History (12 page)

Among them, now and then, there was an aged spinster by the name of Vilma, whom they treated, in those parts, like an imbecile. The muscles of her bo and of her face were always restless, while her gaze, on the contrary, was ecsta too luminous.

She had been orphaned very young, and, unable to do anything else, she adapted herself to heavy jobs, like a laborer. She ran around all day long, ti in Trastevere and in Campo dei Fiori where she also begged for leftovers, not for herself, but for the cats in the Theater of Marcellus. Perhaps the only holiday in her life was when, towards evening, she would sit there on a ruin, in the midst of the cats, scattering half-rotten fi

and bloodstained off on the ground for them. Then her always feverish face would become calm and radiant, as in Paradise. (However, with the progress of the war, these blissful encounters of hers were to become only a memory.)

For some time, Vilma brought back to the Ghetto from her daily laboring rounds strange, unheard-of information, which the other women rejected as fantasies of her brain. And in fact, her imagination was always toiling, like a convict, in Vilma's head; however, later, certain
fantasies
of hers were to prove far less fant:J. than the tru

She insisted that the person who kept her so informed was a
Nun
(she went to work in a convent, among other places . . . ) ; or else a
Signora
who, in secret, listened to some forbidden radio broadcasts, but Vilma was not to say the lady's name. In any case, she tried hard to convince them her informati was genuine; and every day she would repeat the news, through the quarter, in a hoarse, urgent voice, as if she were pleading. But realizing that no one listened to her or believed her, she would burst into

5 1

an anguished laughter like whooping cough. 1l1e only one, perhaps, who did listen to her, with terrible seriousness, was Iduzza, because in her eyes Vilma, in her appearance and her behavior, resembled a kind of prophetess. At present, in her messages, as obsessive as they were futile, she harped constantly on the warning to
save the children at least,
declaring she had learned confi from the
Nun
that in the imminent future's history a new slaughter was written, worse than Herod's. As soon as the Germans occupied a country, the fi thing they did was herd all the Jews, without exception, into one place, and from there, drag them off beyond the borders, nobody knew where, in "the night and in the fog." Most collapsed or died on the journey. And all of them, the dead and the living, were thrown on top of one another into huge pits, which their companions or relatives were forced to dig in their presence. The only ones allowed to surv were the stronger adults, sen tenced to work like slaves for the war.

And the children were all slaughtered, from fi to last, and thrown into the common ditches along the road.

One day, listening to this talk of Vilma's, in addition to lduzza, there was also an elderly little woman, humbly dressed, but wearing a hat on her head. Unlike the woman who kept the shop, this stranger gravely agreed with Vilma's insane, hoarse lamentations. In fact ( in a low voice, for fear of informers ), she spoke up, insisting she herself had heard, from a Cara biniere sergeant, that according to the Germans' laws, the Jews were ver min and were all to be exterminated. After the Axis victory, which was now certain and near, Italy would also become territory of the Reich, and subject to the same, defi law. Over St. Peter's, instead of the Chris tian cross, they would put the swastika; and even baptized Christians, if they were not to be included in the blacklist, would have to prove their Ary blood,
FOR FOUR GENERA
!

There was ample reason, she added, why all the young Jews of good families who had the money had emigrated from Europe, some to Ameri some to Australia, while they were still in time. But by now, with money or wi all the frontiers were closed; it was too late.

"Who's in is in, and who's out is out."

At this point, in an unsteady voice, like a fugitive from justice afraid of leaving clues, Iduzza managed to ask her the exact meaning of
FOR FOUR GENE ONS.
And the little woman, with the smugness of a scientist or mathematician, and not without elaborating and repeating when she deemed it necessary, explained:

"that in the German law, blood was calculated by heads, quotas, and dozens. Fourth
generation
means:
great-grandfathers.
And to calculate the heads, you only have to count great-grandparents and grandparents, which come to a total of:

52 H I S T O R Y
.
. . . . .
1 9 - -

"8
great-gran dparents
+
4 grandparents =
12
heads "namely, one dozen.

"Now, in this dozen heads, each head, if Ary counts as an Aryan quota : one point in the person's favor. If, instead, it's Jewish, it counts as a Jewish quota : one point against. And in the final calculation, the result must be at least two-thirds plus one! A third of a dozen
=
4; two-thirds =
8

+
l
=
9. Anyone appeari to be judged must present a minimum of 9

Aryan points. If he has less, even half a point less, he is considered of Jewi blood."

At home, alone, Ida plunged into a complicated calculation. For her self, really, the solution was simple : born of an Aryan and a mother whose family had been Jewish for many generations, she had only six points out of twelve, and the result was therefore negative. But her main concern namely Nino, proved more abstruse, and here the sum, as she computed it again and again, became muddled in her brain. She was then inspired to take a sheet of paper and draw a family tree for Nino, in which a J marked his Jewish grandparents and great-grandparents, and an A, the Aryans (an
X
stood for the names that, for the moment, had escaped her memory) :

And the count came out propiti Nino, if only by a slight margin, fell within the obligatory number of points: nine out of twelve. Ary

This result, however, wasn't enough to give her peace, not even about her son's position. The real term of the law, in the future and also in the present, remained too vari and obscure
t-0
her. She recalled, for ex ample, having heard in Calabria from an American emigrant that dark blood always wins out over pale blood. A single drop of black blood is enough to determ that a man isn't white, but a black halfbreed.

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4

And so, it's fi clear why the poor woman, on a January day in 1941, greeted the encounter with that humble soldier at San Lorenzo like a nightmare vision. The fears besieging her prevented her from seeing anything of him except a German army uniform.

