The Gilded Chalet

by Padraig Rooney

  On a warm February evening in Bern I cross the Aar, two hundred and thirty meters below. The river turns sharply where the Bellevue Palace Hotel commands the bluff. To the right is the Casino where the seventeen-year-old Cornwell shook Thomas Mann’s hand. Facing the river is the Esplanade where Allen Dulles imagined a waiter ‘spying for an Iron Curtain country’.45 Snow tops the Bernese Oberland. Groups of young people on the benches are rolling joints, canoodling. Black Mercedes limousines with diplomatic plates litter the hotel forecourt. A young doorman does his duty. I ask him where I can have afternoon tea. He gestures to the Bellevue bar where for a century Bern’s diplomats and spies have consorted.

  The manager takes my coat. We confer about teas and settle on Assam. It comes in a silver pot, accompanied by a little mandarin tart. ‘Elevator operators, like waiters and hotel people generally, remember faces. In certain countries, employees of this sort, bartenders, doormen, are police informants.’46 The bar is studiously masculine, like a gentleman’s club. A pianist tinkles the ivories, just as he did for Smiley. A man leans over a laptop, Bluetooth device in his ear. He could be secretly filming me, relaying my presence to Moscow or Beijing. A few shelves of books labelled ‘Politics and Espionage’, a copy of le Carré’s Our Kind of Traitor sitting snug beside a biography of Bill Clinton.

  A marble stairwell descends to the toilets, scene of Dima’s escape in Our Kind of Traitor (2010). Russian money-launderer turned Queen’s evidence, Dima is the epitome of suave vulgar oligarch – the Wild East, as le Carré calls it. Luke the spook spirits him away to safety:

  As Luke buried himself a little deeper in his leather chair, and raised the lid of his silver laptop a little higher, he knew that if there had ever been such a thing as a Eureka moment in his life, it was here and now … the apéro is getting underway. A low baritone burble issues from the Salon d’Honneur, starts to grow, and drops again.47

  Tonight the Salon d’Honneur is filled with burbling Kuwaiti diplomats. Oleaginous politicos who will inherit the earth. The Bellevue is where the cream of Bern rises, rich but not necessarily thick, where le Carré stays when he comes to town, where Dulles and Smiley haunted the bar, where intrigue played out through two world wars and their long cold aftermath.

  Our Kind of Traitor opens with a tennis match in an island hideaway and closes in two Swiss hideaways – the Bellevue’s five-star opulence and a Wengen chalet. The novel has all le Carré’s trademarks: laundered loot, rich trappings and government duplicity. In a 2011 Democracy Now interview, le Carré hints at a possible genesis for this late sortie by an old activist. He cites the scandal of Labour Party mandarin Peter Mandelson, caught partying off Corfu in 2008 on the yacht of Russia’s richest man, Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska had pulled himself up from the Caucasus by his bootstraps and made his billions in aluminium. Mandelson as EU Trade Commissioner had been responsible for setting aluminium tariffs. The FBI wanted the Russian for questioning. Other guests on the yacht were hedge fund manager Nathaniel Rothschild, shadow Chancellor George Osborne and newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch – rich pickings on the eve of the financial crisis. George Osborne and Tory fundraiser Andrew Feldman allegedly solicited Deripaska for donations. The Independent newspaper sketched the story succinctly:

  They drew attention to the power games of a globe-spanning elite of men and women. They shed light on how decisions that can change the world are made on the yachts of the Mediterranean and Caribbean, the ski slopes of Switzerland, in the fashionable restaurants of New York, London and Moscow and the casinos of Montenegro.48

  Le Carré transposed this scandal to Our Kind of Traitor, where a crucial scene of skulduggery is video-recorded on a luxury yacht in ‘an ancient crowded harbour with expensive sailing boats’. From the boat’s stern ‘hang the flags of Switzerland, Britain and Russia’. The Russian Prince is ‘waiting for the Americans to drop some thoroughly unreasonable money-laundering charges’. One of the guests on the yacht is a ‘Shadow Minister, tipped for stratospheric office at the next election’, a leading member of Her Majesty’s Opposition:

  handsome in the way that young men of the eighteenth century were handsome in the portraits they donated to Luke’s old school when they left it: broad brow, receding hairline, the haughty sub-Byronic gaze of sensual entitlement, a pretty pout, and a posture that manages to look down on you however tall you are.49

