The Farm in the Green Mountains

by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer

  Zuck had received ten days of Christmas leave and arrived from Germany at the last moment with the dirty luggage of a soldier, and with the gray appearance of someone who had just come out of the trenches.

  Now we sat in a box at the theater. We heard Zuck’s written words speak, saw his figures act, and I had a vision behind it all of Zuck’s room in Barnard, Vermont. I heard the noise of his typewriter and the rustling of the paper being added to the piles in the drawer or crumpled into balls and thrown into the wastebasket.

  The play was a tremendous success.

  Then everything slowly fell into place.

  When we were married twenty-three years earlier, Zuck owned two suits and a pile of debts, and I had two dresses and a lampshade.

  Six months later Zuck had his first great success, and after a year we had a house in the country, an apartment in the city, a child in the cradle, fine suits and expensive dresses, and lampshades everywhere.

  For eight years fame and money increased. Then Hitler came in, and we left Germany.

  We still had our house in Austria, and for five years we were allowed to stay there.

  Then our time was up; we had to flee.

  We took different and dangerous routes and were reunited in Switzerland. Of our possessions we still had three suits, eight dresses, and two children.

  Then followed emigration and immigration and everything that has been described in this book.

  To tell about getting reacquainted with Europe would take another book.

  I can only say that it was different, quite different from the way we had imagined it.

  The cities were more terribly destroyed than we had envisioned in our worst nightmares.

  The city-dwellers crept about the streets as if they were parts of the crumbling houses and were put together out of bits of ashes, dust, and rubble. But gradually a bright layer began to appear in the piles of dust. It was like the tender skin that begins to grow over infected wounds. It was a layer of unknown persons, whose presence we had not even suspected. It was material out of which something new could be built.

  This layer was composed for the most part of young people who wanted to give their lives form and sense, together with older persons who had decency and character and believed in hope. It was a duty to help this group. It was necessary for their survival and for peace to establish contact between them and the rest of the world.

  We found enemies again, too. They were unchanged. A few had been destroyed. Others sit behind bars. Many have assumed strait-jackets of denazification to convince people that they are normal again, but they are just waiting for a new era of insanity, when crimes will again be legally permitted and the mentally ill will again achieve power and honor.

  We looked for our friends. Many were dead, blown to pieces by bombs, burned up in fires, or hanged by Hitler’s courts.

  The surviving ones were basically unchanged. But everything was different, quite different from what we had expected.

  We experienced success. Zuck’s plays appeared in innumerable theaters. Countless letters arrived, many containing real substance.

  Success is something very attractive and pleasant, if you know your limitations and practice a becoming modesty.

  It makes life easier and it makes it possible to help many others. Sometimes it even has the unusual rewards of real joy and gratitude for your good fortune.

  Everything began again for us, as if the thirteen years of murder, plague, and death had not interrupted our lives.

  Once during a discussion with twelve hundred students in a packed university hall, Zuck was asked, “You say that you found your homeland in America. How is that possible?”

  Yes—how is that possible?

  In an American book I once found the sentence: “Everyone loves his native land, whether he was born there or not.”

  We have a good life in Europe.

  We have suffered no real disappointments, for if you accept people and things as they are you cannot be disappointed.

  We live most of the time in Switzerland near Lake Geneva.

  We have spent summers in Saas–Fee, a village by a glacier at an elevation of six thousand feet, separated from Zermatt and the Matterhorn by high mountains.

  We have our own little apartment there, three rooms, a kitchen with an electric stove, and a bathroom.

  Zuck has written a new play there. I have been able to cook and bake again, and the housework is so little trouble that I have had time to work on this book. From the windows of our apartment we can see fourteen peaks that are over twelve thousand feet high, with glaciers, larch woods, meadows, and fields, one of the most beautiful and grand landscapes in the world.

  We are staying in Saas–Fee until the beginning of winter.

  The summer visitors are long gone, and the autumn work on the farms is beginning.

  In the Wallis you can find rye, oats, barley, potatoes, and vegetable gardens up to an elevation of six thousand feet. They are beginning to thresh in the cottages that stand on stone feet like our corncrib in Barnard. Potatoes and late vegetables are being brought in. Manure is being spread on the fields. It is time to butcher the pigs and sheep, and one night foxes came into the village, howling and baying at the moon as they looked for the blood and entrails of the butchered animals whose cut-up carcasses hung along the barn walls in the moonlight.

  We live in the most beautiful parts of Switzerland. Sometimes we go to Germany, sometimes to Austria.

  But, wherever we go, we are visitors and never at home.

  It is that way in Saas–Fee.

  I like the landscape, the apartment, and the people who own the apartment. They are carpenters and mountain guides, and in their simplicity and independence they remind me of our Barnard neighbors.

  I like the ease of my housework, and I listen with joy to Zuck’s typewriter. It sounds like a mill that can hardly take care of the quantity of grain given to it.

  But this is when and where I first began to have a waking dream that has returned again and again. It is a brother of Drude, but is her opposite in being a daydream of wish fulfillment. My dream is that I am on a journey to America. I board a ship in Rotterdam, one of the slow ships, for I want to recover the time, night after night, that I lost on the journey to Europe.

