The Periodic Table by Primo Levi Read Free Book Online

of Hebrew at thirteen and then has forgotten it. According to the above-mentioned magazine, a Jew is stingy and cunning; but I was not particularly stingy or cunning, nor had my father been.
    So there was plenty to discuss with Rita, but the conversation I had in mind didn’t strike a spark. I soon realized that Rita was different from me: she was not a grain of mustard; she was the daughter of a poor, sickly storekeeper. For her the university was not at all the temple of Knowledge: it was a thorny and difficult path which led to a degree, a job, and regular pay. She herself had worked since childhood: she had helped her father, had been a salesgirl in a village store, and had also ridden about Turin on a bicycle, making deliveries and picking up payments. All this did not put a distance between us; on the contrary I found it admirable, like everything that was part of her: her not very well cared for, rough-looking hands, her modest dress, her steady gaze, her concrete sadness, the reserve with which she accepted my remarks.
    So my zinc sulfate ended up badly by concentrating, turned into nothing more than a bit of white powder which in suffocating clouds exhaled all or almost all of its sulfuric acid. I left it to its fate and asked Rita to let me walk her home. It was dark, and her home was not close by. The goal that I had set myself was objectively modest, but it seemed to me incomparably audacious: I hesitated half of the way and felt on burning coals, and intoxicated myself and her with disjointed, breathless talk. Finally, trembling with emotion, I slipped my arm under hers. Rita did not pull away, nor did she return the pressure: but I fell into step with her, and felt exhilarated and victorious. It seemed to me that I had won a small but decisive battle against the darkness, the emptiness, and the hostile years that lay ahead.

I RON
    Night lay beyond the walls of the Chemical Institute, the night of Europe: Chamberlain had returned from Munich duped, Hitler had marched into Prague without firing a shot, Franco had subdued Barcelona and was ensconced in Madrid. Fascist Italy, the small-time pirate, had occupied Albania, and the premonition of imminent catastrophe condensed like grumous dew in the houses and streets, in wary conversations and dozing consciences.
    But the night did not penetrate those thick walls; Fascist censorship itself, the regime’s masterwork, kept us shut off from the world, in a white, anesthetized limbo. About thirty of us had managed to surmount the harsh barrier of the first exams and had been admitted to the second year’s Qualitative Analysis laboratory. We had entered that enormous, dark, smoky hall like someone who, coming into the House of the Lord, reflects on each of his steps. The previous lab, where I had tackled zinc, seemed an infantile exercise to us now, similar to when as children we had played at cooking: something, by hook or crook, in one way or another, always came of it, perhaps too little, perhaps not very pure, but you really had to be a hopeless case or pigheaded not to get magnesium sulfate from magnesite, or potassium bromide from bromine.
    Not here: here the affair had turned serious, the confrontation with Mother-Matter, our hostile mother, was tougher and closer. At two in the afternoon, Professor D., with his ascetic and distracted air, handed each of us precisely one gram of a certain powder: by the next day we had to complete the qualitative analysis, that is, report what metals and non-metals it contained. Report in writing, like a police report, only yes and no, because doubts and hesitations were not admissible: it was each time a choice, a deliberation, a mature and responsible undertaking, for which Fascism had not prepared us, and from which emanated a good smell, dry and clean.
    Some elements, such as iron and copper, were easy and direct, incapable of concealment; others, such as bismuth and cadmium, were deceptive and elusive. There was a method, a