by Will Self
As she spoke, Joyce noticed that Weiss – whom she had mentally pegged as a cold fish – was becoming more and more agitated: his manicured fingers tugged at his napkin, he spun his wine glass by its stem. As she described her own decision to come to Zürich prematurely, Weiss stilled, grew intent; and Joyce played to this solo audience – for Marianne Kreutzer’s attention was elsewhere, her cold eyes frosting the convivial quartet at the next table: elderly parents, thirtyish son and daughter-in-law; all hale, all hearty, all pink and flaking in a way suggestive of a recent skiing trip.
Joyce slowed down and, as any good storyteller should, took her listener by his figurative hand, led him on to the plane, sat him beside her while she lost control of her fear and her bladder, then led him off again, into the cab, on to the Widder Hotel, sat him at her bedside throughout the sedated night, then took him on again, to Gertrudstrasse.
When they were actually in the suicide flat, and Dr Hohl was mixing the phenobarbital with water, Weiss’s white face swam up from behind his moustache, transfigured by a joyous agony. He was muttering, ‘Schrecklich … schrecklich …’ and when Joyce told him how she had, at the very last moment, refused the poison, Weiss took his otter head in his hands, shook it, then exclaimed: ‘Oh, but Frau Beddoes, this is so very wonderful!’ Before urging his disengaged companion, ‘Isn’t it, Marianne, so very wonderful to be hearing?’
Setting her cigarette down on the edge of the ashtray, Marianne Kreutzer said, ‘These are very bad people, Frau Beddoes; you have done something truly brave and important, we thank you for that.’ Although her frigid tone suggested that she might just as well have administered the poison herself.
Weiss ran on: ‘I am not very involved myself in this thing – but we have friends who are, gegen Fanatiker – who, you would say, make the campaigning against this dreadful thing that they do.’
Joyce stared at him – she felt foolish and vulnerable; of course, they were Catholics – she should’ve kept her mouth shut. Mors slopebit et natora, Cum resurget creatura, Judicanti responsura. Death and Nature shall be astonished, When all creation rises again, To answer to the Judge. She began back-pedalling. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you, Herr Weiss.’ Her tone was correct, off-putting. ‘My decision was impulsive – and nothing to do with Dr Hohl’s ethics – I am still terminally ill, I may want to avail myself of their … of this service at a future date.’
Weiss was not to be deflected so easily. ‘Please, Frau Beddoes, do not think we are das fanatisch – the fanatics – I understand, truly I do; my first wife died of cancer ten years ago. She was still a young woman –’ He stopped short and asked Joyce: ‘And you?’
Taken aback, Joyce found herself confirming, ‘Cancer.’ Then added, ‘Of the liver.’
Marianne Kreutzer appeared to catch this very English irony; at any rate, her creased lips furrowed a little more – but Weiss missed it. Licensed by the revelation that they were both members of the not very exclusive cancer club, he began, energetically, to fill Joyce in on the local resistance to the goings on at Gertrudstrasse. Weiss confirmed her suspicions: there had been such grotesqueries as body bags propped up in the lift. Then there were the emergency vehicles in near-constant attendance, while the arrival – often by private ambulance – of the suicides seeking assistance created a despairing atmosphere.
‘It is not helpful,’ Weiss said, ‘that there is a cemetery next to this building. The people who live there are not best-off type, but the city council – the canton, also – are thinking about taking the action. I think they will be made to move soon. (Moov zoon.)
‘There is also Hohl. He is, you know, well – he is ein Fanatiker. He is offering now to the people with clinical depression his poison – nothing wrong in their body, only the head.’ Weiss massaged his own smooth forehead, mussing his hair. ‘This is making the difference – even non-Catholics understand this to be wrong.’
While these very weighty matters were being discussed, Joyce tidily dissected her chicken. The Swiss couple were equally methodical eaters, although where she can be packing it away is a mystery. When Joyce laid down her cutlery, Weiss responded as if this action were a diagnostic tool and bluntly asserted: ‘You are in much pain, yes? On the drugs? So. I have talked too much; we can drive you to your hotel if you like this.’
