by Primo Levi
This time it was Gedale who interrupted, in good Polish, abandoning the sideshow with the interpreter in his surprise:
“What? What has he done? Where did you capture him?”
“We didn’t capture him,” the Pole snarled, “we rescued him. And don’t go around spreading the word: because this is the first time, damn it, that the NSZ, the National Armed Forces, ever saved a Jew, and what’s more a Russian and a Communist, from German bullets. But he must be just a little soft in the head: armed, in broad daylight, without looking left or right, he was walking straight toward the German checkpoint—”
“What checkpoint?”
“The checkpoint outside the Zielonka power plant. If we hadn’t stopped him, all hell would’ve broken loose, not to mention how important the power from Zielonka is to us, too. If you want to sabotage things, go somewhere else, far from here, and the devil take you. And find out about the political situation. And most of all, don’t send us any more nutcases like this one.”
“We didn’t send him: he did it on his own initiative,” said Gedale. “We’ll interrogate him and we’ll punish him.”
“That’s what he told us, that it was his own idea: we’ve already interrogated him ourselves. But don’t take us for idiots. Or children. We’ve been fighting on two fronts since 1939, and, believe me, we’ve learned a few tricks. And these are tricks that you copied from the Nazis: just like when they burned the Reichstag: you take a mental defective, you send him into action, and then the reprisal lands like a lightning bolt on whichever side is most convenient to you.”
The Pole stopped to catch his breath. He was tall, thin, no longer young, and his gray mustache was quivering with rage. Gedale shot a glance over at Leonid: he was sitting on the stone threshold of the hut, his hands tied, and resting on his thighs. He was only ten steps away, within earshot, but he didn’t seem to be listening. The Pole observed Jozek closely:
“Come to think of it, you look Jewish, too. We’ve seen some strange things, but this beats them all: a band of Jews wandering around Poland with weapons stolen from the Poles, passing themselves off as partisans, the sons of bitches!”
Gedale leaped into action. With his left hand he grabbed the machine gun from the Pole’s hands, and with his right hand he landed a violent blow to the man’s ear. The Pole staggered, took a few stumbling steps, but stayed on his feet. The three others had moved closer with a menacing air, but their leader said something to them, and they retreated a few steps, but with their weapons still leveled.
“I’m a Jew, too, Panie Kondotierze,” said Gedale in a tranquil voice. “We didn’t steal these weapons, and we know how to use them pretty well. You’ve been fighting for five years, we’ve been fighting for three thousand. You’ve been fighting on two fronts, we can’t begin to count the fronts we’ve been fighting on. Try to be reasonable, Mister Captain. We have the same enemy to fight: let’s not squander our forces.” Then he added, with a courteous smile: “. . . or our insults, for that matter.” Perhaps the “captain” would have been less accommodating if he hadn’t found himself surrounded by twenty or so determined-looking Gedalists. He grumbled some mysterious imprecation involving thunder and cholera, then he scowled. “We don’t want to know anything about you and we don’t want to have anything to do with you. Take back your man. And take this one, too, he claims to be one of your people: we don’t know what to do with him.”
At a gesture from him, his men grabbed Leonid by the arms, lifted him to his feet, and shoved him toward Gedale, who immediately cut the rope that bound his wrists. Leonid said not a word, kept his gaze fixed on the ground, and slipped into the crowd of Gedalists standing on the trail. The other man mentioned by the Pole, the one who was off to one side, sunbathing shirtless, stepped forward spontaneously. He was as tall as Gedale, he had a fierce, hawklike nose and a majestic black mustache, but he couldn’t have been much older than twenty. His body, agile and muscular, would have been a perfect model for a sculpture of an athlete if it hadn’t been for the clubfoot that deformed one of his legs. He’d picked up a bundle from the ground, and he seemed happy to change masters. It was time to go; Gedale handed the Pole’s weapon back to him, and said:
“Good Sir Captain, I believe that there is one point on which we can agree, and that’s that we also want nothing to do with you. Tell us which way we ought to go.”
The Pole replied: “Steer clear of Kovel, Lukov, and the railroad. Don’t stir up the Germans in our district, and go straight to hell.”
