Neither Here Nor There

by Bill Bryson

  And this of course is the whole problem. They are so desperately dull, and wretchedly conservative. A friend of mine who was living in Geneva in 1968, when students all over Europe were tearing the continent apart, once told me that the students of Geneva decided to hold a riot of their own, but called it off when the police wouldn’t give them permission. My friend swears it’s a true story. It is certainly true that women didn’t get the vote in Switzerland until 1971, a mere half-century after they got it everywhere else, and in one of the cantons, Appenzell Innherhoden, women were excluded from cantonal votes until 1990. They have a terrible tendency to be smug and ruthlessly self-interested. They happily bring in hundreds of thousands of foreign workers – one person in every five in Switzerland is a foreigner – but refuse to offer the security of citizenship. When times get tough they send the workers home – 300,000 of them during the oil shocks of 1973, for instance – making them leave their homes, pull their children from schools, abandon their comforts, until times get better. Thus the Swiss are able to take advantage of cheap labour during boom times without the inconvenient social responsibilities of providing unemployment benefit and health care during bad times. And by this means they keep inflation low and preserve their own plump, complacent standard of living. I can understand it, but I don’t have to admire it.

  * * *

  On the second day, I went for a long stroll along the lake-side – leafy, spacious, empty – past the old and largely derelict League of Nations building, where young boys with stones were trying without much success to break the windows, through the tranquil Jardin Botanique, and to the gates of the vast Palais des Nations (larger than Versailles, according to the tourist brochures), now home to the United Nations Organization. I hesitated by the gate, thinking about paying the multi-franc entrance fee to go in for a guided tour, and aren’t you glad I didn’t? I am.

  Instead I noticed on my city map that just up the road was the Musée International de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge (International Museum of the Red Cross and Red Breakfast Roll), which sounded much more promising to me. And so it proved to be. It really was a surprisingly nice place, if that isn’t too inappropriate a term to apply to a museum dedicated to human suffering in all its amazing and manifold variety. I mean that it was thoughtfully laid out, with a confident and accomplished use of multi-media resources, as I believe they would call it in the trade. It was virtually empty, too, and generally effective at putting its story across, considering that everything had to be explained in four languages and that they couldn’t be too graphic in their depictions of disasters and human cruelty lest it unsettle young visitors.

  Clearly too the organization’s hands were tied by certain political considerations. One of the displays was a replica of a cell no bigger than a cupboard in which Red Cross workers had discovered seventeen prisoners being held in conditions of unspeakable discomfort, unable even to lie down, for no reason other than that their political views did not accord with those of the rulers. But nowhere did it hint in what country this cell had been found. At first I thought this constant discretion craven, but on reflection I supposed that it was necessary and prudent. To name the country would have jeopardized the Red Cross’s operations there, wherever it was. The scary thing was to realize just how many countries it might have been.

  I spent the rest of the day shuffling around the city, wandering through department stores, fingering the merchandise (this drives Swiss sales clerks crazy), dining on the only affordable food in town (at McDonald’s), visiting the cathedral, exploring the old town and gazing in the windows of antique shops that sold the sort of over-ornate objects you would expect to see in, say, a House Beautiful article on Barry Manilow’s Malibu hacienda – life-sized porcelain tigers, oriental vases you could put a large child in, oversized Louis-Quatorze bureaux and sideboards with gilt gleaming from every curl and crevice.

  In the evening, having scrubbed the mashed figs of Locarno out of my last clean shirt, I went for a beer in a dive bar around the corner, where I waited weeks for service and then spent the next hour gaping alternately at the largeness of the bill and the smallness of the beer, holding the two side by side for purposes of comparison. Declining the advance of Geneva’s only prostitute (‘Thanks, but I’ve just been fucked by the management’), I moved to another semi-seamy bar down the street, but found precisely the same experience, and so returned with heavy feet to my hotel room.

