by Will Self
If it hadn’t been for the curiosity, awakened in Joyce by the cynical Marianne Kreutzer’s incongruous piety, she might have headed back to her own house – but then it could never again be a home, not now; the final washing up had been done, and her underwear itemized for alms. Might have, even so – but then there was that dreadful fear of flying, and the insufferable burden that was Isobel. Might have – but then there was Switzerland itself, its reassuring orderliness, its stolid vitality.
Easter came and then went. Joyce attended the children’s passion play that Vreni Stauben put on at St Anton’s. It seemed no different to such productions in Middle England: the same halting declamations and belted-out song, the same painted faces and haphazard gowns. The narrative – which linked environmental concerns to the Resurrection – had innocent new flowers sprouting on Gründonnerstag, only for them to be scythed down on Karfreitag, as the Saviour was nailed up. Joyce found the play’s spirituality as flabby as anything Anglicans might have originated.
She told herself she went out of simple loyalty; that the week she had stayed at Universitatstrasse had created a bond between her and Vreni Stauben, shared domesticity being more adhesive than any mumbo-jumbo, no matter how ancient or hallowed. The truth was that Joyce was lonely – achingly so.
The heft of the diocese had secured her a flat in a small block on Saatlenstrasse, in the suburb of Oerlikon, which lay beyond the wooded hump of the Zürichberg. With her refugee status under consideration and a temporary residence permit granted, Joyce was freed from the exposure of repeated interviews with Frau Mannlë, the Fremdenpolizei officer who held her dossier.
Her pension income continued to be deposited in her bank account; the running costs of the old family home were handled by direct debit. A small sum was also being discreetly paid into a Swiss bank account, so that for her Zürich rent and her nugatory expenses Joyce could simply withdraw money from a cashpoint. Any questions of taxation might, an adviser at the lawyers’ office told her, be postponed until her residency had been placed on a more permanent footing.
Joyce felt sorry for the solid, inter-war, Bournville semi, the tidy rooms growing mustier as spring quickened the world without: fluffing up the privet, greening the lawn, switching on the bulbs – white, then yellow, then red, violet and orange – in the brown beds. Yet this close dormancy seemed in equipoise with her new Oerlikon apartment.
She had welcomed the stripped-down state of the four small rooms. Light fittings, blinds, carpets, kitchen appliances – all had gone with the previous tenants; this was, Ueli Weiss had told her, the Swiss way. It meant that Joyce had to make several expeditions to the Sihl City shopping centre, where she had wandered the atriums and climbed the escalators, consulted catalogues and spoken with sales assistants. She didn’t mind this, and such was the efficiency of the local service sector that the stuff was all delivered and installed within ten days.
By then, with characteristic competence, Joyce had completed her local orientation. She knew where to shop for groceries, where to buy the dockets that had to be attached to rubbish bags, and how to sort that rubbish so as to conform to the draconian recycling ordinances.
To begin with the neighbours in her three-storey block were, if not exactly friendly, pointedly welcoming. Herr Siemens, the stumpy, bearded man who lived in the flat on the other side of the landing, stopped to chat when they met on the stairs. Joyce guessed he was a computer programmer, and soon enough he confirmed this. He was middle aged, probably obsessive, yet altogether gentle and decent, she thought. In the evenings he played electronic music, and, although the beeps and oscillations were hardly raucous, Herr Siemens came across punctiliously, every two or three days, to confirm that his neighbour still did not object.
It was the same with the Pfeiffers, who lived in the flat below. Their two children, Rolf and Astrid, were no noisier than any other under-fives Joyce had been exposed to – if anything, markedly less so – yet Frau Pfeiffer came up regularly to ask if they were disturbing Joyce. She was a jolly, sloppy, young woman, with uncorseted breasts hanging loose in her cardigan; but, however slatternly Frau Pfeiffer may have been, she was always perfectly correct: polite and distant. Her counterpart in Birmingham would, Joyce felt sure, have been tattooed, pierced and offhandedly abusive – for Oerlikon was a predominantly working-class area, convenient for the workers at the nearby industrial estate.
