12
July–August 1945
They had never traveled like this before: not on foot but in a freight car hooked up to a train; not in the cold, not exposed to rifle fire, not starving, not scattered. Not legal, not yet, and who knows when they would be, but still there was a sign on the side of the car with the route: Munich–Innsbruck–Brenner–Verona: Ludwig had thought of everything. “Leave the car as little as you can,” said Gedale. “The less we’re seen the better, and the less likely it is that somebody decides to check on us.”
But nobody checked on them; on that entire line, and on most of Europe’s rail lines, there was still far too much to be done: tracks to be repaired, rubble to be removed, signals to be restored. The train traveled slowly, almost only by night; by day it sat interminably on sidings, roasting in the sun, to yield the right-of-way to other trains that took precedence. Few were passenger trains: they were freight trains that carried human beings, but packed in like freight; the hundreds of thousands of Italians, women and men, soldiers and civilians, paid workers and slaves, who had labored in the factories and camps of the ravaged Third Reich. Mixed in among them, less noisy, less numerous, eager not to be noticed, other passengers traveled, Germans who were swarming out of occupied Germany in order to escape Allied justice: SS soldiers, Gestapo, and Party officials. Paradoxically, for them, as for the Jews in transit, Italy was the place of least resistance, the best jumping-off point for more hospitable countries: South America, Syria, Egypt. Whether traveling openly or in disguise, with identity documents or without, this variegated tide was pushing south, toward the Brenner Pass: the Brenner Pass had become the narrow neck of a vast funnel. Through the Brenner Pass you could reach Italy, a land with a mild climate and a notoriously open illegality; a friendly-mafioso country whose dual reputation had reached all the way to Norway and Ukraine and the sealed ghettos of Eastern Europe; a place of ignored prohibitions and anarchic tolerance, where every foreigner is welcomed like a brother.
When the train was halted in a station, they kept the doors closed, but they opened them when the train was in motion and during the frequent stops in the open countryside. Sitting on the floor, legs dangling, Mendel watched the landscape spread out solemnly before him: the fertile fields, the lakes, the forests, the farms, and the houses of the Upper Palatinate and then of Bavaria. Neither he nor any of his companions had ever lived in such a rich and civilized land. Behind them, as if dotted by their countless footsteps, the trail of their journey stretched out, endless, as if in a troubled dream, through marshes, fords, forests full of ambushes, snow, rivers, and deaths suffered and inflicted. He felt weary and alien. Alone now: without women, without a destination, without a homeland. Without friends? No, he couldn’t say that; his companions remained, and they always would remain: they filled his emptiness. He didn’t care where the train was taking him; he’d done his job, he’d performed his duty, not easily, not always willingly, but he’d done it. It was over, finished. The war had ended, and what is a gunner to do in peacetime? What does he know how to do? Be a watchmaker? Who could say? Shooting makes your fingers hard, insensitive, and your eyes get accustomed to looking into the distance, through the sights. No call reached him from the promised land, perhaps even there he’d have to walk and fight. Fine, it’s my fate, I accept it, but it doesn’t warm my heart. It’s a duty, and you perform it, like the time I killed the Ukrainian from the auxiliary police. Duty is not a treasure. Neither is the future. But these people are, they are my treasure, I still have them. All of them: with their crudeness and their defects, even those who have offended me, even those whom I have offended. And the women, too, Sissl whom I stupidly abandoned, Line who knows what she wants, who wants everyone, and who left me; and Bella who is boring and slow, and Rokhele the White with her impudent belly, growing like a fruit.
He looked to either side and behind him. There was Pyotr, as candid as an infant, terrible in battle, crazy like any self-respecting Russian. Would you give your life for Pyotr? Certainly, I’d give my life, without hesitation: as someone who’s making a good trade wouldn’t hesitate. He’s better suited to being on the face of the earth than I am. He’s coming to Italy with us, as cheerful and trusting as a child climbing onto a merry-go-round. He chose to fight with us and for us like the knights of days gone by, because he is generous, because he believes in the same Christ we don’t believe in; and yet the patriarch must have told him, too, that we were the ones who nailed Him to the cross.
There was Gedale. It’s strange that he’s called Gedale: the Gedaliah of the Bible was a man of no consequence. Nebuchadnezzar the Chaldaean appointed him governor of Judaea, of the few Jews left in Judaea after the deportation: then as now, like the governors Hitler appointed. In other words he was a collaborator. And he was killed by Ishmael, a partisan, someone like us. If we are right, then Ishmael was right, and he did the right thing by killing that Gedale. . . . What stupid thoughts! A man can’t be blamed for the name he bears: I’m called the Consoler but I don’t console anyone, not even myself. Anyway, a different name would suit Gedale: for instance, Jubal, the one who invented the flute and the guitar; or Jabal, his brother, the first one to travel the world and live in tents; or Tubalcain, the third brother, who taught his fellow men to work copper and iron. They were all sons of Lamech. Lamech was a mysterious avenger, no one knows anymore what wrong he avenged. Lamech in Lyuban, Lamech in Chmielnik, Lamech in Neuhaus. Maybe Lamech, too, was a cheerful avenger, like Gedale; at night, in his tent, after taking vengeance, he played the flute with his sons. I don’t understand Gedale, I couldn’t predict any of his moves or any of his decisions, but Gedale is my brother.
And Line? What to say about Line? She isn’t my sister: she’s much more and much less, she’s a mother-wife-daughter-friend-enemy-rival-teacher. She’s been flesh of my flesh, I entered into her, a thousand years ago, on a windy night in a mill, when the war was still going on and the world was young and each of us was an angel with a sword in his hand. She’s not happy, but she’s certain, and I’m not happy or certain, and I’m a thousand years old, and I carry the world on my back. There she is beside me, she doesn’t look at me, she stares at this German countryside and she always knows exactly what must be done. A thousand years ago, in the marshes, I knew it, too, and now she still knows it and I don’t. She doesn’t look at me, but I look at her, and I feel pleasure in looking at her, along with turmoil, and laceration, and yearning for my neighbor’s wife. Line, Emmeline, Rahab: the holy sinner of Jericho. Whose woman? Everyone’s, which is to say no one’s; she binds but is not bound. I don’t care whose woman, but when I glimpse her body again in my memory, when I can imagine it beneath her clothing, I feel torn, and I want to begin again, and I know it’s not possible and that’s exactly why I feel torn. But I’d feel that anyway, even without Line, even without Sissl. Even without Rivke? No, Mendel, that you don’t know, that you can’t say. Without Rivke you’d be a different man, who knows how you’d think, you’d be a non-Mendel. Without Rivke, without the shadow of Rivke, you’d be ready for the future. Ready to live, to grow like a seed: there are seeds that take root in all soils, even the soil of the land of Israel, and Line is a seed of that kind, and so are all the others. They emerge from the water and shake themselves like dogs and dry off all their memories. They have no scars. Come now, how can you say that? They have them but they don’t talk about them; perhaps each of them, right this second, is thinking the same thoughts you are.
