by Primo Levi
In any case, eight rubles were not much; the price of one or two eggs. It was decided corporately that Cesare and I, now accredited as ambassadors, should go back to the village, and see on the spot what could best be bought with eight rubles.
We set off, and as we walked an idea occurred to us; not goods, but services. The best investment would be to ask our friends for the hire of a horse and cart as far as Starye Dorogi. Perhaps the money was too little, but we could try offering an item of clothing: it was hot enough anyway. So we arrived at the square, welcomed by friendly greetings and sly understanding smiles from the old women and furious barks from the dogs. When silence had been re-established, remembering my Michael Strogov and other books read long ago, I said ‘Telega. Starye Dorogi,’ and showed my eight rubles.
A confused murmuring followed: strange to say, no one had understood. Nevertheless, my task looked like being less arduous than it had been on the previous evening; in a corner of the yard, under a roof, I had seen a four-wheeled farm cart, long and narrow, with sides like a ‘V’; in short, a telega. I touched it, a little impatient at the obtuseness of these people: was this not a telega?
‘Tyelyega!’ the old man corrected me, with paternal severity, scandalized at my barbaric pronunciation.
‘Da. Tyelyega na Starye Dorogi. We pay. Eight rubles.’
The offer was derisory: the equivalent of two eggs against twenty plus twenty miles of road, twelve hours’ travel. Instead, the old man pocketed the rubles, disappeared into the stable, returned with a mule, harnessed it, signed to us to climb on, loaded a few sacks, still in silence, and drove off towards the main road. Cesare went to call the others, in front of whom we naturally showed off like peacocks. We were to enjoy an extremely comfortable journey in a telega or rather in a tyelyega, and a triumphal entry at Starye Dorogi, all for eight rubles; that is what a knowledge of languages and diplomatic ability means.
In reality, we soon realized (so, unfortunately, did our companions) that the eight rubles had been virtually wasted: the old man had to go to Starye Dorogi in any case, on some business of his own, and would perhaps even have taken us free of charge.
We set out about midday, lying down on the old man’s not very soft sacks. However, it was still much better than travelling on foot; we could also enjoy the countryside in comfort.
For us the countryside was unusual and stupendous. The plain, which the day before had oppressed us with its solemn emptiness, was no longer rigorously flat. It rippled in light, barely perceptible undulations, perhaps the remains of ancient dunes, not more than a few feet high, but enough to break the monotony, rest the eyes and create a rhythm, a measure. Pools and marshes, large and small, stretched between one undulation and the next. The open ground was sandy, and here and there bristled with wild clumps of shrubs; elsewhere there were tall trees, but these were few and isolated. On both sides of the road lay shapeless rusty relics, guns, tanks, barbed wire, helmets, drums; the remnants of two armies which had confronted each other in these parts for so many months. We had entered the region of the Pripet marshes.
The road and countryside were deserted, but a little before dusk we noticed that someone was coming after us: a man, black against the white of the dust, was walking vigorously in our direction. Slowly but steadily he gained ground; soon he was within hailing distance, and we recognized the Moor, Avesani of Avesa, the grand old man. He too had spent the night in some hiding place, and was now striding towards Starye Dorogi with the impetus of a tempest, his white hair in the wind, his bloodshot eyes staring ahead of him. He moved forward regularly and powerfully like a steam locomotive; he had tied his famous, weighty bundle on his back and hanging from this his axe flashed, like the Scythe of Kronos.
He prepared to pass us as if he had not seen us or did not recognize us. Cesare called to him and invited him to climb on with us. ‘Desecration of the world! Dirty inhuman swine!’ the Moor replied promptly, giving voice to the blasphemous litany which perpetually filled his mind. He overtook us, and continued his epic march towards the horizon opposite.
Mr Unverdorben knew much more than we did about the Moor; we now learnt from him that the Moor was not (or was not only) an old lunatic. The bundle had its reason, as did the old man’s wandering life. A widower for many years, he had a daughter, only one, now almost fifty, and paralysed in bed; she would never recover. The Moor lived for his daughter; every week he wrote her letters destined never to reach her; for her alone he had worked all his life, and had turned as dark as oak and as hard as stone. For her alone, wandering around the world as a migrant, the Moor pocketed everything that came his way, any object that presented even the smallest potentiality for use or for exchange.
We met no other living creature until we came to Starye Dorogi.
Starye Dorogi was a surprise. It was not a village; or rather, there was a minute village, in the middle of the wood, a little way off the road; but we learnt about this later, as we also learnt that its name meant ‘Old Roads’. The cantonment assigned to us fourteen hundred Italians, however, was a single gigantic building, isolated on the edge of the road in the middle of uncultivated fields, on the fringe of the forest. Its name was ‘Krasny Dom’, the Red House, and in fact it was unstintingly red, both inside and out.
