The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Signor S. arrived a little before six o’clock and extended his apologies to one and all: the train had departed Lugano on time, but then it had been delayed at the border for the usual checks. He kissed his wife and apologized to her as well. He was stout, affable, noisy, and bald, with a crown of fair hair ringing the back of his head. He, too, spoke German, but his command of the language was colloquial, his grammar rudimentary, because he’d learned it on the road. He owned a business and was often out of the country. He found himself face-to-face with Mendel and immediately started telling him about his own concerns as if he’d known him all his life, as is customary among those who have a high opinion of themselves and little interest in the people to whom they are speaking. How inconvenient it was to travel, how difficult it was to reestablish old business contacts. . . . Mendel thought of the way he and his people had traveled and the rabbit that the Uzbek had bartered for salt, but he said nothing. Finally, the other man broke off: “But you must be thirsty, come, come with me!”

  He grabbed Mendel by the wrist and towed him over to the refreshment table. Mendel allowed him to, in a daze; he felt an intense sensation of unreality, as in the dreams you have on too full a stomach. He seized the moment in which S. was raising his cup to his lips, and found the courage to ask him the questions that had been buzzing through his head ever since the party had started. Who were all those people? Were he and his wife really Jews? And was that their house? Hadn’t the Germans come to Milan, too? How had they saved themselves, along with all the lovely things that he saw all around him? Were all Italian Jews as wealthy as they were? Or all Italians? Did they all have beautiful homes like this?

  His host gazed at him with an odd expression, almost as if Mendel had asked stupid or inopportune questions, and then patiently replied, the way you do with children who are not too bright. But of course they were Jews, everyone with the surname S. was a Jew. No, not all of the guests: but after all, was that such an important question? They were friends, that was all, nice people, who were interested in meeting them, seeing that they had come from so far away. And the place belonged to him, why not? He’d earned good money, before the war, and even during the first few years of the war, before the Nazis came. After that, the apartment had been requisitioned, and a high Fascist official had been quartered in it, but the minute he got back from Switzerland he’d pulled some strings and taken it back. Eh, no, not everyone had a place like his: neither Christians nor Jews. Not everyone, but lots of people did, after all, Milan is a wealthy city. Wealthy and generous, many Jews had remained in the city, in hiding or with false identity documents; neighbors and friends who met them pretended not to know them, but in secret they brought them food.

  A big man with a light and youthful voice broke into their conversation, and although he neither spoke nor understood German, he behaved in an extremely friendly fashion toward Mendel. He asked to be introduced to him; S. did as requested, mispronouncing Mendel’s name, and then said to Mendel, “This is the lawyer Longo.” The lawyer proved to be more discreet than the master of the house; he listened in respectful silence to the stories that Mendel told in an abridged version and which the master of the house translated phrase by phrase. In the end, he said to the latter: “They must be tired, these friends of yours; they probably need some rest. Ask them if they would like to be my guests, in Varazze; I have plenty of room in my villa, and perhaps they’ve never been to the beach!”

  This invitation caught Mendel by surprise. He hesitated, stalled for time, and tried to edge closer to his comrades to see what they had to say. He no, he would not have accepted, he felt distant, alien, disagreeable, and wild; he felt as if he still carried the sepulchral odor of Schmulek’s lair. All the same, if the others said yes, he would, too. Bella, Line, and Gedale were also inclined to say no: they came up with vague pretexts, but in fact they were intimidated, they didn’t feel up to the role that was assigned to them. Pavel, on the other hand, would have liked to accept, but not alone; and so he went along with the majority opinion, and they all thanked the lawyer and declined the invitation, happy that their inept words were being translated into Signora S.’s harmonious Italian. “Still, I wouldn’t have minded seeing the sea,” Bella whispered to Gedale.

  The lady of the house took advantage of the fact that all five of them were in one place to introduce them to another friend of hers, a tall bony young man with an energetic air about him who wore military-looking trousers and shirt but without insignia. “This is Francesco, a colleague of yours!” she said with an allusive smile; Francesco on the other hand remained serious. “He was a partisan, too,” the lady went on. “In Valtellina, in the Alps, in other words, on those mountains you can see out there. A brave young man; too bad that he’s a Communist.”