The train had passed Innsbruck, and was straining to climb toward the Brenner Pass and the Italian border. Gedale, sitting in a corner of the car with his back to the wooden wall, was playing in his manner, subdued and distracted. He was playing a Gypsy tune, or perhaps it was Jewish, or Russian: alien peoples often come into contact in music, exchange music, and through music learn to know one another, not to be mistrustful. An unpretentious tune, heard a hundred times, second-rate, steeped in a vulgar nostalgia. Then, suddenly the rhythm grew livelier, and the tune, thus accelerated, became another: sharp, new, noble, and filled with hope. A happy, dancing rhythm urged you to follow along, bobbing your head and clapping your hands; and many members of the band, prickly-bearded, sun-baked, hardened by effort and by the war, did follow along, delighting in the noise, forgetful and savage. Now that the dangers were behind them, now that the war was over, and the road, the blood, and the ice, now that the Satan of Berlin was dead, the world was empty and aimless, waiting to be re-created, repeopled, as after the great flood. Climbing upward, climbing cheerfully toward the pass: ascent, aliyah, that’s what it’s called when you emerge from exile, from the depths, and climb toward the light. The rhythm of the violin, too, was climbing, faster and faster, becoming frenzied, orgiastic. Two of the Gedalists, then four of them, then ten went wild in the car, dancing in couples, in groups, shoulder to shoulder, pounding the heels of their boots on the resonant floor. Gedale, too, had stood up, and was dancing as he played, spinning around and lifting his knees high.
Suddenly there was a sharp crack and the violin fell silent. Gedale stood with the bow in midair; the violin was broken. Fidl kaput! Pavel snickered; others laughed, too, but Gedale didn’t laugh. He stood gazing at the veteran violin, the violin that had saved his life at Luninets, and perhaps other unknown times, buoying him to the surface, above boredom and despair; the violin that had been wounded in battle, pierced by bullets intended for him, that he had decorated with the Hungarian’s bronze medal. “It’s nothing, we’ll fix it,” said Rokhele the White; but she was wrong. Perhaps sunlight and harsh weather had rotted the wood, or perhaps Gedale himself had strained it too far in the reel he’d been playing: whatever the case, it couldn’t be fixed. The bridge had caved in the instrument’s delicate convex belly and penetrated it; the strings dangled, slack and humiliated. There was nothing to be done. Gedale stuck his arm out the door of the freight car, opened his hand, and let the violin drop onto the roadbed of the railroad tracks with a funereal crack.
The train reached the Brenner Pass at noon on July 25, 1945. During stops at the previous stations, Gedale had never failed to make sure the doors were closed, but now it seemed he had forgotten: and yet it was important, that was a border station, there would almost certainly be a check. Line took care of it, even before the train came to a halt; she had those sitting in the open doorway get up, closed both doors, tied them together from the inside with pieces of metal wire, and told everyone to be silent. At first there was a fair amount of turmoil on the platforms, but then there was silence outside as well, and the hours began to pass and impatience increased. The heat also increased, in the locked freight car standing motionless in the hot sun. The Gedalists, thirty-five people crammed into a few square meters, once again felt they were in a trap. Whispering could be heard:
“Are we already in Italy? Have we passed the boundary checkpoint?”
“Maybe they uncoupled the car.”
“No, we would’ve heard the noise.”
“Let’s open up, get out, and take a look.”
“Let’s all get out and continue on foot.”
But Line imposed silence; on the deserted platform there were footsteps and voices. Pavel peeked out through the crack in the doors:
“They’re soldiers. They look English.”
The voices came closer: there were four or five people, and they stopped to talk right outside the freight car. Pavel listened closely.
“But they’re not speaking English,” he said in a faint voice. Then someone rapped sharply twice with his knuckles on the door, and asked an incomprehensible question; but Line understood, made her way through the crowd, and replied. She replied in Hebrew: not in the embalmed liturgical Hebrew of the synagogues, which was familiar to everyone’s ears, but in the fluid, living Hebrew that has always been spoken in Palestine and that among them only Line understood and spoke. She had learned it from the Zionists in Kiev, before the heavens closed up again, before the flood. Line opened the doors.
Standing on the platform were four young men in clean, neatly pressed khaki uniforms. They wore odd loose shorts, low shoes, and woolen knee socks; on their heads were black berets with British insignia, but sewn onto the short-sleeved shirts was the six-pointed star, the Shield of David. English Jews? Jews who had been taken prisoner by the English? Englishmen disguised as Jews? For the Gedalists, a star on the chest was a symbol of slavery, it was the brand imposed by the Nazis on the Jews in the concentration camps. The perplexed Jews in the freight car and the unruffled Jews on the platform stood looking at one another in silence for a few instants. Then one of them, young and sturdy, with a cheerful pink-cheeked fair-skinned face, asked, in Hebrew: “Who here speaks Hebrew?”
“Just me,” Line replied. “The others speak Yiddish, Russian, and Polish.”
“Then we’ll speak Yiddish,” said the young man; but he spoke with an effort and haltingly. His three comrades showed that they’d understood but didn’t speak. “You needn’t be afraid of us. We’re with the Jewish Brigade, we come from the land of Israel but we belong to the British Army. We came up the Italian peninsula, fighting alongside the British, the Americans, the Poles, the Moroccans, and the Indians. Where do you come from?”
That was not an easy question; nearly all of them answered, in confusion, they came from Polesie, Bialystok, Kosava, from the ghettos, from the marshes, from the Caucasus, from the Red Army. The young man, whom his comrades called Chaim, gestured with his hands as if to calm the waters. “Young lady, you speak,” he said. Before speaking, Line consulted in a low voice with Gedale and Mendel: should she tell him everything? should she tell the truth? These are strange soldiers: Jews but in British uniform. Whom do they obey? London or Tel Aviv? Should they be trusted? Gedale seemed undecided, in fact, indifferent.
“Do as you think best,” he said, “and stick to generalities.” Mendel said, “What right do they have to ask us questions? Take your time answering, and do your best to question them. Then we’ll decide the best line to take.”
Chaim was looking on. He smiled, then he laughed openly. “‘The wise man hears one word and understands seven’: as I told you, this uniform may be British, but the war is over now, and we think for ourselves. We’re not here to block your path, if anything, for the exact opposite reason. We, and all the rest of our company, are traveling through Germany, Hungary, and Poland: we’re searching for Jews who survived the concentration camps, Jews who were in hiding, the sick, the children.”
“What will you do with them?”
“We’ll help them, we’ll care for them, we’ll assemble them, and we’ll escort them here, to Italy. My team was in Kraków two weeks ago; tomorrow we’ll be in Mauthausen and Gusen, the day after tomorrow we’ll be in Vienna.”
“And do the British know what you’re doing?”
Chaim shrugged: “Among them as well there are wise men, who understand and give us free rein. There are also fools, who notice nothing. And then there are sticklers for order; in fact, they’re the biggest meddlers, and they often try to put spokes in our wheels. But we weren’t born yesterday, and we know how to deal with them. Where do you want to go?”
“To the land of Israel; but we are weary, we have no money, and here’s a woman who’s about to give birth,” said Line.
“Are you armed?”
Caught off guard, Line said no, but in such an unconvincing tone that Chaim was forced to laugh again:
“Nu, I told you we weren’t born yesterday. Do you think that, with the work we’ve been doing for the past three months, we don’t know how to tell a survivor from a refugee, and a refugee from a partisan? You have it written on your faces, just who you are; and why should you be ashamed of it?”
