by Primo Levi
Mendel said that he, too, liked to play: there were still many hours of daylight ahead, why not have a game? The Uzbek accepted, but once they got back to the airplane he said that he’d like the two of them, Mendel and Leonid, to play the first game. Why? Courtesy of the host, said Peyami, but it was obvious that what he wanted was to get an idea of how his two future adversaries played. He was the kind who play to win.
Leonid got the white pieces, and they were white in fact, and aromatic with the scent of fresh wood. The black pieces, in contrast, were various shades of brown, scorched, smoke-darkened; both white and black pieces were unsteady on their bases, in part because the board was not very level, and in fact was undulating and full of rough surfaces and bumps. Leonid began the game with a queen’s pawn opening, but it quickly became clear that he had no idea how that opening was supposed to proceed, and before long he was floundering, down one pawn and his remaining pieces poorly deployed. He muttered something about the game under his breath, and Mendel replied in the same hushed tone, but in Yiddish: “You keep an eye on him, too, you never can tell. The submachine gun and the pistol are in the cabin. Check.” It was a treacherous check, with the white king awkwardly caught among pawns. Leonid sacrificed a bishop in a futile attempt at self-defense and Mendel announced checkmate in just three moves. Leonid lowered his king in a sign of surrender and homage to the winner but Mendel said, “No, let’s play through to the end.” Leonid understood: they ought to gratify Peyami, there was no risk of him leaving the game, he was watching with the bloodthirsty and professional attention of an aficionado at a bullfight—they had better not deprive him of the spectacle of the kill. Once the kill had occurred, the Uzbek challenged Leonid, who accepted reluctantly.
The Uzbek opened insolently with his queen’s bishop’s pawn. His eyes, whose whites were of such a pure white that they verged on pale blue, were more insolent still. He played with showy, grotesque gestures, hunching shoulder and arm forward at each move as if the piece he were lifting weighed a dozen kilos at least; he slammed the piece down on the board as if he were trying to drive it through the bark, or else he twisted it, pressing down as if to screw it in. Leonid immediately found himself in some discomfort, both because of these gestures and because of his unmistakable superiority: it was clear that Peyami wanted nothing better than to dispense with him as quickly as possible so he could take on Mendel. He moved with contemptuous speed, without stopping to consider his moves, and displaying rude impatience every time Leonid hesitated. He called checkmate in less than ten minutes.
“Now for the two of us,” he said immediately to Mendel, in such a resolute tone of voice that his opponent was both amused and unsettled. This time, Mendel, too, was playing to win, as if the stakes were a mountain of gold, or a safe life, or eternal happiness. He vaguely sensed that he was playing not for himself but as the champion of something or someone. His opening was careful and cautious, and he willed himself not to allow his opponent’s behavior to make him nervous. For that matter, the other man soon abandoned his annoying gesticulations and began to concentrate on the chessboard. Mendel played thoughtfully, Peyami in contrast tended to play recklessly and lightning-fast: Mendel had a hard time guessing whether hidden behind each move was a well-thought-out plan, or the desire to astonish, or the fanciful audacity of an adventurer. After twenty moves or so, neither man had lost any pieces, the situation was well balanced, the chessboard was in a state of frightful confusion, and Mendel realized that he was enjoying himself. He deliberately lost a tempo, purely to force the Uzbek to reveal his intentions, and he saw that he’d put his opponent on edge: now he was the one who was hesitating before each move, looking Mendel in the eye as if he were trying to read a secret. The Uzbek made a move that immediately proved to be disastrous, asked if he could take it back, and Mendel allowed him to; then he got to his feet, shook himself like a dog coming out of the water, and without a word headed inside the airplane. Mendel gestured to Leonid, who understood, followed him closely, and stepped into the cabin right behind him; but the Uzbek wasn’t thinking about weapons, he’d only gone to get the samogon.