“What a great guy!” Gedale said to Mendel when they resumed their march, without a sign of a grudge or contempt. “Just fantastic, like a Hollywood Indian. If you ask me, he was born into the wrong century.”
“But you slapped him around!”
“I had to. But what does that have to do with it? I admired him all the same: the way you might admire a waterfall or an unusual animal. He’s stupid, and he may even be dangerous, but he gave us quite a show.”
Anyway, Gedale seemed to fall in love with every new arrival, aside from any moral or utilitarian consideration. He buzzed around Arie, the clubfooted young man, as if he wanted to sniff him and observe him from every angle. In spite of his handicap, Arie had no trouble keeping up with the line, in fact, his stride was loose and limber, and he immediately made himself popular, killing a quail by hurling a stone at it, and offering it as a gift to Rokhele the White. He neither spoke nor understood Yiddish, and he pronounced Russian in a very odd manner: Arie was Georgian, and proud of the fact. His mother tongue was Georgian, he’d learned Russian at school, but his name, of which he was equally proud, was pure Hebrew: Arie means Lion.
Not many of the Gedalists had ever met a Georgian Jew before, and Jozek, half joking, half serious, even questioned whether Arie really was a Jew; if you don’t speak Yiddish you’re not a Jew, it’s almost axiomatic, and there’s even a proverb: “Redest kain Yiddish, bist nit kain yid.”
“If you’re a Jew, speak to us in Hebrew: let us hear a blessing in Hebrew.”
The young man accepted the challenge, and recited the blessing of the wine with a Sephardi pronunciation, rounded and solemn, instead of an Ashkenazi accent, syncopated and tight. Many of the men laughed.
“Hey, you speak Hebrew like a Christian!”
“No,” Arie replied, with an air of offended nobility, “we speak it the way our father Abraham did. You’re the ones who speak it wrong.”
It was surprising how quickly Arie fit into the band. He was strong and willing and he was happy to do any job; he even accepted what little partisan discipline the band still possessed. Although everyone was curious about him, he showed little interest in the band’s objectives: “If you’re going to kill Germans, I’ll come with you. If you’re going to the land of Israel, I’ll come with you.” He was intelligent, cheerful, proud, and touchy. Proud of many things: of being Georgian (a descendant of Alexander the Great’s Macedonians, he stated, although he was unable to provide any evidence of the fact); of not being Russian, but at the same time of being a compatriot of Stalin; and of his surname, Hazanshvili.
“But of course! You even resemble him,” Mottel laughed. “Not just your mustache, but your name, too.”
“Stalin is a great man and you shouldn’t mock him. I wish I resembled him in my name, but I don’t. He is Dzhugashvili, which means son of Dzhuga, and I’m only Hazanshvili, which means son of the Hazan, the cantor at the synagogue.”
He was sensitive on the subject of his deformity, and he didn’t much like to talk about it, but in all likelihood it had saved his life:
“I was rejected by the draft board, and back home they made fun of me, because for us it’s an honor to join the army. But then, in 1942, when they were taking everyone, I was called up, too, and they sent me behind the lines in Minsk to bake bread in the military bakery. The Germans took me prisoner, but as a civilian laborer, and that was my good luck. They didn’t notice that I was a Jew. . . .”
“It’s all due to
the mustache, believe me,” said Jozek. “Too bad that so few people thought of that, growing a mustache.”
“The mustache and my height. And also because I declared myself a farmer and a specialist in grafting vines.”
“Smart of you!”
“No, not at all, it’s actually my profession, my grandfather and my father and I have always grafted grapevines. And so they sent me to a farm to graft trees that I’d never seen before. We were practically free, and in April I escaped. I wanted to fight with the partisans, and I ran into the ones you saw; but I wasn’t very happy with them—they called me ‘Jew’ and made me carry their loads as if I were their mule.”
Gedale tended to make improvised decisions, but when it came to Leonid he didn’t feel like improvising. He called Jozek, Dov, and Mendel aside, and he wasn’t the Gedale they were used to: he didn’t go off on tangents, he thought about what he was saying, and he spoke in a subdued tone.
