The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  The following day Mendel reported this conversation to Gedale. He expected him to burst out laughing, but instead, Gedale, very seriously, replied that he had no doubt that Mendel ought to accept:

  “I have to tell you, I played a part in this story. Isidor had never been with a woman. He told me that a long time ago, one day when I was making fun of him: it was the day we were at the windmill. I could see that he was suffering; he told me that he’d never had the courage. He was only thirteen years old when he had to hide underneath the stable, he was down there for four years, and you know the things that happened after that. I ought to help him, I decided: on the one hand it struck me as a mitzvah, and on the other hand the experiment aroused my curiosity. So I talked it over with Rokhele, who’d also been left alone, and I suggested she look after him. Well, she looked after him. But I never would have believed that things could move along so fast and so well.”

  “Are you certain that this is a good thing?” asked Mendel.

  “I don’t know, but I think so. It strikes me as a good sign, even if they’re a pair of nebbishes. In fact, precisely because they’re a pair of nebbishes.”

  Feeling slightly ashamed, Mendel married Isidor and Rokhele the White as best he could.

  10

  January–February 1945

  It was a good sign. The Gedalists, and a number of the Poles, who had asked to be invited, celebrated the wedding without much food but with plenty of good cheer. Gedale, of course, played the violin, essential to even the most modest of weddings. He had a vast and varied repertoire, which ranged from the Kreutzer Sonata to supremely frivolous ditties. The evening was already well advanced and Gedale was playing and singing the song of the Foolish Lad: the others were singing along softly. It wasn’t obvious that Gedale meant to allude to Isidor; or, if he did, it wasn’t a malicious allusion but, rather, a harmless and somewhat coarse joke, the kind that is customary at weddings. Perhaps the song had just come into his mind, through an association of ideas, but, for that matter, it’s such a popular song that if you don’t sing it at a party it’s not really a party. The song itself is stupid, but it’s also steeped in a strange tenderness, as of some bizarre and anxious dream that flowered in the warmth of a wooden cottage, next to a large porcelain stove, under the smoke-smudged beams of the ceiling; and above the ceiling you can guess at a dark and snowy sky, in which perhaps a large silvery fish is swimming, along with a bride dressed in white veils, and a green ram, its head down.

  The Foolish Lad in the song, the narisher bokher, is indecisive: he spends the whole night ruminating over what girl to choose, because he’s a fearful fool, and knows that by choosing one he’ll humiliate all the others. Just how he makes up his mind isn’t described, but then the Foolish Lad asks his meydl a series of absurd and pathetic questions (all night long?): What king has no land? What water carries no sand? What is faster than a mouse, and taller than a house? And, last of all, what can burn without a flame, and what can weep without tears? These riddles are not unwarranted; they have a reason. They are the tortuous path that the timid boy has chosen to declare his love, and the clever girl understands that.

  “Foolish Lad,” she answers him melodiously, “the king with no land is the king of the deck of cards, and the water with no sand is the water of tears. Faster than the mouse is the cat, and taller than the house is its chimney. And love can burn without a flame, and a heart can weep without tears.” This tenuous skirmish ends badly: while the boy continues to worry about whether this is really the girl of his heart, another man shows up and brutally carries her off.

  It was a vacation for them all, Poles and Jews: a truce, a relief from tension and expectation. Even the austere Edek beat time with his knuckles on his mess kit, and the Poles, even though they didn’t understand Yiddish, sang in unison the virtually meaningless chorus:

  Tumbala-tumbala-tumbalalaika,

  Tumbala-tumbala-tumbalalaika,

  Tumbalalaika, shpil balalaika,

  Tumbalalaika, freylekh zol zayn!

  Others were beating their feet on the floor and their hands on the table; those closest to the bride and groom were affectionately elbowing them in the ribs and asking them ribald questions. Isidor and Rokhele, glistening with sweat and red with excitement, looked around self-consciously.

