Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1928 emptied the sanatoria after the Second World War. The remaining institutions, like their inmates, are dying out. Re-marketed as spas and wellness hotels, they offer a full range of treatment, catering to what Ian Fleming calls ‘the modern managerial diseases’. Since health insurers have cut back on paying for a stay in the Swiss Alps, only two bona fide sanatoria remain, catering to mostly asthma patients. Davos began to look for new ways to market fresh air and snow. Skiing at Klosters, taken up initially by Conan Doyle, became the sport of royalty in the last decades of the twentieth century. That old magic, money, was back in town. The wealth managers themselves were not far behind, talking filthy lucre as their forefathers had talked ideas.
While the tuberculars were spitting into their Blue Henrys, at the other extremity of Switzerland anarchists, nihilists and fellow travellers plotted to bring down capitalism’s house of cards. A dark room off Geneva’s windy quays held portly men called Boris and Ivan and Vladimir – a secret army of sleepers, bomb merchants, propagandists and spies. Their revolution would mark the twentieth century like no other: reds were under the bed and living it up in Hotel Helvetia, replete with room service and plenty of vodka.
4
GOING TO POT
Anarchy, cross-dressing and kif: Eberhardt and Conrad
Le Grand Hôtel de Russie in Geneva, where anarchists and royalty rubbed shoulders
the respectable and passionless abode of democratic liberty, the serious-minded town of dreary hotels, tendering the same indifferent hospitality to tourists of all nations and to international conspirators of every shade.
Joseph Conrad
Russian royalty and nobility had always wintered on Lake Geneva, but in the second half of the nineteenth century they were joined by anarchists and revolutionaries fleeing Tsarist oppression. These two politically opposed camps rubbed shoulders along the Avenue de la Paix. Switzerland embodied the ideal of natural man in a majestic landscape. Its love of liberty and democracy was also a source of inspiration for Russian revolutionaries, and the writings of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky had nurtured these views among educated Russians. Geneva’s exile petite Russie spawned two wildly different literary responses.
Tsar Alexander II had emancipated the serfs in 1861 but turned increasingly autocratic, countering further concessions with a crackdown on dissent. Members of the People’s Will movement in 1881 eventually assassinated him. The Crimean War of the mid-nineteenth century had been a struggle between great powers in the vacuum left by the Ottoman Empire, a battle still flaring in the twenty-first century along the shores of the Black Sea. The Tsar reigned over a rag-tag army of exiled nihilists, anarchists and revolutionaries, whose calls for change would eventually bear bitter fruit fifty years later in the century of Communism. Many of them plotted from Switzerland.
They congregated around Lake Geneva and in the Italian-speaking Ticino. After escaping from the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin formed the International Brotherhood in Vevey in 1864, a forerunner of the Communist Party. Conferences of the League of Peace and Freedom, advocating international socialism, were held in Geneva and Bern at the same time. At Saint-Imier in the Bernese Jura, the first International Workingmen’s Association was founded in 1872. Bakunin lived out his last years shuttling between Locarno, Lugano and Bern, where the old revolutionary died in 1876.
The workers gathered in Berne on the occasion of the death of Michael Bakunin belong to five different nations. Some are partisans of a Worker’s State, while others advocate the free federation of groups of producers.1
A backward glance at the nineteenth-century workers’ struggle can be instructive from the vantage point of market capitalism. Switzerland was not then the banking paradise it has become. The watchmaking Jura towns were split between workers and fat-cat owners. All boats were not lifted. Emigration was high. Seasonal labour and factory work in textiles were poorly paid and badly regulated – or regulated to serve the corporate owners. The twenty-first century of robber barons, bailed-out bankers, short-term contracts, inequality and social unrest is enough to make an old Leftie dust off his Karl Marx for another read.
