by Primo Levi
Cesare came back to us on one of these tumultuous days. He was in an even worse condition than before; covered in mud from head to foot, in rags, haggard and suffering from a monstrously stiff neck. He had a bottle of Vodka in his hand brand new and full, and his first concern was to search around until he found another empty bottle; then, scowling and funereal, he created an ingenious funnel with a piece of cardboard, decanted the vodka, broke the bottle into small pieces, collected the fragments in a sheet of paper and with an air of secrecy went to bury them in a hole at the back of the camp.
He had been struck by misfortune. One evening, returning from the market to the girl’s house, he had found a Russian there; he had seen his military greatcoat in the hall with its belt and holster, and a bottle. He had taken the bottle, as a partial indemnity, and had wisely gone away; but the Russian had apparently come after him, perhaps because of the bottle, or perhaps through retrospective jealousy.
Here his account became more obscure and less plausible. He had sought in vain to escape and had soon convinced himself that the whole Red Army was on his tracks. He had ended up at a funfair, but even there the hunt had continued, throughout the night. He had spent the last few hours lurking under the floor of the dance hall, while all Poland danced on his head; but he had not abandoned the bottle, because it represented all that was left to him of a week of love. He had destroyed the original container as a precaution, and insisted that the contents be consumed immediately by his closest friends. It was a melancholic and taciturn drinking bout.
The 8 May came: a day of exultation for the Russians, of diffident vigil for the Poles, of joy tinged with deep nostalgia for us. From that day, in fact, our homes were no longer forbidden us, no war front now separated us from them, no concrete obstacle, only red tape; we felt that our repatriation was now our due, and every hour spent in exile weighed on us like lead; but the total lack of news from Italy weighed on us even more. Nevertheless, we all went to the Russians’ show, and we did well.
The theatre had been improvised in the school gymnasium: in fact, everything had been improvised, actors, seats, choir, programme, lights, curtain. The tails worn by the compere, Captain Egorov in person, were strikingly improvised.
Egorov appeared on the stage blind drunk, fitted up with an enormous pair of trousers which reached to his armpits, while his tails swept the floor. He was overcome by a desperate alcoholic despondency, and presented the various comic or patriotic numbers in the programme in a sepulchral voice, amid resounding sobs and fits of tears. His equilibrium was uncertain; at crucial moments he grabbed the microphone, and then the audience fell suddenly silent as when an acrobat leaps into space from his trapeze.
Everybody appeared on the stage: the whole Kommandantur. Marya directed the choir, which was excellent, as are all Russian choirs, and which sang Moskva moya (‘My Moscow’) with wonderful impetus and harmony and manifest good faith. Galina performed by herself, dressed in a Circassian costume and boots, in a giddy dance in which she revealed fantastic and unsuspected athletic talents; she was overwhelmed by applause, and thanked the audience with emotion, dropping innumerable eighteenth-century curtsies, her face as red as a tomato and her eyes glittering with tears. Dr Danchenko and the Mongol with moustaches were as good: although full of vodka, they performed as a pair one of those demoniac Russian dances in which one jumps in the air, crouches down, kicks out and pirouettes on one’s heels like a spinning top.
There followed a remarkable imitation of Charlie Chaplin, personified by one of the robust girls from the Kommandantur, with an exuberant bust and bottom, but punctiliously faithful to her prototype as regards bowler hat, moustache, shoes and cane. And finally, announced by Egorov in a tearful voice, and greeted by all the Russians with a savage shout of approval, there appeared on the stage Vanka Vstanka.
Who Vanka Vstanka is, I cannot really say: perhaps a character from a popular Russian mime. In this instance, he was a timid, dim-witted, love-lorn little shepherd, who wanted to declare his passion for his mistress but did not dare. His mistress was the huge Vassilissa, the Valkyrie responsible for the canteen, as dark as a raven, and muscular, capable of flooring at a swipe an unruly diner or an unfortunate wooer (more than one Italian had tried); but who would have recognized her on the stage? Here her rôle had transformed her; the guileless Vanka Vstanka (off stage one of the lieutenants), his face coated with white and pink powder, courted her from afar, in an Arcadian manner, through twenty melodious strophes unfortunately incomprehensible to us, stretching supplicating and hesitant arms towards his beloved; she repulsed him with smiling but resolute grace, warbling equally sweet and teasing replies. But slowly the distance diminished, while the noise of the applause increased in proportion; after much skirmishing, the two shepherds exchanged chaste kisses on the cheek, and ended by rubbing their backs against each other vigorously and sensuously to the irrepressible enthusiasm of the audience.
