Eva Sleeps (27 page)

Now, the bells, whose noon tolling the soldiers on board their vans had once mistaken for a warning signal, were ringing for a funeral. Lukas, the sacristan, a little older now, the hairs on his sinewy forearms a little grayer, was pulling at the thick rope hanging from the belfry. The hollow sound seemed to be descending, as though weighed down by its own load, into the town, toward the highway from which, every so often, rose the isolated rumble of a car engine, toward the river that glistened in the July light at the bottom of the valley.

Besides his closest relatives, there was just a small group of
Schützen
there to pay homage to Peter, the comrades with whom he had boarded the Bus of Tears in order to attend the Milan trial. They hadn't followed him in his more extreme choices, hadn't gone to hide in the forest or ordered attacks; however, they had carried on with the parades for the redemption of the
Heimat
on
Herz-Jesu
day, the anniversary of the heroic resistance against Napoleon. Once, while peeling potatoes in her
Stube
, Maria had silently wondered what all that display of weapons, those marches, and those orders, screamed worse than at war, had to do with the heart of Our Lord. And Sepp had said that as far as he knew Napoleon hadn't bothered anyone for a century and a half, not even that poor devil buried in the soil, who now had a right to rest.

More and more people thought that way about the
Schützen
. As for those with their
Lederhosen
, their waistcoats with green and red straps, their white lace socks, and little shoes with silver buckles, they really looked as though they had remained stuck in the times when Napoleon was waging war on Europe. The
Schützen
, who were the last remaining terrorist sympathizers, would have liked to fire a few blank shots in Peter's honor, as befitting the memory of a hero; but, during that period of attacks and checkpoints, the authorities had suspended the Schützen their privilege of bearing arms, even those ridiculous trombone-shaped rifles that followed such inconsistent and random trajectories that it was a miracle you didn't shoot yourself in the face. Therefore, no salute, just a wreath of flowers and a scroll with Gothic lettering:
Im Schoß der Heimaterde
, in the womb of the native soil.

Leni stared at the coffin. She was the only one there who had seen its contents. Seeing with her own eyes the matter that had been her husband (she had identified him through a scar on a fragment of ankle) had left neither pain, nor repulsion, nor anger but rather a kind of cosmic perplexity. Ulli and Sigi hung from her arms like small, unripe fruits, a question on their uncertain little faces: would this incomprehensible storm leave them attached to the branch, or would it, sooner or later, knock them down to the ground?

Hermann was reasonably presentable. He had washed, shaved, and even his Sunday suit was clean, with just a moth hole here and there. The last hands to soap it, rinse it, hang it out to dry, then put it back in the drawer with bags of rice against the damp, had been Johanna's—whose funeral Hermann had attended in his work clothes, his truck loaded with timber parked outside the cemetery. However, as they lowered his son's coffin into the rectangular hole, the nakedness of his sorrow was almost obscene. His eyes looked like the genitals in a porn photo: as raw and impersonal as pure living flesh.

The bus from Bolzano got a flat tire on the way and Gerda arrived half an hour late. She'd also had to go and pick up Eva from the Schwingshackls. Trying to keep up with her mother's large strides, and clutching with her fat baby fingers her mother's now callous hand, Eva was ecstatic at this unexpected visit, but also worried. She was confused by her mother's drawn face, which hadn't smiled at her once, the expression with which she held her hand tight, and especially by the explanation she'd been given: Gerda had come to say a last goodbye to Uncle Peter. Not only did Eva have no memory of Uncle Peter, but what was a “last goodbye”? What if you say it to a person and then meet them again? Eva had asked Ulli to explain but even he didn't know what to answer. So they went together to Cousin Wastl, who had clarified everything once and for all.

“If, after you've said the ‘last goodbye' to someone, you then meet them again and they say
Grüß Gott
³⁴
, you must turn away and pretend you haven't heard. It's totally forbidden to use another greeting once you've said your ‘last goodbye,' as the word implies.”

