It was always the same question.
“Fo wem isch de letze?” Whose little girl is this? It would happen at the wedding of a great aunt’s son. Or at a nephew’s christening, with the Pate22 and Patin, the most smartly dressed people there because it was their day. Or at the collective first communions of the first, second, and third cousins all turned twelve the same year, and who, that morning in church, had been given the communion wafer by the priest’s hand in succession, like young battery hens. The result was that every time there would be a crowd of people in their best clothes—the women in dirndl but the men in jacket and tie so they wouldn’t look old-fashioned—gathered in the area between the Schwingshackls’s hayloft and house for a party after the religious ceremony. Everybody was linked to almost everyone else present by either blood or marriage: all were grandchildren, uncles, nephews, grandparents, godparents, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, cousins, great-grandchildren, sons-in-law, mothers-in-law, and daughters-in-law of one another. The relationships between them were woven with invisible threads, a large quilt of belonging, perhaps threadbare in places where two brothers weren’t speaking or because of an obvious dislike between a mother- and daughter-in-law, but which, nevertheless, was spread over everybody and from which no one was excluded. No one, except Eva.
Like a tiny, disorientated buoy, Eva floated in that sea of people, the only one without relatives—even though Sepp and his wife always treated her like one of their own. Thirteen pregnancies had rounded Maria’s body until it had lost its shape. Even the color of her eyes was no longer well-defined, although they were still sharp and luminous like the diamonds on the peacock-shaped brooch she would pin to her dirndl on celebration days. She wore her hair twisted around her head like Frau Mayer, but while the hotel owner’s plait was the product of care and perfection, Maria’s looked like a work of nature, unavoidable and necessary like an ear of barley, a tree, a potato. Her hands were so rough that when they squeezed Eva’s soft, fat fingers, they were almost scratchy, yet they also conveyed a calmness that erased every anxiety—almost. Nobody knew how Maria, with her thirteen living children and dozens of grandchildren, found the time to walk hand-in-hand with a girl that didn’t even belong to her. But her religion had taught her that there is no limit to the love of one’s neighbor and, like Sepp, she was a strong believer.
Even so, sooner or later, there was always some distant relative from a neighboring valley, a partially deaf great-aunt, the mother of a young bride who’d just become part of the family, who’d ask who that little girl was.
“Fo wem isch de letze?”
Maria, Sepp, Eloise, Ruthi had tried to explain. “It’s the little Huber girl, not the ones in the maso above us, but the ones in Shanghai, the daughter, Gerda, got into trouble and . . . ”
However, what the nosy parkers wanted to know wasn’t Eva’s story, with its difficult side plots (unmarried mother, terrorist uncle, and a grandfather who gave you the creeps when you so much as looked at him). All they wanted was to see the stitch that reassuringly darned the communal cloth of belonging. People like Sepp and Maria, generously tolerant of loose threads and frayings, are few and far between. Therefore, a different answer became commonplace:
“Fo wem isch de letze?”
“Fo niamandn.”
Whose little girl is this?
Nobody’s.
Until she turned thirteen, when she went to high school as a boarder in Bolzano, Eva lived with Maria, Sepp, Ruthi and the entire Schwingshackl family for ten months of the year, during the hotel’s summer and winter seasons. In November and again soon after Easter, from the steep slope to which the maso clung, Eva would start scanning the cars driving on the highway down along the river like busy ants. She learned when she was very young that joy arrived on a blue bus with yellow letters. She soon grew able to differentiate it from other vehicles: cars, trucks, tractors, tourist buses, and vans. When the bus from Bolzano emerged from the bend at the bottom of the valley, her heart would leap in her chest like a grasshopper in a cage. She would start following it with her eyes as it turned at the intersection, tackled hairpin curves, disappeared in a thicket of fir trees, reappeared, then stopped, huffing, in the space in front of the little church.
Then Eva would let go of Maria’s hand, stop playing with Ulli, disengage herself from Ruthi’s arms, and would have even taken leave of herself if she could have, in order to run faster, and she never tripped over so she wouldn’t waste silly time on getting back up. But for days on end she ran in vain: the bus doors would open like a promise but the people who got off were useless, and not her mother. Then, every time, in fall and spring, during all those years, just when a desolate hollow was beginning to grow in Eva’s chest, and a grayness would extinguish her thoughts, then, lo and behold, a pair of long legs would appear on the steps of the bus, then a face that was astoundingly beautiful albeit familiar, two strong arms would lift her up and hold her tight, and the smell, the smell, the mammal smell of happiness. Gerda was back.
The tourists who stayed in the town while Gerda was working in Frau Mayer’s hotel would all leave during the low season. There were plenty of vacant furnished rooms when she came to stay with Eva, and it wasn’t hard to rent one. Gerda was now earning enough to provide for herself and her daughter without needing to ask anyone else for anything. Not that Gerda or the other members of staff were earning a fair wage. Yet nobody protested: everybody knew the story of the Trade Unionist, as she was still called.
