Toward the middle of August, however, common ground with the Russians was found. Despite trade secrecy, the whole camp learned that the “Romanians,” with the consent and support of the authorities, were organizing a revue; the rehearsals took place in the sloping hall, whose doors had been repaired as well as possible, and were guarded by pickets who kept all outsiders from entering. Among the numbers in the revue was a heel-and-toe dance; the performer, a very conscientious sailor, practiced every night, with a small circle of experts and consultants. Now, this exercise is by nature noisy: the Lieutenant passed that way, heard the rhythmic din, forced his way through the blockade with a clear abuse of power, and entered. He watched two or three sessions, to the discomfort of the bystanders, without emerging from his habitual reserve and without softening his cryptic scowl; then, unexpectedly, he made known to the organizing committee that in his free time he was a passionate dance fan, that in fact he had long wanted to learn heel-and-toe dancing, and that the dancer was therefore invited, or rather ordered, to give him a series of lessons.
The spectacle of these lessons interested me so much that I found a way of watching them, slipping through the strange labyrinths of the Red House and flattening myself in a dark corner. The Lieutenant was the best student that can be imagined: serious, eager, tenacious, and physically well endowed. He danced in his uniform, with his boots, for exactly an hour a day, without granting a moment’s rest to the teacher or to himself. He made rapid progress.
When the revue was performed, a week later, the heel-and-toe number was a surprise for everyone. Teacher and student danced, faultlessly, in perfect step and perfect time: the teacher, winking and smiling, wearing a fantastic Gypsy costume fashioned by the women; the Lieutenant, his nose in the air and his eyes fixed on the ground, gloomily, as if he were performing a sacrificial rite. In uniform, naturally, and with the medals on his chest and the holster at his side dancing with him.
They were applauded; various other, not very original numbers were likewise applauded (some Neapolitan songs from the classic repertory; “The Firemen of Viggiù”; a sketch in which a lover wins the heart of the girl with a bouquet not of flowers but of ryba, our stinking daily fish; the “Montanara” sung by a chorus, with Signor Unverdorben the chorus master). But two less ordinary numbers had enthusiastic, and well-deserved, success.
A large fat character, masked, padded, and bundled, like Michelin tires’ famous Bibendum, stumbled onto the stage, legs wide apart. He greeted the audience like an athlete, hands clasped above his head; meanwhile, with great effort, two stagehands rolled in next to him an enormous piece of equipment consisting of a bar and two wheels, like those used by weight lifters.
He bent over and grabbed the bar, straining all his muscles: nothing, the bar didn’t move. Then he took off his coat, folded it carefully, placed it on the ground, and prepared for a new attempt. Since the weight didn’t leave the ground this time, either, he took off a second coat, placing it beside the first; and so on through various coats, civilian and military, raincoats, cassocks, overcoats. The athlete diminished in volume before your eyes, the stage filled with garments, and the weight seemed to have put down roots.
When the coats were gone, he began to take off jackets of all kinds (among them a striped Häftling jacket, in homage to our minority), then an abundance of shirts, and every time, after every item that he put down, he tried with punctilious solemnity to lift the contraption, and gave it up without the least sign of impatience or surprise. Then, while he was taking off the fourth or fifth shirt, he stopped suddenly. He examined the shirt attentively, first at arm’s length, then more closely; he searched in the collar and the seams with agile apelike movements and, lo and behold, extracted with thumb and index finger an imaginary louse. He looked at it with eyes dilated in horror, placed it delicately on the floor, drew a chalk circle around it, with one hand snatched the bar, which for the occasion had become light as a reed, off the floor, and squashed the louse with a sharp, precise blow.
Then, after this very rapid digression, he returned to taking off shirts, pants, socks, and girdles with gravity and composure, trying in vain to lift the weight. At the end, he stood in his underwear amid a mountain of items of clothing: he took off the mask, and the audience recognized in him the likable and very popular cook Gridacucco, small, thin, hopping, and busy, and fittingly nicknamed Scannagrillo (Cricket Killer) by Cesare. The applause was deafening: Scannagrillo looked around bewildered, then, as if suddenly overcome by stage fright, he picked up the weight, which probably was made of cardboard, stuck it under his arm, and raced off.
