by Primo Levi
The camp was not fenced. It consisted of broken-down buildings, of one or two storeys, aligned along the four sides of a vast grassy square, probably the old parade ground. Under the burning sun of the hot Russian summer, the square was filled with clusters of people sleeping or intent on delousing themselves, mending their clothes or cooking on improvised fires; the scene was animated by more energetic groups, playing football or ninepins. An enormous wooden hut, low and square, with three entrances all on the same side, dominated the centre. On the three architraves, an uncertain hand had painted in large Cyrillic characters, three words: Mushskaya, Shenskaya, Ofitserskaya, ‘For men’, ‘For women’, ‘For officers’. It was the camp latrine, and at the same time its most salient feature. On the inside, there was only a floor with loose planks, and a hundred square holes, ten by ten, like a gigantic Rabelaisian multiplication table. There were no sub-divisions between the sections allotted to the three sexes; or if there once had been, they had disappeared.
The Russian administration took no care at all of the camp, so that one wondered if it really existed; but it must have existed, since we ate every day. In other words, it was a good administration.
We spent ten days at Slutsk. They were empty days, without encounters, without events to anchor the memory. One day we tried to leave the rectangle of barracks, and enter the plain to collect herbs to eat; but after half an hour’s walk we found ourselves as if in the middle of the sea, at the centre of the horizon, without a tree, a hill, a house to choose as goal. The immense, heroic space of Russia gave a sense of giddiness to us Italians, accustomed as we were to a landscape of mountains and hills and a plain alive with the presence of man, and weighed down our hearts with painful memories. Later we tried to cook the herbs we had collected, but we got very little from them.
In an attic, I had found a textbook on obstetrics, in German, with good coloured illustrations, in two heavy volumes; and as printed paper is a vice of mine, and I had abstained for more than a year, I passed my time reading desultorily, or else sleeping in the sun amid the wild grass.
One morning, the news spread among us, with mysterious and lightning speed, that we should have to leave Slutsk, on foot, to settle at Starye Dorogi, forty-five miles away, in a camp for Italians only. The Germans, in analogous circumstances, would have covered the walls with bilingual placards, beautifully printed, specifying the hour of departure, the prescribed equipment, the timetable, and threatening deserters with the death penalty. The Russians, in contrast, allowed the ordinance to spread by itself, and the march to the other camp to organize itself.
The news provoked something of an uproar. In ten more or less comfortable days, we had settled down at Slutsk, and above all we feared leaving the extravagant abundance of the Slutsk kitchens for some unknown miserable condition. Moreover, forty-five miles are a lot; none of us was trained for so long a march, and few possessed suitable shoes. We tried in vain to obtain more precise information from the Russian Command; all we managed to find out was that we should have to leave on the morning of 20 July, and that a real Russian Command apparently did not exist.
On the morning of 20 July we collected in the main square, like an immense band of gypsies. At the last moment, it had emerged that Slutsk and Starye Dorogi were linked by rail; however, only the women and children, as well as the usual protégés, and the no less usual fast operators were allowed to travel by train. In fact, it did not need exceptional cunning to get round the tenuous bureaucracy ruling our fate; but not many of us were aware of this at the time.
The order to leave was given at about ten o’clock, followed immediately by a counter-order. After this, numerous other false departures followed, so that we began to move only about midday, without eating.
A large motorway runs from Slutsk to Starye Dorogi, the same one connecting Warsaw to Moscow. At that time it was wholly abandoned; it consisted of two lateral carriageways, of bare earth, meant for horses, and a central carriageway, formerly asphalted but ruined by explosions and the tracks of armoured vehicles, and consequently little different from the other two. It ran across an endless plain, almost without villages, and as a result it consisted of enormously long straight stretches; between Slutsk and Starye Dorogi there was only one curve, barely perceptible.
We had set out in a rather carefree mood; the weather was magnificent, we were quite well fed and the idea of a long walk in the heart of this legendary area, the Pripet marshes, had a certain fascination in itself. But we soon changed our minds.
