The Birthday Buyer (3 page)

Henek’s dysentery attack wasn’t as serious as that of others in the infirmary-shack. He was short but sturdy, and helped everyone a little, but spent most of the day next to Hurbinek. I find what binds me to Henek is his love for Hurbinek. That’s why I love him, because he plays my role in relation to Hurbinek and is my vicarious past before History: he represents me. Or at least that is my guilty wish as someone who doesn’t want to forget. I love Henek because I want to be Henek. I don’t know what portion of Humanity Henek is, but I do know that without him, without Henek, what Adorno said would be absolutely right, that after Auschwitz it would have been impossible to write poetry. Or anything else.

He is there. He has made a cradle for Hurbinek, something more suited to his body, that keeps him warmer. On that huge, dirty bunk the child was always trembling. Now his trembling blurs with his spasmodic breathing, but at least he doesn’t seem to be cold. But there’s no doing away with the cold and hunger. Hunger in particular. They organized to try to get a supply of food. The Russians provide better soup than was on offer from the SS, but it’s not enough, and besides their bodies aren’t ready to eat very much. Hurbinek can hardly keep any food down. They don’t know what’s wrong with him, perhaps he is completely atrophied and his digestive system doesn’t work. Perhaps the rest of his body, except for his eyes, has decided to die. And that
is
what is happening. Henek keeps touching him, cuddling him, talking to him, telling him things, kissing his little arms, cleaning his clothing, removing his black excrement, and covering the sores that are all over his body.

I love Henek because he loves Hurbinek.

He reminds him of his Dora, his four-year-old sister, who was also sick and vulnerable, who didn’t last more than half an hour in Auschwitz. At 3:00 a.m., the minute they arrived, all the children in the truck were led by the hand to the gas chamber. They walked in fear and laughed in fear, and Henek watched. Their faces had the same fear that now comes to Hurbinek’s face whenever Henek disappears from sight.

I love Henek because a day didn’t go by when he didn’t try to make Hurbinek laugh, in the hope that he might just once. But he always failed.

One night Henek cut himself on a rusty piece of tin. It was a long gash that ran the whole length of his thumb to the palm of his hand. He was afraid it would get infected so he went to see one of the Polish nurses that occasionally visited the shack. They could only supply him with caustic soda. He applied it to his cut, and burnt himself so badly that he put his right hand out of action.

He sometimes saw rats when he left the shack to get a drop of soup for Hurbinek. The rats were tasty, according to the Polish nurses, but he had never tried rat meat. He discovered it was a dish that was much sought after by the Russians and by those they had recently liberated from Auschwitz. He managed to kill two rats with one blow from a stick. He used his own useless hand as bait to catch them. The rats sidled over to sniff the wound and Henek dropped a sack over them and beat them to death. He took them to Hurbinek so he could see the two dead rats. A Russian photographed Hurbinek with one of the dead rats at the foot of his cradle. They gave Henek a bigger ration of soup and tinned meat.

Buczko the cobbler brings him two bottles of water a day.

Yetzev the schoolmaster changes the patients’ dressings whenever he bumps into the Polish nurses and they give him a supply of bandages.

Roth the ice-cream manufacturer helps Primo Levi to take those who have died in their bunks on to the path outside.

Henek teaches Hurbinek words for things he has never known and will never know. His aim is to get him to speak Hungarian. He says,“This is a tree,”“This is a house,”“This is a cat.” “This is a mother,” “This is a sun.” He says, “This is a hat,” “This is a river,” “There are bridges over rivers,” “This is a cake.” He says, “Hurbinek loves Henek, Henek loves Hurbinek.” He says, “This is an elephant,” and every day, with infinite patience, ignoring his useless hand, Henek makes a grotesque imitation of an elephant, and makes a mud cake, and draws a river and bridge on the earthen floor of the shack, and turns a tin into a hat, and points to the sun when the sun comes out, and imitates a cat meowing, and builds a cardboard house for him. But he can never explain to him what a tree is or what a mother is.