When Joyce had moved in, it was Frau Pfeiffer who told her about the local shops, and directed her to the Peter Tea Room, as a place where an Englishwoman might get a cup of her national beverage. The mannish hair-do that Joyce had had chemically induced was becoming unruly, and, once again, it was Frau Pfeiffer who recommended a salon. But that was as far as it went – no further intimacy was encouraged. She was not alone in this: Herr Siemens was the same, as was the landlord, Herr Frech, who collected the rent in person. All of them remained standing some way off, a people at once fleshily corporeal and nevertheless exiguous: ein verschlossenes Volk – a hidden-away people – as the Swiss said of themselves.
The language barrier didn’t help, although Joyce felt little inclination to surmount it. Her old evening-class German carried her only so far into the impenetrable accent; it was almost impossible to feel out the syntax lying beneath the slushy Schweizerdeutsch. Besides, she feared that the lack of nuance she experienced conversing with these people in a collage of languages – a little English, ein bisschen German, sometimes a soupçon of French – would remain, even if their meaning became as pellucid as the windows of their spick and span homes.
Joyce went for strolls along the railway line where allotment sheds comfortingly clustered, then followed the path that ran beside the River Glatt. Apart from the shallower pitch of the roofs on the boxy dwellings, and the precision of the spray-painted graffiti on the concrete bridges, these could have been dull promenades through the under-imagined outskirts of any small English city.
Or else Joyce turned the other way out of her block and went to the Peter, to sit in its cosy uglification of melamine tables and gingham curtains, watching the slow explosions of cigarette smoke from the ruined mouths of other elderly patrons. After this, telling herself – but for why? – that she ought to work off the Apfelstrudel and the squirty cream, Joyce would plunge uphill on the switchback trails that led to the top of the Zürichberg. Spring sunshine groped the evergloomy limbs of spruce and pine. The blackened trunks of their predecessors, done for by decay, lay tossed into gulleys. The toadstools were white warts on their flayed trunks, the atmosphere was rich with the odour of rotting bark.
Over the course of a month Joyce’s walks grew longer and longer. It was difficult for her to deny to herself that this erect figure in a neat tweed suit and good walking shoes, who crunched over pebbles and skipped across puddles, was a very sprightly lady for her age. On the day she was due to go into town for the results of the medical examinations to which she had submitted, Joyce walked all the way to the top of the hill – feeling not the slightest shortness of breath – then over its thinning brow.
The spires of the Grossmünster and the Fraumünster stood down in the valley, stonily lonesome pines. The cloud lay down on top of the Uetliberg – a mauve-grey muff. She walked on along the ridge to the gates of a cemetery. It was only after noticing the words Friedhof Fluntern cut into the blocks of the wall that Joyce realized the trim cinder path, disappearing down an avenue of silver birches, led to her own grave.
Judex ergo cum sedebit, Quidquid latet apparebit, Nil inultum remanebit. When therefore the Judge takes His seat, Whatever is hidden will reveal itself, Nothing will remain unavenged. Her mother had died before her father, clawed apart by the crab in those pinched years after the war. The tears were creamy on her father’s synthetic face by the graveside. Joyce had been twelve, a bad age for a girl to lose her beloved mother – perhaps the worst. Later on she did not lack insight, understanding that this experience – being forced to mother her father and her younger brother – had helped t
o make of her a tyrant when it came to self-reliance and Best Emotional Practice.
Joyce had had high expectations of the interviews with the Papal Chaplain and Father Grappelli. She had hoped that even the lawyers engaged by the diocese to pursue her claim to Asylberechtigung – and the public relations consultant that they, in turn, had taken on to give currency to this politically sensitive case – would prove interesting interlocutors. The notion of a contemporary miracle was, she thought, so bizarre that anything connected with it would take on a diverting hue.
This was not so. Instead, shiny blue and black suits in the monotonous ambience of corporate offices. His subtle fencing upon their first meeting at Vreni Stauben’s dusty apartment had, Joyce realized, been Monsignor Reiter’s play for her – body and soul. Now he had her, she was subjected to a celibate’s passionate indifference. In place of that delicious worldliness they had fleetingly enjoyed in each other, they sat either side of the Bishop’s desk, surrounded by filing cabinets that could have belonged to any organization.
