by Primo Levi
None of the Gedalists had any experience of city life; only Leonid had, and many of them regretted that he was not there. In Plauen they were overwhelmed and surprised by the contradictions: through rubble-clogged streets the milkman made his rounds with his little cart and his air horn, punctually, every morning at the same time. Coffee and meat were sold at astoundingly high prices, while silverware was cheap. Mottel bought a fine camera, loaded with film, for just a few marks; they arranged themselves for a group photograph, some standing, others squatting in the front row, all of them with weapons in plain sight. No one wanted to miss being in the photo, so they had to ask a passerby to take the picture, against a backdrop of ruined houses. The trains operated poorly, but the Reisebüro, the city’s one official travel agency, worked very well: the telephone line had been restored, and they knew more there than at the train station. Nonetheless, Gedale never ventured very far from the station. He could frequently be seen in the company of one of the railroad laborers; Gedale was generous with him, treating him to beers at the tavern, and one day they were spotted together in the little garden beside the station: Gedale was playing the violin and the German was playing the flute, both of them serious and intent. Gedale, without offering any explanation, insisted that no one wander off: they might be leaving soon, they all should be available at a few minutes’ notice.
Instead, however, they spent a few more weeks at the station, in an atmosphere of laziness, of waiting for nothing in particular. It was hot, and in the station there was a Red Cross facility that distributed soup every day to anyone who wanted it; refugees and stragglers of every race and nationality trickled in and out all the time. Some of the townspeople of Plauen established cautious relations with the encamped Gedalists; they were curious but they never asked questions. The conversations were hobbled by linguistic friction; Yiddish speakers understand German speakers fairly well and vice versa, and, in addition, nearly all the Gedalists were comfortable speaking German, some more grammatically than others, and with Yiddish accents of varying strength, but the two languages, sister tongues in historical terms, appeared to their respective speakers each as a caricature of the other, just as apes appear to us humans caricatures of humanity (and no doubt that is how we appear to them). Perhaps this fact enters into the Germans’ ancient resentment of the Ashkenazi Jews, as corrupters of Hochdeutsch, or High German. But other, deeper factors intervened to disrupt any reciprocal understanding. To the Germans, those foreign Jews, so different from the local bourgeois Jews who had allowed themselves with great discipline to be rounded up and slaughtered, were somehow suspect: too prompt, too vigorous, filthy, ragged, fierce, unpredictable, primitive, “Russian.” To the Jews, it was impossible, and at the same time necessary, to distinguish between the headhunters they had fled, and upon whom they had wrought such passionate vengeance, and these shy and introverted little old people, these courteous fair-haired children who peered in at the station doors as if through the bars of cages at the zoo. It’s not them, no: but it’s their fathers, their teachers, their children, they themselves yesterday and tomorrow. How to untangle the knot? It can’t be done. Leave, as soon as possible. This land is burning hot: this manicured, order-loving land is burning hot; the mild, bland midsummer air is burning. Time to leave, time to leave: we didn’t come all the way from the heart of Polesie just to fall asleep in the Wartesaal of Plauen an der Elster, to pass the time taking group photographs and eating Red Cross soup. But suddenly, on July 20, the signal arrived, in the middle of the night, granting a collective and unexpressed wish. Gedale rushed into the lobby, into the midst of the sleepers:
“Everyone on your feet immediately, with your baggage fastened. Follow me silently, we’re leaving in fifteen minutes.” In the ensuing hubbub, questions and hurried explanations went back and forth: they were all to follow him, it wasn’t far, to a switching track. His friend, the flautist, the laborer, had performed a miracle. There it was, before them, almost new, as good as new, the train car that was going to carry them into Italy: bought, that’s right; bought for just a few dollars, not strictly legally; a damaged car, recently repaired, still waiting to be tested—in other words, organized. Organized? That’s right, that’s what they say, that’s what they said in the ghettos, in the concentration camps, in all of Nazi Europe: something that you procure illegally is said to have been organized. And the train would be coming any minute, the station bell was already ringing.
