by Primo Levi
A small orchestra, whose instruments had been provided by the Russians, began the tired motif, in low muted tones. Slowly swaying to the rhythm, three nightmare figures came on to the stage; they were wrapped up in black cloaks, with black hoods on their heads, and from the hoods emerged three faces, of corpse-like, decrepit pallor, marked by deep livid lines. They entered with a hesitant dance step, holding three long unlighted candles in their hands. When they reached the centre of the stage, always in time to the rhythm, they bowed towards the public with senile difficulty, slowly bending their stiff joints, with small worrying wrenches; they took two full minutes to bend down and rise again, minutes which were full of anguish for all the spectators. They painfully regained an erect position, the orchestra stopped and the three phantoms began to sing the stupid strophe in a tremulous broken voice. They sang; and at every repeat, with the accumulation of gaps replaced by uncertain gestures, it seemed as if life, as well as voice, would drain from them. With the rhythm accentuated by the hypnotic pulsation of a single muted drum, the paralysis proceeded slowly and ineluctably. The final repetition, with absolute silence from orchestra, singers and public, was an excruciating agony, a death throe.
When the song ended, the orchestra began again lugubriously; the three figures, with a final effort, trembling in every limb, repeated their bow. Unbelievably they once more managed to straighten themselves, and with their candles wavering, with a horrible and macabre hesitation, but always in time to the rhythm, they disappeared for ever behind the scenes.
The ‘Three-Cornered Hat’ number took away one’s breath, and every evening was greeted with a silence more eloquent than applause. Why? Perhaps because, under the grotesque appearance, one perceived the heavy breath of a collective dream, of the dream emanating from exile and idleness, when work and troubles have ceased, and nothing acts as a screen between a man and himself; perhaps because we saw the impotence and nullity of our life and of life itself, and the hunch-backed crooked profiles of the monsters generated by the sleep of reason.
More innocuous, indeed puerile and burlesque, was the allegory of the next programme to be arranged. It was already obvious from the title, The Shipwreck of the Spiritless; we were the spiritless, we Italians lost on our way home, grown used to an existence of inertia and boredom; the desert island was Starye Dorogi; and the cannibals were ostentatiously the worthy Russians of the Command. One hundred per cent cannibals; they appeared on the stage naked and tattooed, prattled in some primitive and unintelligible jargon, fed on raw and bloody human meat. Their leader lived in a hut made of branches, he had a white slave permanently on all fours as a seat, and on his chest hung a large alarm clock which he consulted, not to tell the time, but to read the omens for governmental decisions. Comrade Colonel, in charge of our camp, must have been a man of wit, or extremely forbearing, or else just dim, to have authorized so harsh a caricature of his person and office; or perhaps, once more, it was a question of the age-old beneficent Russian insouciance, of that Oblomovian negligence, which was to be found at all levels at that happy moment of their history.
In truth, once at least the suspicion crossed our minds that the Command had not digested the satire, or that it regretted its decision. After the first performance of The Shipwreck, all hell broke loose in the Red House in the middle of the night; yells in the dormitories, kicks at the doors, commands in Russian, Italian and bad German. Those of us who had come from Katowice, and had already witnessed a similar upheaval, were only half frightened; the others lost their heads (the ‘Rumanians’ in particular, who were responsible for the script); rumour of a Russian reprisal immediately went round, and the most apprehensive were already thinking of Siberia.
