In over two years of working at the hotel, Gerda had gone through the swing door that separated Herr Neumann’s kingdom from the dining room only once. On the morning of her first day at work, before the guests had come down for breakfast, and Frau Mayer had shown her the arched windows overlooking the mountains, the tables with the flower decorations in the center of linen tablecloths, the Murano glass chandeliers. Then she had informed her that it was the last time Gerda would ever be setting foot there.
Gerda lingered on the doorstep. The first guests were about to sit at the tables. There were couples, single men, and elderly people. With formal gallantry, the men pulled the chairs out for the ladies, who sat down, casting benevolent looks at the panorama as though it was their property. Gerda was stunned by the contrast between these serene gestures and the anxiety squeezing her chest. None of them was looking for a daughter had with a man who hadn’t wanted to know, and who was now too big for a cage made of fruit crates; a child she had no idea where to put anymore because her job in the kitchen was the only thing she had left and if she lost that too she would end up in the street like all the other girls who’d had no Herr Neumann to come and take them back despite everything, and who left through the gate opened by the nun with a mustache, a child in one arm and only despair in the other.
Then she saw her.
Eva was crawling efficiently toward a specific target: the legs of a middle-aged man sitting alone at a table by the large windows. Her round face was lit up with a satisfied smile that told the world: you can’t but think I’m wonderful, and in fact I am.
Gerda crossed the dining room and scooped her daughter off the floor like soup from a pan. Eva was not pleased to have her plan sabotaged. She began to scream, reaching out with her arms to the gentleman at the table who, surprised but not annoyed, was staring at Gerda with raised eyebrows.
He wasn’t the only one. All the men in the dining room were looking at her. Her breasts, swollen after the last feed, pushing out of her apron, her blonde curls escaping from under her assistant cook’s cap, her cheeks flushed with agitation, her mouth made especially for indescribable delights, her lively legs peering out from the hem of her work skirt that was too short, and that pink little girl in her arms who made her look both younger and more feminine. Even the women couldn’t help looking at her, though they were trying to focus on the grease stains on her apron, the sawdust stuck on the soles of her work clogs, the sweat that glistened in the space between her nose and her lip. Even so, nothing changed the fact that the woman who’d just walked into the dining room was more beautiful than any of them.
“Sie haben unser Abkommen gebrochen.”
Frau Mayer had suddenly appeared next to her like a Germanic goddess invoked by a spell. Her voice was calm, disappointed rather than annoyed. You have broken our agreement.
Two days. That’s all Herr Neumann could do. Two days off in order to make arrangements for Eva. After that, if Gerda hadn’t made any, he would be forced to fire her.
The bus journey from the main town to Gerda’s birthplace was slow, which gave her a lot of time to think. With whom could she leave her daughter? After Johanna’s funeral, which had taken place while Gerda was pregnant, her sister Annemarie had written her a letter in her schoolgirl handwriting. She said she held her responsible for their mother’s death, made her opinion of Gerda clear with various adjectives, and ended the letter with a wish never to see her again. This request wasn’t hard to grant: ever since Annemarie had moved to Voralberg, she and Gerda had only met twice: at Peter’s wedding, and at Ulli’s christening.
After over three hours on the road, when the bus halted at the town station with a huff, Gerda still had no idea what to do. Holding Eva in her arms, she started walking in a daze, aimlessly; her directionless feet then took the most familiar road. Less than half an hour later she found herself a couple of miles out of the town center, near a group of houses on the slope in the shadow of the Medieval castle. She’d reached Shanghai.
The house, built of plaster and river stones, was in the same dark, humid corner. The door was shut.
There was no smoke coming from the chimney. It was still daylight and impossible to see through the dirty windows if there was anyone inside. Gerda stopped on the spot where, in a distant time when Eva hadn’t been born, her father had hurled a suitcase into the air. She looked at the lamp post against which it had been knocked and she thought of somewhere to go.
