by Primo Levi
The first time I penetrated it, I learnt to my cost, with surprise and fear, that the risk of ‘losing oneself in a wood’ existed not only in fairy tales. I had been walking for about an hour, orientating myself as best I could by the sun, which was visible occasionally, where the branches were less thick; but then the sky clouded over, threatening rain, and when I wanted to return I realized that I had lost the north. Moss on the tree trunks? It covered them on all sides. I set out in what seemed the correct direction; but after a long and painful walk through the brambles and undergrowth I found myself in as unrecognizable a spot as that from which I had started.
I walked on for hours, increasingly tired and uneasy, almost until dusk; and I was already beginning to think that even if my companions came to search for me, they would not find me, or would only find me days later, exhausted by hunger, perhaps already dead. As daylight began to fade, swarms of large hungry mosquitoes rose up, as well as other unclassifiable insects, as large and hard as bullets, which darted blindly among the tree trunks, smashing into my face. Then I decided to set off straight ahead, generally speaking towards the north (that is, leaving on my left a slightly more luminous bit of sky, which should have corresponded to the west), and to walk without stopping until I met the main road, or in any case a path or a track. So I continued in the prolonged twilight of the northern summer, until it was almost night, a prey now to utter panic, to the age-old fear of the dark, the forest and the unknown. Despite my weariness, I felt a violent impulse to rush headlong in any direction, and to continue running so long as my strength and breath lasted.
Suddenly I heard the whistle of a train: this meant the railway was to my right, when, according to my calculations, it should have been far away to the left. So I had been going in the wrong direction. Following the noise of the train, I arrived at the railway before nightfall; then I kept to the glinting railway lines, moving in the direction of the Little Bear which had reappeared amid the clouds, and reached safety, first at Starye Dorogi, then at the Red House.
But there were some who had moved to the forest, and lived there; the first had been Cantarella, one of the ‘Rumanians’, who had discovered his vocation as a hermit. Cantarella was a Calabrian sailor, tall and ascetically thin, taciturn and misanthropic. He had built a hut from tree trunks and branches, half an hour’s walk from the camp, and here he lived in wild solitude, dressed only in a loin-cloth. He was a contemplative, but not an idler; he exercised a curious priestly activity.
He possessed a hammer and a sort of roughly cast anvil, which he had salvaged from some war scrap and fixed in a tree stump; with these tools, and with empty food tins, he produced pots and pans with great skill and religious diligence.
He produced them on order, for the new couples. When, in our heterogeneous community, a man and woman decided to live together, and hence felt the need for a minimum of utensils to set up house, they went to Cantarella, holding hands. Without asking questions, he set to work, and in little more than an hour, with expert blows of the hammer, bent and twisted the tinplate into the forms that the couple desired. He did not ask for payment, but accepted gifts in kind, such as bread, cheese, eggs. In this manner, the marriage was celebrated, and in this manner Cantarella lived.
There were also other inhabitants of the wood; I realized this one day, when I chanced across a path that ran westwards, straight and clearly visible, which previously I had not noticed. It led to a particularly thick region of the wood, where it threaded its way along an old trench, and ended at the entrance to a casemate of trunks, almost totally underground: only the roof and the chimney projected above the surface. I pushed at the door, which yielded; there was nobody inside but the place was clearly inhabited. On the bare soil forming the floor (which was swept and clean) there was a stove, plates, an army bowl; in the corner, a pile of hay; hung on the walls, feminine clothing and photographs of men.
I returned to the camp, and discovered that I was the only one not to know about it: it was common knowledge that two German women lived in the casemate. They were two auxiliaries of the Wehrmacht, who had not managed to follow the Germans in defeat, and had remained isolated in the Russian wastes. They were afraid of the Russians, and had not given themselves up; for months they had lived precariously, by small thefts, by gathering herbs and by occasional furtive prostitution to Englishmen and Frenchmen who had occupied the Red House before us – until the arrival of the Italians had brought them prosperity and safety.