The Lieutenant acted as intermediary, and on this occasion seemed even more gloomy and sullen than usual; through him, the Russians made us all get up and dress hastily, and line up in one of the winding passages of the building. Half an hour, an hour passed and nothing happened; at the end of the queue, where I was in one of the last places, nobody knew where the head began, nor did the line move forward a step. Beside the possibility of a reprisal for the Spiritless, the rashest of hypotheses ran through the line: the Russians had decided to search out the Fascists; they were looking for the two girls in the wood; they were subjecting us to an examination for VD; they were recruiting people to work in the kolkhoz; they were looking for specialists, like the Germans. Then we saw an Italian pass by beaming cheerfully. He said: ‘They’re giving out money!’ and shook a wad of rubles in his hand. No one believed him; but a second, then a third one passed and they all confirmed the information. The incident was never clearly understood (but then, who ever fully understood why we were at Starye Dorogi, and what we were doing there?); according to the most sensible interpretation, it seems probable that we had been equated with prisoners of war, at least by some Soviet departments, and so were owed compensation for the days of work we had carried out. But what criterion was used to compute these days (hardly any of us had ever worked for the Russians, either at Starye Dorogi or before); why they also paid the children, and above all, why the ceremony had to occur so tumultuously between two and six in the morning – all this is destined to remain obscure.
The Russians distributed salaries varying from thirty to eighty rubles a head, either following inscrutable criteria, or haphazardly. They were not huge sums, but they pleased everyone; they were equivalent to luxuries for a few days. At dawn we returned to bed, commenting on the event in different ways; no one understood that it was a good omen, a prelude to repatriation.
But from that day, even without an official announcement, the signs multiplied. Tenuous, uncertain, timid signs; but enough to spread the sensation that something was finally moving, something was about to happen. A patrol of young Russian soldiers arrived, baby-faced and lost; they told us that they had come from Austria, and would soon have to leave again to escort a convoy of foreigners; but they did not know where. The Command, after months of useless petitions, distributed shoes to all in need of them. Finally, the Lieutenant disappeared, as if he had been assumed into Heaven.
It was all extremely vague, and not a little ambiguous. Even granting that a departure was imminent, what assurance was there that it was a repatriation, and not another transfer to heaven knows where? The long experience we had by now acquired of Russian methods counselled us to temper our hopes with a salutary coefficient of doubt. The season also contributed to our disquiet; in the first weeks of September the sun and sky clouded over, the air became cold and damp and the first rain fell to remind us of the precariousness of our situation.
The road, meadows and fields changed into a desolate marsh. Water leaked through the roofs of the Red House in abundance, dripping pitilessly on the bunks at night; yet more water entered through the glassless windows. None of us had heavy clothes. In the village we saw peasants coming back from the wood with carts of faggots and branches; others were patching up their houses, adjusting the thatched roofs; all of them, even the women, wore boots. The wind carried a new alarming smell from their homes; the bitter smoke of damp wood burning, the smell of approaching winter. Another winter, the third one – and what a winter!
But finally the announcement came: the announcement of our return, of our salvation, of the conclusion of our lengthy wanderings. It came in two novel unusual ways, from two different sides, and was convincing and open and dissipated all anxiety. It came in the theatre and through the theatre, and it came along the muddy road, carried by a strange and illustrious messenger.
It was night, it was raining, and in the crowded theatre (what else could one do in the evening, before slipping between the damp sheets?) there was a repeat performance of The Shipwreck of the Spiritless, perhaps the ninth or tenth. This Shipwreck made a shapeless but savoury dish, enlivened by its sharp and good-natured allusions to our everyday life; we had all followed it, every line of it, and by now we knew it by heart, and at every performance we were less inclined to laugh at the s
cene in which a Cantarella even more savage than the original built a huge metal pot to order for the Russian cannibals, who intended to cook the leading Dispirited bigwigs in it; and every time the final scene, when the ship arrived, cut deeper.
Because there was, and clearly had to be, a scene in which a sail appeared on the horizon, and all the castaways ran laughing and crying on to the inhospitable beach. Now, just as the doyen among them, white-haired and by now bowed from the interminable wait, pointed his finger towards the sea and shouted: ‘A sail!’ and just as all of us, with a lump in our throats, got ready for the traditional happy ending of the final scene, and for our retirement once more to our bunks, we heard a sudden thud, and saw the cannibal chief, a veritable Deus ex machina, fall vertically on to the stage, as if from the sky. He tore the alarm clock from his neck, the ring from his nose and the band of feathers from his head, and shouted in a thunderous voice: ‘Tomorrow we leave!’
