The Alps

by Stephen O'Shea

  Once back with her grandfather, Heidi convinces the old man to embrace religion and attend services in the village church in the valley, which he has not visited in years due to a longstanding feud. He is welcomed back with open arms. Spirits buoyed, she exchanges letters with Clara, who misses her old friend. Clara’s doctor suggests that as a therapeutic measure, the invalid should spend the following summer with Heidi in the mountains. This Clara does, and the two girls become inseparable. Peter, the goatherd, no longer the center of Heidi’s attentions, becomes jealous of the city girl and, in a fit of rage, hurls her wheelchair down the mountain, thus rendering it useless. Clara, desperate, tries to walk on her own and—lo and behold!—manages to do it. The goat’s milk and fresh mountain air have worked their wonders. Clara is overjoyed, Heidi is overjoyed, the Sesemann family is overjoyed—and millions and millions of readers the world over are overjoyed.

  The three of us approach the entrance of the Heidiland Museum.

  “I’m not going,” Ernst says. “It’s a waste of money.”

  NoéMie laughs and offers to pay the entrance fee for him.

  “I know what a Swiss farmhouse looks like,” he says, gesturing to a rustic building up a path. “I’ve been inside lots of them. I’m not going to pay ten francs to see what I already know.”

  We stand in silence for a moment. Evidently this sudden attack of principled pragmatism is serious. He smiles at me.

  I smile back, remembering our Paris café days spent arguing over everything and anything, just for the fun it. I decide not to take the bait.

  “Have it your way,” I say, and he walks off to the petting zoo to think his thoughts.

  NoéMie and I shell out, enter the museum, and are soon perusing dozens of first-edition book covers in as many languages. The eternal Heidiological question—blonde or brunette?—seems to resolve itself in favor of the latter. We see pictures of the author, Johanna Spyri, a rather severe-looking Suissesse who is believed to have written the book in just four weeks. The accompanying information boards make no mention of the recent discovery of a German book published in 1830, whose title translates to Adelaide, the Girl from the Alps. In imagery and story line, it is remarkably similar to Heidi, and a Spyri expert has conceded that much of it may have been lifted to compose the best-seller.

  The exhibits are too derivative, NoéMie and I decide. We resolve to leave the museum and its tedious press clippings to go to the Heidihaus, the rickety chalet that Ernst waved at dismissively when bowing out of our expedition. This farmhouse, we are informed, is where Heidi lived with her cantankerous grandfather. Much of Asia is milling about its entrance, so our pleasure is deferred in favor of a walk around the grounds, serenaded by the Heidi anthem playing over and over again through hidden loudspeakers. We stumble across a “Sri Chimnoy Peace Blossom” plaque, advocating for world peace through horticulture. Similar gardens, the sign says, can be found at Niagara Falls, the Matterhorn, the Russia–Norway border, and Canberra, Australia. On this day and in this place, this list strikes neither of us as strange.

  At last the crowd thins and we can enter the sanctum. An electronic turnstile wishes us a gute Fahrt as we step into a ground-floor manger and food cellar. We reverently handle the plastic cheese rounds, plastic apples, and plastic potatoes. Upstairs, a mannequin representing Heidi’s gruff grandfather sits in a chair, cradling an odd-looking wooden instrument close to his crotch. We both wish Ernst were around to explain what we’re looking at. Nearby, in the kitchen, dummies representing Peter and Heidi sit across from each other at a rustic table. In what we assume is a botched attempt to make them look jolly, both have their teeth bared in grimaces. They don’t look happy; they look like the homicidal Chucky of horror-film fame. Out come the phones and we snap pictures of ourselves beside the kids as we try to appear just as ferocious.

  That, it turns out, is the highlight of our visit to Heidiland. Else-where are rooms of unknown purpose filled with tools of unknown use. The chalet is a museum of Swiss mountain life, mercifully nondidactic, without the ghost of an explanation anywhere. The Heidi anthem plays occasionally, punctuated by welcoming messages in German and English, themselves accompanied by a weird tinkle of cocktail music straight out of a 1970s fern bar.