Isabelle Eberhardt was born into la petite Russie in Geneva and couldn’t wait to get away. Her short, nomadic life in North Africa on the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seems curiously modern. This cross-dressing, hashish-smoking Muslim convert appears to be of our time. Were she living today we might dub her a jihadi – but wrongly. Joseph Conrad, a Pole born in the Ukraine who took British citizenship, was the first to write about the spy and anarchist world of Geneva during the first decade of the twentieth century. His Under Western Eyes anticipates the espionage novels of John le Carré and the world of oligarchs, poisonings and state-sponsored assassinations of modern Russia. Terrorism was in the air at both ends of the twentieth century. Isabelle Eberhardt and Joseph Conrad make strange bedfellows in straight-laced Geneva.
There was not much of the Swiss nanny or Heidi pigtails about Isabelle. She was born out of wedlock in 1877 in Geneva to the widow of a Russian general, adviser to Tsar Alexander II. A forty-three-year age difference separated the old general and his wife. He sired three children in rapid succession and died of apoplexy in 1873 while his estranged wife was in Switzerland for the waters. A fourth child of doubtful parentage saw the light of day in 1871. Isabelle was the fifth in this curious ménage.
The children, a tutor called Alexander Trophimowsky and the diminutive Madame (she was five foot one inch) must have seemed a mixed bag in Geneva of the 1870s. Madame de Moerder had difficulty keeping up appearances and two apartments. She lived on the rue du Mont-Blanc with the children. Fyodor Dostoyevsky had lived on the same street in 1868. Trophimowsky’s digs were in the more downmarket rue des Grottes. When Isabelle was born in 1877 she was officially fille naturelle of no acknowledged father. This fractured and uncertain identity was to haunt her all her short life. She was destined to be a wandering soul.
Russian presence in Switzerland was of long standing. Diplomatic relations between the Republic of Geneva and Russia had been established since 1687. La petite Russie was inclined to oligarchy and rabble-rousing, but Switzerland, then as now, was also a good place to acquire an education, and not just in French and needlework:
The prospect of a free education at the universities of Zürich and Berne had sparked an influx of Russian students, especially female students, who were nicknamed ‘Cossack fillies’ by the locals. This expression was not used pejoratively but out of respect for the stamina, alertness and courage of these young women from a faraway country. Sometimes they were bold indeed: no sooner had they completed their courses in physics, chemistry and anatomy, than they returned to their homeland to embark on perilous adventures by becoming terrorists or socialist agitators.2
The tutor Trophimowsky was an anarchist who had abandoned his first family near Odessa to take up with his noble-born mistress. His links to Bakunin and the exiled revolutionaries of 1870 in Geneva are hazy. Isabelle later put Nechayev’s views on camouflage and subterfuge into practice as a cross-dressing, dope-smoking Muslim in North Africa:
The revolutionary may and frequently must live within society while pretending to be completely different from what he really is, for he must penetrate everywhere, into the higher and middle classes, into the houses of commerce, the churches and the palaces of the aristocracy, into the world of the bureaucracy, literature and the military, and also into the Third Section and the Winter Palace of the Tsar.3
Nechayev was a nihilist who had founded a secret society called ‘The People’s Retribution’. He was one of the models for Dostoyevsky’s The Demons, but also for Joseph Conrad’s assassin in Under Western Eyes.
Nechayev had organised and participated in the murder of an unfortunate student in Moscow named Ivanov. Eventually arrested in Zürich he was extradited to Russia as a common criminal over the protests of Russian students at
Swiss universities.4
This cloak-and-dagger Switzerland culminated in the assassination of Empress Elisabeth of Austria in Geneva in 1898 by an Italian anarchist. He stabbed her with a homemade four-inch stiletto while she boarded the ferry to Montreux. She was carried to the Hotel Beau Rivage on a makeshift stretcher of a sail and oars. A concierge found the weapon in the doorway of 3 rue des Alpes the following morning.5 Mark Twain, who happened to be in Austria at the time, expressed the grief of his host nation:
One must go back about two thousand years to find an instance to put with this one. The oldest family of unchallenged descent in Christendom lives in Rome and traces its line back seventeen hundred years, but no member of it has been present in the earth when an empress was murdered, until now.6
Twain’s democratic sympathies were with the royal victim. He described the assassin, Luigi Luceni, an Italian army recruit raised in an orphanage, in these terms:
He is at the bottom of the human ladder, as the accepted estimates of degree and value go: a soiled and patched young loafer, without gifts, without talents, without education, without morals, without character, without any born charm or any acquired one that wins or beguiles or attracts; without a single grace of mind or heart or hand that any tramp or prostitute could envy him; an unfaithful private in the ranks, an incompetent stone-cutter, an inefficient lackey; in a word, a mangy, offensive, empty, unwashed, vulgar, gross, mephitic, timid, sneaking, human polecat.7
Twain the seasoned journalist is clearly having a hissy fit here. He gives an astute glimpse of the political forces – imperialist and anarchist – confronting Europe at century’s turn. Three imperial powers were hit by assassination in the space of twenty years: Tsar Alexander II in 1881, Empress Elizabeth in 1898 and US President McKinley in 1901. Governments milked the public mood, and in some cases planted agents provocateurs. Terrorism was a fashionable whipping boy (as it was at the beginning of the twenty-first century) and Geneva was viewed as a hotbed of desperadoes enjoying Swiss hospitality.
