‘I talk to B. every day,’ Ed confessed to me once. How many years since she left us? I’ve forgotten and feel guilty. I watch Khatuna and wonder whether this rosy-cheeked, button-eyed girl is a harbinger of happiness. Ed and I are fifty now, I think. His hair is white and thinning, his belly straining at the cummerbund. I am no longer François’ long-legged, sun-kissed California girl. Ed is no longer B.’s maverick love, the water-balloon king of UC Santa Cruz.
I hear my guests burst into applause and Khatuna smiles, relieved. Then she stands up and belts out a Donizetti aria like a pro.
The evening draws to a close. It was not a complete disaster, although the verdict of my King has yet to be heard.
‘Have you had enough?’ the Duchess asks Roger. We can’t tell whether she’s referring with ennui to the festivities or his liquor intake. She turns to Peter and confesses as they depart, ‘Thank you for the invitation. I should explain. I didn’t want to come this evening for one simple reason. I grew up in this village and hated every minute of it.’
Still dressed, my boys have disappeared to the third floor and collapsed under their thick duvets. Charlotte, still robed like a Richelieu princess in layers of festive purple taffeta, is snoring on the playroom floor. The unwatched Pocahontas video dribbles softly in French.
The indefatigable Eva-Marie is playing caroms expertly against Jean by the fireside. As the little wooden disks ricochet into the corner pockets, V. watches nervously. ‘I hope she’s not playing for money. Émilie was always calculating the odds, but one night in Versailles, she lost heavily.’
‘What was heavy in your day?’
‘Eighty-four thousand livres. I warned her, in English of course, that she was playing with cheats.’
He clears his throat, recalling his ill-timed lèse-majesté. ‘Unfortunately, one or two onlookers understood English. We had to evacuate the court the same night.’
‘Party was over, huh?’
‘Totalement.’ He nods his head with regret at the abrupt loss of his day job as Court Historiographer.
Slowly, coats are gathered, the baby bed collapsed, Estelle carried away in Catherine’s arms, the heavy-lidded Charlotte wrapped up in a heavy blanket, farewells and good wishes exchanged once more.
Outside, a few of V.’s candles still flicker bravely from the pines, although some of the glasses on the mounds of snow have cracked open from the cold. V. and I spot a telltale oyster shell pushed into the snow and surrounded by cat prints. We exchange smiles with conspiratorial relief
Peter waves off the last of the guests. My husband, who claims he needs no social life, who has no ‘real friends,’ who first seemed indifferent to the suggestion of a party, is flushed and happy, loving and young. Despite the early morning hours, that persistent look of harassed fatigue has disappeared from his face.
We sleep late the next morning. In the afternoon, life resumes some normalcy. Our first holiday season in our new Swiss home draws to a close.
V. finds me throwing a dozen white napkins in the washing machine and emptying the third load of plates from the dishwasher. We discover a flowerpot on the terrace table filled to the brim with cigarette butts.
He is looking slightly less perky than usual. My suspicions about the empty champagne bottle in the kitchen are confirmed. He winks at me over the high collar of his best white matelasse dressing gown, with its oversized buttons lining the wide cuffs and the six gold-tasseled bows on either side of the lapels.
He clears his throat, politely raising his eyebrows. ‘How was the King this morning?’ he ventures.
I blush a little, thinking of my exhausted husband left sleeping off his happy dissipation and connubial pleasures in our chambers. ‘I don’t think Pompadour would have complained at the royal reaction.’
‘Bien.’
Chapter Sixteen BIRTH AND DEATH IN EXILE
My offspring have fallen in love with the movie Casablanca.
Theo seems especially impressed when the raffish Vichy officer, Captain Reynaud, switches allegiances to join Rick and the Resistance. So I am not too startled one day by the following scene: our Polish-American friend, Joanna, arrives from New York on a working visit from her office with Human Rights Watch to observe the Geneva session of the UN Commission for Human Rights. Theo knows that Joanna is fighting for the ‘underdog,’ and he greets her formally at our front door in a homemade Vichy uniform. He gives her a snappy salute and announces, ‘Unoccupied Switzerland Welcomes you to St-Cergue!’
