The pact between Frau Mayer and Herr Neumann was clear. If he really wanted to have back in his kitchen that assistant cook who’d gotten herself in trouble and whose trouble, as it happened, was already two months old, with fat pink cheeks and her mother’s transparent eyes, then she wouldn’t stop him. For years, the chef had filled her esteemed guests’ bellies with Tyrolean specialties which, if they were not fancy then at least were perfectly produced, and thus contributed to their return season after season. So now she had no plan to deny him this favor.
Frau Mayer was a woman of about fifty who could have been described (and, in fact, was at one time described) as a “classical Aryan beauty”: slim, with athletic legs, a bosom not large but emphasized by the low-cut bodice of the dirndl and a thick blond plait twisted around her head from which no one had ever seen a hair stray. She spoke good Italian with an almost elegant turn of phrase, being a former pupil of a Fascist period school, but it was when she spoke Hochdeutsch with tourists that she revealed her deep love of correct language.
Everything about Frau Mayer was controlled, except for her blue-green eyes. Frightening yet beautiful, they suggested that, instead of spending her life bestowing dignified smiles upon her guests, she could just as well have lived a life of wild excess. It wasn’t impossible to picture her as a temptress in a Kabarett who drives men to the brink of suicide, a barbarian female warrior with dragon blood on her dagger, a prophesying poetess in touch with the underworld.
Perhaps it was that talent for the absolute which shone from her eyes that had led Frau Mayer to give up the chance of a family and devote herself to the well-being of her guests like the worship of one god. Despite the large number of staff upstairs, in the dining room, and in the kitchen, not a single detail of the hotel management escaped her. The correct plumping up of the goose feather pillows in the birch bedrooms; the supply of sacks of sawdust to throw on the kitchen floor; the decorations made of dried flowers and the threads of plaited hay that embellished the dining room; the boiler repairs: everything had to be approved by her. Even the choice of music played by the small orchestra on the terrace during warm summer evenings relied on her taste, which was based on a very simple premise: always—always—favor sad love songs! Those guests who were lonely and melancholic would feel understood and in harmony with the atmosphere, those happily accompanied would generously take part in the wide range of human emotions, and everybody would have more drinks.
The only detail that sometimes escaped her control was death. Almost all her guests were there because of the town’s spa, whose waters were renowned for being beneficial to a wide spectrum of ailments. Therefore, many of them were of an advanced age and unfortunately this carried a corollary: every so often, they died. Moreover, with little consideration for Frau Mayer, sometimes they even did so in the rooms of her hotel.
Frau Mayer didn’t think of herself but rather of her guests (the live ones, that is). For them, witnessing the transfer of the dead body of someone their age just as they were searching for relief from their own ailments wouldn’t have been pleasant. For that reason Frau Mayer had agreed on a special service with the local undertaker. The corpses were not taken away in traditional coffins but in single-door wardrobes made of good, ancient walnut, thus giving the impression of a house move rather than a funeral. So the only guest whose holiday was disturbed was the one who—peace be with him—would not be having any more of them.
The Mayer family had owned the hotel ever since the noble families of Felix Austria would come to take the waters here, in this southern outpost of the Empire, where the sun shines for two thirds of the year. The Kaiser, coming down to Tyrol in person to check on the emplacements of the Great War, had spent the night here. Frau Mayer retained a vague impression of an imperial hand, gloved and splendid, being placed on her blond curls. Was it an actual memory or a story someone had told her when she was three, and which had been repeated countless times? She didn’t wish to know with certainty.
The hotel was destined for the eldest son, while Irmgard, the third of six children and the only girl, would give up any claim on her father’s estate by getting married. History, however, had not treated the Mayer family plans with much consideration.
Julius, the eldest brother, had died in Montenegro as early as the first year of the second world massacre.
Karl, the second son, had been captured near El Alamein and spent the rest of the war in a prison camp in Texas. There, although he had never had any Nazi sympathies, he had refused to renege on his oath of loyalty to the general staff of the Wehrmacht, something required by the Americans of German officers in order to free them. He returned home almost three years after the end of the war, gravely ill. His fellow townsfolk shunned him as an ex-Nazi—especially those who really had worn the brown uniform of the SS. He passed away shortly afterwards because of “general deterioration” as the family doctor wrote on the death certificate.
Anton, the fourth son, who at the age of twenty had gone to seek his fortune in Brazil in the 1930s, had found it in a coffee fazenda, a mulatto wife, many lovers of various ethnicities, and a dozen children. That he would come back and manage the family hotel was out of the question.
Stefan, the fifth son, had died at the age of three in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1919.
Josef, the youngest, had been hit right in the forehead by a Russian sniper at Kalitva, on the loop of the river Don, south-east of Stalingrad, in 1943.
There was only she, little Irmgard, left to help the parents broken by grief. The profession of faith to the god of hotel hospitality, which marked Frau Mayer’s entire life, was, in other words, the result of a dynastic accident.
The only employee who dared escape Frau Mayer’s total control was Herr Neumann. It was he who made up the menu every day, who decided on the orders of the raw materials and who paid the suppliers. It was he who managed the kitchen personnel. This exception had been agreed on by Herr Neumann and Frau Mayer ever since he had first been employed, just a few years after the end of the war.
