As a result he could find work nowhere, a situation he thought to be absurd and unjust. A year later, in 1942, after his father died of stomach cancer, he was offered an opening by Wander, a pharmaceutical company based in Milan and a branch of the Swiss Nestlé company. He grasped the opportunity and went to live in the rich city that was a rival to Turin. It was his first important journey, his first adventure in life.
6
I shall now follow the thoughts of Primo Levi. He left the sidestreet where his photographer friend owned a shop. He walked on until he reached the Via Roma. There he entered the Café San Carlo where he ordered a coffee made with cold milk. He’d not drunk anything at home, in the old family kitchen.
He proceeded to kill time until he could cross the road and go to the Barichelo laundry, by the Via Pietro Micca, where he collected his suits every week. Today was the day. Life will carry on, he thought yet again, and that encouraged him to see to that little errand and leave nothing undone, however small.
From where he sat, conscious it was the last time he would do so, in one direction he could see the Duomo and Piazza Castello. At the other end of that cloistered avenue stood the iron arches of the huge Porta Nuova Station. A station to which he had returned from hell on October 19, 1945.
While he drank his coffee and warmed up, he once again heard his mother’s voice talking to him about chemists and naturalists and the great sea voyages of the eighteenth century, sailed by Bougainville, La Condamine and Cook, and recalled how she did so sitting in her armchair and holding a book.
He remembered the time when, as a child, she told him about the periodic table, as if it were a story, and about the man who formulated its laws in 1869, the Russian Mendeleev. He remembered that his mother told him another chemist, a German, Lothar Meyer, had argued that it was his discovery, and that his mother, when telling Meyer’s story, adopted a gloomy, scornful tone, as a result of which, though he’d not really understood what his mother was saying, he immediately took the Russian’s side, even if he’d been a callous killer.
Now, that morning, the words that fascinated him echoed round his head again, words like beryllium, fluorine, carbon, aluminium, phosphorus, potassium, scandium, titanium, vanadium, cobalt, arsenic, selenium, zirconium, niobium, palladium, tellurium, wolframium, bismuth, americium and so many others. Alone at the bar in the Café San Carlos he repeated them to himself mentally.
He could repeat straight off the periodic table with its one hundred and fifty elements. When he was a little boy, he found some of the valencies in that system highly amusing, like the ones for sodium (Na), hydrogen (H), magnesium (Mg), sulphur (S), iron (Fe), silver (Ag) or mercury (Hg). He also repeated these to himself mentally.
Ester, his mother, talked to him about concepts such as atomic mass, periods or noble gases: helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon and radon.
This time out loud, and overheard by the waiter who didn’t understand what Primo Levi—that old man leaning on the bar—was talking about as he absentmindely looked out at the avenue, he repeated those words that sounded like a prayer or a wizard’s ancient magic formula: helium-neon-argon-krypton-xenon and radon.
And he thought about something that he had remembered several years after surviving Auschwitz, he thought about the time when he arrived in Buna-Monowitz, where he was to be locked up as a slave, saw the layout of the barracks, and told the person next to him that it looked like the grid of the periodic table: the so-called periods in horizontal rows and the so-called groups in vertical columns.
Once again he brought back to his memory that Lothar Meyer, a German, and perhaps a good man, whom he and his mother found so unpleasant, vying with poor Mendeleev, about whom he knew nothing, except that either in reality or in his imagination, though he couldn’t say why, he fell victim to the German. That was the real law of the periodic table, he finally remembered ironically: to be a victim of a German; and new concepts of chemistry were established in Auschwitz: mass fear, techniques of torture, valencies for annihilation, atoms of invisibility, formulas for extermination, fusion by cremation.
7
Primo Levi joined the anti-fascist resistance movement “Justice and Freedom,” perhaps to reject the fascist policies his father didn’t condemn even when he could see that Jews were being compelled to stay in their ghettos and their civil and labor rights were restricted, or perhaps simply as an outright rejection of his father’s indulgent attitude toward the regime. He fled to the mountains to join the partisans, though he knew nothing about military strategy and the use of arms. That happened in 1943, shortly after the fall of Mussolini and the inception of the Republic of Salò.
He was with his comrades Maestro and Nissim in the Aosta Valley when he was captured by fascist militia on December 13, 1943 in a retaliation attack that caught the group unaware. He was taken to the Carpi-Fossoli concentration camp, where he was identified as a Jew in addition to being a partisan, thus aggravating his position.
8
Three months later he left in a German goods train comprising twelve cattle trucks packed with 650 Italian Jews.
Its final destination was a place in Poland called Auschwitz that he and those men, women and children had never heard of before. “A name without significance for us at the time,” he was to write years later in If This Is a Man, “but it at least implied some place on this earth.”
When the war ended, only 23 returned to Italy from the 650 people that formed that sinister convoy at dawn of February 22, 1944. One of those 23 individuals was Primo Levi. All the rest died.
