Zürich
1915
I COME TO ON THE TRAIN, CHILLY AS A CORPSE AND HUNGRY BESIDES. Lucia is butted up against her father and Georgie is tucked under my armpit; both are asleep. I stretch my toes and lean to look out the window: trees, trees, trees; rock, rock, rock.
Jim grunts. “We’ll go through the Arlberg Tunnel soon, Nora.”
I nod and look out again, my shoulders tangled like briars.
Trieste was evacuated; Jim’s well-to-do students, the count and the baron, rallied around and helped with our visas so we could leave. Jim says they may have saved our lives. I still feel we’re running from the shadows at our backs and won’t rest quiet until we gain Switzerland. I think of Stannie, far away now in Katzenau and, if he gets out, with no family to come home to. I think of our flat on Via Bramante, still paid for while we’re away, the clatter of chairs empty now, Jim’s books rammed up against one another on the shelves, unread; my china cups gathering a fur of dust; the piano silent as a coffin. I see the ghosts of us there, watched over from the wall by the long-dead Joyces, by myself in Silvestri’s portrait.
ZÜRICH, WHEN WE EMERGE FROM THE STATION, IS AS UNPOLLUTED and immaculate as I remember it from eleven years ago.
“Even in June the air is a little brisk,” I say.
“As fresh as a nun’s drawers,” Jim replies.
“And you could eat stew off the footpath,” I answer, looking down.
The children drag their feet and complain of having to carry bags. They look around at the fancy-roofed buildings and down to the river where barges snail by, taking their leisure about their business.
“That’s the Limmat,” Jim says, and sniggers at his own joke.
“The river Limmat,” I explain to the children. “And down that way is the Confiserie Sprüngli where they make macarons light as clouds and bright as rainbows.”
Lucy tugs at my sleeve. “Can we go, Mamma?”
“We will, but not today.”
She puts on her little pig face, a snouty sulk of an expression that always riles me, but now, I’m too tired to tell her to stop. Let her pout.
“Ah-ah, Lucia,” Jim wags a finger and she restores her features at once, shocked that her beloved Babbo, so lenient always, has reprimanded her. Tiredness has us all crabby.
We make our way to the Gasthaus Hoffnung—the first place Jim and I ever lay together—and it’s comfortingly unchanged. Unlike ourselves. I sigh to remember the raw, young Nora, a match surely for the unspoilt nature of Zürich itself. The Hoffnung even smells the same—a whiff of burning cheese and long-smoked cigars—and not a table or flower vase has been moved, it seems. We’re remembered by Herr Döblin—Jim hails him as “my Dublin friend”—and made welcome. Georgie and Lucia run up the stairs before us, keen to see the place. Jim, ahead of me on the return, reaches back and grabs my hand.
“Do you remember, Nora?” he whispers.
“Tu es touchée,” I murmur and he startles. “I have a brain, Jim,” I say, “despite what you may think.”
He groans a little. “If only we didn’t have to share a room with the children tonight.”
“I know,” I say, reaching to run my hand round to the place where his cock nests, already growing to attention.
“I heard what you said,” Georgie calls down from the landing. “If we were rich, Babbo, we could have two rooms but, alas, we’re not.”
“Cheeky pup,” Jim says. He runs up and swings for Georgie, but it’s a good-natured swipe and we all giggle, half crazed from the strain of hours of travel and leaving Trieste behind.
Our room holds two large beds; I close the shutters and Lucia and I pile onto one bed and the boys onto the other. We sleep and sleep until hunger bubbles rise up to our throats and wake us. We drowse into our standing, unable to put up with our gurgling bellies another minute.
“I WOULD TAKE THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIANS, THE WHOLE JIMBANG of them, plus the Italians, over Switzerland’s boring bourgeoisie any day.” Jim sips at a green-stemmed glass of Fendant de Savoie then holds it to the light. “At least the Swiss do good wine,” he murmurs.
“We’ve only just arrived, Jim, don’t be criticizing everything already. The children don’t know Zürich at all, they might like its peace. Let them make up their own minds.”
The children are watching him, their eyes sooty, their mouths—for once—quiet. We are huddled into the corner of a café and Georgie and Lucia are clearly concerned about the whats and whys of this new place. We order fondue and the children liven up, liking the play of dipping their tiny cuts of bread into the broiling cheese on long forks. Georgie loses a piece and Jim bellows, “If a man loses his bread in the pot, he buys the drinks. Come, Giorgio, loosen your purse strings, my boy!”
“Shush, Jim, you’re shocking loud.”
He looks wounded. “I’m only trying to cheer you all—you’re a sorry band.”
