Deviation Read online

  Jeanine looks into the doorway of a barrack. “There she is,” she says. Under a dull light bulb I see, standing in the middle of the room, an affable, middle-aged woman with reddish hair, a broad impassive face, short torso, and long, skinny legs. The copper-colored hair against the smooth, clear skin of her face is the only thing about her that seems alive.

  “What do you want?” she asks Jeanine listlessly. Not answering, Jeanine takes me by the arm and leads me away.

  “La Scopina isn’t actually one of us, she’s working here with the proper papers, but she’s convenient for us because she roams around the camp freely and sees a lot of things, and her boyfriend doesn’t leave us short of coal.” Jeanine seems to be thinking. “Come on,” she says, “the only ones left are the French guy who’s after me, and Jean de Lille, a cute, young worker; then there’s the Moroccan, a real capitalist that one, aside from the fact that his face is covered with smallpox scars. But all three said that they’d seen you. Oh, there’s La Pidocchiosa, ‘lousy,’ the one with the lice. Benito named her that. Benito is the cheese guy, the poor man is furious because at night he always ends up with her again. So sometimes you hear him muttering, ‘I’ll sleep and that’s it, I’ll pay you anyway.’ I can’t tell you how hard the rest of us laugh. And she smokes, she’s always smoking, even smokes potato skins rolled up in newspaper. By the way, what’s your name? A fake name, though.”

  “Carla.”

  “Okay, Carlà. Now we’ll go to Benito. He boasts about having been some kind of fearsome partisan in Italy—under the nom de guerre of Benito, imagine! He’s a fool—Polò calls him by that name ironically, and Benito is proud of it. Who knows who he thinks he is, he hands out gifts left and right, would you believe, he doesn’t eat and slaves away all day to afford it, but meanwhile everyone praises him for his generosity, so he’s content.”

  We skirted the barracks laid out side by side in parallel rows. “Watch out for the barracks that are in the middle, the ones for the volunteers.”

  I try to get a look inside the volunteers’ barracks: they’re roomier than the others, they have cots instead of two-level bunks, and the straw pallets are wrapped in checkered cotton mattress covers.

  “Remember,” Jeanine says, “that we escapees are in barrack fifty-one.”

  “How are people divided up here?”

  “Men in one, women in another, families in a third … And the volunteers are kept separate.”

  As I walk beside Jeanine and follow her words—surrounded by the coming and going of foreigners freely taking a walk, all mingled together, out to breathe the evening air—I sense the invisible camp nearby: there, we were forbidden to even move about and lived holed up in the dark.

  We reach the area behind the kitchen, a wooden building longer than the others with a tin roof. Behind the kitchen, against the fence, is a pile of garbage where children are rummaging. We go and wait for Benito there, looking out past the fence as from the rail of a ship. The concentration camp is on the other side.

  “Jeanine,” I say, “isn’t it dangerous here, so close to…” I gesture to the plain. “The SS, you know.”

  “Would a Nazi suspect that we’re right here under his nose?” she laughs. “No!”

  Benito comes running, hunkers down, unfolds a cloth that he pulls out from under his shirt, and spreads it on his knees. It holds bread, potatoes, and a wedge of cheese.

  “Quick,” he beckons us, “make everything disappear.”

  He grabs the food with his bony, gnarled fingers and hands it out swiftly as if he were stealing. Then he stuffs the cloth under his shirt and straightens up, moving uncertainly, with a sly, idiotic expression.

  “Now let’s beat it,” says Jeanine. “I’m tired. Go eat your portion at the toilet and never let anyone see that you have something, otherwise no one will forgive you for it. Bye, Carlà, bye-bye, baby chick, I feel like I’m your mother hen.”

  She laughs and runs away, disappearing behind the corner of a barrack.

  *

  When the guards retire after roll call—they almost seem harmless here, not accompanied by fidgety German shepherds like in the concentration camp—I run to the toilet to meet Paolo.

  I knock on the wall.

  “I really didn’t think you’d come,” Paolo says in a low voice. I look for where the words are coming from; behind the last of the eight toilet bowls, down below, I finally spot a gap in the wooden partition, the board pulled off.

  “Why did you give me away?” I ask, sitting on the floor and bending over the opening. “I was so content not knowing anyone. You’re wrong, you know, to think I’m safer with all of you. In these places you’re better off alone, unnoticed, without a name.” I speak quickly, gripped by an abrupt terror of becoming attached to other human beings. “So leave me alone, I don’t exist.”

  Paolo doesn’t answer, and I wonder whether he heard me.

  “Paolo?”

  “What?”

  “I thought maybe you didn’t hear me.”

  “Isn’t that what you want, given that you don’t exist?”

  “Help me, I’m afraid.”

  “Of what? I find this dull life so well suited to me that I don’t want it to change.” Paolo’s voice floats up gently.