In no other part of Europe, I think, can you walk for ten hours, and always remain at the same place, as if in a nightmare: always with the same straight road in front of you, stretching to the horizon, always the same steppe and forests on both sides, and behind your back yet more road stretching to the other horizon, like a ship’s wake; not a village, or a house, or smoke, or a milestone to show in some way that a bit of space had been conquered; not a living creature to meet, except for flights of crows and an occasional hawk cruising idly in the wind.
After a few hours’ march, our column, initially compact, stretched for one or two miles. A Russian military cart brought up the rear drawn by two horses and driven by a hideous scowling NCO; he had lost both lips in battle, and his face was a terrifying skull from nose to chin. I think his duty was to pick up anyone exhausted; instead, he was diligently engaged in picking up the luggage gradually dropped by the wayside by people too weary to carry it any farther. For a while we deluded ourselves that he would give it back on arrival; but the first person who tried to stop and wait for the cart was greeted with shouts, cracks of the whip and inarticulate threats. This was how my two volumes of obstetrics ended, for they constituted far and away the heaviest part of my personal luggage.
By dusk, our group was now walking alone. Besides myself, there was the mild and patient Leonardo; Daniele, limping and furious from thirst and tiredness; Mr Unverdorben, with a Triestine friend of his; and, naturally, Cesare.
We stopped for a rest at the only curve breaking the relentless monotony of the road; there was a roofless hut, perhaps the only visible remains of a village swept away by the war. Behind it, we discovered a well, where we quenched our thirst greedily. We were tired, with swollen blistered feet. I had lost my archiepiscopal shoes long before, and had inherited, heaven knows from whom, a pair of cyclist’s plimsolls, as light as a feather; but they were tight, and I was forced to take them off at intervals and walk barefoot.
We held a brief council: what if he made us walk all night? It would be hardly surprising; at Katowice once, the Russians had made us unload boots from a train for twenty-four hours on end, and they had also worked with us. Why not desert and hide in the forest? We would reach Starye Dorogi the next day at our leisure, the NCO certainly had no roll-call, the night was warm, there was water and between the six of us we had something for dinner, although not very much. The hut was in ruins, but there was still a bit of roof to shelter us from the dew.
‘Excellent,’ said Cesare, ‘I’m all for it. I’m going to have roast chicken this evening.’ So we hid in the wood until the cart with the skeleton had passed by, waited for the last laggers to leave the well, and took possession of our bivouac for the night. We spread our blankets on the ground, opened our sacks, lit a fire, and began to prepare dinner, with bread, kasha of millet and a tin of peas.
‘To hell with your dinner!’ said Cesare; ‘to hell with your peas! Now get this: I want to hold a party this evening, and I’m going to have roast chicken.’
Cesare is an untameable man; I had already realized this from wandering around the markets of Katowice with him. It was useless to point out to him what a senseless idea it was searching for a chicken at night, in the middle of the Pripet marshes, without knowing Russian and without money to pay for it. It was useless to offer him a double ration of kasha to shut him up. ‘You stay here with your bloody kasha; I’m going to look for my chicken by myself, and that’s the last you’ll see of me. So good-bye
to you and the Russians and the hut; I’m off, and returning to Italy by myself. Perhaps via Japan.’
At that point I offered to accompany him. Not because of the chicken or the threats; but because I am fond of Cesare, and I enjoy watching him at work.
‘Bravo, Lapè,’ cried Cesare. Lapè is me; so Cesare baptized me long ago and so he still calls me, for the following reason. Our hair was, of course, shaved off in the Lager; at the liberation, after a year of cropping, everybody’s hair, and mine in particular, had regrown curiously smooth and soft; at that time my hair was still very short, and Cesare maintained that it reminded him of a rabbit’s skin. Now ‘rabbit’, or rather ‘rabbit skin’, in the merchant’s jargon which Cesare knew well, is called Lapè. Daniele, on the other hand, the bearded, hirsute, heavy-browed Daniele, as ardent for vengeance and justice as a prophet of old, was called Coralli; because, said Cesare, if corallines (glass beads) were to rain down, they would all be spiked in his hair.
