Coming Out Swiss

by Anne Herrmann

  At some point, the second floor or attic is made into another apartment, identical to the ones below it, apart from lower ceilings. The front door, which in Rhigini’s plans faces the open lot, moves to the back. The metal sign on the garden gate alerts passersby to my uncle’s dental practice, which is on the ground floor. On the first floor, my aunt keeps the apartment immaculate, the poodle’s eagerness at the door not a sign that one is encouraged to enter. My grandmother occupies the second floor, where three rooms in her apartment remain unoccupied in anticipation of our yearly return.

  I arrive in Zürich for the first time in 1952 from New York City, when I am six months old. My baptism in the Wasserkirche is presided over by my two godparents. My godfather will never marry, never leave his parental home in Rüschlikon, and never finish his book, which is published posthumously as Politische und militärische Entscheidungen des Zweiten Weltkrieges. Having contracted tuberculosis during the war, which included a stay in a sanatorium in Davos, converted into a hotel I frequent years later to visit my father, he completes his doctorate in political economy only after the war. Eventually he will write a biweekly column for Finanz und Wirtschaft, Switzerland’s equivalent of the Wall Street Journal. He will make a single trip to America, shortly after the death of my mother, whose bedside he has attended as her lifelong friend and admirer, and visits me in New Haven. The battery once again stolen from the Mustang parked outside my apartment building means I will be late for his train.

  My godmother studies art in Zürich at what was then known as the Kunstgewerbeschule, before it became Schule für Gestaltung, then Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, and finally Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, and meets my mother during the war, when they both volunteer for the women’s auxiliary. She will marry a Canadian journalist and shuttle back and forth between England and Canada. The paths of my mother and godmother will cross again, in Montreal, before I am born, where my parents first land in North America, and in London, when I am in fourth grade and my father works for the navy. Once I arrive in New Haven, I regularly visit them, first in Toronto and then in Lyme Regis, where my godmother and her husband retire. She will make pen-and-ink drawings of native grasses and a color diary that travels to the provinces, and write about artists like Christo.

  In my grandmother’s living room, at a large table that occupies most of the space, we eat breakfast but never lunch and dinner. I fetch milk in a metal pail from the grocer across the street. It is unpasteurized and requires boiling and inevitably acquires a skin. I am advised to mask the taste of the skin with Ovaltine, a taste I dislike almost equally. My grandmother eats Swiss honey, which my mother considers too expensive, so for her children she buys honey from multiple Latin American sources. For dinner, my parents go out with the many university friends they have left behind, while my brother and I eat Bleitibrötli and play guessing games on the veranda with my grandmother until the clock on the Catholic church tower strikes eight. My grandmother sits in the wicker chair designated as hers, which we never occupy, even when she’s not there. We never enter her bedroom, which is across from mine, even after she vacates it in the morning with her chamber pot. We never use the bathroom with the bathtub, which has been cut out of the kitchen to make room for my bedroom, as opposed to the WC, which is communal and has only cold running water. My mother washes my hair in the kitchen sink and tells us to take a shower after swimming in the lake at the Strandbad.

  Most days we eat lunch in the cafeteria of a Frauenferein. In 1894 Susanna Orelli-Rinderknecht founds the Frauenverein für Mässigkeit und Volkswohl, renamed in 1910 Zürcher Frauenverein für alkoholfreie Wirtschaften. Her project is to provide nourishing food, in well-lit rooms, with educational reading material and no alcohol. For the female servers, she reduces the workday to a maximum of nine or ten hours, offers medical and accident insurance, and a pension. The giving and receiving of tips is strictly forbidden. The idea for such an eating establishment emerges out of the temperance movement, whose leaders include Hedwig Bleuler-Waser and her husband, Eugen Bleuler, and whose adherents include Marie Heim-Vögtlin, Switzerland’s first woman doctor. Temperance is treated as a public health issue (raw and cooked fruit is better for one’s health than fermented fruit) and as an economic issue (less money needs to be spent on meals). Run as a profitable business offering a social service, the alcohol-free restaurant provides youth, women and children, and those who prefer not to eat by themselves an alternative to the tavern. The enterprise is enormously successful, so much so that by 1909 there are nine such restaurants, including one in the Zürichberg. The Frohsinn, the smallest of them, is a short walk down the Freiestrasse, at Gemeindestrasse 48. All of us, including my grandmother, my uncle, and my aunt, select our dishes and carry our trays into the shade of the garden, trying not to swallow a wasp lured by the sweetness of our unfermented apple juice.