  Finally I arrive in Hoboken and go from there directly to New York.

  I have many friends there, but I go first to those who seem to me most “American.” I like them, trust them, feel that I can place my fate in their hands. I can accept much from them without feeling oppressed by a sense of obligation. Between us there is passionate objectivity, respectful dignity, and affectionate coolness.

  The next night I am already on my way from Grand Central to the junction town, where I arrive the next morning.

  That town has not become more beautiful in my absence. I go to my Swiss hotel owners and tell them about Switzerland, but what I really want is to hear the latest news from them. How is the hotel doing? What’s new with the help? Have they had any trouble with drunkenness? How are things across the river in the university town?

  Then I take the bus to my town, for I still have to get myself a new car again. I travel a stretch of road that I have gone over a hundred times before, but now I am aware, as if for the first time, of the distance and of the straight, unbending sky over the landscape.

  We arrive in the town, where I unload my luggage and go first of all to our landlord’s store.

  It smells of chocolate, apples, and iron tools. I say, “Hello,” and the landlord answers, “Hello,” and everything is the way it was.

  I go into other stores. They greet me and say, “Back again?” as if I had gone away only a week ago. No one says, “Hello, stranger,” because they only use that expression when people have been away for a short time, or have perhaps been prevented from coming into the store for three or four weeks by a snowstorm or similar catastrophe.

  I go to the snack bar to get a quick cup of coffee and somethi
ng to eat.

  It smells of vanilla, ice, beer, toothpaste, coffee, celery, fried meat, and woodcutters’ jackets.

  A boy about seventeen years old is resting his head sentimentally on his hand as he sings to his girl, accompanied by the jukebox from which he has conjured up the latest hit with his nickel. His elbow rests dreamily on a pile of rolls of toilet paper, stacked up next to the counter for clearance this week.

  I can’t explain why I delight in all this. Later I go over to the gift shop, where it smells of lavender, candles, and herbs.

  She is still there, the old lady who sells the lovely things: fabrics, purses, post cards, cups, and little boxes. I feel like apologizing for buying and taking her things away, for each is a part of the world that surrounds her, and it seems important to preserve her surroundings unchanged.

  Next door is a store that has everything from almonds to nails and is like a Lübeck department store. When you enter the store you automatically lower your voice because it is solemn inside like a church. The salespeople are businesslike, but fair, and ready to let you have some of the wonderful variety that the store contains.

  Then there are the jolly stores of the town, in which you buy meat and vegetables, and where you have to be ready for puns, jokes, satire, and irony.

  There is a big store, part of a chain of stores that goes across the whole country.

  The manager sees me as I come in and waves, but I quietly wait my turn to speak to him. Pushing ahead is not acceptable, even for reunions.

  There is the clothing store. It is bigger and finer than it was, and it has neon lights and a new sign, but the owners are the same.

  I go to the post office, where we shake hands. They tell me that one of them has retired after twenty-four years of service.

  I go to the mill, where I have always bought feed for our animals and coal for our stoves. I say “Hello” and that I will soon need feed and coal again.

  Finally I drive to the farm, taking the long way through the village. I stop at the post office and ask if there is any mail for us, and receive letters and flyers that have waited for us there for two years.

  The postmistress says, “. . . probably glad to be back,” and I nod.

  Then I drive down the steep road through the woods and turn sharply into the dirt road to our house.

  At this point Zuck appears, suddenly sitting beside me in the car.

  I have to shift into low gear. It is summer, but the steep road has many bumps, and it looks as if it has just rained. We drive through the enchanted wood, past the lynx rock. Then comes the meadow, and there is the house.

  We open the door and stand in the kitchen.

  We set our suitcases on the floor, put away the things I have bought, and are home.

  Zuck will build a fire in the big fireplace and we will sit in front of it and plan.

  We have to realize first that we are in the strange situation of earning money in Europe in order to live in America, a reversal of historical tradition. But we have to plan carefully and be sure that we are starting out correctly. Success and money will probably come in America, too, but we cannot count on it.

  We are going to find a new way, a new schedule. We are going to manage the daily work so that it leaves Zuck time to write.

  The chairs on which we are sitting must have new covers, and the living room curtains are getting shabby and faded.

  There is much to do, but we know what we are dealing with, and this time we won’t let the work get the better of us.

  That is how I imagine my journey to America. Even dreams of America are real, right into all the details of everyday life.

  My America has no place for sentimental gratitude. It has no numbness of habit, no tradition, no memory, even none of the feeling that a woman might have who has left home to follow her foreign-born husband to his homeland.

  But there is something else, a factor which we had never before encountered. That is the experience of a “native land,” a place in which one is reborn through a second childhood.

  In America we learned anew to walk, listen, touch, smell, and taste. Of course we could not speak the language correctly and had a foreign accent, but people understood us, and we knew what they were saying.

  In writing this book in German, I have had the grotesque difficulty that I knew hardly a word that had to do with barns, animals, or tools in my native language, for I had never learned the vocabulary of everyday living in Europe.

