Hausfrau

by Jill Alexander Essbaum

  A neighbor’s cat hissed and sputtered at what was likely a hedgehog. Three minutes later, the quarter-hour toll of the church bell rang.

  WHEN SHE PRESENTED HERSELF for the first of her German classes, Anna was empty of expectation. She was not fully indifferent to first-day-of-school jitters, even at her age. At breakfast she told her sons that she was starting school. Charles sweetly offered his pencil box. Charles was like that. Victor was silent; he had no opinion. Ursula made a show of snapping out a dishtowel.

  The Deutschkurs Intensiv met mornings, five days a week. That first day, Anna arrived six minutes late and knocked into a woman with her book bag as she tried to wedge past and take the last seat at the table. It was a modest-sized class, fifteen students whose ages varied and whose nationalities and reasons for expatriation diverged. Their teacher was Roland, a tall Swiss man whose first command was that they go around the room and introduce themselves using whatever German they already knew. He pointed to a blond woman with heavy-lidded eyes and a darting gaze. Her name was Jeanne and she was French. The woman next to her, Martina, was also blond but ten years younger than Jeanne. She told the room she came from Moscow, that she loved music but hated dogs. Then a woman Anna’s age introduced herself as Mary Gilbert and said she was from Canada and that she’d come here with her children and her husband, who played left wing for Zürich’s hockey team. She’d only been in Switzerland two months. Mary apologized for her ham-fisted German but she’d finished the basic class and there was no place for her but here. It didn’t really matter. Everyone’s German was unmistakably foreign, slow and littered with mistakes.

  Then the man sitting next to Mary leaned forward. His accent, even over broken German, was irrefutably Scottish. Glaswegian, Anna would come to learn. His name was Archie Sutherland. As he talked, his eyes scanned the perimeter of the table. By the time his introduction was over, he’d locked his gaze on Anna, who sat across the room at an angle from him. He ended with a small, slight wink, intended for her alone. She blushed beneath her clothes.

  Something in Anna started to burn.

  There was Dennis from the Philippines. Andrew and Gillian, both from Australia. Tran from Vietnam. Yuka from Japan. Ed from England. Nancy from South Africa. Alejandro from Peru, and two other women whose names Anna didn’t catch. They made all together a little UN.

  When Anna introduced herself, she flashed a sincere-seeming smile (a trick she’d taught herself) and spoke the words she’d practiced in her head. Ich bin Anna. Ich bin in die Schweiz für nine years. Mein Mann ist a banker. Ich habe three children. Ich bin from America. Ich bin, ich bin, ich bin. When she couldn’t lay her tongue to the German word, she substituted an English one. Anna hated introducing herself. It was like opening a door.

  Anna looked to Archie. She was compelled by how strong his hands seemed, even from across the table. A man’s hands always did her in. A cock wants a hole. There are only so many. But a man can put his hands anywhere he wants, anyplace I ask him to.

  While standing in line in the cafeteria during their first coffee break, Archie leaned toward Anna and spoke in a low, purling voice rarely heard outside of chapels or alcoves in museums.

  “Anna, is it?”

  “It is.”

  “I’m Archie.”

  “So I heard.” Anna was tentative, but kittenish. Volley and lob. He wants a game of ping-pong. Sure, she thought, I’ll play.

  Archie took a chocolate croissant from a line of plated pastries and put it on his tray. “You want one?”

  Anna shook her head. “Not a big pastry fan.” The line moved forward at an even clip. The Kantine was crowded, but the Swiss cashier was efficient.

  “So what do you nosh on when you fancy a bite?”

  Oh, this man’s good, Anna thought. “A bite? Or a bite to eat?”

  Archie put on an act of impatience. It was husky and hot. “What do you eat, woman?” Anna responded with a blushing, sidelong glance and a half-cocked smirk. They moved forward again. Archie grinned. “Banker husband, you say?”

  “I say indeed.” The reply was all cheek. Am I flirting? I’m totally flirting. It had been a while. I’m going to play this out.

  “And what about Anna? What does Anna do when she isn’t learning German?”

  Anna held for a beat before answering. “Anna does what Anna desires.” Say anything with confidence, Anna thought, and the world will believe it’s true.

