Zbinden's Progress

by Christoph Simon

  Emilie was always doing something or other, or everything at once. Professionally, she wavered for a long time between tour guide and hotelier, then became a dressmaker and a housewife and looked after the neighbours’ children and their children’s children, who would frolic around and make a racket, which explained my moodiness at home. The whole place would be crawling with children: Markus on the pedal tractor, cheerfully shouting ‘Fire! Fire!’; Roberto making a big fuss about looking for the red felt-tip pen; the others hopping around and squealing; and Emilie – cool as you please – carrying an infant on her hip, or asking, ‘Could you hold the baby for a moment, Lukas?’

  ‘Gladly,’ I’d answer, obligingly, accepting the infant in as relaxed a manner as an American soldier handed an unaddressed parcel while on patrol at 40° longitude in Korea. Herr Probst! – You’re certainly in a hurry! – The hot milk and bread? – No, I thought it was tasty. – No, certainly not. – Oh dear, oh dear! – Why, yes, that’s what I’d do, too. – For sure. Tell the manager that until it’s clarified whether the food contained poison, you’ll refuse all forms of nourishment. – Don’t mention it, Herr Probst, you’re very welcome!

  Are you intelligent enough to know that astrology is based on superstition, Kâzim? Emilie was intelligent enough not to take no notice of it nonetheless. Wasn’t there something I wanted to ask Herr Probst?

  You never know what will occur to Herr Probst next. Often he says something sensible, no really, but occasionally something completely hare-brained, too. Poison in the milk and bread. When he’s about to start, it’s always interesting to guess what he might come out with. Either way – sensible, or not – he has the same spontaneous air.

  Herr Probst built up his own business, then had to hand it on. He’d not reckoned with the retirement age applying to him one day, too. His greatest wish is for the management to phone and say, ‘Herr Probst, a revolt is taking place here. Regardless of what your pension plan states – please come out of retirement! Your firm needs you!’

  Until such time as that call arrives, Herr Probst is keeping himself busy with other mysterious phone calls. He stares at the stone floor beneath the payphone in the entrance hall while, at the other end of the line, the dainty sales assistant of a mail-order company turns in her office chair and, distraught, summons, I imagine, her branch manager.

  ‘Your company has sent me an axe I didn’t order,’ Herr Probst says, into the receiver. ‘No, I can’t simply send the item back. Because of the packaging. I’ve … – No, moreover, it’s pretty heavy. I’d prefer it, young lady, if the company would simply collect it. – Probst, Meinrad Probst. Listen, you work for this mail-order company. You can tell the difference between things, I take it? You can imagine, no doubt, that an axe and a corkscrew are very different things? No? – Listen, I’m not exactly young any more, I’ve maybe only a few more bottles to uncork. Surely you don’t want to be the reason the time I have left goes badly? Please connect me with your superior. Please connect me … – No. I just want to know how we can arrange for you to collect the axe, because if I send it by post … ’ but yes, I know, Kâzim. I shouldn’t need the stories of strangers, snippets from other lives, to give myself a boost.

  A stairwell can’t be designed generously enough, to my mind – how do you see it, Kâzim? A staircase has every right to be broad and bright. The removals men would like to be able to carry furniture up or down without first having to dismantle it. The emergency services would be pleased if residents could be stretchered down to the ambulance. Also, when they leave for the last time, residents should have the right to be carried down the stairwell. There were the chef, Lydia and I, waiting in the Breakfast Room with a cake and pastries to wish Herr and Frau Dürig another happy year of marriage, and yet Herr Dürig, tall and broad-shouldered even in his old age, had already been ferried out in the goods lift, like a damaged pedestal. Since the conversion, the ‘adaptations’, this staircase has been anything but generous, I have to say. Despite the paintings that change with the seasons. The Home’s central location, the view from the attic and the pretty courtyard are really the only things that, for me, justify the hefty service charges. And the people – of course, the people – the old and the ancient.