When Isabelle was two and a half her family decamped to Meyrin, west of the city, then a multicultural community of exiles. The impressively bearded Trophimowsky – ‘one of those bearded Russian faces without shape’, as Conrad puts it – had Tolstoyan back-to-nature pretensions and liked to cultivate orchids. The family was dysfunctional, as we might now say. Nathalie, Madame’s daughter, later claimed that Trophimowsky had interfered with her. Isabelle was brought up in boy’s clothes and spoiled by her tutor father, whom she called Vava. A gifted linguist, he taught her Arabic and German, besides the Russian spoken at home. As soon as they could, the boys escaped to the French Foreign Legion. Nathalie absconded in her mid-teens to a lover in Geneva. Swiss police became involved in domestic rows. By the time Isabelle was sixteen, she was polyglot, could read the Koran in Arabic, wrote the language elegantly, and had taken to wandering around the city in boy’s clothes:
I was already a nomad as a young girl, when I used to daydream as I gazed at the enticing white road leading off, under a more brilliant sun, it seemed to me, into the delicious unknown.8
In diaries and travel notes written in North Africa, Isabelle returns to the view from Meyrin of the snow-crowned Jura, her blue remembered hills. On the road to Touggourt in the southern Atlas, ‘at that frontier between town and desert, I was reminded of those autumn and winter sunsets in the land of exile, when the great snow-capped Jura mountains seemed to come closer and turn into an expanse of pale blond and bluish hues’.9 At El Oued on the edge of the Sahara, riding out to assignations with a lover or exploring the dry riverbed, she closed her eyes and ‘was off in a dream. I felt as if I were back in the big woods along the Rhône and in the Parc Sarrazin on a mellow summer evening.’10
Surviving photos of Eberhardt show a sullen, pouty boy dressed as a sailor, or as an Arab under a tarboosh – a boy who might have had to watch his backside in North Africa or on board ship. By all accounts, after a few pipes of hashish Isabelle could be game for anything. The photos give an impression of hardness, posed defiance. She had them taken in Geneva when the dream of life as an Arab began to obsess her.
At sixteen she started smoking and meeting men in bars:
I go around dressed as a sailor, even in town, right under the noses of agents. The other evening I was sitting in the pharmacy and to my great confusion (I remembered my complaints to you about drinking!) I got so drunk on beer (six of them!), happily in the company of Schwarz [her married lover].11
There is some evidence (‘under the noses of agents’) that she became involved with anarchist and nihilist cells in Lausanne and Geneva in the mid-1890s, when she was in her late teens. She got off on disguise, on assembling different selves into a composite identikit. She reminds me of teenagers morphing from goody-two-shoes to Goth to punk in a year. It could get tedious. Like her English counterpart, Lawrence of Arabia, she liked to swan around in Arab robes, describing her mask as ‘a certain tom-boyishness’.