It was Nina who had told her about the Italian waitress who had been kicked out a couple of years before Gerda’s arrival. She was a young woman with more education than the rest of them: she had attended high school for at least two years. She was in the third year of her bookkeeping course when a two-hundred-pound hook had fallen on her father’s skull—her father who wore himself out working overtime at the steelworks in order to give his daughter a qualification, and the possibility of a better life. Left with a widowed mother and three little siblings, she’d had to abandon her studies. After working in Frau Mayer’s hotel for two years, she noticed in her work booklet that she had received only one month of employer’s contributions per season, instead of five. She had protested. Not only that, but she also dared make another demand. The weekly day off started at three in the afternoon and lasted until eleven the following morning: she and the rest of the staff would have to be remunerated for the missing four hours off.
Fray Mayer fired her on the spot. She even took care to report the episode to all the young woman’s future potential employers. Despite the demand for personnel caused by the tourism boom, the Trade Unionist, as everyone was now calling her, never managed to find work in the hotel industry again.
As she told Gerda the story, Nina’s close-set eyes were impassive. She commented neither on Frau Mayer’s behavior, nor on that of the young woman. She let Gerda make up her own mind.
And she did. She checked her own work booklet. And that’s how she discovered that she had lived the recent years of her life on an eternal, careless vacation: only a handful of working days a year were recorded in the work booklet. She also saw that Frau Mayer knew how to time travel, from the present into the future, to steal the pension of the elderly Gerda.
Thief! she wanted to scream at her.
But Gerda had two things, and no more: a daughter and a job.
And Gerda knew only too well the terror of losing everything.
So Gerda said nothing.
Every day, Herr Neumann’s legs hurt more and more, and he had to leave the kitchen increasingly often to urinate: his diabetes was getting worse. One spring day he was standing by his table and, trying to ignore the hollow throbbing of the poor circulation in his shins, he was cutting open, gutting and slicing a kid with expert fingers, the only remaining tapered part of his body. The carcass was losing all semblance of an animal and assuming that of biblical matter. When Herr Neumann had finished, he carefully arranged on his right hand side the dead meat which, soon, through the mystery of digestion, would become living flesh again, but made human: and on his left he put the insides that were now chaotic and deprived of any function.
From the salad counter, Gerda had been watching attentively, as usual. She approached the head chef and pointed at the liver, dark red like a carnivorous flower, with the small heart-shaped bulge attached to it like a uvula it could have been a creature apart from the rest of the carcass. Shyly, she asked if, instead of his throwing it away, she could use it.
For a second, Herr Neumann forgot the annoying throbbing inside his legs. He’d been expecting this moment for a long time: he’d always been certain that, sooner or later, Gerda would ask to experiment, invent, try something out. Trying not to show how pleased he was, he nodded. Gerda cut the liver into very thin strips, quickly fried it on the hotplate, seasoned it with thyme, marjoram, shallots, garlic, and lemon, poured it all into a bowl full of purslane and, finally, seasoned everything with a few drops of balsamic vinegar. With the understanding expression of a child showing the drawing she’s proud of, she proffered him her invention. Herr Neumann stuck three bare fingers into the concoction, squeezed them like pliers and, while Gerda watched him, put a handful of salad and liver into his mouth. It was balanced, flavorsome, satisfactory. Just like Gerda: simple and very well put together.
From his first courses and cooked vegetables counter, Hubert had watched the scene with vague condescension. He handed Gerda a handful of chopped chives.
“A bissl Schnittla aa . . . 23”
Herr Neumann gave a definitive shake of the head. Gerda’s invention already had everything a successful dish needed: any further addition would have been too much.
Peeved, Hubert pirouetted on his long wiry legs without a word and went back to his first courses. He had just finished stirring a pot full of Schlutzkrapfen in browned butter. He took the handful of the snubbed chives and threw it in, as though hurling an insult.
One morning, when he woke up, Herr Neumann’s legs were inert like undercooked chops. Urgently called by Frau Mayer, the doctor administered insulin and anticoagulants, then said that the kitchen would have to do without its chef for a few days.
The meat counter was only a couple of yards away from the first course counter but Herr Neumann’s kingdom had always been inaccessible to Hubert—as it had been to everybody else. Hubert suggested standing in. “Temporarily,” he said, but it was clear he was considering this, finally, to be his chance. He was wrong.
Herr Neumann had a wife and three children who lived in a respectable apartment with geraniums at the windows, at the far end of Val Venosta. Like the lowliest of scullery boys, like Gerda, like all the hotel staff, Herr Neumann returned to his family only during the low season closure. During the working months he stayed in one of the two single rooms reserved for the staff: besides him, only the maître enjoyed the privilege of not sharing with others the tiredness at the end of the day, the body smells and the indiscriminate, revealing sounds of sleep. Until the doctor arrived nobody had ever entered Herr Neumann’s room except him. And now Gerda was there.
Ever since, at the age of sixteen, this beautiful, very beautiful woman, too beautiful for him, had walked into his kitchen, there had been one thing he’d wished to do more than anything else, and he was doing it now: initiating her into the secrets of meat.
It was Elmar who helped her carry a quarter of beef weighing eighty pounds to the little room in the attic, puffing and stopping halfway on the steep wooden stairs where Gerda had tried not to become a mother. They were both wearing the woolen greatcoats you used for entering the refrigerated cell and which were now protecting them from the blood and the grease. Gerda had set up a work table on Herr Neumann’s desk, dragging it from the little window overlooking the mountains to the bed to which he was confined. She had retrieved all his knives from the meat counter: for carving, boning, filleting, the bone hatchet, the carving fork, the flintlock, knives forged into specific, unmistakable shapes for roasts, hams, cured pork and venison. Gerda could barely believe that she was able to touch their impeccable, functional forms: to hold them, use them, and even wash them was the head chef’s exclusive privilege. Their cold, steel glow highlighted further the sad physicality of the sickroom.
