Being an assistant cook was hard work, especially in the summer, when the kitchen was hotter than a tropical forest, and even steamier. Everybody, not only overweight apoplectics like Herr Neumann but also skinny poles like Hubert, sweated buckets. The first course and side vegetables cook always had at the end of his already long arms, like metal offshoots, pots or pans with contents that needed to be tossed in the air, but never out: penne to coat in game sauce, potatoes to smear in butter, mushrooms to fry with garlic and herbs. Sweat would run down their premature wrinkles and sometimes even drip off their chins. Sometimes, even Gerda couldn’t work out if her sweat was coming from her or from the thick fumes in which she was immersed. Down her temples, on either side of her nose and behind the ears, sweat would make sores as deep on her skin as streams on Dolomite limestone. Every evening after having a shower, Gerda would smear Nivea cream on the furrows on her face and neck, but even so by the end of the season her flesh was raw. The only way to dull the burning of salty sweat on your sores was to smoke, and soon Gerda, like everybody else, started to have always a cigarette between her fingers during breaks.
There were no mixers, slicers or blenders: only the arms of scullery boys and assistant cooks. Gerda would remain in the kitchen until midnight to prepare the raw materials which the cooks would use the morning after. She would peel and slice the vegetables that would then be kept in drawers under the cooked side dish counter; she would stretch the pasta for tagliatelle, prepare the sponge, make the cakes and the puff pastry for the house specialty, Strudel, without which a holiday in South Tyrol can’t be called such. Every evening there were therefore dozens of kilos of apples to peel, slice, cover in lemon juice and store under a wet cloth, ready for the pastry cook to put into the dough the following morning. In the evening, Gerda would also put into the oven, which was turned off but still hot, the long stems of rhubarb, lime green with purple streaks, and the sugar. By the following morning they would turn into a stew ready for blending with cream, gelatin, and more sugar, then served chilled in pudding bowls.
Next, Gerda had to prepare the eggs. She would whip the whites to a stiff snow in large copper pots, to make meringues; mix the yolks with sugar and milk in white ceramic mixing bowls, to be used for cakes. Often, she had over fifty eggs to beat and there were evenings when her right arm was so sore that she had to ask Elmar for help with untying her apron.
All the scullery boys in all the restaurants and all the large hotels—and Elmar was no exception despite being barely sixteen years old—were alcoholics. Even so, without them, the kitchens wouldn’t have lasted more than a few hours. They were generally the youngest sons of the poorest peasants, who’d had to choose between dying of the cold by becoming Knechten in the wealthier masi, or dying of the heat in the large hotels. For Elmar, the decision had been easy: he’d had more than his share of the cold, just like his father, his grandfather and his ancestors, for too many generations. Besides, anything seemed preferable to him to the loneliness of the masi in his Val Martello. Now that Herr Neumann had promoted Gerda to assistant cook, it was up to this boy with a long face and large ears, the one at the very bottom of the kitchen hierarchy, to stay behind and scour the cast-iron gridiron shelf after everyone had gone to bed. On the evenings when Elmar had untied Gerda’s apron strings, his grazed, scalded adolescent fingers would tremble. Later, lying on his iron bed, the memory of close contact with the hollow above Gerda’s backside stopped him from sleeping for hours on end.
“Good cooking doesn’t take place in the kitchen but on the market and in the stock room.”
The art of choosing, putting away and preserving foods was at the root of everything for Herr Neumann. Under his guidance, Gerda learned to select everything that was the best.
The fish arrived from Chioggia at dawn on Fridays, in wooden crates covered with ice: mullets, pilchards, sea bass, clams. Herr Neumann used their Italian names, as he did with fruit and vegetables, and especially salads: radicchio, lattuga, valeriana, rucola, portaluca, crescione. Radicchio, lettuce, rocket, valerian, purslane, watercress. On the other hand, he used German for meat: Rindfilet, Lammrippen, Schienbein, and also for desserts: Mohnstrudel, Rollade, Linzertorte, Spitzbuben. This culinary bilingualism was shared by all the staff, as an obligation. The only exception to the rule, almost an involuntary homage to Italian and German stereotypes, were potatoes: although they were classified as vegetables, or at least tubers, everyone always called them Kartoffeln. However, when fried, they would transcend South Tyrolean ethnic tensions and acquire international status, becoming Pommes Frites.
The refrigerating cells were two actual rooms. One for dairy products and the other, the larger one, for meat. It was a kind of furnished room, not with but with hooks from which were suspended quarters of beef, lamb halves, whole chickens and turkeys. It was closed by a heavy wooden door outside of which hung two thick woolen greatcoats on a hook. The first time Herr Neumann took Gerda into the refrigerated cell, he picked one and put it on. She looked at him, puzzled.
“It’s colder in here than at the top of Mount Ortler in January. Have you ever been there?”
She shook her head.
“Neither have I. If you don’t want to die young, wrap up well before coming in here all sweaty.”
From the first time Gerda went back home during the low season, when the hotel was closed, no one ever asked her anything. Neither her mother nor her father enquired what her duties were, whether she had enough food and sleep, or if she got on well with the rest of the staff.
