He retired at the age of fifty-five. The mill had been merely a way of putting bread on the table: his passions were history, society, politics. He and some friends purchased a newspaper and became its publishers. But their position vis-à-vis Swiss neutrality ran counter to that of public opinion, and their limited financial resources made them vulnerable to the competition. The venture gave him and his friends more pain than pleasure, and after a few years they were forced to abandon it. But his activities as a newspaper publisher had brought him into contact with book publishers, and the last project he undertook—and worked on every evening with my grandmother—was to edit a collection of short fiction he called Novels for Your Reading Pleasure and Entertainment.
5
HE LIVED FOR the history he read in books and recounted to me on our walks. No stroll, no hike, no march, as he liked to call them, was complete without a story from Swiss or German history, especially military history. He kept an all-but-inexhaustible trove of battle maps in his head and would draw them in the ground with his walking stick: Morgarten, Sempach, Sankt Jakob an der Birs, Grandson, Murten, Nancy, Marignano, Rossbach, Leuthen, Zorndorf, Waterloo, Königgrätz, Sedan, Tannenberg, and many others I have since forgotten. He had the gift of bringing a story alive.
I had my favorite battles, stories I wanted to hear over and over. The Battle of Morgarten. Count Leopold leads the cream of Austrian knighthood into battle as if it were a hunting party, expecting an easy victory and quick spoils from the supposedly poorly armed, defenseless Swiss. But the Swiss are battle-tested and battle-ready; they know what they are fighting for: freedom, home, hearth, wife, and children. They know too where Leopold will make his move: a knight by the name of von Hünenberg, a good neighbor and friend of the young Swiss Confederation, has shot an arrow with an admonitory parchment into their camp. When the narrow street is jammed with Austrian knights and progress is slow, they rain rocks and tree trunks down upon them, thereby driving a good number of them into the lake and, weighed down as they are by their armor, a watery grave. Then they descend upon the rest in person, and a massacre ensues.
I was impressed by the valor of the Swiss, but I was also worried by von Hünenberg's arrow. Wasn't he a traitor? Didn't his betrayal tarnish the glory of the Swiss?
“Your father asked the same question.” Grandfather nodded.
“Well?”
“Von Hünenberg was a free man. He didn't need to side with the Austrians; he could side with the Swiss or with no one.”
“But he wasn't fighting for the Swiss. He was underhanded about it.”
“He couldn't have helped the Swiss any more if he had fought with them. If you can do the right thing only by being underhanded, being underhanded doesn't make it wrong.”
I wanted to know what had happened to von Hünenberg. But my grandfather did not know.
The Battle of Sempach. Once more the Austrians trust to their heavy armor; once more they underestimate the prowess and courage of the peasants and shepherds. At first the Swiss are unable to wedge their way into the Austrians' front, bristling as it is with spears, but by noon—it is the hottest day of the year—the sun has made the knights' armor red-hot and heavy, and when Arnold von Winkelried seizes all the spears he can and buries them with his dying body, the Austrians are too exhausted to put up any resistance. Once more they are totally defeated.
My first reaction was one of astonishment: How could Arnold von Winkelried, in the midst of his heroic feat, find time to say, “I wish to pave the way for freedom, fellow countrymen. Care for my wife and children!”
But my grandfather would not rest until I understood that the Austrians lost because they had failed to learn the lesson of Morgarten. “Underestimating the Swiss, using heavy armor, ignoring the vagaries of nature—this time sun rather than water—anyone can make a mistake, but no one should make the same mistake twice.”
Once I had grasped this lesson, I was ready for its successor: “One must learn not only from the harm one suffers but also from the harm one inflicts.” He told me about the English who won battle after battle with their longbows but were at a total loss when the French built their own longbows and turned them to good use.
The Battle at Sankt Jakob an der Birs. The very name of the enemy—the Armagnacs—was enough to terrify the Swiss. Grandfather described the army of thirty thousand: mercenaries from France, Spain, and England steeled by long service in the Hundred Years' War and inured to atrocities and plunder. The French king has no more need of them and is only too glad to offer them and their leader, the crown-hungry dauphin, to the Austrians. The Swiss number fifteen hundred. Sent out to reconnoiter rather than attack but seduced into one skirmish after another, they are finally faced with the entire Armagnac army. They retreat to the Sankt Jakob Infirmary, where they fight bravely into the night and to the last man. The Armagnacs are victorious but suffer so many casualties that they lose their taste for war and sue for peace.
“What's the lesson this time?”
Grandfather laughed. “That there are times when doing something crazy is right, provided you do it all the way.”
6
THERE WAS ANOTHER THING about which Grandfather told tale after tale: mistaken verdicts. Here too I had my favorites, ones I requested over and over; here too we discussed the moral implications of the tales. They were momentous. For though mistaken verdicts are unjust by definition, the more famous of them often have a historical significance that goes far beyond injustice and can even transform injustice into justice.
