9
DURING THE BEST few summers my grandparents found the life I was leading with them too isolated, and tried to bring me into contact with children my own age. They knew their neighbors and by talking to a number of families arranged for me to be invited to birthday parties, outings, and visits to the local swimming pool. Since it took a lot of doing and they did it out of love, I did not dare resist, but I was always happy when the event was over and I could return to them.
I had trouble understanding the dialect the children spoke; I did not understand their allusions. Their educational system, their school and after-school activities, their social organization were completely different from mine. Whereas their school provided after-school activities like sports or chorus or dramatics, my friends and I were left to our own devices. The gangs we formed and the wars we fought were harmless, but they had not prepared me for the civilized, structured games of the Swiss children.
Even pool behavior differed from what I was used to: there were no water battles; nobody was tossed into the pool or ducked underwater. They played a kind of fast and fair water polo, boys and girls together—and equal. The pool was a wooden construction on the lakeshore. Non-swimmers could romp on a twenty-meter-square surface of boards that sloped under the water from one meter to one meter seventy, rested on wooden piles, and was surrounded on three sides by changing cubicles and catwalks; swimmers who wished to move beyond it to the lake proper had only to duck under a rope on the fourth side. Once, out of sheer social frustration, I impressed the Swiss children by climbing onto the roof of the outermost cubicle and jumping into the lake from there.
Friendships might have grown out of these contacts had we seen one another more often, but the Swiss children's summer holidays began soon after I arrived, and they would disperse, returning only shortly before my departure. One boy and I bonded over an interest in the conquest of the North and South Poles. Was Cook a con man and Peary a dilettante, Scott great or mad or both, Amundsen filled with a sense of mission or merely obsessed by ambition? The boy's father seemed to like me as well. “You have your father's eyes,” he said to me the first time he saw me. He said it with a sad but friendly smile that perplexed me more than the remark itself. Yet despite these promising beginnings, the projected correspondence between the boy and me never materialized.
So I spent my summer holidays without playmates my own age; I spent them taking the same walks to the lake and hikes through a ravine, around a pond, and up a hill with a view of the lake and the Alps; I spent them going on the same excursions to the Rapperswil fortress, Ufenau Island, the cathedral, the museums, the Kunsthalle. These hikes and excursions were as much a part of the summer as harvesting apples, berries, lettuce, and vegetables, hoeing beds, weeding, snipping wilted flowers, trimming hedges, mowing grass, tending the compost, keeping the watering can filled, and doing the watering. Just as these operations recurred naturally, so the recurrence of the other activities struck me as natural. The never-changing evenings at the table under the lamp thus belonged to the natural rhythm of summer.
10
ONE SUMMER WAS different from the others. For one summer I had a playmate: a girl from a small Ticino village spent the vacation with her great-aunt, our neighbor. Things did not go well. The woman, ailing and barely able to walk, had thought the girl would read aloud to her, play patience with her, and knit. The girl had looked forward to being near the big city. To make matters worse, great-aunt knew next to no Italian, great-niece next to no German.
But Lucia had the gift of simply ignoring the language problem. When she spoke to me through the fence in Italian and I replied in German that I didn't understand, she just kept on, as if I had made perfect sense of her words. Then she stopped and waited until I said something about the school where I was studying Latin. She beamed at me so expectantly and encouragingly that I went on, saying whatever came into my head, trying to turn the Latin vocabulary I had learned in the past two years into Italian words. She laughed, and I joined her.
Then Grandfather would come and talk to her in Italian, and it all bubbled out of her: sentences, laughter, jubilation, pure joy. Her cheeks glowed, her dark eyes shone, and when she shook her head her curly brown locks swung back and forth. I suddenly felt something I could not identify or name; I knew only that it was powerful. It canceled the beautiful moment we had just shared. Lucia had betrayed it; I had been disgraced. I have experienced stronger bouts of jealousy since then, but never have I felt as helpless as I did that first time.
It passed. All summer, whenever Grandfather and I invited her to join us, she would give me to understand that she and I belonged together no matter how much she and Grandfather flirted in Italian. “She's got you under her spell,” Grandmother would say with a smile when she saw us prettying ourselves up for an outing with her.
Grandmother came with us on the boat ride to Ufenau as she did every year. She loved Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and knew the several hundred couplets of his poem “Hutten's Last Days” by heart. On the island, she could celebrate her fondness for him, his work, and poetry in general. She too was under Lucia's spell: her wonder, her trust, her gaiety. When on the trip home Lucia and I sat down facing them, Grandfather took Grandmother's hand. It was the only sign of intimacy I ever saw between them. Today I wonder whether they had hoped in vain for a daughter or perhaps even lost one, but then I was simply happy: we had had a nice day on the island, we were having a nice evening on the lake, my grandparents loved each other and the two of us, and on the walk home Lucia had taken my hand.
