History (52 page)

The little whitish building, without windows on that side, seemed to sit crooked, on uneven terrain, with its battered roof and its little closed door. Impulsively, Mariulina made a leap forward, as if to run to Ace of Hearts, waiting for her down there as usual, on his shaky cot, all ready, his mouth brimming with kisses. But alien arms blocked her, amid menacing voices that questioned her in German. "Ja, ja, yes, yes . . ." she stam mered, bewildered; then suddenly she started wriggling, her eyes wide in a dazed, horrified gaze. "Ma! Maaaa!" she called, turning around, seeking her mother, and bursting into childish tears. And it was only after a while that she heard her mother's voice, calling her, in turn : "Maria! Marietta!" from some place, near but indistinct, among the soldiers who were holding both of them, plunging down the slope towards the little house. Their masked lamps searched the darkness; but there was no sign of a sentry anywhere around, nor was any sound heard except their own footsteps. All

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in battle-dress with sub-machine guns aimed, some of them took up posi tions outside among the olive trees, while two or three went around the hut, and others stood at the door. In the rear, the house's one little window was wide open; and a soldier circumspectly explored the dark interior with his lamp, his free hand on the grenades hanging from his belt, as he muttered a remark in German and, at that same instant, his com panions in front bashed in the door with their feet and the butts of their guns. In the dazzling beams of the lamps, the interior of the hovel proved uninhabited, completely abandoned. On the fl some straw was scat tered, rotten from the rain that had come through the open window; nor were there other furnishings except for a metal cot, without mattress or blankets, where a missing leg had been replaced by a pile of bricks; and some iron springs, with a little straw pallet, shrunken and soaked with rain. On the pallet there was a mashed mess-tin; on the ground, the broken handle of a tin fork; and hanging from a nail a torn piece of a shirt, with a blackish stain, as if it had served to bind a wound. Nothing else: no trace of weapons or of food. The only sign of recent life was, in a comer, a pile of shit, not yet hardened, deposited there by Ace and Company as an insult to possible patrols, a gesture of certain nocturn malefactors, at the door of a cracked safe.

Moreover, on the walls, damp and filthy, they could read some enor mous slogans, still fresh, written with coal : LONG LIVE STALIN, HIT LER KAPUTT, DOWN WITH THE GERMAN MURDERERS. Just

as on the outer walls of the hovel, above a previous Fascist slogan, CON

QUER, there had been freshly added WE WILL in much larger letters.

Inside there, a couple of days later, some country people found the bodies of Mariulina and her mother massacred by bullets, shattered even in the vagina, with knife-stabs or bayonet wounds in the face, on the breasts, everywhere. They had been fl at some distance from each other, on opposite sides of the deserted room. But they were buried to gether, in the same hole, there on the land near the hut, in the absence of any relations or friends to provide for their funeral. In the sequel of his very eventful days, Ninnuzzu never bothered to come back to those places; and as far as we can suppose, he never learned of Mariulina's death, or of her betrayal.

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After the visit of the tavernkeeper Remo, that same night, as all were sleeping, Ida, behind her curtain, by candlelight, unstitched the mattress at the point indicated, taking care not to wake Useppe, who was lying asleep on it. Rummaging in the wool, she drew out

a
clump of ten one-thousand-lire notes, which for her, especially at that moment, represented an enormous fortune. And she immediately placed them in the familiar old stocking, which she put in a safe place, as before. That night, to set her mind at rest, she spread her precious corset between one mattress and the other; but this was surely not suffi guarantee against the movements of her cohabitant refugees, who all seemed to her thieves and murderers, of whom she was in constant fear. Now, she felt a certain homesickness for The Thousand, who had tormented her with noise, but had made up for it by their fondness for Useppe. Not knowing their fate, however, after the recent destruction of the Castelli, she saw them in an ambiguous aspect, halfway between living forms and ghosts. And a surge of panic, stronger than homesickness, choked her as she crossed the room, all bustling with their vague form invaded now by shifting, suspect masks-and where, fi point of squalor, the late Mad man's corner was usurped by outsiders, with no trace of him left except the canaries' empty cage. Although, when he was alive, she had never ad dressed more than two or three words to him ("excuse me" . . . "don't trouble yourself" . . . "thank you" . . . ) now she was in anguish at the injustice of that sprightly little body's being prevented from running about and keeping busy, with that hat on its head. And she would truly have been happy to see him come back in the big room, to tell her the story of his death as a fairy tale, even if she would be obliged, in consequence, to return the ten thousand lire.