  I went into the bathroom to see how my shirt was drying. The purply mashed-fig stains, I noted with the steady gaze of someone who knows his way around disappointment, were coming back, like disappearing ink. I dropped the shirt in the wastebin then went back to the bedroom, switched on the TV and fell onto the bed all in one movement and watched a 1954 film called The Sands of Iwo Jima, featuring John Wayne killing Japanese people while talking in French using someone else’s voice – an acting skill I never knew he possessed.

  It occurred to me, as I lay there watching this movie of which I could understand nary a word other than ‘Bonjour’, ‘Merci bien’ and ‘Aaaaagh!’ (what the Japanese said when John stuck them in the belly with his bayonet), that this was almost boring enough to cause brain damage, and yet at the, same time – and here’s the interesting thing – I was probably having as much fun as anyone in Switzerland.

  I took a morning train to Bern, two hours away to the east. Bern was a huge relief. It was dignified and handsome, and full of lively cafés and young people. I picked up a city map at the station’s tourist office and with its aid found a room in the Hotel Kreuz in the centre of town. I dumped my bag and went straight back out, not only eager to see the town but delighted at my eagerness. I had begun to fear in Geneva that my enthusiasm for travel might be seeping away and that I would spend the rest of the trip shuffling through museums and along cobbled streets in my Willy Loman posture. But, no, I was perky again, as if I’d just been given a booster shot of vitamins.

  Bern is built on a bluff above a broad loop of the River Aare, and the views from the bridges and vantage points are quite splendid, especially back towards the old town – a jumble of orangeish tiled roofs broken up with church spires and towers that look like mutant cuckoo clocks. Most of the streets are arcaded in a way I’ve never seen before: the ground floors are set back and the upper floors jut out over them, their heavy weight supported by thick arched buttresses, creating a covered walkway over the pavements. The shops along them were infinitely more varied and interesting – even more classy – than those in Geneva. There were antiquarian bookstores and art galleries and antique shops specializing in everything from wind-up toys to clocks and binoculars to Etruscan pottery.

  Culturally, Bern is on the dividing line between French-speaking Switzerland and German-speaking Switzerland, and there is a mildly exotic blending of the two. Waiters greet you with ‘Bitte’, for instance, but thank you with ‘Merci’. Architecturally, it is stolidly Swiss-German, with severe (though not disagreeable) sandstone buildings that look as if they were built to withstand a thousand earthquakes. Bern has the air of a busy provincial market town. You would never guess that it is a national capital. This is partly because of the peculiar nature of Swiss politics. So many powers are devolved to the cantons and to national referenda that Switzerland doesn’t even feel the need to have a prime minister, and the presidency is such a nominal and ceremonial position that it changes hands every year. They wouldn’t have a president at all except that they need somebody to greet visiting heads of state at the airport. The Bundeshaus, the national parliament, looks like a provincial town hall, and nowhere in the city – even in the bars on the nearby streets – do you have a sense of being among bureaucrats and politicians.

  I spent a day and a half wandering through the streets of the old town and across the high bridges to the more modern, but still handsome, residential streets on the far side of the Aare. It was a wonderful city for random walking. There were no freeways, no industry, no sterile office parks, just endless
avenues of fine homes and small parks.

  I attempted just two touristy diversions and failed at both. I crossed the high, arched Nydegg Bridge to see the famous bear pits – the city name derives from the German word for bear, so they like to keep several bears as mascots – but the pits were empty. There was no sign to explain why and locals who arrived with their children were clearly as surprised and perplexed as I was.

  I tried also to go to the Albert Einstein museum, housed in his old flat on Kramgasse, one of the main arcaded streets. I walked up and down the street half a dozen times before I found the modest entrance to the building, tucked away between a restaurant and a boutique. The door was locked – it was dusty and looked as if it hadn’t been opened for weeks, perhaps years – and no one answered the bell, though according to the tourist brochure it should have been open. It struck me as odd that nowhere in the town had I encountered any indication that Einstein had ever lived there: no statue in a park or square, no street named in his honour, not even his kindly face on postcards. There wasn’t so much as a plaque on the wall to tell the world that in one year, 1905, while working as an obscure clerk in the Swiss patent office and living above this door, Einstein produced four papers that changed for ever the face of physics – on the theory of Brownian motion, on the theory of relativity, on the photon theory of light and on the establishment of the mass-energy equivalence. I have no idea what any of that means, of course – my grasp of science is such that I don’t actually understand why electricity doesn’t leak out of sockets – but I would have liked to see where he lived.

