17. Switzerland

I reached Brig, by way of Domodossala and the Simplon Pass, at about five in the evening. It was darker and cooler here than it had been in Italy, and the streets were shiny with rain. I got a room in the Hotel Victoria overlooking the station and went straight out to look for food, having had nothing to eat since my two bites of Mashed Fig Delight in Locarno at lunchtime.

All the restaurants in Brig were German. You never know where you are in Switzerland. One minute everything’s Italian, then you travel a mile or two and everyone is talking German or French or some variety of Romansch. All along an irregular line running the length of east-central Switzerland you can find pairs of villages that are neighbours and yet clearly from different linguistic groups – St Blaise and Erlach, Les Diablerets and Gsteig, Delémont and Laufen – and as you head south towards Italy the same thing happens again with Italian. Brig was a nipple of German speakers, so to speak, between the two.

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I examined six or seven restaurants, mystified by the menus, wishing I knew the German for liver, pig’s trotters and boiled eyeball, before chancing upon an establishment called the Restaurant de la Place at the top of the town. Now this is a nice surprise, I thought, and went straight in, figuring that at least I’d have some idea what I was ordering, but the name Restaurant de la Place was just a heartless joke. The menu here was in German, too.

It really is the most unattractive language for foodstuffs. If you want whipped cream on your coffee in much of the German-speaking world, you order it ‘mit Schlag’. Now does that sound to you like a frothy and delicious pick-me-up, or does that sound like the sort of thing smokers bring up first thing in the morning? Here the menu was full of items that brought to mind the noises of a rutting pig: Knoblauchbrot, Schweinskotelett ihrer Wahl, Portion Schlagobers (and that was a dessert).

I ordered Entrecôte and Frites, which sounded a trifle dull after Italy (and indeed so it proved to be), but at least I wouldn’t have to hide most of it in my napkin rather than face that awful, embarrassing cry of disappointment that waiters always give when they find you haven’t touched your Goat’s Scrotum En Croûte. At all events, it was an agreeable enough place, as much bar as restaurant: dark and plain, with a tobacco-stained ceiling, but the waitress was friendly and the beer was large and cold.

In the middle of the table sat a large cast-iron platter, which I assumed was an ashtray, and then I had the awful thought that perhaps it was some kind of food receptacle and that the waitress would come along in a minute and put some bread in it or something. I looked around the room to see if any of the other few customers were using theirs as an ashtray and no one seemed to be, so I snatched out my cigarette butt and dead match and secreted them in a pot plant beside the table, and then tried to disperse the ash with a blow, but it went all over the tablecloth. As I tried to brush it away I knocked my glass with the side of my hand and slopped beer all across the table.

By the time I had finished, much of the tablecloth was a series of grey smudges outlined in a large, irregular patch of yellow that looked distressingly like a urine stain. I casually tried to hide this with my elbow and upper body when the waitress brought my dinner, but she saw instantly what a mess I had made of things and gave me a look not of contempt, as I had dreaded, but – worse – of sympathy. It was the look you might give a stroke victim who has lost control of the muscles in his mouth but is still gamely trying to feed himself. It was a look that said, ‘Bless him, poor soul.’

For one horrible moment I thought she might tie a napkin around my neck and cut my food up for me. Instead, she retreated to her station behind the bar, but she kept a compassionate eye on me throughout the meal, ready to spring forward if any pieces of cutlery should clatter from my grasp or if a sudden spasm should cause me to tip over backwards. I was very pleased to get out of there. The cast-iron pot was an ashtray, by the way.

Brig was a bit of a strange place. Historically it was a staging post on the road between Zurich and Milan, and now it looked as if it didn’t quite know what to do with itself. It was a reasonably sized town but it appeared to offer little in the way of diversions. It was the kind of place where the red-light district would be in a phone box. All the shops sold unarresting products like refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and televisions from behind shiny plate-glass windows. Then it occurred to me that the shops in most countries sell unarresting items from behind plate-glass windows. It was simply that I was no longer in Italy, which caused me a passing pang of grief. This is the problem with travelling: one day you are sitting with a cappuccino on a terrace by the sea and the next you are standing in the rain in the dullest town in Switzerland looking at Zanussis.

