You can’t imagine my spiritual condition when obliged to participate in such socialising. Emilie would come up to me and try to tempt me away from my desk and down to the living room, where her guests were. I would raise my voice, ‘No! I don’t want to! I’ll run away! How am I supposed to prepare young people for life with these constant disturbances?’
Emilie would wait calmly until I had cooled down and it wouldn’t be long before she’d have me there at the tea table. They would talk about Martina, who’d stood behind Moritz and was now missing her ‘own space’; about Herr Rechsteiner, a real gentleman who had presented the Woman’s World group with flowers; about Tobias Wenger, who felt shattered, abandoned, misunderstood and inwardly all over the place. Vreni’s doing the degree she didn’t do before? And what about your Dora, does she like it in La-Chaux-de-Fonds? Marianne has decided in favour of Robert again; Franziska has a lover, married, a good-as-gold fool who feeds her sweets all day. Carlotta feels as if she’s ‘become invisible’; Annemarie feels ‘out of things’; Frau Stettler is advised to try sage infusions to combat the unpleasant flushes; Frau Wehrli is fed up washing and ironing her husband’s shirts; and Frau Schmidt starts talking about the old days when men still existed who spoiled you and cared for you and made you feel desirable. Years later, Frau Schmidt will remove the label from every single one of her husband’s wine bottles before driving off on a motorbike, her arms around a stubble-jawed roofer. Almost all the married women complain that their husbands don’t talk to them enough. Emilie points to Lukas Zbinden who, throughout the entire conversation, has sat silently beside them, and says, ‘He’s the more talkative one in our relationship.’
The women blink, disbelievingly.
‘It’s true,’ Emilie continues. ‘He comes home and can’t wait to tell me everything that’s happened to him during the day, and what thoughts this fleeting day has sparked in him. For centuries, women were punished for talking too much or out of turn. They were tied to ducking stools and held under water till they almost drowned. Signs were hung round their necks and they were put in the pillory, they were gagged and tongue clamps were used to force them to be silent. In this household, my longest speech is always shorter than the shortest one given by my husband. The River Aare will stop flowing before his talk does.’
The women burst into laughter, and I am confused.
For weeks at a time, I completely ignored Emilie’s social life, didn’t take the trouble to ask who had come over to borrow onions, who she’d just been chatting with, singing with, collecting edible umbels with, to make fritters. An omelette batter, fried in hot fat. A delicacy sadly unknown to our chef here.
School holidays were something I dreaded. You never knew who Emilie would want to visit, never mind in which order we’d visit them. It became so complicated, we’d spend the autumn break apart. On the platform, I’d hug Emilie as though we’d never see each other ever again, and I’d literally shake my son’s hand; he – despite my promise – would be rigid with fear that I might kiss him in front of strangers. I would travel with my teacher colleague Bertram to Weimar, or to the City of Equality and Fraternity where, through a bistro window, we could admire a Gallic city rain until such times as I sent Emilie a bouquet of flowers, or rushed into a phone box to tell her how very much I missed her. I’d walk through narrow Italian streets, looking sentimentally into other families’ homes, enviously observing the afternoon passeggiata of moonstruck and less-than-moonstruck couples, and send Emilie wistful postcards that then remained for months in a strike-affected postbox in the railway station in Florence. In truth, I’d rather have travelled with Emilie, regardless of which of her sisters’ homes I’d have imploded with rage in. I didn’t want to be eaten up by missing her, but to travel with her and speak to her and look at her and touch her and hear her laugh.
If Emilie travelled somewhere on her own, she didn’t cook in advance, nor did she leave notes telling the family how to cope. She simply set off on the agreed date. Without imagining the thousand terrible things that could happen at home in her absence. Full of enthusiasm, she’d get into the green carriage, sit down on the green bench and position her suitcase between her feet. Free of fear and cares – while, on the platform, I’d double-check numerous times that she wasn’t about to go off in the wrong direction. I couldn’t handle a whole week without her, but what I loved most about her was that she had a life of her own.
