Eva Sleeps by Francesca Melandri, Katherine Gregor Page A

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.
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    After spending months in the heat, the shouting and the smells of the large kitchen, the silence that had invaded her parents’ house seemed to Gerda, whenever she went back there, as dense as mud dried after a downpour. Every word that was not strictly necessary, every comment, question, exclamation, adverb and adjective had been buried in it. All that remained were imperative verbs (take this; carry this; go out; wash it; eat