She began walking fast. Besides Eva, Gerda had with her only a small shopping bag with a few changes of baby clothes and diapers. She picked up the pace. In less than half an hour she’d reached her destination, a little out of breath because of the climb.
It was the end of the summer; the steep meadows that had broken the backs of generations of Hubers were ready to be harvested for the second and last time of the year. In the distance, she could see the men of the household scything away. The cows sent to pasture hadn’t returned yet, and in the sheds there were only those with newborn calves. The air smelled of hay, smoke, manure, and freshly baked bread. High on the door jamb, the slightly faded letters C, M and B were written in chalk, spaced out with 19 and 64. On New Year’s Day, the children, dressed as the three wise men—Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar—had wished health and luck for 1964, in exchange for a few coins. Gerda knocked. Uncle Hans, Hermann’s eldest brother and the only heir of the closed maso, had died a couple of years earlier. It was the young wife of Michl, the eldest of the cousins with whom Gerda has spent her summers in the pastures as a little girl, who opened the door.
Gerda showed her Eva, and explained.
The young woman, who was only slightly older than Gerda, stared. Neither her husband Michl, nor her brother-in-law Simon (who was now living in Switzerland) mentioned their cousin very often, but when they did it made their eyes glint in a way that made the wife uneasy. Gerda hadn’t come to her own mother’s funeral, and then they’d found out that she was pregnant: without knowing her, the young bride felt no sympathy for her.
Sweaty from work, her husband’s youngest brother came back from the fields. It was that same Sebastian, nicknamed Wastl, who had been cuddled in the hay like a doll by Gerda and his older brothers. He’d grown into a handsome fourteen-year-old boy, tall and strong, with a straight nose, dark blonde hair cut in a brush, and a joyful expression in his eyes. He hugged his cousin warmly. When he became aware of the situation he said to his sister-in-law, “We’ll keep this letze.”
The young bride looked at him in disbelief.
“It’s not as though you’re the one who’s going to look after her.”
Michl arrived too. When he saw Gerda his eyes opened wide and his arms started to spread in a hug, but then he glanced shamefully at his wife and stopped himself. The unbestowed hug lingered in the air, heavy and charged with meaning, while the young bride watched her husband with suspicion. Wastl told his elder brother about Eva, while his sister-in-law’s lips narrowed, and they started to argue. Gerda looked at their mouths but couldn’t keep up with the words, as though they’d started speaking an unknown language. After a while, Michl’s wife said she had a lot to do, that dinner was on the stove and would get burned, and disappeared inside the house. Michl invited Gerda in. She declined. He gave her a sad, guilty look, then went in after his wife.
Wastl also went in but soon came back out with a glass of milk for the little girl, and some Speck and cheese for Gerda. He stood there while Eva drank the milk with small, thoughtful sips, her blue eyes fixed on the hens that were scratching about between the house and the barn. Gerda thanked him and put the food in her bag. Wastl hugged his cousin again. She was so beautiful, and so unlucky. He stroked the soft cheek of that little girl who never cried, then went in for dinner, closing the door behind him.
Even though the way back was downhill, it took Gerda longer to go back to the town than going up. Her legs felt heavy and not because of tiredness.
The sun was low and would soon disappear behind the mountain peaks that framed the valley. When she reached the center of town, the shops were closed, the streets deserted. It was the time of day when the earth is already dark but the sky is still luminous, when the mothers have called back home the children playing outside, when dinner is ready, and anyone who has no home longs for one even more.
Gerda went to the Ursuline convent. When she reached the gate next to the steps, she pulled on the iron cord that was attached to a large bell. After a while, a small, elderly nun appeared. She let her in without too many questions—if a young woman alone with a baby knocks on the door, questions are not necessary.
The nuns gave her a cup of broth, then made their proposition. They would keep the little girl, send her to their school and, when she was grown up, teach her a profession; Gerda could come and visit her and even take her for a walk sometimes. Gerda insisted: perhaps she hadn’t been clear, she hadn’t given her daughter for adoption and had no intention of doing so now. During the low season she didn’t work, so she would find a furnished room and for two whole months of the year, she wanted to keep Eva with her. The nuns said that wasn’t possible. Either she left her there or not. There was no other option.