We left the theatre slightly dazed, but almost moved. The performance had satisfied our deepest feelings; it had been improvised in a few days, and this was noticeable; it was a home-made performance, unpretentious, puritanical, often childish. Yet it presupposed something not improvised, but deep-rooted and robust; a youthful intense native capacity for joy and self-expression, a loving and friendly familiarity with the stage and with the audience a long way removed from empty exhibitionism or intellectual abstractions, from conventionality or tired imitations. Consequently, within its limits, it had been a warm, alive performance, not vulgar, not commonplace, but generously free and self-assertive.
The following day everything had returned to normal and, except for slight shadows under their eyes, the Russians had resumed their habitual appearance. I met Marya at the surgery, and told her that I had greatly enjoyed myself, and that all the Italians had much admired her and her colleagues’ theatrical qualities; it was the simple truth. Marya was, normally and by nature, a not very methodical but extremely practical woman, solidly rooted in the tangible immediacies of her everyday experience, friendly to men of flesh and hostile to the haze of theories. But how many human minds are capable of resisting the slow, fierce, incessant, imperceptible driving force of indoctrination?
She replied with didactic seriousness. She thanked me formally for the praise, and assured me that she would communicate it to the whole Command; then she informed me with great gravity that dancing and singing, as well as recitation, form part of the scholastic curriculum in the Soviet Union; that it is the good citizen’s duty to perfect his abilities or natural talents; that the theatre is one of the most precious instruments of collective education; and other pedagogic platitudes, which sounded absurd and vaguely irritating to my ear, still full of the great gust of vitality and comic force of the previous evening.
On the other hand, Marya herself (‘old and mad’, according to the eighteen-year-old Galina’s description) seemed to possess a second personality, quite distinct from her official one; for she had been seen the evening before, after the theatre, drinking like a fish, and dancing like a Bacchante until late at night, exhausting innumerable partners, like some possessed cavalier riding horse after horse into the ground.
Victory and peace were also celebrated in a different manner which, indirectly, almost cost me very dearly. In the middle of May a football match took place between the Katowice team and a team of Italians.
It was in fact a return game; a first match had been played without particular solemnity two or three weeks before, and had been won comfortably by the Italians against an anonymous scratch team of Polish miners from the suburbs.
But for the return match the Poles took the field with a first-class team; word got about that some players, including the goalkeeper, had been brought for the occasion from no less a place than Warsaw, while the Italians, alas, were in no condition to do likewise.
The goalkeeper was a nightmare. He was a lamp-post of a man, blond, with an emaciated face, a concave chest and slouching movements like an
Apache. He had none of the leap, the emphatic crouch and the nervous twitching of the professional; he stood in the goal with insolent condescension, leaning against one of the posts as if he was only watching the game, with an outraged but also outrageous air. Yet the few times the ball was kicked at the goal by the Italians, he was always in its path, as if by chance, without ever making an abrupt movement; he would stretch out one – only one – long arm, which seemed to emerge from his body like a snail’s horn and to possess the same invertebrate and adhesive quality. The ball stuck there solidly, drained of all its momentum; it slid down his chest, then down his body and leg, to the ground. He never used the other hand; during the whole match he kept it ostentatiously in his pocket.
The game was played on a ground in the suburbs at some distance from Bogucice and the Russians had given passes for the occasion to the entire camp. The match was fiercely disputed, not only between the rival teams, but also between both of these and the referee; for the referee, who was the guest of honour, the occupant of the VIPs’ box, the director of the match and the linesman all at once, was the NKVD captain, the unsubstantial inspector of the kitchens. Now, with his fracture perfectly healed, he seemed to follow the game with intense interest, but not of a sporting kind; with an interest of a mysterious nature, perhaps aesthetic, perhaps metaphysical. His behaviour was irritating, in fact debilitating, if judged by the criteria of the many experts among the spectators; on the other hand, it was exhilarating, and worthy of a high-class clown.