  Basically, I know nothing at all about most of my fellow residents. But it’s impossible, even with the most secretive fellow resident, not to become aware of things that are none of one’s business, for example the number of visits per month, or pointers regarding his health. Many a fellow resident shows no sign of any interest in the others living here, they try to avoid you, if at all possible, take care not to ask questions, are evasive if they themselves are asked any. But not even these spoilsports can get away with not saying ‘Good morning’ or avoid brief comments on the weather. Every human being demands attention from another, simply by virtue of being close by. I barely know most of the residents at all, but actually all of them interest me – some more than others, I admit, depending on their behaviour and my level of weariness – but they do all interest me.

  Whether you wish to or not, Kâzim, at some point you’ll begin to bother your head about the people among whom you’ve landed here. And the odd thing is: if you begin to take an interest in all these strange old people, it soon turns out that ‘old people’ do not exist, but only ever exceptions to the rule. You’ll come across exceptions constantly, believe me.

  You know, I used to be a teacher. First, below the hump of the Gurten, then in the Emmen Valley that is foggy enough to conceal two enemy armies from each other. Later, in a sleepy hamlet between Lake Thun and Lake Brienz. My parents, expecting a post-war crisis, were relieved to see me entering a profession thought of as crisis-proof. At the start of each school year, I began every Geography lesson with the question, ‘What is the Earth?’

  ‘A sphere’ was the required answer. Therein lay all my wisdom. The earth is a sphere. Countless paths lead from person to person. School isn’t about counting and spelling. It’s about learning to get along with your fellow human beings. A great pity then that, in forty years, no one understood that. What did you learn at school, Kâzim? The seated way of life? To be punctual? Not to contradict, and to put up with being given marks?

  I remember one lesson. I’m teaching as usual and the young people are seated before me, anything but mesmerised. Then I go for lunch. When I return, the pupils tell me, ‘Marc was sent home.’

  ‘By whom? How come?’

  During the lesson, I had talked about how, in order really to get to know something, you have to experience it for yourself. I impressed upon them, ‘If you want to know what a roof is, then you have to climb onto the roof, feel the tiles, sit on the crown and listen to the wind sweeping over it. Then you’ll be able to say, I know this roof.’

  Veronika answered, annoyed, ‘You don’t have to have been somewhere to know about it.’

  Ever since I explained the meaning of school to her, she no longer trusted me.

  After the bell for noon, the pupils told me, Marc had climbed onto the roof of the school. In the yard down below, dozens of pupils had gathered, shouted, waved, thrown chestnuts, but he wasn’t to be deterred. Only when the caretaker had dragged out a long ladder and the head teacher, fearing for his life, had scaled the wobbly rungs, had Marc moved. He’d scrambled across the roof and vanished into a skylight.

  So I go to the head teacher’s office, where the latter doesn’t exactly welcome me with open arms. ‘So you come to this school and tell the children to climb onto the roof?’ he rages. ‘You’re a danger to my pupils!’ He doesn’t let me get a word in. ‘How dare you incite the children to climb onto the roof! As if they weren’t undisciplined enough as it is!’

  And he goes on to talk about the education system, its growing value in educational and social terms, the teacher’s task of giving the pupils a good start in life, especially these days. ‘Who do you think is picking up the tab for your antics, Herr Zbinden?’

  A boy sat meditating on the schoo
l roof hardly troubled him less than a load of dynamite. I don’t know whether that head’s still alive today. If so, he’s in his late nineties. In any case – my methods didn’t convince him.

  So I visit Marc at his parents’ place. Good-humouredly, he says, ‘I was able to observe the storks on the primary school roof and, do you know what, Herr Zbinden? One day, I’d like to find out why albatrosses migrate with the wind round the Antarctic.’

  ‘The head teacher …’

  ‘Don’t worry, Herr Zbinden, I’ve learned when I can climb onto roofs and when I can’t. I won’t get it wrong in future.’

