Deviation Page 14

  My French friends then accompanied me to the International Assistance Bureau for concentration camp survivors, which was located behind the eighteenth-century palace of the Carnival prince, on the Rhine. The great river was cool and refreshing to behold in the suffocating heat of that continental August. Unfortunately, the International Bureau dealt exclusively with persecuted Jews. There was, however, another German institution on the other side of the city, near the public park, that might be appropriate in my case. There they handled only former German political prisoners. Nevertheless, they did not let us leave until they had demonstrated, especially to my French friends, that the current German administration offered victims—more specifically those of Nazi tyranny, which had oppressed everyone without distinction—compensation for damages, albeit overdue, in the form of an apartment, a car, a refrigerator, a generous pension, and various privileges, including a weekly distribution of food and medicine parcels normally unobtainable.

  The Frenchmen, disappointed because this was our last attempt, and Russia was the last resort for me, insisted that the German bureau give me a parcel for my trouble, but those gentlemen were sorry, no, at which the French criticized them loudly as the most hypocritical people and wheeled me away. That day on the way back they gave anyone who turned around to look at us a withering look, treating them like brutal Nazis. I, on the other hand, was cheerful. I had set out curious about the outcome, as in a game of chance, and with each slap in the face, seeing those expressions of sympathy, my heart flickered, ready for battle: “And I’m supposed to capitulate because of them?”

  The Frenchmen, who’d wanted to see me settled, had to give it up because they were leaving that same evening: one transferred to Berlin, the other, with TB, to a sanatorium in the Alps. They were twenty-three and twenty-two years old.

  We spent the whole afternoon together. The one who was going to Berlin was sad and looked anxiously back and forth between his companion and me. We two instead joked around. There was talk of love. I said that I was one of the Lord’s chosen ones because He granted all my prayers, maybe even a little too literally. I had wanted to sacrifice and He instantly buried me under a wall; I had argued that, for a woman, love, as currently conceived, meant subjection to a man and He promptly had put me in a position of not being able to love …

  “Dieu nazi!”

  *

  At that time, in the German regional capitals, each of the four victorious powers still had a military post, and the smaller countries an agency, to reclaim those who had been deported.

  The Soviet Command was located in a green house not far from the barracks where Johann lived.

  On the tenth morning following the hospital’s ultimatum, I went there with Schwester Luise.

  I asked for the comrade commander. A man in his fifties, stocky, with a deep voice, wearing a bottle green uniform and high boots, came out of the house to the garden. He sat down on a bench, to which he pushed my wheelchair, and prepared to listen to me.

  I knew Italian, French, and German well; I understood, wrote, and read Russian and Polish; I remembered Latin and ancient Greek fairly well; a little Romanian; I was studying English; I presumed that the Russians might be interested in a polyglot with a humanities background and that, by its very ideological tenets, communist society would recognize the sacrosanct right of every human being to work.

  As I racked my brain to dredge up the clever little phrases, repeated so often during my sleepless nights, that were to lead to my explicit request to go to Russia, and which now escaped me, the captain stood up, went to grab the broom out of a soldier’s hands, and started sweeping vigorously, calling the man a slowpoke.

  Then he came back to sit beside me, puffing, and gave me a concerned look. I had to laugh at the thought of my little contrived speech, and I told him straight out that I wanted to go and settle in Russia because I was paralyzed, I didn’t want to be pitied and kept in Italy as a survivor of myself when, if anything, I was stronger now than before because I knew things that others couldn’t even imagine, and I was capable not only of providing for myself, but also of being useful to others, and I was not afraid of life.

  “You’re not really a ‘run-to-mama,’” he said, using the name the Russians called Italian soldiers during the war.

  “We run back to mama, true, but only after putting up a good fight,” I retorted, feeling stung for my compatriots.

  He laughed heartily: “Khorosho, very good!” and he had them bring me a bag with a huge slab of red, fresh beef that I had not seen for years, a lump of butter, a sack of sugar, a loaf of bread, and some cucumbers.

  But then he stood in front of me and looked as if he were getting ready to leave.

  “Well?” I asked. “Will you let me enter Russia?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “How can you even think of it?”

  “I’ll get Russian citizenship.”

  “In that condition?” He pointed to my legs.

  “Bravo!” I retorted. “Congratulations.”

  We stared, gauging each other. He sat down again. He slapped his hands on his thighs and said:

  “Just my luck that this one had to show up here!”

  “Yes.” By now I was sure that he wouldn’t send me away with a conventional excuse.

  A small group of soldiers had gathered around us. They eyed the young, attractive Luise and, perhaps to appear important, brought the absorbed commander cigarette paper and matches, told him the time, all with great familiarity, until he lost his patience and, with an unwarranted burst of anger, threatened to have them all shot on the spot. They vanished. Still frowning, he slumped back on the bench.

  “You know,” he said finally, “one’s own land”—he paused on the word zemlya—“is always one’s own land.”

  I wrinkled my nose: “Come on!”

  He frowned again.

  “You were a partisan?”

  “No.”

  He hesitated, studying me: “Fascist?”

  I didn’t answer.

