A Tranquil Star Read Free

each story properly fulfills its task, which is only that of condensing into a few pages, and conveying to the reader, a particular memory, a state of mind, or even just a thought. Some are happy and some sad, because our days are happy and sad.” Levi was here speaking of the stories in
Lilith
, but certainly what he says could apply to all his short pieces. “In my opinion,” he wrote, “a story has as many meanings as there are keys in which it can be read, and so all interpretations are true, in fact the more interpretations a story can give, the more ambiguous it is. I insist on this word,‘ambiguous’: a story must be ambiguous or else it is a news story, therefore everything is valid, rationality is valid, the science-fiction world is valid, and even the sensation of dreams isvalid.” For the reader who knows Levi’s other works, these stories are a treasure; for the reader who does not, or who knows only the Holocaust works, they are a revelation, a chance to spend time with a precise, imaginative, and surprising companion.
    A NN G OLDSTEIN
New York, September 2006
T RANSLATION C REDITS
    The following stories have been translated by Ann Goldstein:
    Knall
    In the Park
    The Magic Paint
    Gladiators
    The Fugitive
    The Sorcerers
    The Girl in the Book
    The Molecule’s Defiance
    A Tranquil Star
    The following stories have been translated by Alessandra Bastagli:
    The Death of Marinese
    Bear Meat
    One Night
    Fra Diavolo on the Po
    Bureau of Vital Statistics
    Buffet Dinner
    The TV Fans from Delta Cep.
    The following story has been translated by Jenny McPhee:
    Censorship in Bitinia
Acknowledgments

    The stories that appear in this volume were published in Italian in 1997 in two volumes edited by Marco Belpoliti. We would like to thank both him and the entire editorial staff at Giulio Einaudi Editore for putting together Primo Levi’s
Opere
, which is now being prepared for English publication. We would also like to thank Robert Weil, at Norton, for conceiving of this separate project and making it possible. Thanks also to Francesco Bastagli for his invaluable guidance and close reading of the translation against the original text and to Nunzia and Daniela Rondanini and Valentina Germani for assisting with the dialect.
    Ann Goldstein
    Alessandra Bastagli

PART I

EARLY STORIES
The Death of Marinese

    No one was killed. Sante and Marinese were the only ones captured by the Germans. It made no sense, it was almost incredible, that, of us all, the two of them had been taken. But the older men in the group knew that it is always those who are captured of whom it is later said “Who would have guessed!” And they also knew why.
    When the two were taken away, the sky was gray and the road was covered with snow that had hardened into ice. The truck barreled downhill with the engine off: the chains on the wheels rattled around the bends and clanked rhythmically along the straight stretches. About thirty Germans were standing in the back of the truck, packed shoulder to shoulder, some of them hanging onto the frame of the canvas roof. The tarp had come loose, so that a thin sleet struck their faces and came to rest on the fabric of their uniforms.
    Sante was wounded; he sat mute and still on the rear bench of the truck, while Marinese was at the front, standing, with his back against the driver’s cab. Trembling with fever, Marinese felt himself slowly overcome by a growing drowsiness, so that, taking advantage of a bump in the road, he slid to the wet floor and remained sitting there, an inanimate object amid the muddy boots, his bare head wedged between the bony hips of two soldiers.
    The pursuit had been long and exhausting, and he wanted nothing more than this—for it all to be over, to remain sitting, to have no more decisions to make, to surrender to the heat of his fever and rest. He knew that he would be interrogated, probably beaten, and then almost certainly killed, and he