This sum, among other advantages, then helped her escape from the room. These were days, obviously, when luck was with her. At the Bur sary, where she went to draw her salary as usual, she met this time an elderly colleague, another schoolmistress. Who, seeing Ida so lost, sug gested a prompt and advantageous move to her. The woman knew that the needy family of a former night-school student of hers was prepared to sublet his little bedroom, since he had gone off in '42 to the Russian front. The price was low, because the mother didn't want to empty the boy's room, but to leave it as it was, with all his things in their place, until his return : so in fact she would be renting out the bed. It was a sunny room, however, and clean, and kitchen privileges were included. Thus, three days later, Ida and Useppe bade farewell to Pietralata. Theirs was, this time, a proper housemove, with a cart, because, in addition to the little supply of oil, cloths, and candles they also carr with them the inheri-

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tance from Eppetondo : the real wool mattress and the Peppinielli's empty ca

Another advantage of the new home was that it was in Via Mastro Giorgio, in Testaccio, only a short walk from the school where Ida and that elderly fellow-teacher of hers had taught. At present, the school building had been requisitioned for military purposes, and the classes were held in other rooms, on the Gianicolense; however, the distance to the Gianico lense, from Testaccio, was not insuperable, like the distance from Pietra lata. And so Ida managed to obtain permission to resume her teaching position. And for her it was a special blessing in those days, for the exile from school was becoming entwined, in her fears, with her racial guilt.

And yet it seemed almost impossible to her that the guilt of her mixed blood, now that it was also denounced in ordinances, and under police surveillance, couldn't be read in her face. If one of her pupils raised his little hand to ask a question, she would start and fl suspecting the question would be: "Is it true, Teacher, you're a half-Jew?" If somebody outside knocked at the classroom door, she already felt faint, expecting a visit from the police, or at least a summons from the principal, who had to inform her that as of today she was suspended from teaching, etc., etc.

Testaccio wasn't an outlying quarter, like San Lorenzo. Though it, too, was prevalently inhabited by poor or working-class people, only a few streets separated it from the middle-class neighborhoods. And the Ger mans, who rarely visited Pietralata and the Tiburti , were encountered here in greater numbers. Their presence, for Ida, transformed her daily journey into a revolving track where she personally, ridiculous target, was marked out by spotlights, followed by iron footsteps, encircled by swastika signs. Again, as once before in the past, all Germ looked alike to her. She had fi given up the chimerical anxiety of recognizing, perhaps one day or another, beneath one of those helmets or visored caps, the desperate blue eyes that had visited her at San Lorenzo in January of 1941. By now all these soldiers seemed to her unvary copies of a supreme mechanism, judging and persecutory Their eyes were fl of light, and their mouths, megaphones prepared to shout in loud voices, through the squares and streets :
Catch the halfbreed!

From her new neighborhood, only a few hundred yards separated her from the Ghetto. But on her daily return journ she always avoided crossing the Gari bri beyond which she could glimpse the squat form of the Synagogue, which made her look away, with a heaviness in her legs. In her purse, there was still that note she had picked up from the deportees' train at the Tiburtina station; she had never tried to look for its addressee. It was known that the Ghetto's surv Jews, who had hap-

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pened to escape the round-up of 16 October, had almost all come back to their homes on this side of the Tiber, having nowhere else to go. One surv , talking about it later, compared them to condemned animals, who docilely enter the slaughterhouse pen, warm one another with their breath. And this trust of theirs makes people consider them foolish; but isn't the opinion of outsiders (he remarked ) often foolish?

