ANYTHING AT ALL? LIKE Doktor Messerli, Archie spoke a magnificently accented English intoned not by the shape-shifting consonants of High Alemannic, but by words that both roiled and wrenched open. Here an undulant r, there a queue of vowels rammed into one another like a smithy’s bellows pressed hotly closed. Anna drew herself to men who spoke with accents. It was the lilt of Bruno’s nonnative English that she let slide its thumb, its tongue into the waistband of her panties on their very first date (that, and the Williamsbirnen Schnaps, the pear tinctured eau-de-vie they drank themselves stupid with). In her youth Anna dreamed soft, damp dreams of the men she imagined she would one day love, men who would one day love her. She gave them proper names but indistinct, foreign faces: Michel, the French sculptor with long, clay-caked fingers; Dmitri, the verger of an Orthodox church whose skin smelled of camphor, of rockrose, of sandalwood resin and myrrh; Guillermo, her lover with matador hands. They were phantom men, girlhood ideations. But she mounted an entire international army of them.
It was the Swiss one she married.
If you cannot live without something, you won’t.
Despite Doktor Messerli’s suggestion that she enroll in these classes, Anna did know an elementary level of German. She got around. But hers was a German remarkable only in how badly it was cultivated and by the herculean effort she had to summon in order to speak it. For nine years, though, she’d managed with rudimentary competence. Anna had purchased stamps from the woman at the post office, consulted in semi-specifics with pediatricians and pharmacists, described the haircuts she desired to stylists, haggled prices at flea markets, made brief chitchat with neighbors, and indulged a pair of affable though persistent Zeugen Jehovas who, each month, arrived on her doorstep with a German-language copy of The Watchtower. Anna had also, though with less frequency, given directions to strangers, adapted recipes from cooking programs, taken notes when the chimney sweep detailed structural hazards of loose mortar joints and blocked flues, and extracted herself from citations when, upon the conductor’s request, she could not produce her rail pass for validation.
But Anna’s grasp of grammar and vocabulary was weak, her fluency was choked, and idioms and proper syntax escaped her completely. Occurring monthly, at least, were dozens of instances in which she commended a task into Bruno’s hands. It was he who dealt with local bureaucracy, he who paid the insurance, the taxes, the house note. It was he who filed the paperwork for Anna’s residency permit. And it was Bruno who handled the family’s finances, for he was employed as a midlevel management banker at Credit Suisse. Anna didn’t even have a bank account.
DOKTOR MESSERLI ENCOURAGED ANNA to take a more active role in family matters.
“I should,” Anna said. “I really should.” She wasn’t even sure she knew what Bruno did at work.
THERE WAS NO REASON Anna couldn’t join the mothers chatting in the square, no rule forbidding it, nothing that prevented her from sharing in their small talk. Two of them she knew by sight and one by name, Claudia Zwygart. Her daughter Marlies was in Charles’s class at school.
Anna didn’t join them.
BY WAY OF EXPLANATION, Anna offered the following self-summary: I am shy and cannot talk to strangers.
Doktor Messerli sympathized. “It is difficult for foreigners to make Swiss friends.” The problem runs deeper than a lack of command of German, itself problem enough. Switzerland is an insular country, sealed at its boundaries and neutral by choice for two centuries. With its left hand it reaches out to refugees and seekers of asylum. With its right, it snatches freshly laundered monies and Nazi gold. (Unfair? Perhaps. But when Anna was lonely she lashed out.) And like the landscape upon which they’ve settled, the Swiss themselves are closed at their edges. They tend naturally toward isolation, conspiring to keep outsiders at a distance by appointing not one, two, or three, but four whole national languages. Switzerland’s official name is in yet a fifth: Confoederatio Helvetica. Most Swiss speak German however, and it is German that’s spoken in Zürich.
But it’s not precisely German.