The Periodic Table (17 page)

The prisoner looked at me with curiosity: “Are you the rebels?” he asked. He was perhaps thirty-five, was thin and a bit stooped, had kinky, unruly hair, a badly shaved beard, a large hooked nose, a lipless mouth, and shifty eyes. His hands were disproportionately large, gnarled, baked by sun and wind, and always moving: now he scratched himself, now he drummed on the bench or on his thigh; I noticed that they shook slightly. His breath smelled of wine, and from this I deduced that he had just been arrested; he had the accent of the valley thereabouts, but did not look like a peasant. I answered him, speaking in generalities, but he wasn’t discouraged.

“He’s asleep: you can talk if you want to. I can get news out of here: and anyway I may get out soon.”

He didn’t seem to me all that trustworthy. “Why are you here?” I asked.

“Contraband. I didn’t want to share it with them, that’s all. We’ll end up coming to an agreement, but meanwhile they keep me here. It’s bad, with my trade.”

“It’s bad for all trades!”

“But I have a special trade. I also do contraband, but only in the winter, when the Dora freezes over: so I do many different kinds of work, but none under a boss. We are free people: my father also was like this and my grandfather and all my great-grandfathers since the beginning of time, back to when the Romans came.”

I had not understood the allusion to the frozen Dora and asked him to explain it: Was he a fisherman perhaps?

“You know why it’s called the Dora?” he answered. “Because it’s made of gold. Not all, of course, but it carries gold, and when it freezes over you can no longer take it out.”

“Is there gold on the bottom?”

“Yes, in the sand: not everywhere, but in many stretches. It’s the water that drags it down from the mountain and piles it up at random, there’s some in one bend of the river and none in another. Our particular bend, which we have passed from father to son, is the richest of all: it is well hidden, very much out-of-the-way, but just the same it’s best to go there at night so that nobody can come and poke around. Because of this, when it freezes over solid, as it did for instance last year, you can’t work, because as soon as you’ve cut a hole in the ice more ice forms, and besides your hands can’t stand it. If I were in your place and you in mine, on my word of honor, I’d even tell you where it is—our place.”

I felt wounded by this sentence of his. I knew very well how things stood with me, but I didn’t like to hear it said to me by a stranger. The other man, who realized his blunder, tried awkwardly to make amends:

“Well, what I meant to say is that these are confidential matters, which you don’t even tell to your friends. I live on this, I have nothing else in this world, but I wouldn’t change places with a banker. You see, it’s not that there is so much gold: there is in fact very little, you wash it for a whole night and you manage to get two or three grams out of it: but it never ends. You can go back when you wish: the next night or a month later, whenever you feel like it, and the gold has grown back; and it’s that way forever and ever, like grass comes back in the fields. And so there are no people who are freer than us: that’s why I feel I’m going crazy, staying inside here.

“Besides, you must understand that not everyone is able to wash sand, and that gives you satisfaction. My father taught me, just me, because I was the smartest; my other brothers work in the factory. And only to me he left the pan”—and with his enormous right hand slightly curled into a cup, he sketched the professional rotary movement.

“Not all days are good: it goes better when the weather is good and the moon in its last quarter. I couldn’t say why, but that’s how it is, in case it ever should occur to you to try.”

I appreciated the good omen in silence. Of course I would try it: What wouldn’t I try? During those days, when I was waiting courageously enough for death, I harbored a piercing desire for everything, for all imaginable human experiences, and I cursed my previous life, which it seemed to me I had profited from little or badly, and I felt time running through my fingers, escaping from my body minute by minute, like a hemorrhage that can no longer be stanched. Of course I would search for gold: not to get rich but to try out a new skill, to see again the earth, air, and water from which I was separated by a gulf that grew larger every day; and to find again my chemical trade in its essential and primordial form, the
Scheidekunst,
precisely, the art of separating metal from gangue.

“I don’t sell it all,” the man continued. “I am too fond of it. I keep a little on the side and melt it down, twice a year, and work it: I am not an artist but I like to have it in my hands, hit it with the hammer, score it, scratch it. I’m not interested in getting rich; what counts for me is to live free, not to have a collar like a dog, to work like this, when I wish, and nobody who can come and say, ‘Come on, get moving.’ That’s why I hate staying in here; besides, on top of everything else, you lose a day’s work.”

