It had been a long, warm, late fall, and we had had only a few cold days, even though it was the beginning of December.
Now, however, in the days of the declaration of war on Japan, a shivering cold began to creep into the house, and we could no longer decide whether it was the external cold or doubt that made us shiver constantly.
We waited three days and three nights to see whether the declaration against Germany would happen.
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday . . .
We sat imprisoned in a cold damp cave of a mountain, and heard time drip.
“When I return to daylight,” I thought, “a hundred years will have passed. Everyone I have known will be dead and everything will be changed.”
On Thursday the declaration of war on Germany struck.
Thursday afternoon we found that we had no more provisions in the house, and that we had forgotten to purchase everything from salt to bread.
We decided that Zuck should go to the village store to buy the most necessary items. The round trip to the “general store,” the only store in the village, took 1½ hours.
On that afternoon I can recall everything quite clearly and down to the last detail.
I sat in the living room in front of an open cupboard door, on which I had hung a spring coat, and I was sewing the hem of the spring coat. It was a senseless job: I could not use the coat for the next half year, and I don’t know why this particular piece of clothing came to hand. Outside the storm howled and moaned like a silk ribbon being pulled through teeth.
Zuck had filled the stove in the living room to the top with large chunks of wood and had built a fire of heavy logs in the fireplace.
In spite of that the cold came in from the outer walls in invisible clouds through the room and chilled fingertips and toes.
Now Zuck stood in front of me with the huge carrying basket on his back and the knapsack in his hand.
“You must not let the fire go out,” he said. “I cannot be back in less than two hours.”
I sat and sewed on, and suddenly I had a strange, painless feeling that I had a lump of ice behind my forehead, directly above the bridge of my nose. After Zuck left, I abandoned the coat and sat down in front of the fireplace to warm my fingers.
“Now it is over,” I thought, “now we are completely cut off from over there. No more letters, no news. Now everything is behind us.
“We have emigrated from there, we no longer belong there. Here we are immigrants, but we don’t belong here yet. Will they distrust us here, because we come from the land in which the plague reigns? Will they quarantine us in camps, the way they did in France, or deport us, the way it happened in England?
“This is the end. Emigration and immigration are the same as death and birth. I have not yet been born again.”
I sat there, deaf and dumb, and waited for the touch of the witch’s staff that could slowly turn one to stone, or for that of the magic wand that could teach one to fly.
When Zuck returned, the fires had burned down and it was ice cold in the house.
Zuck, who did not take it lightly when his fire wasn’t watched, was as mild as a philosopher this time, and after only a little scolding got his fires going again.
“What are they saying in town?” I asked him.
“They aren’t saying anything,” he said, “they aren’t talking about the war.”
“Perhaps because we are foreigners,” I said.
“I don’t know,” said Zuck thoughtfully, “I have the feeling that even when we’re not around and can’t hear, nothing is said about the war.”
That same evening it happened that, when Zuck turned on the water faucet, only a tiny bit of a blackish, sluggish liquid came out, and then the water stopped flowing.
From the water tank in the kitchen there came a dangerous bubbling, hissing noise.
“There is no more water in the tank,” said Zuck, “I’ll have to let the stove go out, otherwise the boiler will explode.”
I went to the telephone and called the landlord in the village. “There is no more water in the pipes,” I said, “and the boiler is ready to explode. Please send someone, or come out to the farm yourself, to see what has happened.”
“I’ll stop in tomorrow,” he said calmly. “I already know you have frozen pipes. They freeze easily at thirty below zero.”
We spent half the night working.
Zuck carried glowing coals from the kitchen fire outdoors and hauled buckets of water from the pond, which was covered with a thin layer of ice that had to be chopped away first.
I boiled water in the Irish great-grandmother’s teakettle over the open fire in the fireplace and melted cubes from the refrigerator to use as drinking water.
When our landlord appeared the next morning with a plumber, they brought candles, torches, and Bunsen burners, and warmed the pipes with them so energetically and forcefully that a pipe in the bathroom burst. A flash flood poured out directly over our books into the middle of the living room.
All of these catastrophes taught me from that time on to mind the hearth and fire and—no matter what might happen—never to forget to do first things first.
Saturday morning I woke up early, disturbed by a strong white brightness that seemed to shine from the walls of the room.
It was even stiller than usual, and on that morning I heard for the first time that restless quiet which appeared to swing back and forth in thirds like the sound of the cuckoo’s call, unrhythmically, often repeating the upper or lower note.
It was still very cold, but during the night snow had fallen, the first snow.
Snowed in, the house appeared to be even more lonely and farther removed from human settlements.
In this snow-loneliness I heard the comforting sounds of the morning. I heard Zuck get up, I heard him lay the fire and go into the kitchen to make breakfast. Between us had grown up a gentle-man’s agreement that he would be the breakfast cook, and I would be the noon and evening cook, as well as dishwasher. I heard the rattle of dishes, smelled the hot, poured, slowly dripped coffee and began to feel warm, protected, and safe.
