by Primo Levi
‘How old are you?’
Twenty-five,’ I replied.
‘What do you do?’
‘I’m a chemist’
‘Then you’re a fool,’ he said calmly. ‘A man who has no shoes is a fool.’
He was a great Greek. Few times in my life, before or after, have I felt such concrete wisdom weigh upon me. There was little to say in reply. The validity of the argument was manifest, plain: the two shapeless pieces of trash on my feet, and the two shining marvels on his. There was no justification. I was no longer a slave; but after my first steps on the path of liberty, here was I seated by the road, with my feet in my hands clumsy and useless like the broken-down locomotive we had just left. Was I really entitled to my liberty? The Greek seemed to doubt it
‘… But I had scarlet fever, a high temperature, I was in the sick bay; the shoe store was a long way off, it was forbidden to go near it, and anyway they said that it had been sacked by the Poles. And didn’t I have the right to believe that the Russians would have provided?’
‘Words,’ said the Greek. ‘Anyone can talk. I had a temperature of 104, and I didn’t know if it was day or night; but one thing I did know, that I needed shoes and other things; so I got up, and I went as far as the store to study the situation. There was a Russian with a sten-gun in front of the door, but I wanted the shoes, and so I walked to the back, I broke open a small window and I entered. So I got my shoes, and also the sack, and everything that is inside the sack, which will prove useful later on. That is foresight; yours is stupidity. It’s a failure to understand the reality of things.’
‘Now it’s you who are just talking,’ said I. ‘I may have made a mistake, but now the problem is how to reach Cracow before nightfall, with or without shoes’; and so saying I fumbled around with numbed fingers, and with bits of wire I found on the road, trying to tie the soles to the uppers, at least provisionally.
‘Hold it; that’ll be no use at all.’ He gave me two pieces of robust cloth that he had dragged out of his bundle, and showed me how to pack together shoes and feet, firmly enough at least to hobble along. Then we proceeded in silence.
The suburbs of Cracow were anonymous and squalid. The roads were wholly deserted: the shops were empty, all the doors and windows were barred or smashed. We reached the terminus of a tram line; I hesitated, because we had no money to pay the fare, but the Greek said: ‘Climb on, then we’ll see.’ The tram was empty; after a quarter of an hour the driver arrived, but not the conductor (from which we see that once more the Greek was right; as we shall see, he was to prove right in all the succeeding situations, except one); we left, and during the journey discovered with joy that one of the passengers who had climbed on in the meantime was a Frenchman. He explained to us that he was staying in an old convent, which our tram would soon pass; at the following stop, we should find a barracks requisitioned by the Russians and full of Italian soldiers. My heart rejoiced; I had found a home.
In reality, things did not all go so smoothly. At first, the Polish guard on duty at the barracks told us abruptly to go away. ‘Where?’ ‘What do I care? Away from here, anywhere.’ After much insistence and begging, he was finally induced to go and call an Italian sergeant, on whom the decision to admit other guests clearly depended. It was not easy, he explained to us; the barracks were already bursting, rations were limited; he conceded that I was an Italian, but I was not a soldier; as for my companion, he was Greek, and it was impossible to put him in with veterans of the Greek and Albanian campaigns; disorders and fights would inevitably result. I countered with my best eloquence, and with genuine tears in my eyes; I guaranteed that we would only stay one night (and I thought to myself: once inside…) and that the Greek spoke Italian well and in any case would open his mouth as little as possible. My arguments were weak, and I was aware of it, but the Greek knew how to work all the skives in the world, and while I was speaking he was rooting about in the sack hanging on my back. At a certain point he pushed me aside, and in silence placed under the nose of the Cerberus a dazzling tin of pork, embellished with a many-coloured label, and with futile instructions in six languages on the correct way to handle the contents. So we won a roof and a bed at Cracow.