Everyone was ready in a flash, but Pavel was missing. Gedale cursed in Polish (because you can’t curse in Yiddish) and sent one of his men running to look for him; he was found not far away, with a German prostitute, and led back to the station still buttoning his trousers. He, too, was cursing, in Russian, but he didn’t object. They all climbed into the car without making noise.
“Who’ll couple it to the train?” asked Mendel.
“He will. Ludwig. He promised me. If necessary, we’ll give him a hand ourselves.”
“But how did you manage to make friends with him?”
“With the violin. Just like that character, in ancient times, who tamed tigers with his lyre. Not that Ludwig is a tiger, he’s kind and very talented, it was a pleasure to play with him; and he was willing to do this service for us in exchange for very little.”
“But he’s still a German,” Pavel grumbled.
“So, what does that have to do with it? He didn’t go to war, he’s always worked on the railroads, he plays the flute, and in 1933 he didn’t vote for Hitler. Can you really say what you would have done if you had been born in Germany, to a pureblood mother and father, and you were taught in school all that bubkes about blood and soil?”
The women were readying a pallet, with blankets and straw, for the White in a corner of the railroad car. Bella turned to Gedale and said, “But still, tell the truth, you’ve always liked trains. I think that, if that nun in Bialystok hadn’t got in the way, you wouldn’t have become a violinist—you’d have gone to work for the railroad.”
Gedale laughed happily and said that it really was true, he loved trains and all sorts of vehicles: “But this time the game has proved useful, we’re going to Italy in a private car, all our own. Only heads of state travel this way!”
“Nu,” said Isidor, thoughtfully, “you’re still pretty young. Now that the war is over no one needs partisans anymore. Why shouldn’t you work for the railroad? I’d like it, too, when we get to the land of Israel.”
At that moment the clatter of wheels was heard, they saw the glow of the headlight on the tracks, and a long freight train entered the station. It screeched to a halt and sat motionless for half an hour, then it slowly began maneuvering: perched on the bumper of the last car, a man waved his lantern in greeting—it was him, Ludwig. The train rolled backward at walking speed, there was a jolt, followed by the crash of metal couplings. The train started off again, hauling the Gedalists’ special car toward the Alps.
12
July–August 1945
They had never traveled like this before: not on foot but in a freight car hooked up to a train; not in the cold, not exposed to rifle fire, not starving, not scattered. Not legal, not yet, and who knows when they would be, but still there was a sign on the side of the car with the route: Munich–Innsbruck–Brenner–Verona: Ludwig had thought of everything. “Leave the car as little as you can,” said Gedale. “The less we’re seen the better, and the less likely it is that somebody decides to check on us.”
But nobody checked on them; on that entire line, and on most of Europe’s rail lines, there was still far too much to be done: tracks to be repaired, rubble to be removed, signals to be restored. The train traveled slowly, almost only by night; by day it sat interminably on sidings, roasting in the sun, to yield the right-of-way to other trains that took precedence. Few were passenger trains: they were freight trains that carried human beings, but packed in like freight; the hundreds of thousands of Italians, women and men, soldiers and civilians, paid workers and slaves, who had
labored in the factories and camps of the ravaged Third Reich. Mixed in among them, less noisy, less numerous, eager not to be noticed, other passengers traveled, Germans who were swarming out of occupied Germany in order to escape Allied justice: SS soldiers, Gestapo, and Party officials. Paradoxically, for them, as for the Jews in transit, Italy was the place of least resistance, the best jumping-off point for more hospitable countries: South America, Syria, Egypt. Whether traveling openly or in disguise, with identity documents or without, this variegated tide was pushing south, toward the Brenner Pass: the Brenner Pass had become the narrow neck of a vast funnel. Through the Brenner Pass you could reach Italy, a land with a mild climate and a notoriously open illegality; a friendly-mafioso country whose dual reputation had reached all the way to Norway and Ukraine and the sealed ghettos of Eastern Europe; a place of ignored prohibitions and anarchic tolerance, where every foreigner is welcomed like a brother.
