The Farm in the Green Mountains

by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer

  I saw American families wander from place to place, move into houses and apartments and abandon them again, in a way that I knew from my childhood memories only in officers of the Austro-Hungarian army, who had to move from Cracow to Budapest, from garrison to garrison, and who were transferred again and again.

  But the American families displace themselves willingly, and always with the hope that the next job will be more pleasant and the next house prettier and better than the one they just left.

  Gradually I began to understand the phenomenon: Americans are not dependent on any landscape, any house, any surroundings, because they are at home everywhere in their gigantic and truly borderless land, and for all the differences of the East, South, West, and Midwest, speak one and the same language. They have set up their road signs and information booths across the entire country. Drugstores, gas stations, stores—these can look the same everywhere across the entire wide land and arouse in the foreign traveler the impression that everything is the same in America.

  Naturally a place in Texas looks quite different from a place in Vermont, New Orleans in the South has no resemblance to Boston, and one could collect volumes of picture books on the differences in America.

  But just for that reason they seem to have set up points where they demand uniformity: the same gas stations for gasoline, the same sandwiches and ice creams in the drugstores, the same things to buy in the chain stores.

  Individualism is a private matter in America, but its distribution is much wider and more powerful than one generally imagines.

  We had now set ourselves down with infallible instinct in that state which has overdeveloped individualism to eccentricity, that produces odd characters and is woven about by a complete cycle of stories whose main theme is indestructible independence and the will to do things in one’s own way, even when the approaches are ever so unconventional.

  Vermonters are seen in America as especially whimsical and obstinate and also criticized as narrow-minded and reactionary. I cannot agree with this. I am obstinate myself and measure myself willingly against other respectable obstinate people. Narrow-mindedness I have met much less frequently in Vermont than in Europe, and as for being reactionary, even people who are prejudiced against Vermonters must see that Vermont has put forward a line of senators and governors who have won a not-inconsiderable reputation throughout the country by their forthrightness and personality.

  The old-fashioned things about Vermonters and a certain inclination toward tradition were qualities that eased the transplanting for us significantly.

  There were and are around us people and neighbors who incline to a certain stability, and one of the most stable among them is our landlord.

  He had indeed, when we rented the house, not been living there for twelve years, because he had a store in town and had had to move to the vicinity of the store.

  But in spirit he had never left this house, and he spent his Sundays and holidays, often even a few days of vacation, working in the house and keeping it in condition.

  For that reason our first impression of the house had been one of an inhabited uninhabited dwelling. Even then, when it had no running water and no lighting and only a few pieces of furniture scattered through it, it looked like a cared-for and protected house, and we caught on quickly that this involved not simply chance and renting a house, but that this house was being put under our protection and we had to take care of it.

  I know scarcely any house that is placed in the right relationship to the landscape like this, and that radiates so much harmony in its proportions, in its simplicity, and in its interior.

  We originally wanted to make no new ties; we had a great desire to be as free as the American house changer.

  But now there was this house to which we fell victim.

  To arrange this house was no art. The furniture moved itself to the places in which it belonged.

  Therefore to celebrate Christmas in this house was neither the forced exercise of a tradition or a memory of earlier festivities. It was new and different, and a Christmas that belonged to this house.

  Three days before Christmas Zuck had gone into the woods, sought out a lovely fir and cut it down with an axe.

  Bringing the huge tree through the snowy woods was not so easy.

  When he came into the kitchen with the tree he looked as grumpy as the German Christmas elf, Knecht Ruprecht.

  It was, however, not only the weight of the tree that troubled him, but unbearable burdens of uncertainty, unpredictability, probable unhappiness. Yes, I could bring out a whole row of such unfortunate words that begin with the negative and gloomy “un” and that had camped around us in a ring and appeared to glare at us out of all the corners like unfriendly toads and lizards.

  One could only hold them at a distance with simple tasks like washing, ironing, cleaning, cooking, sewing—work that led to a definite useful end.

  To wash and iron a piece of dirty laundry, to clean, scrub, wax the kitchen floor, to cover holes in stockings with a lattice of threads, to make a wearable garment from whole cloth, or to cook something from all sorts of raw ingredients—that was the same process again and again: namely, going from a disorderly beginning to a state of clean orderliness, or giving form and taste to unformed material.

  This endlessly repetitive, primitive process of accomplishment was a greater protection against care, anxiety, and fear for one’s life than the application of all manner of understanding, reason, and religion.

  This also probably explains the fact that women in threatening and confused times generally find their way more easily and orient themselves less anxiously than men, who are more attached to the chaotic beginning and the stages of development than the final form.

  Also, these observations refer more to European men, for America can be compared to a great household where men and women throw themselves into it equally at the beginning, strive madly to reach the goal, and set their minds on the final result.

  So I buried myself in those days before Christmas in the timeless and time-consuming business of baking.