Henek believes in the power of words, but not one could penetrate the eyes of Hurbinek, who understood nothing, shivered, and only wanted that being speaking those sounds so slowly to stay with him for ever and never let go of his hand. And Henek never stopped talking so Hurbinek would learn.

Hanka Silewski and Jadzia Tryzna are two Polish nurses who are not yet twenty. When they call in at the infirmary-shack, they visit Hurbinek’s cradle and caress his fingers and face; they say he reminds them of the dolls they had in their childhood in Warsaw, something they think is so distant though it was only a few years ago. Even so, appalled by everything they have seen, there is love in the kisses they shower him with and in the clean clothes they bring just for him. But they can’t think what else to do when by his side. They overwhelm him and when he looks at them, they don’t want their eyes to meet the gaze of that child struggling to lift his neck up and mutter unintelligible sounds. Hurbinek’s gaze unsettles them. They’d rather not love him. Besides, Jadzia can’t get the image out of her head of what she found in one of the wards when she entered the camp with the Red Army: a woman was dying with her hands and feet nailed into the floor of the barrack where other women, who seemed not to see her at all, drifted by.

They change bulbs, clean away excrement, dress wounds occasionally, very occasionally, bring morphine, everything in five minutes, they don’t have time to do more, they act frantically, but are perfectly well organized.

Hurbinek’s hoarse groans arouse an ambivalent sense of tenderness, disgust and sorrow. They observe him in the darkness as they change the bulb yet again. One day they will be mothers. How horrible it would be if that child were their son. And yet they would love him.

The wheel of life continues to turn and they don’t want to get left behind, they don’t just want to remember the naked skulls, femurs and vertebrae visible under the skin on those bunks or in the mass graves where they are still burying the dead. They are young and they like Henek.

Henek never gets nervous. He is immutable. He does things calmly, as if he is applying a method. He never becomes impatient or irritated.

Nothing ever works out with Hurbinek and he always has to start from scratch. He doesn’t swallow food and spits out water; he cleans his ass, then he shits himself again; he teaches him a word, and Hurbinek doesn’t speak it.

Henek is tireless.

He takes him gingerly in his arms and on to the esplanade so he can feel the fresh air. The air inside is putrid. He walks around the shack with him, but it is freezing cold and Hurbinek’s breathing immediately breaks into a gasping rattle; his body is about to fall apart and he has to bring him back inside. He very gingerly puts him back in the cradle he has made for him. For Henek, his weight is nearly unnoticeably light.

How could someone so fragile survive like that for three years? I wonder now in Frankfurt. That idea begins to torture me.

Henek isn’t upset by Hurbinek’s sad, forlorn gaze. He ignores it. Nothing about him disgusts him. He cleans out his ears when they are full of pus; he cleans his legs when he pees on himself; he cleans his tears away when he cries. He cries through open eyes.

Suddenly, one day, Hurbinek said something: some people heard
massklo
, others
matisklo
. It wasn’t Hungarian; it was none of the words Henek had been trying to teach him. Nobody ever discovered what that word meant. Perhaps it was his real name.

Primo Levi writes,“Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world of men, from which a bestial power had excluded him, died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed.”

When on that day, March 3, 1945, did Henek wake up and go to see Hurbinek?

When on that day, on that morning, did he realize that the shivers and panting had ceased?

When on that morning did he see that Hurbinek’s eyes and mouth stayed open?

When in the night, did Hurbinek’s heart stop, all by itself?

Nobody knew. With great integrity, after giving a deep sigh, Henek shut first the child’s eyes and then his mouth. It was an astoundingly simple gesture. A gesture that was very common at the time, that even became trite and everyday; but all the same nothing could take away its solemnity, even in that factory of death.

Hurbinek’s face was still warm. Henek covered him with a blanket. Helped by Primo Levi and Rubem Yetzev, he carried the cradle outside. The three waited four hours until other men came and put him in a barrow to take him to the mass grave. But Henek didn’t want him to be buried there. Yetzev and he dug a hole at the foot of a tree, outside the precinct of the Main Camp, and there they lay little Hurbinek, swaddled in a blanket.