It was a truly singular building, which had grown without order in all directions like a volcanic flow; it was difficult to tell whether it was the work of many architects at loggerheads, or of a single one who was mad. The nucleus, now overwhelmed and suffocated by wings and extensions added confusedly later on, consisted of a three-storey block divided into small rooms, perhaps formerly used as military or administrative offices. But around this kernel there was everything: a room for lectures or meetings, a series of classrooms, kitchens, washrooms, a theatre to seat at least a thousand, a surgery, a gymnasium; and next to the main door, a little storeroom with mysterious brackets, which we took to be a ski deposit. But here too, as at Slutsk, nothing or almost nothing remained of the furniture and fittings; not only was there no water, but even the pipes had been carried away, as had the kitchen stoves, the theatre seats, the classroom benches, the banisters of the staircases. The most obsessive feature of the Red House was its staircases. They were to be found in abundance in the interminable building: emphatic and prolix staircases leading to absurd attics full of dust and rubbish; other narrow irregular staircases, blocked half-way by a column heaved up amateurishly to support a collapsing ceiling; fragments of warped, forked, anomalous staircases, linking floors of different levels in adjacent buildings. Memorable even among all these, along one of the façades ran a Cyclopean staircase, which climbed fifty feet up from a grass-covered courtyard, by steps three yards wide, and led nowhere.
Around the Red House there was no fence, not even a symbolical one as at Katowice. Nor were we under any regularly constituted surveillance; at the entrance there was often a Russian soldier, usually a boy, but he had no instructions about us Italians. His duty was solely to prevent other Russians coming at night to molest the Italian women in their quarters.
The Russians, officers and soldiers, lived in a wooden hut nearby, and other Russians, in transit along the road, occasionally stopped there; but they rarely bothered about us. The people who did bother about us were a small group of Italian officers, ex-prisoners of war, somewhat arrogant and uncivil; they were heavily conscious of their status as soldiers, they showed contempt and indifference towards us civilians, and – which somewhat surprised us – they maintained excellent relations with their Soviet counterparts in the hut next door. In fact, they enjoyed a privileged position not only in comparison with us, but also in comparison with the Soviet soldiers; they ate in the Russian officers’ mess, they were given new Soviet uniforms (without badges of rank) and good military boots, and slept in camp beds with sheets and blankets.
Not, however, that the rest of us had any reason to complain. We were treated exactly like the Russian soldiers as regards food and lodgings, and were no
t subjected to any particular regulation or discipline. Only a few Italians worked and these had offered spontaneously to run the kitchens, the baths and the generating plant. In addition, Leonardo acted as a doctor, and I as a nurse; but now, with the good weather, there were very few patients, and our offices were sinecures.
Anyone who wanted to could leave. Several did so, some from sheer boredom or from a spirit of adventure, others in an attempt to pass the frontiers and return to Italy; but they all returned, after a few weeks or months of vagabondage; for, although the camp was neither guarded nor fenced, the distant frontiers were, and strongly so.
On the Russian side there were no attempts to exert ideological pressure, in fact, no attempt to discriminate between us. Our community was too complicated; whether we were ex-soldiers of the ARMIR, ex-partisans, ex-Häftlinge from Auschwitz, ex-workers from the Todt Organization, ex-criminals or prostitutes from Milan jail, Communists, Monarchists or Fascists, the Russians displayed the most impartial indifference towards us. We were Italians, and that was enough; the rest was ‘vsyo ravno’, all the same.
We slept on wooden planks covered with straw sacks: two feet per man. At first we protested, because it seemed too little, but the Russian Command pointed out courteously that our complaint was unfounded. At the head of the planks, scribbled in pencil, we could still read the names of Soviet soldiers who had occupied these places before us; we could judge for ourselves – there was one name per eighteen inches.
The same could be said, and was, about the food. We received two pounds of bread a day: rye bread, scarcely leavened, damp and sour; but it was a large ration and it was their bread. And the daily ‘kasha’ was their ‘kasha’: a compact block of lard, millet, beans, meat and spices, nourishing but ferociously indigestible, which we only learnt to render edible after several days of experiments by boiling it for some hours.
Three or four times a week, fish, ‘ribba’, was also distributed. It was river fish, of doubtful freshness, full of bones, heavy, raw, unsalted. What could we do with it? Few of us were ready to eat it as it was (as did many Russians); to cook it, we needed pots, seasoning, salt and skill. We soon concluded that the best thing was to sell it to the Russians themselves, to peasants at the village or to soldiers passing along the road; a new business for Cesare, who in a short time carried it to a high degree of technical perfection.
On the morning of the fish days, Cesare went around the dormitories, carrying a piece of wire. He collected the ‘ribba’, stuck the wire through its eyes, slung the stinking garland round his shoulders and disappeared. He returned after many hours, sometimes not until the evening, and distributed equitably among his contractors’ rubles, cheese, quarters of chickens and eggs, to everybody’s advantage, and above all to his own.
With the first profits of his trade he bought a balance, which noticeably increased his professional prestige. But to put a plan of his into effect he also needed another instrument of less obvious utility: a syringe. There was no hope of finding one at the Russian village, and so he came to me in the surgery, and asked if I could lend him one.
‘What do you want to do with it?’ I asked him.
‘It’s none of your business. I want a syringe; you have plenty here.’
‘What size?’
‘The biggest you have. It doesn’t matter even if it’s a little the worse for wear.’