  He rested his elbows on his knees, his broad ruddy face in his hands. “Go on. Speak,” he said softly, brisk and somehow trustworthy.

  I was eighteen when the Badoglio government, following the armistice of September 8, 1943, upset the front against the Allies during the war, and the German roundups began; people were terrified, confused, left to their own devices, hiding, feeling as though their earlier ideals were crimes, and any promises just words in the wind. So I wanted to put myself to the test, to see if I too would retreat at the first difficulty. I was troubled, as I am now, searching for the best decision. Thinking and rejecting, thinking and rejecting, I realized that the only way to learn the truth for myself about Fascists and anti-Fascists—many said that they could no longer figure it out—was to ascertain it firsthand. Understanding this, I had to go to the places about which the most outrageous stories were told: the Nazi concentration camps. That’s why I ran away from home on February 8, 1944, and went to Germany as a simple volunteer worker, with pictures of Mussolini and Hitler in my backpack, sure about what I was doing. But after spending a few months in a labor camp near Frankfurt am Main, my comrades organized a strike at the factory, the IG Farben, where I worked in the Ch 89, the chemical division. As a result I was jailed, then later transferred and detained in Dachau. In order to survive, I escaped from there in October, and for a couple of months I remained hidden in Munich. Then I left, following the death of the friends who were helping me: a pregnant Polish woman named Dunja who died in childbirth, and a Frenchman killed by the police. I headed back to my first Lager, traveling partway by train without a ticket, crouched in the toilets of the cars, partway on foot, spending the night in bomb shelters, in abandoned cattle cars, in foreigners’ barracks; I also worked as a garzona (waitress) for a few days for some farmers in the vicinity of Donauwörth; in mid-February I arrived in Mainz. I also met up with an old comrade from IG Farben, Johann, one of the ones wi
th whom we had organized the strike in the factories. He had fled in time and so had avoided arrest. He was working as a kitchen boy in a hotel in Mainz, under a false name. He managed to get me hired as well. I had been working for a week; by then I was safe, I was a waitress at the Königshotel, where … —I choked up—and here I am.

  The captain couldn’t get over his surprise: “A strike! Escaped! But didn’t the Germans catch you again?”

  “Communications had been disrupted for some time.”

  He shrugged. He started pacing up and down. He came back to where I was waiting. He bent down to my ear and whispered, “Don’t mention volunteering. You were a Fascist, but with the genuine spirit of a comrade. In Russia, you’ll see, you will be treated humanely and well.” But he went on: “I still can’t put you on the list. Nie magu,” he spelled out. Only then did I have doubts about being rejected. I couldn’t breathe because of the heat, and, feeling overcome with no further recourse, I let myself go and wept silently, with my eyes alone. He clenched my wrist: “Podozhdi, devchonka.”* He disappeared into the house and came back with two glasses of vodka.

  “If only you were married to a Russian,” he sighed.

  “Over there, though, is it certain that I could get divorced?”

  “Of course!” Then, thinking about it: “Why, is there a man?”

  I laughed nervously. Johann was born in Russia, he spoke Russian as well as I did French; he had no papers, but he could pass himself off as Russian. Still, I didn’t say that to the captain. Instead I asked, “How much time is needed for a wedding? I only have four days, after that they’ll throw me out of the hospital.”

  “Bring the man here, with your documents. I’ll see to the rest.”

  As Luise wheeled me away, I turned to look at the captain, who was watching me with something of a stunned expression. My head was spinning strangely, maybe because of the vodka. I was overjoyed. There were no obstacles too great for me, Lord.

  On the way back, I wanted to stop by the barracks. Luise objected. So I begged her to leave me at the gate, let Johann know I was there, and go away. He would see to getting me back later. She was extremely troubled to do it, but I insisted and she did what I asked.

  Johann appeared very annoyed to see me. It was noon. Apparently I was in the way and he didn’t know what to do with me. A far cry from the imploring, suffering air when he came to visit me or stalked me during my outings with the soldiers. He became more and more irritated each moment that passed. Finally, he wheeled me into the barracks courtyard, picked me up in front of a staircase, and carried me up hurriedly, as if afraid of being seen; he set me down on a cot that stood alone against a wall in an empty room: “Be right back,” he said, and rushed off.

  An hour went by, two, three. I had not unplugged and emptied the catheter from early that morning and I was worried that I had wet myself. I felt down there to check; luckily I was still dry. More time passed. I tried calling out. No one heard me. I called louder. The sound of footsteps stopped behind the door. I called out again. The door opened partway. A woman’s head appeared in the opening; she closed the door again, came back with another woman. One at a time, with curious glances, several people came in.

  They all talked at once: it was the fault of that floozy who looked down on them when she was worse than anyone, shameless, stealing the man of a poor unfortunate like me, poverina, so lieb, I would have moved a stone; and he let himself be led around by the nose by her, he couldn’t get over her, jealous since her boyfriend had returned from prison, he’d become so emaciated he looked like a corpse, at twenty years old, and her, one day she’d say yes to him and the next she’d stroll by him with that chump of an ex-convict without even saying a word.

  The sun was setting.