Certainly, St-Cergue does seem removed from the world, the least likely place to find reflections of a post-Cold War Switzerland seeking a new identity. It’s hard to believe that Switzerland holds more foreigners per capita than any other Western European country, even Germany; foreign-born residents comprise 18% of the Swiss population, compared to 9% in the U.S.
And four of those foreign-born are us.
Moving here requires rotating my psychological compass. It takes more than a few months for the body and mind to shift its deepest bearings, to automatically reckon the new time zones between my aunt in Detroit, or e-mail buddies in Beijing, New York, Buenos Aires and Harare—and me. I slowly shift my sense, not only of this place, but of my new coordinates on the broader map.
‘You’re not the first,’ says V. Despite the cold weather, he suggests a walk into the hills overlooking the village. Alexander, worried his mother will lose her way, offers to come along.
‘I’m only going to see the Vieux Château,’ I tell Alexander, repeating Voltaire’s proposal.
‘You won’t find it,’ Alexander warns me.
‘Sure I will.’ I’ve completely misread the skepticism on my junior historian’s face.
Huge clumps of snow thump off the overhanging pines as we set off. Voltaire hobbles along in those hand-made boots, leaning on his walking stick.
‘To defend their property around here, the good, ahem, monks of the Abbey of Saint-Oyens nearby decided in 1279 to build a château that could overlook the entire lake all the way to Geneva and beyond. And because they were monks, they inveigled the wealthiest neighbor, the Seigneur de Thoiry, to build it for them. It was constructed on the ruins of a look-out left by the ancient Romans.’
‘You won’t find it,’ Alexander sings to me, shivering hands thrust deep into his anorak.
Sure enough, after twenty minutes of hard climbing, we arrive at a breathtaking summit with a clear view of the Alps, Lac Leman, and Geneva shimmering in the distant haze.
‘Where’s the château?’ I demand. V. is futilely thrashing at the bushes with his stick for traces of a thirteenth-century castle.
Alexander stands facing me, hands outstretched in frustration.
‘Mama, I’ve been trying to get your attention all the way here. The château was destroyed in 1476 when Charles-the-Bold rook refuge after his defeat at Morat. The Bernese promised to rebuild it, and sent an engineer, but . . .’
‘Well, I’m pissed off. I was promised a thirteenth-century
fortress.’
‘By whom?’
Should we break the news to V. over there, scrambling around on his hands and knees, scraping at underbrush, and muttering to himself, ‘Damnable monks!’
‘Come here, Mama,’ says Alexander. I follow him to the edge of the precipice. ‘This was the highest lookout of the Roman cavalrymen sent to Nyon by Julius Caesar. In 1958, two archaeologists excavated this site. They found nine skeletons right here, all buried facing that way,’ his thin arm stretches southeastwards, towards Rome. Proof we are hardly the first and surely not the last to adjust our bearings in exile.
Europe, too, is shifting its bearings and its center, broadening out to embrace tentatively the east. Meanwhile, is my version of Switzerland—which extends roughly from Peter’s first floor office in Geneva up the lakeshore coast of suburbs and mounting the fifty-five curves from Nyon to St-Cergue—is my little corner of this country in a state of social flux?
As far as I can see, no.
> One of St-Cergue’s old ‘ruling families,’ the Jaquet clan, still holds primacy, thanks to their ownership of a fleet of mammoth snow plows. They’ve held sway in an unbroken line from their eighteenth-century dominance of the cowherd chalet rentals in summer to the management of the hockey team at the turn of the last century. Some things don’t change.
Occasionally the outside world intrudes. One morning the mothers in the schoolyard gossip that a bearded man wearing a Kosovo Liberation Army insignia had been seen waiting for a train. The Albanians buy some of their arms down in Geneva. What was he doing up here?
Likewise, rumors fly when a Russian mafioso’s wife tips a maternity nurse at the Genolier clinic a thousand francs, fresh from the laundry of some Genevan bank.
Such are the ripples of contact with the darker world that lies east of us. Supposedly there are some 40,000 Chinese immigrants poised on the border of the former Yugoslavia just waiting for ‘snakeheads’ to smuggle them westward. Please, I pray, drop off a couple of decent Sichuanese cooks at the base of our hill.