“Chef means boss, you don’t need to speak French to know that. You tell me how much I can spend and I’ll make sure the dishes reach the dining room. If the guests are unhappy you can fire me. But you can’t tell me what to do. I’m not working in a kitchen where I’m not the one in charge. Take it or leave it.”
Frau Mayer had taken it and had had no regrets for almost twenty years.
Now that Herr Neumann was asking her to employ Gerda again, she had no reason to refuse. Of course, even she could see that she was a beautiful girl and her suspicion that this somehow accounted for Herr Neumann’s stubbornness did not make her happy. However, she dismissed the thought: the chef had never tolerated anyone who didn’t work hard in his kitchen and, until her belly had started knocking against the food counters, Gerda had been no exception. Besides, there wasn’t exactly an abundance of good assistant cooks around to whom you didn’t always have to explain everything, and that also had to be taken into account. However, she laid out very clear conditions: the baby was not to be seen or heard. And the possibility that she could disturb guests in the dining room wasn’t even worth mentioning. No point in considering the inadmissible.
The day she returned to the kitchen, Gerda took an apple crate made of compact smooth wood and no prickles. She lined it with cushions and towels, placed it in a corner where it wouldn’t be in the way, and put Eva inside it. Then she went back to work at Herr Neumann’s side as though she’d never been away.
Even now that Gerda had gotten herself into the kind of mess that perfectly defines the Matratze—getting herself pregnant without making a man marry her—none of the other scullery boys, or assistant cooks, or waiters showed her disrespect. Perhaps it was Eva, in her apple crate in a corner of the kitchen, who made that impossible. Her presence diverted attention from the activity that is the usual subject of coarse jokes to what the aforementioned activity can produce: irresistible, pink, chubby babies. Nobody made any comments even when, several times a day, Gerda would untie her apron and, without taking it off, turn it to one side, unbutton her blouse and give Eva her breast. Of course, everybody looked. Waiters looked, while passing through the kitchen, shouting, “Spinatspatzlan, neu!.” Cooks looked, while frying, stirring and tasting. Elmar looked, while dropping leftover food from plates into the garbage buckets. That white roundness with blue veins and a dark nipple that glistened with milk that would appear and disappear into the little mouth was the focus of all the eyes in the kitchen. While in the sudden silence all that could be heard was the powerful sucking and clicking of the baby feeding, everybody contemplated, speechless, that part of Gerda about which they had always fantasized but which, now that it was performing its primary task, silenced them.
However, there were also difficult hours. When bitterness gained a specific flavor through the incessant rhythm of the daily actions and tasks, just as the bitter taste of radicchio suddenly explodes in your mouth after hiding among the other ingredients of a salad.
In the evening, before going to sleep, Gerda would give Eva her breast one last time in her bed in the attic dormitory she shared with the rest of the female staff. The little one suckled expertly, then both would fall into a deep sleep, the daughter huddled in the crook of her mother’s arm, both enveloped by the smell of milk and diapers. On the first night they were back at the hotel, Eva woke up after just a few hours and began searching for the breast. Gerda’s fingers, numbed by sleep, took a long time to unbutton her nightgown. At first, Eva emitted breathless little moans, then cried increasingly loudly. Protestations, huffs and half-accusations rose from the beds of her dormitory fellow-occupants, which ceased only when Eva found the nipple and quieted down.
The following night, Gerda gave her the breast straightaway to prevent any protest. However, after the feed, Eva began to cry. Gerda lifted the baby from the bed and started walking up and down the dormitory, patting her on the back with the palm of her hand, as the Star of Goodness had taught her. Once again, sleepy voices commanded silence. Gerda was able to go back to bed only when a nice big curdled-milk-smelling burp put an end to Eva’s crying.
There was a repeat of this for a few nights, always in the darkest hours before dawn, when anyone waking up has to fight their own ghosts before they can fall asleep again, and doesn’t necessarily succeed. After a week, her roommates gave Gerda a brief, not impolite but direct speech: if she wanted to carry on sleeping there with her daughter, she couldn’t disturb their sleep anymore.
Gerda could understand them. Like them, she knew the tiredness at the end of the working day, limbs hard as stone, joints on fire, a foggy brain: only sleep can, at least in part, make the idea of starting all over again the next day bearable. The protests were fair: you can’t run around all day from the dining room to the kitchen, your arms loaded with plates, or tidy up dozens of rooms and leave them as new even if they’ve been used by vandals, or wash the floors of a four-story hotel as well as an outbuilding, if you haven’t had enough sleep. Nor could you stir, slice and cook in the overheated kitchen, for that matter, but that baby was her daughter, not theirs. It was therefore her problem. They made a deal: Gerda could stay in the room until the feed before dawn. Then she’d have to go out.
For weeks, Gerda spent the final hours of the night strolling in the corridor with her baby on her neck. Exhaustion and fatigue separated her from the rest of the world like the walls of a prison: she couldn’t imagine ever escaping. Sometimes she fell asleep on the very steps from which, a few months earlier, she had thrown herself precisely so she wouldn’t have to hold a fatherless child in her arms. But Eva was here now, and would let her little blond head down on her shoulder, in a pose of total trust. Gerda had never felt so alone.
