Notes in the Margin

Levi

That moment when Primo Levi, naked and holding an index card with his number on it, squirmed forward with other naked men and women. He says he had a choice to make. Should he pray for his life? A little man, a chemist, in 1943 he’d joined the partisans up in the mountains but he hadn’t been so gung ho about it. He and his friends surrendered not long after to the fascists without firing a shot. And since Mussolini had begun deporting Italian Jews, soon enough there he was, filing past “the commission” that would, with one glance, decide whether he went to the gas chambers or was strong enough to go on working. All around him, his companions, many of whom may have been beseeching God out loud because by that point they’d have been beyond terrified and so no longer silent. Amid all this Levi is having a monumental battle with himself. A nonbeliever, he’s tempted by the idea of God: “For an instant I felt the need to ask for help and asylum.” Yet he resists. The moment passes. “You don’t,” he says, “change the rules at the end of the match or when you’re losing.”

You don’t?

I pray to the God I’ve never believed in during mild to moderate turbulence. Please, God, land this rattling piece of zillion-dollar junk in one piece. And I lie here on my back, on the floor, in the half dark of an idea-less late afternoon and I think, Holy fuck did Levi have balls. He told this decades later, with the benefit of hindsight, in his last book, The Drowned and the Saved. The problem is that the anecdote fits almost too neatly into his argument. It nearly makes him, so un-Levi-like, the hero of the story. He hardly wavered more than a moment. Pray? No, never, not me. Even so: I believe him. That the man somehow transcended what I think would have been the hardest thing—simply putting one bare foot in front of the other and moving forward—to defiantly refuse to throw in with God. What did he have to lose at that point? This is the thing: everything. He had everything to lose. To pray, Levi told himself, would have been as offensive to unbelief as it would have been to belief. I wonder if this is what saved him. If it was something in his face that “the commission” saw. Or rather in his body, because they would never have bothered to look into his face or into his eyes. Still, maybe a single glance at his body would have been enough to catch a glimpse of the force...