Then suddenly I heard footsteps on the path to the house. That was unusual and strange, since in the fall and winter months, after the summer guests and friends had left, almost no one came to the house.
I got up, went to the window, and saw two men climbing the steep hill.
One was in a dark uniform unfamiliar to me, the other was the sheriff of our district.
At first I could scarcely move from fright.
“They’re coming to take him away,” I thought. “We are three thousand miles from the land of ‘taking away,’ and now it’s going to happen to him here.”
I threw on a bathrobe, ran down the stairs, and stopped at the door of the living room.
I could not understand what the men were saying, but their tone of voice sounded calm and deliberate.
“Here are our immigration papers,” I heard Zuck say. The interview lasted scarcely ten minutes.
“You will learn all the other regulations in the newspapers,” I heard the sheriff say clearly.
Then they took their leave, and I saw them go back down the hill again.
I went to Zuck in the kitchen.
“They weren’t able to drive up the hill,” he said. “They had to leave their car parked on the main highway. The road is too icy and snowy.”
“What did they want, and what else will happen?” I asked.
“Nothing, I believe,” he said, “they only wanted to see our papers.”
On the same day a snowstorm set in that did not want to stop, and the snow in front of the windows rose like a flood.
During the night we could scarcely sleep.
The timbers moaned and groaned, and often the rafters cracked like dull thuds of cannon balls. That came, as someone later explained to us, from the large wooden pegs that were loosened in old houses by the storms.
On the following day I opened the kitchen door to go out
doors— it opened in—and the next moment I was standing up to my hips in snow. When Zuck had shoveled me out, and I was back in the kitchen, I said, “We have only two cans left. Do you think that you could get through to the village?”
“I’ll try,” he said.
He tried it on skis and sank so deep in the soft snow that he took them off again and had to carry them, and they could only be used again on the last piece of the way, on the main highway. He returned three hours later, loaded down like a pack mule, soaked through and exhausted.
After he had swallowed two whiskeys, he said, “That was a lovely expedition. This time it went well. But I must have snowshoes, otherwise it can’t be done.”
“And we must have provisions,” I said, “and not just for a couple of days. We must prepare ourselves here like an Alpine cottage in the Grossglockner [Austria] area. If it goes on like this, we can be snowed in here as long as a week. If only the snowplow would come, so that we would have a passable road again!”
That night the snowplow came.
We fell asleep late, because in this third snowy night a new sound had come: the sliding of the compact masses of snow off the roof and the dull thundering roar of the snow that slid off and piled up in front of the ground floor windows like a glacier. When we finally fell asleep, we were shortly wakened again by an earthquake.
The walls trembled, the windows rattled, the house appeared to be shaken to its foundations.
At the same time we heard a motor whining, as though an airplane were caught in a spin, and headlights illuminated our house.
That was the snowplow.
It was three o’clock in the morning.
We quickly pulled on clothes and coats and went down to the kitchen.
The snowplow had driven right up to the kitchen door and had cleared a wide, smooth way.
Now it turned around in the dooryard, rumbling and roaring, so that the back part came to a stop at the kitchen door. It looked like a tired May beetle that had overeaten. Zuck fetched beer from the cellar, and the snowplow men came into the kitchen.
There were three of them. They shook their snow-crusted coats and leather gloves out and hung their wet wool caps up. Now we sat around the warm kitchen stove. They clapped their hands to warm them, and then they drank beer from the bottles.
Then the conversation began. “A lot of snow. It’s going to be a long winter. We’re coming from Mt. Hunger, where there are a lot of farms. The farms there come first. A lot of snow. It’ll get a lot worse yet. It took us two hours from Mt. Hunger to you. It’ll last longer. The winter has just begun. Eighteen years ago, that was a winter . . .”
And then came the stories of storms and catastrophes. And suddenly I felt that I belonged to the winter, the storms, the catastrophes.
From the kitchen stove and the three snowplow men a warmth radiated that took away the strangeness for us and lit a spark of hope.
As they got back in the snowplow at 3:30, they waved and shouted, “Good night. Hope it’s better for Christmas!” That was ten days before Christmas.
We had forgotten about Christmas.
THE CHRISTMASES
The last proper Christmas had been in 1937 in our farmhouse in Henndorf.
It began with horns from the tower.
Late in the afternoon horns played from the church tower announced Christmas with old songs.
Then the peasant children tramped into our house, thirty-six of them, acted their Christmas play, and were given gifts.
Then came the gifts for the family under the large Christmas tree. The smaller and younger our children were, the larger the tree had to be.
Then came the meal, abundant and ritual, and then came the staying up until midnight.
We went to mass along the hill to the brightly lit church.
From all sides cloaked figures streamed toward the church, carrying their lanterns in front of them.
In the church a huge crèche had been set up, baroque peasants and shepherds, carved from wood, knelt around the child in the cradle, and in the church itself it smelled of shepherd and peasant worshippers, who knelt in the pews and sang Christmas carols.
After mass we were invited every year by Mr. Carl Mayr, our friend, the hereditary lord and master of Henndorf.
