Annabelle reached into her purse, pulled out the check, handed it over. The Sibyl read the check carefully, folded it up, slipped it into one of the sleeves of the palla. Then she handed Annabelle the bag.
“The roast chicken recipe,” the Sibyl said, “is particularly good.”
Annabelle had to smile. The Sibyl turned to go.
“Just one thing,” Annabelle said. “Why me?”
The Sibyl paused. “The eternal question,” she said. “We always wind up needing reasons. Kindness to a weird old woman? An old friend repaying old friendship? A life starting itself over? A mother’s prayers for her daughter, finally fulfilled?”
“Oh please,” Annabelle said, amused.
“Don’t laugh,” the Sibyl said. “I had a mother too. But would it be heretical to suggest that sometimes it’s just your turn?—that sometimes the bread does fall butter-side-up, despite all life’s attempts to convince us otherwise?”
“Dangerous theory,” Annabelle said.
“Only if you start expecting it to be that way all the time,” said the Sibyl. “But just occasionally, why not let the universe be kind? And use those,” and she glanced at the bag full of scrolls, “to give you a hand. For food is life…”
And she was gone, just like that.
Annabelle let out a breath, got out her keys, and unlocked the gate, activating the switch to roll it up. There was no telling what lay beyond it—how many cookbooks, how many restaurants, how many more stores opening in what would eventually be her own chain. But for the moment, this one needed tidying.
Annabelle ducked under the gate, unlocked the inner doors, and, smiling, went in to start taking inventory of more than just the spices.
…There we just had a brush with something that has become very popular during the recent explosion of urban fantasy: the Were thing. Skinchangers, people who’re part-time animals (or animals who’re part-time people)… they’ve wandered in and out of my work for a while now: I just had an episode of this in the recently released The Big Meow.
Here another variation on the theme surfaces in an early manifestation, in one of the few capital cities I know which is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site…
Bears
Bern (or Berne, as you’ll also see it spelled) is one of those places that grows on you. You pass through once, noticing all the things the guidebooks tell you about—the miles of sheltered fourteenth-century arcades (6.2), Einstein’s house, the Bundesrat or National Parliament, the Münster, the sharp-peaked, red-tiled roofs stacked up in their long straight lines within the beautiful long loop of the river Aare. Then later you come back, and some one thing which you passed by as too touristy demands your attention: and on further visits, demands it again and again. Later you find yourself wondering which brings you back: the city as a whole, or that one thing? For my husband, it’s a little shop in a back street which sells modern Provençal pottery, including ceramic fountains of surprising design. But for me...it’s the Bear Pit.
The Bärengraben, to give it its proper name. When I first heard about it, the idea of such a thing in a city struck me as extremely medieval, possibly even barbaric: and that initial impression persisted until I saw the structure itself. The word “pit” used to translate graben into English brings with it a connotation of someplace dark, dank and unpleasant, a hole newly dug in the ground. I should have realized, that first time I came to Bern—it was 1985—that the Swiss would not permit something so declassé in their capital city.
The bears are Ursus arctos, the European brown bear, though in color they’re more golden; there seem to be five or six of them. The “pit” is a simple, stone-walled business about twenty feet deep, a large circle divided into two parts—a private one, living quarters for the bears; and a public one, open, and railed, so that people can look down and admire the inmates. Perhaps that’s not quite the right word, either, with its connotation of “prisoners”. These bears are probably the most spoiled ursines west of anywhere. All day, people throw them the officially permitted goodies—figs and carrots, mostly: no meat, no sugary stuff—and the bears stand up on their hind legs and make humorous kissy expressions at the people with their mouths, competing in a good-natured way for the treats. When not feeding their faces, they swim in a small pool, and wander in and out of a multiple-caved den made of huge slabs of mossy stone, and bat around what appears to be a stone ball, and clamber up and down a tall dead pine tree sunk in concrete for them, and sharpen their claws on several other dead tree trunks.