Mottel broke in: “No one’s ashamed here, but we’re not giving up our weapons.”
“We’re certainly not going to take them away from you. I told you, we’re just passing through. But you should be reasonable. A little below the pass is our brigade headquarters; I don’t know if they’re interested in you, but the smartest thing would be to go in and hand over your weapons to them. Farther down, in Bolzano, is British headquarters, and they’re certain to search you; better to hand the weapons over to us than have them confiscate them, don’t you agree?”
Pavel said, “You may have your experience, but we have ours. And it’s our experience that weapons are always useful. In war and in peace, in Russia and in Poland and in Germany and in Italy. Two months ago, when the war was already over, the Germans killed one of our comrades, a woman, and we took revenge for her; how could we have done that if we hadn’t had weapons? And in Poland, under Russian occupation, the Polish Fascists threw a bomb right between our feet.”
Chaim said, “Let’s not act like enemies—we aren’t enemies. Come down out of that freight car, and let’s go sit in the meadow; they’ve unhitched the locomotive, it will be at least two hours until your train departs. You see, we have some important things to talk about.” They all got out of the freight car and went to sit in a circle in the meadow, in the resin-scented air, beneath a sky swept clean by the high winds.
“Where I come from, this is called a kum-sitz, a come-and-sit,” said Chaim, and then continued, “It’s the question of the lion and the fox. You come out of a terrible world. We don’t know that much about it: from the stories our fathers told us, and from what we’ve been able to see on our missions; but we know that each of you is alive by a miracle, and that you’ve left Gehenna behind. You and we have fought the same enemy, but in two different ways. You’ve had to do it on your own: you had to invent everything, defenses, weapons, allies, stratagems. We were luckier: we were part of a great army, organized and integrated. We had no enemies attacking on our flanks, but only straight ahead of us; we didn’t have to fight to obtain our weapons, they were issued to us, and we were also taught to use them. We’ve had hard battles, but supporting us there was always an organization behind the lines, kitchens, infirmaries, and a country that hailed us as liberators. In this country your weapons won’t be of any use to you.”
“Why won’t they be of use?” asked Mottel. “And why is this country different from the other countries? We’re foreigners here the same as we are everywhere: in fact, we’re more foreign here than in Russia and Poland, and a foreigner is an enemy.”
“Italy is a strange country,” said Chaim. “It takes a long time to understand the Italians, and even we, who came up through Italy from Brindisi to the Alps, still don’t really understand them completely; but one thing is certain, in Italy foreigners aren’t enemies. You might say that Italians are more enemies to themselves than they are to foreigners: it’s odd but true. Perhaps it comes from the fact that the Italians don’t like laws, and since Mussolini’s laws, along with his policies and his propaganda, condemned foreigners, maybe that’s exactly why the Italians helped them. The Italians don’t like laws, in fact they like to disobey them: it’s their game, just as the Russians’ game is chess. They like to cheat; they don’t especially like getting cheated, but they don’t make a big thing of it: when somebody cheats them, they think, Look how clever he was, he outsmarted me, and they set about obtaining not revenge but, if anything, a rematch. Just like in chess, in fact.”
“Then they’ll probably cheat us, too,” said Line.
“Probably, but that’s the only real risk you run; that’s why I said that you don’t need your weapons here. But at this point I have to tell you the strangest thing of all: the Italians have been friendly to all foreigners, but to no one have they been friendlier than to us, the Jewish Brigade.”
“Maybe they didn’t realize you were Jews,” said Mendel.
“They certainly did, and for that matter we didn’t hide it. They helped us, not in spite of the fact that we were Jews but because we were. They helped their own Jews, too; when the Germans occupied Italy, they made great efforts to capture them, but they tracked down and killed only a fifth; all the others found shelter in the homes of Christians, and not only the Italian Jews but also many foreign Jews who had taken refuge in Italy.”
“Maybe this happened because the Italians are good Christians,” Mendel now suggested.
“That may well be,” said Chaim, scratching his forehead, “but I’m not really sure. The Italians are strange Christians, too. They attend Mass but they curse. They pray to the Madonna and all the saints to grant them favors, but it seems to me that they don’t especially believe in God. They know the Ten Commandments by heart, but they observe at most two or three. I believe that they help those in need because they’re good people, because they’ve suffered a lot themselves, and because they know that those who suffer should be helped.”
“The Poles have suffered a lot, too, and yet . . .”
“I don’t know what to say to you: we might come up with ten reasons, all of them right and all of them wrong. But there’s one thing you should know: Italian Jews are as strange as Italian Catholics. They don’t speak Yiddish—in fact, they don’t even know what Yiddish is. They speak only Italian; rather, the Jews of Rome speak Roman, the Jews of Venice speak Venetian, and so on. They dress like the others, they have the same faces as the others. . . .”
“Then how do you tell them from the Christians when you see them in the street?”
“That’s just it, you can’t tell them apart. Isn’t it a remarkable country? For that matter, there aren’t that many of them; the Christians don’t pay them much attention, and they aren’t particularly concerned with being Jewish. In Italy there has never been a pogrom, not even when the Church of Rome was inciting the Christians to treat the Jews with contempt and accused them all of being usurers, not even when Mussolini issued the racial laws, not even when northern Italy was under German occupation; no one in Italy knows what a pogrom is, or even the meaning of the word. It’s an oasis of a country. The Italian Jews were Fascists when all the Italians were Fascists and they applauded Mussolini; and when the Germans invaded some of them escaped to Switzerland, while others became partisans, but most of them went into hiding in the cities or in the countryside, and very few were found or betrayed, even though the Germans were offering great sums of money to those willing to collaborate. There, that’s the country you’re entering; a country of good people, people who don’t much like to make war, but do like to trick you. And since to send you to Palestine we have to trick the British, this is the ideal place; you could call it a wharf in the perfect location, put here just for us.”
To the Gedalists squatting or stretched out on the grass of the Brenner Pass, the idea of handing over their weapons, to anyone and for whatever reason, was distasteful; but in the presence of these four soldiers who came from Palestine, who wore Allied uniforms, and who appeared so confident in their speech, they did not dare to express their dissent. They remained silent for a while, and then they began to discuss among themselves in low voices. Chaim and his three comrades showed no signs of impatience; they walked away a short distance and strolled around in the meadow. They came back a few minutes later and Chaim asked, “Who is your leader?”
Gedale raised his hand.
“I guess I’m the leader. I led the band, for better or worse, from White Russia to here; but you see, we have no ranks and we never have. I’ve almost never had to give orders. I’d make a suggestion, and occasionally someone else would, we’d talk it over and come to an agreement. But most of the time we were in agreement even without talking it over. That’s how we lived and fought for eighteen months, and we walked two thousand kilometers. I was the leader because I dreamed up things, because ideas and solutions came to my mind; but why should we have a leader now that the war is over and we’re entering a peaceful country?”