When he wasn’t driving around on his truck, transporting timber, Hermann would sit at the Stammtisch, the table at the tavern reserved for regular customers, and be poked fun at by those made more talkative—not more silent than usual like him—by wine. Johanna had not only given up talking to her husband but also looking at him straight in the face. The last few times she had tried he had stared at her as if she had caused him an unforgivable offense, and she had understood that the offense was the affection Johanna insisted on feeling, in spite of everything, for the man with whom she had been sharing a bed for thirty years.
* * *
Peter’s wife, Leni, had had a child. On the moldy wall of the damp house in Shanghai hung a wooden target with his name painted on it, Ulrich, pierced by the shots fired by Peter and the Schützen of his garrison on the day of the christening. As though the birth of his first child had been a lucky hunt for Peter, he had placed it among his trophies: stag skulls with ramified antlers, steinbock that looked like the close relatives of unicorns, a royal eagle nailed to the wall with its wings spread out. Every so often, Peter would vanish for days on end without warning his parents or his wife, and gave no explanation when he returned. And so, together with little Ulli, Leni became hostage to the darkness of that house. One night, with her baby in her arms in the fir wood marriage bed, Leni dreamed of the scary day when, as a child, she had gotten lost in the forest during a storm. In the dream, lightning struck just a few yards from her feet, making the earth shake. Leni woke up with a start and opened her eyes. Next to her, Peter had thrown himself on the bed with his clothes still on. His hair, skin and clothes, everything had the acrid, sulfurous smell of lightning. As usual, Leni didn’t manage to ask for an explanation: within seconds, her husband had fallen asleep. Ulli, however, had woken up. Leni couldn’t calm him down immediately so she had to get up. With the crying child in her arms, she walked for over an hour on the grayed wooden beams of the Stube. After a while, numb with cold, she put over her shoulders the coat her husband had left on the chair before throwing himself on the bed. She slipped a hand in one of the pockets and when she took it out, it was covered with a thin layer of slightly greasy powder, of the color of bread paper and smelling of sulfur. Leni couldn’t have known that it was an explosive. She wanted to talk to Peter about it the following day but barely an hour after Ulli had finally fallen asleep, and Leni with him, he had gone out. Leni then told Jo
hanna about that strange powder and the smell of sulfur that impregnated her husband’s hair and clothes. Her mother-in-law listened but remained silent. She didn’t tell her about the time, many years earlier, she herself had found traces of red paint on her son’s coat, the very night the granite Wastl had been soiled by unknown persons. Johanna didn’t look at Leni. She remained on her knees in front of the wood stove, and carried on rubbing its enameled doors and steel handles with water and ammonia. When Leni realized that she wouldn’t get a reply, she left the kitchen and the house with Ulli in her arms.
Only then did Johanna turn to the point on the floor where until a moment ago her daughter-in-law’s feet had been. Her left arm, with which she had kept the stove door still in order to rub it better, had all of a sudden become numb, and an unexpected cold sweat beaded her forehead. She suddenly felt nausea, as well as a sense of impending threat. She shouldn’t let herself be frightened like this by what Leni had said, she told herself, after all nothing irreparable had happened. In truth, the disaster was already taking place but inside her body, in the ebb and flow of the blood in her veins and arteries which, ever since she had been born, had been supplying organs and tissues with a silent, regular swish. For some time now, unbeknown to her, her left coronary artery had been partially blocked and was making it hard for the blood to go up to the front wall of her heart. Johanna didn’t know it but there and then, kneeling on the wooden floor covered in drops of soapy water, she was having a mild heart attack.
After spending months in the heat, the shouting and the smells of the large kitchen, the silence that had invaded her parents’ house seemed to Gerda, whenever she went back there, as dense as mud dried after a downpour. Every word that was not strictly necessary, every comment, question, exclamation, adverb and adjective had been buried in it. All that remained were imperative verbs (take this; carry this; go out; wash it; eat this) and the names of things: tello, the bowl you reached out with so that soup could be ladled into it; foiozoig, the lighter to hand her father for his evening pipe; holz, the timber to stack up next to the stove. These surviving words would spring out of the silence the same way objects of a life that has been swept away emerge through a gap in the mud that covers a village buried by a landslide. Things like the back of a chair, a pan with no handles, an odd shoe.
* * *
The first time Hannes spoke to Gerda, he asked, “Wo worschin bis iatz?”
Where had she been until then? How was it possible that he’d never met her before in the streets of the town? She told him that for over a year now she had been spending most of her time in Merano, working in the kitchen. While she was speaking, Gerda noticed in Hannes’s eyes that same look of defenseless astonishment her father had given her that morning, so many years earlier, when he had called her Mamme.
Now that she saw it, it was clear to her: this was what she’d been waiting for all these years without knowing it.