  I asked to be taken back to the hospital. It seemed like a huge task, opinions and counter-opinions, orders and counter-orders; four of them lifted me. God willing, I found myself back in the wheelchair in the courtyard. Not so much as a trace of him. We set off in a group of half a dozen or so, prostitutes and burly men, all outraged, watching over me like a baby chick.

  The nuns welcomed me back, raising their eyes to the heavens. They quickly sent away my companions, who were still talking about the episode with two nosy women in the ward.

  That night I came down with a high fever. I’d returned with the wheelchair soaked and the catheter expelled from my bladder. My buttocks were swollen, hard and hot as coals to the touch. I was delirious. God had done this so that I wouldn’t become proud; by now I knew Him, I didn’t get mad at Him anymore.

  Schwester Luise, angry, watched over me all night, and the next day the other sisters were also surly and cold with me. Johann didn’t come all morning. I managed to persuade the masseuse, who had a car, to go and look for him and bring him to me. In the afternoon one buttock split open and emitted copious putrid matter with an unbearable stench, yet the fever remained high at forty degrees. Johann finally showed up in the evening; the masseuse had not been able to track him down earlier.

  I asked him if he still wanted to marry me. He made me repeat the question. He threw himself at me, covering my face with kisses, as when I was first injured, and asked me how come. I struggled to find an answer. Finally, we would leave, we would start from scratch, he apologized to a patient in a nearby bed who had come in that day, to an orderly, he kissed Sister Vincentia’s hands as she muttered “Armer Kerl!”* and looked at me resignedly. Then he hugged Schwester so hard that her bonnet went askew and she tottered.

  We were all touched; I stroked his head. But, alone, I composed myself: despite the fever I had noticed his excessive enthusiasm, the shifty glances. I mustn’t care, what mattered was that I achieve my objective, whatever the cost. “But,” I said to Him up there, “make him pay dearly.”

  It was easy enough to obtain papers in those days. All you had to do was request them from a special office based on a simple declaration countersigned by four witnesses. You could readily give false information. That was what we did: Johann declared a Russian surname, and proclaimed himself Russian; I gave the name under which I had been working at the hotel and with which I’d been admitted to the hospital.

  The following day, the thirteenth, we went to the Russian Command with two German couples as witnesses. Although the fever had subsided to thirty-eight degrees after my other buttock had split as well, my head was pounding and I felt myself swaying in my chair like an inanimate object.

  The commander looked Johann up and down and called two soldiers, who stood at either side of him.

  “Are you Russian? From where? Why didn’t you report to your command before now?”

  Johann, who in Russian was now Janka, explained that he had waited for me to be in a condition to face a long journey.

  “This marriage then turns out to be convenient for you as well, otherwise I would have written you up.” And in a harsh voice: “Were you SS?”

  “No.”

  “Examine him.”

  The soldiers took Janka by the arms and led him away. The SS men had a tattoo like two lightning bolts in the armpit or on the shoulder or elsewhere.

  Standing at attention, the soldiers declared that there were no markings; the commander wanted to check for himself. Then he had me brought into the house.

  We handed over the German documents that the commander tossed on the table as if to say, I’m going to let it go, signed a register, and a military clerk issued us a certificate. The comrade commander seemed to relax, and slapped his fist on Janka’s back:

  “You’re lucky that I’m already married,” he shouted jovially in his deep voice, a quip that made the soldiers who were present laugh uproariously.

  Then he completely ignored my spouse and, waving his arms to drive the soldiers out like chickens, asked me if this marriage was serious.

  “No, pro forma, that way it will be even easier to get divorced.” The commander thought as much: I wasn’t meant to be tied down.

  Wheeling me d
own the corridor, he informed me that the first convoy was leaving in a week and that meanwhile he would vouch for me with the hospital administration. If he could, he would personally accompany me to the first link-up point of the journey, Homburg in the Saar, because I was a courageous, honest, and, yes, beautiful girl.

  Janka wanted to take me to the former barracks; I really had no desire to go there, but I felt drained, after the stress we’d been under, and conciliatory. They’d been expecting us, because we were immediately surrounded by men, women, and children who popped out of doorways on the four sides of the courtyard. Janka’s eyes kept looking around for someone. In front of the flight of steps he wanted to pick me up to carry me upstairs, amid the applause and coughing of the onlookers, but remembering my last visit and thinking about the foul smell that the bedsores on my behind would have emanated when he lifted me up, I told him I didn’t feel well and wanted to go back to the hospital.

  As we argued, someone called him aside, greatly agitated. He came back to me ashen, beside himself: “She cut her wrists.” And maybe because I remained unfazed, he repeated bitterly, “She cut her wrists.” He stopped a twelve-year-old boy who came by: “Stay with her, take her wherever she wants,” and he rushed off.

  The boy planted his eyes on me, sullen. I promised him chocolate to console him, but nothing coaxed him out of his sulk.

  When, along the way, I suggested that we bet on who would touch my hump as they passed by, his face brightened, and he had a good time maneuvering the wheelchair to make it easier for people to brush me hurriedly. I counted to myself: in odd numbers, they would bring me luck, even numbers bad luck. I tallied seven.