In our colony, women were few, not more than two hundred, and almost all had soon reached a stable arrangement: they were no longer available. So, to go to ‘the girls in the wood’ had become a habit for an indefinite number of Italians, and the only alternative to celibacy. An alternative which was rich with a complex fascination; because the matter was secret and vaguely dangerous (much more for the women than for them); because the girls were foreigners and had grown half savage; because they were in need, and so gave one the ennobling feeling of ‘protecting’ them; and because of the exotic, fairy-tale scenery of the meetings.
Not only Cantarella, but the Velletrano as well had found his personality in the woods. The experiment of transplanting a ‘savage’ into civilization has been tried many times, often with excellent results, to demonstrate the fundamental unity of the human species; with the Velletrano the opposite was accomplished, for, a native of the Jewish quarter of Rome, he had been transformed back into a ‘savage’ with admirable ease.
In fact, he could never have been very civilized. The Velletrano was a Jew of about thirty, a survivor of Auschwitz. He must have created a problem for the Lager official responsible for tattoos, because both his muscular forearms were already thickly covered with them: Cesare, who had known him for some time, explained to me that they were the names of his women; he also pointed out that the Velletrano’s real name was not Velletrano, nor had he been born at Velletri, but had been sent out there to wet-nurse.
He rarely spent the night at the Red House; he lived in the forest, barefoot and half naked. He lived like our progenitors; he laid traps for hares and foxes, climbed up trees after nests, brought down turtle doves with stones and was not above raiding the chicken runs of the most distant farms; he collected mushrooms and berries generally held to be inedible, and in the evening one often met him near the camp, crouching on his heels in front of a large fire, roasting the day’s prey and singing uncouthly. Afterwards, he would go to sleep on the bare ground, lying near the embers. But, as he was still born of man, in his own way he pursued virtue and knowledge, and day by day perfected his art and his instruments; he fabricated a knife, then a spear and an axe, and had he had the time, without doubt he would have rediscovered agriculture and pasturage.
When he had had a good day, he became sociable and affable; through Cesare, who willingly presented him like a freak at a fair, and who recounted his earlier legendary adventures, he invited everybody to Homeric feasts of roast meats; if anyone refused, he turned nasty and pulled out his knife.
After a few days of rain, followed by sun and wind, the mushrooms and bilberries in the wood grew with such abundance as to become of interest no longer from a purely bucolic or sporting point of view, but from a strictly utilitarian one. After taking appropriate measures to avoid losing the way, everybody spent whole days collecting them. The bilberries, which grew in much taller thickets than in Mediterranean countries, were almost as large as nuts, and very tasty; we took them back to camp by the pound, and even tried (in vain) to ferment their juice into wine. As for the mushrooms, there were two varieties: there were the normal brown mushrooms, savoury and certainly edible; and another type, similar to the former in shape and smell, but larger and tougher with slightly different colours.
None of us was certain if these latter were edible; on the other hand, could they be left to rot in the wood? They could not: we were all badly under-nourished, and, even more important, our memory of the hunger of Auschwitz was still too recent, and had changed into
a violent mental stimulus, which obliged us to fill our stomachs to the utmost and imperiously forbade us to renounce any opportunity of eating. Cesare collected a fair quantity, and boiled them according to a recipe unknown to me, adding to the stew vodka and garlic bought in the village, because they ‘kill all poisons’. Then he himself ate some, not much, and offered a little to many of us, so as to limit the risk and collect abundant evidence for the day after. The following day he walked around the dormitories and had never been so polite and solicitous: ‘How are you, Signora Elvira? How are you, Don Vincenzo? Did you sleep well? Did you have a good night?’ And meanwhile he examined their faces with a clinical eye. They were all well, the strange mushrooms could be eaten.
For the laziest and richest, there was no need to go to the wood to find extra provisions. Commercial contacts between the village of Starye Dorogi and the occupants of the Red House had soon become intensive. Every day peasant women arrived with baskets and pails; they sat on the ground, and stayed there for hours, without moving, waiting for clients. If a rain cloud burst, they did not leave, but merely pulled their skirts over their heads. Two or three times the Russians tried to drive them away, and stuck up bilingual edicts, which threatened both parties with punishments of crazy severity; then, as normally occurred, they lost interest in the matter, and the exchanges continued undisturbed.