  The door flies open and four girls burst in. Talking fast in a Slavic language, they pull up their skirts and park themselves on the toilets. They look at me sitting on the floor and, nudging one another, stifle a laugh. Then they dash off, leaving the door open to slam in the wind. I get up and close it; then I go back to squatting on the floor beside the partition.

  “I loved an Italian girl who was very beautiful,” the voice resumes. “She worked at the same factory where we were prisoners. She was a stunning, practical woman who hated the displacements. One day she told me that I was disorganized, argumentative, and indecisive, not the man for her. The next day she was gone, she’d gotten transferred to another city. I escaped in order to find her and ended up here. I took up with Jeanine. Sleeping with her, it doesn’t even seem like you’re embracing a woman. She has the spirited body of a child, what do you expect, she’s sixteen, playful and impish as a cat, plus she knows her way around, every now and then she shows up with tobacco or liquor or bread. ‘Imagine, Polò, what a fluke!’ she says, laughing. A young girl who makes my life tolerable and lets me be the worm that I am: she accepts me as I am and doesn’t go beyond that.”

  “She’s so young!” I sigh.

  “Now don’t go acting like a great-grandmother, you’re young too. How old? Eighteen, right?”

  “I’m only nineteen, it’s true, but I always forget. Then, when I remember, it’s as if I’ve made a great discovery, and at first I’m somewhat happy because I have so much life ahead of me. But then I quickly turn sad, full of dread about the future, and I wonder how I can live after all this.”

  I’m practically lying on the floor with my head under the toilet bowl’s drainpipe; I can’t manage to say anything else and Paolo also falls silent.

  “In the camps,” his reflective voice then goes on, “the ones who survive are those who retain the moral compass of their lives, there is no middle ground. That’s the beauty of it: here you can’t lie. Incidentally, where are you from exactly?”

  “I knew it. That’s what you wanted: for me to talk, to tell you about myself.” I raise my head and bang it against the toilet bowl.

  “If you close yourself off, you’re a goner,” the voice says calmly and, after a pause: “Haven’t you seen how docilely the deportees die? In a group it’s so easy!”

  “I know why they die,” I reply. “Their real lives ended earlier, so they’re throwing away the one they have now, it’s hostile to them, like a wall. Not me, I’m keeping mine, the way bears do: don’t feel, don’t love, just sleep through the cold.” I’m choked by hysterical tears. “That’s why I didn’t want to share anything with you people, but you did it, are you happy now? Look, I’ve known people who were starving to death bu
t never resigned themselves to eating barley and bedbug soup. What could I do? I ate it. They died and I realized that all of life is that way. They refused to work, even under the whip. They were heroes. For what? What does it mean? They played into the Nazis’ hands.” I cover my face with my palms.

  “You’re contradicting yourself,” the voice replies softly. “You have a problem with the ones who throw away this life of ours, yet you want to do the same thing.”

  “No, it’s different.”

  “A bear,” he repeats. “Don’t feel, don’t love.”

  A silence ensues, then: “Me, I’m enjoying the current situation. Can’t you see I’m thriving on it? That I’m devouring it to the last bite?”

  “You’re the one who wants to die,” I murmur.

  The door opens again, and, without looking to see who came in, I spring to my feet, scared, pulling down my pants. I sit on the toilet with unspeakable relief, as if I had an ID card in my pocket. When the girls leave, I lie down again with my pants undone so I can make it to the toilet seat more quickly in case of another interruption.

  “Paolo?” I whisper.

  His voice comes to me: “You’re right, ruskaia, here I can finally die in peace, very very slowly.”

  “Why did you call me then?” I rebel again. “Do you want me to give in too, like you?”

  “You can see I was drawn to this.”

  “Never mind drawn to it, I don’t believe it, you weren’t like that, you wouldn’t understand certain things. You say that to convince yourself, so you won’t suffer.”

  “Not so. I’ve always been falling apart, I’ve always liked to play the victim of fate and here I found my real element, something to sink my teeth into,” he laughs, “and decayed teeth at that!”

  “And then you say that I act like a great-grandmother. You’re the one who acts like an old man. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  “What work did you do before?”

  “Bosun. Cargo ships.”

  Another silence, then finally, “If you want to drop dead in peace,” I ask him, “why do you try to help others?”

  “Who knows, to pass the time. Years of maritime service,” he says quietly, “like it or not it stays with you.” I hear his breathing: “Maybe it was in the freight containers,” he says, beginning to sound upset. “I went crazy. I suffer from claustrophobia, see, it gets you by the throat. You can’t help it: you feel strangled. Mother of God, how I hated those containers, and you see the result, right? I associated them with my fate.”

  “I’m beginning to understand you, you know, you’re worse than they are,” I say.

  “They who?”

  “It was terrible…”

  “Hmm,” he breathes beside me.