Ida was afraid of that little besieged quarter: and all the more so because of a suspicion that among the survivors who had returned to the neighborhood there might also be Signora Celeste Di Segni. She didn't know, in fact, whether on that Monday, October 18th, the Signora had then been allowed to leave with the train or whether, excluded, she had stayed in Rome. And remembering how on that morning, in the street towards the station, she had insanely whispered into her ear,
I'm Jewis
too, Ida since had been more afraid of coming upon the Signora than of encountering a bogey-man. That little whisper now return to her, wi a grim echo, like a mad self-accusation.

In reality, the witness she feared had managed, on that Monday morn ing, to leave with the other Jews. And it was only after the war's end that thesequel and conclusion of that departure were learned.

The progress of the sealed train was very slow: the prisoners had been inside it for fi days when, at dawn on Saturday, they reached the concen tration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, to which they were assigned. Not all, however, reached there alive: and this was a first selection. Among the weakest, who hadn't resisted the trial of the journ y, there was a pregnant daughter-in-law of the Di Segnis.

Of the living, only a minority of about two hundred individuals was judged able to work in the camp. All the others, numbering about eight hundred and fi promptly on arr were sent to death, unaware, in the gas chambers. In addition to the ill, the handicapped, and the less strong, this number included almost all the old people, the children, and babies. Among them were Settimio and Celeste Di Segni, along with their grand children Manuele, Esterina, and Angelino. And, of our acquaintance, there were also wi the notions-vendor Signora Sonnino and the author of the message to "Efrati Pacificho" as well as Iduzza namesake: Ida Di Capua, that is to say the midwife Ezekiel.

For the remaining two hundred, desti to the life of the ca on that Saturday of their arrival, the journ begun on October 16th, 1943, was of varying duration according to their strength. In the end, of the one thousand fi who had left, in a body, from the Tiburtina station, a total of fi came back alive.

And of all those dead, the luckiest were surely the fi eight hundred

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and fi The gas chamber is the only seat of charity, in a concentration camp.

Ida's landlords, Marrocco by name, were natives of the Ciociaria region ( they came from the little village of Sant'Agata ), and had left their moun taineers' hut and their fi of fl only a few years before to move to Rome. The wife, Filomena, worked at home as a dressmaker, shirtmaker, and seamstress, while her husband Tommaso was an orderly at the city hospital. Their son Giovannino, whose room Ida was at present occupying, was born in
1922.
In the summer of
1942,
from Northern Italy, where he and his unit were waiting to leave for the Russian front, the boy had married by proxy Annita, a Ciociaria girl who had grown up near him in the mountains. It was impossible for him to obtain a leave at that time; and so the young couple, practically speaking, had remained only engaged. The girl-bride, now twenty, had recently come to live with her in-laws, along with Filomena's aged father, left a widower a short time before. Neither the girl nor the old man had ever been out of Ciociaria unti now.

All these people shared the apartment in Via Mastro Giorgio, which consisted of a total of two rooms plus a rather spacious entrance hall that Filomena used as her workshop, while her double bedroom, with the mir rored wardrobe, serv as a fi room for her customers. At night, Annita slept in the workroom on a little folding bed, and the old grand father on a cot in the kitchen.

The little bedroom of Ida and Useppe opened off the entrance and, through another door, led directly into the kitchen. Thanks to its window's southern exposure, on fi days it was fi with sunlight. And despite its minuscule proportions, compared to the comer behind the curtain at Pietralata, it seemed to Ida an almost luxurious lodging.

The furniture consisted entirely of a little bed, a wardrobe about a yard wide, a straight chair, and a little table that served both as dressing table and desk. In fact, the room's absent owner, as a boy, had barely reached the second grade; but before being called to the war, he had started attending night school (during the day he worked for a mattress maker ). And neatly arranged on the little table, there were still his few school texts and the notebooks with his homework, written in a diligent, but hesitant and labored hand, like a child's.