They gave her a camp bed in a room behind the kitchen. Gerda lay down on it, her eyes staring blankly at the high stone ceiling. In less than twenty-four hours she had to be back at the hotel without Eva, or she would lose her job. Still, the sleep of a twenty-year-old was stronger than worry: she curled up on her side, enveloped Eva in the crook between her chest and arms, locked her feet by sliding her big toe in the gap between the index and the left big toe, and fell asleep.
Gerda left the convent before dawn. Eva slumbered in her arms, her head dangling.
Leni opened the door still in her dressing gown, with little Sigi in her arms. Ulli stood next to her, a hand on his mother’s leg as though to make sure that at least this parent didn’t suddenly vanish away, like the other one always did. He looked up at Eva with his brown eyes and long eyelashes, and stared at her attentively but without hostility.
Leni was sorry for Gerda, who’d been kicked out of the dark house from which she, on the other hand, had run away. However, she wasn’t sure that it would be better for her sister-in-law to live there alone with that black-hearted father. As for her, she was uncertain, embittered. She hadn’t seen her husband for three months, didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. There were strange, nasty rumors around, but she didn’t believe them—everybody knows people talk nonsense. The head of Peter’s Schützen company had come to tell her that sacrifices for the Heimat, no matter how hard, are always worth it. Leni hadn’t liked to hear those words but hadn’t known what to say in return. Until recently, when he disappeared for weeks, Peter would leave her some money, but not any longer.
A few months earlier, a large British company had opened a factory for mechanical parts on the outskirts of the town: the largest foreign industrial complex anyone had ever seen in Alto Adige. It required a workforce of almost five hundred workers, which was huge in proportion to the local population. Moreover, there were a few Italians in the town, and those were all civil servants, so finally they started hiring South Tyroleans. Leni had taken part in the euphoria that had invaded the valley. It would be the end of hard times for her family, and hadn’t Peter wanted to be a factory worker ever since he was a boy? However, when she had shown him the flyer with the address and hiring times, her husband hadn’t even looked at it. That same day, he had left and not been seen since.
So now, she told Gerda, she and her two children were dependent on her parents, not like a married woman but a girl with a child out of wedlock.
She suddenly stopped herself. Embarrassed, she looked at Gerda, who narrowed her eyes and lifted a shoulder as though to say: never mind.
Although much lower down, they were on the same mountain slope where the Hubers’ old maso stood, and where Gerda had gone the day before, as well as Paul Staggl’s four-star hotel. Not very far from there, there was another maso, linked to that of Leni’s parents by a short dead-end alley. On the doorstep, over which there was a wooden arch that connected the house to the barn there was a nine-year-old girl. She hadn’t budged from there ever since Gerda had arrived with Eva in her arms, and kept staring at her.
The bus to Bolzano was leaving in less than two hours, and if Gerda wanted to be back at the hotel by evening, as she had promised Herr Neumann, she couldn’t miss it. Gerda said goodbye to Leni calmly, as though she had all the time in the world, and went to the neighbors’ maso.
The little girl on the doorstep was wearing a faded dress that was too long, evidently handed down by more than one older sister. Her sockless legs stuck out like pale little branches from black rubber boots; she had two thin, badly braided plaits that framed the pointy face, and eyelashes that were almost white. Gerda asked her who was at home. The girl shook her head. They were all out collecting the hay, and she had been left alone to look after her little siblings and make barley soup. Her name was Ruthi and she was nine years old. She asked if she could hold the baby and Gerda handed Eva to her. The baby let herself slide calmly from one pair of hands to the other with a quizzical smile.
Ruthi cuddled and cooed, which Eva enjoyed, then she put her on the ground. Holding her by her forearms and not her wrists, like a careful mother, she held her up for a couple of steps. Eva turned to look at her with satisfaction. Ruthi smiled at her with encouragement, thus confirming that she was admiring her expertise.
