‘You won’t find any gold here like the Yids left behind,’ said one of the workmen. Two others chimed in with laughter.
But he wasn’t listening to them. The picture of the man and the woman with the child, driving alone in an old East German Wartburg across the white desert would haunt him for many months to come.
Franz Carl Weber
A FEW MINUTES before reaching the main station the train slowed down. The carriage began to rock as the wheels rattled over the points and crossovers. His chance travelling companion, a woman who had boarded a few stations ago and immediately gone to sleep in the comfortable seat opposite him, now opened her eyes.
‘Are we already in Zurich?’ she asked in Italian.
He barely knew that language, but the question was so obvious that he replied: ‘Si, madame, Zurich naturlich ich glaube.’
She smiled at this Volapük, took a small mirror and a lipstick from her handbag and started correcting the contour of her lips. As he furtively watched, he confirmed that one of the alluring features of her beauty was the result of a simple procedure, not nature. It was to do with her mouth, or to be precise, her lower lip. In fact it was no more prominent than the upper one, but by applying her lipstick in the right way, she gave it a defiant quality, as if the open invitation to a kiss held contempt even for a man bold enough to plant one.
He turned his gaze on the window, but the train had just entered a tunnel, and now he caught a glimpse of her face lit from below. That particular shape of the lip made her look like Basini’s Madonna, even though the woman painted in Rome four hundred years ago as Mary was not wearing any lipstick at all. Where did this comparison lead? Nowhere. The train applied its brakes as it slowly rolled in between the platforms.
‘Do you know how to reach the Hotel Gotthard?’ This time she asked in English.
‘It’s nearby. It’s not even worth taking a taxi. Just one stop by trolleybus. Seven minutes on foot. The Hotel Saint Gotthard is at 87 Bahnhofstrasse – you can see it in the distance.’
‘You know the city,’ she said.
‘In a way,’ he replied, on the platform by now, as he fetched down her luggage from the carriage step.
She nodded, and was rapidly on her way. A buckled wheel on her suitcase squealed at every turn. A little later, when the woman had disappeared in the crowd of passengers, he walked up to a notice board displaying the timetable on the platform. He always did this when he alighted at a station in a foreign city, even if he already had a return ticket. Then he checked it once again inside the building. He proceeded no differently now, slowly sauntering towards the ticket hall where, craning his neck a little, he stood in front of the main information board. It all made sense: he had three possibilities for the return journey, not counting multiple connections of course, which he did not have to take into consideration.
If he had been one of those people who use their journeys to produce endless, unrestrained prattle, he would immediately have jotted down in his notebook that Zurich welcomed him with the smell of hot chocolate and over-ripe mandarins. He drank the chocolate standing up at one of the buffets, still in the station concourse. Whereas the extremely mouldy fruits came spilling out of a wooden box, which a Turk was shifting as he closed his stall. He unintentionally stepped on one of the mandarins, and it was a very unpleasant sensation: instead of springing out from under his shoe like a tennis ball, the fruit literally fell apart beneath it, making a boggy squelching noise. As he strolled along Bahnhofstrasse, which in this city ran slightly uphill, he could not avoid the sensation that this bitter-sweet smell was keeping him company, past the shop fronts, banks and tenement buildings. Less than ten minutes later he put down his small suitcase right beside the reception desk at the Hotel Saint Gotthard, where a man with a sad face handed him a registration card and asked: ‘What is the purpose of your stay?’
He did not know how to answer. Finally he mumbled, ‘Tourism,’ and at once added, without concealing his annoyance, ‘tourism and business, but why should I have to write that down?’
‘Not at all,’ said the receptionist, taking the card and handing him the key to room 305. ‘We are simply told to ask that question. You understand, sir,’ he smiled confidentially, ‘security.’
A further exchange of remarks was pointless. But once he had sat down on the bed in his room, taken off his shoes and wiped the remains of the mandarin mush from the sole with a handkerchief wetted for this purpose, he suddenly felt genuine irritation. What sort of terrorist declares the purpose of his mission to the hall porter? And if so, what was that question meant to be? A test? A warning? A Swiss greeting?
He switched on the television but it did not bring him the relaxation he was hoping for. He surfed the channels, only stopping for a moment longer on CNN. The ripped-apart bodies of some Shi’ite pilgrims recalled a war going on somewhere in a country full of sand. He could not remember the name of the blinded king, in chains, being beaten with sticks on a desert road. But in any case, this image, which he remembered from a religious education class at school, was going on here and now in television history. As he tapped out a laconic message on the buttons of his mobile phone – Got here, everything OK – a number of prisoners with their eyes blindfolded filed past the reporter’s camera. But that was not what riveted his attention. It was that suddenly a high-pitched female voice rang out from the room next door. After practising some scales, a beautiful, extremely resonant soprano produced a song. It was the Magnificat.
He realised that instead of a back wall, the wardrobe in which he had hung up the shirts he had unpacked from his case had a door into the next room. It was probably locked, but the fact that he was living in one half of a shared suite – not to mention the none too soundproof acoustics, of course – came as rather a nasty surprise, as if he had bought a first-class ticket for a train entirely made up of second-class carriages. Yet it didn’t matter a jot because of the music: its pure beauty compelled him to admire it, even in this strange manner, with his upper body plunged into the wardrobe and his ear pressed to a cracked wooden slat. With the Magnificat ringing out, he was about to withdraw from his uncomfortable position, when some intriguing changes took place in the next room, and the singer let forth a whole torrent of angry remarks. This was most evidently an exercise, a rehearsal, because none of her curses and expletives was met with an answer. When the stream of shouts abruptly broke off, laughter erupted in hysterical cascades, ending with somebody’s name being invoked. Louis? Luciano? He could not hear it precisely, nor could he recall a libretto like that from the operas he used to know long ago.
Finally, when it had all gone quiet, he backed out of the wardrobe. Whether it was the uncomfortable position with his head lower than his body, or the stuffy smell in there (a combination of the odour of anti-bedbug disinfectant and the residual acrid smell left in there by the vests, socks, slips, stockings, shirts and slippers of hundreds of his predecessors), suffice it to say that he was feeling rather dizzy and was seized with the desire for a breath of fresh air.
Less than five minutes later, he emerged into the small square in front of the hotel. Without a second thought he set off on the route that for some fifteen years he had taken in his dreams, and in a slightly more realistic way on a map of the city. First he passed Saint Peter’s Church, and went downhill to the river along the narrow Schlüsselgasse. At the foot of it he remembered perfectly well not to confuse Zinnengasse with Storchengasse, because if he had gone down the latter, instead of reaching the lawyer’s office he would have come to Weinplatz, from where the pleasure boats left by day. So he correctly chose Zinnengasse, and soon after, on the corner of Wühre, right on the river Limmat, he caught sight of a tenement building on which a modest plaque announced that in this house, at number 33, was the office of law firm Henri & François Rosset. For a while he stood on the pavement with his head slightly raised, gazing at the row of windows on the first floor, behind which, tomorrow morning, his life was to take on colour. The windows were dark and silent, with only the lights from the far bank of the Limmat sliding across them, as if over large, mysterious mirrors.