Take the case of Count von Schmettau against a miller by the name of Arnold. The miller refuses to pay the count his quitrent because he says a local official has grabbed the bread out of his mouth by diverting his millrace into a pond for raising carp. The count takes the miller to court. The count wins in the first and second rounds and finally at the Supreme Court in Berlin. The miller writes to Frederick the Great, who, suspecting the favoritism, bribery, and disgraceful hocus-pocus involved, orders the judges thrown in jail, the pond filled in, and the verdict against the miller rescinded. This order was arbitrary and unjust: the miller's millrace had plenty of water, and had he run the mill as he should have done, he would have been able to pay the quitrent. In other words, the miller was a scoundrel. But the case served to establish Frederick's reputation as a righteous king and Prussia as a state in which all—weak and strong, rich and poor—were equal before the law.
The trial against Joan of Arc may not have transformed injustice into justice, but it did give rise to a situation that would hardly have been possible otherwise. Joan, a beautiful peasant girl of sixteen, arrives at the court of a Charles too weak to besiege the English and have himself crowned king of France at Reims. Joan miraculously leads the French into battle and on to victory, captures Orléans, clears the way for Charles' coronation, and marches on Paris. There she is taken prisoner and sold to the English. The king, who could perhaps have had her liberated, does nothing. Joan, steadfast, is tortured and raped, sentenced to death for witchcraft and sorcery by Bishop Pierre Couchon, and burned at the stake. However, the trial and its verdict make her a martyr for the French cause and a symbol of liberation, and twenty years later the English are ousted. Just as without Arnold the miller there would have been no rule of law in Prussia, so without Joan of Arc, France would not have been liberated.
One of the stories, though, had no redeeming features. In 1846 the beautiful daughter of a Protestant tailor in Nancy, Mennon Elkner, and the son of a Catholic executioner, Eugène Duirwiel, fell in love. The executioner, who had learned of their love from a neighbor of the tailor's, wrung a statement from Mennon to the effect that she would break with Eugène. She was doubly despondent: she had lost her beloved and was pregnant. She brought two stillborn boys into the world and buried them in her garden. But the neighbor had been spying again, and Mennon was arrested, accused of double infanticide, and sentenced to death by the sword. One might guess what is to come. But what comes is even more
gruesome than one might guess. Eugène had just taken over his father's duties and went to his first execution knowing only that it was a case of double infanticide. When he recognized Mennon in the murderess, he grew pale, his head spun, his knees buckled, and his hands shook. Urged on by his father, who was at his side, and by the other officials present, he delivered two blows with his sword, wounding Mennon on her chin and shoulder, but then flung the sword down and neither would nor could go on with it. There being a schedule to be observed and a family's honor to be saved, the executioner lunged at Mennon with his knife to complete his son's job for him. With each stab, the crowd grew more restless until it stormed the platform.
Grandmother, who would recite poems about the battles of Lützen and Hochstädt, about Arnold and Joan of Arc, also knew a perfectly unpoetic, inartistic poem about the fate of the fair Mennon. Whenever Grandfather came to the point in the story when the crowd revolted, he would stop and say, “Ask Grandmother. She's a lot better at telling how it ends.”
I can't reconstruct the entire poem. The last two stanzas went something like this:
The executioners were stoned by all;
They died a painful death that very day.
But could Mennon to safety make her way?
For yet she lived and to her God did call.
They bore her full of hope to a free bed,
But soon thereafter they pronounced her dead.
Five sacrifices form this gruesome tale.
Although from love most true it did arise,
It ended in a bloodbath, woe, and bale.
Who does not shudder at such acts unwise?
Yet there's a happy ending one may proffer:
Perhaps they made their peace in the hereafter.
7
GRANDMOTHER'S ONLY CONTACT with wars, battles, heroic deeds, trials, and verdicts was through poetry. She regarded war as a stupid, stupid game that men were not yet mature enough—and perhaps would never be mature enough—to abandon. She forgave Grandfather his passion for things martial because he joined her in her battle against alcohol, which she considered nearly as great a scourge as war, and for woman suffrage, and because he always respected her other, peaceful, feminine way of viewing and conceptualizing things. It may well have been respect that brought their marriage about and held it together.
One summer, when Grandfather was working in Italy, he had a visit from his mother. She had come to remind him that it was time for him to start a family, and told him about various young women, giving him to believe that he would not be rejected should he propose. Among them was a cousin she had seen at a funeral and taken a liking to. The following summer Grandfather visited his parents, helped to bring in the hay, and roamed the countryside alone, seeking out the fortresses he had read about in his beloved history books. At one point his mother suggested he visit his aunt. There he met the cousin, whom he had not seen since childhood. A photograph taken at the time shows a young woman with luxuriant dark hair, a proud, lively look in her eye, and a mouth whose full lips hold the promise of sensuality and at the same time seem ready to twitch into laughter. It made you wonder what the local young men were waiting for and why she had waited for a man with already thinning hair. His memoirs record a brief conversation at a window and how he was “surprised at her clever thoughts and the placid, resolute—yet never immodest—way she had of expressing them to her rather overbearing cousin.” They then exchanged a few letters, “the contents of which I cannot recall,” whereupon his proposal, in writing, was accepted, likewise in writing. The engagement was celebrated a year later; the wedding, a year after that.
I don't know whether it was a happy marriage; I don't even know whether it makes sense to speak of the happiness of their marriage or whether they ever thought about it. They lived a life together, took the good with the bad, respected each other, relied on each other. I never once saw them have a serious argument, though they often teased and even poked fun at each other. They took pleasure in being together and showing themselves together, he the dignified personage he had become in his old age, she the beautiful woman she had remained. Yet there was always a shadow over them. Everything about them was subdued: the joy, the joking and laughing, the talks about the things of this world. It was my father's early death that had cast its shadow over them, and the shadow never waned.
That too was something I realized only after reading Grandfather's memoirs. At times my grandparents spoke of my father with such immediacy and lack of artifice that I never had the feeling they wanted to withhold information about him from me. I learned which of Grandfather's stories he preferred, that he had collected stamps, sung in the church choir, played handball, drawn, painted, and been a voracious reader; that he had been nearsighted, a good pupil and law student, and never done military service. There was a picture of him in the living room, a slim young man in herringbone knickerbockers standing in front of a wall, his right arm resting on the ledge, his calves crossed. The posture is nonchalant, but the look behind his glasses is impatient, wondering what is going to come next, ready to turn to something else if it fails to engage him. I found intelligence, resolve, and a bit of arrogance in his face, though maybe only because they were qualities I wished for myself. Our eyes had a certain slant to them, one more than the other. Apart from that, I could see no similarity.
But that was enough for me. My mother never brought up my father and never hung a picture of him anywhere. I had heard from my grandparents that he perished in the war while serving with the Swiss Red Cross. Perished, fallen, missing in action—these formulas of finality I had heard so often as a child that I came to think of them as immutable monuments. The pictures of men in uniform I saw at my friends' houses, some with black crêpe trimming their silver frames, made me as uncomfortable as the pictures of the dead adorning gravestones in some countries. It is as if people refused to leave their dead alone, forced them back into the light, made them keep their composure even in death. If that was how war widows commemorated their dead husbands, then I preferred my mother's renunciation of visual commemoration.
But dead and far away as my father was, we were bound by one thing. Grandmother once told me that my father liked poetry and that Theodor Fontane's “John Maynard” was one of his favorite poems. I learned it by heart that very evening. She was pleased, and over the years she would point out one or another poem my father had liked, and I would set to immediately. She knew many poems by heart herself and may simply have been happy to see me spend my evenings memorizing poetry.
8
ONCE THE SUPPER TABLE was cleared, the dishes washed, and the flowers in the garden watered, my grandparents would set to work on the Novels for Your Reading Pleasure and Entertainment series. They worked at the dining table, pulling the ceiling lamp down and reading and editing the manuscripts, the page proofs, and the bound galleys. Sometimes they did some writing as well: they insisted that each volume conclude with a brief didactic essay, and when none was forthcoming they supplied it themselves. They wrote about the importance of toothbrushing, the battle against snoring, the principles of beekeeping, the history of the postal system, Konrad Escher's attempts to control the River Linth, the last days of Ulrich von Hutten. They also rewrote passages in the novels when they found them awkward, unbelievable, or immodest or when they felt they could make a better point. The publisher gave them a free hand.
When I was old enough to stay up after the blackbird had finished its song, I was allowed to sit with them. The light of the lamp just above the table, the dark of the room surrounding it—I loved it. I would read or learn a poem or write a letter to my mother or an entry in my summer diary. Whenever I interrupted my grandparents to ask a question, I got a friendly answer. I was afraid though to ask too many: I could sense their concentration. The remarks they exchanged were sparse, and my questions sounded garrulous. So I read, wrote, and studied in silence. From time to time I lifted my head cautiously, so as not to be noticed, and observed them: Grandfath
er, his dark eyes now riveted on the work before him, now gazing out, lost, into the distance, and Grandmother, who did everything with a light touch, reading with a smile and making corrections with a quick and easy hand. Yet the work must have been much harder on her than on him: while he cared only for history books and had a neutral, objective relationship to the novels they dealt with, she loved literature, fiction as well as verse, and had a sure feeling for it; she must have suffered from having to spend so much time on such banal texts.
I was not allowed to read them. If I grew curious when they talked about one or another novel, I was told in no uncertain terms I was not to read it: there was a better novel or a better novella on the subject by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer or Gottfried Keller or another classic Swiss writer. Grandmother would then get up and bring me the better book.
When they gave me the extra copies of the bound galleys to take home as scrap paper, they made a point of reminding me not to read them. They would not have given them to me at all had paper not been so expensive at the time and my mother's income so low. For many of my school years, everything I did not have to hand in to the teacher I wrote on the back of the bound galleys: Latin, Greek, and English vocabulary words, first drafts of compositions, plot summaries, descriptions of famous paintings, world capitals, rivers and mountains, important dates, and notes to classmates a few desks away. The galleys were on heavy paper and nearly a centimeter thick. The books grew thinner and thinner as I tore pages out of them, but the staples held the remaining pages together. I liked the thick pads of thick paper, and because I was a good boy I refrained from reading the printed sides of the pages for years.