  What do you remember about houses built on stilts, Kâzim? If you want to know something, do you take out your History folder from the school year in question and re-do the sheets? I loaded the pupils onto the train and we headed for the lakes. We spoke to fishermen who waded through the shallows, to house owners at Lake Biel. What does it mean to live by the water? Ideally, the pupils wrote down nothing at all. Instead, they came to associate a concept with encounters they’d had. You might object that that would be significantly more difficult in the case of other topics. Africa, for instance. Maybe we knew someone who had been there? We invited René Gardi to have coffee and cake with us, and he told us about riding across a barren desert, accompanied by two able natives who had fled from a bloodbath in Ghana and were now cheerfully awaiting his instructions.

  Do you know what our biggest problem in life is? My daughter-in-law thinks it’s the educational path her daughter will take. My son thinks it’s the power steering on his petrol explosion engine. Frau Wyttenbach thinks it’s Herr Hügli’s tom, Herr Imhof that it’s Herr Hügli when the latter spits half-chewed meat back onto his plate. Frau Felber thinks it’s her second-hand kidney, Herr Furrer worries about his great-niece’s happiness and the supposedly fantastic restaurant with a wood-fired oven, albeit in the most inhospitable valley of the Jura, that she’s intent on running if he’ll cover half the asking price. And you, Kâzim? Do you think, perhaps, it will be what to do when you’ve done your time here? – By then, you’re sure to have quite different problems, believe me.

  Listen: the biggest problem in our lives is the jadedness that can set in. Eyes, ears, nose: all dulled by constant stimuli. The world lacking all sparkle and clear contours, a dull grey, and foggy. No difference, whether it’s day or night. The one thing that offers any brightness: relaxing as you brush your teeth with your carer, or longingly waiting for your family to visit at Easter.

  As a teacher, I was always looking for new images to illustrate this jadedness for my pupils. I said, ‘Imagine we were born with a thick fog in our heads. And every day we don’t go for a walk, that fog thickens. We just sit where we are instead of going for that Sunday walk with our parents – a waft of mist. A day without making conscious use of our feet, our ears, our eyes – more fog. Consider how thick the fog must be, drifting in our heads. All those hazy impressions and sensations. The fog of jadedness.’

  The image doesn’t work, you think? My jaded-fog speech was directed at beastly girls and unruly grouchy troublemakers, but most of all at shy, disoriented, fast-growing teenagers, and whatever reservations you or I might have about weather conditions in our heads – I can assure you it made sense to the target audience in the way bright yellow lemonade does.

  Didn’t you ever get annoyed with teachers who promised some insight or other, only then to wangle their way out of it? They build weird apparatus, busy themselves with scales and a pendulum; table by table, they set up complicated experiments, but never do they explain what any of it has to do with our thoughts and feelings. In my day, whole herds of professors could survive comfortably in their chairs: all they had to do was acquire a highly polished desk with lots of secret drawers in order to concoct more new philosophical theorems, all in double Dutch. Now, I’m different. If I claim to have discovered some things, I don’t go all coy and keep them under wraps just because they’re simple. What use is it to anyone if I’m completely convinced I know better about something, but keep it to myself?

  Are you a Sunday walker, Kâzim? That’s those who go for a walk primarily because it’s Sunday. They’d always be willing to forget the walk if there were an easier way of getting more fresh air and exercise, without exhaust fumes. The centre of their lives lies beyond their walkable environment. The State endeavours to absorb the dissatisfaction of the Sunday walkers by reducing the number of places where they can walk.

  It’s best if I admit right away: walkers, to begin with, are as jaded as anyone else. But they can overcome that jadedness if they’re prepared, afterwards, to devote some attention to their walks. They resolve to remember their walks, and become accustomed to talking to someone about their experiences every day. Of course! You can also write about the experiences. You think a written sentence is richer than the observation that preceded it?

  Grandfather always advised my brother and me to keep a diary. In a diary you write down everything you do, he told us.

  ‘Everything?’ my brother asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Grandfather said. ‘Then you just have to hide it.’