The hunched maître d’, whose short white jacket and cranky manner reminded Joyce of a lab technician at Mid-East, had abandoned his roast trolley for a copper pot, from which he was ladling large dollops of cream on to the strudels and tartes tatin of the diners. Observing this wanton consumption of criminally unsaturated fats, Joyce gingerly patted her belly beneath the table. There was no pain, or watery intimation of flux to come, only the tight sensation of healthy plenitude. The Leberknödel were in there, she thought, happily being digested.
‘No, please,’ she said. ‘I am feeling quite all right. If it’s not too much trouble I think I would like some dessert.’
After the cream pot had done two rounds and they had all been served with tiny cups of espresso, Weiss finally called for the bill. Joyce reached for her bag and began rummaging for her purse, but her host was having none of this. ‘Please, please,’ he said, warding off the threat of her contributing with open palms. ‘You are our guest, we would be the most upset, wouldn’t we, Marianne?’
Marianne Kreutzer didn’t look as if she would be in the least upset; she had a compact out and was retouching her foundation. Even as a girl, Joyce had found such public attention by a woman to the appearance of her own flesh a distinctly lewd performance. Seeing this elegant – and slightly hostile – Swiss woman doing it, caused Joyce to speculate on the nature of her relationship with Weiss. The sex, she imagined, was necessary – but by no means the most important thing. Despite his assured manner, Weiss was a man-boy, gripped by his enthusiasms – and presumably by childish anxieties as well. Joyce found it easy to imagine his pink, freshly shaven cheek resting between her tired breasts.
Marianne Kreutzer dispelled her reverie by launching into this curious speech: ‘Lenin,’ she began, ‘when he lived in Zürich, in the First War, he said of us Swiss that we could not be having the revolution, because when it came the time to attack the Hauptbahnhof – the train station – the crowd would be stopping to buy the ticket to go on – Ueli, was ist der Name fur Gleis?’
‘The platform.’
‘That is it, the platform. But now, well, you are taking time to see Zürich and our beautiful buildings, our pretty lake, maybe also you are seeing our new kind guests. Black guests, brown guests. People are not so friendly with them; they are invited only by the Government in Berne, I think. There are some times not so long now, when the Swiss in the crowd are not buying the platform ticket!’ She snapped her compact shut for emphasis.
Joyce didn’t know how to respond; it wasn’t at all clear whether Marianne Kreutzer’s remarks had been an endorsement of this revanchism, or simply a description. Pointing out from her severe curls were ears as thin as a fish’s fins; in place of lobes they had diamond studs.
‘What is your hotel?’ Weiss asked, twining his credit card with the strip of receipt.
‘I was staying at the Widder, but, well, to be frank, I’ve decided to stay on for a while in Zürich, and …’ Joyce bowed her head; she didn’t want Marianne Kreutzer’s accusing eyes on her: she didn’t want to be kin of the uninvited guests. ‘It’s not that I can’t afford it, it’s just that it seems too expensive if I’m going to be here that much longer.’
Weiss looked at Joyce’s bag. Its pattern of fleur-de-lys didn’t, she thought, seem out of place in the Kronenhalle. Perhaps I should stay here? ‘So,’ he said, ‘you are without a pension or hotel?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘We have a new kind of taking tax here, you know.’ The waitress had brought Weiss’s loden coat and was hovering by the table, but he showed no inclination to rise. ‘If you are a tourist from European Union country, you may stay as long as you li
ke, but only in a hotel. To rent – just a room only – you must register with the Fremdenpolizei, and then … well, so on and so on, they will check up on you; we know’ – the moustache drooped shamefacedly – ‘the reputation we have abroad. There will be many forms and stamps – too many, I think.’
Joyce rose to this: ‘That doesn’t concern me. I was a professional administrator myself for many years, I’m accustomed to that sort of thing; and if it’s a matter of assets, well, I can produce evidence of sufficient.’
‘Maybe so, maybe so.’ Weiss wasn’t taking Joyce’s competence well. He wants to hang on to me! ‘But foreigners can find it very hard to get the flats and rooms; they are always the last in the line, often times when they are the first – you understand?’
Joyce nodded.
‘I have a friend – she is a member of our church. She has a very nice room. She would be happy, I think – I know – to have you as the Pensionsgast –’
‘Really, Herr Weiss, you’ve been kind enough –’
‘One call, one call …’ He had his mobile phone out already, unfolded, the panel tucked up under his hair. He had taken the coat from the waitress, draped it over one arm, and now began tangoing it towards the door.
