by Primo Levi
He explained his intentions to me: he was a friend of mine, and was not asking me for anything; if I wanted, I could come to the market with him, perhaps even help him and learn the business, but what he really needed was a professional partner, with a small initial capital and some experience. In fact, he had already found such a man, a certain Giacomantonio, a villainous-looking old acquaintance of his from San Lorenzo prison. The terms of the partnership were extremely simple: Giacomantonio would buy, he would sell and they would divide the profits equally.
Buy what? Everything, he told me: anything that came along. Although Cesare was little more than twenty years old, he boasted of a remarkable trading experience, comparable to that of the Greek. But, once the superficial analogies were over, I soon realized that an abyss lay between him and the Greek. Cesare was full of human warmth, always, at every moment of his life, not just outside office hours like Mordo Nahum. For Cesare, ‘work’ was sometimes an unpleasant necessity, at other times an amusing opportunity to meet people, and not a frigid obsession, or a luciferesque affirmation of himself. One of them was free, the other was a slave to himself; one was miserly and reasonable, the other prodigal and fantastic. The Greek was a lone wolf, in an eternal war against all, old before his time, closed in the circle of his own joyless pride; Cesare was a child of the sun, everybody’s friend; he knew no hatred or contempt, was as changeable as the sky, joyous, cunning and ingenuous, bold and cautious, very ignorant, very innocent and very civilized.
I did not want to enter the agreement with Giacomantonio, but I willingly accepted Cesare’s invitation to accompany him sometimes to the market, as an apprentice, an interpreter and a porter. I accepted it not only out of friendship, and a desire to escape the boredom of the camp, but above all because to watch Cesare’s enterprises, even the most modest and trivial ones, constituted a unique experience, a live and fortifying spectacle, which reconciled me to the world and once more lit in me that joy of living which Auschwitz had extinguished.
A virtue like Cesare’s is good in itself, in an absolute sense; it is enough to confer nobility upon a man, to redeem his many other defects, to save his soul. But at the same time, and on a more practical level, it is of priceless value for someone intending to practise his trade on a public square: in fact, nobody was insensitive to Cesare’s charm, neither the Russians of the Command, nor our motley comrades of the camp, nor the citizens of Katowice who frequented the market. Now it is equally clear from the hard laws of commerce that what is of advantage to the seller is of disadvantage to the purchaser and vice versa.
April was drawing to its close, and the sun was already warm and generous, when Cesare came to wait for me at the end of the surgery. His murderous-looking companion had carried out a series of brilliant coups: for a total of fifty zloty he had bought a fountain pen which did not write, a chronometer and a woollen shirt in quite good condition. Then this man Giacomantonio, with the expert nose of a receiver, had had the excellent idea of mounting guard at Katowice station in order to wait for the Russian trains returning from Germany: these soldiers, now demobilized and on their way home, were the easiest dupes imaginable. They were in carefree holiday spirits, had plenty of booty, did not know the local prices and needed ready money.
Apart from any utilitarian aim, it was in any case worthwhile passing a few hours at the station, merely to watch the extraordinary spectacle of the Red Army returning home: a spectacle as dramatic and solemn as a biblical migration, and at the same time as rambling and colourful as the passage of a circus. Endless strings of cattle-trucks, used as military transports, stopped at Katowice: they were fitted out to travel for months, perhaps as far as the Pacific Ocean, and carried, all mixed together, thousands of soldiers and civilians, men and women, former Russian prisoners of the Germans, and fresh German prisoners of the Russians, as well as goods, furniture, cattle, dismantled industrial plant, food, war materials, scrap metal. They were travelling villages: some trucks contained what seemed to be a family nucleus, one or two double beds, a wardrobe with mirrors, a stove, a radio, chairs and tables. Electric wires ran haphazardly between one truck and another, originating in the first truck with a generator; they served for the lighting system and at the same time for hanging out the washing to dry (and to grow black with soot). When the sliding doors were opened in the morning half-dressed men and women appeared with large sleepy faces, who looked out puzzled from the background of these domestic settings, with little idea of which part of the world they found themselves in; then they got down to wash in the freezing water of the hydrants, and offered round tobacco and sheets of Pravda to roll cigarettes.