  Sometimes we go to the Kurhaus Zürichberg, in those days also a Frauenverein, at the end of the tramline near the zoo, just past the cemetery where James Joyce is buried. When it opened in 1901, the response of many was dismay that the city’s most beautiful piece of land had been sold to the teetotalers. There was no access road; no sewage, gas, or electricity; only a fountain with drinking water. Horses transported the necessary building materials up the hill. High above the fog, away from the dust and fumes of the city, the Kurhaus offered a terrace with a view of the lake as well as forty rooms for tired workers and exhausted housewives who needed a rest from urban life. Today it is the Hotel Zürichberg, a four-star hotel with a modern addition that has won an architecture prize. It last served sparkling cider on New Year’s Eve in 2000. The restaurant has recently been renovated to accommodate the lone business traveler, who might prefer eating with others at a long, communal table.

  My aunt Alice, who eats only vegetables for lunch, in an attempt to diminish a body considered too large, has a room on the first floor facing the back. It looks out not onto the Freiestrasse, like the verandas, but the garden, filled with flowers and fruit trees, traversed by gravel paths. It faces the back, where rugs are beaten and clothes are hung out to dry, where pine trees and rhododendrons thrive in the shade. The room is unlike its counterpart upstairs, the one my parents share: cluttered, in disarray, filled with acrimony. Apart from a single bed, her room contains an antique armoire lined with Provençal fabric and shelves lined with books, most of them in French.

  French is the language of aristocratic aspirations on the part of a grocer’s daughter who served as governess in a château before marrying into a family of medical professionals. It is the language of Provence, where she drives every summer with my uncle in their Peugeot, accompanied by their poodle, Le Vent. It is the language of the landscapes my uncle paints, oil on canvas: a solitary building, the color of baked clay, whose only reason for existence, apart from a visual one, is marked by the word “Boulangerie.” It is the language of the books she reads while my uncle listens to the radio in High German, before he falls asleep after lunch, before she begins to prepare dinner.

  The fabrics my aunt brings back from France are fashioned into garments that cover an oversized body, in excess of what can be bought off the rack. She buys food only at specialty stores, never from the supermarket. Although she barely eats, her cupboard is filled with tidy rows of chocolate and Konfekt, which she periodically opens and shares with us. Childless, my aunt moves between the kitchen, which as a skilled cook she prohibits others from entering, and my uncle’s dental practice, where she keeps his books for years without pay. An excess that looks away from, that covers up, deprivation. When she dies, my uncle shows me the closet of clothes that can be worn by no one else and replaces her clerical skills with those of an old flame.

  Speaking the Schwyzerdütsch not of Zürich but of eastern Switzerland, with its broader vowels, my aunt has come from elsewhere. My uncle’s second wife. (The first one is never mentioned. She lost her mind; she took her life; she has been forgotten.) Her class origins, her size, her sterili
ty make her a stranger. French is the first language I learn in school, the second Swiss national language I learn to speak. It is foreign, but not strange, like English. I once imagined that if I ever had to live in Switzerland, I would live in Geneva. My aunt’s francophilia is something I fail to share, but her exclusion, figured by her allegiance to a foreign language, is similar to my own.

  This is the room where she dies, in her bed, her glasses still on her nose, her book still in her hand. She dies reading, a book in French, no doubt. This scene, unannounced, so unanticipated, as neatly arranged as the books on her shelves, as the clothes in her closet, at that moment reveals the perfection I imagine I have been striving for. It is like the stillness of a corpse. A stillness, I realize, available only in death. That perfection, whether of temporal precision or spatial order, is what foreigners think of as Swiss. When perfection falls short, the result is embarrassment. Embarrassed, the Swiss come across as unfriendly.