  With the hostess’s help, the conversation proceeded, labored and contorted, but when Francesco heard that Mendel had been in the Red Army, he stepped up to him and threw his arms around him: “From the day Germany attacked you, I had no doubt that it would be defeated. Tell him that, Adele. Tell him that we fought, too, but if the Soviet Union hadn’t held out it would have meant the end of Europe.” The hostess translated as best she could, but she added some thoughts of her own: “He’s a sweet boy, but he’s hardheaded and he has some strange ideas. If it was up to him, he wouldn’t think twice: dictatorship of the proletariat, all land to the peasants, all factories to the workers, and that’s the end of it. At most, for us, his friends, a seat on the local soviet.”

  Francesco partly understood, chose not to go any further, and with the same serious expression had her say that his party had been the backbone of the Italian Resistance and the true voice of the Italian people; then he told her to ask Mendel why he and his friends were leaving their country. Mendel was confused. He had some vague ideas about what had happened in Italy during the war, and he was astonished that the woman would say so openly that her friend was a Communist: could she have been joking? And was she also joking when she referred to her fear of communism? Or was she really afraid? And, if so, was she right to be afraid? Now, however, he would have to answer that Francesco’s question. How could he explain to him that being a Jew in Russia or in Poland was not the same as being a Jew in Switzerland or on Via Monforte in Milan? He would have had to tell him their whole story. He decided only to say that he and his comrades had nothing against Stalin, indeed, they were grateful to him for having beaten Hitler; but that their homes had been destroyed, they had a void behind them, and they hoped to find a new home in Palestine. The woman translated, and it was Mendel’s impression that the translation was longer than the original; a dubious expression appeared on Francesco’s face and he walked away. To Mendel, even the Italians’ faces were unclear to him; their expressions, their grimaces, were illegible to him, or at least he was afraid he was reading them wrong. Francesco. A partisan, a fellow warrior. How long did you fight, Francesco? Sixteen months, eighteen: from when Venyamin’s radio on the banks of the Dnieper announced that Mussolini was in prison, from when Dov learned that Italy had capitulated. How far did you walk, Francesco? How many friends did you lose? Where is your home? In Milan, perhaps, or up in those mountains whose name I can’t repeat; but you have a home, the home you fought for, along with your ideas. A home, land underneath your feet, a sky over your head that belongs to you and never changes. A mother and a father; a girlfriend or a wife. You have someone or something you want to live for. If I spoke your language I could try to explain.

  Behind him, Signora Adele was talking to Line:

  “. . . but now they’re the ones who help us the most. The weapons come from them, via Czechoslovakia. It’s the Italian Communist Party that orders the strikes; when the British try to halt a refugee ship, all the longshoreman go on strike, and the British have to let it sail. . . .”

  Mendel felt disoriented: in a drawing room filled with lovely objects and courteous people, and at the same time a pawn in a cruel and gigantic game. Perhaps he always had been, always
had been a pawn, ever since he’d gone missing, since he’d met Leonid: you think you’re making a decision and instead you’re obeying the destiny that someone else has already written for you. Who? Stalin, or Roosevelt, or the God of Armies. He turned to Gedale:

  “Let’s go, Gedale: let’s take our leave. This place isn’t for us.”

  “What?” asked Gedale in astonishment: maybe he was afraid he hadn’t understood, or perhaps he was following another chain of thought. Just then, the phone rang in the corner where Bella was sitting, and the woman went to answer. After a short while, she hung up the receiver and said to Mendel, “It’s Zvi, from the farm. Your comrade, the one you call the White, isn’t well. They had to take her into the city; she’s in a clinic, not far from here.”

  All five of them drove to the obstetric clinic, crammed into the lawyer Longo’s automobile. It was a private clinic, orderly and clean, but much of the window glass had been replaced with plywood panels, and crossed strips of paper had been glued to the others. Rokhele was in a room with three other women; she was pale and calm, and she was complaining in a weak voice: maybe they’d given her a tranquilizer. In the hallway, outside the door of the room, stood Isidor, nervous and scowling, alongside Izu, the bare-handed fisherman, and three of his compatriots from Blizna, the roughest members of the band. Isidor was walking up and down, and he had a pistol stuck in his belt. Two of his comrades were sitting on the floor and seemed drunk; the other two were having a conversation by the window. Mendel spotted the bulge of a knife handle through the leather of their worn boots. On the windowsill stood a bottle of red wine and two country rolls.