  First a few, then all gave in to the hypnotic rhythm of the song and began to dance; holding hands, in a circle, mindlessly smiling, dipping their heads upward and to either side, pounding their feet to the rhythm: freylekh zol zayn, let joy reign! Even white-haired Dov, even the two timid newlyweds, even the overconfident Line, even the weavers from Slonim, clumsy though they were, even Mottel the cutthroat. Let joy reign! Before long, the small space between the benches and the walls of the hut was filled with dance and celebration.

  Suddenly the earth trembled and everyone stopped. It wasn’t an earthquake, it was a barrage of heavy artillery; immediately afterward, they heard formations of airplanes filling the sky with their din. A great uproar ensued; they all ran for their weapons, but neither Gedale nor Edek knew what orders to give. Then they heard Marian shouting: “Don’t go outside! Stay under cover!” And in fact the walls of the huts, made of solid logs, could offer a certain degree of protection. The explosions became more frequent and deafening. Mendel listened carefully: his experience as a gunner told him that the shells were being fired from the east, and that they were exploding in the west, not far from Zarnowiec; they went screaming past overhead. So it was a Russian attack, there was no doubt about it, and a large-scale attack, perhaps the culminating attack. Over the thunderous roar, Dov’s voice could be heard: “It’s the front! It’s the front going past!” At that same instant Bogdan, the Pole who was outside on sentry duty, came into the hut. He was pushing before him a mud-spattered man with an unkempt beard, bundled in a long tattered overcoat. “Why don’t you see who this character is!” he said to Edek and Marian; but the two men, in frenzied conversation with the other Poles around them, ignored him. Bogdan repeated his request; then, his patience exhausted, he turned around to go back to his post, but Edek called him back. “No, you stay here, too, we have a decision to make.” Bogdan spoke to the Gedalists: “You people take care of this one, he must be one of yours. He’s not armed.”

  The man looked around bewildered, confused by the explosions and the excited voices, dazzled by the acetylene lamps. Mottel asked him: “Who are you? Where do you come from?” At the sound of the Yiddish words, he started in astonishment; instead of answering, he asked, in turn, “Jews? Jews here?” He seemed like an animal caught in a trap. His eyes darted toward the door, Mendel restrained him with a gesture, and he recoiled in a defensive spasm: “Let me go! What do you want with me?” By this point, the only way to be heard in the hut was to shout; nonetheless, Mendel managed to understand that the man, whose name was Schmulek, had been stopped by the sentry as he was running past the checkpoint. In the darkness, he had been taken for a German. At the same time, he realized that the Poles were deliberating whether to stay there and wait for the arrival of the Red Army or scatter.

  Once Schmulek had understood that neither the Jews were prisoners of the Poles, nor the Poles of the Jews, and that no one meant to detain him or cause him any harm, he burst into speech: they must all come with him, hurry, immediately. He had escaped a bomb by some miracle, he’d been buried by the churned-up dirt. As if to confirm his words, there was a loud explosion, incredibly close: the barrack door was blown in, and then sucked back by the rushing air. The lights went out and the noise became deafening: now the bombs were falling heavily, near and far, and the walls of the hut were creaking ominously, as if about to collapse. It was impossible to tell whether these were bombs being dropped by planes or shells fired by artillery. Everyone piled outside chaotically, into the icy air lit up by the blasts: with the authority of a terrified man, Schmulek shouted at them to come with him, he had a shelter, nearby and safe. At random he grabbed Bella by one arm and dragged her away, tugg
ing; Mendel and others followed them, more than a dozen of them perhaps; the others scattered into the forest.

  Schmulek ran hunched over, from tree to tree, the others strung out behind him in single file, holding one another by the hand like blind people. Some of the trees were on fire. Mendel caught up with Schmulek and shouted into his ear, “Where are you taking us?” but he just kept on running. He led them to a log bunker that was partly underground; next to it was a well. Schmulek climbed over the edge, descended until only his head could be seen, and then said: “Come, all of you, this is the way.” By the reddish glow of the fires, Mendel and the others descended after him; embedded in the walls of the well were rusty iron spikes. Two or three meters down, there was a hole; they climbed in, feeling their way in the darkness, and found themselves in a tunnel that ran slightly downhill; farther along was a cavity dug into the clayey earth, with the ceiling held up by planks. There Schmulek stood panting, waiting for them with a glowing flashlight in his hand. “I live here,” he told Mendel.

