by Primo Levi
Only Pavel knew a few words of Italian, learned back in the days when he was traveling Europe as an actor. He showed the address to a passerby, who looked him in the face with mistrust and then replied angrily: “It’s gone!” What was it that was gone? Was it the wrong address? Or had the building collapsed? The conversation was cumbersome, obstructed by recioprocal misunderstandings: “Fascio, fascismo, fascisti, niente, finito,” the passerby kept repeating. Finally Pavel understood that that had once been the address of an important Fascist headquarters, but that it was no longer there; in any case, the Milanese explained as best he could how to get there. They’d have to walk three kilometers: what’s three kilometers? A laughable distance. They started off, timid and curious; never, on their whole interminable journey, had they felt like such strangers.
It was early afternoon. They straggled along in a disorderly line, careful not to lose sight of Pavel, who was in the lead, but they frequently made him wait so they could look around. Blackened ruins alternated with tall, intact, showy buildings; many of the shops were open, the plate glass windows piled high with tempting merchandise, topped by incomprehensible signs. Only around the train station were there poor people; the passersby they encountered in the streets of the city center were well-dressed and replied affably to their questions, trying to understand and make themselves understood. Via Unione? Straight ahead, two more kilometers, one more. Duomo, Duomo, non capire? Piazza del Duomo, and keep going past that. In front of the massive cathedral, the Duomo, pockmarked by bombs, they came to a halt—gloomy, filthy, and intimidated, loaded down with their sun-faded bundles; furtively, Pyotr crossed himself, three fingers joined, Russian style.
In Via Unione they encountered an atmosphere that seemed more familiar. The Aid Office was teeming with refugees: Poles, Russians, Czechs, Hungarians, nearly all of them speaking Yiddish. They all needed everything, and the confusion was extreme. There were men, women, and children camped in the hallways, families that had built themselves shelters with sheets of plywood or hanging blankets. Up and down the corridor doors, behind the counter windows, women of all ages worked busily, breathless, sweating, tireless. None of them understood Yiddish and only a few understood German; improvised interpreters were shouting themselves hoarse in an effort to establish order and discipline. The air was muggy, with whiffs of latrines and of cooking. An arrow and a sign written in Yiddish pointed the way to the window the new arrivals were to apply to; they got in line and waited patiently.
The line moved forward slowly, and Mendel was mulling over various shapeless and conflicting thoughts. He, too, had never felt like such a stranger: a Russian in Italy, a Jew in the presence of the cathedral, a village watchmaker in a big city, a partisan in peacetime; a stranger by language and soul, a stranger estranged by years of life in the wild. And yet, never before, in any of the hundred places they had been through, had he breathed the air he was breathing here. A stranger, but accepted, and not by the kindly women of the Aid Office alone. Not merely tolerated, accepted; in the faces of the Italians they had spoken to ever since the Brenner Pass, there was occasionally a gleam of mistrust or cunning, but never the murky shadow that separates you from the Russian or the Pole when they recognize you as a Jew. In this country everyone is like Pyotr: perhaps less courageous or subtler, or simply older. Subtle, like old people, who’ve seen it all.
Mendel and Pavel went up to the window side by side; behind the window was a woman who must have been about thirty, in a nicely pressed white blouse, small, pretty, polite, with chestnut hair, fresh from the hairdresser. She wore perfume, and alongside the scent of her perfume Mendel uneasily noticed the heavy, goatish odor of Pavel’s sweaty body. The woman understood German and spoke it reasonably well: there were no major difficulties in communication, but Pavel proudly insisted on speaking Italian, and by so doing complicated the situation instead of simplifying it. Once again, name, age, place of birth, citizenship. Three or four of them answered at once, causing some confusion. The woman understood that they were a group, and without any sign of impatience asked Pavel to answer for them all: she spoke to him using the formal Sie, and this, too, was pleasant, as well as embarrassing, something that had never happened before. It really was an aid office: they were trying to help, to provide assistance, not get rid of them or lock them up in a box of barbed wire.
The woman wrote and wrote; thirty-five names are a lot, and the list was long. Exotic first and last names, bristling with consonants; she had to stop, check, have one repeated, ask the spelling. There, finished. The woman leaned out from the window to look at them. A group, a strange group; refugees unlike the usual ones, unlike the human wreckage that for days and days had been passing before her in that office. Dirty, tired, but upright; different in their gaze, in their speech, in their bearing.
“Have you always been together?” she asked Pavel in German.
Pavel wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to show off. He summoned all the fragments of Italian that he’d picked up years before in his travels, overheard backstage, on trains, in the cheap hotels and whorehouses. He puffed out his chest:
“Group, lovely signora, group. Always together, Russia, Polandia. Walk, walk. Forest, river, snow. Dead Germans, lots and lots. We all partizani, dammit. Not DP, we war, we partizani. All soldiers, dag nab it; even women.”