“I don’t like punishments: I don’t like to give them or receive them. That’s strictly for Prussians, and for people like us they aren’t useful. But this kid has really screwed up: he ran away with our weapons, without orders, and without leave, and he did everything he could to get us all into trouble. It was just a good thing that most of the NSZ forces were far away, otherwise it would have ended badly. He behaved like a fool, and he made us all look like fools: inept intruders, incompetent fumblers. They already dislike us around here; after what happened they’ll like us even less, and we have a long way to go, and we need the support of the populace. Or at least their silent neutrality. Leonid has to understand these things: we have to make him understand.”
Jozek raised his hand to ask to speak. “If it were another man, I think that the best solution would be to beat him up a little and then ask him to do some self-criticism, like the Russians. But Leonid is a strange guy, and it’s hard to figure out why he does the things he does. You’re right, commander, we’ve got to make him understand certain things; all the same, if you ask me, at least for the moment, that boy isn’t capable of understanding a thing. Since we got him back, he hasn’t said a word: not one word. He’s never looked me in the eye, not once, and every time I’ve taken him food he’s pretended to eat and then, the minute I leave, he’s thrown it all away: I saw him perfectly clearly. If this were peacetime, I’d know what he needs.”
“A doctor?” asked Gedale.
“That’s right, a head doctor.”
“You two have known him longer,” Gedale said to Mendel and Dov. “What do you think?”
Dov spoke first, to Mendel’s relief. “At Novoselky he caused me some problems because he wasn’t punctual when it came to work. I sent him out on a sabotage mission, to test him and to give him an opportunity to look good in front of the others: it seemed to me that it was something he needed. He didn’t do badly and he didn’t do well, he was courageous and he was reckless. His nerves betrayed him. If you ask me he’s a good kid with an ugly temper, but I don’t think you can judge a man from what he did at Novoselky; or, for that matter, from what he does here.”
“I’m not interested in judging him,” said Gedale. “I’m interested in deciding what we should do with him. What do you say, watchmaker?”
Mendel was on pins and needles. Did Gedale know, or had he guessed, the real reason for Leonid’s suicide mission? If he did, not to speak of it would be childish and dishonest. If he didn’t, if he hadn’t guessed, Mendel would prefer not to provide a subject for curiosity and gossip. In short, it was nobody’s business but his own, right? His business, and Line’s, private matters. He didn’t feel like making Leonid’s situation worse, and to explain that Leonid had deserted because of a woman would mean making his situation worse. And it would mean making your situation worse, too. Yes, of course: it would make my situation worse, too. He kept it vague, feeling like a liar inside, as despicable as a worm:
“We’ve been together for a year. We met last year in July in the forests of Bryansk. I agree with Dov, he’s a good kid with a prickly personality. He told me his story, his life has never been easy, he began to suffer long before we did. If you ask me, it would be a cruelty to punish him, and pointless besides: he’s already punishing himself. And I agree with Jozek as well; this man needs treatment.”
Gedale jumped up and started pacing back and forth. “You certainly are some fine advisors. Treat him, but we can’t. Punish him, but we shouldn’t. We might as well say it outright, your advice is to leave things the way they are, and let the matter take care of itself. You remind me of Job’s consolers. Fine, for now, let’s leave things as they stand; I’ll see whether the girl can give me any more concrete advice. She knows him better than you do, or at least she knows him in a different light.”
So he doesn’t know, Mendel thought with relief, and at the same time he felt ashamed at how relieved he felt. But Mendel never knew what Gedale and Line said to each other; either they hadn’t spoken or (what was more likely) Line hadn’t said anything important. Gedale’s bad mood didn’t last; in the days that followed his usual demeanor returned, but, as he had done at Sarny, he vanished once again in early July, while the column was camped near Annopol, not far from the Vistula. He reappeared the next day, wearing a new velvet jacket and a peasant’s straw hat, and with a bottle of ersatz perfume for Bella, and small gifts for the four other women. But he hadn’t gone into the city to go shopping; after that a number of things changed. They became more cautious. Once again, as in the spring, they marched at night and by day camped, doing their best not to be noticed, which became increasingly difficult, because the whole area was crisscrossed with roads and dotted with villages and farmhouses. Gedale seemed to be in a hurry; he demanded longer and longer marches, as much as twenty kilometers a night, and he was headed in a specific direction, toward Opatów and Kielce. He reminded all of them not to venture far from the group and not to speak to the peasants they might run into: only those who spoke Polish could talk to the locals, but even they should do so as little as possible.
