You have to leave, Bruno had said. And Anna had left.
Anna crossed the bridge at Bürkliplatz and walked south along the bank of the Zürichsee. I’ll stay in the city today and then tonight, when he starts to miss me, I’ll call. He’ll want to make up. He’ll feel bad. He feels bad already. I can go home and we can talk. Bruno had been calm that morning, so calm. That was a worry Anna couldn’t yet place. Going home was an option, but it was the last option on the list.
Anna was almost alone as she wandered down Seefeldquai. Most Züricher were at work, and tourism is thin during off-season. It was all right. She preferred it that way. The lake was gunmetal blue and unfriendly. Still, it soothed her. This was the Zürich she knew. The greater part of all comfort almost always lies in familiarity. A child’s teddy bear. A favorite pair of shoes. In times of calamity we gravitate toward the things we know or know how to do. On the day of a funeral, it’s the quotidian duty of bed making, dress ironing, dish doing that tethers a person to the physical moment and releases her temporarily from the territory of her pain. The comfort, therefore, was foremost the lake’s gunmetal unfriendliness and secondly Anna’s practice at being alone and wandering lonely paths. Were it otherwise, Anna would have felt worse.
She walked along the waterfront all the way to Zürichhorn, the small harbor where the Zürichsee begins to genuinely widen. She took a seat on the steps but they were cold even through her wool skirt so she stood up just as quickly. On clear days, the outline of the Alps separates the earth from the sky. Eiger. M?nch. Jungfrau. Indistinguishable but undeniable. And hidden in a mountain pass over the Sch?llenen Gorge in Kanton Uri, the Teufelsbrücke, the Devil’s Bridge. Jungfrau. Anna shook her head. We plan and he laughs at our plans. This is what the Doktor meant. All of this.
Anna turned around and walked back the way she came and with every step her stomach kinked and twisted. This was the misery she’d been trying to dodge all day. She supposed it was inevitable. A memory. Dozens of them. Times happy and terrible both. They came at her like diving birds. She couldn’t fight them off. But even the terrible memories were happier than this. Anna felt helpless and very foolish. She walked past the Chinese Garden. In summer the rectangular thatch of land is crowded with families and sunbathers and picnickers. That day the field was empty except for a single young couple kissing near the gate, his hands under her jacket and her hands down the back of his jeans. A very old woman on a bicycle passed Anna on the left. She wore a dark skirt and thick tights and utilitarian shoes. She’d hidden her hair underneath a red and blue headscarf. She rang her bike bell as she passed. Anna was feebly amused. In the States, very old women didn’t ride bikes lakeside on awful gray days. But Anna hadn’t been to the States since she left them. Not even once. She’d had no one to visit and, like today, nowhere to go.
“THERE ARE TWO BASIC groups of German verbs,” Roland said, “strong and weak. Weak verbs are regular verbs that follow typical rules. Strong verbs are irregular. They don’t follow patterns. You deal with strong verbs on their own terms.”
Like people, Anna thought. The strong ones stand out. The weak ones are all the same.