So I left for the market with Cesare, who intended to sell the three objects described above, perhaps to the Russians themselves. By now the market had lost its primitive character of a fair of human miseries. Rationing had been abolished, or rather had fallen into disuse; the peasants’ carts arrived from the rich surrounding countryside with tons of lard and cheese, eggs, chickens, sugar, fruit, butter: a garden of temptations, a cruel challenge to our obsessive hunger, and to our lack of means, an imperious incitement to procure money.
Cesare sold the pen at the first attempt, for twenty zloty, without bargaining. He had absolutely no need of an interpreter: he spoke only Italian, or to be precise Roman dialect, or to be still more precise Roman ghetto slang, studded with corrupt Hebrew words. Clearly he had no choice, because he did not know any other language; but, unknown to him, this ignorance played heavily in his favour. Cesare was playing on his home ground, to use sporting terms; on the other hand, his clients, intent on interpreting his incomprehensible speech and novel gestures, were distracted from the necessary concentration; if they made counter-offers, Cesare did not understand them, or stubbornly pretended not to understand them.
The art of the charlatan is not so widespread as I thought; the Polish public seemed to be unaware of it, and was fascinated. Moreover, Cesare was also a first-class mimic; he waved the shirt in the sun, holding it tightly by the collar (under the collar there was a hole, but Cesare held the shirt in his hand at the very place with the hole), and he declaimed its praises with torrential eloquence, with new and senseless additional digressions, suddenly addressing one or another member of the public with obscene nicknames which he invented on the spot. He stopped abruptly (he knew by instinct the oratorical value of pauses), kissed the shirt with affection and then began again, with a resolute yet desolate voice, as if it tore his heart to part with it, and he was only doing it for love of his neighbour: ‘You, Big Belly,’ he said, ‘how much will you give me for this little koshoola of mine?’
The Big Belly was dumbfounded. He looked at ‘the little koshoola’ with desire, and glanced around out of the corner of his eye, half hoping and half fearing that someone else would make the first offer. Then he came forward hesitantly, held out an uncertain hand and mumbled something like ‘pinjeeshi’. Cesare clutched the shirt to his chest as if he had seen a snake. ‘What did he say?’ he asked me, as if he suspected that he had been mortally insulted; but it was a rhetorical question, for he recognized (or guessed) Polish numbers much more quickly than I.
‘You’re mad,’ he then stated categorically, pointing his index finger at his temple and turning it like a drill. The public rumbled with laughter, visibly siding with this preposterous foreigner who had come from the ends of the earth to perform wonders in their market squares. The Big Belly stood agape, rocking from foot to foot like a bear. ‘Du fereek,’ continued Cesare pitilessly (he meant to say ‘verrückt’); then, to clarify, he added: ‘du meschuge.’ A storm of savage laughter broke out; everyone had understood this. ‘Meschuge’ is a Hebrew word which has survived in Yiddish, and as such is universally understood in all Central and Eastern Europe: it means ‘mad’, but it carries the additional idea of an empty, melancholic, doltish and lunar folly.
The Big Belly scratched his head and hitched up his trousers, full of embarrassment. ‘Sto,’ he then said, trying to mak
e peace: ‘Sto zlotych,’ a hundred zloty.
The offer was interesting. Cesare, somewhat appeased, turned to Big Belly as man to man, with a persuasive voice, as if to convince him of some involuntary yet clumsy transgression of his. He spoke to him at length, opening up his heart, with warmth and confidence, explaining to him: ‘You see? You understand? Don’t you agree?’
‘Sto zlotych,’ repeated the other obstinately.
‘He is a testa dura, as stubborn as a mule,’ Cesare said to me. Then, as if overcome by unexpected tiredness, and in a final attempt to reach agreement, he put a hand on his shoulder and said to him maternally: ‘Listen. Listen, pal. You haven’t understood me. Let’s try it this way. You give me this much’ (and with his fingers he traced 150 on his belly), ‘you give me Sto Pinjeeshi, and it’s all yours. Agreed?’
