If anyone had asked Hermann, Gerda’s father, if he had ever known love (no one ever did, least of all his wife Johanna), the image of his mother standing at the entrance of the barn, handing him the bucket of lukewarm milk from the first milking, would have flashed before him. He’d sink his face into the sweet liquid and raise it again, a creamy mustache on his upper lip, before setting off on the hour-long walk to school. Only after covering a certain distance would he wipe his lip with his wrist. When Sepp Schwingshackl joined him from his maso1 to walk with him. Or, when along came Paul Staggl, who was the poorest boy in the whole school—his father’s maso was not only uphill but north-facing, so never got any sun in the winter. Or, if he’d tried thinking about it (something he never did in all his life, except for just one time, and then died immediately afterwards), he would have remembered his mother’s hand, cool but also as rough as old wood, cupped over his childish cheek in a gesture of total acceptance. By the time Gerda was born, though, Hermann had long ago lost love. Perhaps he’d lost it on the way, like the hay in his dream.
The first time, he was a boy, but then the dream recurred throughout the rest of his life. His mother was spreading a large white sheet on the field, filling it with freshly scythed hay. Then she closed it by bringing together and tying the four corners, and put it on his shoulders, so he would carry it to the barn. It was a huge load but he didn’t care. His mother had given it to him, so the weight was all right. He would walk up from the scythed field, swaying, like a monster flower. His mother watched him with her blue, almond-shaped eyes—the same eyes as Hermann, then his daughter Gerda, and also her daughter, Eva. Stern, gentle eyes like in some portraits of Gothic saints. However, another Hermann—ageless and invisible—realized with alarm that the corners of the large cloth weren’t tied properly and that he was shedding hay behind him on the ground. A few stalks would fly out at first, then entire handfuls. The Hermann who saw and knew everything couldn’t alert the Hermann who was the character in the dream, so when the latter reached the barn, his bundle would be empty.
The first night he dreamed this, the peace treaty was being signed in Saint-Germain, with which the victorious powers of the Great War—France, especially—wishing to punish the dying Austrian empire, assigned South Tyrol to Italy. Italy was very surprised. There had always been talk of liberating Trento and Trieste, but never Bolzano—let alone Bozen. It was perfectly logical. South Tyroleans were German people, perfectly at ease in the Austro-Hungarian empire, and didn’t need anyone to liberate them. Even so, after a war that had certainly not been won on the battlefield, Italy ended up with that stretch of the Alps as their unexpected booty.
That same night, his parents died three hours apart, swept away by the Spanish flu. The following morning, Hermann found himself orphaned, just like his land, South Tyrol, deprived of its Vaterland, Austria.
After their parents’ death, Hans, the eldest brother, inherited the old maso. The property consisted of a house with a Stube2 blackened by smoke, a barn full of wood beetles, a field so steep that in order to cut the hay you had to put your weight on one leg at a time, land so poor and vertical that it kept having to be carried back up on your shoulders in a wicker basket after every rainy season had sent a large part of it sliding down to the lowest point of the field. And Hans was the lucky one.
The three elder sisters got married in a rush, just so they could sleep under a roof they could call their own. Hermann, the youngest, had to go and be a Knecht, a servant, in the wealthier masos, the ones with level slopes you could scythe with your weight on both legs. The ones where the land stayed in its place even after a heavy downpour, and didn’t slide down into the valley. He was eleven years old.
Every night, until he was twenty, never having been away from his mother for more than half a day, he wet the bed from fear and loneliness. In winter, in the drafty loft where the masters made Knechte like him sleep, Hermann would wake up enveloped in his own frozen urine, as in a shroud. When he got up from the straw mattress, the thin tegument would shatter with a light crackle.
It was the sound of loneliness, of shame, of loss, of homesickness.