  Archie’s laugh was sportive, vulpine. “Good to know.” They’d reached the head of the line. Anna paid for her coffee then turned briefly back to Archie and presented a terminal smile before walking away.

  Back in the classroom, Roland reviewed a list of German prepositions: under, against, on top of, from behind.

  Later, at the end of their second break, Archie cornered Anna by the trash cans. “What are you doing this afternoon?”

  A dozen chaste answers came to mind. Anna ignored every one. She put her hand on Archie’s arm and brought her mouth very close to his ear. “You,” she whispered. And that was all.

  Well how about that? Anna thought as she walked away. A woozy, tinny thrill shot through her. Yes, how about it. The inquiry was irrelevant. The answer to every question that day was yes.

  But they were not arduous assents. She’d said yes before.

  After class, Anna telephoned Ursula and told her there were errands she needed to run in the city and she wouldn’t be back until three. Then Anna and Archie took the number 10 tram from Sternen Oerlikon, where the streets ray out from an interior middle like a five-point star, to Central, a stop at the north end of Zürich’s Niederdorf district. From there it was a five-minute walk to Archie’s flat. What followed was an hour and a half of uninhibited sex.

  On Tuesday and again on Wednesday Anna followed Archie home after class. On Thursday and Friday, they skipped school altogether.

  ANNA TWIRLED HERSELF IN the swing, winching the chains so that they lifted her higher off the ground than she was to begin with. Then she pulled up her feet and let herself spin quickly down. She accomplished this multiple times unto dizziness.

  Eventually the church bells rang their midnight toll. A low, wormish feeling of a reckoning approached her. Only in the present tense is the subject married to its verb. The action—all action, past and future—comes at the end. At the very end, when there is nothing left to do but act.

  Even so, Anna was back inside the house before the chime of the twelfth bell.

  3

  ANNA COULD NEVER REALLY LOVE A STEVE, A BOB, A MIKE.

  She abhorred the casual apathy a diminutive implied. How a nickname more often than not announced “I am the sum of every Matt you’ve ever met, the arithmetic mean of a Chris, a Rick, a Jeff.” It wasn’t the length—names don’t get much shorter than “Anna.” She felt a person’s name should resonate with dignity and significance. It should be able to heft the weight and bear the pressures of his personality. A Steffi would never be appointed to a presidential cabinet; a Chad would never appoint her.

  Anna named her children with a seemly eye. Their names were American, but many Swiss had nonnative names; one-third of Zürich’s population is foreign, thanks to the banking industry. The Credit Suisse in which Bruno worked, for example, employed many Swiss, several Germans, some Brits, a few Americans, and an impossibly handsome Nigerian whose skin was as smooth and dark as Sprüngli chocolate. Everything’s eventually normalized by diversity. The names of Anna’s children were uncommon in Switzerland, if not rare. She chose them with that in mind. She liked their names. They seemed to fit.

  A name is a fragile thing. Drop it, and it might break.

  Like Steve. The name of a man Anna could never love.

  ANNA BROUGHT AN EXTREMELY convoluted dream to her analysis. It was organized chaotically without regard to theme or circumstance, and it was unbound by the geographies of time and space. A dream of pointed symbols, archetypal images, and allegoric nuances, Anna was sure.

  There were twenty do
ors the Doktor could have walked through if there was one. Let’s begin with the significance of the horse, Doktor Messerli might have said. What are your associations with balloons and airplanes? What do you think it means that the roller coaster only runs backward? Why, Anna, were you naked in the church? But the Doktor didn’t ask those questions and instead posed the single one that Anna wished she hadn’t.

  “There is a Stephen in your dream. Who’s he?”

  Psychoanalysis is expensive and it is least effective when a patient lies, even by omission. But analysis isn’t pliers, and truth is not teeth: you can’t pull it out by force. A mouth stays closed as long as it wants to. Truth is told when it tells itself.

  Anna shook her head as if to say He is no one of significance.