It wasn't that difficult after all, Wastl had added, you just had to pay attention. You could still talk to the person, and even ask how they were doing, but you had to be very careful never to use any form of greeting,
griastl
,
servus
,
pfiati
and (definitely not)
fwiedersehaugn
. You especially must never say “see you soon” again.

By the time they reached the cemetery, the coffin was already in the ground. Gerda stood apart, watching the undertaker throwing shovelfuls of soil on the pine coffin. A
Schütze
, of about thirty, the same age as Peter, approached. “Your brother was a hero,” he said softly. Not to her but to the cleavage that peered out of the white shirt under the black, mourning pinafore. Then he smiled at her as though everything was agreed between them, and Gerda did not lower her eyes.

Eva, however, was worried. Uncle Peter, to whom she had to say her last goodbye, had already gone and she hadn't been able to see his face. So now how would she recognize him if she met him? How could she be certain she wouldn't say goodbye to him again and inadvertently say, “see you soon”?

Later, as they were leaving the cemetery, Gerda said to Eva, “That man's your
Opa
³⁵
.”

They'd just put a bunch of flowers in a pewter vase engraved with a heart around the letters Jhs on Johanna's grave. As they were walking away, a tall man who was too thin for his moth-eaten suit had approached the headstone.

Gerda had said it without looking back: obviously the blood link between her daughter and “that man” didn't concern her. Eva kept staring at the man. She saw him remove the flowers she and Gerda had put in the pewter vase and throw them into the alleys between the two graves, the no man's land that separates the dead. The man looked up and met her gaze. She started walking, her face turned back so she could keep looking at him, her hand held tight by her mother, who was on her way to the iron gate, and tripped on a black marble headstone.

That's how Eva learned what an
Opa
was: a skinny old man who makes you feel sad to be alive if he looks you in the eye.

 

The owner of the small ground-floor room where Gerda lived when she wasn't working let her stay there with her little girl. Even though they were right in the middle of the summer season, there were few tourists during that year of bombs and attacks, and many rooms were vacant. Eva was lying on the bed next to her mother's body, in a slip. She demanded that body like when she was an unweaned baby.

She knew very well that four was too old to be given the breast, but on that unscheduled evening, Gerda was more patient than usual, and Eva intended to take advantage.

There was a knock at the door. Unpleasant things that have no reason to exist should be ignored, so Eva carried on trying to sneak under her mother's armpit, breathing in. But Gerda raised herself on her elbow and tensed up, listening. There was another knock, accompanied by a man's voice: “Gerda?
Bische do
?”
³⁶

Pulling her muslin slip down to her knees, Gerda went to open the door. It was the Schütze who, at the cemetery, had called Peter a hero. He was no longer in the uniform of the Andreas Hofer followers, but in normal peasant clothes. His eyes were sparkling with drink, but not a lot of drink, just enough to get his courage up.

“Is Eva asleep?” he asked, putting a hand on Gerda's bare shoulder.

She looked at Eva, who, from the bed, was staring at the intruder with silent dislike, then pushed the man's hand off her shoulder.

“No,” she replied and closed the door in his face.

So that was something else Eva learned that day: not being asleep keeps you safe.

I
can picture two travelers. They come from far away, perhaps from another continent, like the Indians in the compartment next door, who are constantly talking on their cellphones, or the American girls. One is looking at the Italy that runs past the window on the right, the other one on the left.

Two worlds. On the right-hand side of the train, the promontory of Gaeta springs like the mythical head of a cetacean from the waters of the Mediterranean. Descending toward the glistening sea are olive and citrus groves, yellow, fuchsia, and red fields. Colors of abundance, of generosity, of a good life. On the left-hand side, in the distance, there's a parade of rough, hard, grim inland mountains. Even though they're much lower than our glaciers, they're no less intimidating. Even the climates are different. A young, spring light is shining on the plain and the sea; inland, however the peaks are wrapped in gloomy, heavy clouds that seem to have been produced by the mountains themselves.

“What a sunny, fertile, cheerful country,” says the first traveler.

“It's so desolate, harsh, hostile . . . ” says the second.

When they tell each other what they've seen, nobody will believe that they've traveled along the same stretch of Italy.

