History (41 page)

In reality, she no longer knew where to go. Her night-suspicion that she was wanted by the Germans was growing to a paranoid certainty in her weakened mind, blocking off like a colossus the return roads to the big room in Pietralata. Nevertheless, she followed Useppe's little footsteps, which went again towards the bus stop, convinced and spellbound even if somewhat unsteady in the oversized and still stiff boots. At Piazzale delle Crociate a middle-aged woman passed them, running like a lunatic in their same direction. Ida recognized her: she was a Jew from the Ghetto, the wife of a certain Settimio Di Segni, who ran a little store, buying and selling second-hand goods, behind Sant'Angelo in Pescheria. On various occasions, in recent years, Ida had gone to his place to off some house hold object for sale, or some piece of personal property; and sometimes she had happened to deal with his wife, running the shop in his place. On some days, in their minuscule storeroom, she had met a few of their numerous children and grandchildren, all of whom lived with them in a couple of rooms over the shop.

"Signora! Signora Di Segni!"

Ida called, walking faster after her, with a voice of almost exultant surprise. And when the other woman didn't seem to hear her, she immedi ately took Useppe in her arms and ran after her, clinging to that alien encounter like an earthling lost in the deserts of the moon who has run into a close relation. But the woman didn't turn or listen; and when Ida was beside her, the woman barely glanced at her, with the grim and hostile eye of a lunatic rejecting all relationship with normal people.

"Signora! . . . Don't you recognize me? I . . ." Ida insisted. But the woman was paying no attention to her; indeed, she seemed not to see or hear Ida, though, at the same time, she had started walking faster, to shake her off suspiciously. She was sweating (she was rather fat), and her bobbed yellow-gray hair was sticking to her forehead. Her left hand, with the "patriotic" steel wedding ring, clutched a wretched little change-purse. She had nothing else with her.

Ida ran along beside her, jolting the baby, in a kind of gasping panic : "Signora," she said suddenly, getting as close to her as she could and speaking in a very low voice, as if to an intimate confi ''I'm Jewish, too."

But Signora Di Scgni didn't seem to understand her, nor did she listen to her. At that point, shaken by some sudden alarm, the woman moved

206 H I S T O R Y
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away from there, bursting into an animal dash across the square, towards the railroad station opposite.

After the bombings, the station had be promptly reopened; but its low rectangular facade, of a yellowish color, was still scorched and black ened by the smoke from the explosions. Since it was a secondary station, there was never much of a crowd, especially on Monday; but today the movement seemed even less than usual. In these times of war, and espe cially since the German occupation, troops were often loaded or unloaded there. But there were no soldiers in sight today, and only a few civilians moved around, without haste. On that late morning of a Monday, the building had an abandoned and temporary look.

But Useppe gazed at it as if it were a monument, perhaps also in a vague reminiscence of the days he had gone there with Ninnuzzu to enjoy the spectacle of the trains. And he remained quiet, looking all around with curious eyes, momentarily forgetting his private, personal impatience : he was in a big hurry in fact, to go back to Pietralata, instead of bouncing around here in his mother's arms; he couldn't wait to carry, fi to Ull and to all of them, today's big news : the boots!

And Ida, meanwhile, had almost forgotten he was in her arms, since she was bent solely on not losing sight of Signora Di Segni's isolated form, which drew her along like a will-o'-the-wisp. Ida saw her head towards the passengers' entrance, then come back again, in her great and furious un touchable's solitude, expecting no help from anyone. Not running any more, but stumbling in haste on her old summer shoes with enormous orthopedic soles, she was now moving along this side of the station's faca then she turn left towards the freight yard, towards the serv entrance. Ida crossed the square and took the same direction.

The gate was open : there was no one on guard outside; and no one shouted at her even from the police sentrybox, just inside the gate. Perhaps ten paces from the entrance, she began to hear, at some distance, a horrible humming sound, but for the moment she couldn't understand precisely where it was coming from. That station area, at present, seemed deserted and idle. There was no movement of trains, or traffi of freight; and the only people visible were beyond the boundary of the yard, distant, within the precincts of the main station : two or three ordinary employees, appar ently calm.

Towards the oblique road leading to the tracks, the sound's volume increased. It was not, as Ida had already persuaded herself, the cry of animals packed into cattle-cars, which could sometimes be heard echoing in this area. It was a sound of voices, of a human mass, coming, it seemed, from the end of the ramps, and Ida followed that signal, though no assem bled crowd was visible among the shunting tracks, which criss-crossed the

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gravel around her. In her progress, which seemed to go on for miles, and sweaty like a march through the desert (in reality it was perhaps thirty steps ), she encountered only a solitary engine-driver, eating from a piece of wrapping paper, beside a spent locomotive, and he said nothing to her. Perhaps the few watchmen had also gone to eat. It must have been just past noon.

The invisible voices were approaching and growing louder, even though they sounded somehow inaccessible, as if they came from an iso lated and contaminated place. The sound suggested certain dins of kinder gartens, hospitals, prisons : however, all jumbled together, like shards thrown into the same machine. At the end of the ramp, on a straight, dead track, a train was standing which, to Ida, seemed of endless length. The voices came from inside it.

There were perhaps twenty cattle-cars, some wide-open and empty, others closed with long iron bars over the outside doors. Following the standard design of such rolling-stock, the cars had no windows, except a tiny grilled opening up high. At each of those grilles, two hands could be seen clinging, or a pair of staring eyes. At that moment, nobody was guarding the train.

Signora Di Segni was there, running back and forth on the open platform, her legs without stockings, short and thin, of an unhealthy whiteness, and her mid-season dust-coat fl behind her shapeless body. She was running clumsily the whole length of the row of cars, shouting in an almost obscene voice :

"Settimio! Settimio! . . . Graziella! . . . Manuele! . . . Settimio!