  The dream of returning to America, of longing to go home, has nothing to do with the past.

  I am in the present when I smell the wood fire in our fireplace, when I see the air shimmer over the pond, when I watch the northern lights in the night sky.

  I smell coffee, bacon, eggs, and warm bread in the morning. I hear the animals in the distance, and the stillness nearby, and everything is alive, as in the days of childhood.

  The ties to the new land are as strong as if we had always lived there.

  We have many ties to Europe. To cut them would be foolish, selfish, and wanton.

  The difference between the two worlds is enormous. Going to Europe is called in America “going abroad,” an expression that the thesaurus equates with “distant suns, Ultima Thule, no one knows where, and the end of the world.”

  “Everyone loves his native land, whether he was born there or not.”

  It is a many-sided homesickness, the deep longing that we have for our new land. It is a feeling for the present that holds future in every action. It is a simple love for everyday living.

  EPILOGUE

  (Translators’ note: Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer wrote two different endings for The Farm in the Green Mountains. The first, which begins near the end of “The Journey to America,” was part of the original book, published in 1949—before the Zuckmayers returned to America. The second, which follows, was written nineteen years later.)

  We had been in Europe for five years, in Germany, in Austria, in Switzerland, but wherever we went we were visitors and never at home. The apartment we had had in Berlin had been completely destroyed by bombs.

  The confiscated house in Austria had been given back to us, but the damage that the house had suffered in the nine years of our absence seemed too great to be worth the money and effort to put it back in good condition. Also, everything had changed. There were new buildings around our house, and the place was no longer the village with large farms and fields we remembered, but had become a suburb of Salzburg. So we sold the house we had won back.

  And after five years we set out on the journey back to America, back to the farm.

  The farm did not belong to us, but its owner, our Mr. Ward, had taken care of it and kept it for us. During the summers he had rented it to unusually nice people from the city, and in the winters he had packed and wrapped up the little house to withstand snow, ice, and storms.

  We sailed on a slow ship, and I enjoyed winning back the time, night after night, that I had lost on the journey to Europe. On five different evenings the notice appeared on the blackboard: “Today at midnight the clock will be set back one hour.” This time we arrived, not in Hoboken, but at a pier in New York. Zuck had to take care of business, and I went in search of friends. I went first to those who seemed to me most “American.” Between us there was passionate objectivity, respectful dignity, and affectionate coolness. There was not much questioning, investigating, or probing, as in Europe. I did not have to do much explaining and found an understanding that comprehended diverse feelings and points of view.

  A week later, at midnight, we were on our way from Grand Central Station to Vermont.

  We traveled in a comfortable sleeping car, which we had all to ourselves, including a small private washroom. The wide bunks were soft, and we could have slept well if we had not been almost thrown out of bed by the terrible rattling and shaking of the car and the sudden stopping of the train.

  The railroads, cars and tracks, had deteriorated in our absence and were in a truly deplorable
state. So we sat pressed against the walls of the bunks, hanging on to the chrome bars on the wall and watching our luggage tumble down, just missing us, to the floor, where it jumped and rolled about.

  After we had been traveling for about three hours, it was suddenly deathly quiet. The train had stopped at a station, and there it stood for three hours waiting for a couple of cars from another train that it had to take to Canada. Suddenly we remembered that the night train had always acted in this puzzling and senseless way. So we loosened our grip on the bars and fell sound asleep. Three hours later we were rudely shaken awake. We sat up because it was better to be pushed about in a sitting position than tossed up and down like a football while lying down. A few hours later we actually arrived, and the train was still on the track.

  Not many years after this, that railroad line was discontinued.

  We arrived at the junction point. The station and the town had not grown more beautiful, but on the platform was standing one of our dearest friends, and near him a large truck to take our luggage. We embraced and our cheeks became very wet, but the warm sun dried them.

  First we all drove in the truck to our shopping center, the little town with beautiful old houses and many stores. The two men sat down in the snack bar and drank beer. I did errands the way I always had.

  First of all I went to the store that belonged to our landlord. It smelled of chocolate, cheese, and iron tools. The owner’s sister was there. She pressed my hands and said, “Joe is up on the farm. He is expecting you.”

  Then I looked in quickly at the shop of the old lady who sold the lovely things: fabrics, purses, aprons, toys, cups, plates, and glasses. I looked for a big old-fashioned kitchen apron, something that was not so easy to find among the new styles of maid’s aprons and fig leaves. The lady was elegant and very old, almost ninety. But she recognized me and called me by name. “How good to see you back,” she said. Then she tripped over to the counter, bent her white head to hide her emotions, picked a little white and green pillow out of the things there, and laid it in my hands. It was filled with balsam pine needles and was fragrant. I thanked her for the unexpected gift and placed it with the apron in my purse. Then I went next door, into the fine, large store that carries everything from stone-ground flour to caviar, from almonds to nails of all sizes and kinds. When I entered that store I automatically lowered my voice because it was so quiet and solemn inside. The salespersons had always been reserved, but quietly ready to find what I wanted from the wonderful variety and get it for me.