Eva Sleeps (21 page)

Frau Mayer's feelings were as unspecific and rarefied as the young man's precision and determination toward Gerda: he would come to pick her up on her first evening off, and take her dancing.

For all his experience as an Italian male with a smile like honey, even the
Zuckerbub
wasn't used to stepping into a nightclub with a woman who caused everyone's pupils to dilate: men's from desire, women's from comparison.

Gerda had never been taken out like this either. With Hannes, she hadn't been out in public. When they'd met, they'd always been on their own, not only on that suspenseful—appropriately so—day in the cable car, but on other occasions too. Hannes would drive his Mercedes, with her sitting next to him, as far as the bends of the passes and there, in the secluded, windy fields, they would make love. Once, he had taken her to Cadore, to a hotel like the one where she worked ten months a year, albeit smaller. Gerda was spared the embarrassment she felt toward the staff, people like those with whom she worked and sweated every day: they didn't leave their room for two days, and ordered food and drinks to be left outside the door.

Gerda had experienced this secluded love as proof of its absoluteness. It never occurred to her that Hannes might have been motivated by embarrassment or different intentions. Be that as it may, Gerda had never been out in public with a man.

There was a juke box.

“Which song do you like?” the
Zuckerbub
asked.

“Mina.”

He slipped in a coin, and she selected a 45: “È l'uomo per me.” Then he put his arm around her waist and pulled her toward him. Gerda thought of the singer's Egyptian eyes, of the thousand implications in her expression, and smiled: now she too, Gerda Huber, Hermann and Johanna's daughter, was dancing.

They spent the night making love amid the sacks of sugar and flour in his van. There were silver beads, chocolate flakes, and colored sugar sticks tangled in Gerda's hair. Thanks to the Zuckerbub's cheerful and expert touch, she returned to the hotel feeling as creamy, soft and light as a Carnival cake.

A few hours later, Frau Mayer appeared in the kitchen tight-lipped. Herr Neumann wondered if any of the guests in the dining room had made a complaint. With a gesture as hard as stale bread, she indicated Gerda who was cutting up radishes into flower shapes for garnishes on the salad counter. All the kitchen staff had the same thought: she was jealous. With cutting politeness, she said, “
Zwei Soldaten fragen nach Ihnen
.”
¹⁹

Gerda looked up at her chef. Herr Neumann tucked his chin into his fat neck in a sign of agreement. Less than twenty minutes later, Gerda was at the barracks at the end of the road. There were two soldiers behind the desk in front of her. One was sitting down and she thought he had a higher rank, even though she knew nothing about medals or decorations. The other one was standing, his mouth half open, as though unable to decide whether to view her as a citizen, a stunning-looking woman, or a suspect. The one who was sitting spoke.

“Is Peter Huber your brother?”

“Yes.”

“What do you know about his activities?”

“What activities?”

“When did you last see him?”

“When my mother died.”

“When was that?”

“A year and a half ago.”

“Are you very close?”

She blinked. “He's my brother.”

“Your brother stands accused of attacks against infrastructures of the Italian state.”

“What does that mean?”

The officer sucked the air in through his teeth in contempt. “Yes, of course. You people here don't even know what the Italian state is.”

“No . . . ‘infra . . . '?”

The soldier who was standing looked away from Gerda for the first time and, even more submissively than required, said to his superior, “‘Infrastructures' is the word she doesn't . . . ”

He was silenced by the other man's irritated look. The soldier cast down his eyes then raised them again at Gerda and resumed his astonished silence. The tone with which the sitting officer addressed Gerda contained gratings, handcuffs, harsh but fair sentences:

“It means bridges, Signorina. Roads, electricity pylons . . . And especially soldiers struck down while doing their duty.”

It didn't take them long to realize that Gerda knew nothing about her brother. They kept her a little longer than necessary but just for form and not out of any particular cruelty. Gerda felt quite indifferent to all this: if she could enjoy a couple of hours of unexpected rest, then she certainly wasn't about to complain about it. Still, she was upset: what was Peter doing? Why were these soldiers asking about him? She felt sorry picturing Leni's disorientated face, her two children. Then she thought of Eva and her arms felt empty. She had placed her daughter on the large Schwingshackl family like a pebble atop a
Mandl
, a stone cairn along a path—a path from which you should never stray or you risk roaming blindly in a blizzard, amid pine trees and quarries: her life.

