The Birthday Buyer Read Online Free PDF

ever discovered what that word meant. Perhaps it was his real name.

13

    Primo Levi writes,“Hurbinek, who had fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain his entry into the world of men, from which a bestial power had excluded him, died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed.”
    When on that day, March 3, 1945, did Henek wake up and go to see Hurbinek?
    When on that day, on that morning, did he realize that the shivers and panting had ceased?
    When on that morning did he see that Hurbinek’s eyes and mouth stayed open?
    When in the night, did Hurbinek’s heart stop, all by itself?
    Nobody knew. With great integrity, after giving a deep sigh, Henek shut first the child’s eyes and then his mouth. It was an astoundingly simple gesture. A gesture that was very common at the time, that even became trite and everyday; but all the same nothing could take away its solemnity, even in that factory of death.
    Hurbinek’s face was still warm. Henek covered him with a blanket. Helped by Primo Levi and Rubem Yetzev, he carried the cradle outside. The three waited four hours until other men came and put him in a barrow to take him to the mass grave. But Henek didn’t want him to be buried there. Yetzev and he dug a hole at the foot of a tree, outside the precinct of the Main Camp, and there they lay little Hurbinek, swaddled in a blanket.
    “Dear children, this Christmas I love you more than ever, but I must continue with my work for the sake of you and your happiness. This is my present,”
SS Obergruppenführer
Heinz Rügen had written to his children on Christmas Eve.

III

THE TATTOO THAT WAS FORGOTTEN
OVER TIME

1

    One day in 1917, it doesn’t matter which, Cesare Levi, who was thirty-nine at the time, a good-looking, lively engineer with conservative political views, married Ester Luzzati in Turin, a twenty-two-year-old beautiful, imaginative girl who collected prints of natural life.
    They were both Jews and descendents of Hebrews from Provence who in turn descended from the Sephardites expelled from Spain in 1492. They were married by Rabbi Mordecai Toledano, though neither was religious.
    An electronics engineer like his father, Cesare was well established socially and belonged to the most influential circles in Piedmont thanks to his well-earned reputation. Levi the engineer enjoyed both professional and financial success in the demanding city on the Po, something that translated into his rapid promotion in markedly anti-Communist entrepreneurial circles.
    When Mussolini’s fascists appeared, he greeted them with ingenuous enthusiasm, and he even donned a black shirt at a few public events, though only a few.

2

    On April 11, 1987 Primo Levi went out into the street for the last time. He had gotten up before dawn; it was still nighttime. A nightmare had prevented him from sleeping. Just another one of his usual nightmares. It was then, still in bed, that he took his decision, in that same bedroom where he had slept as a child. He decided to take his own life, to end things, to inscribe the fullstop. He was an old man, had experienced everything a human being could live and felt unnecessary. He had experienced too much.
    He looked out of the window at the street; it was no longer raining as it had rained the previous evening. His nightmare was connected to the rain and long hours standing and being counted in the Buna-Monowitz camp under freezing rain that soaked you down to your bones and hit your head until it produced the terribly sharp headache he had never been able to throw off in all those years. That was why he had become addicted to umbrellas. He always carried one when he went out into the street.
    In his nightmare, he was stuck under driving rain with his feet buried in mud, unable to move or lift himself. It wasn’t yet another image he had dreamt up. Primo Levi remembered seeing an old French rabbi they had buried knee deep, whom they had stripped, whose
yarmulke
they stuffed into his