by Primo Levi
But for us, almost wholly deprived of meat for eighteen months, one horse more or less could make all the difference. The person to begin the hunt was, naturally, the Velletrano; he came to wake us one morning, covered in blood from head to foot, still clasping the primordial tool he had used, a splinter of an artillery shell tied with leather thongs to a forked stick.
From the investigation we carried out (because the Velletrano was not very good at explaining himself in words) it emerged that he had given the coup de grâce to a horse probably already on its last legs; the poor animal had a highly equivocal look, its stomach so swollen that it sounded like a drum, and froth on its mouth; it must have been kicking all night, as it lay on its side in its death agony, because with its hooves it had dug two deep brown semicircles out of the grass. But we ate it all the same.
After this beginning, several pairs of specialized hunter-knackers were formed, who were no longer satisfied with felling sick or stray horses, but chose the fattest ones, enticed them out of the herd and then killed them in the wood. They preferred to work in the first light of dawn; one covered the animal’s eyes with a cloth, while the other dealt the (not always) mortal blow on its neck.
It was a period of absurd abundance; there was horsemeat for everybody, without stint, gratis; the maximum the hunters would ask for a dead horse was two or three rations of tobacco. In every corner of the wood, and when it was raining even in the corridors and under the staircases in the Red House, men and women were to be seen busily cooking enormous horse steaks with mushrooms; it was thanks to these that we survivors of Auschwitz did not need many more months to regain our strength.
The Russians of the Command did not pay the slightest attention even to this plundering. Only once did they intervene, and only once did they inflict a punishment: towards the end of the migration, when horsemeat was already growing scarce and the price was beginning to rise, one of the ex-jailbirds had the impudence to open a real slaughterhouse, in one of the many garrets of the Red House. The Russians frowned on this enterprise, though it was not clear whether on hygienic or moral grounds; the culprit was publicly censured, declared a ‘chort (devil), parazìt, spyekulànt’ and shut up in a cell.
It was not a very severe punishment: in the cell, for obscure reasons – perhaps through a bureaucratic atavism which looked back to a time when prisoners must long have been three to a cell – one was given three rations of food a day. It made no difference whether the prisoners were nine, or one, or none; the rations were always three. So the illegal butcher left his cell at the end of his punishment, after ten days of overeating, as fat as a pig and full of joie de vivre.
13
Holidays
As always happens, the end of our hunger laid bare and perceptible in us a much deeper hunger. Not only desire for our homes, which in a sense was discounted and projected into the future; but a more immediate and urgent need for human contacts, for mental and physical work, for novelty and variety.
Life at Starye Dorogi, which would have been little less than perfect if it had been felt to be a holiday interlude in a workaday existence, began to weigh on us because of the very idleness it forced upon us. In these conditions, several people left to seek life and adventures elsewhere. It would be inaccurate to speak of a flight, because the camp was not fenced or guarded, and the Russians did not count us, or did not count us carefully; quite simply, they said good-bye to their friends and took off. They got what they were searching for: they saw countries and peoples, they went far afield, some as far as Odessa or Moscow, others as far as the frontiers; they experienced the lock-ups of isolated villages, the biblical hospitality of the peasants, vague love-affairs, stupid interrogations by duty-bound police, more hunger and solitude. Almost all returned to Starye Dorogi, because, even if there was not a trace of barbed wire around the Red House, when they tried to force the legendary frontier towards the west they found it severely barred.
They returned, and resigned themselves to our regime of limbo. The days of the Nordic summer were very long; it was already light at three in the morning, and the dusk dragged on tirelessly until nine or ten in the evening. The excursions into the woods, meals, sleep, risky bathes in the marshes, ever-repeated conversations, plans for the future, were not enough to shorten the time of our expectation, or to lighten its weight, which increased day by day.
We tried to approach the Russians, but with little success. The most sophisticated ones (who spoke German or English) acted in a courteous but diffident manner towards us, and often brusquely interrupted a conversation, as if they felt guilty or spied on. With the most simple-minded ones, the seventeen-year-old soldiers of the Command and the peasants of the neighbourhood, the difficulties of language reduced us to stunted and primordial relationships.
It is six in the morning, but the light of day has long since banished sleep. I am walking towards a thicket where there is a stream, with a pot of potatoes organized by Cesare; it is our favourite place for cooking operations because there is water and wood, and today it is my turn to wash the plates and cook. I light a fire between three stones; and to my surprise, I see a Russian not far away, small but sturdy, with thick Asiatic features, intent on preparations similar to mine. He has no matches; he approaches me, and as far as I can judge is asking me for a light. He is stripped to the waist, wearing only his army trousers, and his air is not very reassuring. He wears a bayonet at his waist.
I offer him a lighted stick; the Russian takes it, but stands there looking at me with suspicious curiosity. Is he thinking that my potatoes are stolen? Or is he meditating whether to take them away from me? Or has he mistaken me for someone he does not like?