Herr Neumann was neither embarrassed nor humiliated by the stale smell, the small window, the modesty of his quarters despite his status as head chef. There was joy in his heart and his legs were no longer throbbing, or at least he didn’t notice: Gerda was there sitting next to him on the wooden bed and he was guiding her hand, showing her how to bone, slice, and scoop.
The huge quarter of beef, he explained, was like a block of marble in the hands of a great sculptor: all it required was for its true shape to be revealed. The long, fleshy cylinder of the fillet, the triangle of the rump, the deformed pyramid of the shank with that bone sticking out, so graceless but so full of flavor . . .
Querrippe, Entrecôte, Steak, Lende, Kugel, dickes Bugstück, Zungenstück, Hüfte, Hals, Zwerchfell, Schulter, Schulterspitze, Dünnung, Schenkel. The names of the meat cuts in German were precise and unambiguous, like everything else in that language of philosophers and mechanics.
The Venetian, Calabrian, and Sicilian workers of which the Bolzano slaughterhouse was now full, and where Herr Neumann bought his supplies, had also taught him the most florid words from the South: filetto, sottofiletto, fesa, spalla, costata, piccione, cappello del prete, campanello, pesce, lacerto, piscione, lattughello, imperatore, manuzza . . .
The cut was everything, Herr Neumann explained. No amount of perfect timing, flavoring, stuffing, marinading, browning, or salting can save a poorly cut piece of meat. The frying pan, tin or pot where it’s cooked is like the bed where the marriage between the meat and its cook is consummated; but the house where the couple lives more or less happily is the chopping board where it takes on its shape. If it’s cut badly, in a rush, or carelessly, the meat will behave like a woman who’s badly treated by day: however much her husband might flatter her at night in the bridal bed, she remains cold, unresponsive, depressed. When you handle her right, however—Herr Neumann was looking at Gerda, at her lips, the curve of her breasts pushing against the apron splashed with blood, the roundness of her behind digging a hollow in the mattress and almost brushing his deformed leg—meat is like a satisfied lover: it melts, becomes yielding and tender, and gives up its juices.
These, however, were thoughts Herr Neumann perhaps couldn’t allow even to brush his mind.
By the time the chef returned to his kitchen, Gerda had been promoted to assistant cook at the meat counter and, whenever he had to go to his increasingly frequent medical appointments, his substitute. Hubert, never much of a talker, stopped speaking altogether. Naturally, Gerda paid no attention: ever since she was a child she’d known how dense the silence between two people can be. So it was she who made the Wiener Schnitzel, which had now become her specialty, for the prestigious guests who sat at Frau Mayer’s tables on that Sunday in 1965.
The hotel owner had rushed into the kitchen, her turquoise eyes blank like those of a crazed clairvoyant, breathless from pride and excitement, to tell Herr Neumann that tomorrow he would be cooking for the Obmann of the Südtiroler Volkspartei and his guests, representatives of the Italian government. What with local and national politicians, lackeys and undersecretaries, there would be over fifty people eating.
Frau Mayer had no interest in Italian politics, but not because it was so convoluted and incomprehensible to the uninitiated. In her eyes, as in the eyes of almost all German-speaking South Tyroleans, the only noteworthy politician in the country whose citizenship they had was the figure leaning on a stick, with a hollow face and straight hair: Silvius Magnago. The residents of the rest of the peninsula were starting to get used to their politicians, like relatives to whom, no matter what, you’re linked by fate; Frau Mayer, on the other hand, didn’t even know their faces. Therefore, she didn’t recognize Magnago’s guests, nor did she feel any curiosity toward them. Only after an obscure master of ceremonies informed her did she realize that the Prime Minister himself (as well as interim Foreign Minister) would be sitting in her dining room, stopping in on his way to the Alpine hut between Alto Adige and Austria where he was to meet the Austrian Foreign Minister Bruno Kreisky. But this seemed a privilege less extraordinary than being able to serve at her Obmann’s table.
Herr Neumann was requested to provide a menu of samples illustrating the Alto Adige gastronomic tradition to the guests from the capital city.
The head cook took the request to heart.
As a starter, he suggested top quality Speck and Kaminwurz24, accompanied by Schüttelbrot from Val Venosta and apple horseradish; goat’s cheese with herbs spread on Breatl25; little Tirtlan with sauerkraut, spinach and potatoes. These were served very hot and crisp straight after being fried, and the Roman lackeys asked for a double portion.
The same members of the political underworld, however, wondered if the second helping had been a good idea when, arriving on trays garnished like paintings by Paul Klee, various kinds of Knödel were served (with liver, Speck, cheese, spinach), Spatzlan, Schlutzkrapfen served on slices of Graukäse and red onion rings, and wine soup.
