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Martin R. Dean 
Michael Robinson, Translator
Translated from the German by Michael Robinson
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...Switzerland has always huddled into smallness, with austere modesty. |
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For some inexplicable reason I felt compelled to go to Melide near Lugano several times, to visit "Miniature Switzerland." I had an urge to say goodbye to this country, and I also wanted to arrive here properly at last. I felt I would have to keep going through these rituals of arrival and departure for just as long as my writing had something to do with Switzerland. This tiny version of Switzerland - you can walk in a few paces from the Rhine harbour in Basel to the cathedral of St. Pierre in Geneva - is almost exactly the same age as I am. It was built when I was a little boy, when I started to have some sense of awareness, with all the usual gaps in it. Here the sun always laughed above the little gables and tiny windows, just as it had laughed when I was a child in the Aargau. I couldn´t imagine this place in rain, fog or snow. The sights of Switzerland were presented here prettily, smartly, with sharp creases ironed in, if you see what I mean, rather like a flower-decked room set for a feast, where you can wander freely from one table to another. I strode from the belfry in Bern to the lion monument in Lucerne to Kolinplatz in Zug, a town I was visiting for a year at the time.
"Our aim," I read in the brochure, "was to produce a symbolic representation of Switzerland, showing all its inhabitants´ activities using a selection of objects from every area, reduced for the model. (...) It is served by an ultra-modern transport system, strikes are unknown, its inhabitants will live happily ever after, without soldiers, without police, without taxes. Discover your homeland!"
I had always been fond of descriptions in prospectuses and the language they use, which often gently detaches itself from the object it is trying to describe so precisely, and forms interesting, usually unanticipated bubbles. This brochure was telling me about the utopia of a small state that in its full-scale reality actually renounces all utopias. Other countries might incline wildly towards monumentalism and anything else hazardously gigantic; endlessly seeking freedom in the great expanses of the West, but Switzerland has always huddled into smallness, with austere modesty. "To suit me," Alberto Giacometti had said, "things have to be small." And Robert Walser scaled his life down in micro-script to the point of ultra-polite illegibility.
Small things always stuck in my throat like fish-bones. I could talk myself out of it in dialect, and set myself apart from any bragging or boasting. But when I was in Germany people poked gentle fun at the way I spoke, as though I had some obscure throat disease, and started to amuse themselves by imitating me as the evening wore on.
Miniature Switzerland was spotless and sterile; no wind of history, no storm of catastrophe and revolution. Cliche had become reality here, and instilled a feeling of intimacy.
This is how home is created, like this and in no other way, I said to myself, as a repeated acknowledgement of something that had long been familiar. I felt I wanted to lie down on the spot and hug parliament building. The little houses, the tiny people, tiny trains and tiny trees set my imagination racing. The miniatures worked like a magnifying glass that made reality clearer at its focal point. "That´s what Switzerland is like!" I suddenly and enthusiastically shouted at a group of terrified Japanese, and went back to Kolinplatz in Zug.
Zug is not part of Central Switzerland! I realized I was mistaken about this when I started my year as "town observer" - as the writer-in-residence is known there.
My guest accommodation was in the middle of the old town, which had a bad reputation for seeming like a museum. But this old town had excellent restaurants and a handful of bars, where you had to fall silent as soon as you went in. If you didn´t fall silent you went under in the noise everyone else was making and left the bar early. So only people with powerful voices that weren´t drowned by the music assembled in the bars. I didn´t usually approach the counter till after midnight, especially when I didn´t have anything left to say.
My hosts were curious about the cool outsider´s eye that I was going to cast over them. "How do you find Zug?" was a question that was often asked, though it was best not to answer. The reason for this was that it always followed a series of critical self-accusations, and it made considerable sense not to agree with these if you didn´t want to offend the self-accuser a great deal. Lasting contacts were made by contradicting energetically. Zug was in fact a small town between two larger ones, and felt that it had an unfortunate reputation. A number of dubious foreign firms, most of them no larger than letterboxes, had set themselves up here because of its attractive tax concessions. They constantly fuelled the bad reputation. And up on the mountain was the successful author Johannes Mario Simmel, writing. I never clapped eyes on him, not even when buying caviar. He was simply here to pay taxes. Quite obviously the whole city suffered from the wealth that it was itself not prepared to accept as entirely earned. I did not want to spend too much time on this, certainly not the whole year; it seemed to me that the typical citizen of Zug was far from being especially avaricious. The people all had good teeth, healthy-looking faces and there was a conspicuous lack of the supposedly dull, exaggeratedly unanimated quality that could have found its way into their faces if they had had too much money.