Eighteen-year-old Isabelle Eberhardt as a sailor in Geneva in 1895 and, right, in Arab get-up
In North Africa she passed herself off as Si Mahmoud Saadi, a young Tunisian taleb (scholar); the word Taliban derives from the same root. There was chutzpah in these disguises but also a certain naivety. In the desert a woman did not go undetected for long and her hosts were tactful and face-saving:
They knew perfectly well, from all sorts of European indiscretions, that Si Mahmoud was a woman. But, with beautiful Arab discretion, they argued that it was none of their business, that it would have been inappropriate to allude to it, and they carried on treating me as they had at first, as an educated and slightly superior friend.12
In the desert near the Moroccan border she wrote: ‘I’m entertained at first, and it’s hard not to laugh hearing them say among themselves: “He’s good looking, the little spahi; he has fine skin!”’13
She might have been attractive as a boy, but as a woman the desert took its toll. She was drawn to sex, to the port cities of Marseilles, Algiers, Bône, Tunis, to the seedy lives of stevedores and garrison recruits. Her writing is full of people down on their luck, fallen women, sex as a currency of trade. She was an aficionado of the quickie. A smoker, a drinker and a habitual user of kif – hashish – staid, abstemious Geneva produced her, like a rare orchid from her father’s greenhouse.
She was particularly drawn to ports, with their wayward, bustling, provisional life, their sense of people always on the point of setting off for the unknown, their coarse virility, their smells, their raucous gaiety, their snatched, rough couplings, and above all their suffering. … lush colours, desert landscapes, brutal, uncommitted love-making. With the sailors in Toulon and St Mandrier, she was probably dressed in her loose workman’s clothes of blue linen jacket, trousers and cap. If she made love with the sailors – and she probably did far less than the scandalised bourgeois later implied – it was as a girl, but as a girl who was their physical equal.14
She sounds and looks like a female Rimbaud passing herself off as one of the lads.
She first travelled to North Africa with her mother in 1897. Madame de Moerder was ailing, quickly converted to Islam and died shortly thereafter. She is buried in a pauper’s grave in Annaba. They must have made a strange pair, knocking about in the streets of the Kasbah. Isabelle assumed the identity of her alter ego Mahmoud Saadi:
She already had a command of classical Arabic and a good knowledge of the Koran, and, as a natural linguist, she now quickly picked up spoken Algerian Arabic … She used to lose herself in the street life in the 500-year-old Kasbah, a few streets away from the rue Rovigo, and soon made friends among the local Arab students.15
What pushed these Russian exiles to renounce the comforts of Geneva for the uncertainties of the Maghreb and the Muslim faith? They bear a curious resemblance to modern-day jihadis spurning the attractions of the west. As Russian émigrées, their attachment to Switzerland was fleeting. Madame de Moerder seems also to have been somewhat detac
hed, if not unhinged. Marked by marriage to a man forty-three years older than her, she might have been looking for escape. Colonial North Africa was filled with such renegades.
Isabelle began publishing stories and travel vignettes in French journals and newspapers, creating a costumed world of sudden passion, death, fallen women and glorious men. Her characters sometimes seem like Cossacks in disguise: ‘Nomads dressed in white wool, spahis superbly draped in red, local gendarmes in black bournouses lined up along the walls, crouched on benches.’16
From 1897 to 1903 she negotiated a path through the often mutually suspicious ethnicities of French North Africa: the indigenous Berber tribes of the Atlas Mountains, the grande and petite Kabylie, the coastal mix of Greek, Phoenician and Roman followed by Arab blow-ins from the seventh century, nomads and their Somali slaves. The company she kept were the spahis of the garrison towns, minstrels, wandering holy men and tribal warriors. They seem remnants of an older nomadic way of life: ‘Men pass: Europeans, Jews, turbaned Bedouin, detachments of rowdy Zouaves, hunters, seamen, troops in red tunics.’17
She would hunker down and smoke hashish with the troops. We might wonder at their motivation. It wasn’t all the finer points of Koranic interpretation by any means. Her hosts in the colonial army treated her to the manly pleasures of military towns at the edge of the desert.
Whatever their unenlightened way of life, the lowliest of Bedouins are far superior to these idiotic Europeans making a nuisance of themselves. Where can one go to flee them, where can one go to live far from those arrogant, prying, evil beings who think it is their privilege to level everything and fashion it in their own dreadful image.18
The Gilded Chalet Page 8