  Since our Christmas tree decorations had been abandoned in Austria, part and parcel, I bought only a few silver chains, angel’s hair, the star for the top, and, most important, cookie cutters. I found hearts, fir trees, rabbits, crescents, stars, and gingerbread men in metal shapes, and now began a nightly baking of Broesel cookie hearts, Linzer cookie trees, chocolate rabbits, nut crescents, cinnamon stars, and gingerbread men, so that the house was enveloped in a cloud of baking smells. I formed marzipan potatoes and rolled Mozart balls. The baked goods lay spread out on fresh wooden boards in all shades of colors to cool, marzipan and chocolate balls to harden their outer shell, while the gilded and silvered nuts hung and dried on strings from the beams of the ceiling.

  There was a complete world of shapes and forms collected in the kitchen, and one stood among them firmly.

  On the night before the children arrived, I sat in the kitchen and pulled colored threads through the cookies. “Tomorrow you can hang them all on the tree,” I said to Zuck, who had always been our tree decorator.

  “Are you looking forward to Christmas?” Zuck asked me.

  “No,” I said, “I cannot look forward to it. I can at best try not to be afraid of it.”

  We sat and snipped strings and talked about our situation, practically, materialistically, and without illusion.

  Foreign bank accounts of aliens were cut off first. Then we had to turn over to the sheriff the splendid big radio that we had been sent as an early Christmas present from an American friend, right after it came, so that the shortwave reception could be removed. We had to swear to have no weapon in the house, which was strange on such an isolated farm. We could not travel without official permission.

  They were, all together, not bad or uncomfortable measures, but we could not know if these were only a beginning.

  Above all, we didn’t know whether the people who were around us would see us as enem
ies, and there is certainly nothing more threatening than to meet the distrust that arises from misunderstanding and can only be changed into trust with difficulty.

  We added up the gloomy facts, we weighed all the possibilities of future misfortunes, we looked for ways out and tried to find solutions. Meanwhile we kept on tying threads, broke many cookies, and ate up the pieces.

  On the next day the children came.

  Everything was ready, the tree that reached to the ceiling was decorated, and I had only to take care that the children did not nibble the tree away before the evening of December 24.

  The children were at that time already quite grown up, fifteen and eighteen years old, but they were to all appearances determined, as they entered their parents’ house, to throw a few years away, and during their vacation they acted like bright, lively, twelve-year-old-at-most twins.

  They ran through the house, tried to peek through the keyhole into the Christmas room, they called to each other in incomprehensible baby talk, called each other by odd names, and sang the old folksongs and Christmas songs in two parts and with amazing variations.

  It was as though we had the whole house full of children. We began to be happy, and we wanted to celebrate for their sakes, in spite of all the uncertain, unknown, and dangerous things that lay outside the boundaries of our house.

  Early in the afternoon of Christmas Eve I began to lay the table in the Christmas room.

  It was the big refectory table, at which eighteen people could sit comfortably without having to keep their elbows in.

  When we had guests, or the children were there, we sat at this large table, but we put no tablecloth on it. Rather, the plates and silverware were put at each place on mats, so that the wood surface of the table remained visible and uncovered for long stretches.

  This American style of covering the table not only shows off the lovely wood, it makes it possible also to clean the polished wood surface and the washable placemats after every use, which is cleaner and more esthetically pleasing than the repeated appearance of used and soiled tablecloths.

  On that day I took the large damask cloth for twenty-four people that I had inherited from my mother and spread it out on the huge table.

  That inherited tablecloth had been rescued at the last moment from seizure by the Gestapo and brought after us into Switzerland with all its twenty-four napkins.

  Since we had fled with only the lightest baggage from Germany to Austria and had had to leave everything behind, the tablecloth always aroused a feeling in me as though a cover of a feather comforter or an empty birdcage or some other piece of household equipment torn at random from the closet had been rescued from the enemy and had followed us.

  But on that Christmas, as on every following one, this useless piece of baggage received a place of honor, and then lay preserved until the next year in the twilight of the linen closet.

  When I had spread the cloth and begun to decorate the table with candles and greenery, I heard something like an auto puffing up toward the house.

  It fought its way through the plowed and drifted road and stopped, coughing and wheezing, in front of the house door.

  I went to the window and saw a man climb out of the truck whom I recognized immediately, although he had his back turned to me, by his uncommon size and wide shoulders. I went to the kitchen and let the giant in. He wore high boots, ski pants, and a thick wool plaid jacket. From his head he took a cap with turned up side pieces that he could use as earmuffs in a storm.

  He looked like a strong, handsome woodsman that daily fells tall trees and in the evening brags about the deeds of the lumberjacks around an open fire and inspires them to new Paul Bunyan feats.

  All sorts of stories were told about him, stories that always showed that he was of uncommon strength and would take no kind of affront, even if it was only ordinary teasing, without settling the account with his fists.