  ALONE ONCE AGAIN, I am in the Bernese Oberland, the dramatic mountainous hinterland of the central Swiss canton of Bern. The town of Meiringen sits amid green fields in a valley in the eastern part of the Oberland, seemingly forgotten when compared to its famous neighbors of Interlaken and Grindelwald. Yet the town’s renown is global. It claims to have given the world its namesake pastry, the meringue. The shop with bragging rights over the meringue’s origin myth still sells the pastries—­and they are indeed delicious.

  Across the street, about two dozen men of all ages stand on the sidewalk in front of a nondescript building, milling about aimlessly. I am about to ask the café waitress at my hotel whether the building is a brothel—I can think of no other explanation—when the men set off together across the street and form a semicircle before our tables. They thrust their hands in their pockets. What ensues is a heavenly chorus of male voices, drifting in plangent majesty through the evening air. Two fellows, one a plump middle-aged man, the other a lean construction worker, occasionally pierce the melody with falsetto half-­yodeling, a hesitant, self-interrupted riff in counterpoint to the surrounding smoothness of polyharmony. The effect is stunning. I remember Ernst telling me at the Stoss Pass, after our encounter with the freelance yodeler, that the Swiss version of the yodel is far more staccato than its Austrian counterpart, which has a tendency to be sentimental and gooey. The choir performs two folk songs and then files into the hotel for its weekly practice session.

  “You, the writer! You must sing now!” A woman’s voice has come from the far side of the terrace. I look up from my notebook and see that all eyes are upon me.

  I shake my head, smiling.

  She stands up, a blonde, five-foot-two pillar of impishness.

  “You must sing for us!”

  Vanquished, I get to my feet and go over to the spot where the singers had placed themselves. I really know only one song, a Clancy Brothers ditty that I sang to each of my daughters in the delivery room just moments after their birth. For each, it was the first time they heard my voice unbuffered by their mother’s belly. I clear my throat and dive in:

  When I was young and had no sense,

  I bought a fiddle for eighteen pence …

  The amusing song then goes on to recount how the damned fiddle could play only one tune—and then only before daybreak. Best sung in stage Irish, at which I happen to excel, the ditty comes across as a delightful piece of whimsy.

  The applause is loud and appreciative. The woman, named Katarina, invites me to sit at her boisterous table. It is her forty-fifth birthday today and she has come here with her mother and friends. I ask her if she learned her excellent English in America.

  “I would never go to America,” she replies emphatically. “I learned English in Australia.”

  Beers are ordered and downed. Repeatedly.

  Katarina’s mother, although in her early eighties, has been taking English lessons. I ask her about her family.

  “Katarina has two brothers,” she says. “One is fifty-six and one is fifty-eight.”

  “Fifty-nine,” Katarina corrects.

  “Ja, fifty-nine.”

  My eyebrows shoot up as I see an opening for payback.

  “Tell me,” I ask the mother as her daughter looks on, “was Katarina an accident?”

  A pause. The old woman looks at Katarina and says with a smile, “Yes. She was a big accident.”

  Katarina explodes, wide-eyed, “What?! You never told me that!”

  But her mother has already turned away to translate our conversation into Swiss German for the others at the table.

  The laughter is loud and long, and lasts well into the night.

  NOT SO EARLY the next morning, I set out in earnest on my
quest to find the spot Arthur Conan Doyle described. Meiringen’s other distinction lies in detective fiction, for being the place where two celebrated characters, contemporaneous with and as famous as Heidi, met their deaths, or so it seemed. Sherlock Holmes and Professor James Moriarty had their final fatal encounter at Meiringen.

  The author was an avid admirer of Switzerland and one of the pioneers of winter tourism here. He brought his children and his wife, who suffered from tuberculosis, to the spa town of Davos, where the rich and powerful of this world now hold their annual chin wag. An athletic man, Conan Doyle made the acquaintance of two locals who were trying out a new sport, downhill skiing. There had been some skiing in Scandinavia, but none in Switzerland.

