by Primo Levi
I became aware of the consequences of our imprudence a few days later. Whereas Alberto was fine at the wakeup call, my throat hurt intensely; I found it hard to swallow and had a high fever. But reporting in sick in the morning was not permitted, so I went to the laboratory as I did every day. I felt deathly ill, yet just that day I was assigned an unusual task. Also working in that laboratory (or pretending to work) were eight girls, Germans, Poles, and Ukrainians; the supervisor told me that I was to teach Fraulein Drechsel a certain analytical method.
The Fraulein was a hefty young German girl, graceless and surly. For the most part she avoided looking at us three chemist-slaves; when she did so, her pale eyes expressed a vague hostility, made up of mistrust, embarrassment, repulsion, and fear. She had never spoken a word to me. I found her disagreeable and also suspect, because earlier I had seen her go off with the young SS fellow who guarded the unit. Then, too, she was the only one who wore a badge with the swastika pinned to her shirt. Perhaps she was a squad leader in the Hitler Youth.
She was a terrible student because she was stupid, and I was a terrible teacher because I did not speak German well and, most of all, because I was not motivated; in fact, I was counter-motivated. Why on earth should I have had to teach that creature anything? The normal teacher-student relationship, which is descending, stood in contrast to our ascending relations: I Jewish and she Aryan, I filthy and sick, she clean and healthy.
I believe that was the only occasion on which I deliberately did wrong. The analysis that I was to teach her involved the use of a pipette: yes, a sister of those to which I owed the illness that was running through my veins. I showed Fraulein Drechsel how to use it, inserting it between my feverish lips; then I handed it to her and proposed that she do the same. In other words, I did what I could to infect her.
A few days later, while I had been admitted to the infirmary, the camp was disbanded in the tragic conditions that have been described numerous times. Alberto was a victim of the small event, of the scarlet fever from which he had recovered as a child. He came to say goodbye to me, and then he set out that night in the snow, along with sixty thousand other ill-fated souls, on the deadly march from which few returned alive. I was saved, in the most unforeseeable way, by the matter of the stolen pipettes, which had brought me a providential disease, just at the moment when, paradoxically, not being able to walk was fortunate. At Auschwitz, in fact, for reasons never made plain, the Nazis who fled refrained from carrying out the orders from Berlin, which were clear: Leave no witnesses behind. They left, abandoning the sick to our fate.
As for what may have happened to Fraulein Drechsel, I have no idea. Perhaps she was guilty of nothing more than a few Nazi kisses. If so, I hope that the small event guided by me did not cause her great harm: at seventeen one soon recovers from scarlet fever and it has no aftereffects. Nevertheless, I feel no remorse for this personal attempt of mine at bacteriological warfare. I learned later that others, in other camps, had acted in a more systematic and more precisely targeted way. In places where exanthematic typhus raged—an often fatal disease that is transmitted by body lice—prisoners assigned to iron the uniforms of the SS went looking for companions who had died of typhus, collected the lice from the corpses, and slipped them under the collars of the military jackets. Lice are not very likable creatures, but they have no racial prejudices.
May 23, 1985
Frogs on the Moon
The “country” interlude lasted for the entire school vacation, that is, nearly three months. Preparations began early, usually on St. Joseph’s Day. My father and mother would go through the valleys, still covered with snow, looking for a place to rent, preferably somewhere served by the railroad and not too far from Turin. This was because we did not have a car (almost nobody did) and because my father’s vacation was limited to three days in mid-August, even though he hated the summer heat. And so, just to sleep in a cool place and be with the family, he subjected himself to the punishment of daily train travel, to Torre Pellice, or Meana, or Bardonecchia. In a show of solidarity, we went to wait for him at the station every evening; he left at dawn the following day, even on Saturday, in order to be in the office by eight.