‘Bravo, Lapè,’ he said to me; and then he explained his plan. Cesare, in fact, was a man of crazy designs, which he then pursued with much practical sense. He had not dreamt up the chicken; he had seen a well-beaten, and hence recent, path leading north from the hut. It probably led to a village; and if there was a village, there were also chickens. He went out into the open; it was now almost dark, and Cesare was right. On the brow of a barely perceptible rise in the ground, perhaps a mile and a half away, we could see a light shining between the tree trunks. So we left, stumbling over roots, pursued by swarms of voracious mosquitoes; we were carrying with us the only commodity our group had finally agreed to part with: our six plates, ordinary earthenware plates which the Russians had previously distributed as our equipment.
We walked in the dark, taking care not to lose the path, and shouting at intervals. No one replied in the village. When we were about a hundred yards away, Cesare stopped, drew in his breath and shouted: ‘Hi! Russkies! We are friends. Italiansky. Have you got a chicken to sell?’ This time the reply came: a flash in the dark, a sharp crack and the whistling of a bullet, some feet above our heads. I flattened myself on the ground, cautiously so as not to break the plates; but Cesare was furious, and stayed on his feet: ‘Blast you! We’re friends, I told you! We’re as straight as they come – see for yourselves. We only want a chicken. We’re not bandits, we’re not Deutschky; we are Italiansky!’
There were no further shots, and already we could see human profiles on the brow of the hill. We approached cautiously, Cesare first, continuing his persuasive speech, and I behind, ready to throw myself on the ground a second time.
Finally we reached the village. There were no more than five or six wooden houses grouped around a minute square, and on the square, waiting for us, stood the entire population, about thirty people, for the most part old women, then children and dogs, all visibly alarmed. From the little crowd a grand bearded old man emerged, the one who had fired; he still held the firearm in his hand.
Cesare now considered that he had done his part, the strategic part, and called on me to do my duty. ‘Now it’s your turn. What are you waiting for? Explain to him that we are Italians, that we don’t want to harm anybody and that we want to buy a chicken to roast.’
The people were considering us with diffident curiosity. They seemed satisfied that, although dressed like two convicts, we could not be dangerous. The old women had stopped cackling, and the dogs had also quietened down. The old man with the gun asked us questions which we did not understand; I knew only about a hundred words of Russian, and none of these was suited to the situation, except for ‘Italiansky’. So I repeated ‘Italiansky’ frequently, until the old man in his turn began to say ‘Italiansky’ for the benefit of the bystanders.
In the meantime Cesare, more down to earth, had taken the plates out of the sack, had placed five of them well in view on the ground as if at the market and held the sixth in his hand, tapping it on the edge with his nail to show it gave the right sound. The peasant women looked on, amused and curious. ‘Tarelki,’ said one. ‘Tarelki, da!’ I replied, delighted at learning the name of the merchandise we were offering; at which one of them stretched a hesitant hand towards the plate which Cesare was displaying. ‘Hey there, what do you take me for?’ he said, withdrawing it quickly: ‘We’re not giving them away!’ And he turned to me waspishly: Well, what was I waiting for? Why didn’t I ask for the chicken in exchange? What use were all my studies?
I was in a pickle. Russian, they say, is an Indo-European language, and chickens must have been known to our common ancestors in an epoch certainly previous to their subdivision into the various modern ethnic families. ‘His fretus’, that is to say, on these fine foundations, I tried to say ‘chicken’ and ‘bird’ in all the ways known to me, but without any visible result.
Cesare was also perplexed. Cesare, deep down, had never really accepted that Germans speak German, and Russians Russian, except out of gross malice; then, in his heart of hearts, he was persuaded that they only pretended not to understand Italian through some refinement of the same malice. Malice, or extreme and scandalous ignorance: clear barbarism. There could be no other explanation. So his perplexity rapidly changed to anger.
He grumbled and swore. Was it possible that it was so difficult to understand what a chicken is, and that we wanted it in exchange for six plates? A chicken, one of those beasts that go around pecking, scratching and saying ‘coccode-e-eh’; and rather half-heartedly, glowering and sullen, he put on a very second-rate imitation of the habits of the chicken, crouching on the ground, scraping first with one foot and then with the other and pecking here and there with his hands shaped like a wedge. Between one oath and the other, he also cried ‘coccode-e-eh’; but this rendering of the chicken’s cry is of course highly conventional; it is only to be heard in Italy and has no currency elsewhere.
