First published in 2012 by
And Other Stories
91 Tadros Court, High Wycombe, Bucks, HP13 7GF
Originally published as Spaziergänger Zbinden
© Christoph Simon 2010
Agreement by Bilger Verlag
English language translation © Donal McLaughlin, 2012
The rights of Christoph Simon and Donal McLaughlin to be identified respectively as Author and Translator of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.
ISBN 978-1-908276-10-0
eBook ISBN 978-1-908276-14-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
The publication of this book was supported by a grant from Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council.
Introduction
Reading this tiny jewel of a novel brought back my experience of watching the Theatre de Complicité’s The Street of Crocodiles: that sense of a confined person taking wing via luminous, poignant recollections; a person sending up brief showers of fireworks from a prison yard. In this case the prison yard is a comfortable enough Swiss retirement home. It is also the declining body itself of our stalwart but grieving narrator.
Lukas Zbinden, octogenarian widower and one-time schoolteacher, is a passionate advocate of walking and has hopes of stepping out. His constant refrain, as he bends the ear of young Kâzim, the home’s new community carer, is that walking is the catch-all cure against jadedness, against anxiety, against greed, selfishness and all negative thoughts. He has hopes of coaxing the young man outdoors, as he has already tried with the attendant, Lydia. Lydia has cried off as usual, pleading imminent rain and offering coffee in the day room instead. ‘Coffee’, Lukas informs us, is a dishearteningly watery instant brew, for which the inmates queue up eagerly, since, having paid into the obligatory kitty, they are hell-bent on getting their money’s worth.
One of Lukas’s many fruitful walking recollections comes from a holiday on Ibiza with his beloved Emilie. ‘Why are you walking?’ asks a kindly village waiter, noting the rucksacks. ‘Are you German?’ While there is a slightly Teutonic texture to Lukas’s walking zeal, we have our own British literary precedents in this matter. William and Dorothy Wordsworth walked incessantly, taking refuge from foul weather behind dry stone walls; and one doesn’t read far into Jane Austen without picking up that the man for Emma Woodhouse is not the alluring Frank Churchill, who rides to London for his fashionable haircuts, but the plain-speaking Mr Knightley, who enters the story knocking mud from his boots. And the woman for Mr Darcy is not the eligible Miss Bingley, who invites her female acquaintance to ‘take a turn about the room’, but muddy-skirted, bedraggled Lizzy Bennet, who has defied convention by striding out, cross-country, to visit her ailing sister.
An endearingly self-mocking old pedagogue, Lukas allots himself – rather as Chaucer does in The Canterbury Tales – the most un-gripping of group ‘talks’, from which the malignant Herr Imhof initiates a mass walk-out, so that even Britta, the geriatric nurse, feels licensed to join the exodus. Lukas is very good company for his readers, as his musings on fellow inmates bear witness; this, whether it be the highbrow grump Herr Ziegler, or the boozy Herr Probst, a one-time business bigwig who now pesters bemused sales assistants with a senile jabberwocky of telephoned complaints, or the sprightly Herr Pfammatter, still capable of forays into foreign cities from which he returns with a miscellany of pilfered trophies. There is also gentle Frau Dürig whose tall, courteous husband has recently been removed via the goods lift, as is the custom for the home’s deceased.
These diversions are the agreeable asides along the way. What I love about this poignant story is its small, quiet quality of epic. The book is a little Odyssey, a little Ulysses; the story of one day’s journey, skilfully playing in tandem with another, lifelong journey that runs concurrently as a monologue in Lukas’s head. This second journey takes him on a private, grieving perusal of life with his beloved Emilie, and of his persistent difficulty relating to his son Markus. Lukas, the walker, an only child since his brother’s early death, fell in love with the indefatigable, many-siblinged Emilie, by first falling for her worn and muddy walking boots as they sang out to him from the boot rack.