I wait in vain.
There is a Bosnian refugee family living in an apartment at the top of the little ski run behind our road, but this is small beer compared to the immigrant influx down in Geneva. The father cleans chimneys and the mother cleans houses. Both look exhausted as they climb the steep slope to their quartier every evening. One day in the parking lot, I’m asked to sign a petition to allow the immigrant mother and father to work legally. As a Swiss-passport holder, I sign, thanking God that the entire village is not exercising a similar door-to-door referendum on me.
During World War II, St-Cergue filled to bursting with Polish, Russian and Dutch refugees, the grocer M. Reymond told Alexander. ‘They built and repaired half our roads.’
Most of the foreigners renting the chalets sprinkled across our mountainside are indeed refugees, not from war, but from recent layoffs at Digital Corp. They’re hardly the type of person who would linger in Rick’s Café offering to trade a night of illicit passion with Captain Reynaud for an exit visa.
There are other echoes of Switzerland’s situation squat in the middle of Europe.
The Swiss daily, Neue Zurcher Zeitung, recently published the Zurich city map issued by Moscow to KGB spies during the Cold War. The best dead-letter drop-off points and anonymous meeting places are carefully transcribed from Swiss-German into Russian Cyrillic letters. Peter finds this hysterically funny, deciphering over dinner the names of his favorite streets and hangouts from the clumsy Russian transliteration back into Zurich dialect. A quick glance shows that the Zurich Zoo Cafeteria was an espionage hotbed.
The faint echoes of that Switzerland, a neutral zone peopled by trench-coated Le Carré wannabes lurking in the Cold between East and West Europe—the memory of that Switzerland—resonates around this map as a quaint joke.
Even St-Cergue was the center of intrigue only fifty years ago, as the only outing allowed the Eastern bloc Communists assigned to diplomatic missions in Geneva. Every weekend, our little village became a Swiss version of the old Bullwinkle cartoon—alive with duplicitous Natashas and their panting Borises swapping secrets and having illicit love affairs.
All in all, one has to admit that at least it was a useful Switzerland. To what purpose now is this Switzerland in the very heart of Europe, yet holding itself aloof, from a European Union about to admit Poland, among others, to its ranks? Time and again, the Swiss vote against union. This conservative sentiment has leaped a generation from the ageing mountain-fast Alpine villagers to the internet-surfing eco-protesters in their twenties fighting the anonymities of corporate globalism. I’m surprised to feel a sneaky admiration for this resistance. After all, what is so appealing up close about the black economy of Berlusconi’s Italy, the corruption of the Chiracs and Dumas in Paris, the racist neo-Nazis in Germany and Austria?
This is not to say Switzerland isn’t still Europe’s mittelground, a halfway house for the merging worlds of post-Yalta, post-Berlin Wall Europe.
I confide to Joanna that I’ve yet to meet anyone in StCergue with whom I’ve got any common interests besides raising children. She’s quick to sympathize.
‘It’s odd you’ve never run into Dzidka Kierkowska,’ she says. ‘I haven’t met her, but we have mutual friends in Geneva. She’s an actress from Krakow who supposedly lives just up the street from here in the apartment complex at the top of the ski slope. She’s exactly your age.’
‘An actress?’ V. speaks up from his revisions of Mérope, a play he claims earned him the first calls for ‘author!’ in the history of the theater. ‘A professional actress? Here in this backwater?’
I’m happy to see my Ghost-in-Residence perk up. Since New Year’s Eve, he’s been ailing with one complaint after another. He announced one morning that one of his teeth had fallen out. I was horrified, but he’s taken this dental disaster in his stride.
‘‘Just another consequence of a malady with which I was born, Life.’ He shrugs. He tosses his tooth in the wastebasket, where it vanishes from sight.
‘No wonder you don’t eat. That’s the third molar you’ve lost since I met you.’
He looks surprised at my distress. ‘Madame, everyone has within him, from the first moment of his life, the cause of his death. We must live with the foe until he kills us.’
