SYLVIA
She spent the night in bursts of restless sleep and wakefulness, images of angry red slogans and steam rising from the fondue pot and Daniel’s bitter smile merging into some strange triptych in her mind. The next morning she ditched the suit for a pair of flared jeans, a turtle neck and a purple bobble hat her mother had crocheted for her, and arrived back at the flat at 9am when Evelyne and the girls – and Daniel, she was surprised to see – were loading banners into a battered old van.
‘Right, everybody in!’ Evelyne said.
‘Wait!’ Nina tugged her arm. ‘This is an important day in the life of the MFL. We need a photo. Here,’ she thrust a camera at Daniel. ‘You take it.’
They lined up in front of the building, insisting that Sylvia be included, and smiled as Daniel snapped a couple of shots, his expression impenetrable behind the camera.
There was a boisterous atmosphere in the van on the way, and when they arrived in the Swiss capital, Sylvia could tell they were all desperate to get out and march. They parked near the train station and Sylvia took her share of the equipment from the van, slung her bag over her shoulder and followed the others into Bern’s Old Town. They’d passed the famed Röstigraben linguistic border somewhere near Fribourg, and here felt like another country entirely, even though they were only forty or so miles away from Lausanne. All the street signs were in German, and the architecture was darker and more austere than Lausanne’s pastel shutters and wrought-iron balconies. Here, the centuries-old stone houses had tiny attic windows, umber roof tiles and gargoyles. Trolley buses rattled up and down worn cobbles, while on each side of the street covered walkways protected pedestrians from the light snow that was falling languorously from the grey sky. Sylvia adjusted her hat over her ears and looked up, feeling the snowflakes on her face with an unexpected sense of joy.
Soon, the street opened out into a large rectangular space lined with cafes. They turned right and reached another square dominated by the Swiss parliament, an imposing building with columns on its facade and a domed roof. On one side of the square, a small stage had been set up, decorated with banners. People were milling about, some holding signs, others just standing in small groups talking and laughing. There was a visceral hum in the air, a collective energy building up as everyone waited for something to happen.
Mon corps, mon choix! she read on one banner. ‘My body, my choice!’ Avortement – oui! said another. ‘Abortion – yes!’
The words hit Sylvia like a punch in the stomach. The wine, the fondue, the music, the sights and sounds of a new country… It had been all too easy to put aside what she knew, with increasing certainty, was happening to her. Seeing the signs here, she knew she was lucky to at least have some choice in the matter. But she wished someone could just tell her which choice was the right one.
Evelyne and her friends were greeted by another group of women and a round of three-kisses began, a ritual that could take some time, Sylvia felt. She found herself standing alone with Daniel.
‘Evelyne must be pleased to have a brother who supports her in this.’
He looked at the ground when she spoke. ‘It’s no big deal.’
She stared at him, willing him to meet her eyes. Was he shy? Or just naturally surly?
‘Oh, it is,’ she said. She looked out over the crowds gathering in the square. ‘It’s a huge deal to have men supporting women because we’ll never get true equality unless men agree it’s important too.’
He didn’t respond, and they stood in silence for a minute, Daniel scuffing his feet on the floor. She thought of Maggie’s father, who never wanted her to go to art school and instead pulled strings with an acquaintance to get her a job as a bank clerk so she could make some pocket money and hopefully meet a respectable moneyed man to marry. But Maggie had only endured three months at the bank before quitting and spending her last month’s salary on a ticket to Thailand where she passed another three months backpacking, drawing by day and partying by night. Sylvia remembered her friend arriving home with her hair in corn rows, a suitcase full of tie-dyed skirts and a portfolio of sketches and paintings that got her into art school later that year. But Sylvia knew how much it pained Maggie that her father still hadn’t forgiven her.
‘I just think everyone should be free to do whatever the hell they want in life,’ Daniel said.
Sylvia turned, cocked her head. ‘Are you free?’ She said it as a reflex, and then immediately regretted saying it out loud. ‘Forget it, it’s none of my business.’
He finally turned to look at her and she saw something soften in his eyes, the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. ‘Evelyne never was any good at keeping her mouth shut,’ he said.
She received no more answer than that because at that moment a woman in a woolly hat and long coat started speaking on the stage, a microphone projecting her voice across the large space so it echoed off the parliament building’s facade. Soon the square had taken on the charged atmosphere of a festival as people cheered at her speech, brandishing their placards and shouting rally chants in French and German.
Equality for women! Our bodies belong to us! Liberation means revolution!
Sylvia took her camera out of her bag and began snapping, slipping amongst the crowd until she’d soon lost Evelyne, Daniel and the others altogether.
Half an hour later, the opening speeches over, the demonstrators began to march out of the square and through the streets of Bern. Chanting and singing as they walked, the trail of people moved up the middle of a cobbled street named Marktgasse, past a stone fountain topped with a curious figure in red and gold. In the distance, Sylvia could see the pointed form of a clock tower; she assumed this was the medieval Zytglogge, displaying an astronomical clock she’d read dated from the sixteenth century. She was suddenly struck by the incongruity of a march for women’s rights taking place amid streets built so long ago. How were they expected to bring change to the modern world when they had so much history to shrug off?
Stashing her camera in her bag, she began to talk to demonstrators – in English and French mostly, plus a mix of very basic German and sign language – about their motives, their hopes, the experiences that had brought them here. She spoke to university students demanding a different future to their mothers, women in their sixties reinvigorated by finally getting the vote, and single women demanding the right to live their lives as they wanted, not as expectation prescribed. There was Sarah, the young wife marching in defiance of her new husband, who had demanded she resign from the job she loved; Mathilde, who’d had an illegal abortion two years ago and nearly died; and Hanna, a striking 25-year-old who was placed in a reform school at the age of sixteen for having the temerity to fall in love with the wrong sort of boy.
‘When I got out of that hell hole,’ she told Sylvia, ‘I vowed never to let anyone dictate my life again.’
She wrote down their words and photographed their passionate faces, seeing the determination and cautious hope in their eyes, the fire that had ignited from being told they must behave in a certain way simply because they were women.
‘Take my picture,’ Hanna said, grabbing Sylvia’s arm. ‘Put it in your newspaper and tell the world what we are fighting for.’
As Sylvia continued to walk, talk and photograph, she saw her feature taking shape; she knew whose stories she would highlight, whose words she would quote, which picture she hoped would turn out well enough to use. Powered by the crowd’s energy and her own adrenaline, she felt hyper-alert, as though on a high from a drug she couldn’t find anywhere else but here – and she understood in that moment that she loved it, this drug. She loved being right in the middle of something important, experiencing history in-the-making. She loved talking to these women leading such different lives to hers, and yet seeing herself reflected in their passion, in their basic need for freedom, for escape from society’s constraints, for control over their own bodies. But most of all she loved being in a position to tell their story. This job was what made her happiest. It was what she was made to do. And she knew she just couldn’t give it up.