A granite Alpino with a thick neck and not very slender—appropriately Italic—legs, directed his grumpy gaze to the northern glaciers, to the spot where the new border had been for the past twenty years. The not exactly sparkling expression of the stone soldier symbolized the blind, obedient and ruthless force that Fascist Italy would unleash against anyone daring to state that Alto Adige did not belong to her. This was not a superfluous clarification, and not only because of the reluctance of many, too many, South Tyroleans to recognize their very Roman lineage. The Fascist government had a more pressing reason for needing this clarification: on entering Vienna only three months earlier, Hitler had declared Austria, through the Anschluss, part of the Third Reich. And Austria, the lost homeland, was right there beyond the glaciers.
But this, as the Alpino stated with his presence, and as the authorities gathered for the occasion repeated, this was Italy.
Mussolini’s project to Italianize Alto Adige had been thorough. However, he soon realized that to make the place “very Roman, Latin, imperial” it wasn’t enough just to prevent the peasants from speaking German and wearing traditional clothes. Nor was it enough to forbid school children to study their mother-tongue and force them, instead, to learn Giosuè Carducci’s poem about the serene, wholesome bull “Pio Bove” by heart. Besides, those poor women sent over from Caserta, Agrigento and Rovigo could only weep at the thankless task of trying to make these blockheads produce the musical sounds of the Italian language. Brave teachers throughout the territory carried on teaching German in Katakombenschulen,5 the clandestine schools. Italianizing place names hadn’t sufficed either. Now, people would look up at the bell towers to work out where they were: if it was bulb-shaped, they knew they were in Völs, if pointy, then in Blumau. As for “Fiè,” “Prato Isarco” and all the other names invented by Mussolini’s topographer, Tolomei, nobody used them except bureaucrats.
There was only one solution for truly Romanizing that beautiful, vertical land: allowing only Italians to live there. It was not enough that the flow of immigrants from other regions was motivated and supported by Fascism in the hope that, someday, German-speaking South Tyroleans would become a minority in their own land. No, they actually had to leave.
Hitler embraced this idea enthusiastically. Ensuring the purity of nations by moving (or erasing) larges masses of people across the map was his favorite occupation. So he promised Mussolini that if the Südtiroler wished to carry on being German, they would be welcomed with open arms by the Greater Germany, and by their brothers who belonged to the pure Aryan race. He would give each and every one of them a new maso as large as the one they’d left behind south of the Brenner Pass, the same size fields and pastures, the same number of cows and, so assured the propaganda, of the same color coat as those left in the hayloft by their ancestors. The Sudeten, Galicia, Styria and even Burgundy then, later on, the boundless lands taken away from the worthless Slav people: Tatras, in Poland, the immense Hungarian puszta, and soon also lush Crimea. Anyone who left Alto Adige would find fertile lands that only needed a virile German workforce to become paradise on earth.
Mussolini, at the same time, was threatening the Dableiber, those who remained, with forced Italianization: speaking German was totally forbidden, even in private, and anyone not adopting Italian—in fact, Roman (with a capital “R” on the flyers)—customs and practices would be deported en masse to Sicily, to grow prickly pears—what they were exactly, nobody really knew. The choice wasn’t between staying or going, but between declaring yourself to be either a Walsch or a Daitsch: Italian or German. You could not remain a German on Italian soil.
Whether or not you left was presented as a matter of free choice. However, the decision to leave, so said the Nazi flyers, would be rewarded as a clear sign of love and devotion to the Great Germanic cause. Whoever loved their Heimat was certainly ready to abandon it and rebuild it elsewhere, exactly the same, in the bosom of the Thousand-Year Reich. Remaining, on the other hand, was an unequivocal sign of betrayal, insubordination against the National Socialist cause, cowardice.
These were your options; actually die Option.
No peasant would have chosen to leave his maso but they all felt Daitsch, and the vast majority ended up doing just that. They opted to, as they used to say. Still, there were too many peasants who would whisper to their wives under the goose eiderdowns at night, wondering: but what about their field, deforested by their great-grandfathers with saws and axes a century earlier? Would they really never see it again? And what about those lands, where cows of the same color awaited, masi with the same extensions, the same number of trees as what they’d leave behind—were they uninhabited? And if they weren’t, then where would the inhabitants go?