The other great success was the song “The Three-Cornered Hat.” This is a song absolutely without sense, which consists of a single quatrain repeated over and over (“My hat has three corners / My hat it has three corners / If it didn’t have three corners / It wouldn’t be my hat”) and sung to a tune so trite and worn by tradition that its origin is unknown. It is characterized by the fact that, at every repetition, one word of the quatrain is silent, replaced by a gesture: the hand concave over the head for “hat,” the fist pounding the chest for “my,” the fingers raised upward to form a cone shape, for “corners,” and so on, until, with all the words eliminated, the stanza is reduced to a mutilated stutter of articles and conjunctions that can’t be expressed by signs, or, in another version, to total silence punctuated by rhythmic gestures.
In the heterogeneous group of “Romanians” there must have been someone who had theater in his blood; in their interpretation, this childish oddity became a sinister, obscurely allegorical pantomime, full of symbolic and disquieting resonance.
A small orchestra, whose instruments had been provided by the Russians, started the tired old tune on low, muted notes. Pitching slowly to the rhythm, three spectral characters came onstage: they were enveloped in black cloaks, with black hoods, and from the hoods emerged faces of a decrepit and corpse-like pallor, marked by deep, livid wrinkles. They entered with unsteady dance steps, holding in their hands three long, spent wax tapers. Still following the rhythm, they reached the center of the stage and bowed to the audience with senile difficulty, bending slowly over arthritic hips, in short weary jerks; to bow and straighten again took two good minutes, which were anguishing for the spectators. Once they had painfully regained an erect posture, the orchestra was silent, and the three phantoms began to sing the silly verses, in tremulous, hoarse voices. They sang, and at every repetition, as the silences accumulated, filled by their shaky gestures, it seemed that life, along with voice, was vanishing from them. Punctuated by the hypnotic pulse of a single, muted drum, the paralysis proceeded slowly and inevitably. The final repeat, with the orchestra, the singers, and the audience in absolute silence, was a harrowing death agony, a mortal spasm.
When the song was over, the orchestra started up again lugubriously: the three figures, with an extreme effort and trembling in every limb, repeated their bow. They managed, incredibly, to straighten up again, and, with the quivering tapers, with terrible, macabre hesitations, but always following the rhythm, disappeared forever into the wings.
The “Three-Cornered Hat” number took your breath away, and was greeted every night with a silence more eloquent than applause. Why? Perhaps because we could perceive, behind the grotesque display, the heavy breath of a collective dream, the dream that emanates from exile and idleness, when work and suffering cease, and nothing places a barrier between man and himself; perhaps because in it we could glimpse the impotence and nullity of our life and of life, and the crooked, hunchbacked profile of the monsters generated by the sleep of reason.
An allegorical play that was organized later was more innocuous, in fact childish and jumbled. It was obvious from the title, The Shipwreck of the Inert; the inert were us, the Italians who had got lost on the way home, and become accustomed to an existence of inertia and boredom; the desert island was Starye Doroghi; and the cannibals were obviously them, the good Russians of the Command. Cannibals down to the last detail: they appeared onstage naked and tattooed, they blathered in a primitive and unintelligible dialect, they fed on raw, bloody human flesh. Their chief lived in a grass hut, he had as a footstool a white slave permanently on all fours, and hanging on his chest was a large alarm clock, which he consulted not for the time but for signs to guide his decisions on governing. The Comrade Colonel in charge of our camp must have been a man of spirit, or extremely tolerant, or foolish, to have authorized such an acerbic caricature of his person and his job: or perhaps it was yet again a matter of the benevolent age-old Russian carelessness, Oblomovian negligence, that emerged at all levels at that happy moment of their history.
