CAN YOU BEAR TO KNOW what I have lost? I scream this at the judges, in their stupid white wigs. And at the lawyers—my own and the one hired to prosecute me. They are both young, dapper African men who would not look out of place in London, Paris or New York. I scream it at the curious onlookers for whom my trial is entertainment. But most of all, I scream it at my family: Adam, Olivia, Benny.
No one responds to my question. The prosecuting attorney suppresses a smile because I have lost control. The judges rap their pencils on their tea trays.
But on the morning of the twelfth of October last did you not make a point of buying several razors at the shop near the Ombere bus station?
Once upon a time there was a man with a very long and tough beard… I began without thinking. Stopping only when it dawned on me that the entire courtroom had burst into laughter. Even Olivia, when I cast a glance at her, was smiling. Oh, Tashi, her look seemed to say, even here, on trial for your life, you are still making things up!
If you would be so kind as to answer the question, says the dapper young attorney, and not attempt to indulge and distract the court with your fantasy life.
My fantasy life. Without it I’m afraid to exist. Who am I, Tashi, renamed in America “Evelyn,” Johnson?
The razor to me was always associated with men, with beards and barber stools. Until I went to America it would never have occurred to me to pick one up, to shave my legs and underarms with it.
Yes, I say to the attorney, I bought three razors.
Why three? he asks.
Because I wanted to be sure.
Sure of what?
To do the job properly.
You mean to kill the old woman?
Yes.
That is all, Your Honors, he says.
That night in my cell I suddenly remembered the large razor I saw at the old man’s house in Bollingen, when Adam took me there. It was truly huge, as if it had belonged to a giant. I thought: How could a man’s face be so large; it would be almost like shaving one’s face with an axe. It was lying outside in the loggia, near the fireplace, and the old man used it, along with a large machete, to shave off slivers of wood for kindling. It was black and ancient, with Chinese dragons engraved in greenish bronze on its sides. The blade was exceedingly sharp. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. The old man, noticing my fascination, placed it tenderly in my hands, closing my fingers over it protectively. It is beautiful, isn’t it? he asked, but I thought he observed my clutching of the thing with a quizzical look in his eye.
I held the razor and looked out over Lake Zurich. Marveling that after our long trip, Adam and I had indeed arrived there.
We had flown first to London, where Olivia was speaking before the Theosophy Society, and then to Paris, and then on to Zurich, a remarkably clean and somnolent city. In fact, from the airplane window the whole of Switzerland seemed to be quietly sleeping. Everything neat and trim, safe. There was an air of thrift, of husbandry, even before one touched the ground. I could see that the forests were carefully tended: where trees were taken out, seedlings were put in. It seemed a country in miniature, where every slight wrong might be corrected, without much trouble.
I remarked to Adam how odd this was: that the people’s characteristics, easily discerned, were imprinted on the landscape.
But that is true everywhere, he said. Everywhere some people go they wreck the land, he said. But this is the land of people who’ve stayed home. Mountains, he said, gesturing at the magnificent Alps, make a wonderful fence.
We were circling the airport. It was in the middle of a field. There were cows and, as we descended closer to the ground, white clover and yellow wildflowers.
There was a train to Bollingen, and we took it. It ran noiselessly on its track, its conductor a redfaced, jovial fellow with graying flaxen hair. We looked out the window at the chalet-style houses, the acres of grapes, the family plots of corn. Gardens everywhere.
I had never imagined a warm Switzerland. In my imagination it was always snowing. People were on skis. The ground was white. There was hot chocolate. To feel the intense heat of the sun, to see people in summer pastels, to glimpse an ice cream vendor in one of the stations, amused me. I felt that my child self, who’d so loved to imagine snowy northern landscapes, especially while I was growing up in equatorial Africa, was experiencing a treat.
Adam seemed somewhat nervous as the train neared the station. Departures and arrivals always upset him. I remembered when we first arrived in America. His excitement to be, finally, “safe” and back home. And his shock at being constantly harassed because he was black.
No, no, he used to correct me. They behave this way not because I’m black but because they are white.
It seemed a curious distinction at the time. I was in love with America. I did not find Americans particularly rude. But then I had not been steeped in the history that Adam’s father had insisted he and Olivia study, in preparation for their return home. I felt I was able to see everything in a much more expansive way. For I saw everything fresh, and with wonder that I was in America at all. If a white person was rude I simply turned and stared. I never acknowledged the system that sanctioned rude behavior, but always responded directly to the person. How uncivilly you have been brought up! was the message of my stare.
We were so intent on reaching the end of our long journey that we missed the station and rode on, oblivious, to the one beyond it, Schmerikon, a pleasant hamlet close to the shore of the lake. Hot and flustered, we clambered down from the train and made our way to a small cafe just by the station. Adam ordered a sandwich—for we’d had no food all day—and I ordered cheese on a roll, a green salad, and lemonade.
There we sat, in the shade of a linden tree, two rotund black people in advanced middle age, our hair graying, our faces glistening with sweat. We might have been models for a painting by Horace Pippin.