Hermann enthusiastically took part in the persecution organized by the regime against the Dableiber. With the blessing of Fascist party officials, he maimed heavy draft horses. He killed guard dogs. He smeared his own excrement on the jambs of the doors of those who weren’t planning on leaving; then he’d go and wash his hands in the streams, feeling in his chest a strength he’d never felt before. During those moments he almost forgot the shame and solitude of the little Knecht who pissed himself in the freezing cold.
There was an old peasant who had been widowed for many years and had no children. He was born in the Stube of the maso where he was living and had never been more than just a few kilometers away. He hadn’t even gone to fight in the Great War because he was born blind in one eye. He had two cows, Lissi and Lotte, which he was reluctant to leave in the hands of strangers: one could say they were his family. In any case, he couldn’t quite make up his mind to hand in his Option form signed. Hermann and two of his comrades set fire to his hayloft. The old man spent all night running up and down with a small bucket of water, trying to bring the fire under control, crying with his good eye. The mooing of Lissi and Lotte, trapped by the fire, sounded like the wailing of two enormous babies. They fell silent only when the burning roof of the hayloft collapsed on top of them and, together with the smoke and the flying fragments, a delicious smell of steak wafted out. The old man let himself fall to the ground and did not get up again.
Hermann also took part in the ambush on Sepp Schwingshackl. Unlike so many of his fellow countrymen, his old schoolmate had never shared that pagan fascination with the Führer, and the way he had quietly and firmly declared that he would not be leaving his maso made him a very dangerous Dableiber. The Gauleiter ordered Hermann and two others to teach him a lesson—they could decide just how hard it should be. And so, even though he and Sepp had walked to school together every day when they were children, even though every time his truck had broken down while carrying a load of timber Sepp had always lent him his hand cart, Hermann went.
Sepp did not die after being ambushed. He remained with his hands shaking, slightly deaf, and with a white scar on his forehead, which lifted his eyebrows in a puzzled expression. As though the astonishment of seeing a childhood friend kicking him in the face was printed on his face forever.
A joyful crowd saw off the first Optanten, pioneers of the new Heimat. Very blond children (chosen expressly for the color of their hair) placed daisy chains on the heads of all those leaving. The red, black, and white of the swastikas stood out against the deep blue sky, the whiteness of the glaciers, the dark gold of larches in the fall. Everybody said it looked magnificent. When Hermann Huber got on the train with his family, Peter was four years old, and his wife Johanna was expecting her second child, Annemarie. Hermann wanted to set an example, as appropriate to a true Nazi, and was one of the first to leave.
Also one of the last. Just a few months later, Italy entered the war and the departures of the Optanten, even though these were the majority of South Tyroleans, were suspended. Those who left, instead, were men called up to the front. As for creating the German paradise on earth, the Daitschn Himml, everybody forgot about it.
The Hubers came back to
the valley after the war. Nobody, including the Dableiber, wondered where they had been. On which front Hermann had fought, in which division of the Wehrmacht, if he had moved over to the SS, if he had murdered many civilians or only his uniformed counterparts, enemy soldiers whom it was right and moral to strike down—nobody asked him. And especially, nobody asked him to give an account of the paradise on earth promised by the Führer. In everybody’s eyes, he might as well have been finished.