He interrupted the game continually, arbitrarily, with piercing blasts of his whistle and with a sadistic preference for the moments when the game was being fought at the goal’s mouth; if the players did not listen to him (and they soon stopped listening to him, because the interruptions were so frequent), he leapt over the wall of his box with his long booted legs, threw himself into the mêlée whistling like a train, and would not let up until he had gained possession of the ball. Then sometimes, he would take it in his hand, turning it over and over with a suspicious air, as if it were an unexploded bomb; at other times, with imperious gestures, he would order it to be placed at a certain point on the field, then would go up to it, unsatisfied, and move it a few inches, walk around it thoughtfully for a long time and finally, as if convinced of heaven knows what, make a sign for the game to continue. At other times again, when he managed to get the ball at his feet, he would make everybody move away, and would kick it at the goal with all his strength; then he would turn radiantly to the public, which bellowed with anger, and salute it for a long time, clasping his hands above his head like a victorious boxer. He was, however, rigorously impartial.
In these conditions, the match (which was deservedly won by the Poles) dragged on for over two hours, until about six in the evening; probably it would have gone on until nightfall had it depended solely upon the captain, who was not in the least worried about the time, who behaved on the field as if he were the Lord’s Anointed, and who seemed to derive a crazy and inexhaustible pleasure from his misinterpreted duties as director of the game. But as twilight came, the sky rapidly darkened, and when the first drops of rain fell he whistled the game to an end.
The rain soon turned into a deluge; Bogucice was far away, there was no shelter on the road and we returned to the camp soaked to the skin. The next day I felt ill; my illness remained mysterious for a long time.
I could no longer breathe freely. It felt as though there were a blockage somewhere in my lungs, an acute pain, a deep stabbing pang, which seemed to be located somewhere above my stomach, but behind, towards the back, and which impeded me from inhaling beyond a certain point. This point dropped, from day to day, from hour to hour; the ration of air it conceded me was reduced with a slow and constant progression that terrified me. On the third day I could no longer move; on the fourth, I lay on my bunk supine, immobile, with short frequent breaths like those of a panting dog.
7
The Dreamers
Although Leonardo tried to hide it from me, he could not understand, and was seriously worried by, my illness. It was difficult to discover its real nature, because his entire professional equipment consisted of one stethoscope; it seemed not only difficult, but hardly advisable, to obtain permission from the Russians to send me to the civilian hospital of Katowice; there was also little to be hoped for from Dr Danchenko.
So for some days I remained stretched out, immobile, drinking only a few spoonfuls of soup, for every time I tried to move, or to swallow some solid food, the pain started up savagely and cut short my breath. After a week of tortured immobility, Leonardo, by dint of tapping my back and chest, managed to discover a symptom: it was a dry pleurisy, nestling insidiously between the two lungs, encumbering the mediastinum and the diaphragm.
Then he did far more than is normally expected of a doctor. He turned himself into a clandestine merchant and drug-smuggler, sturdily assisted by Cesare, and walked miles through the city, from one address to another, searching for sulphonamides and calcium injections. He was not very successful as regards the drugs, because sulphonamides were extremely rare and could be found only on the black market at prices which were prohibitive to us. But he found something better. He discovered a mysterious colleague in Katowice, who possessed a not very legal, but well-equipped, surgery, a pharmaceutical stock, much money and free time, and who was also Italian (or almost).
In fact, everything relating to Dr Gottlieb was wrapped up in a thick cloud of mystery. He spoke Italian perfectly, but German, Polish, Hungarian and Russian equally well. He came from Fiume, Vienna, Zagreb and Auschwitz. He had been at Auschwitz, but he never stated in what quality or condition, nor was he a man to whom it was easy to put questions. It was difficult to understand how he had survived in Auschwitz, for he had an anchylosed arm; it was still more difficult to imagine by what secret paths, and in what fantastic manner he had managed to remain there, never separated from his brother and his equally mysterious brother-in-law, and then, within a few months of leaving the Lager, despite the Russians and the law, to become a wealthy man and the most esteemed doctor in Katowice.