  “How is she?” Bella whispered to Isidor. Without lowering his voice, Isidor replied, “She’s not well. She’s in pain, she was screaming a little while ago. But now they’ve given her an injection.” At the end of the corridor two nuns peeped out, exchanged a few words, and promptly vanished.

  “Come away, she’s in good hands,” said Mendel. “What’s the point of staying here?”

  “I’m not moving,” said Isidor. The four others said nothing; they limited themselves to giving Mendel and the others a hostile glance.

  “You aren’t doing any good and you’re causing trouble,” said Line.

  “I’m not moving,” Isidor said again. “I’m staying here. I don’t trust them.”

  The five of them stepped over to one side. “What should we do?” Gedale asked.

  “There are too many of us here,” said Mendel. “I’ll stay here to see what happens; I’ll try to calm them down. You go downstairs and head back to the farm; the lawyer is waiting. If things go badly I’ll call you on the phone.”

  “I’ll stay, too,” said Line unexpectedly. “A woman can be useful.” Gedale, Bella, and Pavel left; Line and Mendel sat down in the waiting room. Through the half-open door they could keep an eye on the five men camped out in the corridor.

  “Is Isidor drunk, too?” asked Line.

  “I don’t think so,” Mendel replied. “He’s just acting tough because he’s afraid.”

  “Afraid about the baby? About Rokhele?”

  “Yes, but maybe not just about that. He’s a boy, and he needs to feel important. Gedale was wrong to let him drive the truck.”

  Line, in her unaccustomed woman’s clothing, seemed to have changed within as well. She replied in a subdued tone:

  “When was that? In February, right? There was still snow on the ground.”

  “It was in early March, when we left Wolbrom; yes, it must have been the first of March.”

  “It’s hard to keep your memories straight, isn’t it? Doesn’t that happen to you, too?”

  Mendel nodded his head yes, without a word. A nurse came in and said something to them in Italian; neither Line nor Mendel understood, the nurse shrugged her shoulders and left. Line went into Rokhele’s room and came out again immediately:

  “She’s sleeping,” she said. “She seems comfortable, but her pulse is racing.”

  “Could that be true for all women when they have a baby?”

  “I don’t know,” Line replied. She was silent, then she went on:

  “There’s something wrong with us. Do you think it’s right for a man to become a father at the age of seventeen?”

  “Maybe it’s never right to become a father,” said Mendel.

  “Hush, Mendel. Chase those thoughts away. Tonight a child is going to be born.”

  “Do you believe that our thoughts can touch it? Make it be born different somehow?”

  “Who knows?” said Line. “When a child is born, it’s such a delicate thing! Where was it conceived?”

  Mendel calculated mentally:

  “When we were with Edek, near Tunel. In November. Will it be a Polish baby? Or Ukrainian like Rokhele? Or Italian?”

  “Narisher bokher, vos darfst du fregn?” Line said with a laugh, quoting from the song that had marked the passage of the front: “Foolish Lad, how can you ask?” Strangely, Mendel was by no means offended at being called that name: if anything, he felt tenderness. This new Line was no longer Rahab but the pitying-clever meydl of the song.

  “How can you ask?” Line went on, laying her hand on Mendel’s forearm: “A baby is a baby; it only becomes something else later. Why are you worried? After all, it’s not even our child.”

  “Right. It’s not even our child.”

  “We were born, too,” Line suddenly blurted out. Mendel gave her a questioning glance, and Line tried to clarify the thought:

  “Given birth, expelled. Russia conceived us, nourished us, let us grow in the darkness, as in a womb; then she had labor pains, and then contractions, and then she shot us out, and now here we are, new and naked, like newborn babies. Doesn’t it seem that way to you?”

  “Narishe meydl, vos darfst du fregn?” Mendel replied, feeling an affectionate smile on his lips and a light film before his eyes.