All three drank, as the sky was already starting to darken and a cool evening breeze sprang up. Mendel felt strange, out of time and out of place. That focused and serious game of chess was linked in his memory to intensely different times and places and people: to his father, who had taught him the rules, who had beat him easily for two years, with growing difficulty for two more, and thereafter accepted his defeats easily; to his friends, both Jews and Russians, who with him had trained themselves over the chessboard to be cunning and patient; to the quiet warmth of his lost home.
The Uzbek had probably had too much to drink. When he sat down at the chessboard again, he began an interminable series of exchanges that led to a lightened, decanted situation: he with one pawn less, and Mendel the master of the grand diagonal and solidly defended. The Uzbek went on drinking, contrived catastrophe for himself with an absurd attempt at counterattack, and, finally, conceded defeat, declaring that he demanded a rematch; he’d been a weakling, he knew that when you play chess you can’t drink, he’d given in to the temptation like a child. By now it was too dark, but he wanted a rematch: tomorrow morning, first thing, as soon as it was daylight. He said good night, climbed stumbling up the ramshackle rung ladder leading to the cabin, and five minutes later was snoring.
The two men remained silent for a few moments. Against the rustling of wind-tossed branches, less familiar sounds could be heard: the stirring of insects or small creatures, cracklings, a distant chorus of frogs. Mendel said, “This isn’t exactly the traveling companion we were looking for, agreed?”
“We weren’t looking for a traveling companion,” said Leonid, still smarting from his defeat.
“That remains to be seen: in any case, it’s time to get going again, before it’s the middle of the night.”
They waited until the Uzbek’s snoring had become regular, gathered their knapsacks from the cabin, and set off. As a precaution, they headed south first, then abruptly changed direction and headed northwest: but the ground was dry and impervious to footprints.
2
July–August 1943
Mendel wanted to go to Nivnoye, in pursuit of the vague reports he’d dragged out of the Uzbek; Leonid didn’t want to go anywhere, or, to be exact, didn’t know where he wanted to go, and didn’t even know whether he wanted to go anywhere, or do anything. It wasn’t that he rejected Mendel’s suggestions, or rebelled against his decisions, but he exerted a subtle passive friction against every active push: like dust in a watch, Mendel thought. He must have gotten dusty, even if he’s young: it’s stupid to say that young people are strong. You can understand many things better at thirty than at twenty, and so they’re easier to put up with. In fact, if someone had asked Mendel himself how old he was, and if he’d been willing to answer in complete honesty, how should he have responded? Twenty-eight according to the records, a little older to judge from his joints, his lungs, and his heart, but on his back he carried a mountain, more years than Noah and Methuselah. Yes, more than them, considering that Methuselah was fully a hundred and eighty-seven years old when he fathered Lamech, and Noah was five hundred when he brought Shem, Ham, and Japheth into the world, six hundred when he built the ark, and even a little older when he got drunk for the first time; and in the opinion of the rabbi with the two clocks, on that occasion Noah had meant to father a fourth child, if it hadn’t been for that unfortunate mishap with Ham. No, he, Mendel, watchmaker wandering through the woods, was older than either of them. He no longer had any desire to father children or plant vineyards or build arks, not even if the Lord were to order him to do so; but it didn’t seem to him that the Lord, so far, had shown much interest in saving him or his family. Perhaps because he wasn’t as just a man as Noah.
Leonid’s silences were beginning to weigh on him. Instinctively, he liked Leonid: he seemed like someone you could trust, but his passivity annoyed him
. When a watch is dusty, it’s a sign that it’s very old, or that the case isn’t airtight; then you have to disassemble the whole thing and clean it piece by piece with light oil. Leonid wasn’t old; so there must be cracks in his case. What kind of benzene would it take to clean Leonid’s gears?