We were taken by surprise, and at first did not understand. Perhaps it was a joke? But the savage pursued: ‘I am telling the truth, this is not theatre, this time it’s real! The telegram has arrived, tomorrow we are all going home!’ This time it was we Italians, spectators, actors and stagehands, who immediately overwhelmed the terrified Russians, who had understood nothing of this scene, which was not in the script. We emerged from the hall in disorder, and at first there was an anxious exchange of questions without answers; but then we saw the Colonel, surrounded by Italians, nodding assent, and we understood that the hour had come. We lit fires in the woods, and no one slept; we spent the rest of the night singing and dancing, recalling past adventures and remembering our lost companions – for it is not given to man to enjoy uncontaminated happiness.
The next morning, while the Red House was already buzzing and humming like a beehive whose swarm is about to leave, we saw a small car approach along the road. Very few passed by, so our curiosity was aroused, especially as it was not a military car. It slowed down in front of the camp, turned and entered, bouncing on the rough surface in front of the bizarre façade. Then we saw that it was a car all of us knew well, a Fiat 500A, a Topolino, rusty and decrepit, with the suspension piteously deformed.
It stopped in front of the entrance, and was at once surrounded by a crowd of inquisitive people. An extraordinary figure emerged, with great effort. It went on and on emerging; it was a very tall, corpulent, rubicund man, in a uniform we had never seen before: a Soviet General, a Generalissimo, a Marshal. When all of him had finally emerged from the door, the minute bodywork rose a good six inches, and the springs seemed to breathe more freely. The man was literally larger than the car, and it was incomprehensible how he had got inside. His conspicuous dimensions were further increased and accentuated, when he took a black object from the car, and unfolded it. It was a cloak, which hung down to the ground from two long wooden epaulettes; with an easy gesture, which gave evidence of his familiarity with the garment, he swung it over his back and fastened it to his shoulders, with the result that his outline, which had appeared plump, became angular. Seen from behind, the man was a monumental black rectangle one yard by two, who strode with majestic symmetry towards the Red House, amid two rows of perplexed people over whom he towered by a full head. How would he get through the door, as wide as he was? But he bent the two epaulettes backwards, like two wings, and entered.
This celestial messenger, who travelled alone through the mud in a cheap ancient ramshackle car, was Marshal Timoshenko in person, Semyòn Konstantinovich Timoshenko, the hero of the Bolshevik revolution, of Karelia and Stalingrad. After his reception by the local Russians, which was singularly sober and lasted only a few minutes, he emerged once more from the building and chatted unaffectedly with us Italians, like the rough Kutuzov in War and Peace, on the meadow, in the middle of the pots with fish on the boil and the washing hung out to dry. He spoke Rumanian fluently with the ‘Rumanians’ (because he was, in fact is, a native of Bessarabia), and even knew a little Italian. The damp wind ruffled his grey hair, which contrasted with his ruddy suntanned complexion, that of a soldier, an eater and a drinker; he told us that it was really true; we were to leave soon, very soon; ‘War over, everybody home’; the escort was ready, the supplies for the journey as well, the papers were in order. Within a few days the train would be waiting for us at Starye Dorogi station.
15
From Starye Dorogi to Iasi
Nobody was really surprised that the departure was not to be expected ‘tomorrow’ in a literal sense, as the savage had said in the theatre. On various occasions already we had been able to verify that the corresponding Russian term, by one of these semantic lapses which never occur without a reason, had come to mean something far less definite and peremptory than our ‘tomorrow’ and, in harmony with Russian habits, meant rather ‘one of the following days’, ‘sometime or other’, ‘in the near future’; in short, the rigorous temporal determinant is softly blurred. We were not surprised, nor were we particularly aggrieved. Once our departure was certain, we became aware, to our own amazement, that this endless land, these fields and woods which had witnessed the battle to which we owed our salvation, these virgin primordial horizons, this vigorous people full of the love of life, had entered our hearts, had penetrated into us and would remain there for a long time, glorious and living images of a unique season of our existence.