The long, thin prelate was coiled into a swivel-chair. His flared soutane and purple sash – which, in a domestic context, had struck Joyce as charged with exoticism – were here diminished: not-so-fancy dress. The biretta sat on the blotter, the toy of God’s executive. And so the Papal Chaplain examined her, his questions derived from a pre-printed sheet.
There were interviews alone with Reiter, and also ones with the Monsignor and Father Grappelli, who, it transpired, was to amend the first diocesan report on Gertrud Stauben so as to incorporate the evidence of Joyce’s recovery – and recover she definitely had. The results of the exhaustive testing undertaken at the university’s Kinderspital on Steinwiesstrasse had been conclusive: the tumour in Joyce’s liver had radically contracted. Comparing her blood test results with the records obtained from Phillimore at the Mid-East, the medics – although not oncologists – could definitively establish that once more the body’s chemical refinery was working at full capacity: tidying away glycogen, synthesizing vital plasma proteins and emulsifying lipids to produce crucial, digestion-aiding bile.
When he saw these data, Reiter allowed himself a rare quip: ‘The liver is the body’s saviour, no? After all, it is the one organ that can fully regenerate itself – be born again. Your liver, Joyce, well, it has risen from the dead.’
But Joyce was not wandering in the dewy garden of Gethsemane, clad all in white samite; she was trapped beside a filing cabinet as massive and grey as any boulder, looking at a calendar of the Dolomites.
Father Grappelli was preoccupied by one thing alone; had Joyce touched – or been touched by – either himself or Ueli Weiss on the evening they had all met for the first time? Joyce thought it rather crass that an omnipotent super-being should work through such clumsy agents and crude methods; touch, prayer – what were these? Surely, mere metaphysical sleight-of-hand combined with wishful thinking – no great marvel when compared to the blinding complexity of the largest organ in the human body, with its million-plus lobules, through which the life-blood percolated, via the very fenestrae, into a thousand sinusoids.
The parish priest’s English wasn’t good enough for him to interrogate Joyce alone, so Reiter acted as interpreter. Again and again they anatomized the encounter outside the chapel beside the Lindenhof. Joyce remembered the open doors, the overgrown Christ child, Weiss’s showy coat and edible hair – these were the things that had lodged in her memory. There had been verbal shuttlecocks flicked across the language barrier, but whether English stroke had followed through on to Swiss hand … well, the more they peered into the dim recency, the more opaque the run of play became: Joyce saw Weiss’s suede gloves slapping on his open palm – had he also, perhaps, touched her arm?
Like a student confined to a library, Joyce found it impossible to concentrate, and it was visions of a sexual kind that came to her. She was surprised – although not immoderately. Whatever people might assume, she hadn’t been wholly quiescent during her five years of widowhood; there had been one brief affair. Derry had been a carnal man, and even when ill-health had brought about the diminuendo of his own desire, he still desired hers. In life, the conversation of their bodies had been exclusive, yet open-ended: he did not seek to possess his wife from beyond the grave.
She hadn’t been expecting it, but two years after Derry died she was ambushed by the leisurely urgency of reawakened lust. However, worse than an unfamiliar body, she thought, would be its revelation. Strange clothing discarded on a well-known chair, the alien tang and slack tone of a distorted musculature … Yet it wasn’t these, but the very companionability of his caresses that had made her cease to want them. Why bother to get undressed when there was as much intimacy to be gained in front of the television? It was irrelevant whose the body had been – a widower’s, of course, one of their old circle. She still saw him from time to time. There were no hard feelings; after all, there hadn’t been any in the first place; and that, Joyce concluded, was the essence of desire – it was all hard feelings.
Now, here, with the two priests in the Bishop’s office, the feelings were hard, hard as lust before the climacteric. Joyce sensed a hot flush rouging her face – have they noticed? Most disconcerting of all, it was Ueli Weiss who mounted this ambush; Weiss’s body that she wanted to see, flayed of its bourgeois woollen skin; Weiss’s unkempt moustache tickling … my belly? Healthy blush-blood jetted from Joyce’s hepatic veins, through her inferior vena cava, into her heart, into her hot head, round and round. This – this had been one of the conversations the crab had scuttled her away from: the delirious gabble of arousal.