Around mid-June my mother got started on the luggage. Aside from duffel bags and suitcases, the bulk of it consisted of three large wicker baskets that, when full, must have weighed almost a hundred kilograms each. Porters arrived, miraculously hoisted them onto their backs, and carried them down the stairs, sweating and swearing. The baskets held everything: linens, pots, toys, books, food supplies, light clothing and heavy clothing, shoes, medicines, tools, as if we were leaving for Atlantis. In general, the choice of place was made jointly with other families, friends, or relatives; this way, you were less alone—in other words, you brought a piece of the city with you.
The three months passed slowly, quiet and tedious, punctuated by the sadistic abomination of the vacation homework. They brought an ever new contact with nature: humble grasses and flowers whose names it was a pleasure to learn, birds with various calls, bugs, spiders. Once, in the basin in the washhouse, nothing less than a bloodsucker, with its gracefully undulating swim, like a dance. At other times, a bat in the bedroom, a weasel glimpsed at twilight, a mole cricket that was neither cricket nor mole: a fat, repugnant, and menacing little monster. In the garden-courtyard orderly lines of ants bustled, their astuteness and obtuseness fascinating to study. The school textbooks held them up to us as an example: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard.” They never took a vacation. Yes, of course, but at what cost!
The most interesting place was the stream, where my mother brought us every morning to sunbathe and splash around in the clear water while she knitted in the shade of a willow. The stream could be forded without danger from one bank to the other, and it was home to creatures never seen before. Black insects that looked like big ants crawled along the bottom; each dragged with it a cylindrical case made of little pebbles or vegetable matter which housed its abdomen, and from which only its head and legs stuck out. If I disturbed one, it withdrew abruptly into its ambulatory little house.
Marvelous dragonflies with deep blue metallic reflections hovered in midair; their droning, too, was metallic and mechanical. They were tiny war machines: all of a sudden they would descend like arrows on an invisible prey. Nimble green beetles ran along the dry sandy edges, and the conical pits of the ant lions would open up. We watched their ambushes with a secret sense of complicity, and thus of guilt, to the point where my sister, every so often, could not help showing mercy, and with a twig she would turn aside a little ant that was headed toward a cruel, sudden death.
The left bank was teeming with tadpoles, hundreds of them. Why just the left bank? After much discussion we observed a path there, used on Sundays by fishermen. The trout had noticed it, and stayed far away, along the right bank. The tadpoles, in turn, had settled on the left side in order to stay away from the trout. The tadpoles aroused conflicting emotions: laughter and tenderness, like puppies, newborns, and all creatures whose head is too big for their body; and indignation, because from time to time they devoured one another.
They were chimeras, impossible beasts, all head and tail, yet they navigated swiftly and confidently, propelling themselves with an elegant waving of their tails. Despite my mother’s disapproval, I brought home a dozen and put them in a small basin, covering its bottom with sand from the streambed. They seemed to be comfortable there, and in fact, after a few days, they began their metamorphosis. This really was an extraordinary spectacle, full of mystery, like a birth or a death, enough to make the vacation homework pale, and the days flew by while the nights seemed interminable.
The tadpole’s tail would swell into a small knob, near its root. The knob grew, and in two or three days two webbed feet emerged, but the little creature did not use them: it let them hang inert, and continued to wriggle its tail. After a few more days, a pustule formed on one side of its head; it grew, then burst like an abscess, and from
it emerged a front leg, perfectly formed, tiny and transparent, like a small glass hand, which immediately began to swim. Soon afterward the same thing happened on the other side, and, at the same time, the tail began to shrink.
That this was a dramatic period was obvious at first glance. It was an abrupt, brutal puberty: the creature grew restless, as if perceiving in itself the anguish of one whose nature is changing, and who feels distress in body and mind; perhaps it no longer knew who it was. It swam in a frenzy, bewildered, its tail growing shorter and the four little legs still too weak for its needs. It swam in circles, looking for something, perhaps air for its new lungs, perhaps a platform from which to take off toward the world. I realized that the walls of the small basin were too steep for the tadpoles to climb, as they evidently wanted to, and I put two or three wooden boards in the water on a slant.