It dawned on me that I hadn’t seen a refrigerator, vacuum cleaner or other truly functional thing on sale anywhere in Italy. I presume they don’t all drive to Brig to buy them, that they must be able to purchase them somewhere in their own country, but I couldn’t recall seeing any. In Brig, however, there was nothing else. I walked the empty streets trying to work up an interest in white goods, but the mood wouldn’t take me, and I retired instead to the bar of my hotel, where I drank some beer and read Philip Ziegler’s classic account of the black death, imaginatively entitled The Black Death – just the thing for those lonely, rainy nights in a foreign country.

Actually, it was fascinating, not least because it dealt with places I had just passed through – Florence, for instance, where 100,000 people, half the populace, lost their lives in just four months, and Milan, where the news from Florence so terrified the locals that families suspected of harbouring a victim were walled up inside their houses.

There’s nothing like reading about people being entombed alive to put your own problems in perspective. I tend to think of life as bleak when I can’t find a parking space at Sainsbury’s, but imagine what it must have been to be an Italian in the fourteenth century. For a start, in 1345 it rained non-stop for six months, turning much of the country into a stagnant lake and making planting impossible. The economy collapsed, banks went bust and thousands died in the ensuing famines. Two years later the country was rocked with terrible earthquakes – in Rome, Naples, Pisa, Padua, Venice – which brought further death and chaos. And then, just when people were surely thinking that things had to get better now, some anonymous sailor stepped ashore at Genoa and said, ‘You know, I don’t feel so hot,’ and within days the great plague was beginning its long sweep across Europe.

And it didn’t stop there. The plague returned for a mop-up operation in 1360–61, and yet again in 1368–69, 1371, 1375, 1390 and 1405. The odd thing to me is that this coincided with one of the great periods of church-building in Europe. I don’t know about you, but if I lived in an age when God was zinging every third person in my town with suppurating bubos, I don’t think I’d look on Him as being on my side.

In the morning I took a fast train to Geneva. We rattled through a succession of charmless industrial towns – Sierra, Sion, Martigny – places that seemed to consist almost entirely of small factories and industrial workshops fringed with oildrums, stacks of wooden pallets and other semi-abandoned clutter. I had forgotten that quite a lot of Switzerland is really rather ugly. And everywhere there were pylons. I had forgotten about those, too. The Swiss are great ones for stringing wires. They thread them across the mountainsides for electricity and suspend them from endless rows of gibbets along every railway track and hang them like washing lines on all their city streets for the benefit of trams. It seems not to have occurred to them that there might be a more attractive way of arranging things.

We found the shore of Lake Geneva at Villeneuve and spent the next hour racing along its northern banks at a speed that convinced me the driver was slumped dead on the throttle. We shot past the castle of Chillon – shoomp: a picturesque blur – flew through the stations at Montreux and Vevey, scattering people on the platforms, and finally screeched to a long, slow stop at Lausanne, where the body of the driver was presumably taken away for recycling (I assume the fanatically industrious Swiss don’t bury their dead but use them for making heating oil) and his place taken by someone in better health. At all events, the final leg into Geneva was made at a more stately pace.

Just outside my carriage were two young Australians who spent the passage from Lausanne to Geneva discussing great brawls they had taken part in over the years. I couldn’t quite see them, but I could hear every breathless word. They would say things like, ‘D’ya remember the time Muscles Malloy beat the crap out of the Savage triplets with a claw hammer? There was blood and guts all over the place, man.’

‘I was picking pieces of brain out of my beer!’

‘Yeah, it was fan-tas-tic! D’ya remember that time Muscles rammed that snooker cue up Jason Brewster’s nose and it came out the top of his head?’

‘That Muscles was an animal, wasn’t he?’

‘Not half!’

‘Did you ever see him eat a live cat?’

‘No, but I saw him pull the tongue out of a horse once.’

It went on like this all the way to Geneva. These guys were serious psychopaths, in urgent need of a clinic. I kept expecting one of them to look in at me and say, ‘I’m bored. Let’s hang this asshole upside-down out the window and see how many times we can hit his head on the sleepers.’ Eventually, I peeked out. They were both about four feet two inches tall and couldn’t have beaten up a midget in a blindfold. I followed them off the train at Geneva and out of the station, chattering excitedly as they went about people having their heads stuck in a waffle iron or their tongues nailed to the carpet.