 

On the four or, at most, five-hour journey between the Brenner and Bologna, there's always a restaurant car. There's bound to be one on the Rome-Reggio Calabria train. But no.

“There used to be one but they removed it,” the train attendant says when he appears at the compartment doors, announced by the clanking of the refreshments trolley. He brings water, carbonated drinks, salted crackers, mass produced snacks. The reason why the only edible things on this train are all junk food is something I learned at school, and which has a ponderous, important name: the “South Question”

The American girls buy two bags of chips.

“And what would you like, Signorina?”

“Those.” I indicate a box of chocolate cookies.

“Two euros ten. Do you have the right change, Signora?”

I count it out into the palm of his hand, the exact amount to the cent.

“Thank you, Signorina.”

Signorina, Signora, Signorina. I'm used to it. My age, in strangers' estimations, sways like a cable car in a thunderstorm. I just smile, as though both forms of address were necessary.

The attendant is a handsome young man, almost exaggeratedly Southern: an open smile, eyebrows joining above his nose, the narrow hips of a dancer. The strategy of Trenitalia is crystal-clear: go ahead and remove the restaurant car, just keep the staff looking good. A shame that his movements leave no doubt that he's a homosexual. What a waste, I think.

Speak for yourself, Ulli replies. Just as if he were sitting next to me on this southbound train.

 

When I was a little girl I wondered: why is it that Ulli never paws me? All the boys of my age did it, or tried to, or waited to pluck up the courage to. But not him. Never. Was it because we'd grown up together? Because he was my cousin? You must be kidding. Getting your hands on your teenage cousins is a rite of passage, almost a social obligation. So that wasn't the problem. But then why not? I had no idea.

Ulli's puberty seemed to go on forever. By the time his voice began to break, the other boys had been looking at my neckline a lot more than into my eyes for a while. His peers were already dressing up their desperate urge for sex with vulgar casualness, while he still didn't have a single hair on his body. Then, one day, when he was almost twenty, Ulli told me he'd been with a woman. Following a well-established tradition, his sexual initiation had been undertaken by a German tourist.

“Was she beautiful?” I asked.

“She was skilled,” he replied, and I knew I had nothing to fear. He talked about it as though it was a completed task, a milestone reached. There was nothing strange there: all young boys talk like that about the loss of virginity. But in their case, finding a girl who'd go
all the way
, and being able to cling to her precariously and clumsily at least once, was just a catalyst to do it again, and again, and again. Ulli, however, looked like a climber who had come back down after going up Mount Everest: now that he'd reached the peak, he didn't have to go back up any more.

When he confided in me his first relationship with a man, he was completely different: his eyes were dilated from the enormous discovery, its terror and excitement.

“This is what I am,” he said, as though he'd found his own name after a long search. And never again did he mention that North European girl, his first and his last.

Only many years later, when he'd already heard people (men, never women, not even the most narrow-minded ones) say to him things like, “Hitler is what your sort need,”; when his mother had already assured him that, naturally, she still loved him, but that he should simply go to the doctor and that, nowadays, there was no disease that was incurable, so there was sure to be a medicine for this one too; only after he'd already been to Berlin and London, where he'd felt like a man among many—hooray!—a banal homosexual man; after I'd already lent him my bed several times so that he and his lovers wouldn't roam around the woods like cats on heat, after all that had already happened, only then did he confess that, in order to be able to penetrate the girl's long, blonde body, he'd had to close his eyes and imagine that she was a man.

As usual, we were in the warm cabin of Marlene. There had been little snow and the cannons for whitening the ski pistes even in the warmest winters weren't there yet. Every night, Ulli would struggle against the patches of brown that grew wider, like melanomas on the skin of the mountain, shoveling, distributing, and moving snow from the edges of the pistes to the center. He always told me everything, or so I thought. About the train station toilets; about his military service in Veneto (“not all soldiers go with women, you know? Least of all officers.”); about meetings in public parks, almost faceless bodies, disembodied genitals. And yet he'd been so ashamed of the secret fantasies he needed in order to possess that only woman, he'd kept quiet about them for years. I couldn't understand this. So I asked him to explain.