He was a wonderfully equipped person. Intelligence and cunning emanated from him like energy from radium, with the same silent and penetrating continuity, without effort, without a pause, without a sign of exhaustion, in all directions at once. It was clear from the first that he was an excellent doctor. But I was never able to discover if his professional excellence was merely one aspect, one side of his high intellect, or if it was itself his instrument of penetration, his secret weapon to turn enemies into friends, to render prohibitions null, to change no into yes; this too formed part of the cloud in which he wrapped himself and which moved with him. It was an almost visible cloud, which made his looks and the lines of his face hard to decipher, and which led one to suspect, beneath every action of his, every phrase, every silence, the existence of a tactic and a technique, the pursuit of unperceivable ends, a continual shrewd labour of exploration, elaboration, penetration and possession.
Nevertheless, Dr Gottlieb’s intelligence, aimed though it was at practical ends, was not inhuman. So abundant was his self-assurance, his expectancy of victory, his faith in himself, that a large portion remained to bestow on assisting his less gifted neighbours; and in particular on assisting us, for we had escaped like him from the mortal trap of the Lager, a circumstance about which he showed himself strangely sensitive.
Gottlieb restored my health like a thaumaturge. He came once to study the case, then on various other occasions to bring vials and syringes, and a last time, when he said to me: ‘Rise and walk.’ The pain had disappeared, my breathing was free; I was very weak and hungry, but I got up, and I could walk.
Nevertheless, I did not leave the room for another three weeks. I spent the interminable days lying down, avidly reading the odd assortment of books I managed to lay my hands on: an English grammar in Polish, Marie Walewska, le tendre amour de Napoléon, a textbook of elementary trigonometry, Rouletabille à l
a rescousse, The Convicts of the Cayenne, and a curious Nazi propaganda novel, Die Grosse Heimkehr (‘The Great Repatriation’), which portrayed the tragic destiny of a Galician village of pure German race, oppressed, sacked and finally destroyed by the ferocious Poland of Marshal Beck.
It was sad to be confined within four walls, when outside the air was full of spring and victory, and the wind carried stimulating smells from the nearby woods of moss, fresh grass and mushrooms; and it was humiliating to be dependent on companions for even the most elementary needs, to collect my food from the canteen, and to get water, and in the early days even to change my position in bed.
There were about twenty others in my dormitory, including Leonardo and Cesare; but the most outstanding personality, of more than human stature, was the oldest among them, the Moor from Verona. He must have come from a stock tenaciously attached to the soil, for his real name was Avesani, and he came from Avesa, the launderers’ quarter of Verona celebrated by Berto Barbarani.* He was over seventy, and showed all his years; he was a great gnarled old man with huge bones like a dinosaur, tall and upright on his haunches, still as strong as a horse, although age and fatigue had deprived his bony joints of their suppleness. His bald cranium, nobly convex, was encircled at its base with a crown of white hair; but his lean, wrinkled face was of a jaundice-like colour, while his eyes, beneath enormous brows like ferocious dogs lurking at the back of a den, flashed yellow and bloodshot.
In the Moor’s chest, skeletal yet powerful, a gigantic but indeterminate anger raged ceaselessly; a senseless anger against everybody and everything, against the Russians and the Germans, against Italy and the Italians, against God and mankind, against himself and us, against day when it was day, and against night when it was night, against his destiny and all destinies, against his trade, even though it was a trade that ran in his blood. He was a bricklayer; for fifty years, in Italy, America, France, then again in Italy, and finally in Germany, he had laid bricks, and every brick had been cemented with curses. He cursed continuously, but not mechanically; he cursed with method and care, acrimoniously, pausing to find the right word, frequently correcting himself and losing his temper when unable to find the word he wanted; then he cursed the curse that would not come.