  As his wife recuperated, Conan Doyle gamely tried to get the hang of the novel pursuit. The people of Davos laughed at the sight of the famous writer—for Holmes was already well loved in Switzerland by the 1890s—repeatedly wiping out on the slopes above town. In March 1894, laughter turned to respect when Conan Doyle and his two Swiss friends climbed from Davos up to a pass 2,400 meters in altitude and then skied down to the neighboring town of Arosa. He wrote an article on the exploit for the monthly Strand magazine—where his Holmes stories were published—detailing his experience whizzing down a slope. “You let yourself go,” he wrote, “gliding delightfully over the gentle slopes, flying down the steeper ones, taking an occasional cropper, but getting as near to flying as any earthbound man can. In that glorious air it is a delightful experience.” The article attracted considerable attention in Britain. “I am convinced,” he said prophetically, “that the time will come when hundreds of Englishmen will come to Switzerland for the skiing season. I believe I may be the first, save only two Switzers, to do any mountain work, but I am certain I will not by many thousands be the last.”

  The previous year, when he and his wife had made a trip to Meiringen, the author had murder on his mind. He wrote to his mother: “I’m thinking of slaying Holmes … and wind him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.” Conan Doyle was heartily sick of Holmes and wanted to move on to other forms of writing. To effect this homicide, he came up with a story entitled “The Final Problem,” which opens with Holmes arriving at the home of his sidekick, Dr. John Watson, in a state of extreme agitation. There had been three attempts to murder him that day. Holmes reveals to Watson that he has been on the hunt for a brilliant criminal mastermind, Professor Moriarty, and is just days away from turning him and his many confederates over to the police. This “Napoleon of crime,” as Holmes calls him, knows of the detective’s plans and will move heaven and earth to kill him.

  Holmes asks Watson to accompany him to the Continent to avoid the danger. Watson must follow an elaborate stratagem of evasive action the next day to meet his friend at Victoria Station. But Holmes is not there to greet him—an aging Italian priest takes a seat beside Watson. As the train gets underway, the priest reveals himself to be Holmes in disguise. More important, Holmes spots Moriarty on the platform attempting to get the train to stop. Watson has been followed.

  The two men get off at Canterbury and hide behind a pile of luggage as a later train, transporting Moriarty, roars past in pursuit. They take a third train to another port city and board the ferry to Dieppe. They then travel to Strasbourg via Brussels and make their way to Meiringen. Holmes learns that all of Moriarty’s gang has been arrested, save for its brilliant leader. The detective fears the worst.

  Holmes and Watson spend the night at the Englischer Hof, a Meiringen grand hotel where the innkeeper speaks English. He suggests to the men that the next morning they should take a hike in the mountains to see the Reichenbach Falls, a natural wonder of the region. Fatefully, the Englishmen heed his advice.

  The next morning, as Watson and Holmes contemplate the mighty falls, a messenger boy from the hotel runs up to them saying that there is a very ill Englishwoman staying there in need of an English doctor. Watson retraces his steps, leaving Holmes alone. On arriving at the Englischer Hof, Watson discovers the message was a hoax. The innkeeper says it must have been a prank played by the other Englishman at the hotel. Watson realizes he has been tricked by Moriarty.

  He races back up to the falls but sees neither Holmes nor Moriarty. By looking at the footprints on the muddy trail, he detects signs of a great struggle. There are no footprints leading back down the track. He concludes that the two men must have fought it out and fallen to their deaths in the abyss. He eventually finds a farewell note from Holmes penned in haste. Watson announces to the readers of the Strand magazine that Holmes was the wisest man he had ever known.

  Readers worldwide have long argued over what exactly happened to Sherlock Holmes here, but the town of Meiringen harbors no doubts. It is not shy about its place of honor in detective lore. The small central square of the town bears a sign in the typography and font familiar to all visitors to London:

  BOROUGH OF MEIRINGEN

  CONAN DOYLE SQUARE W

  Farther on is another sign in the same lettering:

  CITY OF WESTMINSTER

  BAKER ST.

  On a rock in Conan Doyle Square sits a life-size bronze statue of the detective, pensively puffing on his pipe and wearing his signature deerstalker hat. Behind him is the English Church of Meiringen—there were scores of such English churches built in nineteenth-century Switzerland. The church’s cellar houses a delightful little museum devoted to all things Holmesian. Its stellar attraction, safe behind a glass wall, is a remarkable full-scale re-creation of Holmes’s sitting room at 221B Baker Street, filled with period memorabilia and items mentioned in the stories. We see Victorian armchairs draped with antimacassars, a dining table with a lamp complete with silk shades, the deerstalker cap, Holmes’s violin on a chair, Watson’s war trophies from the second Afghan war, Holmes’s pipe, his magnifying glass, and much more. To one side stands a very rare complete collection of Strand magazines. Unlike the creators of Heidiland, the curators of this museum have wisely elected not to people the exhibit with weirdly grinning dummies representing Holmes and Watson.