Sometimes, during the day, she would fall asleep for an instant while standing at the work table or between steps as she went to fetch ingredients from the store room. Once, she was suddenly overwhelmed by sleep while inside the meat freezer. She had put on the heavy, coarse wool greatcoat, and couldn’t resist lying down on the ground among the quarters of beef and the kid halves covered in brine. If Herr Neumann hadn’t come down immediately after her to fetch a turkey for roasting, she would have frozen to death.
That day Nina, the waitress from Egna, offered to mind the little girl during the Zimmerstunde.
“It won’t do you any harm to get a couple of hours’ sleep,” she said, taking Eva from her arms. Gerda looked into her disillusioned eyes that were too close together. She felt gratitude take over her body, like wind before a storm, and she burst into tears. She calmed down only when she was in her bed. However, sleep was waiting to ambush her and grabbed her suddenly, the way you capture a prisoner.
Ever since a grenade had torn off his leg, Silvius Magnago hadn’t slept well. The physical pain in the phantom limb had been his secret companion for over twenty years. Only to it did he feel he could reveal his true nature: his strength, his anger, his tenacity and despair, his resentment toward healthy people who don’t know what it is to live with the suffering of the flesh, but also his ability to focus on what’s essential. Ever since Magnago had received those pieces of rough toilet paper purloined from the jail in Bolzano, however, the pain in his leg seemed like nothing in comparison with his other pain: that of not having done anything for those who had placed their last hope in him.
The clothes returned to the wives of those imprisoned after Feuernacht, some time after the arrests, were covered in blood, vomit and excrement. However, the Bumser of the BAS were, after all, simple men. In spite of everything, they trusted the fact that if the world had known about the inhuman treatment they were suffering in Bolzano prison, it would have done everything to save them. They’d done all they could to communicate information outside the prison about the torture they’d been subjected to. A few notes were intercepted and their senders punished, but others managed to evade censorship. The obvious addressee of their request to help had been him, Silvius Magnago, the most authoritative political voice in South Tyrol.
Magnago had received those wretched pieces of paper in late 1961. And he, who knew physical pain only too well, had felt the spasms of lactic acid in arms kept raised for hours as if they’d been his own; the tissue torn by fists and the sinister clicking of shattered bones; the retching of incredulous horror of someone forced to eat his own excrement; the lungs bursting because your head is kept under water; the delirium of sleep deprivation. He’d read the notes almost without breathing. He’d wept in the silence of his pale, wood-paneled studio overlooking an exclusive Bolzano street. Episodes he’d witnessed as a young Gebirgsjägerleutnant12 at war had flashed before his eyes, images he’d hoped never to have to remember again. He’d directed his gaze outside the window, at his beloved chimonantus tree that was now bare; the yellow flowers that announced the spring with their scent of vanilla hadn’t blossomed yet. They couldn’t comfort him either.
The Südtiroler Volkspartei, the party he led, couldn’t afford to be associated, even from a distance, with the Bumser. The process of acquiring true autonomy for South Tyrol was still too fragile. The biblical timing of politics, the dance of talks, of promises and threats on the part of a government that had denied the problem so long it had allowed it to fester, and was beginning to realize that a plan for this province was necessary only now that it had become a ticking bomb—all that had to be taken into account.
Magnago had started to weave a fine and delicate canvas of negotiations and compromise in order to obtain that provincial autonomy (“Los von Trient!”) which alone could resolve the South Tyrol deadlock and prevent the worst possible scenario: an ethnic war. He knew very well that the strong German accent with which he spoke otherwiseimpeccable Italian convinced his Rome interlocutors a priori of his fundamental, encysted hatred toward them. He knew how much diplomacy, patience, and deliberate deafness to jokes was necessary even just to explain the starting point of the negotiations: South Tyroleans did not hate Italians but rather the colonization they had endured on the part of the Italian government. He knew that he couldn’t take the risk of being painted with the same brush as those who had resorted to bombs even simply against infrastructures.
However, there was another reason for anxiety, which wasn’t linked to considerations of political opportunities but rather an existential one, in those little sheets of paper which were written on literally with the blood of tortured men. At his Bologna alma mater, from where he’d graduated in Law, Magnago had become convinced that only dialogue, the search for a compromise, the hard but honest meeting between positions, no matter how different, were tools superior to any—any—form of violence. Whoever gives up on verbal discussion and resorts to destructive action against people or things, no matter how justified the reason, automatically gets on the side of the wrong: that was Silvius Magnago’s one and only political creed. Never had he been seduced by any of the ideologies of this fire and arms century. He’d reached adulthood just before the start of the world massacre, and had seen only too clearly what is achieved when politics gives way to violence: a planet in flames. He felt in his own amputated flesh and the pain it radiated every second the duty to safeguard bodies, always. Not just the bodies of the people of his Heimatland, those who’d charged him with a mandate to represent them; but also the bodies of his opponents, of the ignorant politicians in Rome, even those of the administrators who from their positions of small, obtuse power made his people’s lives difficult. His duty was as follows: to separate, always, political struggle from physical destruction, even that of electricity pylons.