The war cemetery of the valley’s main town had—and still has—plain wooden crosses in the midst of very tall larches: a small forest of the dead in the midst of a larger forest of real trees. On the crosses are written the dates and places they fell. Specific information, like Woroschilowgrad, Aletschenka, Jehsowetowska, Trieste, Cassino, Pojaplie, Vermuiza; or more general, such as the Caucasus, Finland, Normandy, Montenegro. In some cases there’s just the continent: Afrika, or the direction: im Osten, in the East. On many crosses there is also a photograph. Young men looking impeccable in well-pressed uniforms, striking poses. Almost no one looks straight ahead, but rather up to the side. Some have gentle expressions, others excited, others uncertain. It’s impossible to tell whether the expression in their eyes that has been fixed forever is consistent with the way they acted in this planetary slaughterhouse. Perhaps that lost-looking nineteen-year-old boy machine-gunned a pregnant woman. Perhaps that SS Unterscharführer with eyes like ice performed an act of mercy toward a prisoner. Of course, many had the opportunity to do both. But nobody wanted to know that. They were the sons, the fathers, the brothers of those who were now rebuilding the houses that had been destroyed. Nobody wanted to know if they had died as humble heroes, as cowards, or as torturers.
Optanten and Dableiber, once enemies, found themselves united by the wish not to give things too specific a name. Nazi, collaborator, informer, war criminal, Konzentrationslagerführer: these were not words but unexploded grenades around which you tiptoed so as not to trigger the worst kind of explosion—the truth. There was still too much war rubble to be cleared, too much hunger to endure, too many dead to mourn, too much loss they had all suffered. Even the monuments to the Italian Alpine troops had been erased by Allied bombs. No, there was no need to ask anyone anything, not even Hermann.
The agreement was made in silence, but it was respected by all.
Alberto Ruotolo, an employee of the railroads, was now occupying the house where the Hubers had lived before the war. Like thousands of other immigrants, Mussolini had called him up from Vomero in order to Italianize Alto Adige. Now, the new Republican government still needed him, along with the rest of the Fascist-era white-collar workers, to operate the country. Through the windows of the house where Hermann had conceived his first child, there now wafted the sour smell of tomato sauce; Ruotolo’s fat wife would summon their children to dinner in a very high-pitched voice, letting out a burst of truncated words. “Pepè! Ueuè! Totò”—that’s how her Neapolitan delivery sounded to South Tyrolean ears. The Ruotolos remained in the house and the Hubers had to go and live in Shanghai. Rücksiedler was what they called—and not affectionately—the cluster of houses on the side of the mountain in the shadow of the Medieval castle, assigned to those who’d returned to live there. It was now the most insulting name, given to the Hubers as well as all the ones who had opted and who’d come home. South Tyroleans seemed to have forgotten that at the time of die Option almost all of them had said they were ready to leave and the only reason they hadn’t was because the war had broken out, and that nobody had stood up for the Dableiber who’d resisted. All the ones who had signed “Ja” on the orange Option paper were now calling the few who had actually left “traitors to the Heimat.” The same people who had waved swastikas and flags at the departure of Hermann and his family were now calling him a bastard. That dark load that would press on his chest from when he used to piss on himself, as an eleven-year-old orphan, became even more oppressive.
Shanghai was nearly a mile away from the nearest shop and almost two from the center of town: its good inhabitants insisted on keeping their distance from the Rücksiedler. It was a cluster of low houses coated with a gray mixture of plaster and stones from the river. The sun would disappear behind the looming hill at the end of September and not reappear until May. During thunderstorms, water from the highway would come flooding in through the front doors and even in summer the washing would never dry. The Shanghai residents were considered good-for-nothing, treacherous, Communists.
Shanghai was also called Hungerburg—from Hunger, hunger—or Revolverviertel, the district of handguns, because of the continuous coming and going of customs officers, Alpini and Carabinieri, and not for patrolling. When, years later, Gerda was seen escorted by an Italian in uniform, some people said, “No wonder! She grew up in Shanghai.”
Peter was ten years old and didn’t have a single friend. He’d spent his early childhood elsewhere and spoke with a strange accent (a Bavarian accent: the Hubers hadn’t actually gone that far). No mother would allow a child of his age to go and play at his house in Shanghai. His schoolmates bullied him then said, “Don’t like it here? Well, nobody asked you to come back.”
Annemarie was old enough to help around the house, and Gerda was a baby. Johanna’s milk had dried up in Munich in the bombing, but Gerda learnt to digest Knödel before she was even four months old, and survived. You could already tell that she was nothing like her mother.