  On the ground floor, my uncle practices dentistry and paints pictures. Sometimes he invites me in and encourages me to choose one of his canvases. I pick the ones with two women: two women in hats; two women on the road somewhere, traveling together. I’m never confident I’ve picked the right one. Like my grandfather, whose only surviving oil painting is of a large ship on an unruly sea, my uncle is both doctor and painter. He gets up early and goes for a walk with his dog in the Zürichberg. He does the vitaparcours in his shirt and tie. He paints in his studio before crossing the corridor to work at his dental chair. One of his paintings—a surrealist scene of two soccer players, a piece of fence and a rose lying on a sheet of tissue paper—hangs in each of our living rooms in America. Occasionally, somebody organizes an exhibit or the city buys one of his paintings. I admire his work. I wonder at his ability to earn a living and still make art. I envy the independence that comes from self-employment. He worries he will run out of space for the canvases that accumulate in his back room. I worry that when he comes up the stairs, having had a few too many and I am alone in the apartment, he will become overly familiar. He has spent his entire adult life living and working in a house he inherited, in the city where he was born, around the corner from his first workplace. He never visits his sister, to whom he has been a surrogate father, whom he encouraged to attend the Höhere Töchterschule, with whom he will co-own Freiestrasse 103. She has spent her whole life in America, recognized only as an act of betrayal.

  At night I lie awake, listening to a single car zooming down Klosbachstrasse, the clicking of high-heeled shoes scurrying down the pavement. The number 15 tram ends its infrequent run by early evening, silencing its screeching breaks. I count the fifteen-minute intervals chiming from not one but three church towers, until they become so cacophonous that I lose track of time. The insomnia that begins with jet lag continues into most of the summer, the sadness that comes from returning to the place intended to cure my mother’s homesickness permeates most of adolescence.

  My grandmother dies. My brother and I live in her apartment while attending the university. My mother comes to visit, but it’s not clear whose apartment it has become. My mother, who has never enjoyed cooking, suggests that I prepare meals for my brother. Positioned as the interloper, I dream of studying in Germany, of leaving Zürich for Freiburg-im-Breisgau.

  My uncle dies and leaves my share of Freiestrasse 103 to my brother. A woman without a man, a Swiss living in America, can’t be trusted with a piece of Switzerland. My brother inherits everything in all three apartments. He tries to sell the paintings, but with little success. When he opens a private practice as an ear, nose, and throat specialist, just above the Römerhof, every wall is covered with my uncle’s paintings, including the one titled Boulangerie, on the back of which is written “This belongs to Anne.”

  My brother moves up the lake, to the town in Switzerland with the highest concentration of millionaires. The Freiestrasse apartments have all been rented. When I visit, I stay in a hotel on the Mainaustrasse, a block from where my mother once lived.

  My brother abandons his private practice to join a private clinic closer to where he lives. The paintings have all disappeared. The only trace is a large poster once in my uncle’s possession for winter sports by Alois Carigiet, whose reds match the rest of the decor.

  The birch tree in the front yard, barely visible in a photograph from 1908, is no longer standing.

  My brother eventually sells the house to the dentist who has been renting my uncle’s former practice and his wife, who practices acupuncture.

  When I think of Zürich not in terms of family members who view women and Americans as traitors or intruders, I think of the lake. Four generations of women swimming: my grandmother, who tried to swim across and was rescued by the boat moving alongside her; my mother, who claimed that without the lake she never would have made it through adolescence; my niece, who convinces me to jump off the diving board and swims with me to the float. Like my mother, she is studying law at the university, but unlike my mother, she is at ease traversing a transnational landscape. As the fourth generation, she will no longer be poorly educated; she will not have to renounce her profession; she will not feel compelled to write a book. She happily inhabits five languages; she continuously crosses borders; she has myriad ways to stay in touch.