So not ‘tomorrow’, but a few days after the announcement, on 15 September 1945, we left the Red House in a troupe and reached the station of Starye Dorogi in a festive mood. The train was there, it was waiting for us, it was not an illusion of our senses; there was coal and water, and the engine, enormous and majestic like a monument of itself, stood at the right end. We hastened to touch its side: alas, it was cold. There were sixty trucks, goods trucks, somewhat the worse for wear, standing in a siding. We invaded them with jubilant fury, and without quarrels; there were fourteen hundred of us, or twenty to twenty-five persons to a truck, which, in comparison with our many previous railway experiences, meant travelling comfortably and restfully.
The train did not leave at once, in fact, not until the following day; and it was clearly useless interrogating the head of the minute station, for he knew nothing. Only two or three trains passed during this time, and none stopped, none even slowed down. When one of them approached, the stationmaster waited for it on the platform, holding up a garland of branches with a sack hanging from it; the engine-driver leant out of the engine as it rushed by, with his right arm hooked. He seized the garland, and immediately threw a similar one to the ground, also with a sack; this was the postal service, Starye Dorogi’s only contact with the rest of the world.
Apart from this, everything was immobile and quiet. Around the station, which was on a slight elevation, the prairies extended interminably, delimited only to the west by the black line of the woods and cut by the giddy ribbon of the railway line. Cattle grazed in herds, few and scattered at wide intervals; this was all there was to break the uniformity of the plain. During the long evening of our vigil, we could hear the songs of the shepherds, tenuous and modulated; one began, a second replied some miles away, then another and yet another, from every side of the horizon, until it seemed as if the very earth were singing.
We prepared for the night. After so many months and displacements, we now formed an organized community; consequently, we had not distributed ourselves casually in the trucks, but according to spontaneous nuclei of cohabitation. The ‘Rumanians’ occupied about ten trucks; three belonged to the San Vittore thieves, who did not want anybody and whom nobody wanted; another three were for the single women; four or five were taken by the couples, legitimate or otherwise; two, divided into two floors by a horizontal partition, and conspicuous because of the laundry hanging out to dry, belonged to families with children. The most striking of all was the orchestra-car: the entire theatrical company resided there, with all their instruments (including a piano), kindly donated by the Russians at the moment of departure. On Leonardo’
s initiative, our truck had been designated the hospital-car; a presumptuous and hopeful title as Leonardo possessed only a syringe and a stethoscope, while the wooden floor was as hard as that of the other trucks; however, there was not even one sick person in the whole train, nor did a single patient present himself during the entire journey. There were about twenty of us, among whom were, naturally, Cesare and Daniele, and, less naturally, the Moor, Mr Unverdorben, Giacomantonio and the Velletrano; besides these, there were about fifteen ex-POWs.
We spent the night drowsing restlessly on the bare floor of the truck. Day came; the engine was smoking, the driver was at his post, waiting with Olympian calm for the boiler to build up pressure. In the middle of the morning the engine roared, with a marvellous, deep metallic voice; it shook, vomited black smoke, the stay rods tightened and the wheels began to turn. We looked at each other, almost bewildered. We had resisted, after all; we had won. After the year of Lager, of anguish and patience, after the wave of death that followed the liberation, after the cold and hunger, the contempt and the haughty company of the Greek, after the illness and misery of Katowice, after the senseless journeys which had made us feel condemned to orbit for eternity in Russian space, like useless spent stars, after the idleness and bitter nostalgia of Starye Dorogi, we were rising once more, travelling upwards, on the journey home. Time, after two years of paralysis, had regained vigour and value, was once more working for us, and this put an end to the torpor of the long summer, to the threat of the approaching winter, and made us impatient, hungry for the days and miles ahead.
But soon, from the very first hours of the journey, we were to realize that the hour of impatience had not yet sounded; the happy journey promised to be long and laborious and not without surprises; a small railroad Odyssey within our greater Odyssey. Patience was still needed, in unforeseeable doses; yet more patience.