When the train was halted in a station, they kept the doors closed, but they opened them when the train was in motion and during the frequent stops in the open countryside. Sitting on the floor, legs dangling, Mendel watched the landscape spread out solemnly before him: the fertile fields, the lakes, the forests, the farms, and the houses of the Upper Palatinate and then of Bavaria. Neither he nor any of his companions had ever lived in such a rich and civilized land. Behind them, as if dotted by their countless footsteps, the trail of their journey stretched out, endless, as if in a troubled dream, through marshes, fords, forests full of ambushes, snow, rivers, and deaths suffered and inflicted. He felt weary and alien. Alone now: without women, without a destination, without a homeland. Without friends? No, he couldn’t say that; his companions remained, and they always would remain: they filled his emptiness. He didn’t care where the train was taking him; he’d done his job, he’d performed his duty, not easily, not always willingly, but he’d done it. It was over, finished. The war had ended, and what is a gunner to do in peacetime? What does he know how to do? Be a watchmaker? Who could say? Shooting makes your fingers hard, insensitive, and your eyes get accustomed to looking into the distance, through the sights. No call reached him from the promised land, perhaps even there he’d have to walk and fight. Fine, it’s my fate, I accept it, but it doesn’t warm my heart. It’s a duty, and you perform it, like the time I killed the Ukrainian from the auxiliary police. Duty is not a treasure. Neither is the future. But these people are, they are my treasure, I still have them. All of them: with their crudeness and their defects, even those who have offended me, even those whom I have offended. And the women, too, Sissl whom I stupidly abandoned, Line who knows what she wants, who wants everyone, and who left me; and Bella who is boring and slow, and Rokhele the White with her impudent belly, growing like a fruit.
He looked to either side and behind him. There was Pyotr, as candid as an infant, terrible in battle, crazy like any self-respecting Russian. Would you give your life for Pyotr? Certainly, I’d give my life, without hesitation: as someone who’s making a good trade wouldn’t hesitate. He’s better suited to being on the face of the earth than I am. He’s coming to Italy with us, as cheerful and trusting as a child climbing onto a merry-go-round. He chose to fight with us and for us like the knights of days gone by, because he is generous, because he believes in the same Christ we don’t believe in; and yet the patriarch must have told him, too, that we were the ones who nailed Him to the cross.
There was Gedale. It’s strange that he’s called Gedale: the Gedaliah of the Bible was a man of no consequence. Nebuchadnezzar the Chaldaean appointed him governor of Judaea, of the few Jews left in Judaea after the deportation: then as now, like the governors Hitler appointed. In other words he was a collaborator. And he was killed by Ishmael, a partisan, someone like us. If we are right, then Ishmael was right, and he did the right thing by killing that Gedale. . . . What stupid thoughts! A man can’t be blamed for the name he bears: I’m called the Consoler but I don’t console anyone, not even myself. Anyway, a different name would suit Gedale: for instance, Jubal, the one who invented the flute and the guitar; or Jabal, his brother, the first one to travel the world and live in tents; or Tubalcain, the third brother, who taught his fellow men to work copper and iron. They were all sons of Lamech. Lamech was a mysterious avenger, no one knows anymore what wrong he avenged. Lamech in Lyuban, Lamech in Chmielnik, Lamech in Neuhaus. Maybe Lamech, too, was a cheerful avenger, like Gedale; at night, in his tent, after taking vengeance, he played the flute with his sons. I don’t understand Gedale, I couldn’t predict any of his moves or any of his decisions, but Gedale is my brother.