Chaim turned to his comrades and said something to them in Hebrew; they replied, and as they did there was no scorn or annoyance on their faces, but instead patience and respect. Chaim said:
“I understand you, or at least I think I do. You’re strange birds yourselves, even stranger than the Italians; but everyone is strange to another person, that’s in the order of things, and war is a great reshuffler. Fine, as far as your leader is concerned, do as you please; elect yourselves one, reappoint him”—and he pointed to Gedale, who shied away—“or do without. But the weapons are a different matter. We understand you perfectly, but the British and the Americans won’t understand you at all. They’re fed up with partisans; they were useful as long as there was fighting, but now they don’t want to hear about them. They even wanted to retire the Italian partisans, this past winter, before the war was over; and now medals and certificates as much as you like, but no more weapons. If they catch them carrying weapons, or find weapons in their homes, they put them in jail; so just imagine what they would do to foreign partisans, especially if they come from Russia. Trust me, be reasonable and give the weapons to us; we’ll be able to make good use of them. Come on, keep whatever weapons you can hide on your persons and hand over the rest. All right?”
Gedale hesitated for a moment, then he shrugged and said sullenly:
“My dear comrades, here we’re returning to the world of law and order.” He climbed back into the freight car and reemerged with Smirnov’s machine pistol and a few other weapons. The four soldiers weren’t that strict; they asked for nothing more, and loaded everything onto the Jeep they’d parked nearby.
“All right. Now what’s to become of us?” asked Gedale when they came back.
“It’s a simple matter,” said Chaim. “Now that you’ve been disarmed, or almost, you’re not so strange anymore. Now you’ve become DPs.”
“What have we become?” asked Line suspiciously. “What’s a DP?”
“A DP is a ‘displaced person’: a refugee, someone uprooted, without a country.”
“We aren’t DPs,” said Line. “We had a country, and it’s not our fault we don’t have it anymore; and we’re going to build another. It’s ahead of us, not behind. We’ve met plenty of refugees along the way, and they were nothing like us. We aren’t DPs, we’re partisans, and not in name alone. We built our future with our own hands.”
“Calm down, girl,” said Chaim. “This isn’t the time to worry about definitions, you shouldn’t give too much weight to words. You have to be flexible. The Allies are here now; sooner or later you’re going to run into the Military Police. They’re nothing like the Nazis, but they can be a pain in the neck, and they’ll lock you up who knows where for who knows how long. They’ll give you food and water, but you’ll stay behind bars, maybe until the war with Japan is over; that is, if war between the Americans and the Russians hasn’t started in the meantime. They won’t ask you a lot of questions; as far as they’re concerned a partisan is a Communist, and if he comes from the east he’s twice as much a Communist: have I made myself clear? In other words, brothers in arms are a thing of the past. Would you like to wind up in a camp, right now?”
The Gedalists replied to the question with a confused mumbling, in which Chaim was able to make out a few scraps of words.
“Go into hiding? Don’t even think of it, Italy isn’t like the places you come from; especially northern Italy, it’s as crowded as a henhouse. There aren’t any forests, there aren’t any marshes, and you don’t know the terrain. The peasants wouldn’t understand you, they’d take you for bandits, and bandits is what you would end up becoming. Try to be flexible, turn yourselves in.”
“Where, how, and to whom?” asked Gedale.
“Try to make it to Milan without being noticed, and in Milan go to this address.”
He wrote a few words on a piece of paper and handed it to Gedale, and then added:
“If we ever meet again, you’ll tell me that I gave you good advice. Now get back into your car: they’re reattaching the locomotive.”
When they got out of the freight car in the Central Station in Milan, beneath the high steel-and-glass shed roof peppered with bomb holes, they thought that another war had broken out. There were people camped everywhere, between the tracks, on the platforms, on the stairways leading down to the piazza, on the escalators that no longer worked, and outside on the piazza itself. There were Italians dressed in rags coming home, foreigners dressed in rags waiting to leave for who knows where; there were Allied soldiers, white-skinned and black-skinned, in their elegant uniforms, and well-dressed Italian civilians, with suitcases and rucksacks, going on vacation. Around the piazza in front of the ugly stone façade a few trams were running, and the rare automobile; there were flower beds that had been transformed into war gardens, only to be plundered and abandoned, and were now overrun with weeds. Some tents had been pitched there, and in front of them women pinched with poverty were cooking meals over rudimentary fires. Other women were crowding around the little spigots, with basins, pots and pans, and whatever receptacles they could find. All around were bomb-damaged apartment buildings.
Only Pavel knew a few words of Italian, learned back in the days when he was traveling Europe as an actor. He showed the address to a passerby, who looked him in the face with mistrust and then replied angrily: “It’s gone!” What was it that was gone? Was it the wrong address? Or had the building collapsed? The conversation was cumbersome, obstructed by recioprocal misunderstandings: “Fascio, fascismo, fascisti, niente, finito,” the passerby kept repeating. Finally Pavel understood that that had once been the address of an important Fascist headquarters, but that it was no longer there; in any case, the Milanese explained as best he could how to get there. They’d have to walk three kilometers: what’s three kilometers? A laughable distance. They started off, timid and curious; never, on their whole interminable journey, had they felt like such strangers.
It was early afternoon. They straggled along in a disorderly line, careful not to lose sight of Pavel, who was in the lead, but they frequently made him wait so they could look around. Blackened ruins alternated with tall, intact, showy buildings; many of the shops were open, the plate glass windows piled high with tempting merchandise, topped by incomprehensible signs. Only around the train station were there poor people; the passersby they encountered in the streets of the city center were well-dressed and replied affably to their questions, trying to understand and make themselves understood. Via Unione? Straight ahead, two more kilometers, one more. Duomo, Duomo, non capire? Piazza del Duomo, and keep going past that. In front of the massive cathedral, the Duomo, pockmarked by bombs, they came to a halt—gloomy, filthy, and intimidated, loaded down with their sun-faded bundles; furtively, Pyotr crossed himself, three fingers joined, Russian style.
In Via Unione they encountered an atmosphere that seemed more familiar. The Aid Office was teeming with refugees: Poles, Russians, Czechs, Hungarians, nearly all of them speaking Yiddish. They all needed everything, and the confusion was extreme. There were men, women, and children camped in the hallways, families that had built themselves shelters with sheets of plywood or hanging blankets. Up and down the corridor doors, behind the counter windows, women of all ages worked busily, breathless, sweating, tireless. None of them understood Yiddish and only a few understood German; improvised interpreters were shouting themselves hoarse in an effort to establish order and discipline. The air was muggy, with whiffs of latrines and of cooking. An arrow and a sign written in Yiddish pointed the way to the window the new arrivals were to apply to; they got in line and waited patiently.
The line moved forward slowly, and Mendel was mulling over various shapeless and conflicting thoughts. He, too, had never felt like such a stranger: a Russian in Italy, a Jew in the presence of the cathedral, a village watchmaker in a big city, a partisan in peacetime; a stranger by language and soul, a stranger estranged by years of life in the wild. And yet, never before, in any of the hundred places they had been through, had he breathed the air he was breathing here. A stranger, but accepted, and not by the kindly women of the Aid Office alone. Not merely tolerated, accepted; in the faces of the Italians they had spoken to ever since the Brenner Pass, there was occasionally a gleam of mistrust or cunning, but never the murky shadow that separates you from the Russian or the Pole when they recognize you as a Jew. In this country everyone is like Pyotr: perhaps less courageous or subtler, or simply older. Subtle, like old people, who’ve seen it all.