  Something does not suddenly appear out of nothing.

  Basel

  * * *

  Basel is the city of culture, as opposed to commerce. It is located on a river, not a lake. The streetcars are green, as opposed to blue.

  In Basel there is Fasnacht, which is world famous. The dark, cold, silent streets; the 4:00 a.m. sounds of the fife and drum of the Morgestraich; people dressed as Waggis, Alsatian peasants, or Alte Tante, old aunts. Leaflets on brightly colored paper distributed with limericks in a Swiss-German only the people of Basel can read, satirizing political situations only they can understand. Zürich has the Sechseläuten, the ringing of the Grossmünster bell at 6:00 p.m., and the burning of winter in the form of the Böögg, a giant snowman. But few outside of Switzerland have heard of it.

  In Basel, my grandmother stores her extra pans in the oven of a one-bedroom apartment across from the railroad tracks. This is where she has landed, after a life in Kiev, St. Petersburg, Moscow. This is how she has landed: things collected in a space too small to neatly store the multitude of memories.

  In Basel, we spend one night in the Mansarde—not like in Zürich, where we spend several months in an apartment where we each have a room. The room in the attic is filled with more things, including photographs signed by musicians like Rachmaninoff.

  My grandmother leaves Basel a child prodigy, to play the piano at the Russian court. Eventually she plays for experimental theater performances at the Bolshoi, where my father spends evenings in his reserved seat. She marries a Russian who practices law, whose voice she trains as a form of cover from the Revolution. When he confesses to having had an affair with the leading lady while on tour in America, she divorces him. His singing barely audible on an old LP, he dies before I am born.

  In Basel she speaks Russian with my father, who never thinks to translate. Unlike my brother, for whom Norwegian secures the nuclear family against the possible incursion of a sibling, my father reestablishes the only bond that endures from his family of origin. She left her soul in Russia, she says, forever regretting the divorce from the country she first adopted, which then forced her into exile. A single mother, she smuggles her son out of a Soviet Union that considers it a crime not to have him raised by the state. In a train station at the border, he loses sight of her and imagines it will be forever. They arrive in Switzerland, and she never plays again, claiming it was not something she had ever enjoyed doing. While someone else practices the piano in the apartment next door, she suffers from perfect pitch.

  She remarries into an old Basel family and moves to Agno, in the Tessin, with her cats and a pergola and a terrace with a view that stretches across the distant valley. When my parents take tri
ps without us, we receive postcards from places with names we can barely pronounce, with messages neatly printed in English, which only we are able to read. My grandmother cuts our fingernails, records our behavior with red and black marks in a hardbound book, and teaches us to play short pieces on one of her grands. I excel at black marks, but neither of us demonstrates a particular aptitude for music. When the nights are hot, my grandmother sleeps outside on her cot; when the days are hot, she closes the shutters and encourages the night to come in.

  She is the only relative who visits America. Does it remind her of that fateful trip to that other enormous country that led to a decision she always longed to reconsider? She lives with us for a month in the Midwest. Every evening, I sit with her at the upright piano in the dining room before dinner. I make progress, but not enough. I begin to understand how progress could be made, but my teacher has arrived too late.

  She is the only relative to convert to Catholicism. They say she refused to baptize my father because at the time she was an atheist. My grandfather has my father baptized in secret, something that later will ratify his Russianness. The metropolite, now patriarch, who presides over my father’s funeral at the Russian Orthodox church in Zürich, claims him as a member. I claim I never knew him to believe in God.

  I am a citizen of Basel because hereditary citizenship could only be inherited from the father, even though the language I speak is Züridütsch, my mother’s tongue. I know how to swim in a lake, not a river with a strong current, like the Rhine. I know how to reach my grandmother’s house on a tram that is bright blue, not one that is dusky green. I know that the people of Basel think they are more politically progressive, but they also form cliques, like the Fasnachtsclique, that someone like me has no chance of joining.