Eva Sleeps by Francesca Melandri, Katherine Gregor

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.
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    â€œGood 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
.
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    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.
    â€œIt’s colder in here than at the top of Mount Ortler in January. Have you ever been there?”
    She shook her head.
    â€œNeither have I. If you don’t want to die young, wrap up well before coming in here all sweaty.”
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    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.
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    * * *
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    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