  In the evening I had a hearty meal, which is about as much as the visitor can aspire to in Switzerland, and went for another long walk down darkened streets and through empty squares. As I returned to the city centre along Marktgasse, one of the main pedestrian venues, I discovered that all the bars were shutting. Waiters were taking chairs and tables inside and lights were going out. It was nine-twenty in the evening. This gives you some idea of what a heady night-life Bern offers.

  Quietly distraught, I wandered around and with relief found another bar still open a couple of blocks away on Kochegasse. It was crowded, but had an amiable, smoky air, and I was just settling in with a tall glass of golden Edelweiss and the closing chapters of The Black Death, when I heard a familiar voice behind me saying, ‘D’ya remember that time Blane Brockhouse got the shits and went crazy with the Uzi in the West Gollagong Working Men’s Club?’

  I turned around to find my two friends from the Geneva train sitting on booster seats behind frothy beers. ‘Hey, how you guys doing?’ I said before I could stop myself.

  They looked at me as if I were potentially insane. ‘Do we know you, mate?’ said one of them.

  I didn’t know what to say. These guys had never seen me before in their lives. ‘You’re Australian, huh?’ I burbled stupidly.

  ‘Yeah. So?’

  ‘I’m an American.’ I was quiet for a bit. ‘But I live in England.’

  There was a long pause. ‘Well, that’s great,’ said one of the Australians with a measured hint of sarcasm, then turned to his friend and said, ‘D’ya remember the time Dung-Breath O’Leary hacked that waitress’s forearms off with a machete because there was a fly in his beer?’

  I felt like an asshole, which of course is a pretty fair description of my condition. Something about their diminutive size and warped little minds heightened the sense of quiet humiliation. I turned back to my beer and my book, the tips of my ears warm to the touch, and took succour in the plight of the poor people of Bristol, where in 1349 the plague so raged through the city that ‘the living were scarce able to bury the dead’ and the grass grew calf-high in the city streets.

  Before long, with the aid of two more beers and 120,000 agonized deaths in the west country of England, my embarrassment was past and I was feeling much better. As they say, time heals all wounds. Still, if you wake up with a bubo on your groin, better see a doctor all the same.

  18. Liechtenstein

  You know when you are entering the German-speaking part of Switzerland because all the towns have names that sound like someone talking with his mouth full of bread: Thun, Leuk, Bülach, Plaffeien, Flims, Gstaad, Pfäffikon, Linthal, Thusis, Fluelen, Thalwil.

  According to my rail ticket I was headed for the last of these, which puzzled me a little, since Thalwil didn’t appear on my much-trusted Kümmerly and Frey ‘Alpenländer Strassenkarte’. Where Thalwil should have been was given instead as Horgen. I couldn’t conceive that the conscientious draughtspeople at Kümmerly and Frey could have made an error of this magnitude in their own country, but equally it was unthinkable that the conservative burghers of this corner of Switzerland would have elected at some time during the last eighteen years to change the name of one of their towns, so I put it down to an act of God and turned my attention instead to spreading out the map on my knees in its full crinkly glory, to the undisguised irritation of the old lady next to me, who hoomphed her bosom and made exasperated noises every time a corner of the paper waggled in her direction.

  What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit, tracing the course of obscure rivers, checking elevations, consulting the marginal notes to see what a little circle with a flag on it signifies (a Burg or Schloss) and what’s the difference between a pictogram of an airplane with a circle around it and one without (one is a Flughafen, the other a Flugplatz), issuing small profound ‘Hmmmm’s’ and nodding my head gravely without having the faintest idea why.