It was already night. Contrary to what the sergeant had led us to believe, the most sumptuous abundance reigned inside the barracks; there were lighted stoves, candles and acetylene lamps, food and drink and straw to sleep on. The Italians were distributed ten or twelve to a dormitory, but we at Monowitz had been two per cubic yard. They were wearing good military clothing, thick jackets, many of them had wrist watches, all of them had hair shining with brilliantine; they were noisy, cheerful and obliging and overwhelmed us with kindness. As for the Greek, they virtually carried him in triumph. A Greek! A Greek has come! The news rang from dormitory to dormitory, and in a short time a festive crowd gathered around my surly partner. They spoke Greek, some of them with ease, these veterans of the most compassionate military occupation that history records: they talked of places and events with colourful sympathy, in a chivalrous tacit recognition of the desperate valour of the invaded country. But there was something more, which opened the way for them; mine was no ordinary Greek, he was visibly a master, an authority, a super-Greek. In a few moments of conversation, he had accomplished a miracle, he had created an atmosphere.
He possessed the right equipment; he could speak Italian, and (what matters more, and what is missing in many Italians themselves) he knew of what to speak in Italian. He amazed me; he showed himself an expert about girls and spaghetti, Juventus* and lyrical music, the war and blennorrhoea, wine and the black market, motor-bikes and spivs. Mordo Nahum, so laconic with me, in a brief time became the pivot of the evening. I realized that his eloquence, his successful attempt at captatio benevolentiae, did not derive solely from opportunist considerations. He too had fought in the Greek campaign, with the rank of sergeant; on the other side of the front, naturally, but this detail at the moment seemed trifling to everybody. He had been at Tepeleni, many Italians had also been there; like them he had suffered cold, hunger, mud and bombardments, and in the end, like them, he had been captured by the Germans. He was a colleague, a fellow-soldier.
He told curious stories of the war; of how, after the Germans had broken through the front, he had found himself with six of his soldiers ransacking the first floor of a bombed and abandoned villa, searching for provisions; he had heard suspicious noises on the floor below, had cautiously climbed down the stairs with his sten-gun at the ready, and had met an Italian sergeant, who with six soldiers was doing exactly the same thing on the ground floor. The Italian in turn had levelled his gun, but the Greek had pointed out that in those conditions a gun fight would have been particularly stupid, that they all found themselves, Greeks and Italians, in the same boat, and that he did not see why they should not make a small separate local peace and continue their researches in their respective occupied territories – to which proposal the Italian had rapidly agreed.
For me too he was a revelation. I knew that he was nothing but a rogue, a merchant, expert in deceit and lacking in scruples, selfish and cold; yet I felt blossom out in him, encouraged by the sympathy of the audience, a warmth, an unsuspected humanity, singular but genuine, rich with promise.
Late at night, heaven knows how, a flask of wine suddenly appeared. It was the coup de grâce: for me everything sank celestially into a warm purple fog, and I barely managed to drag myself on all fours to the straw bed that the Italians, with maternal care, had prepared in a corner for the Greek and myself.
Dawn had barely risen when the Greek woke me. Alas! Where had last night’s jovial guest disappeared to? The Greek who stood in front of me was hard, secretive, taciturn. ‘Get up,’ he said in a tone of voice that admitted no reply, ‘put your shoes on, get the sack and let’s go.’
‘Go where?’
‘To work, to the market. Do you think it’s a nice thing to be supported?’
I felt wholly opposed to thi
s argument It seemed to me, besides being convenient, extremely natural and also pleasant that someone should keep me; I had found the explosion of national solidarity, or rather of spontaneous humanity, the evening before both enjoyable and exhilarating. Even more, full as I was of self-pity, it seemed to me just, good, that the world should at last pity me. Moreover, I had no shoes, I was ill, I was cold, I was tired; and finally, in the name of all the gods, what the hell could I do at the market?
I disclosed all these considerations, obvious to me. But, ‘c’est pas des raisons d’homme,’ he replied sharply; I was forced to realize that I had infringed an important moral principle of his, that he was seriously scandalized, that on this point he was not prepared for compromise or discussion. Moral codes, all of them, are rigid by definition; they do not admit blurrings, compromises, or reciprocal contaminations. They are to be accepted or rejected en bloc. This is one of the principal reasons why man is gregarious and searches more or less consciously for the company not of his generic neighbour, but only of someone who shares his profound beliefs (or lack of them). I was obliged to recognize, with disappointment and amazement, that Mordo Nahum was such a man, a man of deep-rooted beliefs, and, what is more, beliefs far removed from mine. Now everyone knows how awkward it is to do business, in fact to live together, with an ideological opponent.