In fact there was one, with a capacity of one fluid ounce, cracked and practically useless. Cesare examined it with care, and declared that it was what he needed.
‘But what are you going to do with it?’ I asked again. Cesare looked at me sullenly, hurt by my lack of tact. He told me that it was his affair, his own bloody business, an experiment which might end well or badly and that in any case I was a fine friend sticking my nose into what had nothing to do with me. He wrapped up the syringe carefully and went off like an offended prince.
However, the secret of the syringe did not last long: life at Starye Dorogi was too idle for gossip and curiosity not to proliferate. In the following days, Cesare was seen by Signora Letizia going to fetch water in a bucket and carrying it to the woods; he was seen by Stellina in the woods, sitting on the ground with the bucket in the middle of a garland of fish, which ‘he seemed to be feeding’; and finally he was met in the village by Rovati, his rival; he was without his bucket and selling fish, but they were strange fish, fat, firm and round, and not flat and limp like those we were given.
As happens with many scientific discoveries, the idea of the syringe had originated in a failure and in a fortuitous observation. A few days before, Cesare had exchanged fish at the village for a live chicken. He had returned to the Red House convinced that he had struck a good bargain; in return for only two fish they had given him a fine chicken, admittedly not young and with rather a melancholic air, but extraordinarily large and plump. Only after he had killed and plucked it had he realized that something was wrong; the chicken was unsymmetrical: its stomach was all on one side, and to touch it gave an impression of something hard, mobile and elastic. It was not the egg: it was a large watery cyst.
Naturally Cesare had to recoup his losses: he had managed to sell the animal immediately to no less a person than Mr Rovi, and had even made a profit; but then, like a Stendhalian hero, he had thought about it. Why not imitate nature? Why not try with the fish?
At first he had tried to fill them with water through their mouths by means of a tube, but the water all poured out again. Then he had thought of the syringe. With the syringe he noted a certain progress in many cases, but this was clearly dependent on the point at which the injection was made: sometimes the water came out again, immediately or soon after, at other times it stayed in indefinitely. Cesare had then dissected several fish with a knife, and managed to ascertain that, for a permanent effect, the injection needed to be made in the swimming bladder.
As a result the fish, which Cesare sold by weight, yielded from twenty to thirty per cent more than normal, besides having a far more attractive appearance. Certainly, the ‘ribba’ treated like this could not be sold twice to the same client; but it could be sold extremely well to demobilized Russian soldiers passing along the road towards the east, who would only discover the trick some miles farther on.
But one day Cesare returned black in the face; he was without fish, money or goods: ‘I’ve been bamboozled.’ For two days it was impossible to speak to him; he lay on the straw hunched up, as bristly as a porcupine, and only came down for meals. Things had not gone as usual.
He recounted his adventure to me much later, one long warm evening, making me swear not to spread it around, because, if it was known, his commercial honour would suffer. In fact, the fish had not been torn from him violently by a furious Russian, as at first he had tried to pretend; the truth was quite different. He had given the fish away, he confessed to me, full of shame.
He had gone to the village, and, to avoid clients who had already been had, he kept off the main road and took a path leading through the woods; after a few hundred yards he saw an isolated cottage, or rather a ramshackle hut built of un-cemented bricks and corrugated iron. A skinny woman dressed in black and three pale children were sitting on the threshold. He approached, and offered her the fish, and she made him understand that she would have liked the fish, but had nothing to give in exchange; in fact, she and the children had not eaten for two days. She also made him enter the hut, and there was nothing inside, only piles of straw as in a kennel.
At this point the children had looked at him with such eyes that Cesare had thrown down the fish and run away like a thief.
12
The Wood and the Path
We stayed at Starye Dorogi, in that Red House full of mystery and pitfalls like a fairy castle, for two long months: from 15 July to 15 September 1945.
They were months of idleness and relative comfort, and full, therefore, of penetrating nostalgia. Nostalgia is a fragile and tender anguish, basically different, more intimate, more human
than the other pains we had endured till then – beatings, cold, hunger, terror, destitution, disease. Nostalgia is a limpid and clean pain, but demanding; it permeates every minute of the day, permits no other thoughts and induces a need for escape.
Perhaps because of this, the forest around the camp exercised a deep attraction upon us. Perhaps it offered the inestimable gift of solitude to all who sought it; we had been deprived of this for so long! Perhaps because it reminded us of other woods, other solitudes of our previous existence; or perhaps, on the other hand, because it was solemn and austere and untouched like no other scenery known to us.
To the north of the Red House, beyond the road, there was a varied zone of thickets, glades and pine woods, broken by marshes and strips of fine white sand; you came across winding, barely discernible paths, leading to distant farms. But to the south, only a few hundred yards from the Red House, every human trace disappeared. So did every sign of animal life, except for the occasional fawn-coloured flash of a squirrel, or the sinister steady eye of a water snake, wrapped round a rotting trunk. There were no paths, no traces of woodsmen, nothing: only silence, desolation and tree trunks in all directions, pale birches, red-brown conifers, shooting vertically towards the invisible sky; the ground was equally invisible, covered by a thick layer of dead leaves and pine needles, and by clumps of wild waist-high undergrowth.