‘I need time to find out who I am and where my path is leading,’ Angela explains. ‘In the first instance, it’s leading to Marseille. I’m trying out my independence. I take it you’ll both want to support me in that?’
‘We can gladly discuss it,’ says Markus. ‘But the whole thing, no doubt, has a lot to do with your grandfather, am I right?’
Angela stomps into the house, Verena swallows a sedative pill – or one to pep her up so the sedatives don’t over-sedate her.
Believe me, if you’ve been married for fifty years, it’s sometimes confusing to walk with someone else. Should you accompany me, Kâzim, I’ll take care not to call you ‘Dearest’ suddenly or, with customary affection, to put my hand round your hips. Even now, my hand still reaches over mechanically to Emilie’s side of the bed. What is a pullover like that made of, anyway? For sure, no material that comes from the back of an animal.
Of course, walking can be a form of torture. In the most civilised network of footpaths, there are sections even a well-established walker will find uncomfortable. Paths and pavements with baffling bumps, puddles, root damage, paving stones so far apart you get stuck in the gaps in between – that’s how carelessly Highways Departments work. The use of pavements for purposes such as parking bicycles, public conveniences for dogs or storing road signs restricts our space. But things that are difficult, truly enriching, can never be fully appreciated if consumed quickly. Bach’s organ pieces, Shakespeare’s plays, the secrets of Space and of the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel: these all demand enduring and affectionate attention. It’s no different when you walk tricky sections of a path. We decide what we may be subjected to. In time, we can feel at ease even on poorly maintained pavements.
For the sake of walking, you know, I took on some difficult country walks. For the sake of town walks, I had to accept fines. Yet if I had a hundred lives, from the first moment I could think, I would still become a walker. Regardless of how I earn my money, whether as a teacher again, or working at a planing, drilling or milling machine, as a moody house-husband, ant researcher, hereditary nobility or a street sweeper in an orange uniform – my life becomes meaningful the moment I go for a walk. – The fines? For stepping on private property, using public property without permission, causing an assembly of people that hindered traffic. Laws are made to protect us, but it’s impossible for a walker to respect all of them. The assembly of people that hindered the traffic was caused when I gave a lecture to the young people at the Autonomous Centre, up at the bulwark, on the art of walking.
‘Does this scene seem familiar to you?’ I asked. ‘You all sit down on a park bench in the Rose Garden and the elderly lady beside you clings to her bag especially tightly. Maybe your black clothes, heavy jewellery, your spiky dog-collar, disturb her? Explain to the lady her fear isn’t justified. Offer to accompany her on a walk, and tell her about your deaf and blind grandfathers, whom you took for walks in the past but would never have used to beg for charity.’
Believe it or not, the young people crowded round me, amused.
Walking isn’t taught at schools and universities; not a single one. No one seems to be interested in turning others into independent walkers, the type to think about themselves and their environment. Only those who don’t know where they’re coming from, where they’re going, or what can happen in between, are glad to be the victims of all those who would chase them around. After twenty-five years of service, an underpaid, fully qualified cleaner is presented before the assembled staff with a bouquet of flowers, a certificate charred at the edges and a terrifying pin for her lapel. You’re laughing, Kâzim. Is life a stage play, in your eyes, at which people laugh? Aren’t you bang in the middle of it?
Where do you come from, Kâzim? – And your parents? – No, never, sadly. And my knowledge of Turkish is limited to a single expression: Yavash soilarseniz daha eeyee ahnlahyahjahyim. – What that means? Yavash soilarseniz daha … – Don’t you understand? No? Maybe you speak Turkish with a different accent? – Would it ever have occurred to you to appear before your teacher with a cackling goose under your arm, or a bottle of schnapps? That would be outright bribery, wouldn’t it? – You can’t begin to imagine the things Emilie and I experienced.
My second job. In the Emmen Valley, hellish for fog. We two the only heathens among nothing but holy joes who, completely serious, told me at parents’ evenings that their son Ueli had decided not to sin, sin had ceased to exist for him after he’d fallen out of Eichenberger’s cherry tree, and I should endeavour to encourage Ueli in his bid to please God. Emilie’s contribution to the wall tapestry project on ‘Creation’ – Little Eve looking in the cupboard and beneath the bed and explaining via a speech bubble to Little Adam that she’s looking for God – is rejected by the parish council as ‘too free-thinking’.