There followed the pièces de résistance, an appropriate word since many guests were beginning to feel as if they were on that frontline where exhausted gastric juices, heroic but desperate, put up resistance before advancing battalions of food: oven baked shank, lamb chops in herb crust, Greastl scented with bay leaves, venison shoulder on red cabbage and, finally, accompanied by blueberry sauce, Gerda’s Wiener Schnitzel.
There were cooked vegetables to lighten the load: asparagus in vinaigrette sauce, young watercress salad with Kohlrabi26, sauerkraut with juniper, and Rösti27 with potatoes from Val Pusteria. When the desserts arrived, the members of the government, who had wanted to try everything for love of novelty, felt discouraged: the capacity of their stomachs had gone beyond all natural limits, and yet more dishes heaped with delights were coming their way. Assorted cakes (carrot cake, buckwheat cake, cake with berries, walnut cake), Linzertorte, Buchteln28, apple fritters with vanilla cream and, to finish, hot slices of the unmissable Strudel with vanilla cream. Moreover, besides delighting the members of both delegations, Gerda’s Wiener Schnitzel (her secret: before dipping the veal slices in flour, rolling them in breadcrumbs, and frying them in an abundance of lard, she had marinated them for half an hour in marjoram-flavored lemon juice) had triggered a discussion about history two tables away from the table of honor. Middle-ranking government representatives from the Bolzano Christian Democrats and the Südtiroler Volkspartei were seated there. The South Tyroleans had surprised their interlocutors with their correct, albeit rigid, Italian; nobody among the government delegates in charge of solving the Alto Adige issue, however, had deemed it necessary to learn a single word of German. The discussion therefore took place in Italian, more or less as follows:
“The breaded cutlets, like so many good things in the North, were actually copied from Italy by the Austrians.”
“We had nothing to copy, we’ve always breaded our meat. Like in the Wiener Backhendl29, which is also called poulet frit à la viennoise.”
“But it’s a well known fact that it was Radetzky who took them to Vienna! He may have fired his cannons at the Milanese, but he certainly liked their cutlets.”
“That’s a myth! Both in Vienna and here in Tyrol, we’d already been eating them for centuries.”
“Cotoletta alla milanese or Wiener Schnitzel, what’s the difference? You’re all Italians now!”
(No reply; the sound of chewing, embarrassed clearing of throats.)
The person who had less food than anyone else was the Obmann Magnago, sitting at the table of honor, but his guest the Prime Minister also ate with moderation. There’s a singular man, Magnago thought, watching him toy unnervingly with his food before putting it in his mouth: closed, introverted, he never looked his interlocutor in the eye and when he laughed it seemed he did so under duress. He listened with heavy, half-closed eyes as though his mind was far away. He spoke very softly with sleepy, exasperating slowness, and his gestures and movements were limp, as though as a child he used to trip when he ran, slam drawers on his fingers, and forget to tie his shoelaces. Everything about him seemed helpless, weak, certainly not a man of action but rather, the classicist Magnago thought, a cunctator. And yet, over the course of several personal meetings, the Obmann had had occasion to see that this inexpressive face concealed highly subtle political intelligence. Unlike so many other representatives of the Italian government, the man sitting next to him was an intellectual, as well as a high-ranking lawyer. Above all, he was a man out of whose mouth, no matter how tired or distracted he was, stock phrases would never come.
Magnago knew very well that the hard German accent with which he spoke, however perfectly, the language of Dante, and the fact that he had done his war service in the Wehrmacht made his interlocutors immediately associate him with Nazism. He knew how futile it would be to try and explain that not all German officers had been Nazis, and that he’d been drafted into the German army because the residents of his land had had to choose between . . . No, it was impossible: he couldn’t forever inflict a compendium of South Tyrol’s complicated history.
And so the word “Nazi” remained implicitly and powerfully unspoken between him and almost all those with whom he spoke on board the ocean liner that is the Italian Parliament, and something he was very much aware of. Every so often, the label would become explicit, especially on the part of certain right-wing leaders, particularly those who really had some explaining to do as to where they had been after September 8. They, of all people, weren’t ashamed to call South Tyroleans of German ethnicity the name given to traitors during the Risorgimento: austriacanti. As though the Italianization of Alto Adige from Fascism onwards had been the Fifth War of Independence, as though here too Italians had been the oppressed and Austrians the invaders, instead of the other way around. Magnago had lived and studied in Bologna, where he still had many close friends from his university days; and because he knew them very well, he knew that when Italians are given the choice between identifying with the role of victim or that of the aggressor, they will always choose the former. Even in the face of historical truth, if necessary. “Self-pity,” a concept that has no lexical equivalent in the language of Goethe, and which Magnago, even when he spoke German always used in Italian.
However, fortunately, the thought process of the man sitting next to him was not as lazy as that of so many of his fellow countrymen. Naturally, he wasn’t the only intelligent Italian politician. Of course there was Andreotti, for example, though his subtlety and complexity, Magnago thought, sometimes verged on the abyss. Then there was the intellectual refinement of Fanfani, although somewhat corrupted by the envious nastiness typical in some people of small stature: Magnago knew that his own grenadier height triggered irremediable aversion in Fanfani which, he felt, would yield nothing worthwhile in their negotiations. No, the Obmann thought, the intelligence of this man who had allowed the waiter to pour his wine with absent-minded indolence but who had then muttered a submissive “thank you” was as refined as that of Andreotti and Fanfani, but much more humane. When he had met him for the first time after spending years in the baroque halls of Roman palaces, in order to bring to the government’s attention the necessity of a negotiated solution in Alto Adige, years of absent-minded interviews lasting just a few minutes and with a quick handshake for the sole benefit of photographers, Magnago had asked him, “How long can you give me?”