Did I love her? I had as little a concept of love as I had of jealousy. I looked forward to seeing Lucia, missed her when she was not with me, was disappointed when we wanted to see each other but could not, was happy when she was happy and unhappy when she was unhappy and even more when she was cross. She would grow cross from one minute to the next. When something did not go her way, when I failed to understand her or she me, when I was less attentive to her than she required. Often I thought she was unjustified, but to argue over justice was linguistically pointless: I had barely formed giustizia from iustitia. And in any case, I suspected Lucia was not much interested in discussions about justice. I learned to submit to her happiness and crossness like the weather, which one could not count on, only accept with joy or sorrow.
We had little time to ourselves: Lucia had to play patience and knit with her great-aunt; she had to massage her head and feet; she had to listen to her. “If she can't understand me, she can at least listen to me,” the woman told my grandmother when she once pleaded Lucia's cause. Lucia wanted to do as many of the things Grandfather and I did together—walks, hikes, excursions, gardening—as possible. Once she even took part in a dung-collecting expedition. Sometimes we sat in the tree house we had built in the apple tree with Grandfather's assistance, but building the house had been more fun than playing in it, and we had less of a language problem when we were active. We did not exchange addresses at the end of the summer. What would we have done with them?
I had no concept of beauty either. Lucia's ebullience, her quick-wittedness, her dancing curls, her eyes, her facial expressions, her mouth, her pearly, bubbly, gurgly laugh, her wit, her gravity, her tears—they all fell together: I was unable to differentiate between character, behavior, and appearance. Only her dimple held a unique fascination for me.
How could the forehead above the inner end of the left eyebrow be so smooth, yet suddenly show a dimple? It was a dimple of confusion, embarrassment, disappointment, and sadness. It moved me because it spoke to me when Lucia would not or could not. It would perk me up even when she was cross and even though her being cross made me unhappy and I was afraid to make her crosser by showing her the effect it had on me.
By the time I fell in love with a classmate a few years later, I had developed concepts of beauty, love, and jealousy, and what I experienced with her pushed my concept-free experience with Lucia into the background. I had the feeling I was falling in lo
ve for the first time. I had even forgotten Lucia's farewell gift.
On the morning of the day before she was to go home she helped my grandparents and me in the garden as she had occasionally done before. She then took her leave of the garden and my grandparents: she would be spending the rest of the day with her great-aunt and would have time the next morning only for the briefest of farewells. When I took her home, she showed me a door that opened on the steps to the cellar. “Come back at six. I'll be waiting.”
It was the door to the laundry. I pushed it open just wide enough to be able to slip in, then pushed it shut. I saw a large copper cauldron, various tubs and buckets, a washboard and a stomper, and I smelled the freshly washed, white linens hanging on clotheslines. The two windows were large, but the vines growing along the grating did not let in much light. Everything lay in a dusky green.
Lucia was waiting for me. She stood on the far side of the room holding a finger before her lips, so I said nothing and did not move. After we looked at each other for a moment, she bent and lifted the hem of her skirt and showed me her genitalia. Then she gave me a provocative nod, and I understood and undid my belt, unbuttoned my shorts, pushed them down my legs along with my underpants, and stood up straight. I had never had an erection, nor did I have one then. Unlike Lucia, I had no pubic hair. But my face was burning and my heart pounding, and I was overcome by desire, though for what I did not know.
We stood there facing each other for a while. Then she smiled, let go of the dress with her right hand, and walked up to me. She was still holding the skirt with her left hand, so a bit of her naked stomach and naked thighs and genitalia were still visible, and I could not tell whether I should look at them or at her face, in which I found something that had a similar effect on me as her nakedness. She took my head in her right hand, pressed her mouth briefly to mine, and let my body feel a breath of hers. Before I could come to, she turned and disappeared through the other door into the house. I could hear her running along the passageway and up the stairs, and another door opening and closing.
11
WAS IT AFTER THAT that I started reading the forbidden sides of the proofs? Had the romance I had experienced with Lucia aroused a desire in me for the romance of literature? Or did it happen later, when I simply had nothing better to do? During a boring class? When I was tired of doing my homework? On the train, having nothing else to read? When I was thirteen, my mother and I moved out of the city to a village where she had bought a small house, and I had to take a train to school.
The first novel I read was about a German soldier who had escaped from a Russian POW camp and braved a number of dangers on the journey home. I soon forgot the adventures but not his homecoming. He makes it all the way to Germany, finds the city his wife is living in, finds the house, finds the flat. He rings the doorbell; the door opens. There stands his wife as beautiful and young as he remembered her through the long years of war and captivity—no, more beautiful and, if a bit older, more mature, more feminine, womanly. But she does not look happy to see him; she stares at him, horrified, as if seeing a ghost. And she is carrying a little girl who can be no more than two, while another one, a bit older, clings to her and peeks out coyly from behind her apron; moreover, a man is standing next to her with his arm around her.