Mendel and Pavel went up to the window side by side; behind the window was a woman who must have been about thirty, in a nicely pressed white blouse, small, pretty, polite, with chestnut hair, fresh from the hairdresser. She wore perfume, and alongside the scent of her perfume Mendel uneasily noticed the heavy, goatish odor of Pavel’s sweaty body. The woman understood German and spoke it reasonably well: there were no major difficulties in communication, but Pavel proudly insisted on speaking Italian, and by so doing complicated the situation instead of simplifying it. Once again, name, age, place of birth, citizenship. Three or four of them answered at once, causing some confusion. The woman understood that they were a group, and without any sign of impatience asked Pavel to answer for them all: she spoke to him using the formal Sie, and this, too, was pleasant, as well as embarrassing, something that had never happened before. It really was an aid office: they were trying to help, to provide assistance, not get rid of them or lock them up in a box of barbed wire.
The woman wrote and wrote; thirty-five names are a lot, and the list was long. Exotic first and last names, bristling with consonants; she had to stop, check, have one repeated, ask the spelling. There, finished. The woman leaned out from the window to look at them. A group, a strange group; refugees unlike the usual ones, unlike the human wreckage that for days and days had been passing before her in that office. Dirty, tired, but upright; different in their gaze, in their speech, in their bearing.
“Have you always been together?” she asked Pavel in German.
Pavel wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to show off. He summoned all the fragments of Italian that he’d picked up years before in his travels, overheard backstage, on trains, in the cheap hotels and whorehouses. He puffed out his chest:
“Group, lovely signora, group. Always together, Russia, Polandia. Walk, walk. Forest, river, snow. Dead Germans, lots and lots. We all partizani, dammit. Not DP, we war, we partizani. All soldiers, dag nab it; even women.”
The kind woman was perplexed. She asked the Gedalists to step to one side and wait, and she picked up the phone. She talked for a long time in an emphatic tone of voice, but covering her mouth with one hand to keep from being overheard; when she was done with the call, she told Pavel that she hoped he’d be patient; they would have to spend another night camped out, they should make themselves as comfortable as possible in the hallways, but the following day she was sure she would find them a better place. What about washing up? That wouldn’t be easy; no bathrooms, no showers, either, the building had just been refitted, but there was water, soap, and perhaps they could find three or four towels. Not very many for such a large group, of course, but what could you do about it, it wasn’t her fault or her colleagues’, they were all trying their hardest, sometimes putting in their own personal contributions. In her words and on her face Mendel glimpsed reverence, pity, fellow feeling, and anxiety.
“Where are you sending us?” he asked her in his best German.
The woman gave him a nice smile, and with her hands made a complicated and allusive gesture that Mendel didn’t understand: “We’re not going to send you to a refugee camp, but to a place that will suit you better.”
Indeed, the following morning two trucks came to take them away. The woman reassured them, they wouldn’t be going far, to a farm on the outskirts of Milan, a half-hour trip, no more; they would be comfortable there, better than in the city, with more room . . . more relaxed. . . . And that way you’ll be more relaxed, too, thought Mendel. He asked her how it was that she spoke German: were there many Italians who spoke it? Very few, she replied, but she had been a German teacher: yes, she’d taught at a school, until Hitler came to power and she had fled to Switzerland. Switzerland is forty kilometers from Milan. She’d been interned in Switzerland with her husband and her young son; it wasn’t bad there; she’d come back to Milan only a few weeks ago. She stood watching the show as the Gedalists clambered onto the trucks with their Gypsy-like assortment of luggage; she told them that she’d be in touch, waved goodbye, then went back into the office.
The farm had been damaged in the last days of the war and restored as well as possible. They found fifty or so Polish and Hungarian refugees already in residence, but the dormitories were very large, suitable for at least two or three hundred people, and well equipped with cots and bunk beds. They looked around: no, for the first time there were no sentries, no barbed wire. Not a home, but close to it; no restrictions, if you want to go in you go in, if you want to leave you leave. Food provided at the right times of day, water, sunshine, meadows, a bed: practically a hotel, what more do you want? But there’s always something more to be desired: nothing is ever as nice as you expect; but nothing is ever as bad as you expect, Mendel thought, recalling the days of hardworking fervor at Novoselky in the midst of the fog and the marshes, and the mindless intoxication of the battles.
There was a second enrollment, at a second window; a thin, no-nonsense young man, who spoke good Yiddish but who came from Tel Aviv, signed them in without too much paperwork, but he stopped when he came to Bella and Rokhele the White. No, not these women, they’ll have to go back to Milan, they’re not suited for farmwork; and especially not this one, what are they thinking in Via Unione, have they all lost their minds? What were they doing, sending a pregnant woman out to the farm? Line, Gedale, Pavel all started arguing, and especially Isidor, who was shouting louder than any of them: you can’t separate us, we aren’t refugees, we are a band, a single unit. If the White goes back to Milan, all of us are going back to Milan. An odd expression appeared on the young man’s face, but he didn’t insist.
But he was forced to insist the following day. There was work to be done, urgent work: the Gedalists realized that it was a strange sort of farm, where work in the fields didn’t count for much, but where a great deal of merchandise always seemed to be coming and going. There were crates of foodstuffs and medicines, but some of them were far too heavy for the legends stenciled on the side in English to be believable. The young man said that he needed everyone to lend a hand loading the crates onto the trucks. Three or four of the men from Ruzany grumbled that they hadn’t fought their way from Belorussia to Italy to work as porters, and one of them even muttered through clenched teeth: “Kapo.” Zvi, the young foreman of the farm, ignored the insult, shrugged, and said, “When your ship arrives, these things will be useful for you as well,” and then, with the help of two young Hungarians, he started vigorously loading the crates himself. At that, they all stopped complaining and got to work.
There were plenty of people coming and going on the farm as well; refugees of all ages arrived and departed, so that it was difficult to get to know anyone. All the same, the Gedalists quickly noticed that there were a few permanent residents: they did their best to keep a low profile, but they must be playing some essential role. Two in particular caught Mendel’s eye. They were in their early thirties, athletic, and lithe in their movements; they rarely spoke, but to each other they spoke Russian. They were often seen leaving the farmyard with a group of young men carrying sickles, pitchforks, and rakes, and vanishing in the direction of the river. They never came back before nightfall; from the woods along the river, gunshots could occasionally be heard.
“Who are those two?” Mendel asked Zvi.
“Instructors: they’re from the Red Army. Two very smart boys. And if any of you . . .”
“We’ll talk it over later,” said Mendel without making any commitment. “We just got here; let us catch our breath. And after all, I doubt that any of us really have much left to learn.”
“Nu, that’s not what I meant, in fact, the opposite. I meant that you’d have a great deal to teach us,” said Zvi, enunciating carefully. Mendel was reminded of the offer that Smirnov had made at the camp in Glogau, and how he, out of weariness, had turned it down. No, he had no regrets. No, in good conscience; we did our part, I and all the others. In any case, not now: we’re still winded, we haven’t yet learned to breathe the air in this country.