And Line? What to say about Line? She isn’t my sister: she’s much more and much less, she’s a mother-wife-daughter-friend-enemy-rival-teacher. She’s been flesh of my flesh, I entered into her, a thousand years ago, on a windy night in a mill, when the war was still going on and the world was young and each of us was an angel with a sword in his hand. She’s not happy, but she’s certain, and I’m not happy or certain, and I’m a thousand years old, and I carry the world on my back. There she is beside me, she doesn’t look at me, she stares at this German countryside and she always knows exactly what must be done. A thousand years ago, in the marshes, I knew it, too, and now she still knows it and I don’t. She doesn’t look at me, but I look at her, and I feel pleasure in looking at her, along with turmoil, and laceration, and yearning for my neighbor’s wife. Line, Emmeline, Rahab: the holy sinner of Jericho. Whose woman? Everyone’s, which is to say no one’s; she binds but is not bound. I don’t care whose woman, but when I glimpse her body again in my memory, when I can imagine it beneath her clothing, I feel torn, and I want to begin again, and I know it’s not possible and that’s exactly why I feel torn. But I’d feel that anyway, even without Line, even without Sissl. Even without Rivke? No, Mendel, that you don’t know, that you can’t say. Without Rivke you’d be a different man, who knows how you’d think, you’d be a non-Mendel. Without Rivke, without the shadow of Rivke, you’d be ready for the future. Ready to live, to grow like a seed: there are seeds that take root in all soils, even the soil of the land of Israel, and Line is a seed of that kind, and so are all the others. They emerge from the water and shake themselves like dogs and dry off all their memories. They have no scars. Come now, how can you say that? They have them but they don’t talk about them; perhaps each of them, right this second, is thinking the same thoughts you are.
The train had passed Innsbruck, and was straining to climb toward the Brenner Pass and the Italian border. Gedale, sitting in a corner of the car with his back to the wooden wall, was playing in his manner, subdued and distracted. He was playing a Gypsy tune, or perhaps it was Jewish, or Russian: alien peoples often come into contact in music, exchange music, and through music learn to know one another, not to be mistrustful. An unpretentious tune, heard a hundred times, second-rate, steeped in a vulgar nostalgia. Then, suddenly the rhythm grew livelier, and the tune, thus accelerated, became another: sharp, new, noble, and filled with hope. A happy, dancing rhythm urged you to follow along, bobbing your head and clapping your hands; and many members of the band, prickly-bearded, sun-baked, hardened by effort and by the war, did follow along, delighting in the noise, forgetful and savage. Now that the dangers were behind them, now that the war was over, and the road, the blood, and the ice, now that the Satan of Berlin was dead, the world was empty and aimless, waiting to be re-created, repeopled, as after the great flood. Climbing upward, climbing cheerfully toward the pass: ascent, aliyah, that’s what it’s called when you emerge from exile, from the depths, and climb toward the light. The rhythm of the violin, too, was climbing, faster and faster, becoming frenzied, orgiastic. Two of the Gedalists, then four of them, then ten went wild in the car, dancing in couples, in groups, shoulder to shoulder, pounding the heels of their boots on the resonant floor. Gedale, too, had stood up, and was dancing as he played, spinning around and lifting his knees high.
Suddenly there was a sharp crack and the violin fell silent. Gedal
e stood with the bow in midair; the violin was broken. Fidl kaput! Pavel snickered; others laughed, too, but Gedale didn’t laugh. He stood gazing at the veteran violin, the violin that had saved his life at Luninets, and perhaps other unknown times, buoying him to the surface, above boredom and despair; the violin that had been wounded in battle, pierced by bullets intended for him, that he had decorated with the Hungarian’s bronze medal. “It’s nothing, we’ll fix it,” said Rokhele the White; but she was wrong. Perhaps sunlight and harsh weather had rotted the wood, or perhaps Gedale himself had strained it too far in the reel he’d been playing: whatever the case, it couldn’t be fixed. The bridge had caved in the instrument’s delicate convex belly and penetrated it; the strings dangled, slack and humiliated. There was nothing to be done. Gedale stuck his arm out the door of the freight car, opened his hand, and let the violin drop onto the roadbed of the railroad tracks with a funereal crack.