He had carefully folded up the sheets of paper, placed them in an envelope, and put them where only he knew. Later on, people found out about the torture in Bolzano prison, but it wasn’t Silvius Magnago who reported it.
In the two years that followed, two BAS men had died in prison from beatings and their consequences. Many had suffered permanent damage. Torture left the indelible mark of suffering on their bodies, just as the war had done on the body of Gebirgsjägerleutnant Magnago. The Carabinieri guilty of mistreatment were tried, and their defenders claimed that, to the contrary, the prisoners’ wounds were self-inflicted—despite dozens of medical certificates documenting otherwise—with the sole purpose of discrediting Italy. The theory was accepted, the defendants acquitted and, as the verdict was read out, they walked out of the court free, celebrating with their relatives. All were officially praised by the chief of the Carabinieri, General De Lorenzo. Their victims, the prisoners they’d reduced to the state of broken, weeping creatures, were sent back to prison in handcuffs.
Silvius Magnago never revealed what his decision not to act on the Bumser’s desperate request for help cost him. Or if their martyrdom brought nightmares to his already scarce sleep at night.
Bodies. To safeguard bodies. He hadn’t been able to do it for them.
In autumn 1963, a young girl dressed in white, holding bunch of flowers, smiled from the posters that papered the streets of Milan. A Mediterranean version of Gerda: full breasts, soft lips, high cheekbones, but dark-haired. It was the Christian Democrat party’s way of projecting a more youthful image, and to do so it had turned to Ernest Dichter, the American guru of motivational research in advertising—creator of the famous dried Californian prunes campaign. It was he who had coined the slogan that appeared under the beautiful girl:
THE CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS TWENTY!
From Domodossola to Siracusa, from Udine to Bari, on posters throughout the entire peninsula, anonymous hands added a note underneath, in felt tip pen:
TIME TO FUCK HER!
That was something Mr Dichter had not foreseen.
The incitement to do to the twenty-year-old Christian Democratic party what every Latin male would have liked to do to its flesh-and-blood contemporaries was followed by many: in the 1963 elections the Italian Communist Party obtained, for the first time in its history, over a quarter of the votes. The absolute hegemony of the Christian Democrats had been broken.
Under the leadership of Aldo Moro, the first center-left government in Republican Italy was formed. Once the votes had been counted somebody delivered a large box of dried prunes to the headquarters of the Christian Democratic party in Piazza del Gesù.
Nobody laughed. This was a disaster for the Yalta equilibrium. Secret services on both sides of the Atlantic agreed that it was necessary to start playing a different game than the one that had been played up to then. Once again Gladio—the secret paramilitary organization formed in Italy in the 1950s by the CIA in order to counter the advance of the Left—proved useful. The so-called “Solo Plan” was devised. It had three objectives: a military coup that would bring down the newly-formed government, the institution of a “public security” government led by right-wing members of parliament and the military, the murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro.
The Solo Plan was never carried out, and only the last of the three objectives was achieved, albeit with a belated operation—fifteen years later—and by a third party. However, a secret new game, much dirtier and more violent than before, had begun. Italy was about to enter a season of bloodshed.
On 9 December 1963, four days after the Moro government was formed, the biggest political trial since the end of the war started at the Palace of Justice in Milan: the trial of the Feuernacht attackers. There were ninety-one defendants, twenty-three of them on the run.
Up to then, Italians had being totally ignorant about Alto Adige. Almost nobody knew that German was being spoken on a stretch of the national territory. It was only by following the trial in Milan in the newspapers that they began to discover the existence and the character of this borderline province. About a month after the hearing started, on a cold January morning, the doors of the High Court opened its session before an unusually colorful audience. The rows of chairs behind the wives and relatives of the defendants were occupied by dozens of men wearing Lederhosen, red waistcoats, boiled woolen jackets, little felt hats with feathers: Schützen. Among them, with his garrison almost all made up of hunters like himself, was Peter Huber. Just like the wives of the defendants, who’d shared the trouble and expense of the journey by Tränenbus, the so-called Bus of Tears, the Schützen had also hired a bus to arrive en masse at the Milan courthouse. They could only attend a few sessions, no more than a couple of days—they all had jobs and families to get back to—but they felt it was important to show the “BAS Heroes” the support Silvius Magnago had always denied them. Still, the attackers of the Night of Fires continued to disappoint the expectations of those who wanted to see exceptional figures: be they heroes or murderers. Their moral leader was the owner of a small shop in Frangarto, just outside Bolzano. Sepp Kerschbaumer’s body was marked by torture. He was a small man with a gaunt face, an absurd 1920s haircut, and the rather sad eyes of someone who feels more comfortable in the world of ideals than that of commerce where, however, he has to earn his living. For years he’d forced his wife to chase after poor debtors while he recited the Lord’s Prayer several times a day and forgave them their debts. His intelligent, fervent idealism, and his determination to explain the human reasons behind the BAS actions before the historical ones, inspired real respect from the jury in Milan. Kerschbaumer expressed simple concepts which everyone could understand. He talked about the humiliation of going into a government office and not being understood by the staff, about not being able to fill out the forms in Italian, about doctors in hospitals who demanded that the patients—no matter how ill or wounded—should express themselves in a language they didn’t speak, about the lack of prospects for a German-speaking South Tyrolean looking for work outside his own maso. In the heaving courtroom, the crowd of Italians listened to Kerschbaumer’s quiet eloquence, and didn’t find his arguments unfounded.