Two days later a letter from Milan was delivered to the farm: it was written in German, addressed to Signor Pavel Yurevich Levinski, and signed by Signora Adele S.; it emanated the same scent as the kind woman from Via Unione, and it contained an invitation to tea, Sunday afternoon at five, in her home on Via Monforte. It was not limited to Pavel alone, but said, vaguely, “You and a few of your friends”; not too many, evidently, not the whole band—which was reasonable. There was great excitement, and the band split into three factions: those who wanted to go to the tea party, those who didn’t want to go at any cost, and those who remained uncertain or indifferent. Pavel himself wanted to go, as did Bella, Gedale, Line, and a fair number of others, driven by a variety of motives. Pavel, because he considered himself indispensable as an interpreter, and because the envelope was addressed to him; Bella and Gedale, out of curiosity; Line, for ideological reasons, and specifically because she alone in the band had had a Zionist education; and the others because they hoped there would be something good to eat. Among those who didn’t want to go were Pyotr and Arie, out of shyness and because they didn’t speak German; the White, because for the past few days she had been having pains in her belly; Isidor, because he didn’t want to be far from the White; and Mottel, because, he said, the lady’s goyische manners made him uncomfortable, and he couldn’t picture himself in a drawing room.
In the end Pavel, Bella, Line, Gedale, and Mendel went. Mendel, to tell the truth, had been one of those who were uncertain, but the other four had insisted that he come: that it was a singular chance to see how people lived in Italy, that they would have fun and be distracted, that it would be an opportunity to learn useful information, and that, above all, whether he liked it or not, he was the crucial man in the band, the one who best represented it and who had taken part in all its exploits—and hadn’t he been a soldier in the Red Army? Certainly that would be important to the Italians, or at least interesting.
They put on their best clothes. Line, who had nothing but the shapeless military clothing that she’d been wearing since Novoselky, said that she would go to the reception just as she was: “If I dressed differently, it would be as if I were putting on a disguise. As if I were telling a lie. If they want me, they have to take me as I am.”
But everyone tried to persuade her to dress up a little, especially Bella and Zvi. Zvi dug out of the farm’s warehouse a white silk blouse, a pleated ivory skirt, a leather belt, a pair of nylon stockings, and a pair of cork-soled sandals. Line let them talk her into it and withdrew with her trousseau; a few minutes later a never-before-seen creature emerged from the dressing room, like a butterfly from a cocoon. Practically unrecognizable: smaller than the Line everyone knew, younger, almost a child, clumsy in the skirt, for she hadn’t worn one in years, and the high-heeled orthopedic sandals; but her level brown eyes, wide-set, and her thin, straight, short nose remained the same, as did the tense pallor of her cheeks, which no amount of sun and wind seemed able to tan. The fine nylon mesh made her muscular legs and ankles graceful; Bella ran her hand over them, as if to make sure they weren’t bare.
There were many guests in Signora S.’s drawing room, all of them Italian. Some were elegantly dressed, others wore shabby old outfits, and others still were in Allied uniforms. Only two or three of them understood German and no one spoke Yiddish, and so the conversation immediately became tangled. The five members of the band, as if to defend themselves from attack, tried to stick together, but they managed it only for a few minutes: before long each had been singled out, and, at the center of a knot of curious guests, was subjected to a hail of melodious and incomprehensible questions. Pavel and the hostess were busy translating, but without much success, supply was so greatly outweighed by demand. Through a space between two backs, Mendel glimpsed Line surrounded by five or six well-dressed men. “Like wild animals at the zoo!” the girl whispered to him in Yiddish.
“Ferocious animals,” Mendel replied. “If they knew everything we’ve done, they’d be afraid of us.”
The lady of the house was on edge. They belonged to her, those five: they constituted a find, a discovery, and she expected monopoly control. Every word uttered by them belonged to her and must be preserved; she took great pains to tag after them amid the press of her guests, asking people to repeat remarks she hadn’t heard. But she was on edge for another reason as well: she was a fine and well-mannered lady, and some of the stories the five were telling wounded her ears. Pavel and Gedale, in particular, showed no restraint. Of course, these things exist, they happened, war is no joke, even less of a joke was the war that these poor people had experienced; still, in the drawing room, and really, in her drawing room. . . . Yes, all right, acts of valor, reprisals against the Germans, sabotage, marches through the snow; but did they have to talk about lice, foot wrappings, and people hanging themselves in the latrines? She was almost beginning to regret inviting them: mainly because of Pavel, who unfortunately knew a few words of Italian, but, for who knows what reason, seemed to have a distinct preference for curses and dirty words. No doubt about it, her friends would laugh and laugh about this, and they’d be sure to tell the story to half of Milan. After a while, she took shelter on a sofa in the corner, next to Bella, who seemed less crude than the others, didn’t say much, and ate bonbons while admiring the paintings hanging on the wall. Every so often she glanced at the clock: her husband was late. If only he’d hurry up and get home! He’d help her take control of the party, in such a way that every guest, local or exotic, would get what he or she deserved, and there would be no transgressions.
Signor S. arrived a little before six o’clock and extended his apologies to one and all: the train had departed Lugano on time, but then it had been delayed at the border for the usual checks. He kissed his wife and apologized to her as well. He was stout, affable, noisy, and bald, with a crown of fair hair ringing the back of his head. He, too, spoke German, but his command of the language was colloquial, his grammar rudimentary, because he’d learned it on the road. He owned a business and was often out of the country. He found himself face-to-face with Mendel and immediately started telling him about his own concerns as if he’d known him all his life, as is customary among those who have a high opinion of themselves and little interest in the people to whom they are speaking. How inconvenient it was to travel, how difficult it was to reestablish old business contacts. . . . Mendel thought of the way he and his people had traveled and the rabbit that the Uzbek had bartered for salt, but he said nothing. Finally, the other man broke off: “But you must be thirsty, come, come with me!”
He grabbed Mendel by the wrist and towed him over to the refreshment table. Mendel allowed him to, in a daze; he felt an intense sensation of unreality, as in the dreams you have on too full a stomach. He seized the moment in which S. was raising his cup to his lips, and found the courage to ask him the questions that had been buzzing through his head ever since the party had started. Who were all those people? Were he and his wife really Jews? And was that their house? Hadn’t the Germans come to Milan, too? How had they saved themselves, along with all the lovely things that he saw all around him? Were all Italian Jews as wealthy as they were? Or all Italians? Did they all have beautiful homes like this?
His host gazed at him with an odd expression, almost as if Mendel had asked stupid or inopportune questions, and then patiently replied, the way you do with children who are not too bright. But of course they were Jews, everyone with the surname S. was a Jew. No, not all of the guests: but after all, was that such an important question? They were friends, that was all, nice people, who were interested in meeting them, seeing that they had come from so far away. And the place belonged to him, why not? He’d earned good money, before the war, and even during the first few years of the war, before the Nazis came. After that, the apartment had been requisitioned, and a high Fascist official had been quartered in it, but the minute he got back from Switzerland he’d pulled some strings and taken it back. Eh, no, not everyone had a place like his: neither Christians nor Jews. Not everyone, but lots of people did, after all, Milan is a wealthy city. Wealthy and generous, many Jews had remained in the city, in hiding or with false identity documents; neighbors and friends who met them pretended not to know them, but in secret they brought them food.
