Written German in Switzerland is standard schoolbook Hochdeutsch. But the Swiss speak Schwiizerdütsch, which isn’t standard at all. There is no set orthography. There is no pronunciation key. There is no agreed-upon vocabulary. It varies from canton to canton. And the language itself leaps from the back of the throat like an infected tonsil trying to escape. This is only a minor exaggeration. To the non-Swiss ear it sounds as if the speaker is construing made-up words from the oddest rhythms and the queerest clipped consonants and the most perturbing arrangement of gaping, rangy vowels. It is impervious to all outside attempts to learn it, for every word is shibboleth.
Anna spoke the barest minimum of Schwiizerdütsch.
ANNA DIDN’T JOIN THE other mothers. Instead, she scuffed the sole of a brown clog against the sidewalk’s curb. She fiddled with her hair and pretended to watch an invisible bird flying overhead.
It is hard to love a man outside his native tongue. And yet, it was the Swiss one Anna married.
The school bell rang and children spilled from the building and into the courtyard. Anna noticed Victor first, roughhousing with two friends. Charles followed close behind, caught in a throng of jabbering children. He ran to Anna when he spotted her, hugged her, and began prattling about his day without Anna’s prompting. Victor lingered with his pals and dragged his feet. This was Victor being Victor—standoffish and moderately aloof. Anna indulged his reticence and settled on just mussing his hair. Victor grimaced.
Anna experienced her first pinpricks of guilt as they walked toward the house (she couldn’t really call them pangs). They were scattershot and nondebilitating. This level of indifference was fairly new to her pathology. It rendered her queerly self-satisfied.
The Benzes lived no more than a hundred meters away from Primarschule Dorf. Their house would be visible from the schoolyard but for the Kirchgemeindehaus, the nineteenth-century timber-framed parish hall of the village church, which stood exactly between the two. Anna did not usually walk her children home. But it was an hour after the fact and she still felt Archie’s hands on her breasts; a moderate remorse was in order.
They moved to Switzerland in June of ninety-eight. Anna, pregnant and exhausted, had no wherewithal for debate. She telegraphed her compliance in long, silent sighs and hid her many anxieties inside one of her heart’s thousand chambers. She looked for a bright side, a glass half full. Who, after all, wouldn’t snatch the chance to live in Europe were it offered? In high school Anna locked herself in her room most nights and obsessed over the many elsewheres her men would one day take her. In those limp, submissive dreams she gave her men entire charge. Bruno had worked for Credit Suisse for years. They wondered, Would he take a Zürich post? Anna was married and pregnant and more or less in love. That was enough. This will be enough, she thought.
And so they moved to Dietlikon. It was close enough to Zürich to be serviced by two city trains. It was near a large shopping center. Its roads were safe and its houses were well kept and the town’s motto held great promise. It was printed on the website and on pamphlets. It was posted on the sign in front of the Gemeinde, and noted on the first page of the Kurier, Dietlikon’s small weekly newspaper: Menschlich, offen, modern. Personal. Open. Modern. Anna poured all optimism into those three words.
Dietlikon was also Bruno’s hometown. His Heimatort. The place to which the prodigal returned. Anna was twenty-eight. Bruno at thirty-four strode effortlessly back into his native space. Easy enough to do—Ursula lived just a short walk away on Klotenerstrasse in the house in which she raised Bruno and his sister Daniela. Oskar, Bruno’s father, was over a decade dead.
Bruno argued a good case. Living in Dietlikon would merit their children (We’re having more? Are you sure? They hadn’t even really deliberated the first) a wholesome, unbounded childhood, safe and stable. Once she settled into the idea of it (and after Bruno swore that all future children would be discussed prior to their conception), Anna was able to concede the move’s virtues. So when it did happen, rarely in those first months, that she grew lonesome or wistful for people, things, or places she never dreamed she would miss, she consoled herself by imagining the baby’s face. Will I have a ruddish-cheeked Heinz to call me Mueti? A Heidi of my own with blond and braided hair? And Bruno and Anna were, more or less, in love.
THE QUALIFICATION “MORE OR less” troubled Doktor Messerli.
Anna explained. “Is that not always the case? Given any two people in a relationship, one will always love more, the other less. Right?”
AT EIGHT, VICTOR WAS Anna’s eldest child. Charles was six. They were indeed the ruddish-toned, milk-fed children Anna had imagined. They were ash blond and hazel eyed. They were all boy, rowdy, absolutely brothers, and without a doubt the sons of the man Anna had married.
“BUT YOU HAD MORE children, yes? It must not have been entirely terrible.”