leave us here like a bunch of fools. Listen, we’re about to run out of supplies.”
Gedale set down his violin and pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket: “Here you are, woman. We’re not going to starve to death right away. Go on, summon everyone; let’s have an assembly. It’s far too long since the last one, but it’s also far too long since we had good news; now we have some.”
Everyone gathered around Gedale, and Gedale said:
“Don’t expect a speech, speeches aren’t my style. Don’t ask me any questions, at least not for now. I’ll tell you everything I can, which isn’t much, but it is important. We’re no longer orphans and we’re no longer stray dogs. I talked with somebody, and he knew who we are and where we come from. What we did with the locomotive turned out to be useful, more than I imagined. I was given money, we’ll be given more, and perhaps also weapons and regulation uniforms. I’ve learned that we’re not alone. Among the bands that are incorporated in the Red Army, like Ulybin’s, there are also spontaneous bands of peasants, bands of Ukrainian and Tartar dissidents, and bands of bandits, but also other Jewish bands like ours—other Gedales and other Gedalists. They’re not talked about much, because the Russians don’t like separatists, but they’re out there, more or less armed, large and small, on the move or operating in place. There are even Russian bands commanded by Jewish chiefs.
“I laid out our objectives and they were approved; we can continue on our way, it’s fine with them. We don’t need to wait for the front: we’re a vanguard, we are to go ahead. They expect us to go on doing what we’ve always done, guerrilla warfare, sabotage, diversions, but something more than that as well: they want us to advance into Poland and attack the concentration camps holding prisoners of war and Jews, if there are any left. We must gather together those who are scattered and cleanse the country of spies and collaborationists. We must move westward. The Russians want us to be present in the west as Russians; we want to be present as Jews, and, for once in our history, the two things are not mutually exclusive. We’ve been given a free hand, we can cross the borders and mete out our own justice.”
“Cross all the borders?” asked Line.
Gedale replied: “I said not to ask questions.”
They went on marching for days and days, in sun and rain, across the fields and forests of the dreary countryside of Volynia. They kept away from the well-traveled roads, but they couldn’t avoid passing through certain villages, and on the main square of one of these they sighted a poster different from the one that Pavel had taken down, a poster that concerned them more closely. It said:
Whoever kills the Jew Gedale Skidler, a dangerous bandit, will be rewarded with 2 kilograms of salt. Whoever supplies this headquarters with information leading to his capture will be rewarded with 1 kilogram of salt. Whoever captures him and turns him over alive will be rewarded with 5 kilograms of salt.
Gedale happily slapped his thighs, because the photograph printed on the poster was not of him: it was a picture of a Ukrainian collaborationist who was well-known throughout the area. Gedale couldn’t seem to drag himself away: “A fantastic idea, I wish I’d come up with it. It would be even better if we were able to capture this Gedale.” It took a long time to talk him out of the idea and persuade him to continue on the way.
In mid-June it started raining heavily, the water level rose in all the rivers and streams, and it became impossible to wade across them. Even the swamps became deeper. They spotted a windmill, explored it, and found that it was abandoned and empty. Empty, certainly: there was no flour, not a bag, not a handful, but the sour smell of fermented flour pervaded every corner of the building, mixed with the scent of mold and fungus from the rain-soaked wood. Nonetheless, the roof was watertight, and the mill room was reasonably dry; stout shelves ran the length of the walls, perhaps meant to hold the sacks of wheat. The Gedalists settled in for the night, some on the floor, some on the shelves: by candlelight, the place took on a picturesque appearance, half theater and half backstage. Comfortable it wasn’t, but there was room enough for everyone, even to stretch out fully, and the drumming of the rain on the wooden roof was cheerful and cozy.
Isidor, one of the survivors of Blizna, had obtained a candle and a piece of sheet metal: stretched out on his belly, he was scraping every inch of floor. He was the youngest member of the band; he hadn’t yet turned seventeen. Before joining up with Gedale, he’d spent almost four years in hiding, with his father, his mother, and a little sister, in a pit dug beneath a stable floor. The peasant who owned the stable had extorted all the family’s cash and valuables, and then reported them to the Polish police. Isidor had been lucky; every so often one of the four would venture out into the forest for some fresh air, and when the Germans came he was out. He was on his way back, he hid, and from his hiding place he watched as the SS, themselves little more than boys, only a few years older than him, clubbed his father, his mother, and his sister to death. Their faces weren’t ferocious; in fact, they seemed to be enjoying themselves. Behind them, Isidor had seen the peasant and his wife, pale as snow. Since then, Isidor hadn’t been quite right in the head. He was a boy with an absent demeanor, slightly hunched, with long arms and legs; he always carried a knife in his belt, and he often raved about going back to his village to kill that peasant.
