The pictures made her think of Tom. Elena was right—he did seem overly pale. And what was he doing with her niece? He was significantly older, not that she had any right to be bothered by this, considering her Hugo. She shouldn’t judge him so quickly. He had just arrived. First impressions were often strong, though.
His vegetarianism Eva found quite interesting. She had heard of this from Elena, about people not eating meat because of the pain and suffering it caused the animals. Because it was morally wrong.
When the Wall came down, she was able to buy meats that she could never get in the East. Pork, beef, chicken, duck, goose. It wasn’t that there wasn’t meat in the East, but it was hard to come by and then it was often very bad quality. Sometimes, after waiting a week to wait in line to get meat, she’d cook it to find it inedible. When she started seeing Hans, he would take her to restaurants that weren’t open to the general public. There they would eat goulash or steaks. Tender, good meats. It was a treat. Mostly, it seemed, she lived off of bread and hard cheese. She had never thought about the animals, only about herself. About her desire for the meat.
She read that in Cuba, every family was given one chicken a month. Before Castro, she wondered how often the families of Cuba ate chicken. Never? Elena would say, “Mutti, before Castro, things were better in Cuba.” But Eva didn’t think Elena was right. Was Tom a more moral person for not eating meat? Was he morally superior to a poor Cuban family who shared their one chicken a month? Eva was not so sure.
At the end of the war, food had been scarce in Leoben. With their father gone and their mother getting sick and not knowing what was wrong with her, before her diagnosis and swift death, and the country in such a crisis, they almost never ate meat. Indeed, they didn’t get enough of anything. For a while, they had rabbits. Liezel would cry when she had to take a rabbit to the butcher. But she greedily ate the meat afterward. It’s true, even the death of a rabbit is a sad thing. They had tried to go to their uncle Lois’s farm and get some eggs and maybe a chicken. Particularly for Liezel. She wasn’t doing well at that time. Eva and Willi were okay, subsiding on broth and bread. Mushrooms picked from the mountainside. They were bigger already, stronger. They were older, they had strength. Liezel didn’t.
Lois’s farm that winter was not what it had been in the past. Eva remembers her mother begging. Begging him. She had wanted him to take Liezel, to let her stay there. Her mother had argued that Liezel could do some work for him, housework and farmwork, even if she was only six—and in return, just to feed her, give her milk from the cows.
Back in Leoben, the neighbors were the ones who saved Liezel from severe malnutrition. There came a time when, every night, Liezel would go to a different neighbor’s house for dinner. How had her mother managed that? She was so sick then, close to the end, close to being bedridden with lupus, and then suddenly, even though it was a long illness, still, death came so suddenly. She suspected that it wasn’t her mother’s idea, sending Liezel around to the neighbors for meals. That it was the old woman downstairs, Frau Heller’s doing. Or perhaps it had been the Schneiders, across the street from them. No matter, it saved Liezel’s life.
After the war, things were going to get better. They all knew that. Their father would come home, fear and deprivation would go away. But then their father was a prisoner in France. By the time their father did return, his wife was severely ill.
She died, and he remarried. Maria.
Willi had filled her in on what happened after she moved to Vienna. Willi came to the East, once, to visit. He stayed for the day—he had business in West Berlin. It was in the late 1970s, maybe. It was long after Liezel had moved to America. Elena was at school and Hugo was dead. He sat across from her in their modest, frankly quite worn living room. She still had the house then. It was before they moved her out. Her brother, a big-boned, successful businessman, smelling strongly of Brut cologne and expensive tobacco. He brought her some delicacies—smoked fish, a bottle of cream, soft, pungent cheeses, good Austrian red wine. They ate and talked, ate and talked.
“He didn’t love her, you know.”
“Maria? Why marry someone you don’t love?” Eva said, bile rising in her. “What can come of that?”
“So that Liezel and I would have a mother. So that someone would look after us.”
“I was your mother. I looked after you.” Eva felt the blackness then, the blackness that seemed now to roll into her the way night lake water rolls over a person. Her heart pounded. Decade after decade could go by and her life so busy and troubled—how could she ever think of her past? Of that long ago, when she truly had no power? How could it still hurt?
“Yeah, but Vati thought you would get married and leave. You were so beautiful. He didn’t trust you’d stay.” He stroked his sister’s hair. She had already started dying it. She was heavier then, too. She was a grown woman, letting her brother comfort her as if she was that young girl again, taking care of a household. Being the woman of the house.
“I would never have left.” Eva knew it was true.
“Vati didn’t know that.” Willi looked down at his hands, where he played with some matches. “She beat us, worse than Vati did.