Emilie is astonishing in her vitality and fearlessness, in her endless, supportive soup-making for the down-at-heart, her reading groups, choirs and sewing circles, her love for Lukas and their son – and in her passion for intrepid country walks. Lukas is a city walker who loves the sight of a chocolatier’s window or the chance of random conversation at a tram stop, but Emilie converts him to the transfiguring joys of woodland, falcon, field and sky. And Markus, lover of the petrol explosion engine, who believes that the human heart has a finite number of heartbeats which are not to be wasted on podiatric effort – what of him? Or of his ever-anxious, pill-popping wife, Verena? Well, they are good sorts in their way. It’s just that they are not Emilie; beloved Emilie who, so wholly out of character, got terminal cancer and died.
As for the one-day Odyssey, it is taking place indoors. For all that Lukas is ever in hope of coaxing the new assistant out of doors – possibly even to the riverbank – he is all the while leaning on Kâzim’s arm; Kâzim, whose ‘too shiny’ shoelaces are not quite fit for serious walking. The journey upon which the pair are embarked is a descent from the retirement home’s third floor and to its ground floor. It involves the precarious navigation of flights of stairs which Lukas knows all too well because he firmly eschews the lift. He knows that tread number seven is tricky, and that the worst thing about being old is the prospect of falling over. That’s what got him here in the first place. He’s also an expert on the differing micro-climates of levels one and two, as witnessed by the greater thriving of the potted ficus on level two. He knows the place on the landing where the wallpaper pattern doesn’t quite match up. He recalls Pascal on the small diversions that get one through the day. He can smell the air of outdoors where hawks once sat on telegraph poles, as against the indoor overheating. But will he make it through the front door today? Or tomorrow?
Barbara Trapido
Oxford, March 2012
Zbinden’s Progress
For lunch? Hot milk with bread. And genitalia in it. That’s what Herr Hügli claimed they were, at least: some animal’s genitals. He fished them out of his bowl and sat, making strange patterns on the table with them, until Frau Grundbacher and Frau Wyttenbach started telling him off. – On the bedside table? You’re right, this photograph wasn’t there before, there’s no getting past that sharp eye of yours. Nurse Lydia noticed right away, too, when she burst into my room with a raincoat and umbrella yesterday, ready for our walk, armed against every kind of rainfall. Without being invited to, she lifted the photo for a closer look.
‘Such a cheerful couple!’ she exclaimed, her cheeks glowing like tiny apples, her eyes lighting up with excitement at her discovery. ‘Where’s that? Is that your wife? You’d think you were film stars!’
‘This is the pond where she taught me to swim.’ I took back the snap. ‘Our son took the photo. He was ten at the time. Or eleven, maybe.’
‘I didn’t mean to pry,’ Lydia said, apologetically. ‘It’s just: I’ve never seen the photo in your room before, and when I saw it, well, you and your wife seem so …’
She didn’t complete her sentence. Instead, pulled the stool up, sat down beside me by the window and took my hands. And do you know what I felt? I felt you. Your warmth. Lydia’s hands are like yours. And I told her about the two of us, our hazardous excursions and bold swimming adventures. How we walked along that pond beneath the trees, following the shore until no one could see us. The pond was in the shade, the sun well down. We stripped to our underwear and waded into the water. You’d put your hair up with clasps. Our son was trying to catch frogs at the shore, for poison for his arrows. You swam in the pond, showing me the movements to make. Then, in the water, you held me up with your arms and I practised drowning. After a while, I’d got the trick of it and could swim half a metre before I went under.
‘The main thing’s not to be afraid,’ you said.
We took each other’s hand and climbed out of the water as dusk was beginning to fall. At that precise moment, Markus took the photo.
Nurse Lydia listened, smiling, when I told her we wrote to each other daily for four years. – ‘How are you? I am well,’ and you wrote back, ‘My dear fiancé, I, too, am well, and know from all your letters that you are. Would you mind writing a proper letter?’
Lydia nodded, sympathetically, when I told her about your admirer on the bird-watching course, and the storm it had unleashed in me. I told her how silent I’d been for an endlessly long day after you slapped me across the face in Bonstetten Park. I told her about how, so late in life, I started being of some use about the house, after all – and Lydia seemed just as astonished as you were, back then. Only once did I put the hoover bag in the wrong way, and all the dust came billowing out. The handle that had broken off the washing machine, it turned out, only needed some superglue. I put the photo back. Lydia offered me a coffee, in the Cafeteria, and threw the umbrella in the corner.