He reached Auschwitz on February 26. He survived the first selection by the train, when they took aside those who were to be sent straight to the gas chambers. They gassed no less than 536 of the 650 the minute they reached the camp.
He was tatooed with the number 174517.
He worked as a Nazi slave in the Buna-Monowitz camp next to Auschwitz. Buna-Monowitz was an industrial plant built by the powerful pharmaceutical firm IG Farben for the purpose of manufacturing synthetic fuels. Six miles from Auschwitz, Monowitz was a kind of gray, desolate city where they gathered every kind of prisoner: English, Ukranian, French and many others to a total of ten thousand. There were also German civilian engineers. “We are the slaves of the slaves who everyone can order around” he later wrote.
IG Farben also manufactured Zyklon B, the gas that was used in the extermination chambers, an invention of Rudolf Höss, one of the Auschwitz commandants.
Being a slave meant working twelve to fifteen hours with hardly any food or clothes, all to the profit of the Reich and, above all, of IG Farben.
Being a slave meant working until you were exhausted, until you were dead.
Being a slave meant making a profit from death; buying the deaths of others for free.
Being a slave meant you were nobody, were the object of all the manias, perversions and whims of the German SS. A slave had been shot down when he left the building where he worked simply because two German soldiers had laid a bet about who had the best aim. Another slave who wasn’t working sufficiently hard was tied up a few inches from a jug of water and left to die of thirst. They changed the water everyday in front of him.
9
The Russian Red Army liberated the camp of Auschwitz Birkenau in January 1945. Primo Levi then began the long journey home that took him through Poland, Russia, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and finally Italy. By the time he reached his home in Turin, the same house where he was born, it was already October.
He spent the rest of his life—thirty years—working as a chemist who specialized in synthetic varnishes. He sometimes worked as a translator. He wrote articles and gave lectures. Life after slavery wasn’t easy.
He published books and won prizes.
His was a strange death.
10
He committed suicide on April 11, 1987 by throwing hi
mself down the stairwell in the narrow space left by the lift. It happened like this.
He had walked back from the Barichelo laundry carefully carrying a clean gray suit wrapped in brown paper on a coat hanger.
He had taken a detour on his way home, and lingeringly walked down as far as the Piazza Bononi and Academia Albertina to take a final look at the Balbo gardens.
He asked the concierge, Jolanda Gasperi, for the post, but she didn’t have it at hand.
He walked up the stairs to the third floor, actually the fourth, very slowly. An hour later he opened the door and threw himself down those same stairs as if he were diving headfirst into the cold waters of a river. Perhaps during the very last second, that is what he believed, that he was throwing himself into the cold waters of the Po.
Others say it was an accident: a particular medication he was taking made him dizzy and one dizzy spell caused him to fall over the banister. The fact is that Mrs. Gasperi, the concierge, who had taken up the mail he’d wanted only a few minutes before, hadn’t noticed anything strange in his attitude, no expression of anguish that was any worse than normal, and no somber tone in his voice. He had thoughtfully thanked her, as he always did.
He had always been a discreet, taciturn man, though on occasions he could be full of vitality. He preferred to pass unnoticed, but life had ceased to have any meaning forty years earlier, when he watched how Henek placed the final spadefuls of earth over the small grave where the remains of Hurbinek lay.
He sometimes convinced himself that those who had died there were better than the survivors. It wasn’t easy to overcome that perverted guilt, the guilt of having saved oneself.
Those who knew him well know that he was often tortured by the thought that he had forgotten the number tattooed on Hurbinek’s arm. That was his worst slavery, together with the slavery of having survived. He had memorized the number and then over time forgotten it, despite himself. It would have been a useless, shaming memory, but one that was necessary.
IV
SIGNS OF LIFE IN THE DISTANCE
1
Chocolate
1936. Nine years before Hurbinek’s death.
Before entering the living room where all her family is waiting, Sofia Cèrmik adjusts her new tulle dress in a dark, neat and tidy bedroom that looks over Targova Street, the most commercial street in the city of Rzeszów, in the Carpathians of Upper Galicia.
Gathered there already are Raca her mother, Simon her father and Uncle and Aunt Pitlik and the Vigos, her single aunts, Sara and Mikaela, her elder brothers, Max and Aaron and the young Stefan and Anna. Friends and customers of her father also visit the house and bring small token presents. They are all happy and are all going to celebrate her birthday with her. She is sixteen.
She is young and beautiful with a bright, cheerful face, and to that day she has lived without worrying about what is happening beyond the Vistula and the San and its small tributary the Wislok that flows very close to their house, very close to Simon Cèrmik and his partner, Uncle Gork Vigo’s salted fish and meat and spice store, beyond the wooded Carpathians and beyond the great city of Krakow, where she has never set foot and whose bookshops she dreams about.
When she emerges from the small bedroom in the new tulle dress that is her mother’s present, she is greeted by a loud burst of applause in the dining room and hallway. The hurrays ring out like the green branches of trees lashing a tanned hide.