And he had replied, “As long as it takes.”
This interminable luncheon wasn’t just celebrating the start of real talks on the future of South Tyrol, Magnago thought, dabbing his mouth with a linen napkin—picked out especially by Frau Mayer in the workshop of artist weavers in Val Venosta. What was also worth celebrating was the fact that his interlocutor was none other than Aldo Moro.
After lunch, Herr Neumann, Gerda, Hubert, Elmar and the entire kitchen staff washed their hands, straightened the white canvas caps on their heads and, under the fiercely proud eyes of Frau Mayer, stood in a row in order to say goodbye to the illustrious guests.
Gerda didn’t meet Aldo Moro’s eye, and barely heard him say goodbye. Later, she wasn’t even able to say whether his hand had brushed hers or not. However, when Silvius Magnago shook hands with her, she recognized the skinny man she had seen, as a little girl, direct the course of the crowd in Sigmundskro like a captain on a ship. He was barely ten years older now but already looked like an old man. And yet during that time, Gerda thought, the one who had been most transformed by life wasn’t the Obmann: it was her. And the thought made her feel pride as sharp as the steel in Herr Neumann’s knives.
The political reconciliation in South Tyrol that was beginning to be planned wasn’t good news for everyone: there were those who did their best to sabotage it.
The newspapers became war bulletins.
23 MAY 1966: ATTACK ON THE FINANCE POLICE AT PASSO DIVIZZE. CUSTOMS OFFICER BRUNO BOLOGNESI IS KILLED.
24 JULY 1966: NIGHT ATTACK WITH MACHINE GUNS ON THREE CUSTOMS EMPLOYEES IN SAN MARTINO IN VAL CASIES. CUSTOMS OFFICERS SALVATORE GABITTA GIUSEPPE D’IGNOTI ARE KILLED. A THIRD, COSIMO GUZZO, IS SERIOUSLY INJURED.
3 AUGUST 1966: DYNAMITE ATTACK ON THE PALACE OF JUSTICE IN BOLZANO.
20 AUGUST 1966: DYNAMITE ATTACK ON ALITALIA OFFICES IN VIENNA.
SUMMER 1966: THOUSANDS OF DRAFTED AND REGULAR SOLDIERS, AND ANTI-TERRORISM UNITS ARE SENT TO ALTO ADIGE. ROAD BLOCKS, SEARCHES AND ARRESTS ARE A DAILY OCCURRENCE.
SEPTEMBER 1966: EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD PETER WIELAND FROM VALDAORA IS KILLED AT A ROAD BLOCK—HE HAD NOT STOPPED WHEN ASKED TO. MASS DEMONSTRATION OF MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN AT HIS FUNERAL.
It rained, it rained, it rained. In 1966, the sky never seemed to run out of its water reserve. As though it had stored it up for decades with the sole aim of pouring it out on human beings all in one go. Florence had been buried in mud, and the mountain slopes all over Italy were sliding downstream. Even the river that crossed Gerda’s home town had burst its banks and filled houses with mud and detritus, taken chunks out of roads, washed away bridges, and killed people. The flood also invaded the chocolate and Magenzucker30 (small digestive, aromatic sugar lumps red as rubies) factory. For days on end, aid workers shoveled mud that smelled of cinnamon, cloves, and bitter chocolate.
Then the snow came. It fell abundantly on the town, and then some more fell and didn’t stop. Snowflakes continued to fall, lace hexagons fluttering in the air like butterflies. It was only the beginning of December, the beginning of Advent, and children were starting to think that it would never stop, that it would snow forever, till the end of time, and that the world would become a giant snowball, but then who would throw it?
A muffled silence had filled the space between sounds: the gravelly tone of discontented wives had softened, the crying of babies almost seemed a melodic call, and the insults shouted by drunkards as they came out of the Kneipen31 had now acquired a faint elegance. Even the rattling of military vans on the motorway, with heavy chains wrapped around their wheels, had become vague, soft, almost evocative. However, the night of December 2 was torn apart by a specific, pure sound: the roar of an explosion.
Nobody had ever believed in the recycling of the monument to the Alpini into a symbol of reconciliation between South Tyrol and the Italian army—especially not now, with the ubiquitous presence of military columns, barracks in a state of high alert, road blocks, arrests, searches.
Neo-Nazi paramilitary explosives experts from beyond the border had been well-trained: this time the charges were placed perfectly. Not even a fragment remained of that poor, ugly, coarse granite Wastl, the hapless ambassador of Italian humanity and of its humble Alpini.
Things had changed since the last time it had been hit: nobody considered these to be childish actions any longer. The terrorist from the new bloodthirsty BAS who claimed responsibility for the attack was sentenced to seventeen years and called “government enemy number one.” The verdict was pronounced in absentia, however, because he was on the run.