It was the right idea, and several tadpoles took advantage of it; but was it still right to call them tadpoles? No longer; they were no longer larvae, they were frogs, brown and no bigger than a bean, but frogs, creatures like us, with two hands and two legs, who swam “frog style” with some difficulty but with the correct form. They no longer ate one another, and we now experienced a different feeling toward them, maternal and paternal: in some way they were our children, even though we had been more of a hindrance than a help to their transformation. I set one on the palm of my hand: it had a nose, a face, it narrowed its eyes as it watched me, then suddenly opened its mouth. Was it looking for air or did it want to say something? At other times it would start out determinedly along a finger, as if on a diving board, then suddenly take a foolish leap into space.
Raising tadpoles was not so easy after all. Only a few appreciated our rescue boards, and emerged onto dry land. The others we found drowned in the morning; now lacking the gills that had served them in their aquatic infancy, they were exhausted by too much swimming, just as a human swimmer would be, trapped within the walls of a sluice. Even the more intelligent ones, those who had grasped the use of the landing boards, did not have a long life.
A completely understandable instinct, the same one that drove us to the moon, drives the tadpoles to leave the expanse of water where the transformation took place. It doesn’t matter where they go—anyplace but that one. It’s not unlikely that there are other places in nature, marshy meadows or swamps, near a pool or a bend in a stream; and so some survive, migrating and colonizing new environments, but, even in the most favorable conditions, a great number of them are destined to die. This is why mother frogs exhaust themselves giving birth to an interminable succession of eggs: they “know” that infant mortality will be frighteningly high, and they provide for it as our great-grandparents did in the countryside.
Our surviving tadpoles scattered throughout the garden-courtyard, in search of water that was not there. We chased them in vain among the grass and stones; one of them, the boldest, which, with clumsy hops, was struggling to cross the granite path, was spotted by a robin, which made a single mouthful of it. That same instant, the white cat that was our playmate, and had been watching the scene, motionless, made a prodigious leap and swooped down on the bird, which had been distracted by its lucky catch. The cat did not quite kill it but carried it off to a corner to toy with its death throes, as cats do.
August 15, 1985
The Mirror Maker
Timoteo, his father, and all his ancestors, going back to the remotest times, had always made mirrors. A bread chest in their house still held copper mirrors green from oxidation, silver mirrors darkened by centuries of human exhalations, and others of crystal, framed in ivory or precious woods. When his father died, Timoteo felt released from the shackles of tradition; though he continued to fashion perfectly made mirrors, which he sold profitably throughout the region, he began again to ponder an old plan.
Ever since he was a boy, he had been secretly breaking the rules of the guild, behind the backs of his father and grandfather. By day, in the hours spent in the workshop, as a dutiful apprentice he made the usual boring mirrors: flat, transparent, colorless, the kind that, as they say, render a truthful (though virtual) image of the world and, in particular, of the human face. In the evening, when nobody was watching, he created different mirrors. What does a mirror do? “It reflects,” like the human mind. But normal mirrors obey a simple, inexorable physical law; they reflect like a mind that is rigid and obsessed, that claims to grasp the truth about the world. As if there were only one! Timoteo’s secret mirrors were more versatile.
There were some of tinted glass, streaked and milky: they reflected a world that was redder or greener than the real one, or multicolored, or with delicately blurred edges, so that objects and people seemed to cluster together like clouds. There were some multiple ones, made of thin sheets or cleverly angled fragments: these shattered the image, reducing it to a pretty but unintelligible mosaic. A contrivance that had cost Timoteo weeks of work inverted top and bottom and reversed right and left. A person looking at it for the first time experienced intense vertigo, but if he persisted for a few hours he became used to the upside-down world, and then felt nausea in a world that was suddenly right side up. Another mirror was composed of three panels, and a person who looked in it saw his face multiplied by three. Timoteo gave it to the parish priest so that at catechism time he could help the children understand the mystery of the Trinity.
