Red Wollen Mittens
by Olivia Rana.
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Eva Volger sits on a wooden stool in the middle of an ordinary kitchen and digs her half-bitten nails into the palms of her hands. ‘Sechs und funfzig, seiben und funfzig,’ she counts, nylon pins pressing hard against her head.
‘What a disgusting nest,’ Mamma Volger spits, pulling the brush sharply through Eva’s tangled hair.
Eva squeezes her eyes shut and wonders what the clouds taste like. She imagines them melting on her tongue like Holy Communion, cinnamon and coconut. When Mamma reaches one-hundred Eva touches her head, hoping for the stickiness of blood and brains.
On Eva’s ninth birthday Mamma buys her a pair of red woollen mittens from Kitzbuhel. It is only September and Eva knows that the snows are a long time away. Mamma makes her wear them in bed and, when the nest doesn’t disappear, she pulls out a roll of brown tape from the bottom drawer of the ordinary kitchen and crafts mittened shackles for Eva’s slender wrists.
As the summer ferns wane back into the ground and the boats with bare-backed boys disappear from nestled lakes, the mittens begin to whisper under the covers. Their threaded mouths pinch angry at the damp night air, drawing Eva into tented darkness.
Muffled against Eva’s pink nightgown, they spit venom about Mamma Volger and Margot Rass. ‘Sshh,’ Eva pleads, but the fisted pair continue to fill a raw mind with a sumptuous feast of bold ideas. She falls into a dream, where woollen fingers wrap tightly around the soft fur of a black cat until its eyes bulge.
Sandwiched between snow-booted tourists with blue smiles, Eva wants to tell them about the ice-man found on the Hauslab ridge, his blackened skin sticking like cling-film to his ribs. They will ask wryly what he was looking for in a glacier wilderness 5000 years ago, but Eva doesn’t know the answer. No-one does.
Instead, she looks out the window of the green and yellow gondola and onto the marzipan rooftops, cosied up against enthroned church steeples. She thinks of Margot Rass and her perfectly braided hair and milk white-teeth. She would be playing flute for her puffed-up pappa, her Mamma’s needles clicking time. She imagines Margot Rass under every marzipan roof except hers, where Mamma Volger’s white floured hands punch dough on a table and her pappa shuffles silently in a darkened room.
When they reach the top of the Hintertux, Eva stands at the edge and looks out at the bristled trees clinging to the mountainsides and the sweep of the Ziller Valley. This is the top of the world, the rest of it the crumbs from Mamma’s floured hands. Eva waits until the chime of the church bells swallow up the stillness.
Inside the wooden house, the smell of Mamma’s fruity stollen fills the air and the Volgers sit rigid at the table. ‘It was Chinese porcelain,’ Mamma whispers in another person’s voice and they look down at the sparkly shards laid out carefully on the Ziller Daily News.
Eva sits tightly on her hands. ‘It must have been the wind,’ she says firmly and they all agree.
As the snowy mountains bear down on them, Pappa sits all day in his blue overalls, chisel nipping carefully at yellow stone. Eva stands in the doorway and watches the faces emerge from yellow dust. He is chiselling Jesus as he preaches in the temple, robed men gathered around. It is almost done and Pappa has a smile sitting ready on his face.
It will go to Vienna, to a tall house with velvet carpets and little girls on bended knees. Eva feels the cold bite around her ankles and she shifts noisily on the wooden floor. The chisel pauses and Eva slips away.
‘Idle hands are the devil’s tools,’ Grandma Volger used to say. Eva wrings the washing out for Mamma and shovels snow from the stony path, but when the night returns with fastened mittens, her helpful hands are no longer her own.
Pappa swears there hadn’t been a chip in the frame. Chipped frames are worse than terrible; they are short, sharp letters and wasted time. The ready smile disappears from his lips and he returns to shuffling in a darkened room. ‘It must have been the mice,’ Eva says, looking out the window at communion clouds.
As the winter stretches and cracks, woollen strands of vengeance continue to weave their wicked ways, disconnecting Eva, who dreams of severed limbs.
When crocuses and sickletops begin to break the thawing earth, Mamma takes Eva on the Zillertal railway. They snake a red trail to Jenbach, where Eva is delivered promptly onto a platform to a tall man with a wide chin. He carries Eva’s blue case and coughs nervously. They drive in a car that smells of rags, wipers scratching as they crawl up into the orange hills.
Inside a moss-green building the tall man surrenders Eva to a room with a desk full of papers and a picture of smiling children with coloured skin. Eva twists her hands on the back of a chair and listens to the silver rain pelting the windowpanes. She thinks of Pappa treading carefully over muddy puddles
When the door opens, it brings with it a rolling woman, hair melted against a worried face. ‘Welcome to your new home,’ she says, smoothing the front of her too-tight jacket. ‘You will call me Ms. Hauser.’
Eva’s hands fall still as she watches Ms. Hauser reach into the top drawer of a cabinet and pull out a file with Eva’s name written across it in big black letters.
‘Eva Volger,’ she says, opening the file wide on the table. ‘Let’s see what has you here,’
Expectant heads turn like bottle-caps when Eva is led into the long, bed-lined room. Ms. Hauser runs a polished finger along the tops of the cupboards, examining the furry returns with a sniff. ‘You will take this one,’ she says, nodding towards a bed with a sunken middle. Then she claps her way out among hurried girls who close cupboard doors and straighten shoes. The room gives nothing away.
Silence hangs in the air as Eva unpacks her case, placing everything in a crumpled pile. Her red woollen mitten peeping out at her eagerly. She examines the dead flies stuck to the window, victims of their own futile escape. And when small girls slip under tight covers and the light bulbs fizz and flicker into darkness, Eva begins to shake.
She dreams about Margot Rass slipping into a frozen lake, her arms flaying as she sinks open-mouthed into the green. Like the ice-man, they will find her in 5000 years, a child skeleton with rotting braids and a sunken smile. And they will ask what she was doing there, but Eva doesn’t know the answer. No-one does.
©2007 By Olivia Rana