  Mendel looked around. Dov, Bella, Mottel, Line, and Pyotr were there; Gedale wasn’t, but six or seven of the survivors from Ruzany and Blizna were, along with four Poles he’d never met. Down there, the roar of the explosions was muffled; the air was damp and smelled of dirt. There were niches dug into the walls in which it was possible to dimly make out various objects: rolled-up blankets, vases, cooking pots. Along one wall ran a bench; the beaten-earth floor was covered with leafy branches and straw. “Sit down,” said Schmulek. “How long have you been here?” asked Dov. “Three years,” he replied.

  Line broke in: “Are you alone?”

  “I’m alone. Before, I had my nephew, just a boy. He went out looking for food and never came back. But six months ago there were twelve of us, last year there were forty of us, and two years ago more than a hundred.”

  “All in here?” asked Line, incredulous and horrified.

  “Look down there,” said Schmulek, raising the flashlight: “The tunnel continues, it branches, there are other dens. There are also two other exits, inside two oak trees hollowed out by lightning. We lived badly, but we were alive. If we could only have remained underground all the time, they’d never have found us, and only the ones who caught typhus would have died. But we had to go out, to find food, and that’s when they’d shoot us.”

  “The Germans?”

  “Everyone. Germans, Hungarians, Ukrainians. Sometimes the Poles, too: even though we were all Poles, we’d escaped from the ghettos around here. You’d never know: sometimes they’d let us go, other times they’d shoot at us as if we were rabbits, or else they might actually give us food. The last ones to come weren’t partisans, they were bandits, they only had knives. They caught us by surprise. They cut the throats of all who were left and carried off everything we possessed.”

  “How did you survive?” asked Mendel.

  “Pure luck,” said Schmulek. “In civilian life I bought and sold horses, I traveled all the villages of this area, I knew all the paths through the woods. I frequently worked as a guide for the partisans. In September I was working as a guide for a group of Russian soldiers who had escaped from a German concentration camp; they wanted to go to the Holy Cross Mountains, and I led them out of the forest. That was when the bandits came and massacred the rest. The boy happened to be out at the same time.”

  “We found them, those Russian soldiers,” Mendel said. “They were surrounded by Germans; they were all killed. But now the war is about to end.”

  “I don’t care whether the war ends. When this war comes to an end, the Jews of Poland will also come to an end. I don’t care about anything anymore. What I care about is the fact that you had the courage to pick up a rifle, and I lacked that courage.”

  “That means nothing,” said Mendel. “You made yourself useful in other ways. Fighting isn’t something for old people.”

  “How old do you think I am?”

  “Fifty,” Dov ventured. But he was thinking seventy.

  “I’m thirty-six,” said Schmulek.

  Outside, the battle continued; in Schmulek’s lair they could hear nothing but a dull roar, interrupted now and again by louder explosions that made the earth tremble, and which you heard with your whole body rather than with your ears. All the same, by midnight they were all asleep, even though they knew that these were decisive hours: their very anxiety and the tension of waiting had worn them out.

  Mendel found himself awake by late morning, and he realized that what had awoken him was the silence. The earth was no longer trembling; there was no sound other than the heavy breathing of sleeping people. The darkness was absolute. He reached out and felt around him; to his left he recognized Bella’s thin body, to his right the rough clothes and heavy belt of a Pole. It might be nothing more than a break in the fighting; or the Russians might have withdrawn, and now their shelter was in no-man’s-land. But then his ears, sharpened by silence, caught an unlikely sound, something out of his childhood, something he hadn’t heard in years. Bells: those were really bells, a faint, fragile pealing of bells, filtering down through the earth in which they were buried; a toy carillon that rang out in celebration, and meant that the war was over.