Emilie wasn’t my first love, I have to admit. My incisors had yet to erupt when I pelted snowball after snowball at Margrit from the vegetable stalls on the Bundesplatz, and when I ran away, she ran after me and caught me, tore my knitted hat off and rubbed my face with slush. I didn’t dare speak to Margrit, but I often pelted her with snow.
I was nine maybe when, for the second time, I fell in love with a girl not meant for me. Valentina was two classes above me at school and smelled of lavender. I admired her because her braids were so long she could sit on them. She was wearing a crystal-white dress, holding a fan and leaning against the firewood of the Residents’ Association, stacked in its corrugated-iron shed. I can still remember my legs going and my carotid artery thumping so much my eyes blurred. I was throwing stones at the municipal trams, but Valentina just played with her fan and seemed not in the least interested in me. I held out the stamps I’d removed from a postcard from distant Portugal and hoarded like treasure in my trouser pocket. Valentina took them, only to proclaim, ‘Romain ate an earthworm for me.’
That was the start of my misfortune. In the days that followed, I ate several handfuls of ants for Valentina, a number of butterflies, a small basket of cherries – she ate the reddish-black flesh, I swallowed the stones – a monstrous waste of ammunition for our catapults. On the terrace beside the Cathedral, she ran ahead of me, pointing her fan at a clump of grass here, a crumpled advert for bras and girdles from a fashion mag there, and I complied without a word. Without the slightest hint of admiration or even affection, she trotted off again, returning with a few woodlice or a spider that she proffered, wrapped in a cloth hankie. I’d barely finished when she pointed out, ‘Romain ate three snails for me, the shells as well, and he only stopped because his mum called him in for tea.’
‘May I kiss you?’ I asked.
‘Yes, but don’t make my cheek wet, I don’t like that.’
I may say that never again did I re-discover that smell of sweets, firewood and lavender on a woman’s face. As you may well imagine, though, it was a good bit easier loving Emilie.
We waited for five years before we got married. I was guarding the Simplon Pass and, when there was a silver moon, could hear the melodic voices of the enemy. I played cards with my comrades, listened to Von Salis and his World Chronicle on Radio Beromünster and hoarded Emilie’s letters. She, meanwhile, was mending army blouses and shared the concerns of the whole world at the time: emergency supplies, blackouts, rationing, problems with the heating, the possibility of evacuation. I’d sent her a handcart, just in case. Emilie presided over the Women’s Association in Ostermundigen and organised a Sewing Circle, a Knitting Circle, a Christmas Parcel Circle, bazaars and clothes collections for the Red Cross. I wrote telling her I wanted to desert and come home and hide beneath the bed until the war was over. That was a crazy idea, Emilie wrote back, and she didn’t want to hear any more about it.
Every free minute I had, I spent reading. I read her clever and soothing letters over and over till I knew them by heart. ‘We look deep into the things that have become dear to us for the shine we ourselves project on them,’ she wrote, adding a sentence by an unproblematic German philosopher who meant something to her. ‘We see things not as they are, but as we are. That said, we could just try being married, to see whether matrimony is annoying, or not. If it doesn’t work, we’ll proceed calmly and quietly towards a divorce. That way, no one gets hurt.’
I carried the letters around with me, in the inside and outer pockets of my uniform, and when the crumpled envelopes began to fall apart
, I put the letters in a new envelope.
Then peace came along and, finally, the marriage became official. We accepted the keys to an apartment in Köniz, on the edge of Berne, went to the register office together, talked all night, listening to nonsense songs composed by Americans full of zest for life, then threw out our guests: Emilie’s siblings who spoke six languages between them, yet talked in such a way you died of boredom while they were still on their mother tongue; our fathers and fathers-in-law who, from hour to hour, were agreeing more and more on how completely different all our war-ravaged neighbouring countries were – ‘and they think that will all grow together into a single Europe?’ Not forgetting our mothers and mothers-in-law and grandmothers – offended, even appalled, because they’d have preferred to see the bride in a white veil and to have organ music and a priest’s blessing, preferably in the Cathedral.