Whether they were marching or in camp, Leonid’s presence had become burdensome to them all, and especially to Mendel. Mendel was forced to admit that he was afraid of Leonid. He avoided being around him; when they were marching in single file, he went to the head of the line if Leonid was at the rear, or vice versa, but in fact, Mendel noticed, to his chagrin, Leonid, intentionally or not, always seemed to maneuver so that he was close to him, although he never spoke. He merely looked at him, with those dark eyes of his, heavy with sadness and supplication, as if he wished to afflict him with his presence, refusing to be forgotten, and taking vengeance by afflicting him. Or was he just keeping an eye on him? It could be: certain gestures of his made Mendel think that Leonid was laboring under some suspicion. He’d turn his head suddenly and look behind him. During the halts, which took place during the day, and for the most part in abandoned peasant huts, when he lay down to sleep he would choose the place closest to the door, and even then slept only fitfully; he’d wake up with a jerk, look around uneasily, and peer out the door or one of the windows.
On a cloudy gray morning, after a night march that had worn everybody out, Mendel was gathering firewood in the forest and he spotted Leonid nearby, also gathering firewood, even though no one had ordered him to. He had lost weight and looked tense, and his eyes glistened. He turned to Mendel with an air of complicity: “You understand it, too, don’t you?”
“Understand what?”
“That we’ve been sold out. We can’t have any more illusions. We’ve been sold out, and he’s the one who sold us.”
“He who?” Mendel asked, in astonishment.
Leonid lowered his voice: “Him, Gedale. But he had no alternative, they were blackmailing him, he was a puppet in their hands.” Then he raised his finger to his lips, invoking silence, and went back to gathering firewood. Mendel told no one else about it, but a few days later Dov said to him:
“That friend of yours has some strange ideas. He says that
Gedale works for the NKVD or who knows what other branch of the secret police, that they’re blackmailing him, and that we’re all hostages in his hands.”
“He said something of the sort to me, too,” said Mendel. “What should we do?”
“Nothing,” said Dov.
Mendel remembered comparing Leonid to a watch clogged with dust, but now Leonid reminded him of certain other watches that people had brought him to repair: perhaps they’d bumped against something, and the coils of the mainspring had got tangled; for a while they’d run slow, for a while they’d rush madly ahead, and ultimately they would break down, impossible to fix.
The summer was bright and windy, and the Gedalists realized that they had ventured into the land of hunger. Gedale’s instructions, to avoid contact with the local people, proved superfluous, if not actually ironic. There weren’t a lot of people to avoid, in that countryside: no men, few women; standing in the doorways of the devastated farmhouses only old people and children. These weren’t people they had any need to fear; if anything, they themselves were marked by fear. Just a few months earlier, the partisans of the Polish Home Army had launched an attack on the German garrisons throughout the area, while to the south of Lublin units of Soviet paratroopers were interrupting the German lines of communication that brought ammunition and provisions to the front. Other Polish fighting units had blown up bridges and viaducts, and they had also attacked a village where the Germans had driven out the peasants by force in 1942 and resettled the place with colonists of the Thousand Year Reich. The German reprisal was widespread, covering the entire district, and it was ferocious. It was directed not against the bands, which had fled to safety in the forests and were almost impossible to catch, but, rather, against the civilian population. The Germans had brought in reinforcements from distant areas behind the lines; at night they would encircle the Polish villages and set them on fire, or else they deported all the men and women of working age: they gave them half an hour to get ready for the journey, then loaded them onto trucks and hauled them away. In some towns they’d focused their attention on the children: they deported to Germany the “Aryan”-looking children and killed all the others. The villages, which had always been poor, were reduced to smoking piles of ruins and rubble, but the fields were left undamaged and the ripe rye stood waiting, in vain, for someone to harvest it.