His voice is still too rowdy. I lean in and speak quietly, hoping he will match me. “None of which is helped by you lamenting Trieste and the rule of the Habsburgs. We’re here now. We need to push our chests out and get on with it.” I flick my hand at our children. “They didn’t ask for the pain of learning a new language.” I thump my chest. “I don’t want it either. But here we are. Safe. We’re not enemy aliens, under threat of being dragged from our beds to rot in some prison, like poor Stannie. So, Jim Joyce, you can retire your sentiment for the old life.” I poke the table with my finger three times. “We. Are. Here.”
He sips his wine and eyes me. “Isn’t your mother the most wonderful woman who lives, my darlings? Tua madre è meravigliosa, ragazzi!” He leans over and taps my nose with his finger. “To my Gooseen.” Jim raises his glass and tosses the Fendant down his throat.
THE CHILDREN ARE PUT BACK TWO YEARS IN SCHOOL AND THIS has Jim hopping. Georgie, at ten, is very aware of how this makes him look to the youngers and he’s ripping about it, too. I don’t mind at all; they struggle with the German—it’s the Swiss brand of it, all shushy on the s’s, which reminds me of the Galway way of speaking. Anyway, the children will have to make do, they can’t move ahead until they master Schweizerdeutsch, for who knows how long this war will rattle on for, or when we’ll return to Trieste. I miss our old life, of course, but I won’t let Jim undo whatever good is to be found here by grumbling about it all the time.
“I miss the marine smell of the Adriatic,” he said last night, the look of a condemned man on his face.
I pointed out the window at the Zürichsee. “Isn’t there a lake as good as any sea out there?”
He shrugged and looked at me as if I were responsible for his melancholy, as if we aren’t all overturned by being here, far from the only home we’ve known. He’s a consequence of a chap and no mistake and I told him so.
I’m lighter today. I got a telegram and I’m walking to the bank—Uncle Michael Healy has sent us some money and I’ll retrieve it there and it’ll help with warm flannels for the children and, perhaps, a winter hat for myself, a nice furry ushanka, maybe, and a good, heavy overcoat. Jim bought a discarded coat for eleven francs from the landlady, but he complains that the man who owned it had unnaturally short arms. Also, with the money, I mean to make up a package for Stannie and send it to him at Katzenau: a tin of biscuits, some dried milk, cigars that he can use to trade with the other prisoners, a nice book, if I can persuade Jim to part with one he finished this week.
Zürich is altogether colder than Trieste. The snow never quite leaves the Uetliberg and her sister mountains that soar behind the city—Jim calls them “great lumps of sugar” and pretends he’s not moved by the majesty of them. I look to their white caps now and imagine sitting atop the Uetliberg and racing down it on a toboggan. Wouldn’t that be a wonder?
Yes, Uncle Michael’s gift of money will get us straight: there are a couple of drafty rooms available in a rackety house on Reinhardstrasse that will do for now and we can pay something down and the money coming in from Jim’s new students will soon have us able to settle, feel like we belong a little. Jim says Zürich is full of people like us; people like him, he really means—smart types who object to the war. Already he’s found a drinking spot, the Pfauen, though he calls it the Pee-Cock and finds himself mightily funny each time he says it, repeating it in case I don’t understand. There he has met artists and the like and, for all his complaining, has found a niche for himself, a thing I’m still a-struggle to do. It’s harder for women, for sure. We have to rely on other wives or girlfriends who are in need of a pal.
I gain the bank at last; the man at the counter is very official, not a smile, barely a hello. He hands me the money in an envelope and, when I get outside, I pull out the notes, toss the envelope to the ground, and walk on, smiling at the money in my hand. The clack of boots at my shoulder startles me, though I’m aware that someone has been calling out. I turn to see a policeman, his face aglow with rage, holding out the envelope I threw away.
“Der Mülleimer!” he says, pointing madly to a nearby rubbish bin like a man with a demon in his arm. “Der Mülleimer, ja?”
I feel my face pink up and I take the envelope from his hand and make a great show of walking, straight-backed and slowly, to the bin. I eye him and drop the envelope inside. I cock my eyebrow to ask if he’s happy.
He throws up his hands, mutters, “Ausländer!” and marches off.
Ausländer is one of the only German words I understand. I know that he was barking “Foreigners!” and I flush with outrage. I’ve lived in Europe for more than a decade, I feel like no foreigner at all. Is it my fault that the Swiss need every surface in their city free of even the tiniest speck of dust and litter? If you ask me, it’s not natural to want to be so tidy.
I stuff my money into my bag and trot back toward the Hoffnung, stopping only to buy a box of macarons for the children at Confiserie Sprüngli. I pull out a pistachio one and eat it as I walk, not caring who sees me or what crumbs sully the sacred Swiss streets.