‘Please.’ Most unexpectedly, Marianne Kreutzer had placed her long elegant fingers on Joyce’s sleeve. ‘Let Ueli be the helper for you. I said one time, he is ausländerfreundlich – it is his Natur.’
The sky was still bright, although long shadows fingered the bolt of grey tarmac that was woven with tram lines. The compact Mercedes pulled up to the kerb and Joyce got out. Antiquariat der Literatur was stencilled on the window of a small bookshop, and a clothesline strung across this was pegged with different editions of a periodical called Du. Below them lay rows of German-language books with paper covers.
Coming up beside her, Weiss said: ‘This is the university quarter, many culture people are living here. This lady, her husband is – was – a professor.’
Marianne Kreutzer extracted herself from the back of the car, but it was only to wish Joyce auf Wiedersehen. ‘I am waiting,’ she said to Weiss.
Opposite the bookshop stood a large, faintly ugly, Italianate building. It had a four-storey tower, and a three-storey wing with cast-iron balconies; two dismal dormer windows protruded from the tiled roof. ‘Frau Stauben is on the top. Very good views, I think.’ So saying, Joyce’s protector led her across the road.
The views from Frau Stauben’s apartment were an irrelevance – or so she seemed to believe. Her living-room windows were covered with both straw blinds and heavy, dark green velvet curtains that were half drawn. The furniture was dated, yet still of the wrong period: padded European Modernist slabs with tapered poles for legs and arms. The nylon covers of these chairs and sofas were time-faded beige and mauve, plush with moulted cat fur.
Frau Stauben – or Vreni, as she insisted on being called – was the ruddy-faced woman who had been doing the girls’ hair at St Anton’s. Upon Joyce and Weiss’s arrival, she had first imposed a plate of pastries on her guests, then put them on one of the bigger slabs. While she hustled in and out of the adjoining kitchen preparing coffee, Frau Stauben chattered away in heavily accented English. ‘It is Gründonnerstag soon now – that’s what we say; in English, “Green Thursday”, I think. The children will do their playing then – the day before Karfreitag … Good Friday.’
Weiss hadn’t taken his loden coat off. He sat awkwardly on the edge of the sofa. There were patches of icing sugar on either knee of his immaculately creased black trousers. A large cat came padding into the room; it was – Joyce dredged up from some sink hole of memory – a Birman. A strip had been shaved out of its thick, smoky-blue coat, exposing disturbingly human skin and the fresh stitching of an incision. The cat advanced halfway across the furry carpet, then sat and stared at Joyce with malevolent yellow eyes.
Weiss accepted a cup of coffee and said, ‘Frau Beddoes, please allow me to explain your situation to Frau Stauben in German.’ Joyce fluttered her hand – a gesture she wasn’t aware of having in her repertoire – and the two Swiss began spitting and lilting Schweizerdeutsch over one another.
Through the kitchen door Joyce could see wind chimes dangling above the sink; spider plants in string harnesses had parachuted into the corners of the living room; in the corridor there were framed homilies illustrated with tow-headed cherubs. It all reminded her of the drop-in centre at the hospital, where, together with a troop of other sufferers, Joyce had lain in vest and tracksuit bottoms on a tatami mat, as a tranquillized tape recording urged them all to go into the garden.
Joyce had wondered why? The garden at Mid-East was a concrete waste land, its only blooms polythene. But maybe the voice meant her own garden, which, although no show-stopper, had afforded her so much pleasurable absorption: the crumble of loam between fingertips, while she stared intently at the rippling ultramarine of an iris petal.
Or perhaps the voice had meant her to recall weekends in the garden with Derry. He hadn’t been that attuned to the natural world – every seasonal change, right until the very end, remained a source of mild surprise – and yet he still dutifully assisted her, because her pleasure was his own. In the last year or two, like a walrus in his old grey cords, pulling himself up from the weeding, elbows on to the seat first, then so slow and ungainly to stand. In bed at night the awful gurgling: everything draining away.
And here was his widow, listening while one foreign stranger explained to another that, despite the fact that she, too, was dying, she also had to rent a room. Hardly what you want in a prospective tenant.