There were old and young peasant women; the former were dressed in the traditional manner, with quilted blouses and skirts and handkerchiefs tied over their heads; the latter, in light cotton garments, went about for the most part barefoot and were frank, bold and ready to laugh, but not brazen. In addition to mushrooms, bilberries and raspberries, they sold milk, cheese, eggs, chickens, lettuce and fruit, and in exchange accepted fish, bread, tobacco and any piece of clothing or fabric, however torn and threadbare; naturally rubles could be used by those who still possessed them.
In a short time Cesare knew all the women, especially the young ones. I often went with him to these peasants, to listen to their interesting bargaining. I do not intend to deny the utility of speaking the same language in business affairs, but I can affirm from experience that it is not strictly necessary; each of the two knows exactly what the other wants, and although initially he does not know the intensity of the desire to buy or sell respectively, he can deduce it with excellent approximation from the expression on the other’s face, from his gestures and from the number of his replies.
Let us look at Cesare, who is going to the market early in the morning with a fish. He looks for and finds Irina, his friend, his contemporary, whose sympathies he has conquered some time before by baptizing her ‘Greta Garbo’ and giving her a pencil; Irina has a cow and sells milk, moloko; in fact, in the evening, returning from the pasturage, she often stops in front of the Red House and milks the cow directly into her clients’ receptacles. The problem today is to agree how much milk Cesare’s fish is worth; Cesare is carrying a half-gallon pail (it is one of Cantarella’s, which Cesare had picked up cheaply from a ‘ménage’ which had broken down through incompatibility), and with his hand flat, palm down, indicates that he wants it full. Irina laughs, and replies with quick harmonious words, probably insults; she slaps away Cesare’s hand, and with two fingers points half-way up the side of the pail.
Now it is Cesare’s turn to grow angry; he brandishes the fish (‘untreated’), dangles it in the air by its tail with an enormous effort, as if it weighed a hundredweight, and says: ‘Look at the size!’, then runs its entire length under Irina’s nose, and while doing this closes his eyes and draws in his breath deeply, as if inebriated with the fragrance of the fish. Irina takes advantage of the second in which Cesare’s eyes are closed to snatch the fish from him as quickly as a cat, to bite off its head cleanly with her white teeth, and to slap the flaccid mutilated corpse in Cesare’s face, with all her considerable strength. Then, so as not to ruin their friendship and the bargaining, she touches the pail at the three-quarter mark: three pints. Half stunned by the blow, Cesare mutters a string of obscene gallantries which he judges fit to restore his virile honour; then, however, he accepts Irina’s last offer, and leaves her the fish, which she devours on the spot.
We were to meet the voracious Irina later, several times, in a context which to us Latins seemed somewhat embarrassing, but which was perfectly natural to her.
In a glade in the wood, half-way between the village and the camp, was the public bath, to be found in every Russian village, and which at Starye Dorogi functioned on alternate days for the Russians and for us. It was a wooden hut, with two long stone benches inside, and zinc wash tubs of various sizes scattered about. On the wall there were taps with abundant hot and cold water. The soap, on the other hand, was not abundant: it was distributed with great parsimony in the dressing-room. The official responsible for the distribution of the soap was Irina.
She sat at a table with a small block of smelly greyish soap on it, and held a knife in her hand. We undressed, handed in our clothes for disinfection and lined up completely nude in front of Irina’s table. The girl was extremely serious and incorruptible when carrying out her duties as a public official; she frowned with attention and stuck her tongue between her teeth like a child, as she cut a small slice of soap for everyone aspiring to a bath; a little thinner for skinny people, a little thicker for fat people, either because she had been ordered to do so, or because she was moved by an unconscious desire for a just distribution. Not a muscle of her face moved at the impertinences of her more foul-mouthed customers.
After the bath, we had to recover our clothes from the disinfection room; this was another surprise of the Starye Dorogi regime. The room was heated at 250° F.: the first time they told us we had to enter it personally to get our clothing, we looked at each other, perplexed; Russians are made of iron, as we had seen many times, but we were not, and we should certainly be roasted. Then someone tried, and we saw that the exploit was not so terrible as it seemed, so long as one observed the following precautions: to enter while still wet; to know the number of one’s clothes hanger in advance; to take a deep breath before passing through the door and then not to breathe again and not to touch any metal object; above all, to hurry.