  I noticed now that I might alternatively have gone from Brig to Geneva on a more southerly route, by way of Aosta, Mont Blanc and Chamonix. It would almost certainly have been much more scenically exciting. What a fool I was to miss the chance to see Aosta and Mont Blanc. How could I have come this far and failed to travel through the heart of the Alps? What a mighty dick-head I am. ‘Hmmmm,’ I said, nodding gravely and folding up the map.

  We chuntered pleasantly through a landscape of small farms and steep wooded hills, beside a shallow river, stopping frequently at isolated villages where half a dozen people would climb aboard with empty shopping baskets. When the train was full, we would call at a busy little market town like Langnau or Zug and all the passengers would pour off, leaving me all alone, and then the slow, steady refilling process would begin again. It was not a bad way to spend a day.

  I left the train at Sargans, just short of Liechtenstein. The railway runs through Liechtenstein, but, in line with the national policy of being ridiculous in every possible way, it doesn’t stop there. You must instead get off at Sargans or Buchs and transfer to Vaduz, the diminutive Liechtenstein capital, on a yellow post bus.

  One was conveniently waiting at the station. I purchased a ticket and took a seat midway along, the only passenger not clutching bagloads of shopping, and sat high on the seat, eager to see the little country. It is only about seven miles from Sargans to Vaduz, but the journey takes an hour or so because the bus goes all over the place, darting down every side road and making cautious, circuitous detours around back lanes, as if trying to sneak into Vaduz. I watched carefully out of the window, but never did know at what point we entered Liechtenstein – indeed wasn’t certain that we were there at all until I saw the city-limit sign for Vaduz.

  Everything about Liechtenstein is ridiculous. For a start it is ridiculously small: it is barely 1/250th the size of Switzerland, which of course is itself ridiculously small. It is the last remaining fragment of the Holy Roman Empire, and so obscure that its ruling family didn’t even bother to come and see it for 150 years. It has two political parties, popularly known as the Reds and the Blacks, which have so few ideological differences that they share a motto: ‘Faith in God, Prince and Fatherland’. Liechtenstein’s last military engagement was in 1866, when it sent eighty men to fight against the Italians. Nobody was killed. In fact – you’re going to like this – they came back with eighty-one
men, because they made a friend on the way. Two years later, realizing that the Liechtensteiners could beat no one, the Crown Prince disbanded the army.

  More ridiculousness: it is the world’s largest producer of sausage skins and false teeth. It is a notorious tax haven, the only country in the world with more registered companies than people (though most of these companies exist only as pieces of paper in someone’s desk). It was the last country in Europe to give women suffrage (in 1984). Its single prison is so small that prisoners’ meals are sent over from a nearby restaurant. To acquire citizenship, a referendum must be held in the applicant’s village and, if that passes, the Prime Minister and his cabinet must then vote on it. But this never happens, and hundreds of families who have lived in Liechtenstein for generations are still treated as foreigners.

  Vaduz is not terribly picturesque, but the setting is arresting. The town nestles at the very foot of Mount Alpspitz, 6,700 feet high. On an outcrop directly above the town is the gloomy and fortress-like royal Schloss, looking uncannily like the Wicked Witch’s castle in The Wizard of Oz. Every time I looked up at it I expected to see those winged monkeys flying in and out. Curiously, despite centuries as a backwater, Vaduz retains almost no sense of antiquity. The whole town looks as if it were built twenty years ago in a hurry – not exactly ugly, but certainly undistinguished.

  It was a Saturday and the main road through the town was backed up with big Mercedes from Switzerland and Germany. The rich must come at the weekends to visit their money. There were only four hotels in the central area. Two were full and one was closed, but I managed to get a room at the fourth, the Engel. It was friendly but outrageously expensive for what it offered, which wasn’t much – a lumpy bed, a reading light with a twenty-watt bulb, no TV, and a radio so old that I half expected to hear Edward R. Murrow broadcasting details of the Battle of Monte Cassino. Instead, all I could get was polka music, mercifully interrupted at frequent intervals by a German-speaking disc jockey who had evidently overdosed on sleeping pills (or possibly on polka music), judging by the snappiness of his delivery. He ... talked ... like ... this, like someone trapped in a terrible dream, which I suppose in a sense he was.