Free Eva Sleeps by Francesca Melandri, Katherine Gregor Page B

to comment.
    â€œPolice everywhere, all over the world, beat people up,” he replied.
    The conspirators talked. All of them. The network of attackers of the Night of Fires was dissolved in less than a month. Two of them were tortured to death in jail. Some time later, the carabinieri who tortured them were tried for cruel and unusual treatment and all were acquitted.
    There was a full-page headline in huge characters on the front page of the newspaper Alto Adige on 23 June 1961:
    Â 
    BOLZANO IS AN INTEGRAL PART
OF THE ITALIAN STATE.
    IT WOULD BE BEST IF EVERYBODY
ACKNOWLEDGED THIS REALITY.
    Â 
    â€œThe bombs are driving tourists away.”
    That’s what the people in the town were saying when Gerda went home at the end of the season.
    Meanwhile, Peter had managed to get married. Leni, a small, dark girl like Johanna, but who liked dancing, had gone to live with the Hubers, and was now expecting a child. Gerda’s sister Anne-Marie, too, had got married a couple of years earlier, and joined her husband in Vorarlberg. Since then, her parents hadn’t seen her: going to visit her would have been a journey/hike.
    â€œThe bombs are driving tourists away.” It was especially the members of the new Consortium and its president, Paul Staggl, who were saying it.
    The poorest among Hermann’s schoolmates, the one who would join him and Sepp Schwingshackl on the way to school, had become a man with reddish hair, pale, reptilian eyelids, a rough voice, the wide-set legs of someone who owes his success solely to his own abilities. Out of the steep, shady land that had kept his family in grinding poverty for generations, he had made his fortune. At the end of the 1920s, while Hermann was being taught to drive a truck as a reward for becoming a Fascist, young Staggl had built a rudimentary pulley on his land. The adventurous skiers who would climb up to the pastures above the town, armed with long skis and seal skins, would attach themselves to it so as to be taken uphill, and save time and effort. In the beginning, the pulley was operated by his father’s large draft horse, but soon enough Paul earned enough from the toll paid by the skiers to be able to afford a generator.
    When his father died, during those troubled 1930s when Hermann had become first a Fascist then a Nazi, Paul had convinced his mother and two still unmarried sisters to rent out the rooms of their maso to those same skiers who were using the rudimentary ski lift. What could be better for German sportsmen than to wake up early in the morning and be already at the foot of a ski slope, and on the right side of the Alps, the south side, at that? Soon, business was going so well that Paul was able to invest in enlarging the house next to the barn. Its most sensational novelty was the creation of a real toilet, and not in the courtyard but—an unheard-of luxury—inside the house: so when nature called on a winter’s night you wouldn’t have to go out in the open anymore. Paul invited the entire neighborhood to the inauguration party. He behaved with great generosity: not only did he show his neighbors the immaculate
Wasser Klosètt
, but insisted they try it in person. To make sure the exceptional occasion was exploited to the full by everyone, adults and children alike, he got his mother and sisters to prepare large quantities of
Zwetschgnknödel
—prune dumplings.
    The
Wasser Klosètt
was tested by the neighbors time and again. The waste outlet didn’t get blocked. It was a memorable party and people were to talk about it for many years to come.
    Â 
    At the time of the Option, Paul Staggl had kept a low profile. He had avoided taking dangerous stands, opting to be transferred according to the wishes of the authorities. Good businessman that he was, however, he had taken into account the fact that the imminent war would postpone, prolong, perhaps even interrupt everything. It turned out to be one of his many