The militiaman jerked in his sleep and the tommy gun that he held between his knees fell to the floor with a crash. The stranger and I exchanged a quick glance; we understood each other in a flash and rose with a jump from the bench: but we barely had time to take a step and already the militiaman had picked up his gun. He sat up, looked at his watch, cursed in Venetian dialect, and told us roughly that it was time to return to our cells. In the corridor we met Guido and Aldo, who, escorted by another guard, were on their way to take our place in the dusty fug of the boiler room: they greeted me with a nod of the head.

In the cell I was welcomed by the solitude, the freezing, pure breath of the mountains which came through the small window, and the anguish of tomorrow. I listened—in the silence of curfew one could hear the murmur of the Dora, lost friend, and all friends were lost, and youth and joy, and perhaps life: it flowed close by but indifferent, dragging along the gold in its womb of melted ice. I felt gripped by a painful envy for my ambiguous companion, who would soon return to his precarious but monstrously free life, to his inexhaustible trickle of gold, and an endless series of days.

C
ERIUM

The fact that I, a chemist, engaged here in writing my stories about chemistry, have lived a different season, has been narrated elsewhere.
{7}

At a distance of thirty years I find it difficult to reconstruct the sort of human being that corresponded, in November 1944, to my name or, better, to my number: 174517. I must have by then overcome the most terrible crisis, the crisis of having become part of
Lager
system, and I must have developed a strange callousness if I then managed not only to survive but also to think, to register the world around me, and even to perform rather delicate work, in an environment infected by the daily presence of death and at the same time brought to a frenzy by the approach of the Russian liberators, who by now were only eighty kilometers away. Desperation and hope alternated at a rate that would have destroyed almost any normal person in an hour.

We were not normal because we were hungry. Our hunger at that time had nothing in common with the well-known (and not completely disagreeable) sensation of someone who has missed a meal and is certain that the next meal will not be missed: it was a need, a lack, a yearning that had accompanied us now for a year, had struck deep, permanent roots in us, lived in our cells, and conditioned our behavior. To eat, to get something to eat, was our prime stimulus, behind which, at a great distance, followed all the other problems of survival, and even still farther away the memories of home and the very fear of death.

I was a chemist in a chemical plant, in a chemical laboratory (this too has been narrated), and I stole in order to eat. If you do not begin as a child, learning how to steal is not easy; it had taken me several months before I could repress the moral commandments and acquired the necessary techniques, and at a certain point I realized (with a flash of laughter and a pinch of satisfied ambition) that I was reliving—
me,
a respectable little university graduate—the involution-evolution of a famous respectable dog, a Victorian, Darwinian dog who is deported and becomes a thief in order to live in his Klondike
Lager
—the great Buck of
The Call of the Wild.
I stole like him and like the foxes: at every favorable opportunity but with sly cunning and without exposing myself. I stole everything except the bread of my companions.

From the point of view, precisely, of substances that you could steal with profit, that laboratory was virgin territory, waiting to be explored. There was gasoline and alcohol, banal and inconvenient loot: many stole them, at various points in the plant, the offer was high and also the risk, since liquids require receptacles. This is the great problem of packaging, which every experienced chemist knows: and it was well known to God Almighty, who solved it brilliantly, as he is wont to, with cellular membranes, eggshells, the multiple peel of oranges, and our own skins, because after all we too are liquids. Now, at that time, there did not exist polyethylene, which would have suited me perfectly since it is flexible, light, and splendidly impermeable: but it is also a bit too incorruptible, and not by chance God Almighty himself, although he is a master of polymerization, abstained from patenting it: He does not like incorruptible things.

Since I lacked the proper packaging materials, the ideal loot would therefore have had to be solid, not perishable, not cumbersome, and above all new. It had to be of high unitary value, that is, not voluminous, because we were often searched at the camp’s entrance after work; and it should finally be useful to or desired by at least one of the social categories that composed the
Lager’s
complicated universe.