  AT 5:45 A.M. ON SATURDAY Anna was jolted awake by an unnatural scream. She threw herself out of bed and raced up the stairs two at a time. It was Polly Jean. She was cutting a tooth. Ten months was late for a first tooth; Victor’s came in at five months, Charles’s at four. Anna slipped her thumb into Polly Jean’s mouth and confirmed the presence of a small white nub. Polly countered with a string of wild infant curses. Anna picked her daughter up, shushed her, rocked her, tried to lull her back into sleep. Or a version of sleep.

  Make no mistake: everything has a variant. Like versions of truth, like versions of love, there are versions of sleep. The deepest sleep is meant only for children and perfect fools. Everyone else must pay each night her restless due.

  The sky was still dark and the neighborhood silent. From the square of window above Polly’s crib, the modest spire of the parish church was visible. The Benzes resided, quite literally, in the shadow cast by Dietlikon’s Swiss Reformed church. They lived in its figurative shadow as well. For a thirty-year tenure that ended only at his death, Oskar Benz, father to Bruno and Daniela and husband to Ursula, was the congregation’s Pfarrer. Its pastor.

  Churchgoing in Switzerland is a matter of custom, not zeal. Even a practicing Swiss Christian won’t engage in religious swagger. That’s an American antic. Swiss faith seems more bureaucratic. You are baptized in a church, you wed in a church, you are eulogized in a church, and that’s it. Still, when Bruno and Anna went to the Gemeinde to file the papers for her residence permit, she was asked her religious preference. The churches are funded by taxes; money is distributed according to citizen affiliation.

  As in America, while most Christian Swiss don’t regularly attend, even the smallest towns have at least one Kirche. In Dietlikon there were three: the congregation Oskar Benz once pastored, a Catholic church half a kilometer away from Anna and Bruno’s house, and an Orthodox group so thinly populated that the church didn’t have a permanent address and met instead in a rented, unremarkable building just across the street from the cemetery. Ursula went to church on Sundays and sometimes took her grandsons with her. Bruno and Anna stayed home.

  Anna had a cursory, teetering knowledge of religion. Her parents, in a moment of conviction during Anna’s youth, flirted briefly with the Episcopalians. They attended church sporadically for almost a year before finding other things to occupy a Sunday morning’s empty hours (for Anna’s mother it was ladies’ brunch and for her father it was golf). It was a case of dispassion rather than one of theological opposition. They simply didn’t care enough to continue. So Anna’s spiritual formation was relegated to cultural expressions of faith: the Christmas Baby Jesus and his gifts, the Easter risen Christ and his chocolate bunnies, and a copy of The Thorn Birds pulled from her mother’s bookshelf.

  Anna didn’t oppose religious belief. She endorsed it in principle, if not in practice. While she wasn’t sure if she believed in God, she wanted to believe. She hoped she believed. Sometimes, anyway. Other times, belief seized her with terror. From God there are no secrets. I’m not sure I like that. Except she was sure: she didn’t.

  But anyone might feel that way on a walk through downtown Zürich; Altstadt is clotted with historically significant churches. Everywhere you turn the Eye of God is on you. The Fraumünster is famous for its Chagall-designed stained glass windows. The clock face on the steeple of St. Peter’s is one of the largest in all of Europe. The Wasserkirche was built on the site where Felix and Regula—Zürich’s patron saints—were martyred. And the gray, imposing Grossmünster was erected on the very spot where those same martyrs are said to have delivered their severed heads before they finally (and with no further business to attend to) released their souls to death.

  Felix and Regula. Happiness and order. How Zürich of them to carry their own heads up the hill! Anna thought. A perfectly Swiss way to die—pragmatic and correct!

  Pragmatic, correct, efficient, predetermined. It was that theology that troubled Anna most of all. Anna had no qualms laying this anxiety directly at the feet of the Swiss; it was their adopted son John Calvin who insisted that it was impossible for sinners to consciously choose to follow God, taught that all are fallen, preached that all are lost. He called us slaves to depravity, helpless to the whims of Divine Will. There’s nothing we can do to free ourselves. The fate of every soul is foreordained. Eternity’s determined. Prayer is pointless. You’ve bought a ticket, but the raffle’s fixed. So what’s the use of worrying if there’s nothing to be done? That was just it. There was no use. So whenever this crisis presented, Anna would remind herself that one way or the other, it didn’t matter. Either her fate was predecided or she had no fate. There was nothing she could do to change it. Therefore when she worried it was never for very long.