‘She had – was sagt man für Gebärmutter?’
‘A … well, ich weiss nicht, eben … She has had her womb – is it womb? – cut out of her.’
Joyce smiled. She hadn’t realized how intently she had been staring at the cat; nor that the cat had continued to glare at her. ‘Frau Stauben,’ she asked, ‘might I use your bathroom?’
Braced, Joyce voided herself. A smooth sensation: pleasing distension, holding on and then letting go. A rounded ‘plop’, a single cool splash on her left buttock. The shabbiness of the rest of the apartment was absent from this tiled confinement; the open window admitted fresh air and birdsong. Maybe that’s why I was relaxed enough? Joyce mused, for if there wasn’t diarrhoea, there was usually its hardened opponent.
But when she rose, wiped herself and looked back at the healthy brown bracket encapsulating the greenish water, she comprehended that the true explanation lay within: the vicious antagonisms – bowel screeching at stomach, gall bladder howling at liver – had been subsumed by a low hubbub, as of parish councillors mildly debating in a musty hall.
Joyce rearranged her clothes, flushed the toilet and checked her face in the mirror. Going back along the dim corridor, she noticed a ceramic name plate on a door; it was decorated with edelweiss and read Gertrud’s Zimmer. The door was ajar and she could see candlelight blinking on a skirting board.
Joyce pushed the door open. It was a perfectly ordinary teenage girl’s bedroom – or, rather, had once been. The pink flounce around the padded headboard of the bed was dusty and mildewed, the mattress was bare except for a quilted under-sheet. On the walls, the puncture marks of withdrawn drawing pins, and the tacky marks of ripped-off Sellotape showed where pop posters and hobby certificates had resided. The window was tight shut, the blind half drawn.
This was not a room that had been recently vacated; tiny temporal jibes – the cartoon decal stuck to the wardrobe door, a fluffy slipper sticking out from under the bed – informed Joyce that the girl who had once slept here was long since grown. Or dead, because the candlelight came from two rows of nightlights that had been arranged on a makeshift shrine.
Three planks, set like stairs on supports of increasing height, were cluttered with snapshots, drawings, glass figurines, china dogs and kittens. Among these were amateurish handicrafts, while in pride of place, in the middle of the highest plank, was a missal with a gold-
tooled cover and a rosary looped around it, one bead a smooth football at the feet of a plastic ballerina. On the wall above the clutter hung an ornately framed photograph of the goddess of these small things: Gertrud herself, on skis, wearing a bright pink ski suit, and with a vanilla ice cream Alp over her shoulder. Her portrait was flanked by a crucifix: Jesus, hairless legs in white pants, and with a brasserie waiter’s goatee, hung casually from the cross, having simply dropped by.
Joyce stood planted in the doorway; she hated that she’d intruded, yet found herself unable to retreat. The black silhouette of a bird flapped by the bottom half of the window: out there, in the daylight, were the living; while in this fusty room there were only brain-dead girls, their souls kept alive on faith-support equipment.
Frau Stauben bustled along the corridor. Joyce turned, flustered. ‘Please, I’m sorry … I didn’t mean to intrude – the candles –’
But her prospective landlady was unfussed. ‘It is a silly thing,’ she said. ‘My daughter,’ she continued, pointing at the girl in the ski suit, ‘she dies many of these years ago, it was a cancer in the blood.’
‘Leukaemia?’
‘Yes … so. I am always meaning to do the tidy’ – she made sweeping motions with her sturdy hands – ‘but …’ Frau Stauben left this, and the hands, dangling. Joyce looked into her periwinkle-blue eyes and saw nothing unusual, only the cliché of humanity. All at once she decided she would try to like Frau Stauben – Vreni; trust her, maybe.
‘So,’ the other woman resumed, taking Joyce by the arm and leading her not towards the living room but further into the bowels of the apartment, ‘Herr Weiss, Ueli, he had to be gone – you were a long time.’
‘Really?’ Joyce felt not abandoned but relieved.
‘Yes, that Marianne –’ Frau Stauben pulled herself up. ‘So, this is the room I am hiring.’
It was large, clean and, in contrast to the others, well aired. Twin beds were pushed together beside one wall, the fitted carpet was an institutional tan, the wallpaper a pattern of trellises and climbing roses.