During the hearing, in order to illustrate the abuse suffered by the South Tyroleans, another defendant said, “My mother-in-law hasn’t received her pension for over six years.”
There were titters of laughter in the courtroom, murmurs of approval. Also, clearly sympathetic shouts from the audience:
“Neither has my mother!”
“Neither have I!”
It took a long time to restore order.
That’s how, thanks to the sessions in the Milan courtroom, Italians discovered not only Alto Adige but also the meticulous mechanics, peasants and small craftsmen of the BAS, and many South Tyroleans became aquainted with an Italy beyond the straits of Salorno, that oblong boot of which their Heimat, whether they liked it or not, was now a part. They too began to realize that also in Lecce, Rome, Novara,, and even Milan, the Italian government treated its citizens carelessly, and that the slowness and convoluted nature of public administration was therefore not a form of ethnic discrimination. In other words, the pachydermic inefficiency of Italian public administration had nothing personal against South Tyroleans—or at least not them alone.
Peter looked at the faces of the audience in the heaving courtroom. These were not the Italians he’d seen arrive at Bolzano Station almost ten years earlier. They didn’t have the gaunt faces of people running away from poverty, eyes blank from hunger, hope and fear, the dirty fingernails of people who, the night before leaving for the factories of the North, had brought their goats back to the stone fold for the last time. These Italians could call the cities where they were living “home.” There were beautiful Milanese girls with their hair in beehives; young men with thick black-rimmed glasses bending over their notebooks; housewives with swollen ankles but shrewdness in their eyes, accustomed to tackling the prices at the market every morning and often having a laugh with their friends; metalworkers who would come to the courthouse on their way home after an overnight shift to see the faces of the peasant Krauts who had proved to have such rebellious organizational skills that they might even be able to teach the workers’ movement a thing or two.
There, next to citizens of boom time Italy, sat a company of Schützen in 19th-century costumes. Peter wore the capercaillie feather on his hat, the waistcoat with crossed straps like the one worn by Andreas Hofer when he was pushing back Napoleon’s army, patent shoes with silver buckles over white cotton socks. Maybe it was precisely because of the incongruous clothes he was wearing that the Milan trial had a different effect on him—the opposite effect—than it did on the majority of South Tyroleans. He became convinced that the protest actions against electricity pylons carried out by the Bumser sitting there in the defendant’s dock, were no longer enough. It was time to step up the game.
When Peter came back home after a few days in Milan, over the course of which once again he hadn’t taken the trouble to send news of himself, he found that his wife had gone: Leni had returned to her parents’ house. She was two months pregnant with her second child, but she no longer wanted to live in that house of absence and silence.
Eva was growing. Week after week she slept a little longer without interruption. After a while, Gerda stopped falling asleep on her feet: her daughter no longer cried at night. From the crate, she watched, wide-eyed, the red sauce being poured into pots, the clouds of steam rising from uncovered saucepans, the long, springy legs of Hubert, as he drained Schlutzkrapfen with one hand and browned sage in butter with the other. Eva’s eyes, very long and transparent like Gerda’s, didn’t possess her mother’s haughty expression but gave and yearned for affection. The expression in other people’s eyes had never meant anything to Gerda; but to Eva it seemed to mean everything.
They’d put tiny pieces of carrot, slivers of fennel, flakes of Grana Padano into her hand. They laughed at the seriousness with which she would lick them, suck them, nibble them with her toothless gums, testing their consistency like a scientist, her face scrunched up when she discovered that the yellow half-moon they had handed her was a segment of lemon. Like parents proud of their offspring, the kitchen workers sought one another’s eyes in order to enjoy her irresistible baby deeds together. During the months when Eva quietly occupied the apple crate there were almost no screams and insults between cooks and waiters.
Gerda had begun to laugh again. Her full lips would stretch to reveal white teeth that were still very young in spite of everything, especially when she was looking at her daughter. And then all the men around her, cooks, waiters, Elmar the scullery boy, felt something stir inside them. As for Herr Neumann, when Gerda laughed, he would wipe his forehead with his apron to hide his face.
Gerda had changed: she was now aware of men’s looks. And she didn’t pretend not to like it.
Months went by. The apple crate was no longer large enough for Eva. Elmar helped Gerda build a kind of cage by nailing different crates together. They put it under the dessert counter, safe from splashes of boiling oil, large meat knives, bottles of detergent. Occasionally, flour and sugar fell on her head, making it comically white. Die letze, the little one, was a braves Schneckile, a well-behaved little snail who did her best not to cause any bother. She’d lie there in her spot, looking around hesitantly as though asking: I’m doing alright, aren’t I? Nobody refused her the smile she asked, but it was clear that she couldn’t stay there forever.
“What are you going to do when she starts walking?” Nina asked one night in the attic dormitory.