. . . Settimio! Esteri . . . Manuele! . . . Angelino! .
_
.
"

From inside the train, some unknown voice reached her, shouting at her to go away : otherwise
they
would take her, too, when they came back in a little while. "No-o-o! I won't go!" she railed, in reply, threatening and enraged, hammering her fi against the cars, "my family's in there! Call them! Di Segni! The Di Segni family!" . . . "Settimiooo!! !"' she burst out suddenly, running, her arms out towards one of the cars and clinging to the bar on the door, in an impossible attempt to force it. Behind the grille, up above, a little head had appeared, an old man's. His eyeglasses could be seen glistening over his emaciated nose, against the darkness behind; and his tiny hands clutched the bars.

"Settimio!! The others?! Are they there with you?"

"Go away, Celeste," her husband said to her. "Go away, I tell you: right now.
They'll
be back any minute . . ." Ida recognized his slow, sententious voice. It was the same that, on other occa in his cubby hole full of old junk, had said to her, for example, with sage and pondered judgment, "This, Signora, isn't even worth the cost of mending . . ." or

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.
.
.
. .
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else, "I can give you six lire for the whole lot . . ." but today it sounded toneless, alien, as if from an atrocious paradise beyond all access.

The interior of the cars, scorched by the lingering summer sun, con tinued to reecho with that incessant sound. In its disorder, babies' cries overlapped with quarrels, ritual chanting, meaningless mumbles, senile voices calling for mother; others that conversed, aside, almost ceremonious, and others that were even giggling. And at times, over all this, sterile, bloodcurdling screams rose; or others, of a bestial physicality, exclaiming elementary words like "water!" "air!" From one of the last cars, dominat ing all the other voices, a young \\·oman would burst out, at intervals, with convulsive, piercing shrieks, typical of labo pains.

And Ida recognized this confused chorus. No less than the Signora's almost indecent screams and old Di Segni's sententious tones, all this wretched human sound from the cars caught her in a heart-rending sweet ness, because of a constant memory that didn't return to her from known time, but from some other channel : from the same place as her father's little Calabrian songs that had lulled her, or the anonymous poem of the previous night, or the little kisses that whispered
carina, carina
to her. It was a place of repose that drew her down, into the promiscuous den of a single, endless family.

"I've been running all over the place the whole morning . . ."

Leaning towards that bespectacled face at the grille, Signora Di Segni had started chatting hastily, in a kind of feverish gossip, but also in the familiar and almost ordinary manner of a wife who is accounting for her day to her husband. She told how that morning around ten, as planned, she had returned from an expedition to Fara Sabina with two fl of olive oil she had managed to fi And arriving, she had discovered the neigh borhood deserted, doors barred, nobody in the houses, nobody in the street. Nobody. She had inquired, she had asked here, there, the Aryan cafe keeper, the Aryan news-vendor. And questions everywhere. Even the Temple deserted. " . . . and I ran this way and that way, to this one and that one . . . They're at the Military Academy . . . at the Termini sta tion . . . at Tiburtino . . .
"

"Go away, Celeste."

"No,
I
won't go away. I'm just as Jewish as you! I want to get into this train too!!"

"Reschut,
Celeste, in the name of God, get out, before
they
come back."

"Noool No! Setti Where are the others? Manuele? Graziella? The

baby? . . . Why can't I see them? Why don't they show their faces?" Suddenly, like a madwoman, she burst out screaming again : "Angelinooo! Esterinaaa! Manuele!! Graziella!!"

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A certain shifting could be heard i:-tside the car. Having climbed somehow to the grille, a head with a mop of hair, two little black eyes, could be seen behind the old man .
.
.

"Esterinnaaa! Esterinaaa! Graziella!! Open up! Isn't anybody in charge around here? I'm a Jew! A Jew! I have to go with them! Open up! Fascists! FASCISTS!! Open the door!" She shouted
Fascists,
not as an accusation or as an insult, but as a natural form of address, as one might say
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury
or
Offi
to appeal to Order and Authority in the situation. And she insisted doggedly in her impossible attempt to force the bars.

"Go away, Signora! Don't stay here! It's best for you! Go away quick!" From the central offices of the Station, beyond the yard, some men ( porters or clerks ) were gesticulating to her from a distance, with agitated urging. But they didn't approach the train. They seemed, indeed, to avoid it, like a funeral or infected chamber.

No one had yet shown any interest in the presence of Ida, who had remained a bit behind, at the end of the ramp; and she, too, had almost forgotten about herself. She felt invaded by an extreme weakness; and although the heat wasn't excessive there in the open, on the platform she was covered with sweat as if she had a fever of 104 degrees. However, she abandoned herself to this weakness of her body as if to the last sweetness possible, as she became confused in this throng, mingling with the sweat of the others.

She heard bells ring; and there fl through her head the warning that she had to hurry to conclude her daily round of shopping; perhaps the stores were already closing. Then she heard some deep and cadenced blows, echoing somewhere near her; and she thought at fi they were the puff of the engine starti and imagined that the train was preparing for its departure. She promptly realized, however, that those blows had been with her for the whole time she had been on the platform, even if she hadn't paid any attention to them before; and that they were resounding very close to her, right against her body. In fact, it was Useppe's heart beati that way.

The child was quiet, huddled into her arms, his left side against her breast; but he held his head turned to look at the train. In reality, he hadn't moved from that position since the fi moment. And as she peered around to examine him, she saw him still staring at the train, his face motionless, his mouth half-open, his eyes wide in an indescribable gaze of horror.