  We are back at Sherborne School, and the Head Boy caught with his pants down. Our Kind of Traitor ends in a chalet in Wengen, where turncoat Dima is sequestered with his family pending a deal with the spooks in London (including posh boarding schools for the kids). Le Carré keeps his own chalet in the mountain resort and knows its forest tracks well:

  Ollie was referring to the village of Grindelwald, which lay at the opposing foot of the Eiger massif. To reach Wengen from the Lauterbrunnen side by any means except mountain railway was impossible, Ollie had reported: the summer track might be good enough for chamois and the odd foolhardy motorcyclist, but not for a four-wheeled vehicle with three men aboard.50

  As crown witness, Dima will expose the launderers’ dirty linen. His handlers spirit him across the saddle of Kleine Scheidegg:

  Ollie dowsed the jeep’s lights altogether, and they slunk like thieves past the twin hulks of the great hotel. The glow of Grindelwald appeared below them. They began the descent, entered forest and saw the lights of the Brandegg winking at them through the trees.51

  Le Carré’s protagonists have been hiding out in Switzerland for half a century, as undercover or double agents. Custard-coloured primroses push up through the motorway embankments at Morges along the lakeshore from Lausanne. Probably nuclear shelters behind them. Vaults of dodgy gold? After reading le Carré, one wonders what various bumps and protrusions in the Swiss landscape conceal. The old spymaster has revisited again and again a terrain where his seventeen-year-old self cut his spying teeth. He keeps checking into its grand hotels, drawn to them like treachery itself. Switzerland is where the boy from Sherborne first set out to walk on the shady side of the street.

  13

  ON THE ROAD

  Carry on up the Khyber with Maillart, Schwarzenbach and Bouvier

  Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Ella Maillart on the trip detailed in The Cruel Way

  It is the Switzerland of Asia, a buffer-state without colonies or access to the sea.

  Ella Maillart

  When I went to pay for Nicolas Bouvier’s one-volume Oeuvres (2004), clocking in at 1,400 pages, the grey-haired lady behind the counter at my local bookshop in Sète turned misty eyed. We travellers, she admitted, always took Bouvier with us in our backpacks. It was the thinking woman’s On the Road. This cult following grew to literary fame only towards the close of Bouvier’s life. He died in 1998, fêted as a great wanderer and chronicler. He is in a line of footloose Swiss writers on a spiritual quest for adventure they didn’t find at home. This is the story of three of them, heading east to Afghanistan long before the hippy trail, half a century and more in advance of yoga and chakras, wellness and mindfulness, the Buddha of suburbia and the Zen of corporate chic.

  My bookseller recommended Ella Maillart. Maillart’s journeys led me to Annemarie Schwarzenbach, with whom I fell a little bit in love. It’s hard to look at any photo of Annemarie and not to come under the spell of her icy androgynous beauty with its noli me tangere hauteur. I could Google her image all day. Her photographs and the cult of personality have put her writing in the shade. These three Swiss travellers – Ella, Annemarie and Nicolas – are the sons and daughters of Rousseau’s wanderlust. What is it about Switzerland that sends its writers out on the road?

  Ella Maillart led a long life of action. Born in Geneva in 1903, she was the daughter of a Swiss furrier and a Danish mother. The lake entranced her early and she took to sailing, representing Switzerland at the Paris Olympics of 1924. Later, she was the only woman member of the Swiss National Ski Team, at a time when women didn’t have the vote in Switzerland and when skiing was still
thought of as somewhat of an English pastime.

  She began her travels in the South of France, soon headed to Weimar Berlin and then to Russia, where she studied film and became a fluent speaker of the language. By 1930 she was in the Caucasus, later in Russian Turkestan. She wrote an account of her travels as Among the Russian Youth (1932). Travel and writing were inextricably linked for the rest of her long life. ‘I write with my foot,’ she admitted.1

  In 1939 she teamed up with Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908–42) for a cross-country drive in a Ford Roadster ‘Deluxe’ 18 horsepower from Geneva to Afghanistan. Schwarzenbach was a writer, photojournalist and antifascist scion of one of Switzerland’s blue-blooded families. Her father was a wealthy silk industrialist (he provided the car) and her mother an aristocratic horsewoman descended from Bismarck. Renée Schwarzenbach had wanted to be a boy and passed this conflicted identity on to her daughter. The mother was imperious and manipulative – the kind who burns your papers after you die. She dressed Annemarie as a boy from an early age. Annemarie was strikingly good-looking and photogenic. Outspoken against the rise of Hitler and National Socialism, she was eager to escape the strictures of the family estate on Lake Zürich. Her reactionary family included fervent supporters of the little failed painter from Austria; they saw Annemarie as the black sheep. She took up a position against Nazism early in the 1930s, at a time when many in the German world and further afield were enamoured.

  Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Ella Maillart en route to Afghanistan

  For Roger Martin du Gard, Annemarie had ‘the face of an inconsolable angel’.2 The American writer Carson McCullers promptly fell in love and dedicated Reflections in a Golden Eye (1942) to her: ‘She had a face that I knew would haunt me to the end of my life.’3 Trousered, lounging against the bonnets of vintage cars, louche-eyed, Annemarie looks like a cross between David Bowie as the thin white duke and a leggy thirteen-year-old boy between the wars. In 1930 she encountered Klaus and Erika Mann, the wayward children of Thomas Mann. Both left-wing gay intellectuals decades ahead of their time, the ‘terrible twins’ introduced Annemarie to the politicised decadence of Berlin’s cabaret, the world of Isherwood and Dietrich, as well as to morphine. Her unrequited love for Erika Mann marked her short life. Annemarie’s first novel The Friends of Bernhard (1931) and her Lyric Novella (1933) are set in this cabaret semi-closet on the eve of Hitler’s accession to power. She was another gay writer who switched the pronouns.

  Schwarzenbach writing in her house in Sils-Baselgia in 1942

  She took to the road as a photojournalist and travelled to Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Persia. In 1936, Erika Mann, in exile from Munich, relocated her political cabaret Die Pfeffermühle (The Peppermill) to Zürich. The cabaret was attacked by Swiss pro-fascists, among whom were members of Annemarie’s family. This fracas strained relationships all round. Annemarie’s marriage to a gay French diplomat in Tehran in 1935 provided friendship, a useful diplomatic passport and some measure of distance from her family. Like Jane Bowles and Bryher – lesbians in ‘lavender marriages’ – Annemarie’s androgynous looks appealed to the half-open closet. Erika Mann, for her part, seeking British citizenship, asked Christopher Isherwood’s hand in marriage in 1934. He refused, but suggested his friend W.H. Auden. ‘DELIGHTED’, Auden cabled back, arranged a wedding party in a pub near the school where he was teaching, and invited colleagues and pupils. ‘What are buggers for?’ Auden later asked.4

  By the time she encountered Ella Maillart in 1939, the inconsolable angel was an accomplished and prolific writer addicted to morphine. She had just checked out of a drug rehabilitation clinic in Yverdon. Both women were aware of the harbingers of another European war. Maillart thought she could save Annemarie from her demons, and their trip together was an attempt by both of them to do exactly that. Maillart had succumbed to the younger woman’s charisma, but we have no evidence that their relationship had a physical component. Both writers later produced accounts of their journey. Maillart’s is suffused with knowledge of her travelling companion’s death, but also of the devastation of war.

  Klaus Mann, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Erika Mann and Ricki Hallgarten, shortly before the latter’s suicide

  In her 2012 foreword to Maillart’s The Cruel Way (1947), Jessa Crispin contrasts the current American orientalism and Maillart’s trailblazing:

  We’re so overstuffed with stories of blonde women finding spirituality in the East, as they blithely overlook poverty and patriarchy in these countries and return to America to open up a vegan bakery/chakra cleansing studio. Our Western world went to the East, bought everything it could at the bazaar, and wonders why it doesn’t feel any better. We’re still picking international fights, we’re still looking for enlightenment that can be purchased with a credit card, and we think because we know two dozen yoga poses that we understand Hinduism.5

  Maillart calls her travelling companion ‘Christina’, a pseudonym imposed on the author by Renée Schwarzenbach following her daughter’s death. Both mother and Maillart must have tailored post-mortem description to the mores of the time:

  She was sitting on the bench – with hollowed chest, hugging her knees, her adolescent body leaning against the great stove built in the corner of the room … her subtle body, her pensive face lighted by the pale brow, put forth a charm that acted powerfully on those who are attracted by the tragic greatness of androgyny.6