That afternoon Joyce left the diocesan office and, instead of taking the tram home, walked over the Zürichberg again. As she paid out her thread of orientation from the old town to Oerlikon, she thought on this: there had already been a small item in Neue Züricher Zeitung by a sympathetic journalist. Nothing showy – the Church was playing its hand close to its chest – still, enough to create some impetus. There was to be a meeting called by the Christian-Democratic Party in the canton. A follow-up editorial in the same newspaper had proposed another referendum on assisted suicide, singling out Dr Hohl’s organization for especial censure – and, in particular, the move to offer clinical depressives their service.
And when Joyce reached the end of the reel, at Saatlenstrasse, there was the Minotaur: Isobel, bullish with booze, crashing up and down outside the apartment block.
Of course, it hadn’t been the media references to ‘the English woman who has cheated Doctor Death’ that had sent Isobel bellowing and snorting towards Oerlikon, but Vreni Stauben, who, having had Joyce explain to her, perfectly matter-of-factly, that her daughter was an alcoholic, still insisted that it would not be mütterlich to so reject her only child.
Isobel kicked at the wheelie-bins in the front yard. She shouted, ‘Mummy, what’re you doin’, Mum? Are you a fuckin’ ghost, or what?’
At least the Tamil man – whose mouthful, Joyce had gathered, was Chandrashekra – wasn’t with her this time. He had come on other occasions, and the way he loitered had seemed far more menacing than Isobel’s acting up.
Since he wasn’t in evidence – and her daughter was making still more noise than usual – Joyce let her come up to the flat for her handout. The beast, with greasy horns of hair on her spotty forehead, trampled from bedroom to living room. ‘Very ni-ce, very ni-ce,’ she snorted, laying hoofs on curtains and upholstery, her nasal vowels a bad impression of a Birmingham hausfrau.
Stupidly, Joyce offered her tea. Isobel laughed like a dirty drain: ‘Tea? I don’t want your fucking tea, Mummy.’ She was staying with Chandra at some kind of refugee hostel; the wardens were ‘cunts’, but, so long as he smuggled her in late at night and she left early in the morning, she could get away with it.
‘But what’re you getting away with?’ Joyce made herself some peppermint tea anyway, hating herself for her neurotic little sponge-dabs on the worktop; old womanish, fending off dirty diso
rder and dusty death with nothing but habit.
She sat on the sofa nursing the hot vessel. ‘Why’re you still here, Izzy? Look, if you go and get your things and meet me at the airport, I’ll buy you a ticket home right away –’
‘I’m not bloody going!’ Isobel bellowed. ‘I’ve told you that before, an’ I’m specially not going now I know you really are the fucking saint you’ve always behaved like.’
‘Sit down before you fall over, Isobel – and what do you mean by that?’
‘I may not be able to read bloody German – but Chandra can; we saw the thing in the paper. Oh, Mum.’ She fell to her knees and came snuffling across the carpet. ‘What’ve you got yourself involved in – are you getting treatment from some quack?’
Sympathy, Joyce thought, didn’t suit her daughter. To be on the receiving end of it was to feel damp and mauled. ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m not getting treatment any more, Isobel, there isn’t any. You know that – I’m terminally ill –’
‘Terminally ill?’ Isobel laughed bitterly. ‘Have you looked in a mirror recently, Mummy, you look bloody better than I do!’
There was a deep pathos in this: the bland room, barely furnished – a show home for a second life; the bigger, younger woman, her face rubbed with alcohol and then scraped raw by distress, kneeling at the sharp knees of the older, trimmer woman, who would apply no salve.
However, this awareness came later, after Isobel had got her 200 francs, crashed off down the stairs, bashed through the front doors, then disappeared down the road in the direction of the tram stop, still bellowing. It came later, after Joyce had gone across the landing, then downstairs, to apologize haltingly to Herr Siemens and Frau Pfeiffer, both of whom had stared at her blankly, while denying that they had heard anything untoward.