Hausfrau (2 page)

It was the Swiss one she married.

If you cannot live without something, you won’t.

Despite Doktor Messerli’s suggestion that she enroll in these classes, Anna
did
know an elementary level of German. She got around. But hers was a German remarkable only in how badly it was cultivated and by the herculean effort she had to summon in order to speak it. For nine years, though, she’d managed with rudimentary competence. Anna had purchased stamps from the woman at the post office, consulted in semi-specifics with pediatricians and pharmacists, described the haircuts she desired to stylists, haggled prices at flea markets, made brief chitchat with neighbors, and indulged a pair of affable though persistent Zeugen Jehovas who, each month, arrived on her doorstep with a German-language copy of
The Watchtower.
Anna had also, though with less frequency, given directions to strangers, adapted recipes from cooking programs, taken notes when the chimney sweep detailed structural hazards of loose mortar joints and blocked flues, and extracted herself from citations when, upon the conductor’s request, she could not produce her rail pass for validation.

But Anna’s grasp of grammar and vocabulary was weak, her fluency was choked, and idioms and proper syntax escaped her completely. Occurring monthly, at least, were dozens of instances in which she commended a task into Bruno’s hands. It was he who dealt with local bureaucracy, he who paid the insurance, the taxes, the house note. It was he who filed the paperwork for Anna’s residency permit. And it was Bruno who handled the family’s finances, for he was employed as a midlevel
management banker at Credit Suisse. Anna didn’t even have a bank account.

D
OKTOR
M
ESSERLI ENCOURAGED
A
NNA
to take a more active role in family matters.

“I should,” Anna said. “I really should.” She wasn’t even sure she knew what Bruno did at work.

T
HERE WAS NO REASON
Anna couldn’t join the mothers chatting in the square, no rule forbidding it, nothing that prevented her from sharing in their small talk. Two of them she knew by sight and one by name, Claudia Zwygart. Her daughter Marlies was in Charles’s class at school.

Anna didn’t join them.

B
Y WAY OF EXPLANATION
, Anna offered the following self-summary:
I am shy and cannot talk to strangers.

Doktor Messerli sympathized. “It is difficult for foreigners to make Swiss friends.” The problem runs deeper than a lack of command of German, itself problem enough. Switzerland is an insular country, sealed at its boundaries and neutral by choice for two centuries. With its left hand it reaches out to refugees and seekers of asylum. With its right, it snatches freshly laundered monies and Nazi gold. (Unfair? Perhaps. But when Anna was lonely she lashed out.) And like the landscape upon which they’ve settled, the Swiss themselves are closed at their edges. They tend naturally toward isolation, conspiring to keep outsiders at a distance by appointing not one, two, or three, but
four whole national languages. Switzerland’s official name is in yet a fifth:
Confoederatio Helvetica.
Most Swiss speak German however, and it is German that’s spoken in Zürich.

But it’s not precisely German.

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.

A
NNA 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.

T
HE 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?”

A
T EIGHT
, V
ICTOR 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.

“B
UT YOU HAD MORE
children, yes? It must not have been entirely terrible.”

Of course not. It hadn’t been terrible at all. Not always. Not everything had not always been terrible.
Anna doubled her negatives, tripled them. Ten months earlier Anna had given birth to a black-haired, bisque-skinned daughter whom she named Polly Jean.

And so they were the Benz family and they lived in the town of Dietlikon, in the district of Bülach, in the canton of Zürich. The Benzes:
Bruno, Victor, Charles, Polly, Anna.
A plain and mostly temperate household who lived on a street called Rosenweg—Rose Way—a private road that cul-de-sacked directly in front of their house, which itself lay at the foot of a slow, sloping hill that crested a half kilometer behind their property and leveled off at the base of the Dietlikon woods.

Anna lived on a dead end, last exit road.

But the house was nice and their yard was larger than nearly all the other ones around them. There were farmhouses to their immediate south, whose properties abutted fields of corn, sunflower, and rapeseed. Eight fully mature
Apfelbäume
grew in their side yard and in August when the trees were pregnant with ripe, heavy apples, fruit tumbled from the branches
to the ground in a
thump-tha-thump-thump
rhythm that was nearly consistent with light rainfall. They had raspberry bushes and a strawberry patch and red currants and black currants both. And while the vegetable garden in the side yard was generally left untended, the Benzes enjoyed, behind a thigh-high picket fence in front of their property, a spate of rosebushes, blooms of every shade.
Everything comes up roses on Rosenweg.
Sometimes Anna thought this to herself.

Victor and Charles barreled through the front door. They were greeted before they passed through the boot room by a dour-faced Ursula pressing her finger to her lips.
Your sister’s asleep!

Anna was grateful for Ursula—really she was. But Ursula, who was usually never blatantly unkind to Anna, still treated her as a foreign object, a means to the end of her son’s happiness (if indeed “happy” was the word for what Bruno was, and Anna was almost sure it wasn’t) and the vessel by which her grandchildren—whom she deeply loved—were carried into the world. The help that Ursula offered was for the children’s sake, not Anna’s. She had been a high school English teacher for thirty years. Her English was stilted but fluent and she conceded to speak it whenever Anna was in the room, which sometimes Bruno didn’t even do. Ursula shooed her grandsons into the kitchen for a snack.

“I’m taking a shower,” Anna said. Ursula raised an eyebrow but then lowered it as she followed Victor and Charles into the kitchen. It was no concern of hers. Anna took a towel from the linen closet and locked the bathroom door behind her.

She needed the shower. She smelled like sex.

“W
HAT CAN
’
T YOU LIVE WITHOUT
?”

This, Anna asked Archie as they shared, incautiously, a cigarette in bed. Anna didn’t smoke. She was wrapped in a top sheet. It was Friday.

“Whiskey and women,” Archie said. “In that order.”

Archie was a whiskey man. Literally. He stocked it, stacked it, and sold it in a shop he owned with his brother, Glenn.

He laughed in an up-for-interpretation way. Archie and Anna were new lovers, green lovers,
ganz neue Geliebte.
Nearly virgin to each other, they still had reason to touch. Archie was ten years older than Anna, but his brown-red curls had not yet begun to thin and his body was taut. Anna responded to his laughter with laughter of her own: the sad, empty laughter of knowing that the newness, nice as it was, wouldn’t last. Novelty’s a cloth that wears thin at an alarming rate. So Anna would enjoy it prior to its tattering. Because tatter it surely would.