The Big Belly mumbled and shook his head negatively, staring at the ground; but Cesare’s clinical eye had caught the sign of capitulation: an imperceptible movement of his hand towards the back pocket of his trousers.
‘Come on. Shake out those shekels!’ Cesare rushed on, striking while the iron was hot. The money was finally produced and the shirt changed hands. But immediately Cesare tore me from my ecstatic admiration.
‘Come on, lad. Let’s hop it, before he puts his hand through the hole.’ So, fearful lest the client discover the hole too quickly, we hopped it, forgoing our attempt to get rid of the unsaleable chronometer. We walked at a slow dignified pace as far as the nearest corner, then we cut and ran as fast as our legs would carry us, and returned to the camp by devious routes.
6
Victory Day
Life in the camp of Bogucice, the surgery and the market, rudimentary human relations with Russians, Poles and others, rapid oscillations between hunger and a full belly, between hopes of return and disappointment, expectancy and uncertainty, barrack life and improvisations, almost a spurious form of military life in a temporary and foreign environment, aroused in me discomfort, nostalgia and, above all, boredom. On the other hand it agreed with Cesare’s habits, character and aspirations.
At Bogucice, Cesare flourished visibly, day by day, like a tree nourished by the spring sap. At the market he now had a fixed place and an affectionate clientele, created from nothing by himself by virtue of nicknames: The Bearded Lady, Skin and Bones, Booby, as many as three Buttocks, The Street Walker, Frankenstein, a Junoesque girl whom he called the Old Bailey and many others. In the camp, he enjoyed unquestioned prestige: he had quarrelled with Giacomantonio, but many others entrusted him with goods to sell, without a contract, purely on trust, so that he was never short of money.
One evening he disappeared: he did not come back to camp for dinner, or to the dormitory to sleep. Naturally, we did not create complications; nevertheless, when his absence had lasted for three days and nights, even I, who by nature am not very apprehensive, and was even less so as regards Cesare, began to feel slightly uneasy.
Cesare returned at dawn of the fourth day, as dishevelled and bristly as a cat returning from a roof-top jamboree. He had bags under his eyes, but they still shone with a proud light. ‘Leave me alone,’ he said as soon as he entered, although no one had asked him anything, and most of us were still snoring. He threw himself on his bunk with an air of extreme exhaustion; but after a few minutes, unable to contain the great secret pent up inside him, he came over to me just as I was waking up. In a hoarse voice, with a grim expression on his face as if he had been at a witches’ sabbath for the past three nights, he told me: ‘I’ve made it at last. I’ve got a panienca.’
The news did not sound particularly thrilling to me. He was certainly not the first to manage it; other Italians, particularly soldiers, had got themselves a girl in the city; for ‘panienca’ is the exact equivalent of ‘segnorina’, with an equally distorted sound.*
It was not a very difficult undertaking, since men were scarce in Poland; in fact, many Italians had ‘established’ themselves, impelled not merely by the national amatory myth, but also because they felt a deeper and more serious need, a nostalgia for a home and for affection. As a result, the dead or distant husband had been replaced not only in the woman’s heart and bed, but in some cases in all his duties: Italians could be seen going to work in the coalfields together with Poles in order to carry their wages ‘home’, or serving behind the counter in a store, while strange families were to be seen on Sundays, walking decorously along the boulevards, the Italian arm in arm with a Polish girl, holding an excessively blond child by the hand.
But, Cesare explained to me, his case was different (all cases are always different, I thought, yawning). His panienca was beautiful, unmarried, elegant, clean, in love with him and therefore inexpensive. Besides this, she was extremely experienced; her only defect was that she spoke Polish. So if I were his friend, I had to help him.
I was hardly in a position to help him very much, I wearily explained to him. In the first place, I did not know more than thirty words of Polish; in the second place, I was wholly lacking in the sentimental terminology he required; in the third place, I did not feel in the right mood to go with him. But Cesare refused to give up: perhaps the girl understood German. He had in mind a very clear plan; so would I kindly stop being obstructive, and tell him the German for this, that and the other.