No, something else is worrying him. He has realized that I do not speak Russian, and this vexes him. The fact that a man, adult and normal, cannot speak Russian, which means he cannot speak, seems to him to smack of insolent arrogance, as if I had flatly refused to reply to him. He is not ill-intentioned, in fact, he is prepared to give me a hand, to raise me from my guilty condition of ignorance; Russian is so easy, everybody speaks it, even children who have not yet started to walk. He sits beside me; I continue to be anxious for my potatoes, and watch him carefully; but, to judge by his appearance, he has nothing else on his mind except a desire to help me recover lost time. He does not understand, he does not admit my attitude of refusal; he wants to teach me his tongue.
Alas, as a teacher he is not worth much; he lacks method and patience, and, even worse, works on the mistaken assumption that I can follow his explanations and comments. So long as it is simply a question of terms, everything goes quite well, and in fact I quite enjoy the game. He points to a potato, and says: ‘Kartòfel’; then he grips my shoulder with his mighty paw, pushes his index finger in my face, listens intently like a deaf man and waits. I repeat: ‘Kartòfel.’ He puts on a disgusted expression; my pronunciation is wrong: I do not even know how to pronounce! He tries two or three times more, then he gets bored and tries a new word. ‘Ogón,’ he says, pointing to the fire; that is better, apparently my repetition satisfies him. He looks around searching for other pedagogic objects, then stares at me with intensity, slowly rising to his feet as he does so, as if he wished to hypnotize me; then, in a flash, he whips his bayonet out of its scabbard and flourishes it in the air.
I jump to my feet and make off, towards the Red House: too bad about the potatoes. But after a few steps I hear an ogrish laugh echoing behind my back: his joke has been successful.
‘Britva,’ he says to me, making the blade flash in the sun; and I repeat the word, feeling somewhat uneasy. With a slash worthy of a paladin, he slices a branch clean off a tree; he shows it to me, and says: ‘Dèrevo.’ I repeat: ‘Dèrevo.’
‘Ya russky soldàt.’ I repeat, as best I can: ‘Ya russky soldàt.’ Another laugh, which seems to me contemptuous: he is a Russian soldier, I am not, and that makes quite a difference. He explains this to me in a confused manner, with a torrent of words, pointing first at my ches
t, and then at his, and nodding yes and no with his head. Clearly he regards me as a worthless pupil, a desperate case of obtuseness; to my relief, he returns to his fire and abandons me to my barbarism.
On another day, but at the same time and in the same place, I come across an unaccustomed spectacle. A group of Italians surround a boyish Russian sailor, tall, with rapid agile movements. He is ‘narrating’ an episode of war; and because he knows that his language is not understood, he expresses himself as best he can, in a manner which for him is nearly as spontaneous as, if not more so than, words: he expresses himself with all his muscles, with the precocious furrows on his face, with flashing eyes and teeth, with leaps and gestures; and from this is born a pas seul, full of fascination and force.
It is night, ‘noch’: palms down, he moves his hands slowly around him. Everything is silent: he pronounces a long ‘ssh’ with his index finger parallel to his nose. He narrows his eyes and points to the horizon: there, far away, are the Germans, ‘niemtzy’. How many? Five, he indicates with his fingers; ‘finef’, he adds in Yiddish for greater clarity. With his hand he digs a small round hole in the sand, and lays five twigs flat in it, these are the Germans; then a sixth twig pointing sideways, the ‘mashina’, the machine-gun. What are the Germans doing? Here his eyes light up with savage mirth: ‘spats’, they are sleeping (and for a moment he himself snores); they are sleeping, the fools, and they do not know what is coming to them.
What did he do? This is what he did: he approached, cautiously, against the wind, like a leopard. Then, with a leap, he jumped into the nest pulling out his knife; and now he repeats his former actions, wholly lost in a dramatic ecstasy. The ambush, and the sudden atrocious scuffle, are repeated before our eyes; the man, his face transfigured by a tense sinister grin, turns into a whirlwind; he jumps forwards and backwards, striking in front of him, to his side, high up and low down, in an explosion of deadly energy; but it is a lucid fury, his weapon (which exists, a long knife which he has taken out of his boot) penetrates, slashes, rips open with ferocity, but at the same time with tremendous skill, a foot away from our faces.
Suddenly the sailor stops, slowly rises; his knife drops from his hand; he is panting, his eyes grow vacuous. He looks at the ground, as if amazed not to see the corpses and blood there; he looks around bewildered, emptied; he becomes aware of us, and gives us a childish timid smile. ‘Koniechno,’ he says: it is over; he walks slowly away.
Quite different, and just as mysterious then as it seems now, was the case of the Lieutenant. The Lieutenant (we were never able to learn his name, perhaps not by chance) was a young lean sallow Russian, perpetually frowning. He spoke Italian perfectly, with so slight a Russian accent that it could be mistaken for some Italian dialectal cadence; but, in contrast to all the other Russians of the Command, he showed little cordiality or sympathy towards us. He was the only person we were able to question. How was it he spoke Italian? Why was he with us? Why did they keep us in Russia four months after the end of the war? Were we hostages? Had we been forgotten? Why could we not write to Italy? When would we return?… But the Lieutenant replied to all these questions, which weighed as heavy as lead, in a curt, elusive manner, showing a self-confidence and authority which ill accorded with his not very elevated rank. We noticed that even his superiors treated him with a strange deference, as if they were afraid of him.