I often had to go away from Zug, and yet I always liked coming back again. When I arrived in Zug and the foehn was blowing, the mountains stood there backlit, like defiant, snow-powdered officers. The lake was at the foot of all this camaraderie.
The lake, Lake Zug, was the first and only thing that I could see from my lofty visitor´s home. At times it lay as flat as a lead mirror, and then its surface would prickle like a dragon´s scaly armour. After only a few days I came to like the view from the window so much that I couldn´t do without it. The image of the lake rippled with my sub-conscious in ever-recurring waves, a daily barometer that told me my state of mind. If I looked out of the window, my mood was dictated to me. Despite its operetta-like qualities - the ships, for example, seemed like paper models of ocean liners, and the dancing buoys in their turn like islands - I could use the lake to read the weather and the state of the town´s soul. In my breaks from writing I ran along the lake in old track-suit bottoms, in the summer I swam out till the bank went away and left me and I was encircled only by the mountains.
Participation and observation were two words in my brief, a third was description: that was how I was to enrich the cultural life of Zug. In reality it was I, the so-called observer, who was ceaselessly observed, and that with a great deal of verve. Sometimes a local would come towards me with his pupils widening threateningly until I had gone past; then he would turn round, and I felt his look scramble over me and tickle my shoulders.
Here in Zug writing became a public matter for me. Some people looked me sharply up and down, as though they needed to do that to find out whether their tax money had been well spent on me. What I was actually doing was writing a novel with the working title "The Guyana Knot." As this activity had no perceptible meaning and no apparent use I constantly found myself on the defensive. But I was trying to defend something that I didn´t even think was worth defending myself, and the more I defended it the worse it seemed. If people saw me in the street I was obviously not writing, just indulging my taste for squandering taxpayers´ money. Then again, if I was sitting at my desk, steadily tying knot after knot, and thus continuing to weave my fabric, I was obviously neglecting my brief, which was to make contact with the locals.
But despite the high expectations invested in me in some circles, I only managed to respond appropriately to hostile overtures, or even to keep them alive, in the tiniest number of cases. I felt that interest in me was waning after three, four months: I must have been much too conciliatory somewhere or other. My alien appearance, which attracted a great deal of curiosity, began to lose its effect. I was taken for a Tamil or a Turk in the street with increasing frequency, and people spoke to me, in a friendly yet threatening way, in English, Turkish or that inimitable mixture that consists of rudimentary Swiss-German with the words twisted violently around. In fact, many people in Zug could not agree with each other, and had hoped that my implacable appearance would give them a common cause again.
Invited by an interested circle of readers, a woman indignantly told me about a neighbour who had watched another neighbour shooting at some parrots that were flying around in the wild. When I failed to be as outraged as expected, and did not spout a torrent of contemptuous words, an older woman at the table shouted vehemently at me: "But that sort of thing is racist!"
When I was being greeted by the cultural circle in an adjacent parish, they took the opportunity of asking me where I actually came from. But it was not possible to answer this question without a lengthy digression, and to say something pretty close to the truth - "I come from Menziken" - would have run counter to their expectations, so we opted for a longer lecture as soon as the coffee and cakes had been served. This was about the strange phenomenon of the "neighbourhoods," which again was something quite different from what I had thought it to be. The admiring exclamations that I threw in, or even my discreet questions, discreet because they were whispered when the lecturer was pausing for breath, drifting into the middle of the table like a cloud of breath, were ignored until there was no point in asking them any longer. It became quite clear that my hosts had to go into their own origins immediately: one cannot sit back in a chair and relax until one has explained one´s background, right down to the last detail.
They kept offering me more and more pieces of cake, which meant that I couldn´t interrupt or ask questions, and at the same time passing on a captivatingly complex piece of local history. Rites and role-specific behaviour I had never heard of before among the various "neighbourhoods."
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