Zbinden's Progress

by Christoph Simon

  ‘No!’ Frau Lüscher-Stucki shouts, bravely. ‘The main thing is: you play right!’

  And – I can’t stress it often enough – that’s how it is with a leisure activity. What counts isn’t that we have any old activity. Recently, a sad figure on the second floor said to me, ‘I’m starving my way out of the world.’

  What counts is that you have the right leisure activity. An activity with which you can live when it gets very dark; that gives you support in the face of major challenges; for which there are no requirements in terms of age and ability; that requires no proof of an unimpaired ability to think; an activity during which you can die peacefully. The opportunity to die peacefully as you do it is a great measure of the rightness of such an activity. My grandmother continued going for walks, even at a fine old age. At ninety-four, she bent down so far to see a field flower, her heart failed.

  Here in the Home, there are people who don’t go for walks because they take exception to me. Before me is a young woman who explains, ‘I’m doing work experience; I’m studying Psychology.’

  I say, ‘Nice. And what’s new?’

  What was her name again? Perhaps you know her name? – Plaits, up, not down, work experience? Expression on her face like in a fashion catalogue? No? – She smiles, ‘Herr Zbinden, I listened to you a little in the Dining Room before. You know, walkers aren’t any better than other people.’

  And off she goes. I get told stories about people like me: ‘self-appointed life coaches’. One betrayed trust. Another took off with all the money. Things have happened all over with ‘self-appointed life coaches’. What are you supposed to say in reply? No walker ever says: Follow me and be blessed. They say: Follow the path and be blessed. A walker who talks about walking like me is a signpost. With a signpost, it’s not a problem if it’s crooked, askew, or has faded in the rain. If you can see where it’s pointing, at least. ‘Do you want to avoid the walk just because you don’t get on with the babbling idiot in your care home?’ I say to … what-was-her-name-again?

  Frau Lüscher-Stucki used to play in the Chess Club. Herr Hügli will have to buy a book on chess and practise in secret. He’s not a good sport at all. Last night, he threw his cards down during the very first game and said, ‘You can’t expect me to play with these cards!’

  I gathered up all the cards that had been dealt and noted down 257 points for Herr Probst and me. I’m ruthless in that respect. We knew right away there was something very wrong with Herr Otzenberger when Herr Hügli managed to checkmate him back in the Spring.

  In the Dining Room, Herr Hügli puts well-chewed meat back on his plate, to feed to his tom later. A black-and-white tom that, with its patchy fur and the mysterious kink in its tail, looks a bit the worse for wear. Once a notorious street-fighter, now retired. Of course, it bothers people. Not half! Hügli’s tom bothers everyone who thinks having cats in a home for the elderly isn’t exactly hygienic. Cats aren’t always dozing, after all. They climb, too, for example via the chestnut tree in the courtyard up to Frau Wyttenbach’s room, where they crawl into her bed. Frau Wyttenbach, red-eyed and with a runny nose, complained to the management. The air here is full of cat hair, she said. You find it in your soup, up your nose, and the cushions in the Day Room have been torn to shreds, like someone’s been trying out their claws on them. She demanded sanctions. As far as I heard, the manager promised Frau Wyttenbach to investigate if she submitted a written report that would then be discussed at a meeting. And with that, for him, it was kicked into the long grass.

  Not for Frau Wyttenbach, however. What does she do? Quick as a flash, she whizzes across the entrance hall to the cellar door, where I’ve just seen Hügli’s tom go down the steps. With a less than subtle kick, she slams the door shut, takes a deep breath, turns the key – then looks to see if anyone’s seen her.

  ‘Now, listen here, dear Frau Wyttenbach,’ I say, ‘that’s not acceptable. It’s cold down in the cellar. It may well be you can’t stand Gandhi. But as I see it, everyone else likes him, and if you hurt him, they could come and take you away.’

  A contrite Frau Wyttenbach opens the cellar door and throws Gandhi – who bolts to freedom as if he’d been trapped in the lift for days with an activation therapist – a treat. That’s life for you. You invent non-violent resistance and liberate India, and five decades later, Herr Hügli names a dodgy cat after you.