The disinfected clothing presented interesting phenomena; corpses of exploded lice, strangely deformed; plastic pens, forgotten in a pocket by some plutocrat, distorted and with the cover sealed up; melted candle ends soaked up by the cloth; an egg, left in a pocket as an experiment, cracked open and dried out into a horny mass, but still edible. But the two Russian attendants walked in and out of the furnace with indifference, like the legendary salamander.
So the days at Starye Dorogi passed by, in an interminable indolence, as sleepy and salubrious as a long holiday, only broken at intervals by the painful thought of a distant home and by the enchantment of our rediscovery of nature. It was useless to go to the Russians of the Command to ask why we were not returning, when we should return, by what road, what future awaited us; they knew no more than we did, or else, with polite candour, they proffered fantastic or terrifying or senseless answers: that there were no trains; or that war against America was about to start; that soon we should be sent to work in the kolkhoz; that they were waiting to exchange us for Russian prisoners in Italy. They told us these and other enormities without hatred or derision, in fact with an almost affectionate solicitude, as if they were speaking to children who asked too many questions, to quieten them.
They simply could not understand our haste to return home: were we not given food and beds? What did we lack at Starye Dorogi? We did not even have to work; did they, soldiers of the Red Army, who had fought four years, and had won the war, complain about not being sent home?
In fact they were returning home haphazardly, slowly and, to judge from appearance, in extreme disorder. The spectacle of the Russian demobilization, which we had already admired at the station of Katowice, now continued in a different form before our eyes, day by day; groups of the victorious army passe
d by, no longer by rail, but along the road in front of the Red House, moving from west to east, in tight or straggling bands, at all hours of the day and night. Men passed by on foot, often barefoot, with their shoes hanging from their shoulders to save the soles, because the march was long; with or without uniforms, armed or unarmed, some singing lustily, others grey-faced and exhausted. Some carried sacks or suitcases on their shoulders; others, the most varied of possessions, an easy chair, a standard lamp, copper pots, a radio, a pendulum clock.
Others passed by on carts, or on horseback; yet others, droves of them, on motor-cycles, driven at intoxicating speed, with an infernal noise. American Dodge trucks passed by, packed with men clinging even to the bonnet and mudguards; other trucks were towing equally packed trailers. We saw one of these trailers travelling on three wheels; a pine-trunk had been fixed as well as possible in place of the fourth wheel at an angle, so that one extremity rested and dragged along the ground. As it was slowly consumed by friction, the tree-trunk was pushed gradually farther down, so as to maintain the vehicle’s equilibrium. Almost in front of the Red House one of the three remaining tyres deflated; the occupants, about twenty, got down, overturned the trailer to clear the road and again packed into the already overloaded truck, which left in a cloud of dust, while everybody cheered.
Other unusual vehicles also passed, always crammed: agricultural tractors, postal vans, German buses formerly used for city transport and still bearing the names of the Berlin terminals; some already broken down, and dragged by other vehicles or by horses.
About the beginning of August, this multiple migration imperceptibly changed character. Horses slowly began to prevail over vehicles; after a week, one could only see the former, the road belonged to them. There must have been all the horses of occupied Germany, tens of thousands passing through each day; they moved by endlessly, tired, sweating, starving, accompanied by clouds of horse-flies and by sharp animal smells; they were goaded and urged on with cries and blows of the whip by girls, one to every hundred or more animals, who rode on horseback, without a saddle, bare-legged, sunburnt and dishevelled. In the evening, they drove the horses off the road into the fields and woods, so that they could graze in liberty and rest till dawn. There were carthorses, thoroughbreds, mules, mares with foals still sucking, rheumatic old hacks, asses; we soon realized not only that they were not counted, but also that their drovers took no interest at all in the animals which dropped out because they were tired or ill or limping, or in those which were lost during the. night. The horses were so many, what did it matter if one more or less reached its destination?