A big man with a light and youthful voice broke into their conversation, and although he neither spoke nor understood German, he behaved in an extremely friendly fashion toward Mendel. He asked to be introduced to him; S. did as requested, mispronouncing Mendel’s name, and then said to Mendel, “This is the lawyer Longo.” The lawyer proved to be more discreet than the master of the house; he listened in respectful silence to the stories that Mendel told in an abridged version and which the master of the house translated phrase by phrase. In the end, he said to the latter: “They must be tired, these friends of yours; they probably need some rest. Ask them if they would like to be my guests, in Varazze; I have plenty of room in my villa, and perhaps they’ve never been to the beach!”
This invitation caught Mendel by surprise. He hesitated, stalled for time, and tried to edge closer to his comrades to see what they had to say. He no, he would not have accepted, he felt distant, alien, disagreeable, and wild; he felt as if he still carried the sepulchral odor of Schmulek’s lair. All the same, if the others said yes, he would, too. Bella, Line, and Gedale were also inclined to say no: they came up with vague pretexts, but in fact they were intimidated, they didn’t feel up to the role that was assigned to them. Pavel, on the other hand, would have liked to accept, but not alone; and so he went along with the majority opinion, and they all thanked the lawyer and declined the invitation, happy that their inept words were being translated into Signora S.’s harmonious Italian. “Still, I wouldn’t have minded seeing the sea,” Bella whispered to Gedale.
The lady of the house took advantage of the fact that all five of them were in one place to introduce them to another friend of hers, a tall bony young man with an energetic air about him who wore military-looking trousers and shirt but without insignia. “This is Francesco, a colleague of yours!” she said with an allusive smile; Francesco on the other hand remained serious. “He was a partisan, too,” the lady went on. “In Valtellina, in the Alps, in other words, on those mountains you can see out there. A brave young man; too bad that he’s a Communist.”
With the hostess’s help, the conversation proceeded, labored and contorted, but when Francesco heard that Mendel had been in the Red Army, he stepped up to him and threw his arms around him: “From the day Germany attacked you, I had no doubt that it would be defeated. Tell him that, Adele. Tell him that we fought, too, but if the Soviet Union hadn’t held out it would have meant the end of Europe.” The hostess translated as best she could, but she added some thoughts of her own: “He’s a sweet boy, but he’s hardheaded and he has some strange ideas. If it was up to him, he wouldn’t think twice: dictatorship of the proletariat, all land to the peasants, all factories to the workers, and that’s the end of it. At most, for us, his friends, a seat on the local soviet.”
Francesco partly understood, chose not to go any further, and with the same serious expression had her say that his party had been the backbone of the Italian Resistance and the true voice of the Italian people; then he told her to ask Mendel why he and his friends were leaving their country. Mendel was confused. He had some vague ideas about what had happened in Italy during the war, and he was astonished that the woman would say so openly that her friend was a Communist: could she have been joking? And was she also joking when she referred to her fear of communism? Or was she really afraid? And, if so, was she right to be afraid? Now, however, he would have to answer that Francesco’s question. How could he explain to him that being a Jew in Russia or in Poland was not the same as being a Jew in Switzerland or on Via Monforte in Milan? He would have had to tell him their whole story. He decided only to say that he and his comrades had nothing against Stalin, indeed, they were grateful to him for having beaten Hitler; but that their homes had been destroyed, they had a void behind them, and they hoped to find a new home in Palestine. The woman translated, and it was Mendel’s impression that the translation was longer than the original; a dubious expression appeared on Francesco’s face and he walked away. To Mendel, even the Italians’ faces were unclear to him; their expressions, their grimaces, were illegible to him, or at least he was afraid he was reading them wrong. Francesco. A partisan, a fellow warrior. How long did you fight, Francesco? Sixteen months, eighteen: from when Venyamin’s radio on the banks of the Dnieper announced that Mussolini was in prison, from when Dov learned that Italy had capitulated. How far did you walk, Francesco? How many friends did you lose? Where is your home? In Milan, perhaps, or up in those mountains whose name I can’t repeat; but you have a home, the home you fought for, along with your ideas. A home, land underneath your feet, a sky over your head that belongs to you and never changes. A mother and a father; a girlfriend or a wife. You have someone or something you want to live for. If I spoke your language I could try to explain.
Behind him, Signora Adele was talking to Line:
“. . . but now they’re the ones who help us the most. The weapons come from them, via Czechoslovakia. It’s the Italian Communist Party that orders the strikes; when the British try to halt a refugee ship, all the longshoreman go on strike, and the British have to let it sail. . . .”
Mendel felt disoriented: in a drawing room filled with lovely objects and courteous people, and at the same time a pawn in a cruel and gigantic game. Perhaps he always had been, always had been a pawn, ever since he’d gone missing, since he’d met Leonid: you think you’re making a decision and instead you’re obeying the destiny that someone else has already written for you. Who? Stalin, or Roosevelt, or the God of Armies. He turned to Gedale:
“Let’s go, Gedale: let’s take our leave. This place isn’t for us.”
“What?” asked Gedale in astonishment: maybe he was afraid he hadn’t understood, or perhaps he was following another chain of thought. Just then, the phone rang in the corner where Bella was sitting, and the woman went to answer. After a short while, she hung up the receiver and said to Mendel, “It’s Zvi, from the farm. Your comrade, the one you call the White, isn’t well. They had to take her into the city; she’s in a clinic, not far from here.”
All five of them drove to the obstetric clinic, crammed into the lawyer Longo’s automobile. It was a private clinic, orderly and clean, but much of the window glass had been replaced with plywood panels, and crossed strips of paper had been glued to the others. Rokhele was in a room with three other women; she was pale and calm, and she was complaining in a weak voice: maybe they’d given her a tranquilizer. In the hallway, outside the door of the room, stood Isidor, nervous and scowling, alongside Izu, the bare-handed fisherman, and three of his compatriots from Blizna, the roughest members of the band. Isidor was walking up and down, and he had a pistol stuck in his belt. Two of his comrades were sitting on the floor and seemed drunk; the other two were having a conversation by the window. Mendel spotted the bulge of a knife handle through the leather of their worn boots. On the windowsill stood a bottle of red wine and two country rolls.
“How is she?” Bella whispered to Isidor. Without lowering his voice, Isidor replied, “She’s not well. She’s in pain, she was screaming a little while ago. But now they’ve given her an injection.” At the end of the corridor two nuns peeped out, exchanged a few words, and promptly vanished.
“Come away, she’s in good hands,” said Mendel. “What’s the point of staying here?”
“I’m not moving,” said Isidor. The four others said nothing; they limited themselves to giving Mendel and the others a hostile glance.
“You aren’t doing any good and you’re causing trouble,” said Line.
“I’m not moving,” Isidor said again. “I’m staying here. I don’t trust them.”
The five of them stepped over to one side. “What should we do?” Gedale asked.
“There are too many of us here,” said Mendel. “I’ll stay here to see what happens; I’ll try to calm them down. You go downstairs and head back to the farm; the lawyer is waiting. If things go badly I’ll call you on the phone.”
