I found Zuck there in the coffee section, and our friend by the wines, where he was looking over the bottles and making his selection.
The owner and the clerks came over and greeted us as if we had been away only a week.
But then the storm broke.
It was in the grocery store, where we buy meat, vegetables, and fruit, and where it is noisy and cheerful like a marketplace. There people ran up to us, hugged us, kissed us, shook our hands practically out of their sockets, and showed in their joy at seeing us again not a trace of New England reserve.
We were quite overcome, and our friend rescued us into his car and drove us up to his wonderful, old house on the hill.
We sit the way we had in former times at his beautifully set dinner table. The man of the house carves the roast and distributes the slices. His wife fills the plates with vegetables and rice. The children sit in their usual places, but now they are grown up.
The man of the house says, “I thank God that our friends have returned home.”
Soon we had to break away to get home.
The two men sat up front in the cab, and I settled down on the luggage. We drove to the farm, with a detour through Barnard. That is the stretch of road that I have gone over a hundred times before, but now I am aware of the distance and of the straight, unbending sky over the landscape. We still had the reunion with the people of Barnard, a torrent so fed by springs of affection and joy that we were almost borne along on its current.
We drive on from Barnard, down the road, and then turn sharply left into the woods. We have to shift into low gear because the woods road is just the same—steep, bumpy, and narrow. We drive through the enchanted wood, past the lynx rock. Then comes the meadow, on the other side the pond, and there is the house.
The barn door is open, and our Mr. Ward is working in the barn.
The luggage is unloaded. Mr. Ward helps me carry the groceries into the kitchen, and I put away the things I have bought.
Mr. Ward says that the electric stove isn’t working.
Zuck gets wood and makes a fire in the kitchen stove.
Our friend says goodbye and takes Mr. Ward back with him to town. Evening falls and it is frosty, but the old iron stove warms us....
It is now nineteen years since I finished writing this book. The book ended with a dream, a waking dream of returning to the farm that came back again and again. The dream has become reality, and this reality surpassed all my dream images.
In this first summer we got back some of the animals that we had left with a farmer: three goats, six laying hens, our ducks Goesta and Emma, and above all our wolfhound Bertram. So the sheds, the meadows, and the pond were full of life, and there was a little milking and feeding to take care of.
Everything should have been just the way it had been, but we had changed. We had become unaccustomed to work, and even the small amount of work gave us trouble. We were no longer used to having to interrupt every piece of intellectual work, whether it was writing or reading, to feed animals, chop wood, tend fires, carry heavy water buckets. I even found the housework in the big house too much for me with only a couple of hours a week of hired help.
We began to feel short of time in everything we did, and we were no longer willing to waste time on work that was now not absolutely necessary for survival, as it had been. It was a mild summer, and sometimes I could drive our newly purchased car, a powerful Willis Overland, to the library. There everything was unchanged.
In November we had to return to Europe.
We gave the animals to the farmer, and together with Mr. Ward we packed up the house for winter.
We went back, over there.
Going to Europe the Americans call going “over there,” and in the thesaurus I found under “over there” and “abroad” the expressions: distant suns—Ultima Thule—no one knows where—the end of the world.
We didn’t return until fall the next year. Our American friends had rented a house for us in the town where we always did our shopping. The house was a hundred years old, but very comfortably furnished. It was on a river, near a high bridge.
In the middle of the town is a park with mighty elms. Birds sing in the quiet side streets where autos stand like patient house animals in front of the houses of their owners or in their yards. There are many people in the town who know the birds not only by their plumage but by their songs.
In the evening, when it gets dark, the people living in the houses do not draw their curtains. Behind the large glass windows stands a table with a bright lamp, and around the table they sit in armchairs knitting or reading. They don’t worry about passersby, and the passersby don’t watch them through the windows.
The work in the little house on the river was no trouble, and I did not have to be afraid when Zuck was away and I was alone in the house.
In 1953 we were all at the farm. Our older daughter was there with her husband and two children. The younger daughter came to say goodbye, since she had decided to work and live in Germany— later in Austria.
This summer we lived without chickens, goats, and ducks. Our dog had died at the ripe old age of thirteen years.
We had been given a hunting dog and a dachshund puppy.
It would have been a beautiful summer if the shadow of final departure had not hung over it.
After the children had left and we walked about the autumn farm, we knew: everything was different, quite different from the way we had pictured it. We established the fact that we were in the unusual situation of having to earn money in Europe to be able to live in America, a grotesque reversal of historic tradition. We traveled there and here, and here and there, and the traveling and temporary living here and there cost impossible sums.
Many good offers fell through because Zuck again and again had to leave for America at the decisive moment. Everything that had begun in so hopeful and promising a way after our return to Europe seemed to be endangered. Also the American passport requirements then in force became more and more difficult, almost impossible to fulfill, and we slowly began to realize that our existence was threatened.
Success and money would perhaps come some day in America, but we knew then that we couldn’t wait for them, that we did not dare to count on them.
The decision was made for us in a strange way. We had no possibility of buying the farm. We could no longer live on it in the winter. We could no longer live with it and in it, and yet we had a many-sided attachment to it. It was a symbol of the most difficult and the happiest time of our life.
In 1955 something happened that we had long expected. The highway came. For years the farmers had fought to keep their land and property, even though they were to receive a large sum of money for the pieces of land that they had to sacrifice to the highway. At first they said that the highway would be built in the valley, far from the farm. Then they said that the highway wouldn’t be built at all. But one day it was there, the highway. Right next to the farm, much closer than we had anticipated in our darkest imaginings. Mountains were moved, gorges cut out. The enchanted rocks were destroyed by gigantic machines that stamped and spat through the virgin forest like primeval beasts, cutting off our lonely road through the woods.
The farm is now easy to reach. It lies near the great white highway, and from the pond you can see the shining autos race by.
At the same time plans were being made to encircle the house in Chardonne above Lake Geneva, where for years we had kept a European apartment, with a 180-degree hairpin curve, cutting off pieces from its enchanting garden.
We had spent many summers in Saas–Fee, exactly sixteen between 1938 and 1957. We knew the land and the people.
We often went past a house that was set in a large garden with many trees, and we thought: We would like to live there.
At that time there were not many houses for sale in Saas–Fee.
A few weeks later we signed the purchase papers.
I went back once more to America and gave up the house on th
e river. I took furniture, books, pictures, and other things we cared about to our new house. For:
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; . . . a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together, a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get and a time to lose, a time to keep . . .”
Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer and Heidi the goat.
TRANSLATORS’ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We wish to thank Maria (Winnetou) Zuckmayer-Guttenbrunner, the staff of the Baker Library at Dartmouth College, and the staff of the Baily-Howe Library at the University of Vermont. The author used the following sources, though in most cases the quotations in the original book were not attributed:
Borden, Arnold, and Paul Allen. Students’ Handbook of the Baker Memorial Library at Dartmouth College. Hanover, N.H., 1930.
Deering, Ferdie. USDA, Manager of American Agriculture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1945.
Goodrich, Nathaniel L. “Dartmouth’s New Library.” The Library Journal (March 1929): pp. 191–94.
Kellogg, Charles E. “What Is Farm Research?” In USDA Year-book 1943–1947.
Quint, Wilder Dwight. The Story of Dartmouth. Boston, 1914. Stimson, Rufus W., and Frank W. Lathrop. History of Agricultural Education of Less than College Grade in the U.S. Facts of publication unknown.
Vermont Standard.
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