  They said that he came of a respected family. It was further told that he had fled the city, the people, and his own temper, and had escaped to the country, to farming and solitude, so as to be able to choose his associates here as his own master.

  He had three children and also a wife of such charming gentleness that she touched the hearts of the people, and they were accustomed to speak of her as of an enchanted princess who had to live with a powerful giant.

  At the beginning I was afraid of him, and above all of his handshake, which was as hearty as it was painful.

  Now he stood in the kitchen and stamped his feet the way everyone did when they came in from outside to shake off the snow and ice. In one hand he held his cap, and in the other a great round hatbox for ladies’ hats.

  He put the hatbox carefully on the table, as though he was putting a heavy beech log on a woodpile in a room in which children were sleeping whom he did not want to wake.

  I looked at the box in amazement, then I invited him to sit down and pulled a chair near the kitchen stove so that the melting streams from his clothes and shoes could run off first onto the linoleum-covered kitchen floor.

  “How did you get up here?” I asked him. “The road is almost drifted in again.”

  “The damn thing goes everywhere,” he said, “it goes through everything.”

  The “damn thing”—a 1915 Ford—stood like an old work horse in front of the kitchen door and continued to snort.

  “Shouldn’t I put warm water in the radiator?” I asked, concerned.

  He stood up, opened the kitchen door, went to the vehicle, took an old horse blanket out and threw it over the hood.

  Then he slapped the side of the car as though he were slapping the flanks of his horse.

  “That’ll do,” he said, and then we went into the living room. I called Zuck and the children, who came down from upstairs, and we sat in front of the fire in the fireplace. Zuck threw a large beech log on the fire, and the bark of the yellow beech cracked and disappeared in the fire. Zuck brewed a hot grog to warm up our American, the children and I drank tea with rum, and we talked about the snow, the condition of the roads, and whether one should farm.

  Next spring he wanted to start a chicken farm with four thousand chicks; we were thinking of getting ourselves laying hens, ducks, and geese.

  “But perhaps I’ll be drafted,” he said, “then the chicken farm will come to nothing.”

  Then he stood up and took his leave quickly.

  “I must go home,” he said.

  He went through the kitchen and pointed to the hatbox.

  “Our Tu Ulikki made that; she is Finnish,” he said. “I hope it’s all right.”

  Then he climbed into his car and started up the motor so that it rattled like a coffee mill.

  As he drove away, he waved and called through the broken window of his auto: “Merry Christmas!” and with that he rolled down the hill.

  Scarcely was he gone when we pulled the many strings from the hatbox, lifted the lid, and carefully took out one layer of tissue paper after another.

  On the bottom of the hatbox lay a ring cake as big as a millstone.

  I lifted it out and laid it on the kitchen table. It was yellow with saffron, dotted with currants and pistachios, smelled of cardamom, and looked like pictures of Christmas celebrations in Sweden.

  We spread ourselves around the cake and spelled out the inscription that traveled over its entire hilly landscape.

  There stood written in white sugar frosting and flawless German: “Fröhliche Weihnachten!”

  THE TELEPHONE

  In that first winter we would have learned little about the place and the people if it had not been for the telephone.

  With the telephone we could find out how our neighbors were living, what they were thinking, what they were cooking, when they were doing laundry, what was happening to them; from their voices we could tell if they were sad and out-of-sorts or happy and optimistic. We have nine on our line.

  That is, we have a party line that we share with eight others. Not the way it is
with party lines in European cities, where the signal is a sharp, extended ringing, where a black or white indicator shows that the telephone is now in use and that someone else is on the line without being able to hear him, and you have to wait, grinding your teeth, until the indicator shows that the line is clear. No, we nine are really on one line and share our telephone in the broadest sense.

  Recently our telephone company helpfully sent us this notice:

  Sharing a line with others is a friendly custom in New England. Whether they ride the same ski lift [to emphasize this comparison a ski tow line is pictured under the name of the telephone company, to which are clinging two beaming young men, with an even more glowing young woman] or use the same telephone line, everything depends on the friendly New England habit of making the best of a difficult situation. Shortage of materials has restricted the extensive expansion program of the New England Telephone Company. Soon the necessary materials will again be available, and soon we will again be able to supply private lines for those who request them. Meanwhile, however, we can give telephone service to many who would otherwise not have it by putting more customers on one line. If you keep your conversations short and answer your ring promptly, then you and your neighbors can fully enjoy the advantages of the party line.

  Our telephones consist of brown boxes that are firmly attached to the wall and have a black handle on the side. The telephone itself is attached to the box by a wire. We have a modern set, with mouthpiece and receiver in one piece; many, however, still have telephones where you grab the mouthpiece with your left hand and hold it like a bouquet, while you hold the receiver to your ear with your right hand like an earphone for the hard-of-hearing. Each of us has his own ring, a Morse code signal which is hard to recognize for newcomers, especially if they are not musical or have no sense of rhythm. Our number is Bethel 69 ring 12. The number 12 is our special signal.