“Dear children, this Christmas I love you more than ever, but I must continue with my work for the sake of you and your happiness. This is my present,”
SS Obergruppenführer
Heinz Rügen had written to his children on Christmas Eve.

One day in 1917, it doesn’t matter which, Cesare Levi, who was thirty-nine at the time, a good-looking, lively engineer with conservative political views, married Ester Luzzati in Turin, a twenty-two-year-old beautiful, imaginative girl who collected prints of natural life.

They were both Jews and descendents of Hebrews from Provence who in turn descended from the Sephardites expelled from Spain in 1492. They were married by Rabbi Mordecai Toledano, though neither was religious.

An electronics engineer like his father, Cesare was well established socially and belonged to the most influential circles in Piedmont thanks to his well-earned reputation. Levi the engineer enjoyed both professional and financial success in the demanding city on the Po, something that translated into his rapid promotion in markedly anti-Communist entrepreneurial circles.

When Mussolini’s fascists appeared, he greeted them with ingenuous enthusiasm, and he even donned a black shirt at a few public events, though only a few.

On April 11, 1987 Primo Levi went out into the street for the last time. He had gotten up before dawn; it was still nighttime. A nightmare had prevented him from sleeping. Just another one of his usual nightmares. It was then, still in bed, that he took his decision, in that same bedroom where he had slept as a child. He decided to take his own life, to end things, to inscribe the fullstop. He was an old man, had experienced everything a human being could live and felt unnecessary. He had experienced too much.

He looked out of the window at the street; it was no longer raining as it had rained the previous evening. His nightmare was connected to the rain and long hours standing and being counted in the Buna-Monowitz camp under freezing rain that soaked you down to your bones and hit your head until it produced the terribly sharp headache he had never been able to throw off in all those years. That was why he had become addicted to umbrellas. He always carried one when he went out into the street.

In his nightmare, he was stuck under driving rain with his feet buried in mud, unable to move or lift himself. It wasn’t yet another image he had dreamt up. Primo Levi remembered seeing an old French rabbi they had buried knee deep, whom they had stripped, whose
yarmulke
they stuffed into his mouth and whom they left for three days on the camp esplanade exposed to the snow and the gusts, until he died.

After he’d gotten dressed, Primo Levi walked falteringly down the passageway in his house where he lived with his wife Lucia and his senile mother and blind mother-in-law, both in their nineties and paralytic. He was very depressed, more than ever perhaps, and was worried by his prostate cancer. He no longer loved living, and wondered where he would find new reasons to make him love life anew.

He moved gracefully, accustomed to shadows and darkness. He was surprised that the decision to take his life, he, a man who had looked death in the face long ago and had never been able to drive its specter away, didn’t seem at all dramatic, but logical, even happy, or perhaps merely the product of inertia.

He started thinking about how to do so in the old kitchen, employing the usual calculated intensity and methodical application he brought to the laboratory experiments he undertook in the course of his work.

He left the house because after his death, life would have to continue just as normal and he didn’t want to leave any loose ends. He had an errand. He walked down several streets from Corso Re Umberto, in the Crocetta, and turned right into the fourth where he crossed and walked through a large entrance that led to a small courtyard, where Ugo Raboni, the photographer, had his shop.

He stopped when he saw it was shut. It was early, but he had anticipated that nobody would be there, and pushed an envelope under the door which contained instructions and several ten thousand lira bills.

The instructions referred to the fact that the photographer, his only friend from adolescence, should keep a large portait of his mother Esther that Raboni had taken on her fiftieth birthday and that a month before he had asked the same photographer to frame. What was that photo of his mother like, his beloved mother, who’d been in his mind at every moment in his life, who harrowed him now she’d become such a crazy old despot? What was his mother like before, his sweet, courageous and sensitive mother? In that dark alleyway, in the rain, on the last day of his life, Primo Levi could not recall his mother’s face when she was young. For him she was the premonition that preceeds real, definitive death.

On July 31, 1919, Ester Luzzati de Levi was in labor and gave birth to a son. They called him Primo.