The basis of his ethic was work, which to him was a sacred duty, but which he understood in a very wide sense. To him, work included everything, but with the condition that it should bring profit without limiting liberty. The concept of work thus included, as well as certain permissible activities, smuggling, theft and fraud (not robbery; he was not a violent man). On the other hand he considered reprehensible, because humiliating, all activities which did not involve initiative or risk, or which presupposed a discipline and a hierarchy; any relationship of employment, any services, even if they were well paid, he lumped together as ‘servile work’. But it was not servile work to plough your own field, or to sell false antiques to tourists at a port.
As for the more elevated activities of the spirit, as for creative work, I soon understood that the Greek was divided. These were delicate judgements, to be made on the merits of each case; it was permissible for example to pursue success for its own sake, even by selling false paintings or literary trash, or, more generally, by harming one’s neighbour; it was reprehensible obstinately to pursue an unprofitable ideal; it was sinful to withdraw from the world in contemplation; the path of the man who dedicated himself to meditation and the acquisition of wisdom, on the other hand, was permissible, in fact commendable – so long as he did not believe that he had the right to receive his bread free from mankind, for wisdom was also merchandise, which could and should be exchanged.
Since Mordo Nahum was no fool, he clearly realized that these principles might not be shared by individuals of a different origin and formation, and in particular by me; he was however firmly persuaded of them, and it was his ambition to put them into practice, to demonstrate their general validity.
In conclusion, my proposal to wait quietly for food from the Russians could only appear detestable to him; because it was ‘unearned bread’; because it implied a relationship of subjection; and because every form of order, of structure, was suspect, whether it brought a loaf of bread a day, or a monthly pay-packet.
So I followed the Greek to the market, not really because I was convinced by his arguments, but mainly through inertia and curiosity. The evening before, when I was already navigating in a sea of vinous vapours, he had diligently enquired about the location, customs, tariffs, supply and demand of the free market of Cracow, and his duty now called him.
We left, he with the sack (which I carried), I in my disintegrating shoes, which turned each step into a problem. The market of Cracow had blossomed out spontaneously, as soon as the front had passed by, and in a few days it had invaded an entire suburb. Everything was bought and sold there, and the whole city centred on it; townsfolk were selling furniture, books, paintings, clothes and silver; peasant women, padded out like mattresses, offered meat, poultry, eggs, cheese; boys and girls, with noses and cheeks reddened by the icy wind, searched for tobacco-addicts to buy their ration, which the Soviet military administration distributed with extravagant munificence (ten ounces a month to everybody, including babies).
With joy I met a group of compatriots: quick-witted folk, three soldiers and a girl, jovial and spendthrift, who carried on an excellent business in those days of cold and hunger with a sort of hot fritter, cooked with unusual ingredients in a doorway nearby.
After a preliminary survey, the Greek decided on shirts. Were we partners? Well then, he would contribute the capital and business experience; I, my (feeble) knowledge of German and the physical work. ‘Off you go,’ he told me, ‘wander around all the stalls where they are selling shirts, ask how much they cost, reply that it’s too much, then report back to me. Don’t let yourself be noticed too much.’ Reluctantly I prepared to carry out this market research; I still harboured a fossil hunger, cold and inertia, and at the same time curiosity, lightheartedness and a new and sapid willingness to converse, to open up human contacts, to parade and squander my immeasurable liberty. But the Greek, behind the back of my would-be vendors, followed me with severe eye; hurry up, damn you, time is money, and business is business.
I came back from my investigation with some comparative prices, which the Greek noted mentally; and with a fair number of disordered philological oddments: that one says something like koshoola for a shirt; that Polish numbers resemble Greek ones; that for ‘how much?’ and ‘what time is it?’ one says something like eela kostooya and ktoora gojeena; a termination of the genitive in –ago that clarified the sense of some Polish oaths I had often heard in the Lager; and other scraps of information which filled me with a foolish and puerile joy.
The Greek was calculating to himself. A shirt could be sold for fifty to one hundred zloty; an egg cost five or six zloty; for ten zloty, according to the Italian fritter-mongers, one could eat soup and another course at the soup-kitchen behind the cathedral. The Greek decided to sell only one of the three shirts he owned, and to eat at the soup-kitchen; the surplus would be invested in eggs. Then we would see what to do.
