So I had to go to Zurich again for a few days. My mother wished to see me. And because of my nerves about it, I’d felt so unwell over the whole long weekend that I suffered from severe constipation. On top of this, I should say that I’d written a novel a quarter century ago which I’d titled, for some reason I regrettably no longer recall, Faserland. It ends in Zurich, out in the middle of the lake, so to speak, somewhat traumatically.
That chapter of my life came back to me for the first time in years when, in Zurich as I said, down on Bahnhofstrasse, I purchased a dark brown, rather chunky wool sweater at a little stall hammered together from wooden beams, not far from Paradeplatz. It was already evening, I’d taken some valerian, and the effect of the pills and the despair of the Swiss autumn and the twenty-five preceding years weighed, leaden beyond measure, on my mood.
Just before that I’d been out in the Old Town. Over in Niederdorf there had been a clandestine screening of In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, the last film by Guy Debord, completed just before his suicide. Four or five people had come, which seemed to me a miracle on account of the radiantly sunny, clement evening and this bloodless, soporific work. And after the audience, which is to say a pair of professors, the projectionist, and a homeless man who’d attended only to doze in the cinema seat for a while, had said their goodbyes and shaken one another’s hands, I must have walked aimlessly back down into the night toward Paradeplatz. And there, on the other side of the Limmat, I came across that makeshift stall run by some Swiss commune, where two bespectacled women of indeterminate age and a friendly bearded young man were selling heavy wool sweaters and blankets in natural colors, which they had knit themselves.
These simple woolen items, juxtaposed with the clothing on show in the windows of the closed but still brightly illuminated boutiques on Bahnhofstrasse, seemed to me to possess a quaint sort of authenticity, just as the women’s smiles seemed—well, there’s no other way to put it—suffused with reality and meaning, or at least more real than the rest of Bahnhofstrasse, with its dozens upon dozens of Swiss flags hanging left and right and the luxurious trinkets in the display cases. And when I handed the communards that hundred-franc bill—after taking off the sweater I’d impulsively tried on, despite the cold, and accepting it, folded inside a light brown paper bag—for a brief moment I had the impression, perhaps also false, of having derived something significant from this transaction. I said goodbye with an awkward smile and trekked toward Münsterplatz, shivering slightly, with the thought of grabbing a drink at the bar in Kronenhalle before returning to the hotel, climbing into bed, taking another herbal sleeping pill, and turning out the light.
My mother’s situation—and now I’ll get to the point—often forced me to visit Zurich, this city of posers and braggarts and debasement, and had completely paralyzed me for years. It had become vile, altogether heinous, it had become more than I was able to bear, than one should have to bear. My mother, in short, was very sick, which is to say sick in the head, too—not just there, but primarily there. In order not to lose touch with her, I’d decided at some point to accept the misery in which she had been wasting away for decades, surrounded by empty vodka bottles, unopened bills from various Zurich sable-fur warehouses, and the crinkling foils of her pain medication. Not to mention all those still shrink-wrapped articles of clothing she had bought, out of some compulsion stemming from the war and the postwar years—the sweaters and cardigans and pleated slacks, which had wandered into the armoires in her apartment, stacked and stowed away and archived, as it were, next to the dozens of Hermès handbags and the quite literally hundreds of Ferragamo shoes that were never worn.
She had neither an email address nor a mobile phone, and spurned the internet altogether. Too complicated, she’d always said, and the computer keys? Too small. I guessed, however, that she refused it all out of arrogance. She made a performance of liking to read the newspapers and Stendhal. Her skin had the texture of dry silk, and she was always slightly sunburned despite never sitting outside on the terrace, among the hydrangeas.
Her housekeeper stole from her. Every other day her wallet was empty. Although she almost never spent any money, it was all invariably gone, just as her black Mercedes was gone one day, too: taken from her apartment building’s garage and off to Bukovina by the Bukovinian husband of her Bukovinian housekeeper. It was vile, but at least she wasn’t in Winterthur anymore.
For that was where she’d had to celebrate her eightieth birthday, on the locked psychiatric ward. If one were to have a sense of humor about it, the scene was like something out of Dürrenmatt, only it was much sadder than in Dürrenmatt because it concerned not just any old woman but my own mother.
In any case, they’d released her from Winterthur—had been forced to release her, because she could be kept in the mental hospital only by a court order, and there wasn’t one and would never be one. You see, with her cunning manipulations, her brusquely betokened sangfroid, my mother knew how to persuade whoever was examining her that everything was in perfect order, that she had only to be allowed back into her apartment and everything would remain that way. She had only to be left to her phenobarbital, the cases of deplorable Fendant—white wine in screw-top bottles at seven francs fifty—her subscription, canceled every week and promptly reinstated, and the mediocre Expressionist paintings that her husband, my father, had given her during their marriage, while he’d of course preferred to keep the Noldes, Munchs, and Kirchners (which he had collected in the GDR with Lothar-Günther Buchheim) rolled up under his bed in the château on Lake Geneva where he lived after divorcing her.