I had made various attempts in the lab. I had stolen a few hundred grams of fatty acids, laboriously obtained by the oxidation of paraffin from some colleagues of mine on the other side of the barrier: I had eaten half of it and it really took the edge off my hunger, but it had such a nasty taste that I gave up the idea of selling the remainder. I had tried to make fritters with sanitary cotton, which I pressed against an electric hot plate; they had a vague taste of burnt sugar, but they looked so awful that I did not consider them marketable. As for selling the cotton directly to the
Lager’s
infirmary, I had tried this once, but it was too cumbersome and not much sought after. I also forced myself to ingest and digest glycerin, basing myself on the simplistic reasoning that, since it is a product of the splitting of fats, it must after all in some way be metabolized and furnish calories: and perhaps it did furnish them, but at the cost of extremely unpleasant side effects.

There was a mysterious jar on one of the shelves. It contained about twenty gray, hard, colorless, tasteless little rods and did not have a label. This was very strange, because it was a German laboratory. Yes, of course, the Russians were a few kilometers away, catastrophe was in the air, almost visible; there were bombings every day; everybody knew the war was about to end: but finally some constants must still subsist, and among these were our hunger, that that laboratory was German, and that Germans never forget the labels. In fact, all the other jars and bottles in the lab had neat labels, written on the typewriter or by hand in beautiful Gothic characters—only that jar lacked a label.

In the situation I certainly did not dispose of the equipment and tranquility necessary to identify the nature of those small rods. Just to be sure, I hid three in my pocket and carried them with me that evening into the camp. They were about twenty-five millimeters long and had a diameter of four or five.

I showed them to my friend Alberto. Alberto took a penknife out of his pocket and tried to cut into one of them: it was hard, resisted the blade. He tried to scrape it: we heard a slight crepitation and saw a spray of yellow sparks. At this point diagnosis was easy: it was iron-cerium, an alloy from which the common flints of cigarette lighters are made. But why were they so large? Alberto, who for some weeks had worked as a laborer with a squad of welders, explained to me that they were mounted on the tips of oxyacetylene torches to ignite the flame. At this point I felt skeptical about the commercial possibilities of my stolen goods: they could perhaps be used to light a fire, but in the
Lager
matches (illegal) were certainly not scarce.

Alberto reproached me. For him renunciation, pessimism, discouragement were abominable and culpable: he did not accept the concentration camp universe, he rejected it both instinctively and with his reason, and he did not let himself be tainted by it He was a man of good and strong will, and miraculously he had remained free, and his words and his acts were free: he had not bowed his head, he had not bent his back. A gesture of his, a word, a smile had a liberating virtue, they were a rip in the rigid fabric of the
Lager,
and all those who had contact with him felt this, even those who did not understand his language. I believe that nobody, in that place, was loved as much as he was.

He reproached me: you should never be disheartened, because it is harmful and therefore immoral, almost indecent. I had stolen the cerium: good, now it’s a matter of launching it. He would take care of it, he would turn it into a novelty, an article of high commercial value. Prometheus had been foolish to bestow fire on men instead of selling it to them: he would have made money, placated Jove, and avoided all that trouble with the vulture.

We must be more astute. This speech, about the necessity of being astute, was not new between us; Alberto had often made it to me, and before him others in the free world, and still many others repeated it to me later, an infinite number of times down to today, with a modest result; indeed, with the paradoxical result of developing in me a dangerous tendency of symbiosis with a truly astute person, who obtained (or felt he obtained) temporal or spiritual advantages from his companionship with me. Alberto was an ideal symbiont, because he refrained from being astute at my expense. I did not know, but he did (he always knew everything about everyone, and yet he didn’t know German, or Polish, and had very little French), that in the plant there was a clandestine industry of cigarette lighters: unknown craftsmen, at spare moments, made them for important persons and civilian workers. Now flints are needed for lighters, and they had to be of a certain size: we had to thin down the rods I had. But how could we thin them down, and how much? “Don’t make difficulties,” he told me. “Leave it to me. You just worry about stealing the rest of them.”