In fact, we were struck at least once by the suspicion that the Russians of the Command had not fully digested the satire, or regretted it. After the première of The Shipwreck, an uproar broke out in the Red House in the middle of the night: shouts throughout the dormitories, doors kicked in, commands in Russian, Italian, and bad German. We who came from Katowice, and had witnessed a similar pandemonium, were only half frightened; the others lost their heads (especially the “Romanians,” who were responsible for the script), the rumor of a Russian reprisal immediately spread, and the more apprehensive were already thinking of Siberia.
The Russians, through the intermediary of the Lieutenant, who in the circumstances seemed more wretched and contemptuous than usual, made us all get up and dress in a hurry, and lined us up in one of the mazelike corridors of the building. Half an hour passed, an hour, and nothing happened; the line, in which I occupied one of the last places, couldn’t understand where the head was, and didn’t advance a step. In addition to the rumor of reprisal for The Shipwreck, the wildest hypotheses ran from mouth to mouth: the Russians had decided to look for Fascists; they were looking for the two girls in the woods; they were going to examine us for gonorrhea; they were recruiting people to work on the collectives; they were looking for specialists, like the Germans. Then an Italian came by, all cheerful. He said, “They’re giving us money!” and he waved a bunch of rubles. No one believed him; but a second passed, then a third, and they all confirmed the news. The affair was never well understood (but anyway, who ever understood fully why we were in Starye Doroghi, and what we were doing there?); according to the most knowledgeable interpretation, we were to be considered equivalent to prisoners of war, by at least some Soviet officers, and so were due some recompense for days devoted to work. But on what principle these days were calculated (almost none of us had ever worked for the Russians, in Starye Doroghi or before); why even the children should be remunerated; and, principally, why the ceremony should happen so tumultuously between two and six in the morning—all this is fated to remain obscure.
The Russians distributed compensation varying from thirty to eighty rubles a person, according to inscrutable or random criteria. The sum was not enormous, but it gave pleasure to everyone; it was equivalent to several days of extra food. We returned to bed at dawn, commenting variously on the event; and no one understood that it was a lucky omen, a prelude to returning home.
But from that day on, even without any official announcement, the signs multiplied. Tenuous, ill-defined, timid signs, but enough to promote the sensation that something was finally moving, something was about to happen. A platoon of young Russian soldiers arrived, beardless and out of place; they told us that they had come from Austria, and were supposed to leave again soon, escorting a convoy of foreigners; but they didn’t know where. After our months of futile begging, the Command distributed shoes to all those who had need of them. Finally, the Lieutenant disappeared, as if taken up to heaven.
It was all extremely vague and not a little ambiguous. Even given that a departure was imminent, who could assure us that it would be to our own country, and not a new transfer somewhere or other? The long experience we had gained by now of the Russians’ methods counseled us to temper our hope with a healthy quotient of doubt. The season, too, contributed to our anxiety: in the first ten days of September, the sun and the sky darkened, the air became cold and damp, and the first rains fell, reminding us of the precariousness of our situation.
Road, meadows, and fields turned into a desolate swamp. Water leaked copiously through the roof of the Red House, dripping pitilessly at night on our bunks; more water came in through the windows, which had no glass. None of us had warm clothing. In the village the peasants could be seen returning from the woods with cartloads of sticks and logs; others patched up their houses, repaired the straw roofs; all, even the women, wore boots. The wind carried from the houses a new, alarming odor: the bitter smoke of damp wood burning, the odor of the coming winter. Another winter, the third: and what a winter!
But the announcement came, finally: the announcement of return, of salvation, of the conclusion of our long wanderings. It came in two new and unusual ways, from two directions, and was convincing and open and dissipated every anxiety. It came in the theater and through the theater, and it came along the muddy road, brought by a strange and distinguished messenger.
It was night, it was raining, and in the crowded sloping hall (what else could one do in the evening, before slipping under the damp blankets?) The Shipwreck of the Inert was playing, perhaps for the ninth or tenth time. This Shipwreck was a shapeless but inventive mishmash, vivid because of the witty, good-humored allusions to our everyday life; we had all been present at all its performances, and now we knew it mostly by heart, and at every repeat we laughed less at the scene in which a Cantarella even more savage than the original fashioned an enormous tin pot commissioned by the man-eating Russians, who intended to cook in it the chieftains of the inert; and the final scene, in which the ship arrived, was more and more heart-wrenching.