“What are you doing, Isidor? Cleaning house for Passover?” Mottel asked from his shelf high above. Isidor said nothing and went on scraping: every now and then, when he had gathered a pinch of off-white dust, he lifted it to his mouth, chewed it, and then spat it out.
“Stop that, you’ll make yourself sick to your stomach,” said Mottel, “you’re eating more rotten wood than flour.” Isidor often got himself into trouble and they tried to keep an eye on him; still, he did his best to be helpful, and everyone loved him. He had an obsessive hunger, and he put everything he found into his mouth.
“Here, eat this,” Rokhele the Black said to him, holding out a handful of gooseberries that she had gathered in the woods. “It won’t be long until Jozek gets back—he’s probably found something.”
In fact, Jozek came back with not much stuff and not much variety. The local peasants were poor and also mistrustful; they had no sympathy for Russians, or Jews, or partisans. They had agreed to deal with him only because he spoke Polish, but all they gave him was grapes
and bread, and that for an exorbitant price. “We have enough for today and for tomorrow, and after that we’ll see,” said Gedale. “We’ll see what strategy to follow.”
The wind had sprung up, and they felt as if they were inside a ship. The structure, made of colossal rough-hewn wooden beams, creaked, vibrated, and pitched. The four blades, stripped of their cloth and stuck for who could say how long, lurched with every gust of wind and then stopped immediately with a dull thump. Their pointless efforts were transmitted into jolts and slamming blows to the shafts and gears; the entire structure seemed to strain like a giant slave struggling to free itself. Only Pavel managed to get to sleep, and he was snoring, flat on his back, with his mouth open.
“Hey, the whole place is full of worms!” Isidor said suddenly, poking a stick into the gaps between the planks of the floor.
“Leave them alone,” said Bella, in alarm. “Eat your bread and go to sleep.”
Isidor turned to Bella with a foolish laugh: “Of course I’ll leave them alone. I’d never eat worms—they aren’t kosher.”
“Silly, the reason we don’t eat worms is that they’re dirty, not because they’re not kosher,” said Bella, who was cutting her fingernails with a small pair of scissors. That was the only pair of scissors that the band possessed: Bella claimed that they belonged to her personally, and that anyone who wished to use them had to ask her to lend them and had to return them without fail. With each fingernail that she cut, she contemplated the back of her hand with careful complacency, like a painter after a brushstroke.
Rokhele the White broke in, in a faint voice: “Worms are trayf precisely because they’re dirty. Pigs are dirty, too, which is why they’re trayf. How can you not believe in kashrut? You might as well stop being Jewish.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” said Jozek, “these are all stories from bygone times. Pigs may be dirty, but rabbits and horses are clean, and yet they’re not kosher. Why not?”
“You can’t know everything,” the White responded with some annoyance. “Perhaps, in Moses’ time, they were dirty, or they carried some disease.”
“Exactly: it’s just as you said, these are things from bygone times. If Moses were here with us, in this windmill, he wouldn’t hesitate two seconds to change the laws. He would shatter the tablets, just as he did that time when he flew into a rage over the golden calf, and he would make new ones. Especially if he had seen the things that we have.”
“Kosher-schmosher,” Mottel yawned, falling back on the ingenious Yiddish way of dismissing something by repeating it in distorted form. “Kosher-schmosher, if I had a rabbit I would eat it. In fact, tomorrow I’m going to put out some traps. When I was a boy I was good at making traps; I’ll have to get good at it again.”
Pyotr sat listening in amazement. He turned to Leonid, who was sitting beside him: “Why can’t you eat rabbit?”
“I have no idea. I know that you’re not supposed to, but I couldn’t tell you why. It’s a forbidden creature, it says so in the Torah.”
Dov broke in: “It’s forbidden because it doesn’t have a cloven hoof.”
Isidor said, “But in that case, if my worms had cloven hoofs, would we be able to eat them?”
Gedale had noticed Pyotr’s astonished face:
“Pay it no mind, Russian. If you stay with us, you’ll have to get used to these things. All Jews are crazy, but we’re a little crazier than the rest. That’s why we’ve been lucky so far, ours is the luck of the meshuggener. In fact, now that I think about it, we have an anthem, but we don’t have a flag. You ought to make us one, Bella, instead of wasting your time primping. A flag with all different colors, and in the middle, instead of a sickle, or a hammer, or a two-headed eagle, or a Star of David, you can put a meshuggener with a fool’s cap with bells and a butterfly net.”
Then he spoke to Pyotr again: “For that matter, the fact that you chose to come with us must mean you’re a little crazy yourself—there’s no other explanation. Russians, after all, are either crazy or boring, and clearly you’re from the crazy side of the family. You’ll fit in fine, even if our laws are a bit complicated; don’t worry about it, we only observe them when they do nothing to hinder the partizanka, but we do have fun arguing about them. We’re very good at making distinctions, between the pure and the impure, men and women, Jews and goyim, and we also make distinctions between the laws of peace and the laws of war. For instance: the law of peace says that you must not covet your neighbor’s wife. . . .”