After a day imprisoned under the dessert counter, Eva was swimming on the wooden floor of the dormitory, propelling herself with her arms and legs, her bottom puffed up with a diaper and held high like a flag. She’d reached one of the beds at the end of the room and now, gripping the iron bedpost with her fat hands, had managed to raise herself on her feet. With a triumphant gurgle she searched for her mother’s eyes to share her victory. She couldn’t find it: Gerda’s head was bowed and her eyes downcast. She had no answer to Nina’s question.
Everybody feared Eva’s eviction from the kitchen but nobody was surprised when it came. One day, cooks, scullery boys, and assistant cooks were in the dark little room next to the store room, eating the lunch prepared by Herr Neumann. Gerda had stayed behind in the kitchen to warm up the baby bottle. When she approached the dessert counter, she noticed that one of the bars on the cage had been moved. Eva wasn’t there. The hot baby bottle in her hand, Gerda rushed around the kitchen. On the meat counter, heavy, sharp knives were less than an inch from the edge, ready to fall off like axes. There were burning hot metal handles on the lit oven right at the level of the baby’s hands. Even a child bigger than Eva could have drowned in the pail of dirty water next to the sink. Gerda didn’t find her daughter sliced, scalded, or drowned, but each new relief soon became deeper panic: her daughter wasn’t there. She came out of the kitchen.
In over two years of working at the hotel, Gerda had gone through the swing door that separated Herr Neumann’s kingdom from the dining room only once. On the morning of her first day at work, before the guests had come down for breakfast, and Frau Mayer had shown her the arched windows overlooking the mountains, the tables with the flower decorations in the center of linen tablecloths, the Murano glass chandeliers. Then she had informed her that it was the last time Gerda would ever be setting foot there.
Gerda lingered on the doorstep. The first guests were about to sit at the tables. There were couples, single men, and elderly people. With formal gallantry, the men pulled the chairs out for the ladies, who sat down, casting benevolent looks at the panorama as though it was their property. Gerda was stunned by the contrast between these serene gestures and the anxiety squeezing her chest. None of them was looking for a daughter had with a man who hadn’t wanted to know, and who was now too big for a cage made of fruit crates; a child she had no idea where to put anymore because her job in the kitchen was the only thing she had left and if she lost that too she would end up in the street like all the other girls who’d had no Herr Neumann to come and take them back despite everything, and who left through the gate opened by the nun with a mustache, a child in one arm and only despair in the other.
Then she saw her.
Eva was crawling efficiently toward a specific target: the legs of a middle-aged man sitting alone at a table by the large windows. Her round face was lit up with a satisfied smile that told the world: you can’t but think I’m wonderful, and in fact I am.
Gerda crossed the dining room and scooped her daughter off the floor like soup from a pan. Eva was not pleased to have her plan sabotaged. She began to scream, reaching out with her arms to the gentleman at the table who, surprised but not annoyed, was staring at Gerda with raised eyebrows.
He wasn’t the only one. All the men in the dining room were looking at her. Her breasts, swollen after the last feed, pushing out of her apron, her blonde curls escaping from under her assistant cook’s cap, her cheeks flushed with agitation, her mouth made especially for indescribable delights, her lively legs peering out from the hem of her work skirt that was too short, and that pink little girl in her arms who made her look both younger and more feminine. Even the women couldn’t help looking at her, though they were trying to focus on the grease stains on her apron, the sawdust stuck on the soles of her work clogs, the sweat that glistened in the space between her nose and her lip. Even so, nothing changed the fact that the woman who’d just walked into the dining room was more beautiful than any of them.
“Sie haben unser Abkommen gebrochen.”
Frau Mayer had suddenly appeared next to her like a Germanic goddess invoked by a spell. Her voice was calm, disappointed rather than annoyed. You have broken our agreement.
Two days. That’s all Herr Neumann could do. Two days off in order to make arrangements for Eva. After that, if Gerda hadn’t made any, he would be forced to fire her.
The bus journey from the main town to Gerda’s birthplace was slow, which gave her a lot of time to think. With whom could she leave her daughter? After Johanna’s funeral, which had taken place while Gerda was pregnant, her sister Annemarie had written her a letter in her schoolgirl handwriting. She said she held her responsible for their mother’s death, made her opinion of Gerda clear with various adjectives, and ended the letter with a wish never to see her again. This request wasn’t hard to grant: ever since Annemarie had moved to Voralberg, she and Gerda had only met twice: at Peter’s wedding, and at Ulli’s christening.
After over three hours on the road, when the bus halted at the town station with a huff, Gerda still had no idea what to do. Holding Eva in her arms, she started walking in a daze, aimlessly; her directionless feet then took the most familiar road. Less than half an hour later she found herself a couple of miles out of the town center, near a group of houses on the slope in the shadow of the Medieval castle. She’d reached Shanghai.
The house, built of plaster and river stones, was in the same dark, humid corner. The door was shut.
There was no smoke coming from the chimney. It was still daylight and impossible to see through the dirty windows if there was anyone inside. Gerda stopped on the spot where, in a distant time when Eva hadn’t been born, her father had hurled a suitcase into the air. She looked at the lamp post against which it had been knocked and she thought of somewhere to go.
She began walking fast. Besides Eva, Gerda had with her only a small shopping bag with a few changes of baby clothes and diapers. She picked up the pace. In less than half an hour she’d reached her destination, a little out of breath because of the climb.