A few weeks after I take up my post, a tractor stops outside and Ueli’s father unloads two very full sacks. I look at Emilie to check, but she has ordered neither a sack of onions nor 100 kilos of potatoes. The farmer says it’s right enough and – by the way – Ueli’s unhappy with his role as Judas in the Nativity play. I say: either we pay for this produce from his fields or he can load it back on his tractor. Ueli’s father takes the money and begins to move off, confused. What kind of new teacher is this? When I accompany him to the tractor, I see a curtain moving in the house opposite. So that evening, I head out and announce that we paid for the potatoes and onions. Paid! The landlord’s wife understands and nods, pulls a beer and pours me an elder schnapps. Isn’t it okay to treat her Vreni’s teacher to a schnapps? And what’s what Vreni wrote in her Religion jotter supposed to mean? ‘Corn is a deity!’ Every few days, the girls in my class turned up before Emilie with bunches of flowers they’d picked themselves, beaming and hoping I’d now appreciate their best writing. At Christmas, the girls made coasters, little pots for chives and salt-dough models for Emilie, and the boys presented me with soaps and apple wine. We sent everything the parents donated back – apart from the freshly slaughtered rabbit a farmer gave me as a birthday present. It wasn’t that I wished to keep the rabbit, no, but we couldn’t send it back because it had vanished without trace. Where was it? A pupil – Maria? Michaela? – snitched. It was Ruedi, the donor’s son. Ruedi had got really angry because he couldn’t stand me, he’d removed the rabbit from the staff room, taken it home again, and said, ‘As if I’m going to let that scoundrel eat our Fridolin!’
At the end of his time at school, I put my hand on Ruedi’s now-useless cowhide school bag and acknowledged, ‘You’ve got something. You’ll go far.’
At some point, on a Personal Development course for teachers, I heard that, one day in Konolfingen, Ruedi had stepped up to the bench of his locksmith foreman with a carbine. I assume Ruedi then gained an insight into the workings of state authorities, something surely granted to very few.
How cold the winters were in the Emmen Valley! Ice covered the streams, the fields were rock-hard. Boys planning to fight in the yard were forced indoors by the biting cold. The teachers in the staff room were wrapped up in woollen jackets, coats and army blankets. A layer of ice formed on my coffee and the flame froze in the hearth. You could touch the flame. We broke pieces off and put them in our mouths. They tasted like peperoncini. In this inhospitable valley, our son was born, to the unbridled joy of the girls in my class, too. They sent little notes to the hospital in Langnau. ‘Did it go well, Frau Zbinden? What does he weigh? Is everything about him in proper and working order? Our teacher has such a happy cough.’
I had been born and grown up in town and didn’t ever feel quite at ease out in the country, though I taught in the Emmen Valley for more than fifteen years. For a town walker, this region was as little capable of being a permanent residence as Elba was for Napoleon. In the sixties, I switched to another school, and we moved to a miniature town between Lake Thun and Lake Brienz. Power plant, tourists for the skiing, Italian restaurants, two pharmacies, a double gym hall and two thousand hou
seholds. Close by: sunny mountains and trees and shrubs and protected shoreline for Emilie’s country walks.
We rented a house not far from the Aare and focused on fitting in. A lightweight house, such as children often draw: a door in the middle, two windows downstairs, two windows crouching beneath the gable roof. Rose bushes on both sides of the door, seasonal joys in the garden. The walls became multi-coloured; a washing machine and oil-fired heating were installed; a Bernina sewing machine acquired; Emilie’s workshop kitted out. ‘Frau Zbinden, a seam has burst on my blue dress. Could you … ?’
The women of Lower Goldey – as far down as Seidenfadenstrasse – proclaimed their delight when they fetched the altered garments from Emilie, and those who were especially thrilled got a discount. Emilie knew about cutting to size and sewing, she’d come in with a tape measure in her hand and walk around you twice and before you knew what was happening, you were taking a seat beside your spouse in the chandelier room in the Victoria-Jungfrau in a dress that left the Dutch and English ladies at the neighbouring tables speechless.