I love thinking about you, there’s so much to remember. I can’t remember a time when you weren’t part of me. And these days – I don’t look up into the clouds for you, I look close by.
Of course, I feel uncomfortable in this shirt – what do you think? I keep having to loosen the collar. It’s mad, dressing like this in this heat, but the new civilian-service carer is waiting at the door for me, and I’d like to make a good first impression. Trustworthy. Lukas Zbinden: knowledgeable and respectable. He may always open his heart to the lonely and unhappy but, in the face of injustice, he’s fearless and makes no allowances. I hope the young man might like to accompany me into town a little. That would be my greatest wish. And if I’m honest, I’d be a little miffed if he were to be in a hurry to leave again. It’s always nicer if others also enjoy what gives you pleasure. Cross your fingers for me, Emilie.
Kâzim, I did catch your name correctly, didn’t I? Give an ageing walker your hand, young man. I have terrible difficulty with staircases. Can you believe this home for the elderly was once a private home? That a family of just four, or five, lived here? The children would creep up to the railings, here, and crouch down to watch as their parents hosted a soirée downstairs. – Take what? You’ll have to speak up. I’ve two hearing aids. With one, I can hear but it gives me headaches. With the other, I don’t get a headache but I can’t hear. – The lift? No, I never take the lift. In the lift, everyone just stands there, rigid, staring straight ahead, or with their eyes down. The door opens, someone gets out and someone else gets in – but turns immediately to face the door and study it, awkwardly. Who is it orders them all to study the door? If I have to use a lift, I like to turn my back to the door, look into the others’ faces and say, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if the lift got stuck and we all got to know each other?’
Do you know what happens then? When the door opens on the next floor, they all get out.
I know. I ask people the most impossible questions. I ask my son to explain how the automatic gearbox works. I ask the manager, here in the Home, who knits his socks. Frau Grundbacher, do you think you’re being sensitive but, in fact, are just in a huff? Herr Imhof, can you look at a cleaning lady without instantly wanting to get physical? Herr Ziegler, do you enjoy underestimating your ability to hurt other people’s feelings? Herr Hügli, do you get up off your backside to go and see if it’s raining? Or do you whistle for your tomcat to come in and feel whether he’s wet?
If I head down Thunstrasse – its gentle gradient – towards Helvetiaplatz, wishing the numerous on-comers a good day, it’s not unknown for someone – unsettled by this harmless act – to ask, ‘Do we know each other?’
‘No, but I’d like to learn a little about you. What spurs you on? What do you consider important?’
And sometimes someone replies, annoyed, ‘Shameless idiot.’
Don’t think the rejection leaves me cold. But I cushion my pain. What a pity, I think, making allowances, that he doesn’t feel like getting to know me. If I see him again tomorrow, I’ll give him another chance.
Who do you have to thank for ideas, Kâzim? I like to eavesdrop on conversations in the street. Expressions of affection always trigger a smile in me. I listen especially attentively if the voice in question sounds troubled. For ten minutes, I can be dragged through the abysses of life, to continue afterwards, grateful for my own good fortune. My wife, may she rest in peace, didn’t like that. She’d say, again and again, I shouldn’t need the stories of strangers, snippets from other lives, to give myself a boost. I told her once, while it was still fresh, about a phone conversation I’d overheard – an excited French-speaker at the station, whose Saint Bernard bitch was locked in his car, in the car park of the Dog School in Lausanne – and when I started to stutter and lose my thread as I tried to repeat the scraps of French, Emilie just said, calmly, ‘You’re getting lost in the detail, Lukas.’
This is the sixth step, if I’m not wrong. A splendid step, isn’t it? The next step is number seven on the way down, eighty-eight on the way up. Immaculate, isn’t it? – Please, why do you think I keep putting my hand behind my ear and shrugging? You have to speak up more, Kâzim. Speak slowly and clearly. – Thank you, it’s hardly worth mentioning. At a leisurely pace, but it’s possible. Apart from when I put my weight on the wrong hip.