It was the end of the summer; the steep meadows that had broken the backs of generations of Hubers were ready to be harvested for the second and last time of the year. In the distance, she could see the men of the household scything away. The cows sent to pasture hadn’t returned yet, and in the sheds there were only those with newborn calves. The air smelled of hay, smoke, manure, and freshly baked bread. High on the door jamb, the slightly faded letters C, M and B were written in chalk, spaced out with 19 and 64. On New Year’s Day, the children, dressed as the three wise men—Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar—had wished health and luck for 1964, in exchange for a few coins. Gerda knocked. Uncle Hans, Hermann’s eldest brother and the only heir of the closed maso, had died a couple of years earlier. It was the young wife of Michl, the eldest of the cousins with whom Gerda has spent her summers in the pastures as a little girl, who opened the door.
Gerda showed her Eva, and explained.
The young woman, who was only slightly older than Gerda, stared. Neither her husband Michl, nor her brother-in-law Simon (who was now living in Switzerland) mentioned their cousin very often, but when they did it made their eyes glint in a way that made the wife uneasy. Gerda hadn’t come to her own mother’s funeral, and then they’d found out that she was pregnant: without knowing her, the young bride felt no sympathy for her.
Sweaty from work, her husband’s youngest brother came back from the fields. It was that same Sebastian, nicknamed Wastl, who had been cuddled in the hay like a doll by Gerda and his older brothers. He’d grown into a handsome fourteen-year-old boy, tall and strong, with a straight nose, dark blonde hair cut in a brush, and a joyful expression in his eyes. He hugged his cousin warmly. When he became aware of the situation he said to his sister-in-law, “We’ll keep this letze.”
The young bride looked at him in disbelief.
“It’s not as though you’re the one who’s going to look after her.”
Michl arrived too. When he saw Gerda his eyes opened wide and his arms started to spread in a hug, but then he glanced shamefully at his wife and stopped himself. The unbestowed hug lingered in the air, heavy and charged with meaning, while the young bride watched her husband with suspicion. Wastl told his elder brother about Eva, while his sister-in-law’s lips narrowed, and they started to argue. Gerda looked at their mouths but couldn’t keep up with the words, as though they’d started speaking an unknown language. After a while, Michl’s wife said she had a lot to do, that dinner was on the stove and would get burned, and disappeared inside the house. Michl invited Gerda in. She declined. He gave her a sad, guilty look, then went in after his wife.
Wastl also went in but soon came back out with a glass of milk for the little girl, and some Speck and cheese for Gerda. He stood there while Eva drank the milk with small, thoughtful sips, her blue eyes fixed on the hens that were scratching about between the house and the barn. Gerda thanked him and put the food in her bag. Wastl hugged his cousin again. She was so beautiful, and so unlucky. He stroked the soft cheek of that little girl who never cried, then went in for dinner, closing the door behind him.
Even though the way back was downhill, it took Gerda longer to go back to the town than going up. Her legs felt heavy and not because of tiredness. The sun was low and would soon disappear behind the mountain peaks that framed the valley. When she reached the center of town, the shops were closed, the streets deserted. It was the time of day when the earth is already dark but the sky is still luminous, when the mothers have called back home the children playing outside, when dinner is ready, and anyone who has no home longs for one even more.
Gerda went to the Ursuline convent. When she reached the gate next to the steps, she pulled on the iron cord that was attached to a large bell. After a while, a small, elderly nun appeared. She let her in without too many questions—if a young woman alone with a baby knocks on the door, questions are not necessary.
The nuns gave her a cup of broth, then made their proposition. They would keep the little girl, send her to their school and, when she was grown up, teach her a profession; Gerda could come and visit her and even take her for a walk sometimes. Gerda insisted: perhaps she hadn’t been clear, she hadn’t given her daughter for adoption and had no intention of doing so now. During the low season she didn’t work, so she would find a furnished room and for two whole months of the year, she wanted to keep Eva with her. The nuns said that wasn’t possible. Either she left her there or not. There was no other option.
They gave her a camp bed in a room behind the kitchen. Gerda lay down on it, her eyes staring blankly at the high stone ceiling. In less than twenty-four hours she had to be back at the hotel without Eva, or she would lose her job. Still, the sleep of a twenty-year-old was stronger than worry: she curled up on her side, enveloped Eva in the crook between her chest and arms, locked her feet by sliding her big toe in the gap between the index and the left big toe, and fell asleep.
Gerda left the convent before dawn. Eva slumbered in her arms, her head dangling.
Leni opened the door still in her dressing gown, with little Sigi in her arms. Ulli stood next to her, a hand on his mother’s leg as though to make sure that at least this parent didn’t suddenly vanish away, like the other one always did. He looked up at Eva with his brown eyes and long eyelashes, and stared at her attentively but without hostility.
Leni was sorry for Gerda, who’d been kicked out of the dark house from which she, on the other hand, had run away. However, she wasn’t sure that it would be better for her sister-in-law to live there alone with that black-hearted father. As for her, she was uncertain, embittered. She hadn’t seen her husband for three months, didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. There were strange, nasty rumors around, but she didn’t believe them—everybody knows people talk nonsense. The head of Peter’s Schützen company had come to tell her that sacrifices for the Heimat, no matter how hard, are always worth it. Leni hadn’t liked to hear those words but hadn’t known what to say in return. Until recently, when he disappeared for weeks, Peter would leave her some money, but not any longer.