He’d tried to get him to talk more than once. He’d managed to tease out shreds, tiles in a mosaic to be patiently reassembled later, fitted together as in certain children’s games. The German concentration camp: fine, it can’t have been pleasant, but he hadn’t been there long and it hadn’t broken his health; if anything, he’d been lucky, why wouldn’t he admit it? If the Germans had figured out that they had laid hands on a Jewish paratrooper, things would have gone differently for him. Being lucky is a good thing, it’s a guarantee for the future; to reject your own good luck is sacrilegious. The stolen watch and the prison: Lord God, he’d sinned, and he’d paid for his sin. If only all sinners were lucky enough to expiate their sins, to settle their accounts. There must be something else, in Leonid, some inner scar, a bruising, perhaps a halo of grief around a human face, a portrait. Mendel was reminded of the large oval photographs of the previous century, with the solemn images of ancestors at the center of a blurry gray circle. It had something to do with his family, Mendel was sure of it, not on the basis of Leonid’s answers, which were terse and irritated, but on the basis of his silences. In fact, the mosaic to be reassembled was made up for the most part of black tiles: evasive, nonexistent, or even insolent answers. It required patience; little by little the picture would take shape. Now, Mendel was a patient man. He mulled it over, night after night, as they walked, frustrated by the rebuffs and the angry convulsive parrying of his traveling companion. No doubt, he, Mendel, was not a man of many virtues, but patience was something he possessed; well, if you have patience you use it.
It took longer to get to the marshes of Nivnoye than the three days the Uzbek had mentioned. For Mendel and Leonid the trip took six days, or, rather, six nights, because they preferred to stop and rest during the day. They crossed deserted roads and paths, a railroad line (it must have been the Gomel–Bryansk branch, Mendel calculated), clearings, shallow streams with clear water, offering relief for their thirst and their aching feet. They avoided farms and villages: this forced them to make lengthy detours, but it wasn’t as if they were in a hurry.
By traveling only in the dark and shunning populated places, they encountered few people—shepherds, farmers in their fields, dawdling wayfarers—and none gave them a second glance. But there was one encounter they couldn’t escape. On the fourth day, in the early light of dawn, as they were following a cart track, they found themselves descending into a cut that ran through a rise in the terrain; coming toward them from the far end of the cut was a cart drawn by a weary old horse, and driven by a middle-aged man. Mendel gripped his pistol. The driver wore the light-blue armband of the Ukrainian auxiliary police. Mendel asked him:
“What are you transporting?”
“Flour, can’t you see?”
“Where are you taking it?”
“To the Germans. To the warehouse in Mglin.”
“Get down and go. That’s right, go, just keep walking.”
The Ukrainian shrugged his shoulders; this must not be the first time something of the sort had happened to him. “What am I supposed to say?”
“Whatever you like. That bandits robbed you.”
The Ukrainian left. There were six sacks of flour and a bundle of newly scythed grass on the wagon. Mendel had put away his pistol and had a puzzled look on his face.
“Now what are you planning to do?” asked Leonid.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what we’re going to do, but what I wanted to do was the right thing. I wanted to do something decisive, as when a man destroys a bridge behind him, and, whether it’s right or wrong, once he knows the bridge is no longer there and he has no other choices, he can no longer go back. Come on, let’s unhitch the horse and see how many sacks it can carry.”
“Why don’t we keep the wagon, too?”
“Because from now on they’ll be looking for us, and we’ll have to keep off the roads.”
The horse didn’t look as if it would prove very useful. It held its head and ears low, and there were open sores on its back covered with flies and horseflies. With lengths of rope they’d found in the cart, they managed to hang two flour sacks on it: more than that would have been unwise. Atop the sacks, which dangled dangerously against the animal’s fleshless ribs, they arranged the bundle of grass.
“What about the cart? And the other sacks?”
“We’ll hide them, as best we can.”
It wasn’t easy, but they finally managed to do it, before day had fully dawned: the cart in a gorge filled with thornbushes, and the sacks of flour under the cart. Then they set off again, staying far from the road, leading the horse, which was lazy and recalcitrant, and further hindered them because of the clumsily loaded sacks, which kept getting caught in the low-hanging branches. They walked in silence for a long time, then Leonid said, “I don’t know what I want, but I know that I don’t know. You don’t know any more than I do, but you’re convinced that you do.”