  We didn’t know why you had to hide a diary. Soon, we did. On Saturdays, Mother always put the milk money in the milk box. We took fifty rappen from it and bought two lined jotters. The milkman complained, but Mother – bright red in the face – insisted she’d left the exact amount out. A terrible quarrel. To my knowledge, there had never been a bloody incident in our part of town, but Matthäus and I had the feeling there was one in the air. In the end, she paid the difference, but from that moment on we got our milk from another milkman. – Pardon? – 321? That’s up the stairs here. The next floor, along the corridor and round the corner to the left at the end of it. May I ask why you’re going there? 321’s empty at the moment. – No. Has been for weeks, everything’s upside down in it. – You’re visiting your great-aunt? What’s your great-aunt’s name? – Ah! Frau Rossi’s in Room 231! – 231, that’s right! Down the stairs, second floor, along the corridor, second door on the left. – 231, for sure. – Don’t mention it. – Yes, yes. There are a lot of rooms here, no shortage of them. She’ll be glad of your company, that’s nice, you paying her a visit. – Same to you!

  Do you know Frau Rossi, Kâzim? – How come you know Frau Jacobs and Herr Hügli already, but not Frau Rossi? – Slight build, shy? Check in your list of residents. Her mother frightened her to death as a child with the story of a girl who watched a thunderstorm from her window and when the lightning struck, a replica of her face remained on the glass forever. Frau Rossi never forgot the story, that’s for sure. – No, Frau Rossi hasn’t been able to see properly for years. Blind, nearly. A result of her diabetes. When the sun’s shining, she can only see a blue strip beneath her eyelids. Terrible. When Lydia was taking her to the toilet once, Frau Rossi got caught on a table leg and fell and broke her forearm. She really should do exercises, but doesn’t dare leave her wheelchair. Should, ought to! Believe me, many a time here, you long for nothing more than a faith healer.

  The second floor, generally, is associated with trouble, concern and adversity. Misanthropist Wenk sits on the hard elbow chair out in the corridor, saying nothing. Expressionless eyes. I’ve seen dead trout with a friendlier twinkle. It’s said that, in the whole world, only four watchmakers are in a position to appreciate what that man has accomplished in terms of craftsmanship, and he no longer speaks to three of them. I think he thought all his life that a human being is someone who accomplishes something, and that the value of a person can only be measured by the quality of that accomplishment. That seemed an elegant conviction until his hands went numb. Whilst Herr Kleiber – Herr ‘Money-never-goes-stale’ Kleiber – Room 233. Reported his trustee to the police alleging that his income is no longer even 25 per cent of what it used to be; and he wants the gymnastics assistant to be arrested. Stole his left trainer, he claims; the proof is in her locker. Hard work, that man.

  I can give you some advice to kee
p you out of trouble here, Kâzim. First: never touch Herr Kleiber’s things. Second: don’t worry if you get the impression the residents aren’t speaking to each other. In the Prayer Group and the Biography sessions, they’re working on it. Third: take the time to accompany elderly walkers when they request it. Fourth: the number of people on first-name terms here can be counted on one hand. Can you remember all that? The woman who takes the Biography sessions disappears for twenty minutes in every hour. – To drink coffee and chat, in the Office, to the head of Admin.

  And Frau Grundbacher from 229? – You don’t know her? Plump as a Mother Superior – if ever you’re in need of shade, she’s the one to follow. Spends the whole day trying to corner people. Then does nothing but bleat at her victims. Illnesses and wrongdoers: she has a great memory for every imposition she’s ever been subjected to. Only new arrivals and the completely unbiased ever join her. Can you imagine how Frau Rossi must feel, stuck between 229 and 233?

  I’m at Frau Grundbacher’s door one evening. I knock, she lets me in. She complains again about her stomach operation, undertaken by an incompetent anaesthetist. I could pass an exam on the subject of her stomach. A day-by-day calendar is hanging on her cupboard. I tear a page from the calendar, roll it into a ball and throw it into her wastepaper basket. Frau Grundbacher looks at me, beginning to question my right to be there.