He kept the same surly aloofness from the Russians as from us. He never smiled, he did not drink, he would not accept invitations, or cigarettes; he spoke little, with cautious words which he seemed to weigh one by one. At his first appearances, we had naturally thought of him as our interpreter and delegate at the Russian Command, but we soon saw that his duties (if he had any, and if his behaviour was not merely a complicated manner of boosting his own importance) must have been different, and we preferred to stay silent in his presence. From a few reticent remarks of his we realized that he had a good knowledge of the topography of Turin and Milan. Had he been to Italy? ‘No,’ he replied curtly, and gave no other explanations.
Public health was excellent, and the patients at the surgery were few and always the same, with boils, the usual imaginary illnesses, a little scabies, a touch of colitis. One day a woman came, complaining of vague disturbances: nausea, backache, giddiness, attacks of sweating. Leonardo examined her; she had bruises almost everywhere, but told us not to pay attention to them, she had fallen down the stairs. A detailed diagnosis was not very easy with so few instruments available, but, by a process of elimination and by deduction from the numerous precedents among our women, Leonardo declared to his patient that she was probably in her third month of pregnancy. The woman showed no joy, anguish, surprise or indignation; she accepted the diagnosis, thanked him, but did not go away. She went back to sit on the bench in the corridor, silent and tranquil, as if she were waiting for someone.
She was a small, dark-haired girl, about twenty-five years old, with a homely air, submissive and absent; her face, which was not very attractive, nor very expressive, did not seem new to me, nor did her way of speaking, with gentle Tuscan inflections.
I had certainly met her somewhere, but not at Starye Dorogi. I felt an evanescent sensation of an overlap, of a transposition, of a marked inversion of relationships, which however I was unable to define. In a vague but insistent manner, I linked this feminine image to a knot of intense feelings: of a humble and distant admiration, of gratitude, frustration, fear, even of abstract desire, but above all of a deep and indeterminate anguish.
As she continued to sit on the bench, quiet and still, with no signs of impatience, I asked her if she wanted something, if she still had need of us; surgery was over, there were no other patients, it was time to close. ‘No, no,’ she replied; ‘I don’t need anything. I shall go now.’
Flora! The nebulous memory abruptly took shape, coagulated into a precise, definite picture, rich in retrospective details of time and place, colours, states of mind, atmosphere, smells. She was Flora: the Italian from the Buna cellars, the woman from the Lager, the object of Alberto’s and my dreams for over a month, unwitting symbol of a lost and by then unhoped-for liberty. Flora, last seen only a year ago, and it seemed a century.
Flora was a small-time prostitute, who had ended in Germany with the Todt Organization. She did not know German and had learnt no trade, so she had been set to sweep the floors of the Buna factory. She swept all day, wearily, exchanging not a word with anyone, never raising her eyes from her broom and her endless work. Nobody seemed to bother about her, while for her part she hardly climbed to the upper floors, almost as if she feared the light of day; she swept the cellars interminably, from top to bottom, and then began again, like a sleepwalker.
She was the only woman we had seen for months, and she spoke our language, but we Häftlinge were forbidden to talk to her. To Alberto and myself she seemed beautiful, mysterious, incorporeal. Despite the prohibition, which in a sense multiplied the enchantment of our meetings by adding to them the pungent flavour of the illicit, we exchanged a few furtive phrases with Flora; we declared ourselves Italians, and asked her for bread. We asked her this reluctantly, only too aware that we were demeaning ourselves and the quality of this delicate human contact; but hunger, which rarely compromises, obliged us not to waste the occasion.
Flora often brought us bread, and gave it to us with a bewildered air, in the dark corners of the basement, sniffing back her tears. She was sorry for us, and would have liked to help us in other ways as well, but did not know how to and was afraid. Afraid of everything, like a defenceless animal; perhaps even of us, not directly, but in so far as we formed part of that foreign and incomprehensible world which had torn her from her country, had forced a broom into her hand and had relegated her beneath the earth, to sweep floors already swept a hundred times.
For our part, we were upset, grateful and full of shame. We suddenly became aware of our miserable appearance and suffered because of it. Alberto, who used to wander around all day with hi
s eyes fixed to the ground like a bloodhound, and so found the most curious oddments, picked up a comb somewhere, and solemnly gave it to Flora, who still possessed her hair; after that we felt tied to her by a gentle unsullied tie, and we dreamt of her at night. Consequently we felt acute discomfort, an absurd and impotent mixture of jealousy and disillusionment, when we were forced by the evidence to realize, to admit to ourselves, that Flora had meetings with other men. Where and how and with whom? In the least attractive place and manner; not far away, in the hay, in a clandestine warren organized in a basement by a co-operative of German and Polish Kapos. Little was needed: a wink, an imperious nod of the head, and Flora laid down her broom and docilely followed the man of the moment. After a few minutes she returned alone; she adjusted her clothes and began to sweep again without looking us in the face. After this squalid discovery, Flora’s bread was bitter to our taste, not that this stopped us from accepting and eating it.