He’s looking older every day, complains that he is ‘an old man,’ that anybody over forty has no right to feel as old as he does. Or did he say fifty? Happily, the news of an actress in the neighborhood brings a smile to his face for the next day or two.
‘Aren’t you a little old for actresses?’ I tease. ‘‘Just this week you were saying that you’d given up women, even your dear Émilie, at the age of forty-six out of sheer physical exhaustion.’
‘Poor Émilie found my amorous retirement hard to accept,’ he acknowledges. ‘I don’t suppose it was much of a comfort to her that I delivered the bad news as poetically as I could.’ He waves an ink blotter in the air, marking the rhythm of his lines:
Si vous voulez que j’aime encore,
Rendez-moi l’âge des amours,
Au crépuscule de mes jours
Rejoignez s’il se peut, l’aurore.
On meurt deux fois, je le vois bien,
Cesser d’ aimer et d’être aimable
C’est une mort insupportable,
Cesser de vivre ce n’est rien.
Du ciel alors daignant descendre,
l’amitié vint a mon secours,
Elle est plus égale, aussi tendre
Et moins vive que les amours.
Touche de sa beauté nouvelle,
Et de sa lumiere éclairée,
Je la sui vis mais je pleurais
De ne plus pouvoir suivre qu’elle.
If you wish me still to love,
Bring me back the age of loving.
In the twilight of my days,
Revive if possible, the dawn.
We die twice, I see it well,
To cease to love and be lovable
Is an unbearable death.
To cease living, that’s nothing.
Then deigning to fall from heaven,
Friendship came to my rescue,
Steadier and more tender,
Less lively than affairs.
Touched by her new beauty,
And by her illuminated light,
I followed her, but would weep
To be able to follow only her.
‘You gave up sex at forty-six because you were too old? Peter didn’t even marry me ’til he was forty-eight!’
He shakes his head, which makes his wig shift slightly back from his balding forehead.
‘She’d worn me out. Well, you know Émilie. She didn’t take it well. I suppose my suggestion we be no more than friends was a sad surprise for her. She had a very ardent nature and had to take hot baths every morning to subdue her needs.’
‘That’s okay, I don’t need to hear the details.’ I’m blushing.
‘I agree. Let’s change the subject. When does the Polish beauty visit?’ he asks, brightening up.
‘This Saturday, for a buffet lunch. The Polish actress, her professor husband Henryk, Joanna’s two Polish friends Dzidek and Beta, who are international human rights experts, and a Polish explorer who at sixty-five is about to launch a solo crossing to the North Pole. His name is Jurek.’
‘Just like Lunéville!’ he exclaims. ‘Just like Maupertuis’ expedition to Lapland! Oh, how well I remember it! He came back with two Lap sisters, both his lovers. Exotic trifles, but hard to discard later.’
‘Looneyville? I know my New Year’s Party was shambolic, but—’
‘Tsk, tsk, Lunéville, Madame, the Polish court-in-exile in Lorraine, where Madame du Châtelet and I were forced to take refuge after the gambling incident in Versailles.’
‘Oh, that.’
‘Yes, that. Well, I couldn’t stay shuttered up in the Château de Sceaux forever, could I? I hid out there for months, writing one little novel after another to amuse my hostess, the old Duchesse du Maine. Let’s see, I wrote five short novels—’
‘—only five, think of that—’ Here I am still struggling with that damned Tibet mystery. I hate him.
He ticks them off on his bony fingers, ‘Babouc, Memnon, Scarmentado, Micromégas, Zadig—’
‘Where was Émilie?’
‘Oh, busy paying off the 84,000 livres she lost at the gaming tables, and apologizing to those scoundrels. Everybody promised to forgive and forget, especially the biggest cheats, but still—’ his voice trails off.
Émilie, it seems to me, was left to fend for herself.
‘Who was in this Polish court—?’
‘—In-exile. You recall Maurice’s father, Augustus the Strong had kicked out—’
‘Why King Stanislaus Leszczynski, of course! Wait a minute. That means you fled Versailles and the wrath of Queen Marie by taking refuge with—’
A Visit From Voltaire Page 19