“I’ll stay, too,” said Line unexpectedly. “A woman can be useful.” Gedale, Bella, and Pavel left; Line and Mendel sat down in the waiting room. Through the half-open door they could keep an eye on the five men camped out in the corridor.
“Is Isidor drunk, too?” asked Line.
“I don’t think so,” Mendel replied. “He’s just acting tough because he’s afraid.”
“Afraid about the baby? About Rokhele?”
“Yes, but maybe not just about that. He’s a boy, and he needs to feel important. Gedale was wrong to let him drive the truck.”
Line, in her unaccustomed woman’s clothing, seemed to have changed within as well. She replied in a subdued tone:
“When was that? In February, right? There was still snow on the ground.”
“It was in early March, when we left Wolbrom; yes, it must have been the first of March.”
“It’s hard to keep your memories straight, isn’t it? Doesn’t that happen to you, too?”
Mendel nodded his head yes, without a word. A nurse came in and said something to them in Italian; neither Line nor Mendel understood, the nurse shrugged her shoulders and left. Line went into Rokhele’s room and came out again immediately:
“She’s sleeping,” she said. “She seems comfortable, but her pulse is racing.”
“Could that be true for all women when they have a baby?”
“I don’t know,” Line replied. She was silent, then she went on:
“There’s something wrong with us. Do you think it’s right for a man to become a father at the age of seventeen?”
“Maybe it’s never right to become a father,” said Mendel.
“Hush, Mendel. Chase those thoughts away. Tonight a child is going to be born.”
“Do you believe that our thoughts can touch it? Make it be born different somehow?”
“Who knows?” said Line. “When a child is born, it’s such a delicate thing! Where was it conceived?”
Mendel calculated mentally:
“When we were with Edek, near Tunel. In November. Will it be a Polish baby? Or Ukrainian like Rokhele? Or Italian?”
“Narisher bokher, vos darfst du fregn?” Line said with a laugh, quoting from the song that had marked the passage of the front: “Foolish Lad, how can you ask?” Strangely, Mendel was by no means offended at being called that name: if anything, he felt tenderness. This new Line was no longer Rahab but the pitying-clever meydl of the song.
“How can you ask?” Line went on, laying her hand on Mendel’s forearm: “A baby is a baby; it only becomes something else later. Why are you worried? After all, it’s not even our child.”
“Right. It’s not even our child.”
“We were born, too,” Line suddenly blurted out. Mendel gave her a questioning glance, and Line tried to clarify the thought:
“Given birth, expelled. Russia conceived us, nourished us, let us grow in the darkness, as in a womb; then she had labor pains, and then contractions, and then she shot us out, and now here we are, new and naked, like newborn babies. Doesn’t it seem that way to you?”
“Narishe meydl, vos darfst du fregn?” Mendel replied, feeling an affectionate smile on his lips and a light film before his eyes.
There was movement in the corridor, footsteps, whispering. Mendel got up and went to look through the crack in the door: the White was breathing heavily and moaning at intervals. Suddenly she writhed and yelled loudly twice, three times. The four men from Blizna leaped to their feet, bellicose and sleepy; Isidor knelt down beside the bed, then strode out into the corridor. He came back a minute later, dragging a nun and the doctor who was on duty. All three of them were frightened, for different reasons. Isidor was shouting in Yiddish:
“This woman must not die, Mr. Doctor, do you understand? She’s my wife, we came here all the way from Russia, we fought and we walked. And the baby is my son, he has to be born. He mustn’t die, understood? You’ll be in trouble if the woman or the baby dies: we are partisans. Go on, Mr. Doctor, do what you have to, and be careful how you do it.”
Line walked over to Isidor to try to calm him down and reassure him, but Isidor, who kept his hand on the handle of the pistol shoved into his belt, pushed her away roughly. The doctor didn’t understand Yiddish, but he understood what a pistol in the hand of a terrified young man could mean; he spoke rapidly to the nun, then he took a step toward the telephone in the corner of the hallway, but Isidor cut him off. Then he and the nun took the gurney that was standing nearby, moved the White onto it as she went on screaming, and headed off toward the delivery room. Isidor nodded to his men and followed them; Mendel and Line followed Isidor.
Isidor didn’t dare force his way into the delivery room. The seven of them sat down outside the door, and the hours began to go by. More than once, Mendel tried to calm Isidor down and persuade him to hand over the pistol. He might even have tried to grab it out of Isidor’s hands if he hadn’t seen that Isidore’s four compatriots were right behind him. His efforts were unsuccessful: Isidor stood in front of him without hearing a word he said, arrogant at first, then straining to hear the muffled sounds that came from the delivery room.
Sitting next to Line, Mendel looked at her knees, sticking out from beneath her skirt. It was the first time he’d seen them: never before, except with the vision in his fingertips, trembling with desire, in the darkness of their pallets, a different one every night, or through the opaque cloth of her trousers. Don’t give in. Don’t give in to her. Don’t start all over again, be sensible, resist. You wouldn’t live beside her for a lifetime, she isn’t a woman for a lifetime, and you’re not even thirty yet. When you’re thirty, life can begin again. Like a book, when you’ve finished the first volume. Start over from where? From here, from today, from this Milanese dawn rising behind the frosted glass: from this morning. This is a good place to start living. Maybe you should’ve done what they did, they were right after all, the two nebbishes; they didn’t do it the way you did with Line, they closed their eyes and let go and the seed of man was not spilt and a woman conceived.
A nun walked past, pushing a trolley. Line, who had been dozing, shook herself and said:
“It’s a while since we stayed up all night.”
“It’s a while since we spent the night together,” Mendel replied. No, I wouldn’t live a lifetime with Line, but I can’t leave her and I don’t want to leave her. I’ll carry her with me forever, inside me, even if we’re separated, the way I was separated from Rivke.
Outside, they could hear the city awakening, the screeching of trams, the shutters of the shops being rolled up. A nurse emerged from the delivery room, followed by the doctor himself, who went back in almost immediately. Isidor, no longer truculent but now imploring, asked questions that were understood in spite of the language. The doctor made reassuring gestures, held up his wristwatch: it would be two hours, one hour. Repeated screaming could be heard, the hum of a motor, then silence. Finally, in broad daylight, a nurse with a cheerful face emerged, carrying a little bundle. “It’s a boy, it’s a boy,” she laughed. No one understood, she looked around and found Izu, the hairy one, close at hand, and jerked on his beard: “A boy, like this one!”
They all got to their feet. Mendel and Line embraced Isidor, whose eyes, red from lack of sleep, were suddenly glistening. The doctor came out, too, slapped Isidor on the back, and headed down the hall, but he ran into a colleague who was walking along with a newspaper held out before him, and he stopped to talk. Other doctors, nuns, and nurses gathered around the two men. Mendel, too, ventured closer and managed to see that the newspaper, which consisted of a single sheet of paper, had a headline in a very large type size, but he didn’t understand what it said. That newspaper bore the date of Tuesday, August 7, 1945, and it gave the news of the first atomic bomb, dropped on Hiroshima.
Turin, January 11–December 20, 1981