So the result was negative. They goggled at us with amazement, and certainly took us for madmen. Why, for what conceivable reason, had we come from the ends of the earth to play the fool on their square? Hopping mad by now, Cesare even tried to lay an egg, pouring far-fetched insults on them all the while, so rendering the meaning of his performance even more obscure. At this improper spectacle, the housewives’ chattering rose by an octave, and turned into the buzz of a disturbed wasps’ nest.
When I noticed one of the old women approaching the old man, and speaking to him, looking nervously at us meanwhile, I realized that the situation was getting out of hand. I made Cesare get out of his unnatural posture, calmed him and approached the man together with him. ‘Excuse me,’ I said to the man and led him near a window, where a lamp lit up a piece of ground quite well. Here, painfully aware of the many suspicious glances, I drew a chicken on the ground, complete in all its attributes, including an egg behind it, to avoid all ambiguity.
Then I got up and said: ‘You – plates. We – eat.’
A brief consultation followed; then an old woman sprang out of the hut, her eyes alight with joy and comprehension; she stepped forward a couple of paces, and in a shrill voice pronounced: ‘Kura! Kuritsa!’
She was very proud and happy that she had been the one to resolve the enigma. From all sides laughter and applause broke out and voices cried ‘Kuritsa, Kuritsa!’; and we also clapped our hands, caught up in the game and in the general enthusiasm. The old woman curtsied, like an actress at the end of her performance; she disappeared and re-emerged after a few minutes holding a hen already plucked. She dangled it comically under Cesare’s nose, as a double check; and when she saw that he reacted positively, she loosened her hold, collected the plates and carried them off.
Cesare, who understood these matters because he had once had a stall at Porta Portese market, assured me that the ‘kurizetta’, the little hen, was fat enough, and worth our six plates. We took it back to the hut, woke up our companions who had already fallen asleep, relit the fire, cooked the chicken and ate it with our fingers because we no longer had any plates.
11
Old Roads
The hen, and the night spent in the open, were as good as a medicine for us. After a sound sleep, which wholly revived us, although we had slept on the bare ground, we woke up in the morning in excellent humour and health. We were contented, because of the sun, because we felt free, because of the good smell coming from the earth and also a little because a couple of miles away there were people not hostile to us, in fact cheerful and ready to laugh; it was true that they had shot at us, but they had afterwards welcomed us and had even sold us a chicken. We were contented because that day (we did not know about the next; but what happens tomorrow is not always important) we could do things which we had not done for too long; drink water from a well, stretch out in the sun in the middle of tall robust grass, smell the summer air, light a fire and cook, go into the woods in search of strawberries and mushrooms, smoke a cigarette looking at the high sky swept clean by the wind.
We could do these things and we did them, with puerile joy. But our resources were coming to an end; we could not live on strawberries and mushrooms, and none of us (not even Cesare, a townsman and Roman citizen ‘since Nero’s time’) was morally and technically equipped for a precarious life of vagabondage and rural thefts. The choice was clear: either to rejoin at once the ranks of civilization, or to go hungry. Twenty miles of a dizzily straight road, however, still separated us from civilization, represented by the mysterious camp of Starye Dorogi. If we managed to cover them in one go, perhaps we should arrive in time for the evening meal; otherwise, we should have to camp once more on the road, in liberty, but on an empty stomach.
A rapid census of our possessions was carried out. They were not much; eight rubles in all. It was difficult to calculate their purchasing power, at that moment and in that place; our previous monetary experiences with the Russians had been incoherent and absurd. Some of them accepted money from any country without difficulty, even German or Polish money; others were suspicious, afraid of being cheated, and only accepted exchanges in kind or in metal coinage. Indeed the most improbable coinage was circulating: coins from Tsarist times, brought out of ancestral hiding places; guineas, Scandinavian crowns, even old coins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In contrast, at Zhmerinka we had seen the walls of one of the station latrines studded with German marks, meticulously stuck to the wall one by one with an unmentionable material.