The lower rank soldier escorted her to the barracks exit. He stepped over the threshold that separated the Fascist buildings from the sidewalk and thus, free from architecture-bound constrictions, asked if he could see her again.

He'd already arrested her once, Gerda said, so he could always do it again.

The young soldier gave a silly laugh but she didn't care. It's not as though she had to marry him, have a child with him, exchange promises of eternal love. All she had to do with him, on her next evening off, was to sway her hips against the gritty velvet of Mina's voice.

 

It was a mixture of mold, rot, stale alcohol, and urine. It hung over the scent of cut hay that spread from the fields around the town, weighing over the breeze on that clear September night, and, slippery, filtering in through the nostrils like a poisoned tentacle. This smell greeted the four Carabinieri who knocked on the door of the Shanghai house just before dawn. Its residents couldn't have been sleeping very soundly: as soon as Marshal Scanu, the highest ranking officer, lifted his arm to knock again, the peeling door turned on its hinges. The air that came out from inside the house triggered in him an archaic terror, like a curse.

The corporal and the two Carabinieri with him also came from the South and the islands, and all four were almost half a head shorter than the man who opened the door. Only the hats with the peaks evened out the proportions. Some had been posted to Alto Adige just few months earlier, some years, but they all missed home very much. One thing, though, couldn't be denied about South Tyrol residents: these people were precise, clean, and valued tidiness very highly. These people didn't ask you, “Everything all right?” but “
Alles in Ordnung
?.”
²⁰
Therefore, they had never seen a house like this.

The
Stube
that led to the front door was covered in piles of wood, dirty clothes, loose engine parts. On the shelf of the wooden stove, there were saucepans and plates covered in old dirt mixed with the crumbs and leftovers of food in a single smelly slush. Various pails more or less full of dirty water cluttered the floor over which were scattered dozens of empty bottles. Until a year and a half ago, the house had been lived in, even though it was dark and damp, but it was now reduced to a dump, a junk dealer's storeroom, a trash can. The man who had opened the door was wearing a yellowed undershirt, old pants covered in crusts, and had an unkempt beard.

Standing there in the middle, they questioned him. They were looking for his son. He said he hadn't seen him for a long time. Did he know where he was? No. Where he was living? He had no idea, even his daughter-in-law had left. The Marshal made a show of not believing him and threatened him with serious consequences for lying. The man remained silent. The two Carabinieri started searching the house. When people have their house searched they always follow and make sure that nothing is broken, put everything immediately back in its place, rush to open every lock to avoid it being broken or even just to speed up the process. But not this man. He stood motionless in the middle of the room, lit up by a single bulb, silent, as though the coming and going of the soldiers did not concern him.

He didn't ask the reason they were looking for his son, not because he already knew it but because, in this old man—who wasn't even sixty yet—there were no more questions left.

Scanu looked at Hermann Huber's face and thought of a cemetery.

 

Raids, searches, military incursions into the homes of civilians aren't carried out when the sun is up, when people have washed faces and their bellies are warm with caffelatte, when the humors used by the body to express itself to itself in the pagan intimacy of sleep have been washed away with water, soap, work clothes. Nor are raids conducted when the soup is simmering on the stove, when the welcoming smell of translucent onion wafts out of a cast-iron pan into which potatoes and cumin seeds will also soon be poured, and the bread is on the board, ready to be sliced. If the peasants are in the fields and so are their women, when low, black, late summer clouds menace cut hay, and every arm is needed to make sure it's safe in the hayloft before the first crack of thunder, then that's not a good time for raids either. Nor is it a good time when the earth is already black but the sky still opalescent and, inside the
Stube
, babies have already fallen asleep in the arms of their older sisters, women are darning holes in socks, and men are talking about the stretch of road that slid down during the most recent thunderstorm. Raids, arrests, searches: they, too, like all human activities, have a correct and appropriate moment which, since the dawn of time, has only ever been the darkest hour before sunrise.

