ANNA COULD NEVER REALLY LOVE A STEVE, A BOB, A MIKE.
She abhorred the casual apathy a diminutive implied. How a nickname more often than not announced “I am the sum of every Matt you’ve ever met, the arithmetic mean of a Chris, a Rick, a Jeff.” It wasn’t the length—names don’t get much shorter than “Anna.” She felt a person’s name should resonate with dignity and significance. It should be able to heft the weight and bear the pressures of his personality. A Steffi would never be appointed to a presidential cabinet; a Chad would never appoint her.
Anna named her children with a seemly eye. Their names were American, but many Swiss had nonnative names; one-third of Zürich’s population is foreign, thanks to the banking industry. The Credit Suisse in which Bruno worked, for example, employed many Swiss, several Germans, some Brits, a few Americans, and an impossibly handsome Nigerian whose skin was as smooth and dark as Sprüngli chocolate. Everything’s eventually normalized by diversity. The names of Anna’s children were uncommon in Switzerland, if not rare. She chose them with that in mind. She liked their names. They seemed to fit.
A name is a fragile thing. Drop it, and it might break.
Like Steve. The name of a man Anna could never love.
ANNA BROUGHT AN EXTREMELY convoluted dream to her analysis. It was organized chaotically without regard to theme or circumstance, and it was unbound by the geographies of time and space. A dream of pointed symbols, archetypal images, and allegoric nuances, Anna was sure.
There were twenty doors the Doktor could have walked through if there was one. Let’s begin with the significance of the horse, Doktor Messerli might have said. What are your associations with balloons and airplanes? What do you think it means that the roller coaster only runs backward? Why, Anna, were you naked in the church? But the Doktor didn’t ask those questions and instead posed the single one that Anna wished she hadn’t.
“There is a Stephen in your dream. Who’s he?”
Psychoanalysis is expensive and it is least effective when a patient lies, even by omission. But analysis isn’t pliers, and truth is not teeth: you can’t pull it out by force. A mouth stays closed as long as it wants to. Truth is told when it tells itself.
Anna shook her head as if to say He is no one of significance.
AT 5:45 A.M. ON SATURDAY Anna was jolted awake by an unnatural scream. She threw herself out of bed and raced up the stairs two at a time. It was Polly Jean. She was cutting a tooth. Ten months was late for a first tooth; Victor’s came in at five months, Charles’s at four. Anna slipped her thumb into Polly Jean’s mouth and confirmed the presence of a small white nub. Polly countered with a string of wild infant curses. Anna picked her daughter up, shushed her, rocked her, tried to lull her back into sleep. Or a version of sleep.
Make no mistake: everything has a variant. Like versions of truth, like versions of love, there are versions of sleep. The deepest sleep is meant only for children and perfect fools. Everyone else must pay each night her restless due.
The sky was still dark and the neighborhood silent. From the square of window above Polly’s crib, the modest spire of the parish church was visible. The Benzes resided, quite literally, in the shadow cast by Dietlikon’s Swiss Reformed church. They lived in its figurative shadow as well. For a thirty-year tenure that ended only at his death, Oskar Benz, father to Bruno and Daniela and husband to Ursula, was the congregation’s Pfarrer. Its pastor.
Churchgoing in Switzerland is a matter of custom, not zeal. Even a practicing Swiss Christian won’t engage in religious swagger. That’s an American antic. Swiss faith seems more bureaucratic. You are baptized in a church, you wed in a church, you are eulogized in a church, and that’s it. Still, when Bruno and Anna went to the Gemeinde to file the papers for her residence permit, she was asked her religious preference. The churches are funded by taxes; money is distributed according to citizen affiliation.