  On the other hand, a walker who fails to cope with a staircase is only a semi-expert in his field. We are, Kâzim, aren’t we – aren’t we going to complete this steep slope together? Posterity mustn’t be able to say of Lukas Zbinden that his footwork was sloppy. And maybe then you’ll accompany me outside? Feel free not to rush your decision, I don’t mean to push you. But a walk would be a good opportunity for us to have a proper conversation, you and I.

  What would you give a nineteen-year-old girl who already has everything? – It’s to be a surprise. – I just thought you’d know, maybe. As a little girl, Angela loved to walk with her grandparents and parents along the River Lombach to the pier at Neuhaus on Lake Thun. She’d call out the names of the flora she saw at the edge of the path, my son called out the names of the cars passing, then they’d both complain bitterly to each other that the other didn’t listen. On the way home, she’d pick golden-yellow coltsfoot from the edge of the ditch, or she’d sit down in the clay furrow at the golf course, which seemed a bit too energetic to her mother behind the camera. Emilie and I treasured the fact that always, when our granddaughter was around, much more happened than when we were alone. Often, we found ourselves back at the age at which children ask questions – when we’d ask twenty-nine questions in ten minutes. Which butterfly is that? What lives in a puddle, stream or pond? And anyway, are the stars in the sky just painted onto a curtain, maybe? We’d lift sticks from the ground and rattle them along wooden fence-posts.

  On one occasion, my barefoot granddaughter, Emilie and I are listening to a song thrush that, just a few steps from our well-trodden path, is perched unusually low in a tree. It is so far down, a taller man could have grabbed it. A woman and a boy from the campsite pass by. The child hears the bird, pulls at his mother’s hand and wants to stop. ‘Look!’

  The boy asks what the bird’s name is, and the woman answers, ‘Lark, now come on.’

  To which Angela, genuinely astonished, responds, ‘But, Grandma, it’s a song thrush, isn’t it?’

  The bird is perched before us, and lit by the sun behind us. On its bright breast, every single browny-black fleck is visible. When it sings, we can look inside its beak.

  ‘Let’s see if it always sings the same melody,’ Emilie says.

  It doesn’t.

  ‘How does it manage to hold onto the branch? It’s remarkable that the thrush can sit still for so long. I reckon it can sit longer on that thin branch than we can stand here, on firm ground. Shall we see which of the four of us lasts the longest?’

  Angela and I want to. The bird’s keen, too, clearly. We stand there for over fifteen minutes. Angela seesaws, spreads her toes, bends her knees. She pleads with the bird to sing Ramseiers, and it produces something that, with a lot of imagination, resembles that tune. In the same way as sometimes, at night, you think the wind is saying something. You see, Angela was an impeccable walker. And now – what do you make of this, Kâzim? The day before yesterday, she says, ‘Grandfather, you’re no doubt right: I need to cultivate the walker within me. One day, I’ll …’

  ‘One day?’

  ‘Well, later.’

  ‘Why not today?’

  Angela makes hot chocolate for us and, pouring it from cup to cup, makes it go cold again. ‘I’d like to, of course. And at some point, I’ll do without all kinds of things to achieve that. But, first, we’d like to achieve something in life, Louis and I. And stop trying to fatten me up. I saw you pouring cream into the milk, thinking I wouldn’t notice.’

  I realise, though, distressingly, that my charming nineteen-year-old granddaughter is determined to s
tart moving up the tax brackets.

  ‘Louis says Marseille’s a fairy-tale town that will give you everything you want – as long as you’re strong and brave enough to ask for it.’

  ‘Perish the thought!’

  Every single day, my grandmother took a walk through Schüpfen and had time to chat to everyone she knew. And imagine: back then, there were no washing machines and no Moulinex appliances. She had four children to look after, wooden floors that had to be swept, paraffin lamps, a wooden kettle. She scrubbed clothes with soap until her nails were bleeding. In winter, she had to get up at five to put a bundle of wood in the tiled stove so the schoolroom was heated by the time Grandfather and his pupils arrived. She’d time, though, to walk through the village every day. Does my granddaughter? No, she doesn’t. Why doesn’t she make the time? I think – in the background – there’s someone badgering her. Someone who, like the lion tamer at the circus, is constantly cracking his whip and rushing people. I call this lion tamer competition. I take it you have an imagination, Kâzim? Competition takes us up a very high mountain, from which you can see far. It opens the curtains and we can see all the riches of the world and all its splendour. Competition says to us: I’ll give you all of that, if you’re industrious enough and compete well. Why should Angela sacrifice her youth to achieve prosperity, and then use up that prosperity trying to stay young?

