“A storm that generates itself,” I said, spellbound. “Are they rare?”
“There are a couple every year. Some years three, some years not even one. But nature gives and then takes away. Storms of this kind are miniature apocalypses that don’t last long. Not more than an hour or two, three at the most, and they’re restricted to a small area.” A brief hesitation. “That’s the norm.”
“And when the general rule doesn’t apply?”
“Then we come to April 28, 1985. The mother of all self-regenerating storms. Siebenhoch and the surrounding area were cut off from the world for nearly a week. No roads, no telephones, no radio. The Civil Defense people had to fight their way through with bulldozers. The point at which the storm broke with the greatest violence—and I’m talking about violence equal to that of a hurricane—was the Bletterbach.” He passed a hand over his chin, cleared his throat, and added, “It lasted five days. From April 28 to May 3. Five days of hell.”
I tried to imagine that storm mass shedding its load over the horizon I could admire from the window a short distance from me. I didn’t succeed.
“But that wasn’t how they died,” Werner whispered, shaking his head. “That would have been . . . I won’t say fairer, but more natural. It can happen, right? A flash of lightning. A rock. In the mountains, nasty things . . . happen.”
My throat had gone dry. Yes, nasty things happen. I knew that only too well.
To get rid of the dryness, I stood up and poured myself another grappa. It went down my throat like hot iron. I poured myself a third, less generous amount and sat down again.
“Those poor kids weren’t just killed, what happened to them was . . .” Werner grimaced in a way I’d never seen him do before. “Once, many years ago, I went hunting with my father. Before the reserve was there and . . . You remember our chat about going hungry?”
Of course I remembered it. “Yes.”
“I’m hungry, I go hunting, I kill. I try not to cause pain, I kill in a clean, rational manner. Because. I’m. Hungry. Those things can’t be judged, can they? They go beyond the normal concept of good and evil.”
These words, uttered by a man who had spent years saving other people’s lives, made a deep impression. I nodded to encourage him to continue, but there was no need, Werner would continue with or without my approval. It was a concept with which he had spent many hours and he was determined to express it as best he could. I could recognize an obsession when I saw one.
“During the war, people killed other people. Was that right? Was it wrong? Stupid, ridiculous questions. Anyone who didn’t go out to kill was shot. Can we assert that the people who refused to use a rifle were saints or heroes? We can, of course. In fact, in times of peace it’s right to see them that way. But can we force millions of people to behave like saints or heroes? To sacrifice themselves for an ideal of peace? No, we can’t.”
I wasn’t sure where he was going with this, but I let him continue. If working on factual series had taught me anything, it was that the more freely people talk, the more interesting the words that come out of their mouths.
“In war, people kill each other. It’s bad to order them to do so. It’s bad to force generations to slaughter each other on battlefields. It’s an insult to God. But if you’re not a king or a general, what else can you do? Shoot or be shot. And if you shoot, there’s a chance you’ll save your own skin and get back to the people you love.”
He drummed with his fingers on the table.
“In war, you kill. In hunting, you kill. Killing is human, even though we don’t like to admit it, and it’s right to try and stop it as much as possible. But what was done to those three poor kids in the Bletterbach in 1985 wasn’t killing. It was slaughter, and there wasn’t much that was human about it.”
“Who were they?” I asked in a thin voice.
“Evi, Kurt, and Markus,” was the brief reply. “Do you mind if we go out? It’s starting to get a bit too hot in here. Let’s take a walk.”
We went out and headed for a path that led to the woods.
The smell of autumn, that sweetish smell that almost upsets the nostrils, was at its height. I had no doubt that winter would soon sweep everything away. After a while, even the most beautiful autumn asks for the right to eternal rest.
I shuddered. I didn’t like the turn my thoughts had taken.
“They were good kids, you know?” Werner said, after we had passed a pine tree split in two by a bolt of lightning. “All three born here. Evi and Markus were brother and sister. She was the older of the two. A lovely girl. Very unlucky, though.”
“In what way?”
“You know the South Tyrol disease, Jeremiah?”
“No, I have no idea.”
“Alcohol.”
“Evi was an alcoholic?”
“Not Evi. Her mother. She’d been deserted by her husband, a traveling salesman from Verona, in the seventies or thereabouts, soon after Markus was born. But her life was already a disaster, you can bet on it.”
“Why?”
“Different times, Jeremiah. You know my property?”
“Welshboden?”
“You know why I bought it for not much more than peanuts?”
“Because you have a nose for business?”
“That, too. Can you translate the name?”
“Welshboden?”
“Genau.”
The local dialect was a fairly twisted version of the Hochdeutsch my mother had brought me up on, and I often found it incomprehensible. I shook my head.
“The word Walscher, or Welsher, and God knows how many other versions there are, is a key word if you want to understand the dirt that’s been swept under the rug around here, Jeremiah.”
He was alluding to the ethnic clashes that had begun after the Second World War. I’d heard a lot about them. “Italians against Germans and Germans against Italians? Belfast with strudel?”