When nocturnal animals are back in their dens, with a moribund bit of fur or feathers in their mouths, and the daytime ones haven't yet emerged; when humans have stopped running and flying with the eternally agile body of dreams, but haven't yet been remembered by their earthly one, full of aches and pains; when the currents between the valley and the mountain are in harmony, when, for a moment, cold and warmth no longer stir and mix as usual and the air is still; there: that dark, silent and motionless brief space of time when nothing happens is the time when people expect soldiers to arrive, complete with jeeps and boots, and abrupt shouts not aimed at being understood but at terrorizing, with that primeval power that the man who has a weapon in his hand possesses over the one who has not.

Instead, it was in full daylight, just before noon, that the soldiers arrived to the group of masi clinging to the slopes of the valley and gathered around the little church. It was an inter-forces operation involving Alpini, Carabinieri, police. There were almost a thousand of them, they had jeeps, armored vehicles, and even a tank. In other words it wasn't hard to notice their arrival. Shots were fired from behind a haystack. Was it Peter? If so, were the others who were responsible for the anti-tank bombs that had injured half a dozen soldiers a few days earlier, there with him? Were the people behind the haystack terrorists? If so, how many? Just one? More than one? No one ever found out. They'd fired from behind a makeshift shelter, like children playing at cowboys, but the weapons were real and a soldier was injured. Whoever they were, they ran away along the steep slopes behind them, along the hunters', then steinbocks' paths, then, like after every attack, dispersed in Austrian territory, leaving the residents of the group of masi to face the reprisals and frustration of Italian soldiers on their own. Suddenly, the tolling of bells filled the cool September air, as though sounding the alarm.

It was Lukas, the elderly sacristan with thin, often disheveled hair, arms that were short but muscular from decades spent pulling the bell rope. The fact that the village was surrounded by armed soldiers didn't seem to him a good enough reason to fail in his daily task: toll the bell twelve times to mark noon. The soldiers, however, didn't know Lukas or how zealous he was: they were sure this was a signal for terrorists to attack from above, so they mounted an assault against the group of masi, as though storming a fortress.

They kicked doors down, barked orders as though the war wasn't over and Italians and Nazis were still allied, they fired at panic-stricken hens around their boots, turning them into motionless heaps of blood and dirty feathers. They forced everyone out of their houses, men, women, old people and children. A soldier burst into a
Stube
where a deaf old woman was spinning, shut away in the private silence that had enveloped her for decades. He was a young man from Niscemi, outside Caltanissetta, just two months in the army. He was eighteen, and was holding an assault rifle he barely knew how to use. When he saw the old woman motionless amid all the screams and shots, he was certain she was hiding something. He shot at her face. The bullet missed her and got stuck in the pine-coated wall right next to the gray plait twisted around the old woman's head; like a new knot in the old timber. Only then did the woman raise her head.

Two other soldiers burst into Leni's parents' house. When Ulli saw them, he ran across the kitchen and buried his face between his mother's legs: perhaps to blot out that unfathomable nightmare. Leni lowered the pan in which she was about to melt some butter and turned it sideways, placing it in front of his head like a shield. One of the soldiers remained on the doorstep; the other one went up to the little bed in the corner of the room and pointed the automatic rifle against the head of little Sigi, who was asleep, shouting at Leni to tell him where her husband was or he would shoot.

Leni didn't know where Peter was. She didn't know where he went, what he did, or why. She'd never known or asked. She wasn't even certain that the furtive man who had come in and out of her bed in the middle of the night a few hours earlier had been the same to whom a long time ago she had sworn to be faithful before God. She hadn't seen her husband's face in the daylight for months. All she knew was that the head of one of her children was sticking to her thighs with the frying pan shielding it, and that the other one, so soft and smelling of sleep, was in the firing line of the rifle on the opposite side of the kitchen. Her children's heads seemed farther apart than two continents; between them, like an ocean, stretched her powerlessness as a mother.