He waited for us in his garden salon. His house looked like a little castle.
The scene on the rare wallpaper of the garden salon was very lively and portrayed a trip in America with forests, Indians, and coaches in which old-fashioned ladies and gentlemen traveled to Niagara.
There are supposed to be only five copies of this paper in existence, one of them in a house in the state of New Hampshire.
The room itself was full of valuable silk-covered furniture, and there stood the table, festively set with much silver, precious porcelain, and crystal glasses. It held the traditional wake-up meal for mass-goers: weisswurst and beer, cakes, pastry, and wine. Later in the night, champagne. The children remained with us in the room for a while after the meal, then they went back to the kitchen with the housekeeper, who had once been their nursemaid. They were drunk with sleep, but too proud to admit it, and wanted to use and enjoy this permission to stay up late, their longest night of the year, to the very end.
That was Christmas at Henndorf.
It seems to me as long ago as my childhood.
1938 was the first emigration Christmas in Switzerland, a friendly, melancholy Christmas among newly acquired friends at Lake Geneva.
Then followed the first Christmas in America, and it was so very, so completely unlike Christmas that I can only recall it with astonished wonder and a slight chill.
The children spent this first American Christmas in the East, the older one in New York, the younger in her school in Vermont.
We sat in the West, three thousand miles from the children, in an Italian bar in San Francisco, and tried to forget Christmas.
In the windows of the houses stood Christmas trees dotted with colored electric lights that were turned on every evening starting two weeks before Christmas and which gave the impression of a carnival. What appeared colorful and cheerful in San Francisco, however, seemed to be transformed in Hollywood to a haunted sea-bottom landscape.
In Hollywood and the neighboring area, I saw Christmas trees still up on New Year’s Day, standing on the streets and in gardens, sprinkled with pale blue lights in the snowless southern landscape and looking like decomposing seaweed around which light-fish had gathered.
By 1940 our Christmas had recovered and improved somewhat.
We had our apartment in New York, the children were with us, and we tried to make the best of our current situation. This is an important American saying, one could almost call it a motto, “To make the best of it.”
I had found real colored wax candles with candleholders in the German quarter. Our Christmas tree was dragged back from in front of the window into a corner that lay out of sight of the superintendent and was decorated with wax candles.
On Christmas Eve it smelled of wax and pine, and almost like Christmas.
The use of wax candles on Christmas trees is strictly prohibited in America, although I do not believe that the fire damage in the United States is significantly reduced by this. Especially since it is allowable and common, as a pleasant custom in American houses, to decorate the evening dinner table with pretty colored candles.
Yes, in America the matter of fire and also of house, yard, home, and hearth is so strange and at first so incomprehensible that I have to explain that first to be able to tell about our third Christmas, that Christmas that we celebrated in house, yard, and home, at hearth and fireplace.
The prohibition against genuine Christmas tree candles seems to me a useless attempt to oppose the wave of fires that burn throughout the states and bring immeasurable damage. The casualty list from fires reaches approximately ten thousand deaths a year, and the damages, for the year 1945 for example, amounted to about $484,274,000, or about two billion Swiss francs.
In the course of the years I made the astonishing observation that it very rarely had anything to do with arson, yet so little was done toward fire prevention that it is amazing that so many houses and buildings are still standing.
The blame can be laid on a whole pattern of carelessness: chimneys are not cleaned regularly, heaters are not inspected regularly, they let children play with kerosene and woodstoves and let them swing on electric cords, they burn the grass so closely around the houses every year and with so little care that the lightest wind can ignite a prairie fire and lay the houses and homes in ruins and ashes.
And just to look at the ways and habits of cigarette smokers can easily give a person nightmares. For years I used to go to a certain movie house and saw with panicky alarm the cigarette burns of the audience on the seats, the carpet, and the walls.
It was amazing that the cinema only caught fire three years later, and indeed burned down under cover of night, after the last performance, smoldering slowly into ashes and disappearing quietly without loss of life.
For years a strong campaign has been waged in America against fire.
It is aimed at feelings and reason, but it appears that they have forgotten the most important thing: namely to seek the roots that lie in tradition, as it were, in the historical habit of fire.
For centuries Americans have been accustomed to having their houses, scarcely built, laid in ruins and ashes by Indians or other enemies. It was a common, traditional misfortune that forced the Americans to continuous new construction or to further wandering.
Now the respect, the interest in preservation of things, surely has a very close relationship with how much a person has his heart set on things, how painfully he feels their destruction.
Constant destruction appears, however, gradually to deaden the pain, to set aside respect, to loosen ties, and finally to lead to forgetting the past and living for the future.
In the beginning I was horrified at this phenomenon that took place before our eyes again and again.
People furnished a house with unending care and trouble, with the work of their own hands, with vision and imagination. But hardly was the house complete, and they could now enjoy it and take pleasure in it in peace, than they sold it on short notice and looked for another house that they dauntlessly remodeled and furnished with the same zeal as the past house and the countless past houses that they had already left behind them.
The Farm in the Green Mountains Page 4