“Walscher means foreign, alien. Someone from outside. But in a nasty, derogatory way. That’s why I bought it for a ridiculous figure. Because it was the land of the Walscher.”
“But the conflict—”
“The conflict is over, thanks to tourism and thanks to God. But deep down, there’s always that hint of . . .”
“Resentment.”
“I like that, it’s a nice word. A polite way of putting it, but that’s the way it is. A very polite ethnic conflict. In the sixties, though, when Evi and Markus’s mother married that traveling salesman from Verona, the ethnic conflict was being expressed with bombs. In the register, Evi’s surname was Tognon, but if you ask around everybody will tell you that Evi and Markus were called Baumgartner, which was their mother’s surname. You understand? The fifty percent of Italian blood was wiped out. Evi’s mother had married an Italian: can you imagine what that meant at the time, a mixed marriage?”
“Not a happy life.”
“Not at all. Then her husband left and alcohol destroyed what little common sense she still had. It was Evi who raised Markus.”
“Is she still alive?”
“Evi’s mother died a couple of years after we buried her children. She didn’t come to the funeral. We found her lying on her back in the kitchen of her apartment. She was out of her head with booze and asked us if we wanted . . . you know, if we wanted . . .”
I spared him his embarrassment with a question. “She prostituted herself?”
“Only when she’d run out of the money she managed to scrape together doing a few little jobs here and there.”
We walked in silence for a while. I listened to the calls of the loons and the sparrows.
A passing cloud obscured the sun, then headed east, placid and indifferent to the tragedy that Werner was recounting.
“What about Kurt?” I asked to break the silence, which was starting to make me uncomfortable.
“Kurt Schaltzmann. Kurt was the oldest of the three. He was a good kid, too.” He stopped to break off a small branch from a dark, gnarl
ed pine. “I know that in such cases people always say that kind of thing. But believe me, they really were good kids.”
Werner fell silent and to fill the silence I murmured, “In ’85 I wanted to be a pitcher for the Yankees and I was in love with my aunt Betty. She made incredible muffins. I have beautiful memories of that period.”
“Around here, that period was the worst since the war, believe me. The young people were leaving and those who didn’t killed themselves with alcohol. Just like most of the adults. There was no tourism, there were no subsidies for agriculture. There was no work. There was no future.”
“So why did Evi and the others stay?”
“Who said they stayed?”
“You mean they left?”
“Evi was the first. She wasn’t just bright, she was also beautiful. And you know what happened in those years to beautiful, intelligent girls around here?”
“They married and became alcoholics?”
Werner nodded. “The first bastard who showed up, and there are plenty here like everywhere else, would make her fall in love with him, get her pregnant, and then slap her with his belt if there wasn’t enough beer in the fridge. And after a while, trust me, there’s never enough. Evi had seen what happened to women who lost their heads over a bastard.”
It was the first time I had heard Werner use that kind of language.
“Evi had a plan. She graduated with the highest marks and won a scholarship to university. Both she and Markus were bilingual, but her mother refused to speak Italian and had taught Evi to call herself Baumgartner, so when she had to choose what university to go to, Evi opted for Austria.”
“What department did she choose?”
“Geology. She loved these mountains. The Bletterbach, above all. The Bletterbach was where she took her younger brother when things at home got bad and it was in the Bletterbach, or so they say, that she realized she was in love.”
“With Kurt?” I asked, already sure of the answer.
“They knew each other, because in a small village everyone knows everyone, but they led different lives. Kurt was five years older than Evi, he was an Alpine guide and an accomplished rescuer. He came from a good family. His father, Hannes Schaltzmann, was a friend of mine.” He broke off, and for a moment his eyes were veiled with sadness. “A dear friend. It was Hannes who passed on his love for the mountains to his son.”
“Was Hannes also in the rescue team?”
“One of the leading lights. He was the one who raised the money to buy the Alouette. I remember that Kurt was always urging us to use that little machine to fly tourists over the Dolomites for a good price, but, although it was a brilliant idea, we didn’t listen. The Alouette was for saving lives, not for making holidaymakers happy. Don’t go thinking he was greedy, though. As an Alpine guide Kurt didn’t earn much, and as a rescuer he earned even less, given that we were all volunteers. But for Kurt, money wasn’t important. His reward was the mountains.”
“Was it a happy love story between Evi and Kurt?”
Werner smiled. “The kind you only see in fairy tales. Evi had clear ideas about her future. University, graduating with top marks, a doctorate, then the Natural History Museum in Bolzano, which people were talking about a lot at the time. She was ambitious. Her dream was to become the curator of the geology department. And in my opinion, she would have done it, she was that good. Once she got started at Innsbruck, she immediately stood out in the classroom. And remember, she hadn’t had an easy life. Imagine the girl, a mountain girl speaking our dialokt, who starts debating the know-it-alls at the university, some of whom had started their careers in the thirties or forties. I don’t know if I’m making myself clear. In spite of all that, she got excellent marks. She started publishing papers. She was a rising star.”