Primo’s childhood was always marked by ill health and his mother’s care, since the Levi family lived in fear of tuberculosis, pneumonia or whooping cough, illnesses that had led to the deaths of friends and relatives.

Ester spent many nights at the foot of her son’s bed, reading books about science and zoology, her main interests. Primo Levi inherited her great curiosity about nature, particularly about fish.

For his sixth birthday, his mother gave him a large aquarium, the bottom of which was made of shards of lapislazuli. The red and silvery fish glowed in the water thanks to an electric device his father Cesare had installed at the back of the tank.

Years later he would remember how, on a whim, he’d called each fish after a mineral.

That present filled little Primo Levi with wonder and he always kept it near him like the lost treasure of innocence he would never again meet in the time he was forced to live.

Included in the instructions he listed in the letter he slipped under the door of Ugo Raboni’s photography shop was one to the effect that the aquarium, now kept in his library—the same aquarium his mother gave him as a present on his sixth birthday—be given to Raboni himself on the day they got over the upset caused by their shock at his death, and executed the requisite legal measures.

The photo of his mother and the aquarium were the obejcts he loved most. He wasn’t bothered about the fate of his other belongings and left no written wishes. They would remain with the family and his children Renzo and Lisa should decide what to do with his legacy.

At the age of fifteen, on his own initiative, young Levi enrolled in the Massimo D’Azeglio Grammar School where some of the leading intellectual opponents of Mussolini’s fascism were on the teaching staff. The school was renowned for its liberal approach. His father, currently under the influence of Lombroso’s spiritualism, opposed his choice, but not too strenuously. Ester effortlessly brought him round.

It was in the Massimo D’Azeglio that he met Raboni and they enrolled together in Turin University in 1937. Both friends opted for Chemistry. Primo did so on the advice of his mother. He chose that subject because, together with Biology, it was what had most attracted him as an adolescent and where he had shown a leaning and some talent, given the lay, scientific spirit that informed the Levi household, not to mention the interests inculcated by his mother.

A year later, in October 1938, Benito Mussolini passed the Italian racial laws in Italy that decreed that no Jew could study or derive benefit from any of the advantages offered by the State. Nonetheless, Primo Levi continued his studies because he had entered the university the year before those segregationist laws were enacted. Even so, when he finished his degree with the highest possible marks in 1941, he was horrified to see that his degree certificate specified that the graduate belonged to the Hebrew race.

As a result he could find work nowhere, a situation he thought to be absurd and unjust. A year later, in 1942, after his father died of stomach cancer, he was offered an opening by Wander, a pharmaceutical company based in Milan and a branch of the Swiss Nestlé company. He grasped the opportunity and went to live in the rich city that was a rival to Turin. It was his first important journey, his first adventure in life.

I shall now follow the thoughts of Primo Levi. He left the sidestreet where his photographer friend owned a shop. He walked on until he reached the Via Roma. There he entered the Café San Carlo where he ordered a coffee made with cold milk. He’d not drunk anything at home, in the old family kitchen.

He proceeded to kill time until he could cross the road and go to the Barichelo laundry, by the Via Pietro Micca, where he collected his suits every week. Today was the day. Life will carry on, he thought yet again, and that encouraged him to see to that little errand and leave nothing undone, however small.

From where he sat, conscious it was the last time he would do so, in one direction he could see the Duomo and Piazza Castello. At the other end of that cloistered avenue stood the iron arches of the huge Porta Nuova Station. A station to which he had returned from hell on October 19, 1945.

While he drank his coffee and warmed up, he once again heard his mother’s voice talking to him about chemists and naturalists and the great sea voyages of the eighteenth century, sailed by Bougainville, La Condamine and Cook, and recalled how she did so sitting in her armchair and holding a book.

He remembered the time when, as a child, she told him about the periodic table, as if it were a story, and about the man who formulated its laws in 1869, the Russian Mendeleev. He remembered that his mother told him another chemist, a German, Lothar Meyer, had argued that it was his discovery, and that his mother, when telling Meyer’s story, adopted a gloomy, scornful tone, as a result of which, though he’d not really understood what his mother was saying, he immediately took the Russian’s side, even if he’d been a callous killer.