So he gave me the shirt, and ordered me to hold it up and shout: ‘A shirt, gentlemen, a shirt.’ For ‘shirt’, I was already documented; as for ‘gentlemen’, I believed that the correct form was Panovye, which I had heard used a few minutes before by my rivals and which I interpreted as a plural vocative of Pan, gentleman. As for this last term, I had no doubts: it is to be found in an important dialogue in The Brothers Karamazov. It really must have been the correct word, as various clients addressed me in Polish, asking me incomprehensible questions about the shirt. I was in difficulties; the Greek intervened authoritatively, pushed me aside and personally conducted the negotiations, which were long and laborious, but which ended happily. At the purchaser’s request, the consignment of the article took place, not in the public square, but in a doorway.
Seventy zloty, equivalent to seven meals or a dozen eggs. I don’t know about the Greek; as for myself, I had not possessed so large a sum of foodstuffs all at one time for fourteen months. But did I really possess them? It seemed highly doubtful; the Greek had pocketed the sum silently, and his whole attitude led one to understand that he intended to keep the administration of the profits to himself.
We wandered round the egg-stalls, where we learnt that hard-boiled and raw eggs sold at the same price. We bought six for dinner: the Greek proceeded to their purchase with extreme care, choosing the largest after detailed comparisons and much perplexity and changes of mind, wholly insensitive to the disapproving looks of the seller.
The soup-kitchen was behind the cathedral; it remained only to determine which, of the many and beautiful churches of Cracow, was the cathedral. Whom could one ask, and how? A priest walked by; I would ask the priest. Now the priest, young and of benign appearance, understood
neither French nor German; as a result, for the first and only time in my post-scholastic career, I reaped the fruits of years of classical studies, carrying on the most extravagant and chaotic of conversations in Latin. After the initial request for information (Pater optime, ubi est menas pauperorum?), we began to speak confusedly of everything, of my being a Jew, of the Lager (castra? Better: Lager, only too likely to be understood by everybody), of Italy, of the danger of speaking German in public (which I was to understand soon after, by direct experience), and of innumerable other things, to which the unusual dress of the language gave a curious air of the remotest past.
I had completely forgotten the hunger and the cold, so true is it that the need for human contact is to be numbered among the primordial needs. I had also forgotten the Greek; but he had not forgotten me, and he emerged brutally after a few minutes, interrupting the conversation pitilessly. It was not that he was incapable of human contact, or that he did not understand its value (I had seen that the evening before in the barracks); but it was something for outside office hours, for holidays, something supplementary, not to be mixed up with the serious and strenuous business that was daily work. To my feeble protests, he replied only with a morose look. We walked on; the Greek was silent for a long time, then, as a conclusive judgement on my collaboration, he said to me in a thoughtful tone: ‘Je n’ai pas encore compris si tu es idiot ou fainéant.’
By following the priest’s valuable directions, we reached the soup-kitchen. It was a somewhat depressing place, but warm and full of voluptuous smells. The Greek ordered two soups and only one ration of beans with lard; this was the punishment for my indecorous and fatuous behaviour in the morning. He was angry; but after he had gulped down his soup he softened perceptibly, so much so as to leave me a good quarter of his beans. Outside it had begun to snow, and a vicious wind was blowing. Whether from pity at the sight of my striped clothes, or from indifference to the regulations, the kitchen staff left us in peace for a good part of the afternoon to meditate and make plans for the future. The Greek’s mood seemed to have changed; perhaps his fever had returned, or perhaps, after the bargains of the morning, he felt that he was on holiday. In fact he was in a benevolently pedagogic mood; as the hours slowly passed, the tone of his discourse grew gradually warmer, and on a parallel plane the tie that united us changed: from owner–slave at midday, to employer–employee at one o’clock, from master–disciple at two o’clock, to elder brother–younger brother at three o’clock. The discourse came back to my shoes, which neither of us, for different reasons, could forget. He explained to me that to be without shoes is a very serious fault. When war is waging, one has to think of two things before all others: in the first place of one’s shoes, in the second place of food to eat; and not vice versa, as the common herd believes, because he who has shoes can search for food, but the inverse is not true. ‘But the war is over,’ I objected: and I thought it was over, as did many in those months of truce, in a much more universal sense than one dares to think today. ‘There is always war,’ replied Mordo Nahum memorably.