The affection with which they’re treated, by both the local Bernese and the people responsible for them, is something that sticks out in my memory. I have pictures, from that 1985 visit, of a mother bear and her three cubs. At one point, one of the keepers came out of an access door and picked one of the cubs up, and for a little while walked around with it in his arms, like someone waiting patiently for a baby to burp. The mother gazed benevolently at him all this while: the other cubs ambled after him, bleating for attention. The cub he was holding washed his ear.
When I came home, that was the memory that always came up first when someone mentioned Bern. Over the years that followed, I got back to Switzerland many times—the excuse being that I was doing research for a novel. The bears weren’t in the novel, yet somehow I never missed coming back to see them when in the country. Certainly there are other pleasures to being in Bern—shopping in the arcaded streets, strolling under the shelter of the out-thrust second floor, watching through the wide supporting arches as, beyond them, the snow sifts gently down on the street-cobbles: or spending an idle afternoon sitting outside in golden Gerechtigkeitsgasse with a Gurten beer (with the inevitable bear on it), in the sunshine, watching the city go by and listening to the murmur of people speaking in the local German dialect, Bernerdeutsch...
Yet on any visit, before I would abandon myself to such pleasures, I would always first wander off to the Bärengraben, to see how the bears were getting on. The cubs grew up into fine strapping creatures, and plainly learned everything their mother taught them about making faces at the tourists to best effect—the funniest bear gets the most food. And the Bernese love them as much as ever, and regard as a typically peculiar foreign notion the idea that it might be politically or ecologically incorrect to keep bears in the center of town. “They’re safer here,” is the remark I best remember on the subject; “we’re protecting them from the government.”
That was Ron’s line, which surprised me somewhat until he explained. It was on the visit before last—a hurried one, to buy reference books—that I met Ron, downstairs in the Hotel Bären, where I was staying on account of the murals.
In a city which takes its mascot very seriously, and where bears seem to appear on everything, the Bären Bar stands out. Some artist of the early 20th century has painted bears doing human things, but so naturally that you have to look twice. In one mural, bears, most likely from the rolling hills and pastures of the nearby Emmental valleys, are out haying—bringing in the hay in carts, lying in the fields picnicking on bread and wine, playing with bouncing baby bears: an ursine pastoral. In another mural are more bears, dressed in their fin-de-siècle best, out for a promenade across the river, looking back toward the city. The cathedral-towers of the Münster stand up, the graceful greened-bronze Bundesrat dome is there, all on a fine sunny day: and bears with parasols and bears in tailcoats walk up and down arm in arm, admiring the day and the city they’re so lucky to live in. The quality of the artwork is high: the detail is excellent. You can sit for a good while down in the Bären having a snack and drinking one of the good regional wines, getting lost in the artist’s eye for small things.
Unless you start chatting with somebody, which always seems to happen to me. Ron and I were sitting, each alone, at adjoining tables: soon we were exchanging business horror stories, and from there it went, I don’t know how, to ethnic jokes. Swiss ethnic jokes.
I was astonished to find that even in so small a country, one canton’s
people will still manage to tell scathing jokes about another canton’s people, and their (purported) manners and ways, as if they came from the other side of the planet, or some other planet entirely. In retrospect, seeing that the same kind of thing happens in Ireland among rival counties, I should have expected it. In Swiss joke-opinion, anyway, Zürchers are supposed to be moneymad and grasping, Baslers slippery and not really very Swiss at all, Uri people stubborn and tricky: and the Bernese, Ron explained to me, were slow.
This caught me by surprise. Ron had struck me as anything but slow, though he did have a big, well-fed look about him. It turned out that he was a commodities broker and investment advisor, with a grip of the complexities of the futures markets that left me shaking my head at my own obtuseness. But he insisted that, as a Bernese, he probably was slow. “It’s the nature of the beast,” he said. “We’re still mountain people, really. We take our time, thinking. We don’t talk fast—“ which was what most of the jokes seemed to rely on. “What’s this?” Ron said. “Bang!” A long pause. “Bang!” Another one, longer. “Bang!” Pause. “Bang!” Pause.