Now, that morning, the words that fascinated him echoed round his head again, words like beryllium, fluorine, carbon, aluminium, phosphorus, potassium, scandium, titanium, vanadium, cobalt, arsenic, selenium, zirconium, niobium, palladium, tellurium, wolframium, bismuth, americium and so many others. Alone at the bar in the Café San Carlos he repeated them to himself mentally.

He could repeat straight off the periodic table with its one hundred and fifty elements. When he was a little boy, he found some of the valencies in that system highly amusing, like the ones for sodium (Na), hydrogen (H), magnesium (Mg), sulphur (S), iron (Fe), silver (Ag) or mercury (Hg). He also repeated these to himself mentally.

Ester, his mother, talked to him about concepts such as atomic mass, periods or noble gases: helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon and radon.

This time out loud, and overheard by the waiter who didn’t understand what Primo Levi—that old man leaning on the bar—was talking about as he absentmindely looked out at the avenue, he repeated those words that sounded like a prayer or a wizard’s ancient magic formula: helium-neon-argon-krypton-xenon and radon.

And he thought about something that he had remembered several years after surviving Auschwitz, he thought about the time when he arrived in Buna-Monowitz, where he was to be locked up as a slave, saw the layout of the barracks, and told the person next to him that it looked like the grid of the periodic table: the so-called
periods
in horizontal rows and the so-called
groups
in vertical columns.

Once again he brought back to his memory that Lothar Meyer, a German, and perhaps a good man, whom he and his mother found so unpleasant, vying with poor Mendeleev, about whom he knew nothing, except that either in reality or in his imagination, though he couldn’t say why, he fell victim to the German. That was the real law of the periodic table, he finally remembered ironically: to be a victim of a German; and new concepts of chemistry were established in Auschwitz: mass fear, techniques of torture, valencies for annihilation, atoms of invisibility, formulas for extermination, fusion by cremation.

Primo Levi joined the anti-fascist resistance movement “Justice and Freedom,” perhaps to reject the fascist policies his father didn’t condemn even when he could see that Jews were being compelled to stay in their ghettos and their civil and labor rights were restricted, or perhaps simply as an outright rejection of his father’s indulgent attitude toward the regime. He fled to the mountains to join the partisans, though he knew nothing about military strategy and the use of arms. That happened in 1943, shortly after the fall of Mussolini and the inception of the Republic of Salò.

He was with his comrades Maestro and Nissim in the Aosta Valley when he was captured by fascist militia on December 13, 1943 in a retaliation attack that caught the group unaware. He was taken to the Carpi-Fossoli concentration camp, where he was identified as a Jew in addition to being a partisan, thus aggravating his position.

Three months later he left in a German goods train comprising twelve cattle trucks packed with 650 Italian Jews.

Its final destination was a place in Poland called Auschwitz that he and those men, women and children had never heard of before. “A name without significance for us at the time,” he was to write years later in
If This Is a Man
, “but it at least implied some place on this earth.”

When the war ended, only 23 returned to Italy from the 650 people that formed that sinister convoy at dawn of February 22, 1944. One of those 23 individuals was Primo Levi. All the rest died.

He reached Auschwitz on February 26. He survived the first selection by the train, when they took aside those who were to be sent straight to the gas chambers. They gassed no less than 536 of the 650 the minute they reached the camp.

He was tatooed with the number 174517.

He worked as a Nazi slave in the Buna-Monowitz camp next to Auschwitz. Buna-Monowitz was an industrial plant built by the powerful pharmaceutical firm IG Farben for the purpose of manufacturing synthetic fuels. Six miles from Auschwitz, Monowitz was a kind of gray, desolate city where they gathered every kind of prisoner: English, Ukranian, French and many others to a total of ten thousand. There were also German civilian engineers. “We are the slaves of the slaves who everyone can order around” he later wrote.