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.”