‘Is there a problem?’ Emilie asks when Annemarie Gygax throws the fourteenth dress over the folding screen.
‘It’s pointless,’ Annemarie sighs. ‘Nothing suits me. Really, nothing at all.’
‘This is what to do,’ Emilie replies. ‘Ask yourself, what do I want to say with this dress?’ She lifts one garment after another from the floor and holds it up against Annemarie. ‘Do you want to say: hi, look at me, the pearl of the evening? Do you want to say: quiet, inconspicuous, but deep within is a horse thief trying to get out? Do you want to say: I’d a rotten week, so let’s drink the wine before it turns? Or do you want to say: I’m here with my husband but open to offers?’
‘I want to say: I had to put the children to bed before I left, and to write the phone numbers down for the babysitter in an emergency, and hope you didn’t all wait for me to arrive before you started the first course.’
‘Good, kitchen apron and feather duster then,’ – and I would leave our enchanted house. It took me about twenty minutes to reach my desk at the school, but going home often took longer for, along the way, there were many opportunities for gentle escapades: the crossing known as ‘Robbers’ Corner’; the benches on the square outside the town hall, where I could warm my stomach and look forward to Emilie. Once I witnessed a biblical-style Flood from there. An inky-black sky, then the sluices opened above the town. In a matter of minutes, the street had become a river, the women pulled their skirts up and, knee-high in water, fled into the bakery or gave each other piggybacks across the bridge to Interlaken that saved them. – You don’t believe me? Emilie was piling sandbags against the garden fence as I approached, dripping wet, in no hurry, but with a certain feeling of security, as with a firmly secured property.
If people moved in, Emilie paid them a visit. Alone, or heading a small reception committee. She took presents to welcome them, a basket with bread and salt, a bottle of mineral water, and introduced herself to the new neighbours. Emilie was so full of beautiful things she could share with others. Her whole life was sharing with others, just as I wish that for my own life. Believe me when I say that, it’s why I’m working at becoming inwardly rich. So that every time I’m together with someone, I can share something with that person.
I remember a walk at Lake Brienz. Sand, pebbles, upturned boats. Our two-year-old son ran to the lakeside. I spotted this and wanted to stop him. Emilie held me back saying, ‘Let him run!’
And the little chap – he could hardly stay upright – continued to wobble down the slope. The story has a happy ending: my son didn’t drown.
You see, Kâzim, on the first floor it’s dark even if the sun’s shining outside, and everything’s wrapped in a deep silence. Back there, that’s Herr Wenk. He’s not half fierce, eh? Go on, give him a friendly wave.
Why I liked Emilie isn’t hard to understand. But I often ask myself what she got out of me. For years, I had the uncomfortable feeling that I owed her something. From all the things I boast about having never learned – shopping so as to have things in reserve, replacing shampoo and suntan lotion, tying up the papers for recycling, answering the phone, writing thank-you letters, watering the flowers, raking the garden paths, killing off the weeds, storing left-over food in freezer bags – you can easily deduce what Emilie spent her time in the house doing. For her, gardening was a pure joy – was seeing things grow. For me, it was a sore back.
If I lit a fire in the nature reserve, she might come running across the picnic area and throw her arms round me. ‘What a wonderful fire you’ve got going!’
And I’m thinking: Oh God, I need a dozen copies of the Volksblatt and a mountain of tinder-dry chippings, and I’m creating so much smoke, the animals are fleeing in droves from the forest. Sooner or later, she’ll find out the truth and despise me. What does she see in me?
I know my physical appearance is okay. There were years when I actually looked attractive. But it didn’t matter how good I looked, for as soon as Emilie stood in front of me, I was convinced she could see right through me to the scrawny, clumsy boy who, when the cadets were playing, hid with his piccolo behind his big brother, afraid of being eaten alive over a few wrong notes.
‘Emilie, what do you see in me?’ I could ask her, and she’d sit down on the sofa, stroke my arm and answer, ‘Lukas Zbinden, you are endearing just the way you are. You think you need to be something more, but you don’t. You are a Scorpio, and scorpions, characteristically, can bend their tails over their own back, ready to sting themselves. Bid goodbye to an old friend: self-criticism.’