Cesare overestimated my linguistic knowledge. The things he wanted to learn from me are not taught in any German language course, nor had I had the slightest occasion to learn them in Auschwitz; moreover, they were such subtle and idiomatic questions that I suspect that they do not exist in any language other than Italian and French.
I explained my doubts to him, but Cesare looked offended. He put on his shoes and left, mumbling curses at me. I was being subversive, that was clear; it was sheer envy. He came back in the afternoon, and threw in front of me a nice pocket Italian–German dictionary which he had bought for twenty zloty at the market. ‘There is everything here,’ he told me with an air that admitted of no further discussion or quibbling. Alas, there was not everything; in fact the essential things were missing, those things which a mysterious convention expurgates from the universe of printed paper; it was money thrown away. Cesare went away again, disillusioned with culture, with friendship, indeed with printed paper itself.
From then on he paid only rare visits to the camp; his panienca provided generously for all his needs. At the end of April he disappeared for a whole week. Now, that was not the end of just any April; it was the memorable one of 1945.
Unfortunately we were not able to understand the Polish newspapers; but the size of the headlines which increased day by day, the names we could read on them, the very air we breathed in the streets and at the Kommandantur, made us understand that victory was near. We read ‘Vienna’, ‘Koblenz’, ‘Rhine’; then ‘Bologna’; then, with emotion and joy, ‘Turin’ and ‘Milan’. Finally, ‘Mussolini’, in enormous letters, followed by an awesome and indecipherable past participle; and at last, in red ink, covering half a page, the final, cryptic and exhilarating announcement; ‘BERLIN UPADL!’
On 30 April Leonardo, I and a few other passholders were summoned by Captain Egorov; with a curiously reserved and embarrassed air, which was untypical of him, he told us through the interpreter that we should have to hand back the propusk; the following day we should receive another one. Naturally we did not believe him, but we still had to give back the card. The measure seemed to us absurd and slightly annoying, and increased our anxiety and expectancy; but the next day we understood the reason.
For the next day was 1 May; it was followed on the 3rd by some important Polish holiday; on the 8th the war ended. The news, although expected, exploded like a hurricane; for eight days the camp, the Kommandantur, Bogucice, Katowice and the whole of Poland and the entire Red Army burst out in a fit of delirious enthusiasm. The Soviet Union is a gigantic country, and harbours within its heart gigantic vigour, a Homeric capacity for joy and abandon, a primordial vitality, an uncontaminated pagan appet
ite for carousals, carnivals, massive revelry.
In a few hours the atmosphere turned tropical. There were Russians everywhere, like ants coming out of an anthill; they embraced each other as if they were all old friends, and sang and shouted; although generally unsteady on their legs, they danced with each other, and overwhelmed anyone they happened to meet with embraces. They fired shots in the air, and sometimes not in the air; a young baby-faced soldier was brought to us in the surgery, a parachutist, with a bullet shot passing from his abdomen through his back. Miraculously the shot had not harmed any vital organs; the boy-soldier stayed in bed for three days and peacefully submitted to medical care, looking at us with eyes as virgin as the sea; then one evening, as a festive band of his companions passed by in the street, he jumped out of his bed fully dressed, wearing his uniform and boots, and like the good parachutist he was, simply threw himself into the road from the first-floor window before the eyes of the other patients.
The already tenuous traces of military discipline vanished. On the evening of 1 May the sentry snored drunken and sprawling on the ground in front of the camp gate, with his sten-gun on his shoulder; then he was seen no more. It was useless to go to the Kommandantur for anything urgent; the person responsible was not there, or was in bed sleeping off his drunkenness, or was engaged in mysterious and feverish preparations in the school gymnasium. It was extremely fortunate that the kitchen and surgery were in Italian hands.
What these preparations were for we soon found out. They were organizing a great party for Victory Day; a theatrical performance, with choruses, dancing and recitation, offered by the Russians to us, the guests of the camp. To us Italians; because in the meantime, as the other nationalities had been moved off according to some complicated plan, we had remained as a large majority at Bogucice, in fact, almost alone with a few French and Greeks.