Once the convivial part had broken up, I turned the glasses over on a cloth to dry and stepped into the bedroom and – you want to experience this one day too, Kâzim: Emilie was standing by the bed, in the altogether, nothing but a pearl necklace, and smiling at me, not entirely unselfconscious. Right there and then, her normally quiet, composed husband dropped the briefcase he’d received as a wedding present and chased her round the room.
Two mornings later, we found a postcard in our letterbox. ‘Dear Tenants, You’ve now been in your new apartment for two days. We hope you’ve been settling in nicely. You’ve no doubt noticed by now that here on Fliederweg it’s very easy to see into each other’s apartments. Especially at night, if the lights are on and you’ve forgotten to close the shutters and the curtains aren’t closed. Please bear in mind: current and future pupils of yours are watching. With kind regards, Your Neighbours.’
It’s possible my debut as a teacher in Köniz wasn’t a complete triumph. It’s a wonder I didn’t re-pack my things immediately when I saw the classroom I’d been given: a hovel, riddled with dirt and mouse-holes; bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling on long cords; on the wall, a rather flat relief map, Switzerland before the folding of the Alps. With my back to the militant class, I searched the sponge tray frantically for a usable piece of chalk. At the end of the lesson, the sweat was dripping from my brow and I’d banged the table so hard that the local clerk’s son was beginning to worry about the furnishings. Have you seen this, though? The pattern on the wallpaper here doesn’t match the rest. And there’s a bulge in it here.
I’m in the habit of saying to my anaemic, pale-faced daughter-in-law, ‘Go for a walk before you start sniffing at the curtains like an addict or using your tweezers to clean the logo on the home stereo. Before you try to stay sane by indulging in murderous fantasies while you hoover the tiger-fur covers on the front seats in the car.’
Of course she wouldn’t be able to go for splendid walks right away, even if I did manage to persuade her. Senior citizens who have practised all their lives can maybe go for splendid walks – equipped with a sailor’s cap, a tucker bag with tassels and a beautiful stick on which they lean for support, the right shoe badly worn at the heel. Without this kind of practice, most people remain second- or third-class walkers. Walkers who have only a loose – less than observant – contact with the world outside; walkers who don’t notice the sensations to which they are exposed. What is sensational, after all, is that sensations don’t appear to be sensations. You step out of the door of a morning and find the newspaper in the letterbox, and you remain completely calm because the same thing happened yesterday and will happen again tomorrow.
My daughter-in-law drops by: clattering heels; vampire-blue, soon-to-be-fifty eyelids. She unpacks a pullover, drowned-in-dye, for me; sinks crookedly into the armchair in the Day Room; asks whether the chair couldn’t be upholstered again; then gets onto her favourite topic of the moment: what will become of Angela if she actually passes her exams next year? I answer, truthfully, that I don’t know. She removes her hand from her hair and stares at me in silence, devastated by the realisation that I can watch with such indifference as a family member hurtles towards misfortune. The handling of Verena’s hair: something always seems to need doing on her head. Hair is constantly being caressed and put behind her ear; or ends are being tugged at; or all five fingers, even, work at the roots. Maybe she should risk a decelerated walk for once? What do you think, Kâzim? Maybe she’ll walk to the shops for once? My daughter-in-law says she’s constantly exhausted and cold, and I tell her what she can do to stop that. Is that not permitted? People only ever do what they want, I’ve understood that much. I know that no one ever accepts advice.
Verena takes a tablet while I’m at the window, looking out. I turn round and she’s just closing the blue-and-white tin. ‘On holiday,’ she claims, ‘in attractive places – there, I do go for walks. Until I drop.’
It’s just that walking time can’t be accumulated. You can’t catch up on walks you didn’t take. Walk for five hours and you’ll feel worse than after three hours. Walks that last longer than an hour and a half, two hours at best, offer no additional gain.