A life on the run was what Peter had been looking for ever since, as a boy, he would walk around the woods and glaciers, his soul stripped bare by solitude, like a shelled kernel,
That’s what he’d always wanted, to find himself exposed to the non-human: the perfect Y-shaped tracks of a hare in the March snow; marmots blinking in the June sun, thin and bewildered after the long fast, the same ones which, in September, after a summer of eating their fill, with fat behinds like babies in diapers, whistle while doing clownish somersaults; needles that look gold in the October light, raining down from pine trees at the first gust of a northerly wind, messenger of winter; the horizontal pupils of an ibex, caught unawares a few yards away, its alien expression free of reproach, even toward the bullet seconds away from killing it. And now, in addition to all this, Peter also had a mission: the Heimat had called him and he had answered. It was his answer to every other question.
The equipment, the lifestyle, and the way his days panned out, weren’t that different from when he was a hunter. Ankle boots, knee-high socks, binoculars around his neck, a peaked hat, a backpack, a rope, a shotgun. For a few weeks now, he and his companions had been calling home a rocky recess of green granite with black streaks from the humidity, its open side shielded by boughs. It was comfortable. They’d built themselves benches and a kind of low table with carved branches tied together. Nails in the walls acted as a wardrobe, the nearby stream as a bath, shower and sink. A trusted woman who understood them and shared their views, not like that silly Leni, climbed up from the bottom of the valley every so often. She would take winding paths so as not to be followed and bring blackened pans full of food, bags of provisions, bottles and cigarettes. But it was risky, so they mostly managed by themselves, crossing the border to Austria where there was no danger and they could even go to the shops.
Sometime earlier, the Bavarian chemist with fingers fluttering like butterflies had returned to the cave, panting from the effort of dragging his huge baby thighs all the way up there. He had topped up their supplies of raw materials—which was neither food, nor grappa, nor cigarettes. He had also brought along what would make that inert material alive and exciting: wire, fuses, detonators. He’d given final instructions but hadn’t stayed long: he really didn’t care for the life of an explorer. He was a civilized man! A city man! An intellectual! One day, the war would finally break out in Südtirol, he thought, and then these mountain people who stank like goats and hid in caves like in the Stone Age, would realize that only they, the pan-Germans from across the border, could lead them. Meanwhile, they might as well be useful.
And now, hidden in the ditch next to the motorway, on a night of the waning moon, Peter was fearlessly tinkering with sticks of dynamite and fuses. He didn’t picture the faces of his future victims, the Carabinieri on duty who would be passing there a few hours later. If he really had to think about his targets—which he almost never did—he thought of uniforms, ranks, machine guns and, mostly, of sentences in a language with too many vowels that called for you to halt.
He was working, his fingers agile even in the dark. His opaque eyes had never needed much light, and the crescent moon over which clouds floated like the figures of a magic lantern was enough for him. The clover crushed by his boots gave off a fresh, sour smell.
He picked one and put it in his mouth. He felt an explosion of sharp, peppery taste which made him happier than he had ever been. Happier than that time when the Carabinieri had surrounded him but he had managed to escape. Happier than when he had entered Leni’s body on their wedding night. Happier than when he had killed his first chamois. Happier than when his mother was nursing him and—at the age of twenty Johanna could still do it—smiling at him. Happier than before he was born, and the world was One.
The happiness Peter felt was blinding, luminous, total. Perhaps even eternal.
When her sixteen-year-old cousin Sebastian, known as Wastl, laughed, he sounded like a woodpecker digging a nest in a trunk: “T-t-t, t-t-t, t-t-t!.” To Eva, it was the most cheerful sound in the world: whenever she heard it, she was shaken from top to toe by a laughter the reason for which was irrelevant. This, too, her cousin-uncle, who was almost a man, had taught her: that you could always find a reason to laugh, laugh, and then laugh some more, if you really wanted to.
In the field between the Hubers’ maso and that of Leni’s parents, Wastl was showing off an imitation of a distant relative who liked Schnaps a little too much. “Madoja, oschpele, hardimitz’n”32 mumbled Wastl, swaying with the dignity of a drunkard, almost falling over his intertwined legs; there was no doubt he was about to end up on his face but no, he managed to stand up, then he would arch his back and almost fall backwards . . .
Eva watched with her mouth open, her eyes shining, breathless, her belly sore. She was laughing uncontrollably. Next to her, Ulli, her other cousin, a year older than her, was laughing a little because of Wastl, and a little because of Eva, who was now spread on the ground like a broken doll and couldn’t stop giggling, not just at the drunken imitation, but because laughter had made her limbs limp and she was unable to stand up, and then because Wastl and Ulli had started laughing at her, and finally because, when the desire to laugh hasn’t stopped yet and nothing can be done, you have to drink it up, until the last spasm in your solar plexus, until the last tickle in your throat.
When Leni appeared in the hayloft, they were still laughing, but no sooner had they seen her face than all three of them stopped abruptly.
Leni approached Wastl and said something to him. Eva, who was still only four, didn’t understand much. She just understood that it had something to do with Ulli’s Tata, the one who wasn’t there. And now, judging from Leni’s confused words, he would carry on not being there, but differently. For the first time in her life Eva noticed something: that there are many ways in which a father can be not there, but some are worse than others.