  ‘Have you heard about Ecuador’s relaxed approach to everything? I’ve no idea how you calculate this type of thing, but according to official sources, the country’s legendary sluggishness saves it seven hundred million dollars per year in healthcare costs. Even the President always turns up late for his English lessons.’

  ‘Put any idea of me becoming a teacher out of your head, Granda,’ Angela replies. ‘Party-catering is a great job. And don’t say, yet again, Perish the thought!’

  Do I seem too anti-competitive to you, Kâzim? – Feel free to tell me. – Out with it, if that’s the case! – Please! You don’t need to act the modest civilian-service type with me. Do you think I’m doting, maybe? – You’re an odd one, Kâzim. You don’t let anyone look any deeper. There’s no way you are as simple as you make out.

  Like watchmaker Wenk with his numb hands, I too grew up in an age when it was drummed into people that they had to be able to do something. A terrible, terrible thing it was to miss out on your career – all those kinds of warnings. I remember the story, part of my preparation for Confirmation, about the man who entrusted his property to his servants, and then condemned the one servant who had buried his talent beneath the earth, where it couldn’t generate further talents. Human beings must take advantage of every minute and not drift around, aimlessly, in the world God created. We would like so much to be free, but have hardly acquitted ourselves of one duty when we start to tailor our next corset.

  If I describe my own personal town walk to Frau Lüscher-Stucki, and she wipes the sweat from her brow with a lilac cloth and says, all agitated, ‘I’d never manage anything as arduous as that!’, then I get to work on her.

  I say, ‘If you turn your mind to walking, then simply don’t worry about performance. You shouldn’t compare yourself to others. In walking, there is no victory over others, and no such thing as defeat. You aren’t competing with anyone, Frau Lüscher-Stucki. Competing with others is a torture rack. Competition is a relentless sieve.’

  Walkers don’t set out to do a more difficult walk than someone else. That wouldn’t be a benchmark for their art. They don’t set out to climb two hundred metres, or to do fifteen hundred metres in six minutes. Those are the types of goals sportsmen set themselves. Those who want to beat others, or themselves, do sport.

  I lost my brother early in life. Just as an example. Our friends, my brother and I decided to race to see who would be the quickest to get to Marktgasse, the street where we all lived. Matthäus – in his sweat-drenched, red-checked shirt – was the exhausted victor. At home, he turned on the tap, let the water run a good while, so it was really cold and refreshing, then drank a jugful in one go. A week later, he’d bad pneumonia. Within a month, he was dead.

  Thirteen, my brother was. A stroke of fate you can’t come to terms with, unless you accept it. Even nowadays, I sometimes think I can hear his voice, imagine I can see him, in the Day Room or the Dining Room, behind a curtain where he so liked to hide.

  For days, Father didn’t say a word. He just squeezed Mother’s arm constantly as if he were suffering a physical pain.

  ‘If you don’t want to, you don’t have to go to the funeral, Lukas,’ Mother said.

  ‘But I’d like to go – with you both.’ – Father clasped my hand as if he were being lacerated.

  The evening before the start of the summer holidays, I told Father I wanted to go and see Grandfather, the village schoolteacher in Schüpfen.

  Father was standing at the front door, smoking.

  ‘Come here, Lukas,’ he said, his voice as toneless as the wind.

  I was standing beside him, but he didn’t say a word. I lowered my head, and he continued smoking. Finally, he said, ‘Go to bed, Lukas.’

  I squeezed past and his elbow brushed my arm. He stepped inside after me and said, casually, ‘Let’s eat early tomorrow. We’ll go to the cemetery together.’

  At the door of the room, he turned and looked at me. His cigarette was smouldering in the darkness. He cleared his throat and said again, ‘Go to bed, Lukas.’

  For a moment he stood there in silence, then I saw the glow of his cigarette turn away from me.

  I said, ‘Dad, I’d like to go and see Grandfather.’

  At that point, he came over and put his hand on my hair. ‘We’ll talk about it tomorrow.’

  I couldn’t get to sleep for a long time. My father appeared before my eyes, sitting in the middle of a white, empty surface, on an apple crate.