  Oskar Benz was a beloved pastor. By all accounts. How generous he was. How wise. Discerning. Gracious. Sage. But Anna knew nothing of him as a husband. That wasn’t a conversation she’d had with Ursula. She assumed he’d been good to her. They smiled in their photographs. Ursula still wore her wedding band. Beyond that she didn’t know. Was he romantic? A good kisser? Kinky in bed? Violent behind closed doors? This is none of my business, Anna thought. If Ursula isn’t telling, I won’t ask.

  Daniela’s eyes glossed with adoration when she spoke of her father. “I loved him so,” she pined to Anna. “I miss him every day. A father’s the most important man in any girl’s life.” Anna’s only response was sad silence. She was twenty-one when her own parents died in a car accident two weeks after her college graduation. She’d loved her father too—both her parents—but after sixteen years the ardor had dissipated (though Anna would likely have never described her affection for them with that word to begin with). “I dunno,” she told Doktor Messerli, when the Doktor asked her to classify her relationship with her parents. “It was normal. Unremarkable.”

  The Doktor pushed on Anna. “Try harder.”

  Anna closed her eyes and searched her memory. “Positive. Liberal, maybe. Reserved, occasionally. Polite, always. Sufficient.” They were good. They loved her. She loved them back. Anna left this out.

  “Mm.” Doktor Messerli jotted.

  “What?”

  Doktor Messerli suppressed a chuckle. She rarely laughed. “Interesting how our souls seek equilibrium. We search out the familiar. The familial. That which we know and have known since perhaps even before we were born. It’s inevitable.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have described your parents?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve also described the Swiss.”

  Bruno rarely spoke of Oskar. They’d skied and hiked together, camped and fished. Bruno was a good father; Anna assumed that Oskar was as well. Bruno stopped going to church long before Anna had met him and she’d never asked him what he thought about God. Not once, Anna thought. Is that right? That can’t be right? She had no idea what he believed. Asking would have embarrassed them both.

  AT SEVEN A.M. THE bells began to ring. Those bells. Mornings they roused her, evenings they soothed her, and during the dark, marauding hours before dawn they companioned her. They rang on every hour, and twice a day they pealed for a continuous fifteen minutes. They rang on Sundays before church. They rang
at weddings, funerals, and national holidays. As many people hated them as were indifferent to them. Few loved them. But Anna did. The ringing of the bells may have been her singular Swiss joy. Anna stopped herself from fully admitting this with her daughter in her arms.

  Polly eventually defeated her pain with sleep and Anna tucked her into her crib once more then slipped out of the room. She’ll be okay, Anna told herself. It’s the newness of the pain that brings the screaming. A new pain that Polly hadn’t learned how to manage. For even infants understand the rotten, instinctive truth: that no pain ever takes full leave of its person. That pain is greedy and doesn’t give ground. That a body remembers what hurts it and how. Old pains get swallowed by new pains. But newer pains always follow suit.

  “WHAT’S THE PURPOSE OF pain?” Anna asked Doktor Messerli. It was a question that had skimmed the air around her for years like a ghost that trolls the attic of a house it is forever damned to spook.

  “It’s instructive. It warns of impending events. Pain precedes change. It is a tool.” She spoke in textbook phrases. Anna was suspicious of these answers. Doktor Messerli arced a single eyebrow. “Do you not believe me?”

  Anna arced an eyebrow back. No. I don’t.

  ANNA PULLED SHUT THE door to her daughter’s room and went downstairs to make coffee. The house on Rosenweg was, by American standards, small. The Benzes were five people residing in what amounted to just over 1,300 square feet of livable space. There were two upstairs bedrooms, each not much bigger than an oversized closet—a shared room for the boys and a room for Polly. The attic encompassed the rest of the second floor. Everything else was downstairs: the kitchen, the bathroom, the den with its tiny dining nook, Bruno’s study, and the bedroom Anna and Bruno shared. Beneath it all lay a cold concrete basement. It was cramped quarters.