Gerda sat before the same officer who, sometime earlier, had called her in to request information about Peter. This time, it was he who imparted information: her brother had been blown up while preparing an attack. He was no longer outraged, but rather stiff with embarrassment. How do you express condolences to the sister of a man whose death has avoided the one he was planning for five of your fellow soldiers? Gerda thought she felt in her chest the explosion that had torn her brother to pieces. Her heart stopped. So did her breath, and the growth of her nails and hair.
The soldier standing next to the desk was also the same one as the previous time. He leaned toward her and with awkward concern asked if she had understood. Gerda half closed her eyes and this was correctly interpreted as a “Yes.” He offered her a glass of water and she cocked her head: “No.”
The officer reassured her: she didn’t have to worry, his remains had already been identified by the wife of the deceased. Gerda wanted to stand up but didn’t quite know where she had put her legs and hands, and yet she’d had them when she’d come in. When she found them again, she stood up without a word and left the room, supporting herself against the wall.
The soldier ran after her and, on the same spot on the sidewalk where the other time he’d asked her out to dance, he said, “My condolences.”
She looked at him like someone searching for something. “He with me, once . . . an Ausflug . . . How do you say?”
The soldier spoke a few words of German but couldn’t remember that one. He felt sorry for it. Gerda walked away, straight and stiff like a sentry box in the barracks. She knew only this: that if she didn’t lower her head or curve her shoulders, if she could walk in a precise line, without smudging it with wayward steps, then she would be able to reach Frau Mayer’s hotel. Only when she had disappeared behind the block did the soldier remember.
An outing.
Ausflug is an outing.
Peter was not buried in the town’s largest cemetery but in the tiny village gathered around the bulb-shaped belfry on the northern side of the mountain.
The living had been generous to the dead: on that steep, vertical land, they had dedicated to the little cemetery, surrounded by a low lime wall, a precious plot of flat land which stretched out, like a minute soul, toward the imposing vastness of the glaciers. For centuries, it had been the Hubers’ final resting place. Even the younger offspring, the ones who through the hard but necessary law of the maso were kicked out to go and seek their fortunes elsewhere, were welcomed back, in death, to the soil of their forbears. A cemetery is certainly not like a hayfield which, when parcelled out, drives everyone to poverty within a few generations; in a cemetery people cultivate memory and identity, facts decided by destiny that never diminish, not even if shared with others. This is where Hermann’s parents were buried after the Spanish flu had swept them away, both on the same night. This is where Johanna rested and, next to her, there was space for her husband. This is where they buried Peter.
Crowded funerals for Bumser people were a thing of the past. Tens of thousands of South Tyroleans had taken part in the funeral procession of Sepp Kerschbaumer, the gentle idealist who’d died in prison after the conclusion of the Milan trial. However, nobody understood these new terrorists who not only struck at Fascist monuments or electricity pylons but also at people, even if those people wore uniforms. They killed and maimed then ran across the border, giving soldiers an excuse to make the lives of family members in the maso even harder, as had happened right there during that raid, just over two years earlier.
That day was still spoken of with terror, as well as with incredulity and relief: it really had happened right there, where the last noteworthy event had been the passage of a Russian prisoner who’d escaped during the Great War. And that helicopter! It had appeared in the sky like a deus ex machina in reverse, a dazzling incarnation of Evil which, however—as everybody knew because every line of the dialogue between the two officers had been repeated countless times—had been vanquished by an unlikely hero, the officer commanding the raid, the very man who until that moment had played the part of the bad guy. It therefore didn’t seem strange that Peter, the search for whom had been the trigger behind the event, was buried there. The soldiers were welcome to come back and look for him now: they would find him, with no need for all that Schweinerei33 again.
Now, the bells, whose noon tolling the soldiers on board their vans had once mistaken for a warning signal, were ringing for a funeral. Lukas, the sacristan, a little older now, the hairs on his sinewy forearms a little grayer, was pulling at the thick rope hanging from the belfry. The hollow sound seemed to be descending, as though weighed down by its own load, into the town, toward the highway from which, every so often, rose the isolated rumble of a car engine, toward the river that glistened in the July light at the bottom of the valley.
Besides his closest relatives, there was just a small group of Schützen there to pay homage to Peter, the comrades with whom he had boarded the Bus of Tears in order to attend the Milan trial. They hadn’t followed him in his more extreme choices, hadn’t gone to hide in the forest or ordered attacks; however, they had carried on with the parades for the redemption of the Heimat on Herz-Jesu day, the anniversary of the heroic resistance against Napoleon. Once, while peeling potatoes in her Stube, Maria had silently wondered what all that display of weapons, those marches, and those orders, screamed worse than at war, had to do with the heart of Our Lord. And Sepp had said that as far as he knew Napoleon hadn’t bothered anyone for a century and a half, not even that poor devil buried in the soil, who now had a right to rest.
More and more people thought that way about the Schützen. As for those with their Lederhosen, their waistcoats with green and red straps, their white lace socks, and little shoes with silver buckles, they really looked as though they had remained stuck in the times when Napoleon was waging war on Europe. The Schützen, who were the last remaining terrorist sympathizers, would have liked to fire a few blank shots in Peter’s honor, as befitting the memory of a hero; but, during that period of attacks and checkpoints, the authorities had suspended the Schützen their privilege of bearing arms, even those ridiculous trombone-shaped rifles that followed such inconsistent and random trajectories that it was a miracle you didn’t shoot yourself in the face. Therefore, no salute, just a wreath of flowers and a scroll with Gothic lettering: Im Schoß der Heimaterde, in the womb of the native soil.