All the family relatives start to kiss Sofia, as do neighbors who keep coming and her girl friends from school, and suddenly a luminous party atmosphere spreads throughout the Cèrmik household.
It was a special Spring day.
The china cups are brimming with hot chocolate and they eat sponge cakes baked by Raca.
It’s five o’clock in the afternoon and a guitar strikes up a romantic song that speaks of love and travel.
Gradually, chocolate splashes every face, moustache and beard, and the women’s red lips and children’s pale cheeks. The dogs of the house lick up the leftovers on the plates in the kitchen.
There are garlands and flowers in every corner of the living room held up with the many books in the house. Shopkeeper Cèrmik brings out bottles of anisette and other liqueurs he offers to his guests. His eyes ooze with satisfaction behind his glasses.
Simon Cèrmik makes a toast to his favorite daughter who sips on her glass, glowing and blushing.
Sofia is slim, but her shape is subtle, firm and well defined. Just a few months ago she abandoned the last traces of herself as a little girl and changed into a woman with a slender waist and broad hips. Her skin is smooth and her hair fair, fragrant and very curly. Her voice, sweet, low and enveloping.
Yakov, the son of the Pawlickas, the schoolteachers, has come to the birthday party and can’t take his eyes off her. Although she is rather taken aback, Sofia returns his look and offers him a cup of hot chocolate.
They have known each other forever but it is the first time they have looked at each other like that. Tall as houses, dreams are sometimes real and can be reached like the stars, Sofia thinks as she watches Yakov and feels her fingers brush his as they have never done before. Or are the stars dreams? People in Rzeszów are still not sure. Some went on singing deep into the night.
2
Portrait
1945. Seven months after Hurbinek’s death.
Targova Street in Rzeszów has hardly changed in these years of war. The shops are the same, although they have lost the color they had and it has been a long time since they sold anything new or truly useful.
Targova Street, the old business hub in the small city, is now swept by gusts of wind that blow up clouds of dust that were never so thick in the pre-war years.
Grandmother Raca Cèrmik, Zelman by her maiden name, stares through the window at that end-of-autumn wind. Russian troops had knocked on her door yet again asking her for milk and meat, but the houses have no cows, hens or rabbits. The gardens bear sparse produce that soon rots. Raca gave the three baby-faced soldiers a couple of fresh turnips and a head of garlic.
They have taken all the wine and spirits that were in the cellar, the old bottles kept there for big occasions by her husband Simon Cèrmik, felled by a heart attack on that same Targova Street, in 1942, when a German soldier forced him to run from one end of the street to the other carrying a large drum of gasoline. As he lay on the sidewalk, the German poured it over him and set fire to him, but old Cèrmik was already dead.
Raca stands and looks out of the window after the Russian soldiers have gone, but she’s not really looking at the wind, however much the wind puts on a show, blowing away paper, leaves and clothes from washing lines.
Raca sees another street in other times.
She sees that distant morning when Sofia was five years old and a man crossed Targova Street in a very determined fashion, knocked on their door and asked for the girl.
It was a Norwegian painter, though he looked more like a homeless man. His name was Gottwold, he was very tall and an inevitable sadness dwelled on his bearded, lean face. He had noticed Sofia when she was playing in the entrance to the Cèrmik store. He simply wanted to draw a portrait of her.
Raca opened the door, and asked Gottwold in after he had told her what he wanted to do. He had come from Katowice, where he knew his sister was married to a Pole by the name of Dayna, but when he got there, he discovered this Dayna, whom he did not know personally, had killed his young wife and their two children and had then taken his own life. Devastated by the news of that tragedy, Gottwold wept for his sister for some time but then, rather than returning to Norway, where no one was waiting for him, he stayed in the district tramping around like a surly gypsy shunning the presence of human beings. He painted whatever he felt like. He’d been doing that for three years and his backpack was stuffed with paper and cardboard covered in drawings. He had recently been wandering around M
ielec and Kolbuszowa, where Raca came from, very near Rzeszów, and perhaps that was why Sofia’s mother decided to give him lodging for a time.
A few days later Gottwold painted Sofia.
Now as Raca looks out of the window and remembers that man coming, the Cèrmik house is desolate and cold because she has lived there alone ever since the Germans took her family away. Raca doesn’t try to clean or keep it warm. Nor are there many photos or portraits left on the walls or cupboards, although she does have lots of memories. They pass through her mind time and again as she waits for insanity to sweep here into these memories and save her from this world.
The portrait that the sad, silent Norwegian drew of Sofia hangs in a prominent position in her bedroom. When she looks at it, for a few seconds Raca thinks that brighteyed girl will run into the house at any moment, terrified by one of those vague, frightening things that scare children but are only fantasy stoked by non-existent horrors. Then the immense, infinite love that Raca has always possesed slips out of her hands.
3
Wedding
The Birthday Buyer Page 4