Gerda watched her daughter’s arms held tight by that little girl’s hands which were already so expert. She looked at the fields behind the maso where, in the distance, looking like dark dots against a green background, peasants were sickling the hay. Then she stared into Ruthi’s eyes.
Gerda was already on the bus back to the hotel when Ruthi’s grandparents, parents, and older brothers realized that a baby girl not even a year old had been added to their large family. Leni was called from the neighboring maso, and told them who that blonde young woman who had left Eva as a gift, like a doll, was. The father threatened to whip Ruthi, but her grandfather stopped him. Sepp Schwingshackl wasn’t sixty yet but his hands were shaking, he couldn’t hear very well, and a coarse, white scar cut across his eyebrows: the signs left by Hermann Huber when he had beaten him until he bled almost thirty years earlier. However, he also had the clear eyes of someone who has nothing to hide and the sweet smile of an old man who understands children. In Ruthi’s arms, Eva looked around anxiously. Still, she wasn’t crying, as though at least one thing was clear: whoever these strangers were, it was obvious they were going to look after her. Sepp gently took her from his granddaughter’s arms and put her on his lap.
“God has brought her to us, and we’re going to keep her,” he said.
It’s not God but the Nutte daughter of a bad man, thought his son, but kept that to himself.
It’s not God, but she’s like my sister Eloise, only more beautiful, thought Ruthi, but kept that to herself.
It is God, or rather Her, but where is She? thought Eva but, since she couldn’t talk, she kept that to herself. If she could have, she would have also said, “I shan’t sleep until She’s back.”
However, tiredness and disorientation were starting to weigh heavily on her eyes. The soft little body relaxed against Sepp’s hard one, which smelled of wood, soap and sweat. Eva fell asleep.
And so that was the beginning of what Eva’s life would be for many years: ten months a year in the Schwingshackl house and, during the two months a year of low season, in a furnished room with her mother.
Meanwhile, on the bus, Gerda was crying. She cried all the way through the long valley of which her birthplace was the main town, she cried as they turned onto the highway, she cried as they arrived in Bolzano. There, crying, she changed buses, and she cried as she walked from the bus station to the hotel. However, whe
n she walked into the dormitory she shared with the other female workers, somebody had turned on the radio, and Gerda suddenly realized a few things. She no longer had a little girl to look after all day long. She no longer had a reputation to protect. She wasn’t yet twenty. She felt a sudden desire to sway her hips and arms to the rhythm of swing and, like Mina, to look straight into the eye of anyone who had any objection.
KILOMETER 715
I’m planning on taking the Metro from Tiburtina station to Termini, where the 7:15 train from Rome to Reggio Calabria is waiting for me. I don’t have much baggage so it will be easy.
Mistake. It would be easy if I had a ticket. But I don’t have one. I don’t even have a one-euro coin, and in any case all the ticket machines are out of order. Only a child, a madman or a German could hope for a ticket window open at 6:38 in the morning on Easter Sunday. I may be ethnically Germanic but my region has been part of Italy for too long for me to harbor that illusion.
I go up from the Metro to the floor above and look for a newsagent. The first one I come across is open but has run out of tickets, the second one is closed because, as we said, it’s now 6:43 on Easter morning, and the third one is at least a mile away, as I am told by the sleepy Ukrainian behind the counter of a café.
Never mind, I’ll take a taxi. I come out of the station as the Roman sky starts to assume a thousand different colors, and stop to look at it. Impalpable swooshes of orange, grey, acid green and pink expand against a turquoise background. Delicate, dreamy colors you wouldn’t expect to see above this cruelly ugly part of the city, with its overpass as high as the windows of the third-floor dining rooms and kitchens. And yet even above this flaky gray, even I, accustomed to mountain sunsets, am struck by the magnificence of the Roman sky. Then I look down again and go on my way.
Eva Sleeps Page 14