  There was movement in the corridor, footsteps, whispering. Mendel got up and went to look through the crack in the door: the White was breathing heavily and moaning at intervals. Suddenly she writhed and yelled loudly twice, three times. The four men from Blizna leaped to their feet, bellicose and sleepy; Isidor knelt down beside the bed, then strode out into the corridor. He came back a minute later, dragging a nun and the doctor who was on duty. All three of them were frightened, for different reasons. Isidor was shouting in Yiddish:

  “This woman must not die, Mr. Doctor, do you understand? She’s my wife, we came here all the way from Russia, we fought and we walked. And the baby is my son, he has to be born. He mustn’t die, understood? You’ll be in trouble if the woman or the baby dies: we are partisans. Go on, Mr. Doctor, do what you have to, and be careful how you do it.”

  Line walked over to Isidor to try to calm him down and reassure him, but Isidor, who kept his hand on the handle of the pistol shoved into his belt, pushed her away roughly. The doctor didn’t understand Yiddish, but he understood what a pistol in the hand of a terrified young man could mean; he spoke rapidly to the nun, then he took a step toward the telephone in the corner of the hallway, but Isidor cut him off. Then he and the nun took the gurney that was standing nearby, moved the White onto it as she went on screaming, and headed off toward the delivery room. Isidor nodded to his men and followed them; Mendel and Line followed Isidor.

  Isidor didn’t dare force his way into the delivery room. The seven of them sat down outside the door, and the hours began to go by. More than once, Mendel tried to calm Isidor down and persuade him to hand over the pistol. He might even have tried to grab it out of Isidor’s hands if he hadn’t seen that Isidore’s four compatriots were right behind him. His efforts were unsuccessful: Isidor stood in front of him without hearing a word he said, arrogant at first, then straining to hear the muffled sounds that came from the delivery room.

  Sitting next to Line, Mendel looked at her knees, sticking out from beneath her skirt. It was the first time he’d seen them: never before, except with the vision in his fingertips
, trembling with desire, in the darkness of their pallets, a different one every night, or through the opaque cloth of her trousers. Don’t give in. Don’t give in to her. Don’t start all over again, be sensible, resist. You wouldn’t live beside her for a lifetime, she isn’t a woman for a lifetime, and you’re not even thirty yet. When you’re thirty, life can begin again. Like a book, when you’ve finished the first volume. Start over from where? From here, from today, from this Milanese dawn rising behind the frosted glass: from this morning. This is a good place to start living. Maybe you should’ve done what they did, they were right after all, the two nebbishes; they didn’t do it the way you did with Line, they closed their eyes and let go and the seed of man was not spilt and a woman conceived.

  A nun walked past, pushing a trolley. Line, who had been dozing, shook herself and said:

  “It’s a while since we stayed up all night.”

  “It’s a while since we spent the night together,” Mendel replied. No, I wouldn’t live a lifetime with Line, but I can’t leave her and I don’t want to leave her. I’ll carry her with me forever, inside me, even if we’re separated, the way I was separated from Rivke.

  Outside, they could hear the city awakening, the screeching of trams, the shutters of the shops being rolled up. A nurse emerged from the delivery room, followed by the doctor himself, who went back in almost immediately. Isidor, no longer truculent but now imploring, asked questions that were understood in spite of the language. The doctor made reassuring gestures, held up his wristwatch: it would be two hours, one hour. Repeated screaming could be heard, the hum of a motor, then silence. Finally, in broad daylight, a nurse with a cheerful face emerged, carrying a little bundle. “It’s a boy, it’s a boy,” she laughed. No one understood, she looked around and found Izu, the hairy one, close at hand, and jerked on his beard: “A boy, like this one!”

  They all got to their feet. Mendel and Line embraced Isidor, whose eyes, red from lack of sleep, were suddenly glistening. The doctor came out, too, slapped Isidor on the back, and headed down the hall, but he ran into a colleague who was walking along with a newspaper held out before him, and he stopped to talk. Other doctors, nuns, and nurses gathered around the two men. Mendel, too, ventured closer and managed to see that the newspaper, which consisted of a single sheet of paper, had a headline in a very large type size, but he didn’t understand what it said. That newspaper bore the date of Tuesday, August 7, 1945, and it gave the news of the first atomic bomb, dropped on Hiroshima.