  On my way out of town, I pass what had been the Englischer Hof, the hotel where Holmes and Watson stayed and where Conan Doyle and his wife lodged as he dreamed up his hero’s demise. The establishment is now named the Parkhotel du Sauvage. A prominent plaque on its facade reads:

  IN THIS HOTEL, CALLED BY SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  ENGLISCHER HOF

  MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES AND DR. WATSON

  SPENT THE NIGHT OF 3RD/4TH MAY, 1891.

  IT WAS FROM HERE THAT MR. HOLMES LEFT

  FOR THE FATAL ENCOUNTER AT THE REICHENBACH FALLS

  WITH PROFESSOR MORIARTY, THE NAPOLEON OF CRIME.

  I reach the foot of the Reichenbach Falls within minutes, for they are less than a couple of kilometers from town. There, a vintage red funicular awaits boarding, the signs on its slatted wooden seats imploring visitors in several languages not to lean over the side. As we get underway, a Spanish family with two small children proceeds to do just that, much to my dismay. The conductor ignores them.

  One hears the falls before seeing them. A deafening roar grows louder and louder as we ascend, the rushing water hidden by a canopy of foliage. At last we arrive at the top and see, from a viewing platform, the falls just about a dozen meters in front of us. It is a tremendous, violent sight, the water cascading from a cliff top to be dashed on green-gray boulders far below. Across the abyss, on the opposite rockface, a small white star adorns a narrow ledge—the spot where Holmes and Moriarty had their showdown. There’s barely room for one person on the ledge, let alone two brawling men. Clearly, the gentleman tourist of 1893, who had murder on his mind, found this the ideal place to polish off his famous detective. As Conan Doyle, in a passage of uncommon descriptive power, writes of the falls in “The Final Problem”:

  It is indeed, a fearful place. The torrent, swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke fro
m a burning house. The shaft into which the river hurls itself is an immense chasm, lined by glistening coal-black rock, and narrowing into a creaming, boiling pit of incalculable depth, which brims over and shoots the stream onward over its jagged lip. The long sweep of green water roaring forever down, and the thick flickering curtain of spray hissing forever upward, turn a man giddy with their constant whirl and clamour. We stood near the edge peering down at the gleam of the breaking water far below us against the black rocks, and listening to the half-human shout which came booming up with the spray out of the abyss.

  Given that powerful description, one could reasonably assume that Holmes’s demise was definitive. But that would be to assume too much. Public clamor over Holmes’s disappearance eventually led, in 1901, to his reappearance in the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. Arthur Conan Doyle caved to the pressure of his readers. Holmes had not fallen to his death; he had been hiding abroad to escape detection by a confederate of the late Moriarty. The next two decades saw the publication of dozens of Sherlock Holmes short stories as Conan Doyle reconciled himself to the brilliance of his creation.

  THE DRIVE from Meiringen to Interlaken partakes of breathtaking beauty, with towering peaks on both sides, then suddenly an aquamarine lake surrounded by chalets spilling down deep green hillsides. A visit to the crown jewel of the Bernese Oberland then requires a left fishhook turn into a gap so narrow that there’s barely room for cars and the gigantic piles of logs and lumber stacked close to the roadway. A series of hairpins leads up into a broader high valley, where, since this is Switzerland, there is a railroad station. Somehow Swiss rail engineers managed to thread the needle of the gap, although how they did this—and where—I did not see.

  The valley opens up. There are holiday chalets everywhere. At the town of Grindelwald, with its crescent-shaped main street an impressive string of businesses and banks, there are signs in German, English, French, and Japanese. Construction cranes ring the town. Crowds shuffle along the sidewalks. I pass the Japanese Information Bureau, a privately run purveyor of services, one of which promotes a course in Swiss cheesemaking. Make your own cheese round, then take it home in triumph to Osaka.