Johanna wasn’t old: she’d married Hermann at eighteen and was now about thirty. Nor was she ugly. She just looked even more mortified about being in this world than before. Perhaps it was the war, or perhaps the fact that her husband had stopped speaking to her since he’d returned.
“Ostfront,” is all Hermann would say to the rare people who asked where he had fought. The Eastern Front.
Gerda was growing up. Peter and Annemarie had inherited their mother’s black eyes, while hers were blue and almond-shaped like her father’s, and her cheekbones were high and Johanna, on the other hand, became more and more stooped, like a woman twice her age. As though there were a limited amount of vital force available in that house and that it was no longer for the mother but only for the youngest daughter. And that’s where it flowed in its entirety and with a vengeance.
Peter began spending more and more time on his own in the woods. Every step he took on the thick layer of humus, the billions of larch needles that had accumulated over thousands of years, made the live rock several feet deep resound like a drum; that light thud as he advanced gingerly, holding a sling, seemed to him the most welcoming sound in the world. That was his home, and the squirrels, foxes, martens, grouses, and magpies were his companions. He learned to kill them, of course, but first he got to know them, to watch them patiently, and wait for them for hours. He was an excellent shot and soon, with the money from the furs and feathers he sold to the milliners, he bought his first gun.
Although she was still very young, Gerda was to remember for the rest of her life the day Peter brought home his first stag. He loaded it on his shoulders, wrapping it over his neck and holding its legs almost tenderly. The stag’s head was bobbing up and down on his back, its mouth open, its tongue hanging out, like a bloody version of the Good Shepherd. Gerda was struck by the contrast between the inertness of the dull eyes and the fur still soft to the touch. The sickly-sweet smell of blood remained in her nostrils for a long time while Peter was skinning the deer, and also the stench of nerves and animal fat that emanated from the largest pot Johanna owned, and over the edge of which protruded long, elegant antlers. If Gerda hadn’t seen Peter cut the head clean off the animal’s body, she would have always believed that the stag was playing hide and seek in a pan with magic powers.
The skull was boiled and the flesh stripped off completely. Peter was planning to make good money by selling it as a trophy.
When they had left, those who had “opted” had renounced Italian citizenship, so now the Rücksiedler wer
e stateless. Without documents, without work, and without respect, times were hard for the Hubers, at first, like for all the other Shanghai residents. The mother of the town dentist, a baroness, offered to take Johanna into her service but Hermann wouldn’t hear of it: as long as he was alive his wife would not be bringing money home. And so to top up the family income, at the age of twelve, Peter went to work in a sawmill. Annemarie started cleaning the stairs of the primary school when she turned ten, and was therefore still younger than the pupils in the final year. Their efforts weren’t in vain: after a couple of years driving other people’s trucks, Hermann managed to buy himself one.
Three years after the end of the war, with a merciful gesture, the Italian government made a clean slate of the effects of the Option: it gave back Italian citizenship to the Rücksiedler who requested it. The old Hermann could never have imagined the relief he felt the day he obtained once again, for himself and his family, the documents which declared them to be Italian Citizens.
Shanghai became once again part of what was now Republican Italy.
When Gerda was eight she began replacing her mother in the task of warming up the engine of Hermann’s truck. She would wake up at three in the morning, put on her coat without even washing her face, and go out into the winter frost when the night was at his darkest. Interrupting her sleep was even more painful than the cold slapping her drowsy face. At night, her father’s truck was parked outside the front door, and in order to start the engine in the morning you first had to scrape the ice off the crank on the front. Gerda’s hands were already as rough as a washerwoman’s. She would light a small fire with shavings and paper under the belly of the vehicle, taking care not to waste the matches. She stayed there in the cold, on all fours, to make sure it wouldn’t go out, spreading the fuel in a circle with an iron shovel. You had to be careful: if the flame was too high the oil tank and the entire truck would explode, and she with them. Once the starting crank was warm and the ice vapor that blocked it had melted, Gerda would go back home, pick up the cup her mother had meanwhile prepared on the wooden stove, and wake up Hermann with the coffee. While her father climbed into the truck and started the engine, Gerda would get ready for school.
Eva Sleeps Page 3