  He was about to awaken his comrades, but he hesitated. Later, there was time, now he had other things to do. What things? He had accounting to do, his own accounts. He felt as if he’d escaped a storm at sea, as if he’d washed up alone on a deserted and unknown land. Not ready, not prepared, empty; tranquil and unwound, the way a clock that has run down is tranquil. Tranquil and not happy, a tranquil unhappiness. Swollen with memories: Leonid, the Uzbek, Venya’s band, rivers and forests and marshes, the battle of the monastery, Ulybin, Dov’s return. The girl from Valuets with her nanny goats, Line, Sissl. Mendel the womanless. He glimpsed, beyond his eyelids, Rivke’s sharp face, her eyes sealed shut, her hair twisted like serpents. Rivke, underground, just like us. She is the one who blows all the other women away from me, like the chaff from the wheat. Always the balebusteh; who said that the dead have no power?

  Crowded with memories, and at the same time filled with forgetfulness: his memories, even the recent ones, were faded, their outlines were uncertain, they piled up as he strained, as if someone were drawing designs on a blackboard and then half erasing them, only to draw new ones on top of the old. Maybe that’s how somebody who’s a hundred years old remembers his life, or the patriarchs who were nine hundred years old. Maybe memory is like a pail; if you try to put more fruit into it than can fit, the fruit gets crushed.

  In the meantime, the bells went on ringing, wherever they might be. In a village somewhere, the peasants must be celebrating, the Nazi nightmare was over for them, the worst was ended. I, too, should celebrate and ring my bells, thought Mendel, clutching his sleep so that it couldn’t escape him. Our war is over, too, the time for dying and killing is over, and yet I’m not happy and I wish that my sleep would never end. Our war is over, and we’re sealed in an underground lair, and we have to emerge and start walking again. This is the home of Schmulek who has no home, who has lost everything, even himself. And where is my home? It’s nowhere. It’s in the pack that I carry with me, and it’s in the Heinkel that was shot down, and it’s at Novoselky, it’s in the camp at Turov and in Edek’s camp, it’s beyond the sea, in a fabled land, where milk and honey flow. A man enters his home and hangs up his clothes and his memories; where do you hang up your memories, Mendel son of Nachman?

  One by one they all woke up, and they all asked questions but no one knew the answers. The front had gone by, there was no doubt about that; but what to do now? Go on waiting, as Schmulek recommended? Go out and meet the Russians? Go out and look for food? Send someone to scout?

  Dov offered to go and see how things looked: his identity documents were in order, he spoke Russian, he was wearing a Russian uniform, he had Russian papers, and, finally, he was Russian, more official than Pyotr. He headed down the tunnel but came back immediately: he’d have to wait, someone w
as lowering a bucket into the well. The bucket went up full, Dov was able to leave, and he found himself in the midst of a platoon of soldiers who, naked from the belt up, were joyously washing themselves in the water that they poured into a watering trough. There was a handsbreadth of snow on the ground, churned up and half melted by the fires of the night. Not far away, other soldiers had lit a fire and were drying their clothes. They welcomed Dov with good-natured indifference:

  “Hey, uncle! Where did you pop up from? What regiment are you with?”

  “If you weren’t careful we would have hauled you up in our bucket!”

  “I’ll tell you where he comes from: he got drunk and fell into the well.”

  “Or else they threw him in. Say, uncle: did the Germans throw you into the well? Or did you jump in to save yourself?”

  “In this country you see some strange things,” said a Mongolian soldier thoughtfully. “Yesterday, in the middle of the battle, I saw a hare: instead of running away, it just sat there as if spellbound. And the day before that I saw a pretty girl in a barrel—”

  “What was she doing in the barrel?”

  “Nothing. She was just hiding in there.”

  “And what did you do with her?”

  “Nothing. I just said to her, ‘Good morning, panienka, forgive the intrusion,’ and I closed the lid.”

  “You’re either a liar or an idiot, Afanasy; a hare is for roasting, and a pretty girl is for making love.”

  “No, really, I was just trying to say that this is a strange place. Yesterday the hare, the day before yesterday, the girl, and today a white-haired solider pops out of a well. Come here, soldier: if you’re not a ghost, have a glass of vodka, and if you are a ghost, go back to where you came from.”

  The platoon corporal went over to Dov, felt him, and said: “But you’re not even wet!”

  “There’s an opening in the well,” said Dov. “Let me explain.”