  Ella and Annemarie set off from Geneva on 6 June 1939. Germany is mobilising for war. Switzerland, in contrast, is the picture of peace:

  a streaming multitude was delighted with the clever ‘Swiss Exhibition’, which, on the eve of another world war, reminded the Confederates what Switzerland stood for … I remembered a similar atmosphere during the Fête de Juin, the pageant that took place in Geneva in 1914. I saw the wide theatre whose vast stage opened onto the natural background of Lake Léman … the huge barques sailed up to the stage full of Swiss soldiers of the past coming to liberate Geneva from Napoleon.7

  The grand sweep of history here – Napoleon routed from Geneva, the First and Second World Wars – presents Switzerland as steadfast. Maillart is writing in 1946, the war over, Annemarie dead and the eastern world they explored together changed utterly.

  Annemarie presents difficulties from the start. By the Balkans she is back on the drugs. Maillart finds a broken glass phial. Annemarie could be intense and withdrawn and for much of the trip she is taken as a boy. No doubt Maillart too could be strong-willed. Along the road people mistake them for Germans (there were still half a million Germans living in Yugoslavia) and give the Nazi salute to the passing car.

  In Istanbul, after another relapse, Schwarzenbach puts herself in Maillart’s hands:

  I give you complete power over me, day and night. Don’t leave me alone. If it happens again, I’ll leave the car with you and go back. Let’s go away quickly. I have to be far from towns. I can’t help thinking: the temptation may come any moment, I shall yield, lured by the few minutes of forgetfulness it gives me.8

  At Trebizond on the Black Sea, famous for its hazelnuts and dolphin oil, the two women encounter a Swiss buyer of nuts for chocolate factories back home. The trader has been told ‘a lady and a boy of fifteen had just arrived from Switzerland’.9

  Maillart at one point looks back on what it was that sent her out on the road in the first place: ‘I am glad that I left home when I was young and followed the wake of the subtle Ulysses, glad to have lived the sea and the desert instead of helping father to air the silky softness of the deep sealskins, to value the bunches of ruffle-tailed silver foxes.’10 Her driven character clashes with Annemarie’s more fragile one. Annemarie is aware of her ‘impetuous demands’, that she exhausts those she is with. Maillart is more grounded, Annemarie ‘a poet moving among ideas’.11

  In Tehran they stay at the Nazi-infected German Legation. A chemist recognises Annemarie from her previous stay and presents an unpaid bill. Child labour and opium are prevalent:

  It was a fac
t that wherever crops were exploited and manufactured, boys and girls were good at their work until they were about eighteen. Then the boys took to opium and the girls to marriage and child-bearing.12

  All three of our Swiss travellers present feudal Afghanistan as proudly independent. The irony is that the world has come calling throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Britain twice, Russia, the Americans). Afghanistan remains a powder keg to this day.

  You’ve come to the country where women are not seen, where men are capped with snowy muslin and walk with heavy shoes like gondolas. You’ve come to a country that has never been subjugated – neither by Alexander the Great nor by Timur the Lame, neither by Nadir nor by John Bull. It is the Switzerland of Asia, a buffer-state without colonies or access to the sea, a country whose great hills shelter five races speaking three totally different languages, a country of simple hillmen and wellbred citizens.13

  Afghanistan’s dilemma between mullahs and modernity is clear. The mullahs don’t want education, certainly not for girls; education implies girls thinking for themselves. Modernity means information, science and independent thought; the mullahs are not keen on those either. They’ve got enlightenment: who needs thought? This is the nub of the problem across a swathe of countries coming into contact with western power. In the Hindu Kush, Annemarie notices ‘the strangest mixture of races and tongues, the new proletariat of a state striving towards civilization’.14 Afghanistan is where this clash of values has played itself out for over a century:

  Grouped around the mullahs, the ancients were against innovation. At a meeting where 1600 mullahs gathered, a programme of forty-eight points was drawn up; one demand was that the girls’ school should be closed, for modern education only causes mischief in feminine heads. The government refused. Another point insisted on the closing of the cinema – where I saw men not used to chairs manage to squat on these uncomfortable pieces of furniture. This was also refused, government maintaining that films have an educative value: they bring a glimpse of the world to those not fortunate enough to travel.15