Emilie always refused to accept that. ‘I know my body,’ she would assert. ‘And I know it does me good to walk for five hours if, for several days before, I’ve walked just a little or not at all. I feel better afterwards.’
On nocturnal walks, Emilie was often the last decent soul to head past the darkly populated Golden Anchor, in the direction of Rugen. For a nocturnal walk of several hours along the River Lütschine, she’d pack a torch and replacement batteries, a whistle and a compass, some pulp fiction – protection against the cold – and a warm drink in a flask. Motionless, I would ferment among the forest’s excretions while, by torchlight and in a croaky voice, Emilie read me a gruesome ghost story. She could identify the outlines of little birds in the shade of a thicket where, even after she’d shown me the exact spot, I could only see a black wall of leaves. After experiencing the different types of darkness, the adventure of the starry night, and ghostly figures and bat-wings rushing towards us, we returned home, chilled to the bone. We struggled to open the leather buttons on our coats with numb fingers. How can we look attractive when we screw our faces up so much they appear to be saying, ‘Wasn’t that unbearable?’ Why don’t we try to relax our features and think, as we do, ‘What a wonderful cold night’?
Although, shortly after Verena’s visit, my granddaughter looks in and walks round the Home with me. On the day she was born, I immediately opened a savings account for her, for her education one day. Such were the overwhelming feelings of happiness I experienced, I couldn’t think what to do for her. Now she’s a tall young lady, by far the prettiest in the family – like her paternal grandmother, more than anyone else. Even if less bashful than her grandmother, she beams with joy as she tells me how she persuaded a teacher at the grammar to let her off some homework by hinting she’d period pains.
The girls in my classes, in the past, never mentioned menstruation to me; not ever. I don’t know what was behind that; a woman should be proud of her monthly cycle. It’s fantastic what goes on in a female body: the womb, what the ovaries do … If ever I started on about it, Emilie would change the subject.
The smell of the pullover Verena gave me makes me feel sick. I put my head back and breathe through my mouth, but the feeling of nausea won’t go away. I explain to my granddaughter, gently, what the advantages and disadvantages of studying this or that are. Has she made a decision already? Maybe she just needs a bit more time to find out who she is and where her path is leading?
Angela blinks at me, mischievously. ‘Granda, look at me properly!’
‘You’ve ruined your eyebrows by plucking them.’
‘Really nice of you to say that.’
‘Out with it, then!’
‘It’s like this, Granda: I’m in love!’
‘And I’m supposed to be able to see that?’
‘Of course. The red cheeks, the glazed look … ’ She gives a little laugh.
‘Do you remember, dear Gran
dchild,’ I say, ‘it’s not even three weeks since you told me – should you ever think of falling in love again, ever in your life – to box your ears, left and right, and if that didn’t help, you authorised me to seek medical help for you.’
‘Gabor was a monster.’
‘I thought you’d established: all men are monsters.’
‘Louis is an exception.’
‘And who’s Louis?’
‘An exchange pupil. Twenty, and an excellent beach volleyball player. The way things are looking, we’ll be using the money in my education account to start up a party-boat hire company – that also provides catering – in Marseille.’
‘Generally, one thinks long and hard before taking the decision to start up a something-or-other that also provides something-else.’
She scrapes her pointy-toed shoes on the stones along the edge of the herb borders. ‘Will you tell my fossilised parents, or do I have to do it myself?’
I imagine Angela going back to her parental home and dropping the bomb. A house with an English-style lawn and a decorated Hollywood swing, Markus swinging in it, looking at the broken guttering. Complaining to Verena that the mortgage has left him no room for manoeuvre, and that his white wine spritzer is too warm.
‘I’m not going to uni,’ Angela says, and her parents’ eyes turn to her.
Verena slams her hands against her forehead, runs her fingers through her hair and pulls a terrible face. ‘May I ask why not?’
Zbinden's Progress Page 5