And on meeting, at the very door of her home, tha t uniform which seemed stationed there, waiting for her, she though t she had arrived at the terri rendezvous preordained for her since the beginning of the world.

He must be an agent of the Racial Committee, perhaps a Corporal, or a Captain, of the SS, come to identify her. For her, he had no features of his own. He was a copy of the thousands of similar faces that multiplied to infi the sole, incomprehensible face of her persecution.

The soldier was off feeling the unknown lady's evident and extraordinary disgust was an injustice. He wasn't accustomed to inspiri disgust in women, and furthermore he knew (despite his earlier little disappointments ) he was in an allied, not an enemy country However, in his mortifi instead of giving up, he insisted. When the family cat, through some absurd ill-humor, crouches in his pri hiding-places, the children persist in hunting him.

For that matter, she didn't even try to move aside. Her only act was to hide in one of her shopping bags-like threatening documents of her own guilt-some school copybook she was holding. She did not see him so much as, in a splitting of her personality, she saw herself, stri now of every disguise, down to her private, half-Jewish heart, there before him.

If she could have seen him, truly, she would perhaps have realized he stood before her as a beggar rather than an assassin. As if acting the role of the pilgrim, deliberately to move her to pity, he had placed his tilted cheek against his palm. And his bass voice, already mature, but fresh and new, with a certain greenness of growth in it, repeated twice the cheerful but stubborn plea :

"Schlafen . . . Schlafen . . .
"

To her, totally ignorant of the German language, the incomprehen sible word, with its mysteri pantomime, sounded like some formula of investigation or accusation . And in Italian she attempted a vague answer, which was reduced to an almost tearful grimace. But for the soldier, the wine had transformed all the terrestrial Babel into a circus. Resolutely, on a gallant-bandit impulse, he took the bundles and shopping bags from her hands; and with a trapeze-artist's leap, he preceded her forthwith up the stairs. At each landing, he stopped to wait for her, like a son who, coming home with his slow mother, acts as scout. And she followed him, stum bling at every step, like a petty thief dragging himself behind the bearers of his cross.

Her worst anxiety, during that climb, was the thought that Nino,

54 H I S T O R Y
. . . . . .
1 9 - -

today of all days, by some rare chance might be at home in the aftern

For the fi time since she had become a mother, she hoped her little street ruffi would stay out ail day and ail night. And she swore to herself desperately that, if the German asked about her son, she would deny not onlyhis presence, but even his existence.

On the sixth landing, they had arrived. And when, bathed in icy sweat, she had trouble dealing with the lock, the German put the bags on the fl and promptly lent her a hand, like someone coming into his own home. For the fi time since she had borne him, she was relieved to discover Ninnarieddu was out.

The interior consisted of two rooms in ail, plus lavatory and kitchen; and it displayed, besides its untidiness, the coupled desolation of poverty and the lower middle class. But the immediate eff of that place on the young soldier was a savage homesickness and melancholy, because of some slight affi ities with his maternal house in Bavaria. His desire to play vanished like the smoke of a Bengal light; and his drunkenness, not yet worn off, became a feverish bitterness in his body. Plunging into total silence, he began to march among the considerable clutter of the room with the tough look of a stray starv wolf, seeking something to appease his hunger in an alien lair.

In Ida's eyes, this look corresponded exactly to his police duties. Pre paring herself for a general search, she remembered the paper with Nino's family tree, which she had put in a drawer among other important docu ments; and she wondered if those enigmatic marks would not be obvious clues for him.

He ca to a halt at an enlarged photograph, which occupied the place of honor on the wail, framed like an important oil painting. It portrayed (at about half life-size) a little hoodlum of perhaps fi or sixteen, wrapped in a sumptuous camel's-hair coat, which he wore as if it were a fl Between the fi of his ri hand you could vaguely discern

a cigarette's whiteness; and his left foot rested on the running-board of a custom-built sports car (parked there at random by som
e
unknown owner), with the masterful attitude of tiger-hunters, in the great forests.

In the background, the buildings of a city street were visible, with their signs. But the excessive enlargement, blown up from what had been originaily the cheap p roduct of a street photographer, had made the whole scene somewhat faint and blurred.

Having examined the picture thoroughly, the soldier connected it, in his own supposition, with the family cult of the dead. And pointing his fi at the subject of the photograph, he asked Ida with the gravity of an investi or:

"Tot?" (dead? )

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The question, naturally, was incomprehensible to her. However, the only defense her terror counseled her today was to answer always no to whatever inquiry, like illiterates under police interrogation. And she didn't know that, this time, contrary to all her intentions, she was giving informa tion to the enemy.

"No! no!" she answered, in a doll's little voice, her eyes amazed and fi And, in fact, that was truly not the memorial of a dead person, but a recent photo of her son Ninnuzzu, which he had had enlarged and framed, on his own initiative. In fact, among bitter quarrels, she was still paying the instalments on that camel's-hair coat which Nino, last autumn, had ordered without authoriza

For that matter, the house itself be hopelessly, and in a loud voice, that fugitive inhabitant she wanted to conceal! The room, which the German had boldly invaded from the hall, was a kind of living-room-study, and at night it serv also for sleeping, as was obvious from a daybed, still unmade and consisting simply of some elementary springs without legs, and a lumpy mattress. Around this daybed, like a dog's pallet ( the pillow askew, stained and greasy with brilliantine, sheets and blankets all rumpled and tangled) there lay, hurled on the fl the previous evening, an artificial silk counterpane and some hard cushions ( which in the daytime camou fl the bed); and among these, further, were to be found: a sports magazine; a pajama top, pale blue, of a still fairly small size; and a medium size sock, dirty, with a hole, in a loud plaid pattern . . .