How do you measure intelligence, Kâzim? Right at the top of the official list is the ability to figure out complex problems very quickly, to be able to read and write at a certain level, and to solve algebraic equations in a flash. Emilie considered the ability to enjoy every single day, and every hour of every day, a more reliable gauge of intelligence. The happier you can make yourself, the more intelligent you are. For children, it’s natural to find yourself beautiful and see yourself as terribly important, but later you internalise the demands made of you by your environment. You weren’t put on this earth to like yourself, that’s not the point – what are others to think of you, in that case?
‘Face the fact,’ Emilie said. ‘The person with whom you spend most time in life, is you yourself. Learn to like yourself.’ She pressed my arm gently, and my muscles tensed involuntarily. ‘Lukas Zbinden, I didn’t know you have a bicep!’
So I stuck a post-it on the bathroom mirror with the prompt: ‘Like yourself!’
My self-doubts didn’t lessen. I put another post-it on the mirror: ‘Like yourself anyhow.’
That helped.
Frau Grundbacher, a very good d— Pardon? What jumped out? – There, there. You have to be more caref— Of course, prevention is better than suffering later. – Well, no. – Oh, it’s outrageous, all the things you can learn from day-by-day calendars. – Kâzim is right, that’s a nice Zimmer-frame you have there, Frau Grundbacher. New, is it? – No, it is, it is, a nice colour – as Kâzim says – very plain. You haven’t met? – He’s our new carer. Has latched onto me and engaged me, against my will, in conversation. – Well then, Frau Grundbacher, let’s look forward to tomorrow. – Goodbye. – Here, Kâzim, round the corner, let’s attack the next floor.
You didn’t half butter Frau Grundbacher up! About to start moaning, she was, and you took the wind from her sails. Nice Zimmer-frame, you don’t say! Isn’t it amazing that we keep running into one another, Frau Grundbacher and I? I peep round every corner to avoid meeting her, and she goes out of her way to avoid me. Seems to be on good form, though. I shan’t speak ill of her ever again. I’ll try not to, believe me. On the other hand, conduct a survey. It will confirm for you that, after an hour in the vicinity of Frau Grundbacher, every rational person has the feeling that that was enough for the time being.
This morning, in the overheated Day Room. The rays of the morn
ing sun coming in, making the yellow curtains glow. I write a wish down on a sheet of paper, a wish for the Worries box in the Dining Room: ‘Fritters, please. Edible umbels.’ Herr Ziegler is reading, with his reading-glass, To the Roman Age in an Elevator, a tattered archaeological excavation report, keeping up his fascination with adventures of the spade. Herr Feuz is filling out a competition card, to win kitchen cupboards to the value of five thousand francs, and is keeping the seat at the window for ninety-five-year-old Herr Eggenschwiler. Frau Rossi is sitting silently, motionless and trustingly in the wheelchair. A fly lands, undisturbed, on her hand. Herr Probst is telling Frau Dürig about his latest contact with the Customer Service Team of a mail-order company specialising in tools, while Frau Dürig sucks the remainder of the sugar from her empty teacup, teabag string dangling. Frau Grundbacher is explaining to a pitiful Herr Eggenschwiler, who isn’t getting any closer to the seat being kept for him by Herr Feuz, what is going on in her stomach. This is the Home’s contribution to world affairs today.
Sitting at the table next to me are Herr Hügli and Frau Lüscher-Stucki. The barely seventy-year-old Frau Lüscher-Stucki who, a few months after her husband’s funeral, grew sick of eating alone at mealtimes. Occasionally, she toddles into the Dining Room in a ruby evening dress, still trying to straighten the collar, the clatter of trolleys and trays all around her. You’ll soon see who I mean. White hair, tinted blue.
Herr Hügli moves his knight diagonally across the board. Frau Lüscher-Stucki gives a start. ‘Just a moment!’ she shouts, her shrill voice piercing the quiet of the Day Room. ‘That’s not what you do with the knight!’
Herr Hügli replies, ‘Don’t be such a nit-picker, Frau Lüscher-Stucki. The main thing is: we have fun.’
‘Don’t! Stop it!’
‘You sound like a guinea pig,’ Herr Ziegler butts in. ‘Alessandra, could you stuff a cloth in Frau Lüscher’s mouth, please? If everyone here were to scream like that, the doors and windows would rattle.’
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