The kind woman was perplexed. She asked the Gedalists to step to one side and wait, and she picked up the phone. She talked for a long time in an emphatic tone of voice, but covering her mouth with one hand to keep from being overheard; when she was done with the call, she told Pavel that she hoped he’d be patient; they would have to spend another night camped out, they should make themselves as comfortable as possible in the hallways, but the following day she was sure she would find them a better place. What about washing up? That wouldn’t be easy; no bathrooms, no showers, either, the building had just been refitted, but there was water, soap, and perhaps they could find three or four towels. Not very many for such a large group, of course, but what could you do about it, it wasn’t her fault or her colleagues’, they were all trying their hardest, sometimes putting in their own personal contributions. In her words and on her face Mendel glimpsed reverence, pity, fellow feeling, and anxiety.
“Where are you sending us?” he asked her in his best German.
The woman gave him a nice smile, and with her hands made a complicated and allusive gesture that Mendel didn’t understand: “We’re not going to send you to a refugee camp, but to a place that will suit you better.”
Indeed, the following morning two trucks came to take them away. The woman reassured them, they wouldn’t be going far, to a farm on the outskirts of Milan, a half-hour trip, no more; they would be comfortable there, better than in the city, with more room . . . more relaxed. . . . And that way you’ll be more relaxed, too, thought Mendel. He asked her how it was that she spoke German: were there many Italians who spoke it? Very few, she replied, but she had been a German teacher: yes, she’d taught at a school, until Hitler came to power and she had fled to Switzerland. Switzerland is forty kilometers from Milan. She’d been interned in Switzerland with her husband and her young son; it wasn’t bad there; she’d come back to Milan only a few weeks ago. She stood watching the show as the Gedalists clambered onto the trucks with their Gypsy-like assortment of luggage; she told them that she’d be in touch, waved goodbye, then went back into the office.
The farm had been damaged in the last days of the war and restored as well as possible. They found fifty or so Polish and Hungarian refugees already in residence, but the dormitories were very large, suitable for at least two or three hundred people, and well equipped with cots and bunk beds. They looked around: no, for the first time there were no sentries, no barbed wire. Not a home, but close to it; no restrictions, if you want to go in you go in, if you want to leave you leave. Food provided at the right times of day, water, sunshine, meadows, a bed: practically a hotel, what more do you want? But there’s always so
mething more to be desired: nothing is ever as nice as you expect; but nothing is ever as bad as you expect, Mendel thought, recalling the days of hardworking fervor at Novoselky in the midst of the fog and the marshes, and the mindless intoxication of the battles.
There was a second enrollment, at a second window; a thin, no-nonsense young man, who spoke good Yiddish but who came from Tel Aviv, signed them in without too much paperwork, but he stopped when he came to Bella and Rokhele the White. No, not these women, they’ll have to go back to Milan, they’re not suited for farmwork; and especially not this one, what are they thinking in Via Unione, have they all lost their minds? What were they doing, sending a pregnant woman out to the farm? Line, Gedale, Pavel all started arguing, and especially Isidor, who was shouting louder than any of them: you can’t separate us, we aren’t refugees, we are a band, a single unit. If the White goes back to Milan, all of us are going back to Milan. An odd expression appeared on the young man’s face, but he didn’t insist.
But he was forced to insist the following day. There was work to be done, urgent work: the Gedalists realized that it was a strange sort of farm, where work in the fields didn’t count for much, but where a great deal of merchandise always seemed to be coming and going. There were crates of foodstuffs and medicines, but some of them were far too heavy for the legends stenciled on the side in English to be believable. The young man said that he needed everyone to lend a hand loading the crates onto the trucks. Three or four of the men from Ruzany grumbled that they hadn’t fought their way from Belorussia to Italy to work as porters, and one of them even muttered through clenched teeth: “Kapo.” Zvi, the young foreman of the farm, ignored the insult, shrugged, and said, “When your ship arrives, these things will be useful for you as well,” and then, with the help of two young Hungarians, he started vigorously loading the crates himself. At that, they all stopped complaining and got to work.
There were plenty of people coming and going on the farm as well; refugees of all ages arrived and departed, so that it was difficult to get to know anyone. All the same, the Gedalists quickly noticed that there were a few permanent residents: they did their best to keep a low profile, but they must be playing some essential role. Two in particular caught Mendel’s eye. They were in their early thirties, athletic, and lithe in their movements; they rarely spoke, but to each other they spoke Russian. They were often seen leaving the farmyard with a group of young men carrying sickles, pitchforks, and rakes, and vanishing in the direction of the river. They never came back before nightfall; from the woods along the river, gunshots could occasionally be heard.
“Who are those two?” Mendel asked Zvi.
“Instructors: they’re from the Red Army. Two very smart boys. And if any of you . . .”
“We’ll talk it over later,” said Mendel without making any commitment. “We just got here; let us catch our breath. And after all, I doubt that any of us really have much left to learn.”
“Nu, that’s not what I meant, in fact, the opposite. I meant that you’d have a great deal to teach us,” said Zvi, enunciating carefully. Mendel was reminded of the offer that Smirnov had made at the camp in Glogau, and how he, out of weariness, had turned it down. No, he had no regrets. No, in good conscience; we did our part, I and all the others. In any case, not now: we’re still winded, we haven’t yet learned to breathe the air in this country.