Do the men fight over the woman? Do they know each other from before? Are they meeting for the first time? Does the man with his arm around the woman deceive her and tell her the other man fell in action? Or does he even pose as the other soldier home from the war or captivity? Does the woman fall in love with him without a second thought and put her old life behind her? Or does she take him on without love, out of need, because she is unable to brave her loss and start anew? Because she needs a man to care for her and her first daughter. The daughter by her first husband, who now stands before her in tatters, disbelief, and despair.
I was not to know: I had used the blank sides of the paper the proofs were printed on and torn out and disposed of the first pages. The first pages were the last pages of the novel.
12
I WANTED TO READ the end of the novel the following summer. I had thrown away the last pages but still had the first page and hence both author and title. I knew that my grandparents kept the complete series in their bedroom; it filled shelf after shelf of a tall, narrow bookcase.
I did not think the novel would be hard to locate. True, the bound galleys did not have the serial numbers that the finished copies had and that served to order them in the bookcase, but since I had been given the bound galleys the summer before and the novels came out at a rate of two a month, I expected to find the one I was looking for among the latest twenty-four. I did not. I knew that my grandparents sometimes altered the titles, so I looked for it under the author's name. When I had no success there either, I suspected that they had changed both title and author, and I looked at the opening passage of each novel. In the end I found neither the title nor the author nor the opening passage. Not even after I extended my search to include earlier titles and pulled out one after another did I find the novel. But I did not work my way through all the approximately four hundred of them. After the first sunny week it rained steadily to the end of my stay. My grandparents could not do any gardening, and I could find no excuse to run upstairs, slip into their bedroom, and continue my search.
By the following summer I had forgotten the novel. It was the last time I spent the whole vacation with my grandparents. My friends had started taking trips together or going on exchange visits to England and France. I was asked if I wanted to go on a bicycle trip. I could not afford it. I had been delivering magazines for a year and earned a decent wage, but needed the money: the purchase of the house had put a financial strain on my mother, and I had to pay for my own clothes and books.
I was disappointed at having to give up the bicycle trip, but I still looked forward to spending the summer with my grandparents. I found it annoying to be babied by my mother and told what to do all the time. At my grandparents' I enjoyed being treated like someone who was free to be himself and was taken seriously and loved. I looked forward to waking up in my bed under Stückelberg's Girl with a Lizard, helping Grandmother with the cooking and asking her for a poem while we worked, bringing Grandfather back into the kitchen from his Germans scattered all over the world, and sitting with the two of them at the brightly lit table; I looked forward to the scent of Grandmother's eau de toilette in the bathroom, to the potted linden in Grandfather's study, the plates with the red blossoms around the edges, the cutlery with the ivory handles, the giant cheese dome; I looked forward to the summer quiet, the summer noises, the summer smells.
As a result I experienced everything intensely. Many of my memories of house and garden, of village, lake, and landscape derive from images of this last summer.
During my student years the visits were brief: a few days before or after Christmas, a few after summer semester ended or before the winter semester began. I would send Grandfather the papers I thought might interest him; he would immediately write back an appreciative letter, setting aside the critical questions, of which he had many, until we next met. He in turn collected newspaper clippings for me, mainly about the Germans in Silesia, Transylvania, and Kazakhstan, whom he felt I was insufficiently concerned about. Once a semester I received a parcel with a packet of clippings, a packet of dried apple slices, and a five-mark banknote.
13
THE WINTER BEFORE my comprehensive exam I was nervous about getting through the material and thought of canceling my Christmas visit, but my grandparents insisted on my coming: I didn't need to stay long, they wrote, but I had to come. It was urgent.
They had always kept their house tidy, but during this last visit the tidiness was oppressive. They had parted with everything that they did not absolutely need and that they felt I, their only grandson, would have no interest in. They did not want to go to an old people's home; they wanted to keep their house. But they were making ready for death an
d could bear nothing superfluous, nothing gratuitous around them.
They went from room to room asking me what I wanted. Many familiar objects had already gone, and the shelves and cupboards they opened were half empty. I wanted everything: everything was full of memories, and everything I took would help me to keep the memory alive. But there was a message in the sobriety with which they were preparing for death: I could take very little. During my university years and early career I would have a small flat and be unable to afford storage costs: I could use only what could fit into one room. Grandfather's desk and armchair, perhaps? His history books? Grandmother's Gotthelf, Keller, and Meyer? The picture of the mill Grandfather had run? I had a lump in my throat; I could not speak; I nodded to everything.
The Novels for Your Reading Pleasure and Entertainment were still there, but my grandparents did not offer them, nor did I ask for them. They would certainly have given them to me. I could also have confessed that I had ignored their admonition and read first the novel about the soldier coming home, then others in the series. After giving up their editorship and closing the series, they expressed a certain pride in the novels, which an editor in Bern had praised as the best of their kind. Besides, they were perfectly cheerful about their preparations for death. I was often on the point of tears during my visit; they were not.
Homecoming Page 3
