Eva Sleeps (10 page)

Countless ready dishes would appear and disappear swiftly from the serving hatch counter, like raindrops on a window during a storm. The executed order notes were speared by Herr Neumann onto a spike next to the serving hatch. At particularly hectic times, with a slight grunting effort and satisfaction, he would sometimes push down twenty notes at once. Woe to anyone who, through inexperience or absent-mindedness, dared to replace him in this task: only the head cook could sanction that an order had been executed to perfection, delivered and, therefore, archived. Once, a young, recently hired Ladino man thought a slip of paper containing an order that had already been delivered had been forgotten on the counter, so he dared spear it onto the spike. Herr Neumann said nothing. He simply grabbed the assistant cook by the wrist and flattened his hand on the serving hatch counter. Then he took the spike and, with the hard, swift and precise blows he used to pound escalopes, he stuck the iron tip into the wood of the counter in the spaces between two of the young man's fingers. “Next time, it won't be between your fingers,” he said.

After that, nobody ever touched the order slips.

The waiters emptied the dirty plates into a bin next to the door, then placed them on a rack for the dish washer. When Gerda washed a plate, she immediately knew who had brought it back from the dining room. With male waiters, you were lucky enough if they removed the largest leftovers, like chicken bones and ribs. The plates they put on the rack were full of leftover food. Their message was crystal clear: theirs was a superior job, so it was up to her to clean the plates. The women, on the other hand, would throw the leftovers into the bucket, carefully scrape the plates with cutlery and, if they had the time, would even drain excess sauce: the dishes they placed on the rack were much easier to clean. Some of the plates almost looked as if you just needed to wipe them with a cloth and put them away: like the ones brought back by Nina, a waitress from Egna, who was about thirty. The first few times, Gerda had thanked her, but Nina had stood before her, staring with her dark eyes, slightly too close together, ready to carry out the four dishes balanced on her forearms, her feet swollen in orthopedic shoes. “
Lass es
,” she had replied: don't mention it. In other words: better dispense with courtesies here. I come in and out of that door a hundred times a day, so if on top of that I had to thank the cooks for every dish then this would really be hell.

Gerda stopped thanking her. However, Nina's dirty plates still remained the cleanest ones.

The staff had lunch at eleven, while the final basic concoctions were being made on the rings, just before the customers arrived in the dining hall. They ate in a dark little room in the basement under the kitchen, next to the stockroom, waiters on one side and cooks on the other. Herr Neumann cooked for them. He insisted that the staff eat well, and was always improvising something with the leftovers. With leftover roast he would make meatballs with sauce; boiled meats he would shred and stir-fry with potatoes, onion and bay leaves, making a fragrant
Greastl
; mix macaroni with meat sauce with cheese and béchamel, and bake it in the oven; with broth, leftover vegetables and a sprinkle of chives, he would create a risotto. Even so, he did not lunch with them: a chef never leaves his kitchen unattended.

Gerda ate quickly, practically on her feet, three mouthfuls at a time, then rushed upstairs. She didn't enjoy eating and not only because it's hard to work up an appetite when you're constantly surrounded by the smell of food. It's something she never enjoyed, not even when she became a great cook, and not even when she retired—that was also something Eva was to inherit from her. But there was another reason for Gerda to eat so quickly: she wanted to have time to watch what Herr Neumann was doing.

The head cook had noticed how attentively Gerda would observe the stages of food preparation in the various departments. She never asked for explanations but, on the rare occasions when there was a break, she would stare with her pale, elongated eyes at what was happening at the salad and starters counter and the first course and dessert counter and, sometimes, she had the incredible cheek even to watch the meat counter, Herr Neumann's kingdom. Consequently, he decided to check whether this girl who was too shapely and whose gait was too slinky to guarantee a modicum of calm in his kitchen, was wasting time that would be better employed scrubbing plates and glasses, or whether she would learn something. And so, against all the rules, after as little as a year, Herr Neumann promoted Gerda to assistant cook. Hubert muttered heavy hints under his breath about the true reason for this promotion but he didn't have the courage to say anything in front of her, let alone in front of the chef.

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 Johanna 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.