  I wouldn’t like to forget everything. To eat my soup with a fork. To cut my ears off. The year before last, Herr Ruchti, a wise, friendly man, started being forever on the move, around the building, laughing quietly to himself, looking for things. And yet you’d the impression that what he was looking for was in his pocket. One morning, he couldn’t find his electric razor. Smiling, he asked Frau Lüscher-Stucki did she have it, but she didn’t. Did she know where it had got to? She didn’t. Could he maybe borrow her shaving things? Frau Lüscher-Stucki had to remind him she doesn’t use shaving things. Herr Ruchti was transferred to the special-care home in Holenacker. Panorama, it’s called. I miss him terribly.

  A quarter of all those over eighty lose their minds. I try to keep my mind alert. For decades, thoughts to and fro like weaver’s shuttles; then they suddenly decelerate. The first to disappear are the names, then the nouns. I need scissors and say to Irina in the Gift-Making Group, ‘Can you please let me have the … oh … eh … drat, the things for cutting.’

  You become slow, quiet, then turn into a lettuce-head. Recently, I’ve been wondering more and more whether I’ll still be living here in a year’s time. I’m full of concern: how long will I still be able to speak, hear, perceive things? How long will I still be able to sense, for example, that my son is with me, that I’m not alone. The end of my path is becoming more and more identifiable. I’ve started taking my leave of people, but they tell me it’s still too early for that. Angela dreams aloud about all the things she wants to show me in the south of France. What, Kâzim? – I thought you said something.

  Should I tell you something? I’ve researched this thoroughly over a long period of time, and there are a great many examples of scientists, musicians and poets finding surprising solutions for their problems while out for a walk. Quite unexpectedly, the solutions came to them at the edge of meadows, in rambling gardens or on forest paths.

  Take the discovery of the molecular structure of benzene. For years, the chemist August Kekulé tried without success to discover the structure of benzene. A closed ring of carbon atoms, do you remember, Kâzim? On a windy evening in 1865, sick of the c
rackling fire in the hearth, Kekulé goes outside. The leaves of a birch tree dance before his eyes. Forms in various different designs. Leaves and branches, moving, twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But what’s this? One of the snakes seizes hold of its own tail, and the form whirls mockingly before Kekulé’s eyes. In a flash, he understands and spends the rest of the night … – Frau Dürig, how are you? Did you try the hot milk and bread I recommended to you? – So, how was it? Tasty? – You see! Full of strange vitamins. – No. Tomorrow, I have to attend a funeral. A close friend of my late Emilie. – Yes, the country’s dying out. If I’m asked what I do, I answer: I go to funerals. – I’ve developed firm principles for funerals, principles I adhere to strictly. – Why, yes. I position myself at a table, find a reliable waitress who will look after me, and receive the people. Ever since I passed the eighty mark, it seems too much like hard work, much too tiring, to have to push my way through crowds of mourners. – Your woollen coat’s at the laundry? – You won’t need it, don’t worry. A hood or umbrella, at most. – This is Kâzim, our new carer. Gentle and shy. You have to keep asking him to speak up. He clears his throat and says ‘Sorry’, then carries on mumbling as before. – How did you guess, Frau Dürig? – Someone has to encourage the others. In the entire civilised world there’s a need for more walkers. The United States of North America need walkers. Russia needs walkers. North Korea could do with a few. – Why, yes. It’s my task to get people out onto the streets and give them a little shove. – I’ll knock on your door the day after tomorrow then. Gladly. – Until then, Frau Dürig, you too!

  Or take the composer Giuseppe Tartini. Not heard of him? Has a walk to thank for his Devil’s Trill Sonata. In his study, Tartini reads the Faust legend. Then heads out to stretch his legs in the park. The devil steps out from behind a pine, with a violin in his hand, and plays eerie, odd notes, full of peculiar trills and fast runs. In his memoirs, Tartini tells us how astonished he was at hearing the devil play with such virtuosity. Tartini hurries home. He shoves the violin beneath his chin, replays what he heard and presents the work as his own. Look at Frau Dürig and you’d be forgiven for thinking the slightest breeze would knock her off her feet. A wounded little bird, fallen to the ground. Her deceased husband was the exact opposite. Herr Dürig’s wonderfully broad shoulders are something you, sadly, Kâzim, won’t now get to behold. He died on his sixty-second wedding anniversary.