I shuddered. I too had been called fifty percent of a rising star. It was a label that brought bad luck. Really bad luck.
“When did she go to Innsbruck?”
“Evi left in ’81, leaving Markus behind. He was a minor, and his mother, as people say in such cases, wasn’t in her right mind, but Markus could take care of himself. Evi left and Kurt went to live with her the following year, 1982, the year Italy won the World Cup.” Werner burst out laughing. “Quite a few long faces around here!”
“Still for ethnic reasons?”
“We supported Germany.”
“Not Austria?” I asked innocently.
Werner’s immediate response made me laugh, too. “Have you ever seen the Austrian national team play? They might as well have raised a white flag.”
“How stupid it all seems.”
“Think of it this way, Jeremiah: if you’re talking about soccer, you don’t have time to make bombs.” A brief pause. “Kurt was in love and so he left. When Hannes told me that his son, his only son, was going to Innsbruck to live with Evi, well, even though I considered myself fairly broad minded, it was a bit shocking even for me.”
“Why?”
Werner cleared his throat, embarrassed. “Around here we’ve always been a bit conservative, you understand?”
“They weren’t married.”
“And had no intention of getting married. They said that marriage was a tradition from the old days. I tried to convince Hannes that it wasn’t such a bad thing. You see, when Kurt left to live with Evi, he and his father stopped talking to each other, and I didn’t like that. And besides, I was fond of Evi, she was a good girl. But Hannes could never accept it. Like a lot of people in Siebenhoch,” Werner added bitterly.
“Because of Evi’s surname?”
“Evi already had one sin to atone for—being half Italian. Now she was cohabiting with her boyfriend, in a world that still hadn’t even coined the word. Cohabitation. Cohabitation was fine for film stars, but certainly not for the hard-working people of Siebenhoch. But do you want me to tell you the whole truth?”
“I’m here to listen.”
Werner stopped.
We had reached a point where there was a hairpin bend above a forty-meter drop. We were exposed to the breeze from the west, which was starting to turn into a wind. It wasn’t cold yet, though.
“Even though it may make you see Siebenhoch in a new light?”
“Of course.”
“Evi had taken one of Siebenhoch’s best sons away. He was a good boy and they were a good match but, as always in such cases, it never occurred to anyone that going to Innsbruck had been his own idea and not a kind of . . . plot on Evi’s part to steal one of the most eligible bachelors in the village for herself.”
“What sons of bitches.”
“You can say that again, although out of love for my country I ought to punch you in the nose. Absolute shits. Then time passed, and, as happens in little villages like ours, Evi and Kurt vanished from memory. If it hadn’t been for Markus, I don’t think anyone would have gone on talking about them.”
“Because Markus had stayed here.”
“He’d go to school then spend his days wandering in the mountains. When he could, he went to work as an apprentice in a carpentry shop in Aldino, to earn a little bit of money. Evi and Kurt would come to Siebenhoch just to see him. In spite of my efforts to make Hannes see reason, he and Kurt were still not speaking.”
Having spent a good half of my life quarreling with my own father and the other half realizing how like him I was, I immediately understood.
“They didn’t come often. No European Union, no reduced prices, and above all no credit cards for Evi and Kurt. Traveling cost an arm and a leg. Evi had her scholarship and, knowing her, I’m sure she had a part-time job even up there. Kurt on the other hand found the sterotypical job for an Italian immigrant.”
“Pizza maker?”
“Waiter. They were happy and they had a future. I won’t it hide from you . . .”—he stopped and asked me for a cigarette—“. . . That’s what I find the hardest to take about this business. Kurt and Evi had a future in front of them. A wonderful future.”
; We smoked in silence, listening to the wind bending the treetops.
Less than ten kilometers away, the Bletterbach was eavesdropping on our conversation.
“Some people in the village said it was the Lord who had punished them for their sins.”
Werner’s words hit me like a whip. I was disgusted.
“What happened on April 28, Werner?”
Werner turned to me so slowly that I thought he hadn’t understood the question. “Nobody knows for certain what happened that day. I can only tell you what I saw and did. Or rather, what I saw and did between April 28 and 30 of that damned year 1985. Let’s make a pact, Jeremiah.”
He was deadly serious.
“What kind of pact?”
“I’ll tell you everything I know, without leaving anything out, and in return you promise me that you won’t let yourself be devoured by this story.”
He had used the German verb Fressen, which means eating in the sense used for animals. For men, the verb is Essen, to eat.
Beasts devour.
“That’s what happens to anybody who becomes too involved with the Bletterbach killings.”
The hair stood up on my head.
The breeze had become a wind and seemed to me to be hissing.
“Tell me.”
At that moment my cell phone rang, making us both jump.
“I’m sorry,” I said, annoyed at the interruption.
The line was bad and it took me a while to understand.
It was Annelise. And she was crying.
The Saltner
I flung open the car door without waiting for the engine to stop and rushed into the house. Annelise was sitting in my favorite armchair in the middle of the living room.
Without saying anything I kissed her. She smelled of coffee and ironing.
Beneath the Mountain Page 6