Because there was, as obviously there should be, a scene in which a sail appeared on the horizon, and all the shipwrecked men and women, laughing and crying, rushed to the inhospitable beach. Now, just as the oldest among them, white-haired and bent by the interminable wait, extended one finger toward the sea and shouted, “A ship!” and while all of us, with a lump in our throat, prepared for the happy ending of the last scene, then to retire yet again into our dens, we heard a sudden crash, and the cannibal chieftain, a true deus ex machina, plummeted upright onto the stage, as if he had fallen from the sky. He tore the alarm clock from his neck, the ring from his nose, the helmet of feathers from his head, and shouted in a thunderous voice, “Tomorrow we depart!”
We were taken by surprise, and at first we didn’t understand. Might it be a joke? But the savage pressed on: “I’m telling the truth, it’s not the play, this is it! The telegram arrived, tomorrow we’re all going home!” This time it was we Italians, actors, spectators, and extras, who instantly overwhelmed the frightened Russians—they understood nothing in that scene that wasn’t in the script. We came outside in a disorderly fashion, and at first there was a breathless overlapping of questions without answers; but then we saw the Colonel, amid a circle of Italians, nodding yes, and then we knew that the time had come. We lit fires in the woods and no one slept; we passed the rest of the night singing and dancing, telling one another our past adventures and recalling our lost companions: since mankind is not permitted to experience joys untarnished.
The next morning, while the Red House was buzzing and teeming, like a beehive preparing for the swarm, we saw a small automobile coming along the road. Very few cars passed, so the fact roused our interest, especially since it wasn’t a military vehicle. It slowed in front of the camp, swerved, and turned in, jolting over the rough ground in front of the strange façade. Then we saw that it was a vehicle familiar to all of us, a Fiat 500A, a rusty, beat-up Topolino, with its suspension pitifully misshapen.
It stopped in front of the entrance and was immediately surrounded by a crowd of the curious. An extraordinary figure emerged from it, with great effort, as if he would never finish getting out. He was a very tall, corpulent, ruddy man, in a uniform we had never seen before: a Soviet general, a high-ranking general, a field marshal. When he was completely out of the door, the tiny auto body rose a good few inches, and the suspension seemed to breathe. The man was literally larger than the car, and it was incomprehensible how he could have got into it. His dimensions were further enlarged and accentuated; he took a black object out of the car and unfolded it. It was a cloak that hung to the ground from two long rigid epaulets, of wood; with a casual gesture, attesting to a great familiarity with that equipment, he whirled it around and unfolded it over his back, so that his outline, which had been rounded, became angular. Seen from behind, the man was a monumental black rectangle of one meter by two, who advanced toward the vault of the Red House with majestic symmetry, between two lines of puzzled people whom he towered over by an entire head. How would he get through the door, wide as he was? But he folded back the two epaulets, like wings, and entered.
That heavenly messenger, who traveled alone through the mud in an ancient, disintegrating small car, was Marshal Timoshenko in person, Semyon Konstantinovich Timoshenko, the hero of the Bolshevik Revolution, of Karelia and Stalingrad. After his welcome by the local Russians, which for that matter was singularly sober and lasted only a few minutes, he came out of the building again and chatted informally with us Italians, like the rough Kutuzov in War and Peace, on the field, amid the pots of fish cooking and laundry hung out to dry. He spoke Romanian fluently with the Romanians (since he was, rather is, originally from Bessarabia), and even knew a little Italian. The damp wind stirred his gray locks, which contrasted with his ruddy, tanned complexion, the complexion of a soldier, and of a hearty eater and drinker. He told us that yes, it was really true: we would be leaving soon, very soon; “war over, everybody home”; the escort was ready, also the provisions for the journey, the papers were in order. In a few days the train would be waiting for us in the station in Starye Doroghi.