Leni stared at the coffin. She was the only one there who had seen its contents. Seeing with her own eyes the matter that had been her husband (she had identified him through a scar on a fragment of ankle) had left neither pain, nor repulsion, nor anger but rather a kind of cosmic perplexity. Ulli and Sigi hung from her arms like small, unripe fruits, a question on their uncertain little faces: would this incomprehensible storm leave them attached to the branch, or would it, sooner or later, knock them down to the ground?
Hermann was reasonably presentable. He had washed, shaved, and even his Sunday suit was clean, with just a moth hole here and there. The last hands to soap it, rinse it, hang it out to dry, then put it back in the drawer with bags of rice against the damp, had been Johanna’s—whose funeral Hermann had attended in his work clothes, his truck loaded with timber parked outside the cemetery. However, as they lowered his son’s coffin into the rectangular hole, the nakedness of his sorrow was almost obscene. His eyes looked like the genitals in a porn photo: as raw and impersonal as pure living flesh.
The bus from Bolzano got a flat tire on the way and Gerda arrived half an hour late. She’d also had to go and pick up Eva from the Schwingshackls. Trying to keep up with her mother’s large strides, and clutching with her fat baby fingers her mother’s now callous hand, Eva was ecstatic at this unexpected visit, but also worried. She was confused by her mother’s drawn face, which hadn’t smiled at her once, the expression with which she held her hand tight, and especially by the explanation she’d been given: Gerda had come to say a last goodbye to Uncle Peter. Not only did Eva have no memory of Uncle Peter, but what was a “last goodbye”? What if you say it to a person and then meet them again? Eva had asked Ulli to explain but even he didn’t know what to answer. So they went together to Cousin Wastl, who had clarified everything once and for all.
“If, after you’ve said the ‘last goodbye’ to someone, you then meet them again and they say Grüß Gott34, you must turn away and pretend you haven’t heard. It’s totally forbidden to use another greeting once you’ve said your ‘last goodbye,’ as the word implies.”
It wasn’t that difficult after all, Wastl had added, you just had to pay attention. You could still talk to the person, and even ask how they were doing, but you had to be very careful never to use any form of greeting, griastl, servus, pfiati and (definitely not) fwiedersehaugn. You especially must never say “see you soon” again.
By the time they reached the cemetery, the coffin was already in the ground. Gerda stood apart, watching the undertaker throwing shovelfuls of soil on the pine coffin. A Schütze, of about thirty, the same age as Peter, approached. “Your brother was a hero,” he said softly. Not to her but to the cleavage that peered out of the white shirt under the black, mourning pinafore. Then he smiled at her as though everything was agreed between them, and Gerda did not lower her eyes.
Eva, however, was worried. Uncle Peter, to whom she had to say her last goodbye, had already gone and she hadn’t been able to see his face. So now how would she recognize him if she met him? How could she be certain she wouldn’t say goodbye to him again and inadvertently say, “see you soon”?
Later, as they were leaving the cemetery, Gerda said to Eva, “That man’s your Opa35.”
They’d just put a bunch of flowers in a pewter vase engraved with a heart around the letters Jhs on Johanna’s grave. As they were walking away, a tall man who was too thin for his moth-eaten suit had approached the headstone.
Gerda had said it without looking back: obviously the blood link between her daughter and “that man” didn’t concern her. Eva kept staring at the man. She saw him remove the flowers she and Gerda had put in the pewter vase and throw them into the alleys between the two graves, the no man’s land that separates the dead. The man looked up and met her gaze. She started walking, her face turned back so she could keep looking at him, her hand held tight by her mother, who was on her way to the iron gate, and tripped on a black marble headstone.
That’s how Eva learned what an Opa was: a skinny old man who makes you feel sad to be alive if he looks you in the eye.
The owner of the small ground-floor room where Gerda lived when she wasn’t working let her stay there with her little girl. Even though they were right in the middle of the summer season, there were few tourists during that year of bombs and attacks, and many rooms were vacant. Eva was lying on the bed next to her mother’s body, in a slip. She demanded that body like when she was an unweaned baby.
She knew very well that four was too old to be given the breast, but on that unscheduled evening, Gerda was more patient than usual, and Eva intended to take advantage.
There was a knock at the door. Unpleasant things that have no reason to exist should be ignored, so Eva carried on trying to sneak under her mother’s armpit, breathing in. But Gerda raised herself on her elbow and tensed up, listening. There was another knock, accompanied by a man’s voice: “Gerda? Bische do?”36
Pulling her muslin slip down to her knees, Gerda went to open the door. It was the Schütze who, at the cemetery, had called Peter a hero. He was no longer in the uniform of the Andreas Hofer followers, but in normal peasant clothes. His eyes were sparkling with drink, but not a lot of drink, just enough to get his courage up.
“Is Eva asleep?” he asked, putting a hand on Gerda’s bare shoulder.
She looked at Eva, who, from the bed, was staring at the intruder with silent dislike, then pushed the man’s hand off her shoulder.
“No,” she replied and closed the door in his face.
So that was something else Eva learned that day: not being asleep keeps you safe.