  “If you had seen those women,” I say, “they would fight each other like wild animals for a cigarette, a turnip, a man, always the same threats, they’d report one another to the Kapos, the SS, for having insulted Nazism, for having spat on Hitler’s portrait, they’d be arrested and…” My words come out choked. I make an effort: “Paolo,” I confide, “Nazism was their weapon. But you’re educated, you’ve traveled, and it’s much worse: you use it as an excuse. You know who you remind me of? There was a German woman among the common criminals, who, at dawn, as we were washing up, would sing a song at the top of her lungs; it’s an ordinary parody but, for some reason, it always haunts me when I have hunger cramps.” I sing the refrain that in German goes:

  Es geht alles vorüber

  es geht alles vorbei

  mein Mann ist in Russland

  mein Bett ist noch frei.*

  The quivering sound of my voice under the toilet’s drainpipe singing to a hole in a partition has a strange effect on me and I stop. I feel a confusion, an unreasonable regret, and I blurt out: “I left them. They’re there now. I couldn’t take it. They’ve probably been punished because of me.” The sobbing suffocates me: “But I didn’t want to die, it was stronger than me, you have to believe me.”

  “I’m convinced the Germans have spotted me, they look the other way so they can keep a closer eye on me and pounce on me at the right time—meanwhile, here I can’t do any harm, get it?” There’s a grin in his voice.

  The toilet’s electric light grows dim due to the nighttime blackout, plunging the room into a bleak, dull half-light that hangs over the ungainly white toilet seats.

  “It’s ten o’clock,” Paolo sighs.

  “At our camp too, at the same hour.”

  “It’s the first time you’ve run away, right?”

  “The second. This time I’ve come from a camp in Munich.”

  “So then you already know that from now on all you’ll do is escape. You’ll think only about saving your own skin and the hell with all the rest. You’ll become less sensitive,” he sniggers (which sounds like a groan).

  “Instead it’s just the opposite. It’s always worse for me,” I say, still crying.

  “Come on, I didn’t mean to get you down.” His voice cracks: “You shouldn’t listen to me, I’m teasing, see, I’m always teasing.” Abruptly his tone becomes firm: “Enough of that, let’s move on to serious matters. You’re in trouble. When I approached you this morning behind that stove, you jumped so high, even an idiot would have gotten suspicious. Remember: anyone who jumps at every shadow and looks ready to fight tooth and nail has already denounced herself.”

  “That’s not true. I was composed, I was just keeping to myself.”

  “Keeping to yourself!” he chuckles. “With eyes that can’t stop darting around. That’s the mark of a fugitive, what else? Always feeling like you’re being hunted.”

  “So according to you a person should let herself be deceived by the calm of appearances? And thereby neglect even the most elementary precautions?”

  “You’re quick to leap to the opposite extreme. The point is this: you can’t give a shit about the big issues—heroes, significance, weapons, justifications, and whatever else you dragged out! All bullshit. You have to get by however you can, that’s the only way you’ll see the practical side of things. You have to resist your instinct, my dear girl, the war isn’t about to end tomorrow, it will take time, and how! At least several months longer.”

  “Months?”

  “Right, months at least. The winter for sure.” He falls silent, then suddenly resumes: “I forgot the best part. I called you here to warn you about an imminent danger to you, but don’t panic, it’s just a technical danger, so to speak. As soon as the Russians receive their documents, they’ll be sent off to perform hard labor somewhere, while maybe thinking they’re going to lead a normal life.”

  The low voice behind the partition laughs with senseless pleasure. “On the day they’re transported, the Germans might notice you, so be on your guard: that’s when our support can be helpful to you, I would say, essential.”

  The thought of having to take precautions for the immediate future rouses me.

  “Thanks,” I say. “I’m sorry, you know, for the way I talked when I came in, I’m just at the end of my rope.”

  I hear footsteps and men’s voices outside. I wait for them to go away, with my eyes closed, woozy. Afterward, I call out.

  “Paolo?” No answer. “Paolo? Are you there?” I wait a little longer, then look down: the opening in the partition is gone. I drag myself up; my legs are numb and I feel a little dizzy.

  I go out into the frosty December air. I start back to my barrack, lost in thought, skirting the fence to try to make out my old camp in the darkness. But suddenly I stop and crouch down, because lanterns are swaying a few meters away from me and German words can be heard, orders snapped by the SS with detached impatience, which sound to my ears like the cracks of a whip.

  They are right in front of the barrack where I sleep: my Russians are being dragged from their beds and lined up in the courtyard. I realize that they are leaving this very night: the barrack door is open and they come out, one at a time, stopped by guards
who shine lantern light on their faces as they blink their eyes and show their papers. Vehicles with dim headlights slowly make their way past the fence, stopping in a row in front of the camp entrance. The beams of light pierce the darkness, unhurriedly and insidiously, and I’m afraid of being discovered. If Paolo hadn’t arranged to meet me, I would have been captured already. I don’t know where to hide. Creeping along the barracks, I slip back into the toilet. From behind the door I listen to the impersonal German voices, the pleading cries of the Russians, the roar of engines, the patter of footsteps.