A few months earlier, a large British company had opened a factory for mechanical parts on the outskirts of the town: the largest foreign industrial complex anyone had ever seen in Alto Adige. It required a workforce of almost five hundred workers, which was huge in proportion to the local population. Moreover, there were a few Italians in the town, and those were all civil servants, so finally they started hiring South Tyroleans. Leni had taken part in the euphoria that had invaded the valley. It would be the end of hard times for her family, and hadn’t Peter wanted to be a factory worker ever since he was a boy? However, when she had shown him the flyer with the address and hiring times, her husband hadn’t even looked at it. That same day, he had left and not been seen since.
So now, she told Gerda, she and her two children were dependent on her parents, not like a married woman but a girl with a child out of wedlock.
She suddenly stopped herself. Embarrassed, she looked at Gerda, who narrowed her eyes and lifted a shoulder as though to say: never mind.
Although much lower down, they were on the same mountain slope where the Hubers’ old maso stood, and where Gerda had gone the day before, as well as Paul Staggl’s four-star hotel. Not very far from there, there was another maso, linked to that of Leni’s parents by a short dead-end alley. On the doorstep, over which there was a wooden arch that connected the house to the barn there was a nine-year-old girl. She hadn’t budged from there ever since Gerda had arrived with Eva in her arms, and kept staring at her.
The bus to Bolzano was leaving in less than two hours, and if Gerda wanted to be back at the hotel by evening, as she had promised Herr Neumann, she couldn’t miss it. Gerda said goodbye to Leni calmly, as though she had all the time in the world, and went to the neighbors’ maso.
The little girl on the doorstep was wearing a faded dress that was too long, evidently handed down by more than one older sister. Her sockless legs stuck out like pale little branches from black rubber boots; she had two thin, badly braided plaits that framed the pointy face, and eyelashes that were almost white. Gerda asked her who was at home. The girl shook her head. They were all out collecting the hay, and she had been left alone to look after her little siblings and make barley soup. Her name was Ruthi and she was nine years old. She asked if she could hold the baby and Gerda handed Eva to her. The baby let herself slide calmly from one pair of hands to the other with a quizzical smile.
Ruthi cuddled and cooed, which Eva enjoyed, then she put her on the ground. Holding her by her forearms and not her wrists, like a careful mother, she held her up for a couple of steps. Eva turned to look at her with satisfaction. Ruthi smiled at her with encouragement, thus confirming that she was admiring her expertise.
Gerda watched her daughter’s arms held tight by that little girl’s hands which were already so expert. She looked at the fields behind the maso where, in the distance, looking like dark dots against a green background, peasants were sickling the hay. Then she stared into Ruthi’s eyes.
Gerda was already on the bus back to the hotel when Ruthi’s grandparents, parents, and older brothers realized that a baby girl not even a year old had been added to their large family. Leni was called from the neighboring maso, and told them who that blonde young woman who had left Eva as a gift, like a doll, was. The father threatened to whip Ruthi, but her grandfather stopped him. Sepp Schwingshackl wasn’t sixty yet but his hands were shaking, he couldn’t hear very well, and a coarse, white scar cut across his eyebrows: the signs left by Hermann Huber when he had beaten him until he bled almost thirty years earlier. However, he also had the clear eyes of someone who has nothing to hide and the sweet smile of an old man who understands children. In Ruthi’s arms, Eva looked around anxiously. Still, she wasn’t crying, as though at least one thing was clear: whoever these strangers were, it was obvious they were going to look after her. Sepp gently took her from his granddaughter’s arms and put her on his lap.
“God has brought her to us, and we’re going to keep her,” he said.
It’s not God but the Nutte daughter of a bad man, thought his son, but kept that to himself.
It’s not God, but she’s like my sister Eloise, only more beautiful, thought Ruthi, but kept that to herself.
It is God, or rather Her, but where is She? thought Eva but, since she couldn’t talk, she kept that to herself. If she could have, she would have also said, “I shan’t sleep until She’s back.”
However, tiredness and disorientation were starting to weigh heavily on her eyes. The soft little body relaxed against Sepp’s hard one, which smelled of wood, soap and sweat. Eva fell asleep.
And so that was the beginning of what Eva’s life would be for many years: ten months a year in the Schwingshackl house and, during the two months a year of low season, in a furnished room with her mother.
Meanwhile, on the bus, Gerda was crying. She cried all the way through the long valley of which her birthplace was the main town, she cried as they turned onto the highway, she cried as they arrived in Bolzano. There, crying, she changed buses, and she cried as she walked from the bus station to the hotel. However, when she walked into the dormitory she shared with the other female workers, somebody had turned on the radio, and Gerda suddenly realized a few things. She no longer had a little girl to look after all day long. She no longer had a reputation to protect. She wasn’t yet twenty. She felt a sudden desire to sway her hips and arms to the rhythm of swing and, like Mina, to look straight into the eye of anyone who had any objection.