Pyotr, who was lying next to Rokhele the Black, moved away from her slightly, perhaps unconsciously.
“No, in fact, you have nothing to worry about. Here all the men desire all the women.”
“Commander, you never talk seriously,” broke in Line, who instead was always serious. Her slightly hoarse contralto voice wasn’t loud, but it did have the quality of being heard over all other voices. “When it comes to the issue of your neighbor’s wife, we have a great deal to say.”
“We who?” asked Gedale.
“We women. First of all: why can a woman belong to a man, whether or not he’s your neighbor, but a man cannot belong to one woman? Does that seem just? It doesn’t seem just to us, it’s not acceptable. It’s not acceptable anymore; nowadays women are sent into exile just like men, they’re hanged just like men, and they shoot better than men. This alone would be enough to show how reactionary Mosaic law is.”
Pavel had woken up, and now he was snickering and saying something under his breath to Pyotr. Leonid was silent, but he was looking at Line out of the corner of his eye with a worried expression. There was a strong gust of wind, rain mixed with hail showered against the wall; the windmill creaked, then slowly turned, like a carousel, on the gigantic axle set in its buried foundation. Isidor clutched the White, and she comforted him, caressing his bristly head.
“Go on, go on, Line,” said Gedale. “I can’t believe a little wind will frighten you. Tell us what your law is; if it’s not too harsh, we’ll try to comply with it.”
“It’s not the wind that scares me, it’s you people. You’re a bunch of cynical primitives. Our law is simple: as long as they are not married, men and women can desire one another and make love as much as they wish. Love, until marriage, must be free, and in fact it already is, and always has been, and there is no law that can imprison it. Not even the Bible says anything different; our parents were no different, they made love just as we do, then as now.”
“Then even more than now,” said Pavel. “It’s no accident that the Bible begins with two people screwing.”
“. . . but after marriage things change,” Line went on, ignoring him. “We believe in marriage, because it’s a pact, and pacts must be observed. The wife belongs to the husband, but the husband also belongs to the wife.”
“Then we shouldn’t get married,” said Gedale. “Right, Bella?”
“Shut up, listen,” Bella replied. “After all, everyone here knows that you’re a filthy pig. And I never asked you to marry me. As a commander I suppose you’re all right, but as a husband, the less said the better.”
“That’s fine,” said Gedale. “You see that we’re always in agreement. We have plenty of time to think it over: first, we need the war to end.” Then he turned to Leonid, who was curled up next to Line, his face dark with anger. “And you, Muscovite, what do you think about your woman’s theories?”
“I don’t think anything. Leave me alone.”
“. . . and I’m not anyone’s woman,” Line added.
“All this talk!” said Jozek from his corner, addressing one of the men from Slonim. “Our father Jacob, for instance, had four wives and they all got along famously.”
Mottel broke in:
“But they weren’t his neighbor’s wives. Jacob had every right to them, because one of them he married by accident, in fact, through the trickery of Laban, and the other two were slave girls. He only had one real wife: it was all on the up and up.”
“Nice work, Mottel!” sai
d Gedale. “I didn’t know you were such a scholar. Did you study at the yeshiva, before you started cutting throats?”
“I studied many different things,” Mottel replied haughtily. “I studied the Talmud, too, and do you know what the Talmud says about women? It says that you must not speak to a woman who is not your wife, and that you must not even signal to her, with your hands, or your feet, or your eyes. That you must not look at her clothing, even when she’s not wearing it. That listening to a woman sing is like looking at her naked. That it is a grave sin if two people engaged to be married embrace—that the woman is rendered unclean, as if she were having her period, and she must be purified in a ritual bath.”
“All this is written in the Talmud?” asked Mendel, who hadn’t spoken until then.
“In the Talmud and elsewhere,” said Mottel.
“What’s the Talmud?” asked Pyotr. “Is it your Book of Gospels?”
“The Talmud is like a soup containing all the things that a man can eat,” said Dov. “But there is the wheat with the chaff, the fruit with its pits, and the meat with the bones. It’s not that tasty, but it’s nutritious. It’s filled with errors and contradictions, but for that very reason it teaches you how to think, and anyone who has read it all—”
Pavel interrupted him: “Just what the Talmud is I can explain to you with an example. Now pay close attention. Two chimney sweeps fall down a chimney; one emerges covered with soot, the other emerges perfectly clean. Now I ask you: which of the two goes to wash himself?”
Suspecting a trap, Pyotr looked around as if in search of help. Then he gathered his courage, and replied: “The dirty one goes to wash himself.”
“Wrong,” said Pavel. “The one who is dirty sees the face of the other man, which is clean, and believes that he, too, is clean. The one who is clean, on the other hand, sees the soot on the face of the other man, believes that he is dirty, and goes to wash himself. Do you understand?”