Two days later a letter from Milan was delivered to the farm: it was written in German, addressed to Signor Pavel Yurevich Levinski, and signed by Signora Adele S.; it emanated the same scent as the kind woman from Via Unione, and it contained an invitation to tea, Sunday afternoon at five, in her home on Via Monforte. It was not limited to Pavel alone, but said, vaguely, “You and a few of your friends”; not too many, evidently, not the whole band—which was reasonable. There was great excitement, and the band split into three factions: those who wanted to go to the tea party, those who didn’t want to go at any cost, and those who remained uncertain or indifferent. Pavel himself wanted to go, as did Bella, Gedale, Line, and a fair number of others, driven by a variety of motives. Pavel, because he considered himself indispensable as an interpreter, and because the envelope was addressed to him; Bella and Gedale, out of curiosity; Line, for ideological reasons, and specifically because she alone in the band had had a Zionist education; and the others because they hoped there would be something good to eat. Among those who didn’t want to go were Pyotr and Arie, out of shyness and because they didn’t speak German; the White, because for the past few days she had been having pains in her belly; Isidor, because he didn’t want to be far from the White; and Mottel, because, he said, the lady’s goyische manners made him uncomfortable, and he couldn’t picture himself in a drawing room.
In the end Pavel, Bella, Line, Gedale, and Mendel went. Mendel, to tell the truth, had been one of those who were uncertain, but the other four had insisted that he come: that it was a singular chance to see how people lived in Italy, that they would have fun and be distracted, that it would be an opportunity to learn useful information, and that, above all, whether he liked it or not, he was the crucial man in the band, the one who best represented it and who had taken part in all its exploits—and hadn’t he been a soldier in the Red Army? Certainly that would be important to the Italians, or at least interesting.
They put on their best clothes. Line, who had nothing but the shapeless military clothing that she’d been wearing since Novoselky, said that she would go to the reception just as she was: “If I dressed differently, it would be as if I were putting on a disguise. As if I were telling a lie. If they want me, they have to take me as I am.”
But everyone tried to persuade her to dress up a little, especially Bella and Zvi. Zvi dug out of the farm’s warehouse a white silk blouse, a pleated ivory skirt, a leather belt, a pair of nylon stockings, and a pair of cork-soled sandals. Line let them talk her into it and withdrew with her trousseau; a few minutes later a never-before-seen creature emerged from the dressing room, like a butterfly from a cocoon. Practically unrecognizable: smaller than the Line everyone knew, younger, almost a child, clumsy in the skirt, for she hadn’t worn one in years, and the high-heeled orthopedic sandals; but her level brown eyes, wide-set, and her thin, straight, short nose remained the same, as did the tense pallor of her cheeks, which no amount of sun and wind seemed able to tan. The fine nylon mesh made her muscular legs and ankles graceful; Bella ran her hand over them, as if to make sure they weren’t bare.
There were many guests in Signora S.’s drawing room, all of them Italian. Some were elegantly dressed, others wore shabby old outfits, and others still were in Allied uniforms. Only two or three of them understood German and no one spoke Yiddish, and so the conversation immediately became tangled. The five members of the band, as if to defend themselves from attack, tried to stick together, but they managed it only for a few minutes: before long each had been singled out, and, at the center of a knot of curious guests, was subjected to a hail of melodious and incomprehensible questions. Pavel and the hostess were busy translating, but without much success, supply was so greatly outweighed by demand. Through a space between two backs, Mendel glimpsed Line surrounded by five or six well-dressed men. “Like wild animals at the zoo!” the girl whispered to him in Yiddish.
“Ferocious animals,” Mendel replied. “If they knew everything we’ve done, they’d be afraid of us.”
The lady of the house was on edge. They belonged to her, those five: they constituted a find, a discovery, and she expected monopoly control. Every word uttered by them belonged to her and must be preserved; she took great pains to tag after them amid the press of her guests, asking people to repeat remarks she hadn’t heard. But she was on edge for another reason as well: she was a fine and well-mannered lady, and some of the stories the five were telling wounded her ears. Pavel and Gedale, in particular, showed no restraint. Of course, these things exist, they happened, war is no joke, even less of a joke was the war that these poor people had experie
nced; still, in the drawing room, and really, in her drawing room. . . . Yes, all right, acts of valor, reprisals against the Germans, sabotage, marches through the snow; but did they have to talk about lice, foot wrappings, and people hanging themselves in the latrines? She was almost beginning to regret inviting them: mainly because of Pavel, who unfortunately knew a few words of Italian, but, for who knows what reason, seemed to have a distinct preference for curses and dirty words. No doubt about it, her friends would laugh and laugh about this, and they’d be sure to tell the story to half of Milan. After a while, she took shelter on a sofa in the corner, next to Bella, who seemed less crude than the others, didn’t say much, and ate bonbons while admiring the paintings hanging on the wall. Every so often she glanced at the clock: her husband was late. If only he’d hurry up and get home! He’d help her take control of the party, in such a way that every guest, local or exotic, would get what he or she deserved, and there would be no transgressions.