The cable car that would unload dozens of skiers on the top of the mountain, opening the doors to prosperity for the town and its residents, had now been completed by the Consortium. Half of the forest of larches, pines and spruces which covered the north side of the mountain, and which had been cursed by Paul Staggl’s ancestors because it was steep and without sunlight, had disappeared. Now it had been plowed down by the winding paths of ski tracks, and the almost straight line that connected the pylons of the new ski lift. A few weeks later, its inauguration would take place. The red cabin with room for thirty, hanging from a heavy steel cable, would stand out against the blue sky and, flying above the heads of the band, all the gathered citizens, the mayor, and especially Paul Staggl, the visionary capitalist responsible for its creation, would show everyone the bright future awaiting the valley.
In view of the inauguration, last-minute safety tests and rescue drills in case of a power cut were taking place. Hannes persuaded his father’s workmen to use him and Gerda as the victims of a pretend accident. They would act the parts of skiers on holiday trapped in the cabin because of a power outage, and the workmen would come and save them.
When Gerda walked into the lower station of the cable car, she thought it looked like a cave large enough for giants rather than humans. The huge wheels suspended from the roof were dragging a fake steel cable from which dangled a red cabin attached by a black clamp—like a cloth fixed with a gigantic peg to an enormous washing line. However, when it completed the tour around the pylon and drew near with the door open, Gerda thought it looked more like a squat, square tourist coach than something suitable for staying up in the air: it was both scary and ridiculous at the same time. Hannes noticed her hesitation. He held her by the arm and helped her walk into the cabin. The doors closed behind them, the large wheels continued to turn with the roar of a furnace, there was a sudden increase in speed, almost a change of state, the cabin got off the ground and began its suspended journey.
There was a sudden silence. What made Gerda’s heart leap into her throat more than the growing distance between her feet and the ground, more than the treetops she was seeing from above for the first time, more than the horizon of glaciers and faraway peaks that spread before her, was the silence, which was interrupted only by light gusts of wind. It wasn’t the silence of her childhood pastures, of windless, moonless nights when she huddled up with Michl, Simon and little Wastl in the hay, while telling stories of witches. Those nights, through the cracks of the mountain hut beams, an infinite, enveloping space resounded all around, and everything was a part of it—the four children, the starry sky, the screams of night birds, and the cracking sound of the mountain. That silence that echoed a thousand presences, and from which nothing and nobody was separate from it.
Here, however, the glass of the cabin was separating Gerda and Hannes from the noise of the world, from the rustle of the tallest fir tree branches, from the calls of the crows that were flying parallel to the cable, curious about that strange flying object, from the increasingly distant voices coming from the tiny houses at their feet.
When the cable passed through the small wheels of the pylons, it produced for a few seconds a metallic screech which then made the silence that followed even more intense. It was a silence reserved for just the two of them. Gerda looked up at Hannes. This was the moment he seemed to be waiting for: he bent over her and kissed her.
At that moment, the cabin suddenly stopped and started swaying in the void. But Gerda wasn’t scared. That swinging over the abyss, which tourists jammed in a cable car would always find scary, and which would provoke screams, fainting, and scenes of panic, was for her a sign: the first kiss of her life had to be precisely here, right now, with Hannes. It was written, it was fate. It was what she had always been waiting for. And now, finally, she knew it.
A few weeks later, when Gerda went back to the hotel for the winter season, she got Nina to read her fortune with cards. Gerda wanted them to say that Hannes loved her, that he thought of her every single instant just as she thought of him. She wanted to hear about his love and wanted an opportunity to say his name out loud: Hannes!
Nina had a wide face with dark eyes that were a little too close together, a beautiful straight mouth and almost all her teeth. She looked at Gerda without smiling. “He’s rich, isn’t he?” It was as though she was asking confirmation of a diagnosis.
“Isch mir Wurst,” Gerda replied. I don’t care about that. It wasn’t wealth but love that was important for her. Her love for Hannes, and his for her. Nina shook her head, displeased. She laid out on the table seven Watten cards, face down.
“Turn over one card. Don’t think about it.”
Gerda didn’t think and turned over the first card on the left. “Seven of acorns.”
Nina stared at the card with the bitter satisfaction of someone who has foreseen the worst and it is coming true.
She looked up at Gerda and said, “You’re pregnant. And better give up any idea of his marrying you.”
KILOMETERS 35 – 230
On the Fortezza-Bolzano train there are two girls sitting opposite me, probably about sixteen. One is blond, the other dark. They look like the kind of scantily-clad young women you see on Italian TV, like the soubrettes in the programs my mother claims not to know because she watches only the Austrian ORF channels, but which she actually sits and gulps down for hours on end. They’re dressed identically: black jacket with gray fur collar, black trousers worn very low on the waist, slid into black boots. They look like they’re wearing a uniform. They get off at Bressanone, where Max, the largest discotheque in the area is situated: Easter Saturday or not, they’re going dancing.
South Tyrol discotheques used to be closed on Easter Saturday. In fact there weren’t any. Max didn’t use to hold a gay night every third Thursday of the month. No South Tyrol hotel would have written “gay-friendly” in their brochure (but only in the English-language ones aimed at an Anglo-Saxon clientele, not in the German or Italian ones). In the snow bulletin issued by the pistes and the pharmacy opening times on the Internet, you didn’t use to see a list of places where you could go cruising (in my town it’s the toilets of the bus station and the parking lot by the river).
Eva Sleeps Page 8