“I don’t know: what?”
“A Bernese machine gun.”
Jokes about Bernese lightning followed, and about why you should never tell a Bernese a joke on Friday (he’ll get it Sunday morning, in church, and laugh out loud). This went on for a couple of hours at least: I told Ron some transplanted Kerryman jokes from Ireland (let’s not forget the one about the guy who ran away from the circus to join an orphanage), and a displaced New Yorker’s rude jokes about the inhabitants of New Jersey. Ron spread his net a little wider, and told me the story about the territorial dispute between Canton Glarus and Canton Uri—how it was resolved by a piggyback race, and a lazy Glarner cockerel; and then, later, the one about the Battle of Morgarten, in which Switzerland wasn’t actually born, but destiny certainly went into labor with it.
All of these jokes and stories seemed (we agreed, more soberly, over the last glass of grüner Veltliner) finally to be about the same concept: that our local reality always tends to seem somehow inherently “better” than the one over there, no matter how close over there is—and the people over there tend to seem less human, if we’re not very careful, than the ones over here. From such thinking, blind, cruel nationalism can be born: and has been, in many places. In Switzerland, there remained a tendency for people from one canton to consider marriages to people from other cantons as “mixed marriages”, inherently undesirable. This made my head spin a little, as if someone had suggested that a marriage between a New Yorker and someone from California was “mixed”. But it remained a mystery to me (so I said to Ron, as he started going through his wallet for money to pay the tab) that in Switzerland—a whole crowd of tiny discrete countries, originally, and all fiercely independent—the result was a lot of funny and fairly rude jokes, and the “mixed marriage” situation, but nothing much worse.
Ron shrugged. “Maybe,” he said, reaching into his wallet for one more thing—his business card, cunningly printed on the back of a Swiss phone card—”it’s that we don’t much like the neighbors, but they sided with us when we fought that lot out there—” And he sketched a gesture in the air which indicated the rest of Europe, certainly: possibly the rest of the world. “So we’ll put up with them—for the time being....”
“But the bears,” I said. “You said you were protecting them from the government...?”
Ron smiled a little crookedly and told me the story about the founding of the city: how the duke who decided to build his fortified town in that long narrow loop of the Aare told his people to go out hunting, and that he would name the city after the first beast they killed. It was a bear (though there is an odd, apocryphal version of the story which insists that they shot a chicken first, and then some kind of large frog, and each time the exasperated Duke told them to go try again). So “Bärn”, or as others would spell it, “Bern” or “Berne”, the city became: but when people began to move into the town in numbers, the bears were driven away as a menace to town life, and finally hunted nearly to extinction. Now, due to “repatriation” projects, brown bears are once again rambling in the National Park and among the mountains of the Bernese Oberland. “But without the Bärengraben,” Ron said, and shook his head, “who knows? Would there be any left at all? So we look after them. A responsibility to the family...”
He had to go. We shook hands: Ron took his leave. I sat there a while looking at his card, and realized I had been misspelling his name in my head. “Ran”, not “Ron”: Ranald von Zahringen, the card said, under the logo of a famous bank based in Zurich. A memory itched at the back of my mind, and was gone, untraceable, a moment later. I shrugged and tucked the card away, and left the bar, thinking idly about Bernese lightning.
Some months later, it wasn’t lightning on my mind when I passed through Bern again, but light. It was dark in the streets. It was Fasnacht.
Fasnacht takes some explaining. It’s more than just the carnival tradition which runs through Europe, and which surfaces (in much-changed forms) in the US at Mardi Gras, and in the southern Americas. It can start the week before Shrove Tuesday, and may run through until the week after, depending on local preferences. And Fasnacht has very much its own character in each of the cities which celebrate it.