Mendel, who was in front and was pulling on the horse’s bridle, didn’t turn around or say anything, but shortly Leonid lit into him again, “In your town you didn’t have a movie house. Didn’t you have horses, either?”
“There were horses, but I never had to take care of them. I was in a different line of work.”
“I was in another line of work myself, but a horse like this can’t carry a load like that, or it can’t carry it for long. Anyone can see that.”
There wasn’t much to argue with, and besides it was too light out to go any farther. They stopped in the dense woods by a stream, let the horse drink, tied it to a tree trunk, gave it the grass to eat, and fell asleep. When they woke up, in midafternoon, the bundle of grass had been finished, and the horse had nibbled the few shrubs that were within reach, and was pulling on the rope to get the ones farther away; it must really have been hungry. Too bad the sacks contained flour, not grain: they tried giving the horse a little flour, but the animal got flour all over its muzzle up to the eyes, and then started coughing until it seemed it might suffocate. They had to rinse its mouth and nostrils in the stream, and then they set off again. There was a new, sweetish, fresh smell in the air: the marshes must not be far away.
Half a day’s march from Nivnoye they ran into an elderly peasant woman and they decided to strike up a conversation. What about the horse? The woman looked it over with an expert eye:
“Eh, poor old beast. It’s certainly not worth much, it’s old, tired, hungry, and it looks sick to me, too. The flour’s another matter, but I can’t offer you anything because I have nothing to offer.”
She was probably no fool. She looked the two of them up and down with an equally expert eye; then, as if in response to a tacit question, she added:
“Don’t be afraid, there’s plenty of folk like you around here. Maybe even too many, but there aren’t many Germans and they aren’t very dangerous. As for the horse and the flour, I already told you, I have nothing to offer you, but I could talk to the village elder about it, if you’re in agreement.”
Mendel was in a hurry to get rid of the animal; it was of little or no use to them, and if anything, its mere presence seemed to darken Leonid’s mood, his critical spirit, and his desire to quarrel. He consulted briefly with him. No, no intermediaries, it was obvious that the woman would try to rake something off the top of whatever deal, small or large. But they were both reluctant to venture into the village.
“All right,” said Mendel. “Try to arrange a meeting with this elder, midway, in some isolated place: is that possible?” That would be possible, said the woman.
The elder showed up on time, at sunset, in a hut that the peasant woman had told them about. He was about sixty, a man of few words, white-haired, and sturdy. Yes, he, or, rather, t
he village, was solvent: they had eggs, lard, salt, and apples, but the horse wasn’t worth much.
“The horse isn’t all there is,” said Mendel. “There’s also a cart and six sacks of flour; two are here and the other four are hidden not far away, with the cart.”
“The deal isn’t clear,” said the elder: “The horse and two sacks of flour are here for us to see, but what is a cart and four sacks of flour worth, if they’re hidden in the woods, and you don’t know where, and you don’t really even know if they exist? What is a treasure worth if it’s on the moon?”
Leonid took a step forward and broke in harshly:
“They’re worth our word and our self-respect, and if you don’t . . .”
The elder looked at him without losing his temper. Mendel placed his hand on Leonid’s shoulder and intervened:
“Reasonable people can always come to an understanding. Look, the goods are close to the road, sooner or later someone will find them, they’ll take them away without paying, and it will be a loss for us and for you; and if it starts raining again the flour won’t last long. And we’re just passing through; we’re in a hurry to be on our way.”
The elder had small, cunning eyes. He turned them successively to the horse, the sacks of flour, and Mendel, and said, “It’s not good to be in a hurry and to be forced to go slowly. If you keep the horse, you’ll go as slow as it goes. If you sell it, and you don’t sell the two sacks of flour, with fifty kilos of flour each on your backs, you won’t go fast or far: at worst you’ll have to haggle with someone else. You don’t have a lot of choices.”
Mendel caught a glance from Leonid, swift but overflowing with malevolent delight: it was his revenge for his defeat at chess. The elder’s arguments were powerful, and he would have been wiser not to mention their haste. He had no option but to retrench:
