Deviation E-Book

Luce d'Eramo

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 671

Beschreibung

The devastating account of one woman's infatuation – and subsequent disillusion – with Nazism, translated into English for the first timeLucie has been brought up by bourgeois parents as a passionate young fascist. At the age of eighteen, she decides to volunteer in the Nazi labour camps in Germany. Intending to disprove what she sees as the lies that are being told about Nazi-Fascism, she instead encounters the horrors of life there – and is changed completely. Shedding her identity, she joins a group of deportees being sent to Dachau concentration camp. She escapes the camp in October 1944 and wanders a Germany devastated by allied bombardments.Translated into English for the first time, Deviation is about the repression of memory, and one woman's attempt to make sense of the hell she has lived through.Luce d'Eramo (1925–2001) was born to Italian parents in Reims, France. Eventually settling in Rome, she earned degrees in Literature and Philosophy and wrote many works of fiction and non-fiction, including the novels Nucleo Zero and Partiranno. Deviation was first published in Italy in 1979 and became an international bestseller.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGETRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTIONPART 1:ESCAPE FROM THE LAGERSTHOMASBRÄUASYLUM AT DACHAUPART 2:BENEATH THE RUBBLEAS LONG AS THE HEAD LIVESPART 3:FIRST ARRIVAL IN THE THIRD REICHIN THE CH 89PART 4:THE DEVIATIONTRANSLATOR’S NOTESABOUT THE PUBLISHERCOPYRIGHT

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

The novel Deviation, by Luce D’Eramo, published by Mondadori in 1979 and reissued by Feltrinelli in 2012, is the story of the author’s experiences as a volunteer worker in the Nazi labor camps in Germany during World War II, as well as her attempts to make sense of that “parenthesis” in her life during the decades that followed. Begun several years after her return to Italy in 1945, the book was not completed and published until more than thirty years later. Categorized as fiction, the text may also be viewed as autobiography, narrative nonfiction, a memoir, a testimonial, a Bildungs-roman, and a psychoanalytical probe into the reasons certain of the author’s memories were repressed.

Though the events that inspired the novel took place within a relatively short span of time (1944–1945), they played a very prominent, determining role over the ensuing course of the author’s life. The biographical facts can be summarized as follows: Luce D’Eramo (née Lucette Mangione) was born in Reims, France. The daughter of Italian parents, she lived in France until the age of fourteen, when her family returned to Italy in 1938. From a bourgeois Fascist family (her father was a government official in the Republic of Salò and her mother had served as a voluntary secretary of the Italian Fascio in Paris), she enrolled in the Faculty of Letters at the Sapienza University of Rome and was a member of GUF (Association of Fascist Students). At age eighteen, rendered uncertain by the collapse of Fascism and her ideals, she left home to volunteer in the German labor camps (Lagers) to disprove what she believed were lies being told about Nazi-Fascism, and to determine the truth firsthand. The encounter changed her, leading to a desire to shed her identity as the privileged daughter of a Fascist bureaucrat; discarding her documents, she voluntarily slipped into a group of deportees being sent to Dachau, from which she escaped in October 1944. These experiences, narrated in the book, culminate with a devastating accident on February 27, 1945, in Mainz: while Luce was helping to rescue the wounded buried under the rubble of a bombed building, a wall collapsed on her, leaving her permanently paralyzed. In 1946 she married Pacifico D’Eramo and they moved to Rome; their son, Marco, was born in 1947. Though the marriage ended in separation years later, Luce went on to make a life for herself and her son, obtaining a doctorate with a thesis on Kant, and earning a living by writing dissertations and tutoring university students and exam candidates.

The autobiographical elements in the novel are plain: the experiences of the protagonist, Lucia (alternately called Lucie, Luzi, or Lùszia), a young Italian girl from a bourgeois Fascist family, retrace those of the author. Confronted with the reality of the labor camps, her journey becomes a harrowing, surreal experience told with great emotional intensity, at once a testament, a cry of alarm, and a tale of self-discovery. In the story, D’Eramo has Lucia say, “Sometimes when you go astray and touch bottom, you finally come out on the other side.” With Lucia, D’Eramo revisits a course of development and transformation that was her own, and which involved a shift of consciousness as it looked squarely into the face of evil and horror in the world. Nadia Fusini, in her introduction to Feltrinelli’s 2012 edition of Deviation, entitled “Resilience, a Virtue,” refers to an “abnormality of living” that was certainly known to Luce D’Eramo, in whose difficult times the very ideas of “regulations” and “rules” were subject to perversion and distortion. Those who had to conform to them could not help but “deviate,” and in the course of that “deviation” experience the depths of horror wherein all “rectitude” is lost.

The novel’s consequent “deviations” result in an account that does not—cannot—proceed in a straight line. Bia Sarasini, writing about Luce D’Eramo in the essay “Se scrivere è un viaggio nel tempo,”* points out that, rather than a linear account, Deviation is a complex narrative construction of an alteration of awareness, achieved through a display of streams of consciousness and very different linguistic registers—all to accompany the writer and the reader through the abyss and out to the other side. The registers and verb persons change and the chronological order is necessarily shuffled. The story, like the memories themselves, comes out in fits and starts, as a result of a series of repressions and setbacks. At times the narrative voice finds memory less than trustworthy and struggles to get the story straight. In Part IV, she explains: “In fact, nearly a lifetime went by, in which only fragmented memories of the camps and hospitals emerged, and always in very specific circumstances—a forced choice on the part of my consciousness—which cluster around only two periods: the years ’53–54 and ’60–61.” The “specific circumstances” refer to the period when her marriage started to dissolve (1953) and the year she landed in Villa della Pace (1960), a home for the disabled. In both situations she felt trapped. It is not surprising that, confined by a hurtful marital bond, she turned to memories of her earlier, unparalyzed, liberated self:

That’s the context in which I resurrected the buried German experience for the first time. A time when it seemed to me I needed to make a clean break with my present life … Unable to run away as I’d done then, held captive by paralysis, by fever, by drugs, by the betrayals, and by my jealousy, what else could I do but look for a less imprisoned version of myself? It was natural for me to recall the escape from Dachau, in October ’44 …

Years later, after a time of living on her own with her young son, she again finds herself in the position of receiving assistance, a role she feels society has forced on her with its insistence on viewing her as an invalid:

This for me was the ultimate confirmation that my memory block had been linked to the struggle against the social pressures that wanted to confine me to the role of invalid … there is always someone who asks, “What! You live alone?” in a mournful voice. “What if you were to fall?” …

I’d returned to my proper place, to the role of aid recipient that society had assigned me. At age thirty-five, I found myself back where I started; what’s more, loaded with debt …

The first chapters of the book, which constitute Part I, “Escape from the Lagers,” were written around the same time: “Thomasbräu” in 1953 and “Asylum at Dachau” in 1954. “As Long as the Head Lives,” which makes up Part II, “Beneath the Rubble,” followed in 1961. It then took a number of years more for “In the Ch 89,” which makes up Part III, “First Arrival in the Third Reich”; and Part IV, “The Deviation,” to be completed, in 1975 and 1977, respectively. Parts I and II, which cover the experiences in Thomasbräu and Dachau as well as the accident and its aftermath, are narrated in the first person: “In the Dachau concentration camp I was part of the crew assigned to …,” and “Until I went to the concentration camp, I wasn’t even aware that there was another camp not far away,” and “That day I was sure I would die.” Part III goes back to when Lucia first arrived in the Lager; though it starts off in the first person, it abruptly shifts to the third: “The first few days, Lucia felt relieved: life in a camp was less harsh than what it was rumored to be.”

Why the shift in Part III? Since it was written more than twenty years later than the early chapters, the woman writing at that point in time was no longer the same person, and therefore the girl she sees in some old photos both is and is not her.

Gradually I had developed a curious image of myself. I thought I’d been a slender girl, with delicate wrists and ankles, who had gone through hell without changing her appearance …

If I recalled scenes of anger or terror, I pictured myself as a small, restrained figure amid a mob of frenzied people …

But the face that appears in the photograph of a factory badge and on the last fake ID card that was issued to me in Mainz, before the wall collapsed on my back, is a different one: a sturdy face, heavier, not given to dreams … there is a willfulness discernible in the downward turn of the tight lips, in the dark eyes staring starkly at the lens.

She distances herself from that girl, referring to herself as “l’italiana”: “The girl had a mental image of herself that she had carried with her from Italy and did not see how she had become …”

Part IV returns to the first person: “but the sense of estrangement between herself and the other whom she’s become grows wider, as though time had hollowed out impassable trenches,” Fusini writes. The narrator is determined to bring the disparity between her present self and the earlier girl to light: “There is a fact that I evaded. By so often saying that I had been deported to Dachau, I ended up believing it. But it’s not true.” In this section the narration becomes more introspective. Explaining why she had formerly repressed certain memories, D’Eramo seems to be trying to make sense of her actions, indeed to question the wisdom of them:

And, constrained by the irrelevance of my paralyzed body, I recognized my limitation in the very air I breathed, measuring the vanity of the rancor that had driven me to join the deportees in Verona, and to escape from Dachau in order to convince my fellow internees that one did not have to bow one’s head. And for what? To end up in a wheelchair.

She attempts to clarify why in the hospital, after the accident, her body shattered, she had tried to counteract the damage:

I didn’t know where to turn, what with my broken ribs, exposed back, burned skin, split forehead, useless organs, so I poured my whole heart into foolish inanities, as compensation, in the need to matter in some way, futilely, superficially, to endure the blow, to loosen the hold of that body that immobilized me and kept me alive.

In the novel, Lucia’s deviations or turning points assume various forms. There is the deviation from an idealized Fascism, with its attendant disillusionment, coupled with the self-doubt that maybe she hasn’t really gone over to the other side: “You still don’t condemn Fascism,” her friend Martine tells her; “you find extenuating circumstances for it as opposed to Nazism.” There is the deviation from accepted values by which perversion, in the Lagers, comes to seem normal rather than aberrant. There is the subsequent deviation that leads Lucia to reject her privileged class status and strive to adopt new values of solidarity, identifying with the victims, the Untermenschen or subhumans, rather than the masters. There is the deviation by which she loses her fear of those who give orders, realizing that they are not at all superior to those they command; indeed the jailers themselves are subhuman: “If I accused the Nazis of dehumanizing us foreigners, whom should I blame for the dehumanization of the Nazis?” And finally there is the most personal deviation of all, the accident that renders her body broken and useless, forcing her to rely on an agile mind to counter the paralysis of her legs.

D’Eramo’s efforts to achieve accuracy and fidelity in order to arrive at the truth about her “deviation”—that of sloughing off the constricting snakeskin of her social class—remain determined, despite the advice offered to her by the writer Elio Vittorini: “You must free yourself from the oppression of memory,” she tells us he wrote to her in 1957. Yet memory proves to be fluid: shifting sands that constantly rearrange themselves. As Oliver Sacks writes in Hallucinations: “We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.” Because the connection with the past is unstable and volatile, as Fusini suggests, any reconciliation between becoming and being, between past and present, seems impossible. Consequently, Deviation resists any ultimate resolution of its series of memories and occurrences. At a certain point the author herself is tempted to give up the attempt to understand why she blocked out certain past events. Her “snake” tells her soothingly:

“If things are really as you fear, from a compositional point of view you can only rejoice: you don’t have to understand the repression—your search fails, and that’s that. You even have a nice conclusion: you reveal to the reader that the story of your deviation was a dream in which your imagination enacted one of the most tenacious (and vain) aspirations of all mortals, the eternal human dream of correcting the past.”

She admits to being enticed: “It was such a relief to be able to wrap up not only my wartime Germany but my entire complicated life that I almost followed that poetic diversion.” In the end, however, she remains resolute: “I won’t be like Don Quixote (I thought), who at the end of his life repudiated his knighthood: I was insane, I was insane, he said, now I’m sensible. I’ve known for some time who I am: a woman who’s always told herself imaginary stories …”

The metaphor of the snakeskin becomes more prevalent in the latter part of the book. The snake represents the temptation to revert to her origins, to her privileged social status, and to abandon her comrades and their struggle—to abandon her social conscience. At one point the author admits: “I spent half my life playing hide-and-seek with myself.” Her wavering and oscillations were there early on, in the Lagers, but the Lucie in the camps hadn’t been aware of them:

I had later become aware of the contradiction, for one thing because my relations with my fellow Lager mates had improved, but this oscillation had existed: I wanted to be a worker, while letting people know who I was, thereby deep down laying the ground for the consideration due to my bourgeois circumstances. The fear I subsequently had of reverting to that temptation—using class privilege to save myself from the fate of vulnerable commoners—and wanting to throw away my papers so as to put myself in a similarly helpless position, is even more understandable. But, in this light, the fact that after Dachau and Thomasbräu I got myself hired at Siemens in Munich, again using my real name, is no longer just the boldness of a nineteen-year-old carried away by her impregnability: it’s you popping up again, Mr. Snake, as though I was unconsciously holding on to the possibility of resorting to high places.

Only years later is she able to pinpoint for certain where and when the snake had first tightened its coils around her:

But it was there, in Dachau, that the snake had unquestionably settled in, when Lucia had chosen a solitary path of rebellion, which lasted thirty years … She’d fled from Verona but also from Dachau: from her privileged status but also from the fate common to those on the other side, who have no means of getting out, who lack the psychological resources that stemmed from her class and allowed her to address the guards uncaringly.

Ultimately she is able to see the reason for the decades-long repression of her memories:

… deep inside I was secretly aware that it was I who had failed. Simply because the class leap in Dachau had been so extreme, the terror of it so violent, that it drove me to take refuge in oblivion. Actually acknowledging it, however? Never! The lady couldn’t admit to her failures, she made others pay for them. The lady understood human frailties so she relativized everything so as not to really side with those beneath her, with whom she declared herself to be so sympathetic. She felt different from the people of her bourgeois class solely because she criticized their conformist lifestyle no matter how they were defined (right or left), while continuing in fact—though with her fruitless reservations—to live like them herself.

In the end one can’t help but agree with Fusini that Deviation is not Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” On the contrary, it is more like a raw expression of what Wordsworth termed the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” that give rise to the emotion that lies at the heart of poetry.† It is this quality that led the writer Goliarda Sapienza, a contemporary of D’Eramo, to describe the narrative voice in Deviation as “a nocturnal monologue of a saxophone with brief … sunny notes of a clarinet driven to maximum heights of tenderness … touching tenuous nerve chords.”‡ Sapienza thought highly of D’Eramo’s work, even saying that it would “force me to reread [Primo Levi’s] If This Is a Man and [André Schwarz-Bart’s] The Last of the Just to prove what I suspect. That is, that Luce’s book is the most relevant on that theme, the harshest, most in-depth account of the Nazi experience, the most uncompromising and courageous.”§

As I read Luce D’Eramo’s Deviation I found myself thinking of Dante’s journey through the abyss. Led by his determined guide, Virgil, the poet is able to climb out of the depths, to finally emerge a riveder le stelle,¶ to see again the stars. It strikes me that in Deviation, D’Eramo is Dante and Virgil at one and the same time. When Lucia leaves home to go and serve as a volunteer worker at the IG Farben in Frankfurt-Höchst, she effectively enters the gate to Hades, calling to mind the famous inscription LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA, VOI CH’ENTRATE, “abandon all hope, ye who enter here,”|| making Luce-Lucia both the pilgrim journeying through the netherworld (the younger Lucia) and the cicerone (the later woman) leading herself and that earlier girl out to the other side. Since she had literally gone through hell, D’Eramo’s passage is transformational.

Anne Milano Appel July 2017

*Bia Sarasini, “Se scrivere è un viaggio nel tempo,” Il paese delle donne on line—rivista, April 22, 2017; http://www.womenews.net/se-scrivere-e-un-viaggio-nel-tempo/.

† William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” in Prefaces and Prologues, The Harvard Classics, vol. 39 (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909–14).

‡ From an unpublished letter dated April 5, 1979; quoted with the kind permission of Sapienza’s husband, Angelo Pellegrino.

§ Goliarda Sapienza, Il vizio di parlare a me stessa (Turin: Einaudi, 2011), p. 89.

¶ Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia, Inferno XXXIV:139.

|| Ibid., Inferno III:9, trans. John Ciardi.

PART 1

ESCAPE FROM THE LAGERS

THOMASBRÄU

Escaping was extraordinarily simple.

In the Dachau concentration camp I was part of the crew assigned to clean out the waste pipes for the metropolis of Munich. Each morning we set out for the city with sticks and scrubbing brushes; they loaded us onto trucks in platoons of twenty people.

Cleaning out sewers is a more varied job than it may appear at first: there are assorted chores involved.

Sometimes you have to lift a metal manhole cover on a sidewalk and lower yourself into the depths below. There’s a huge pipe down there with a short, closed neck that protrudes vertically from it. You uncover this neck and jab your stick in, swirling it around to dislodge the amassed feces. You have to scrape and stir them until they slide down again.

At other times we cleaned the toilets and drainpipes in factories and public buildings. Or they took us to the huge drainage conduit where, using the long sticks, we pushed at the encrusted feces from the grated openings and sloshed corrosive acids and water on them; then all that noxious decomposition flowed away rapidly like an infernal torrent. After that we attached scrubbing brushes to our sticks and scoured the walls of the conduit.

But the worst was when they brought us to rural villages to empty the cesspools: out there, there are no sewer pipes. When the black holes fill up, you have to empty them with buckets and eventually climb in yourself. Only then did they give us masks and rubber boots, and we worked covered in shit until we finished.

A lot of people got sick and there were some who died from toxicity.

There were also good days, when the pipes were not blocked by excrement, when the public toilets functioned efficiently and the “grand canal” flowed without obstruction; on those days we were promoted to the grade of manure spreaders, called Mistbreiter.

We were sent out to farms. We went behind the stables and, with the pitchforks they gave us, loaded the manure onto wagons. Then we followed the wagons, on foot, to outlying fields. Once we reached our destination, the wagons would stop every ten yards or so and the farmer would dump out a pile of manure that we had to spread around.

I’d sink the pitchfork into the pile and, tensing my muscles, lift with a swift, violent wrench until it emerged with an excessive load of manure; then, as I was about to scatter it around, my muscles would give way, and the fork wavered and tipped its load. So I jabbed the fork in again, trying to pull it out slowly and steadily, but just when I was congratulating myself for how easily I’d lifted it up, I noticed the long, bare prongs draped with only a few strands of dripping manure.

The ideal time to escape was during one of the air raids that would hit while we were at work, without warning, the enemy bombardment sudden enough to surprise the guards, who had a hard time rounding us up.

So that’s what I did.

I’d looked into it for some time, cautiously, because the Nazis managed to make us suspicious of one another. The internees do not look favorably upon those who want to escape from the camp, because every runaway doubles the surveillance and results in additional punishments and penalties for those who remain; nor do the prospective escapees ever make themselves known, because they are afraid of being informed on by fellow prisoners unable to endure torture or resist promises of reward.

Under pressure I was able to learn that in the city of Munich, about ten miles away, right near the Labor Bureau, there is a so-called Durchgangslager, a transit camp where fugitives hide out while waiting to find a more secure accommodation. The camp is commonly referred to by us as Thomasbräu, after the nearby Thomas brewery. I treasured that reference as if it were a reliable friend whose first name was Thomas and whose last name was Bräu.

At Dachau they told me:

“Kiss the ground and be thankful they didn’t throw you into one of their brothels. Nineteen years old, female, what were you expecting … freedom in the Third Reich?”

But one afternoon when we’d been transported to Munich, as we were working on the sidewalk sewers in a downtown neighborhood, the siren sounded, immediately followed by explosive thuds; people were fleeing. I flatten myself in a doorway, dash into the next doorway … a narrow alley, I squeeze into a niche amid the uproar of the bombs, eyes darting all around me, I throw off the rubber gear. No one is pursuing me. Still running, I reach the station, where I think I’ll be safer from any snitches, since no one takes refuge there during bombings.

In the snow, which falls unsteadily, I head for the dead-end sidings where debris piles up, the scraps emerging from the snow to testify to their need, and drawing me to them like sad old friends. I move among the torn-up metal that juts out in twisted hunks and sit behind a shed on a rusty shaft that protrudes sideways from a pile of rubble.

The bombs follow one another compulsively and crash like waves in a stormy sea. I’m not afraid because every boom is my accomplice.

When I see the planes move on to the other side of the city, I get up and go in search of an air-raid shelter, to hide and mix in with the people.

I walk through deserted streets in the dithering snow until I come across the opening of an underground shelter that looks like a subway under construction; I go down the stairs and come out into a long, wide corridor full of pitiable indigents, so it must be a bunker for foreigners. I look at them avidly as if to trace the face of freedom: they have sagging mouths, jaws, and a vague mask of defiance on their faces. No one pays any attention to me.

When the all-clear sounds, I ask an Italian who seems friendly and more welcoming where the Labor Bureau is.

“At this hour?” He looks at his watch.

“What time is it?”

“It’s eight o’clock, the Bureau is closed.”

“It doesn’t matter. Where is it?”

The man picks a crumpled piece of yellow paper off the ground, smooths it out meticulously with his hands, flattening it against the wall, and with a pencil, under the dim glow of a dangling light bulb, sketches a map of the streets I need to take.

Other Italians gather around me.

“Are you Italian?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you from?”

“From Rome.”

“Interned?”

“Yes.”

“For a long time?”

“Yes.”

“So, what else is new.”

They don’t ask me any more questions. They go out of their way to explain to me where I have to go.

One says, “At Sendicatorplatz you can ask.” (Later I’ll find out that the real name is Sendlinger Tor Platz, which no foreigner has ever been able to pronounce correctly.)

Someone else shrugs. “Don’t you understand that she can’t ask?”

“Oh!”

They look at me indifferently. I wonder if they can help me? I take a chance:

“Where are you staying?”

“At Siemens. Today is a day off.”

“Some day off!” one of them remarks, spitting on the floor. “Stuck in here.”

“If you need anything, come on over.”

“We’re in barrack eighteen, in the first camp.”

“But be careful.”

They say goodbye. They go away.

I don’t know what to do and I hide in a corner. People leave, no German guard appears. The dim light bulbs go out. I wait in the uncertain silence.

I wake up terrified because I fell asleep without meaning to and I’m afraid it’s gotten late. I go outside: it’s the dead of night. It’s still snowing; occasional streetlamps, their glass obscured, cast a mysterious light on the harsh houses, on streets made even more immaculate by the snow.

I walk along following the route on the yellow paper; undisturbed, I wander through streets smoothed over by whiteness, in dazzling solitude, caressed by the snow that lulls me. The Labor Bureau must be here, though I can’t make out any Lager, I don’t see any barracks, or barbed wire, no guards walking around. Only uniform houses, their white roofs lowered over gray facades like inhospitable visors, continually barring my way.

I’m exhausted from the cold, tired and hungry. A furtive shadow slinks in front of me, sees me, stops, watches me.

It’s a blond young man, thin, tense, eyes like two slits. He looks like a foreigner. I wish he’d say something, but he remains silent. Maybe he’s waiting for me to speak first. I raise my hand slowly and nod at him. He repeats my gesture. I’d like to call out, but I’m afraid of the sound of my voice in the soft silence. I raise my hand again to motion him over to me.

He approaches, his right hand in his pocket.

“What do you want?” he asks me in French, looking me up and down. His voice is as peaceful as the snow and doesn’t disturb anything.

“Are you French?” I ask in turn in his language.

“Yes. And you?”

“I’m Italian, but born and raised in France.”

“What are you looking for?”

Suddenly I feel very trustful. “Thomasbräu,” I tell him.

A quick smile, affectionate and patronizing, flickers over his gaunt, impassive face.

“Come with me.”

He walks briskly, without a sound, on the unspoiled snow, and I can barely keep up.

When we come to a corner, he turns to me: “Hurry up.”

“Okay.” I nod fervently and move faster; I have the impression that my steps alone are making a terrible racket, while his are muffled.

We arrive in front of a wall. The young Frenchman moves closer and stands facing it.

“Climb on me and scramble over.”

I start to climb, but am left awkwardly straddling his back, unable to go any farther.

The boy sighs. “Get down,” he says brusquely.

I slide off. He picks me up; I barely have time to marvel at his strength (it comes from freedom, I think joyfully).

“Grab on to the edge of the wall, watch out for the glass shards.” I do what he says and cut my hand.

“Put your feet on my shoulders. Now climb over.”

A thud and I find myself sitting on the ground, on the other side of the wall. With an agile leap the Frenchman joins me, pulls me up, takes my hand, and pulls me along.

We’re in a spacious courtyard, occupied by massive silhouettes of vehicles camouflaged by the snow. On the ground shiny white tracks left by tires trace diamond patterns and arabesques.

The young man stops. “Beautiful,” he says, his eyes indicating the tracks: “It looks like they’re trying to tell us something.” He looks at me and smiles again like he did earlier.

“What’s your name?”

“Lucie.”

“I’m Louis.”

He starts walking again, unhurriedly, lighting a cigarette. I’m worried that someone will pop out from behind a truck, but I don’t dare tell him that.

“Is it far?” I ask as we leisurely make our way across the courtyard, as if we were out for a stroll.

“There.” He points to a small door that I hadn’t noticed in the wall in front of us, which is not actually a wall, but the side of a house without windows.

A pang of dismay stops me dead. “Louis.”

“What is it?”

“I was looking for the Thomasbräu Lager.”

“I know.”

We reach the door. He shoves it open with his hip. He goes in, stamps his feet vigorously to shake off the snow, pulls me inside, and kicks the door shut. He switches the light on.

We’re in a clammy corridor full of gobs of spit and dirt; a pipe runs along a wall, bending abruptly into the hall and ending at a thunderous faucet, which noisily spills water into a bucket. The water splashes out onto the floor and races toward the door in rivulets.

Louis grabs the bucket, tosses the water into a corner, sets it upside down.

“Have a seat,” he says.

He crouches on his calves in front of me.

“What, don’t you like the place?” he asks with mock innocence.

“Oh yes, very much.”

“Where did you come from?”

“Dachau.”

He gives an admiring whistle. He gathers his thoughts and says, “So then, Thomasbräu is officially the Labor Bureau’s transit camp where foreigners stay while awaiting a new job or repatriation, or while waiting for new convoys to be formed because, in case you didn’t know it, none of us, not even those sold for free labor, has the right to travel alone.”

“Isn’t it dangerous there?”

“Dangerous?” He snickers briefly. “Not at all: we’re safe there. Who could be better informed than us about searches, rumors concerning escapees or suspects?”

“Aren’t there informers?”

“Informers! Don’t be silly! The camp also houses those who are really waiting for a decision from the Labor Bureau, there are a lot of them, in fact, and they’re constantly shifting, replacing one another: the ones who get a job leave and new ones arrive. New faces all the time! How can the Germans tell the difference between them all? The majority of the new arrivals don’t have documents, they’re people who’ve been rounded up in the streets, morons deported by mistake, desperate volunteer workers. If one of us should end up at roll call by mistake, all he has to do is answer confidently to any name, receive a glance in return, and that’s that.”

“And the new ones keep quiet?”

“What do they know? We sure don’t go and own up to them!”

“But at roll call?”

“Not a word! Those people are so scared they’re shaking. Don’t worry, they don’t bother anybody, really: they hole up all day and don’t spend their time at Thomasbräu.”

“The brewery?”

“Right.”

“What about the Germans?”

“Which ones?”

“The ones at the Bureau.”

“Who ever sees them? We go there late in the evening when they’re at home eating their lard, or in the daytime during office hours, when they’re slaving over their stupid paperwork.”

“Isn’t the brewery owner an informer?”

“Forget about it! Nobody pays him better than we do. It’s not worth it to him.”

“But where do you get the money?”

Louis stands up, irritated, looking down on me as if to say, Are you done grilling me? Then he says, “Go to sleep, go on.”

I stand up too: “Where?”

“In there.” With a look he indicates a rickety little door at the end of the hall.

I don’t dare move. I’m afraid of being left alone. Just to say something, I ask him, “How come you always keep your hand in your pocket?”

Louis pulls out a revolver.

I stumble over the bucket.

“Where do you come from, anyway?” he says with a tight-lipped smile.

Thin, skinny maybe, but nimble, with something feline about his movements and posture. He’s wearing blue coveralls; back straight, head held high on a tense, sturdy neck. He has sharp, pointy features, a little like a weasel; his eyes are small, shifty, changeable, at this moment very dark. His blond hair the color of chestnut wood is unruly in back, his mouth a slit with no lips, his expression guardedly harsh.

He puts the gun back in his pocket and takes his hand out. He seems more conciliatory.

“Force of habit.”

“I see,” I say (how did he manage to get hold of a weapon?). “I’m sorry,” I add.

He studies me. “You’re a …” he begins, then falls silent. Continuing to stare at me, not turning away, he spits the cigarette stub out of the corner of his mouth like a bullet. “They raised you not to get your hands dirty, right?” he laughs with a quick smirk. I laugh curtly in return. We stare into each other’s eyes for a long moment. “Lucky you!” he sighs. He turns abruptly and goes to shut off the faucet: “That water is annoying, isn’t it?” He looks at me again and says, “Let’s go.” He starts toward the rickety door, pushing me ahead of him. He opens the door slowly.

Hidden in shadows, the lumpy profiles of straw mattresses on bunk beds materialize in front of me, and the sweaty stench of humanity in closely packed quarters assails me.

I recognize the world of Dachau. All that effort only to find myself at the same point again.

I stop at the door.

“Are you scared?” he whispers softly.

“Yes.”

Louis goes in and disappears among the beds. I hear heavy, raucous breathing intermingling confusedly in the darkness. After a short while he reappears, takes my hand, and leads me through the tight spaces to a corner where two pallets are empty. “Lie down there,” he murmurs. He leaves. Someone groans and moves, making the bed creak ominously.

The light from the corridor is turned off. Louis’s shadow reappears and he lies down on the mattress next to mine.

He lights a cigarette and in the brief glow of the match the upper bunk can be seen, the eternal baldachin of the Lagers, presumptuous and grotesque in its consumption. Louis slips a blanket out from under his pallet and throws it to me.

“Cover yourself.”

“What about you?”

“I’m warm.”

“Is this where you sleep?”

“Yeah.”

After a while he hands me a bar of chocolate.

“Eat it.”

I finger it, because I think it’s a joke.

“Thank you.”

Slowly I unwrap it from the thin silver paper my touch has forgotten, lingering to savor the delicate sensation.

Meanwhile, more distinct sounds emerge from the oppressive air, muffled laughter, groans, a swelling surge, like a shifting, heaving mass. The wooden timbers themselves seem to be in a frenzy, taking on an insolent nocturnal life of their own.

“Louis.”

“Lucie.”

“Is this one of their brothels?”

“We only screw among ourselves.” He waits.

“Men enter freely?”

Louis turns on his side:

“Do you perhaps expect the Nazi gentlemen to be so kind as to provide separate dormitories for men and women?”

“In Dachau …,” I start to say.

“There they do, and here they don’t,” he says, cutting me short. “As it suits them, my dear girl. There they do, because it’s easier to monitor them when they’re separated, and because abstinence is a punishment. Here they don’t, because for a temporary Lager such an arrangement would be too much effort, and because foreigners entering Germany should learn right away that they’re nothing but swine.” He pauses. “Get it? Inferior races.”

“I see.”

“You don’t copulate over there?” he asks with exaggerated innocence.

“In Dachau?”

“Don’t say that name, dummy.”

“Some make love, but the men have to sneak in, and are risking their lives.”

“What did I tell you?” he laughs. “And you?”

“Me, no.”

After a moment, Louis replies, “Too bad,” and turns his back.

A big hand moves toward me across the space between me and the other bunk bed. Starts groping the blankets. An arm follows, a hairy face appears.

My throat is dry. I reach out toward Louis. He sits up abruptly.

“What’s wrong?” He lights a match. He deals a sharp blow to the fingers that have reached my breast.

The hand retracts like a mechanical device.

“Leave her alone, she’s my girl,” Louis hisses.

The hairy face vanishes with a grunt.

Louis makes me change places with him and moves over to my pallet. I stare into the shadows. In front of me, in the semi-darkness, on the upper level of the bunk across the way, I gradually make out a jumble of bodies from which tangled arms and legs stick out, stretching and contracting like multiple blind antennae of huge snails. I close my eyes, the rancid smell of the blanket in my nose.

“Squeeze in!” an excited voice yells.

“Don’t slump on top of me!” another one pants, out of breath. Teasing, suggestive remarks, rude catcalls then spill out, as if a repressed effusiveness, lying in wait, had been given the green light to emerge. Occasional drowsy voices wearily break their silence.

It’s true, escape is merely a superficial remedy; the essentials remain unchanged.

Louis isn’t sleeping; he lights a cigarette.

“Don’t cry,” he whispers. He leans over me. “They’re just a bunch of poor bastards.”

Having been exposed, I cry even more.

When I wake up, I feel hemmed in: there are people standing up around the beds, chatting, their heads bent forward under the beams of the upper bunks; others are sitting up on top with their legs dangling over; while others still are milling around in the narrow aisles between the beds, backs leaning against the wood frames. Anemic, evasive faces, dark circles under sunken eyes, stick figures made of rotten, measly wood, entrenched filth.

Yet observing those sordid, anxious creatures, I feel like I’ve been part of this misery, which breathes around me like swamp air on an abandoned daffodil, from time immemorial.

Louis’s pallet is empty. There is a package with my name. I take it and unwrap it: in it I find a big piece of bread with two sausages. No one says a word to me. I hide the bundle in my coverall. I go wash up in the corridor, plunging my arms into the bucket and rubbing my face with the bracing water.

The word spreads swiftly like a gust of wind: “Police.”

The camp empties. I go outside; to the left of the door, in the courtyard, there’s a gate through which they all leave with a show of nonchalance, scattering along the way.

It’s raining. The snow has disintegrated into a dreary gray slush.

I walk until I come to a desolate, welcoming cemetery. I go inside; there are no crosses or cypresses. It seems like the old garden of an enchanted castle where everyone has been turned to stone. I stroll along slowly and say a prayer at random: like when I was a little girl and would amuse myself sitting at the window, watching the passersby and mentally reciting the “Angel of God” for figures whom I chose aimlessly, on a whim.

I eat my bread and sausage, savoring them slowly, and spend the day there until, turning quickly, I notice that the shadows are lengthening, reaching out everywhere like absorbent stains, and that the light descending through the latticework of foliage is becoming more and more spidery and tenuous. I race out, bump into a red house starkly exposed on the sidewalk, and return to the camp.

I lie down on my pallet in the darkest corner. The shadows thicken. Louis is nowhere in sight. I’m afraid, what if he doesn’t come back? I should try to get some information. But since leaving Dachau I’ve set myself a goal: to go unnoticed, mix in completely with the crowd.

I don’t want to die.

Finally, Louis shows up. I sit up on the mattress. He jerks his head toward the door.

“Come with me.”

I follow him happily.

He turns to me and winks: “Let’s go get to know Thomasbräu.”

In the mist dissolved by the muted red glow of twilight, it seems to me, in my sudden contentment, that the houses with their intermittently illuminated windows are twinkling at me like the befuddled, shiny faces of regulars in a smoke-filled, crowded tavern.

It’s as if things were waking up from a hazy languor. Even Louis is different than he was yesterday.

We go into Thomasbräu. A room with solid tables and benches, walls paneled halfway up in wood, dignified deer antlers of various sizes and branches mounted high on the walls, beer steins. A lot of noisy people, foreigners.

To the right is another room with small, intimate tables, white tablecloths and small vases of flowers, swanky customers, a subtle chamber orchestra: the Germans’ dining room.

Louis shows me to a seat in the wood-paneled room, next to a couple whom he greets with a quick wave of his right index finger, and sits down beside me.

“Here you are, Lucie. These friends will protect you, since I rarely stay at the camp, so I’m putting you in their hands. They already know who you are.”

The woman is young, with a marmoreal complexion, gentle, remote blue eyes, cropped shaggy hair; she’s in an advanced state of pregnancy. The man has very dark skin and hair, dark eyes; he’s older, with the deep-set wrinkles typical of peasants from the south. He immediately explains to me, in the broken French of emigrants, that the signora is Polish, while he is Sicilian.

“I’m Italian too,” I say, smiling.

“Oh.” He nods soberly. “Good,” he says, then proceeds to tell me the story of his companion. “Her husband, a Polish patriot, was shot by the Nazis and she was deported to Germany and placed here to await the delivery. After which they intend to shoot her.” He gestures as he talks, but his tone of voice is composed and his hands sometimes pause in midair. “I love her, I want to adopt her child, they won’t make a Nazi out of him.” His face contracts. He relaxes his jaw: “I want to marry her,” he says with a slight bow to his beloved. “She’s very intelligent.” He smiles at her. “She’s already learning a little Italian. I work for a German civilian and I’m trying to find a way out. I have less than two months’ time,” he says, a gleam of frantic resolution in his eyes. The woman looks at him with patient tenderness. The Sicilian continues:

“Louis told me to watch over you too. So then, always stay close to Dunja, no one will do anything to you.”

The woman smiles at me.

Louis looks at his watch.

“I’ll leave you now. I have to go.”

“Go and don’t worry,” the Sicilian replies in French, clapping him on the shoulder with a certain respect.

Louis waves goodbye to everyone and without turning around goes away.

At the camp, I lie down next to Dunja.

The days go by without a ripple.

Louis shows up now and then, to take me to the movies. He doesn’t talk much. Sometimes I catch him studying me on the sly, but as soon as he sees that I’ve noticed, he won’t look at me again all evening.

The Sicilian man gives me food.

“Thank you. But how can I repay you?”

“Forget it. Louis takes care of everything. All I do is bring it.”

“But Louis too, how will I pay him back?”

“Don’t worry about it. If he hasn’t asked you for it, it means he doesn’t want anything.”

The side door of the camp opens onto the yard of an ice factory, where the French prisoners of war, who are housed on the upper floors of our building, work.

I’ve never gone up to their quarters, but they say they have a lot more space than us and many more amenities. They are French soldiers who refused to become civilian workers. I discover that they are doubly well-off because not only are they respected by everyone for practically being heroes of the Resistance, but they also work two steps away from where they live, earn a salary, regularly receive packages from the Red Cross, have proper uniforms that are periodically replaced, also by the Red Cross, and inspire a certain awe in the Germans, on whom they occasionally lavish such unavailable delicacies as coffee and chocolate, which they get in their care packages. Finally, they have all the women they want, between the German girls attracted by the goodies, the strapping military bearing, and the chic French aura, and the women in our camp who look up to them as Prince Charmings, and to whom they resort only in the absence of someone better, and then with a certain arrogant condescension. They do not seem politicized, unlike others I’ve met before. In fact, on the ground floor, where they rarely set foot, they look down on the banished criminals more so than on the new arrivals. Indeed, they only ever show up here in order to choose some appetizing, compliant girl from among the newcomers.

The ground floor, for its part, liberally returns their contempt, referring to them collectively as the law-abiding ones upstairs.

We are the unlawful ones.

Still, they don’t bother anyone and they make it a point of honor never to know anything when the Germans question them about one of us. Finally, when they work the night shift at their factory, they aren’t the least interested in our own comings and goings in their yard.

On the other side, our odd camp verges on the courtyard of the Labor Bureau: a rather dirty quad, surrounded by low buildings with dust-covered, frosted glass windows.

Every so often I get in line with the new arrivals at the Bureau to receive, like them, a bowl of soup with two slices of bread, the daily ration the Bureau distributes to those it assists.

But I have another source of personal income.

I go to Thomasbräu with a group. I was commissioned by our bunkmates to sell their cigarettes on the black market to the Germans in the non-pariah room, where there are laundered tablecloths, clean doilies, and vases of flowers on the tables. I get a percentage for this job. I know what to do at a glance, can immediately distinguish the tightfisted Germans, the ones appalled by the boisterous carrying-on in our room, the stern, guarded types, and the more indulgent ones—especially the young people and soldiers who enjoy watching the comings and goings in our ward.

Often I trade the cigarettes for food coupons. Then we eat and sing until the dead of night. Sometimes I sit in a corner and remind myself, “Here I will not do as I did at the K-Lager, in Dachau. Here I will resist. I will hold out until the end. I won’t do anything impulsive. I will be one of them, like them, at all times, and that’s that.”

But as usual, we are out of money and have to leave the waitresses at the Thomasbräu pawns, which later we will not redeem. Stolen stuff.

There is a small humpbacked waitress, a spinster who shows great sympathy for all of us, her chest heaving with compassionate sighs, but she is a very greedy, cunning usurer, with bulging eyes that make her look like a fly.

Most of our time, however, is spent at the camp, where we pass the long hours of the day killing body lice.

We strip and, by the feeble light that filters through the windowpanes, the grayish light from the yard, we search through our clothes, all of us women in the corner, hunting for those repulsive insects; we ball them up between our fingers like children do boogers, and crush them. I have a smooth rock I use for the purpose.

Some are very swollen, gray with pale streaks, their step wobbly due to their big bellies; others have dark spots, some intensely brown; the ugliest, the most sprightly, splatter like worms. There, in the cobwebs of light, in the mud-colored shadows of the large room, those multipedes clinging to the fabric of our clothing and blankets gleam like bronze.

What’s more, I’ve always been quite an expert at this, even at Dachau: at night I wake up to a well-known itch, feel about cautiously, and suddenly pounce on the scurrying insect. Then I toss it on the floor, not bothering to squash it.

I’ve also discovered that body lice keep you warm.

Louis was right. It’s not at all risky living a few yards away from the Labor Bureau. It would appear that our lawlessness here is the natural offspring of the Bureau, and it sometimes seems strange to me that I was surprised at first, as though they were in any way opposed.

Just as incest and adultery thrive in repressive countries with extremely rigid customs, their thousand tentacles protected by a code of silence, undisturbed as long as appearances are preserved, and therefore nurtured by that same intransigence, so we are the most authentic product of the great Nazi machine that manufactures the most obsessive control and discipline in existence, and it is therefore only logical and right for us to be sheltered by its wing.

Armed with this elementary discovery, I wander without misgivings through the area of the Labor Bureau, smiling at my earlier anxieties.

I’ve also made several visits to the Labor Bureau building itself, to overhear what was being said about some panicked escapee.

It’s a yellow building, the walls flaking, with endless small offices lining interminable corridors, large windows with blank, inert light, lifeless employees sagging behind their desks, and long rows of workers used to being obsequious but somewhat disillusioned by the bloodless impersonality of the law. More than anything else, willing to endure it, despite the exhaustion of hours standing in line in front of cramped windows, where the presenting and return of documents that open the way to social assurance is purposely complicated and difficult.

Sometimes a German escorted by two SS suddenly storms into the camp during the evening roll call or at some other opportune moment and, after stationing his guards in front of the exits, demands the documents of everyone present.

There have been some fruitful raids. But given the intensity of the criminal life going on at our place, the chances of arrest are minimal compared to those anywhere else, and are not worthy of serious consideration.

I come to learn that Louis, in particular, is wanted by the police.

Generally, however, the inspections are harmless. Some Germans burst in, already in a great hurry to get out of this grim, dangerous place.

If I don’t have time to hide under a bed, I tag along, preceding them, repeating the unintelligible foreign names that they don’t understand, pronouncing the syllables clearly. I accompany them back to the door and they routinely forget to ask me for my documents as well.

Louis is an epileptic. During his seizures, his frenzy is treacherous, unexpected. His mouth becomes rigid and his eyes remain wide open, unmoving. He thrashes and kicks in fits and starts, his expression demented, but in him even this rage seems premeditated. I sit with him during the long unconscious periods that follow his seizures, and I’m the only one who does, because he has no friends, except for the Sicilian, who is often absent; I put compresses on his forehead while he looks at me with a yearning, sweet expression, not seeing me.

Sendlinger Tor Platz is a meeting place for foreigners. A large irregular square surrounded by low shops, with a skimpy little park in the middle. There are even benches for Polen and Osten, that is, for Poles and Russians, and cafés for foreigners, Osten included, as the many signs explain. One side of the square is closed off by a wooden pen, the kind in which livestock are crammed during the large regional cattle fairs. I like to wander around in there. This is the foreigners’ market, where they officially have the right to trade clothing, tobacco, and stuff to eat.

Foreigners of all nationalities, mostly Slavs, push and shove around ghastly red dresses, green socks, brown handkerchiefs, stale loaves of bread, and moldy packs of tobacco, whose price is sky high. They touch the goods, they shrug.

You think you’re living in a silent film because everyone is jostling and gesturing and none of the buyers speak. All you hear is a muted buzzing, as though from a movie camera.

At times you witness a fight, silent at first, which then degenerates into threats from the contenders and incitements from the spectators who egg them on and snicker.

While I roam around idly, I come across Louis. He doesn’t look up, doesn’t recognize me. He turns away looking irritated. I’m about to call out to him, but he’s slipping a roll of marks out of the pocket of a bony man. His expression is preoccupied and slightly tense.

I deliberately pass in front of him again and stop.

“Louis,” I say. The money has already disappeared. He raises his eyes without surprise, looks at me sharply, and disappears. I search the crowd, but I can’t find him.

I buy a pair of plush clogs with wooden soles for sixteen marks—the fruit of my latest speculations at Thomasbräu—and I have just enough money left over for a pair of panties that make me happiest of all because the rough cloth of my pants chafes my skin. Besides, the overalls that I mended are falling apart and, no matter how many hours I spend patching them, a tear occasionally exposes my skin. And in November it’s cold, a cold so intense that I’m always shivering. Though that’s the least of my ordeals.

Evening is falling, but I’m so satisfied with my purchases that rather than go back to the camp to look for food, I go into the garage of a repair shop nearby. I feel content: I climb in and out of the trucks, enter the drivers’ cabs, jump on the seats, drift from one vehicle to another.

I’ve just settled into a nice car, landing with a thud on the soft, springy seat, enjoying myself as I put on airs and act like a grande dame, when I freeze. There’s a man hiding in there. It’s Louis. Actually, he’s not hiding, but is quietly stretched out on a seat, smoking, a folded newspaper in his hand. He lights a match, unfazed, smiles at me. Just then I forget about his stealing and in my euphoria I tell him about my purchases. I show him the clogs and he keeps striking matches to consider them.

He looks at me without speaking. He no longer has the ironic manner of the other evening. He is always either very shy with me or abrupt or hesitant, as if he were afraid of doing something wrong, before he finally gets up the nerve and speaks in argot.

He hands me vouchers and money for supper, but as I’m about to take them, I unfortunately remember his theft at Sendlinger Tor Platz.

“Is it a foreigner’s money?” I ask him.

“Of course,” he says, “I don’t steal from our own anymore.” He looks at me as if begging me to accept his gift. Suddenly I’m ashamed of my rudeness: What was I thinking! Giving him a lecture! “Thanks.” I smile, mortified. “Thank you, Louis.”

Then, looking straight ahead—sitting in the shadows, so close to me that I practically brush against him—he tells me that he is the son of Normandy fishermen, that his father died at sea when he was a child. At eight years old he sailed off as a cabin boy and since then he’s always been on the water, traveling on the cargo ship of a smuggler from Marseilles; the ship called at the most unexpected shores.

And once, to avoid port customs, they stopped for a long time at a harbor in the French Congo, and he caught malaria. Then, when the ship returned home, they left him ashore with no money, nothing.

“I earned a little, yeah, but I spent it all. Meanwhile, my mother had died from TB. So I went to Paris and looked for another job. I couldn’t do much because I can barely read and can hardly write at all. I have no skills. I’m twenty-six years old.”

As he speaks, haltingly, he seems like an untamed, wounded animal. I want to squeeze his hand, but I don’t dare and I don’t move. We fall silent.

“Go and eat,” he says finally, “it’s late.”

“Come on,” I say.

“I have things to do.”

“Can’t you take a break?”

“When I work, I don’t think about anything else.”

I take his hand, a rough, cracked hand, a hand with chilblains. Louis dismisses me without returning my squeeze. “Go on, go,” he says.

I get out of the car and head for camp, shaken, preoccupied by absurd feelings. I now know that I am more drawn to the vagrants at Thomasbräu than to anyone in my earlier, proper life. I’m fearful of the hold such a short time has taken on me, and I feel like my life will never be as genuine and secure as it is now. In my bourgeois way, I know, I’m ashamed of Louis, but just thinking about him I feel a pang, my heart pounding.

I leave the garage; the city throbbing with tiny flickering lights is profiled against the backdrop of a sky in which clouds, like lumps of coal, spread a last flaming glow to the edges. I am suddenly listless, and feel the joy of a short time ago slip down around my feet, like a loose-fitting tunic.

I enter the brewery and slump down on a bench next to my companions.

Three German soldiers come into the room and sit at our table. They’ve come from the front, you can tell, and maybe they don’t know about us or just don’t care. They order bread and beer and chew slowly.

We decide to pool the vouchers required for a meal among the three of us and place them on the table, next to the soldiers. They take them without a word. They have no idea how much the vouchers cost us. We start eating again, we even order dessert for them and offer them a cigarette.

They’re exhausted, unkempt, their hair is prematurely graying, they don’t even talk to one another. In the end they thank us awkwardly. I catch them shooting a vivid glare of resentment at these extravagant, uninhibited foreigners who feed them in their own home. The look of a poor relative.

So I explain to one of them, whispering in his ear, that we’re poor bastards with no place to sleep, that we’re crammed in like cattle in a stall full of lice.