Some cities do it twice—once for the Catholic population, once for the Protestants: and on different weeks (so that each group can go to the other’s party?). In some cities it’s an intensely adult preoccupation, as in Basel: razory verbal wit overlies the outrageous costumes, and underlies the rest of the celebration, in the form of the schneedel, the long skinny printed handbills of rude and loony dialect doggerel handed out by costumed marchers to passersby—though the same name is also given to the sudden satirical schnitzelbaenk theatre which breaks out without warning in bars and restaurants, and on the street.
There are adult dangers, as well. In Basel, at Fasnacht, as long as you’re masked (meaning complete-body disguise), you can go up to anyone you know, put on a squeaky high voice, and tell them exactly what you think of them. They’ll have no comeback: traditionally, retaliation against someone who gave you a piece of their mind at Fasnacht just isn’t done. Here, more than elsewhere, the “pressure valve” quality of carnival tradition makes itself plain—and the continuity of medieval tradition, too, when at four in the morning all the lights in the city suddenly go out, and the massed cliques, the formally-constituted parade groups, stand in the city’s main plaza in their hundreds, drumming and fifing the Morgestraich: the slow, stately Basler call to arms. On a freezing February night, in the pitch darkness, with the drumbeats and the shrill fluting of the fifes rattling off the old buildings around you, you find it unnervingly easy to believe that you’ve fallen into the fourteenth century, and that the enemy is outside the city walls yet again, waiting to sack the place. When something of the kind might happen any year, you take your Carnival pleasures seriously. You might not taste them again...
Bern’s Fasnacht, though, seems a little less deeply grounded in history, and more evenly divided between the adults and the children. The children have their own parade, early on in the proceedings. And Bärner Fasnacht doesn’t seem as serious as Basel’s Fasnacht does. People dress up a lot, though not as formally, not with such intensity, as in Basel; and if there’s a repeating theme among the costumes other than whatever the city’s Fasnacht committee has already determined for that year, it’s bears. Anyone not with one of the cliques is likely to be dressed as a bear. The city streets are usually full of them. Night and day there are parties, balls, and impromptu parades, besides the scheduled ones: and everywhere you look, bears dance, bears drink, bears play musical instruments and prowl the streets in packs: bears weave in and out of the arches of the arcades, bears yell “Gruezi!” at you and offer you a drink out of bottles or narrow-necked pewter “cans” of good Swiss wine.
The streets were full of bears this week. A happy accident of business on the conti
nent a few days before had left me free to go to Bern for Fasnacht after the weekend, and another accident (someone’s cancellation) had made it possible to actually stay in the city, in a time when hotel beds are usually scarcer than hen’s teeth.
So I put up happily enough in the Bären, remembering the incredible street noise the last time my husband and I stayed there together: a summer night, too hot not to leave the windows open, certainly too hot for most of the city to go to sleep. Half of Bern stayed up till four in the morning, drinking in the ten or twelve big open-air cafés on the Bundesplatz around the corner: the roar was subdued but incessant, a cheerful unending growl. Never again, I swore then, never again in weather this hot will I stay this close to a large plaza in town: don’t these people have homes to go to...! But this time of year it would be much too cold to need to leave windows open: the noise would be no problem. I dumped my bags and changed out of business clothes, and got into more appropriate dress, meaning jeans and a sweatshirt and jacket I wouldn’t mind having drink spilled on if it came to that: then went out to the Bundesplatz to join the mob.
Once there, I ate a lot (because Bern is a brilliant city for food, and you’d be crazy not to). I drank a lot (which is difficult to avoid at this time of year: the atmosphere of near-compulsive frivolity and discarded inhibitions is very contagious). In the midst of it all, I found myself being cordially laughed at by some of the people around me in the restaurant when my phone went off and it was Peter, calling to check up on me and complain about not being able to be there and help me eat a lot and drink a lot. I explained to him that I was having a terrible time and would be home the next day, or maybe the day after, depending on how much more unbearable things got. His response to this was to groan at the pun, and then he dictated me a detailed shopping list for things he wanted from the food hall downstairs in the Globus department store. When he finished, I kissed him long-distance and hung up, and the laughing people at the next table, a trio of couples, suggested that we should all go out and do something more interesting than eat.