There were mirrors that magnified things, as, it is foolishly said, ox eyes do, and others that shrank things or made them appear infinitely far away; in some you saw yourself elongated, in others short and fat, like a Buddha. As a gift for Agata, Timoteo made a wardrobe mirror from a slightly wavy sheet of glass, but got a result that he had not anticipated. If the subject looked at himself without moving, the image showed only a slight distortion; if instead he moved up and down, bending his knees a little or rising up on tiptoe, stomach and chest flowed impetuously upward or downward. Agata now saw herself transformed into a stork-woman, her shoulders, breast, and stomach compressed into a bundle that hovered on two long, skinny legs; immediately afterward, she was a monster with a spindly neck from which all the rest hung: a squashed, squat mass of hernias, like potter’s clay that sags under its own weight. The affair ended badly. Agata broke the mirror and the engagement, and Timoteo grieved, though not too much.
He had a more ambitious project in mind. In great secrecy he experimented with various types of glass and silver plating, subjected his mirrors to electric fields, irradiated them with lamps that he sent for from distant countries, until he thought he was close to his objective, which was to produce metaphysical mirrors. A Spemet, that is, a specchio metafisico, a metaphysical mirror, does not obey the laws of optics but reproduces your image as it is seen by the person facing you. The idea was an old one: Aesop had already thought of it and who knows how many others before and after him, but Timoteo was the first to realize it.
Timoteo’s Spemets were the size of a business card, flexible and adhesive: in fact, they were intended to be pasted to the forehead. Timoteo tried out the first model by sticking it to the wall, but he didn’t see anything special in it: just his usual image, that of a thirty-year-old whose hairline was already receding, with a penetrating, dreamy, and somewhat disheveled look. But, of course, a wall doesn’t see you; it doesn’t harbor images of you. He prepared about twenty samples, and it seemed only right to offer the first one to Agata, with whom he had maintained a stormy relationship, in order to be forgiven for the matter of the wavy mirror.
Agata accepted it coldly, listening to his explanations with an appearance of distraction. But when Timoteo suggested that she apply the Spemet to her forehead, she did not wait to be asked twice: she had understood all too well, thought Timoteo. In fact, the image of himself that he saw, as if on a tiny television screen, was not very flattering. He wasn’t going bald but was bald, his lips were half open in an inane smile that revealed his rotten teeth (ah, yes, he had been putting off the treatment recommended by the dentist for some
time now), his expression was not dreamy but moronic, and his eyes looked strange. Why strange? It didn’t take him long to figure it out: in a normal mirror the eyes are always looking at you; in this one, instead, they were looking sideways toward the left. He moved closer and shifted a bit: the eyes leaped to the right. Timoteo left Agata with conflicting emotions: the experiment had gone well, but if Agata truly saw him that way the breakup could only be final.
He offered the second Spemet to his mother, who did not ask for any explanations. He saw himself as a sixteen-year-old, blond, rosy, ethereal and angelic, his hair neatly combed and his tie knotted at the right height: like a memento of the dead, he thought to himself. Nothing to do with the school photos he had found a few years ago in a drawer, which showed a lively boy, though interchangeable with the majority of his fellow students.
The third Spemet was for Emma, no doubt about it. Timoteo had drifted from Agata to Emma with no sudden jolts. Emma was petite, languid, gentle, and shrewd. Under the covers, she taught Timoteo several tricks that he would never have thought of on his own. She was less intelligent than Agata, but did not possess the latter’s stony severity: Agata-agate, Timoteo had never noticed it before, names do mean something. Emma did not understand a thing about Timoteo’s work, but she often knocked at the door of his workshop, and would sit and watch him for hours, spellbound. On Emma’s smooth forehead, Timoteo saw a magnificent Timoteo. He was half length and bare-chested; he had the well-proportioned torso that it had always pained him not to have, a classically handsome face with thick locks graced by a laurel wreath, and a gaze that was at once serene, joyful, and hawk-like. At that moment, Timoteo realized that he loved Emma with an intense, sweet, and abiding love.