I watched them go, then turned and, with an instinct that seldom fails to let me down, checked into the dreariest and unfriendliest hotel in its class in Geneva, the aptly named Terminus.

Finding nothing to detain me there, I went straight to the Union Bank of Switzerland offices on the Rue du Rhône to claim my refund on my Visa traveller’s cheques. I was directed to a small room in the basement, where international transactions were dealt with. I had assumed that things would be painlessly efficient here, but I hadn’t allowed for the fact that the Swiss national motto is ‘Trust No One’. It took most of the afternoon.

First, I had to stand in a long queue, full of veiled women and men in nightshirts, all involved in complicated transfers of funds from one Arab sandpit to another, requiring the production of parchment documents, the careful counting of huge stacks of brightly coloured money and occasional breaks to pray to Allah and slaughter a goat. All of this was presided over by a blonde woman who clearly hated her job and every living thing on the planet. It took an hour for me just to reach the window, where I was required to do no more than establish my identity and reveal, in a low voice and with significant sidelong glances, the secret reclaim number I had been given over the phone in Florence. This done, the woman told me to take a seat.

‘Oh, thanks, but I’d never get it in my suitcase,’ I said with my best Iowa smile. ‘Can’t I just have my cheques?’

‘You must take a seat and wait. Next.’

I sat for three-quarters of an hour before I was summoned to the window and handed a claim form packed with questions and sent back to my seat to fill them in. It was an irritating document. It required me not only to explain in detail how I had been so reckless as to have lost the traveller’s cheques with which Visa had trustingly endowed me, and to give all manner of trifling detail including the number of the police report and the address of the police station at which the report was made, but also contained long sections of irrelevant questions concerning things like my height, weight and complexion. ‘What the fuck does my complexion have to do with traveller’s cheques?’ I said, a trifle wildly, causing a pleasant-looking matron sitting next to me to put some space between us. Finally it instructed me to give two financial references and one personal reference.

I couldn’t believe it. By what mad logic should I have to give references to reclaim something that was mine? ‘American Express doesn’t ask for anything like this,’ I said to the matronly lady, who looked at me and shifted her butt another two inches towards safety. I lied on all the answers. I said I was four feet two inches tall, weighed 400 pounds, was born in Abyssinia and busted broncos for a living. I put ‘amber’ for complexion and Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky for my financial references. For a personal reference, I gave myself, of course. Who better? I was spluttering with indignation when I rejoined the queue, which had now grown to include a delegation of Rwandan diamond merchants and two guys with camels.

‘Why do I have to answer all these stupid questions?’ I demanded as I turned in my claim form. ‘This is the most stupid thing I’ve ever seen. It’s really ... stupid.’ I get eloquent like that when I’m angry. The woman pointed out that it was nothing to do with her, that she was just following instructions. ‘That’s what Himmler said!’ I cried, both feet leaving the ground at once. Then I realized it was pointless, that she would only make me take a seat again and wait there until Michaelmas if I didn’t act calm and Swiss about it all, so I accepted my replacement traveller’s cheques with nothing stronger than sulky indignation.

But from now on it’s American Express traveller’s cheques for me, boy, and if the company wishes to acknowledge this endorsement with a set of luggage or a skiing holiday in the Rockies, then let the record show that I am ready to accept it.

I spent two days in Geneva, wandering around with an odd, empty longing to be somewhere else. I don’t know why exactly, because Geneva is an agreeable enough place – compact, spotless, eminently walkable, with a steep and venerable old town, some pleasant parks and its vast blue lake, glittering by day and even more fetching at night with the multi-coloured lights of the city stretched across it. But it is also a dull community: expensive, businesslike, buttoned up, impossible to warm to. Everyone walked with a brisk, hunched, out-of-my-way posture. It was spring on the streets, but February on people’s faces. It seemed to have no young people enlivening the bars and bistros, as they do in Amsterdam and Copenhagen. It had no exuberance, no sparkle, no soul. The best thing that could be said for it was that the streets were clean.

I suppose you have to admire the Swiss for their industriousness. Here, after all, is a country that is small, mountainous, has virtually no natural resources and yet has managed to become the richest nation on earth. (Its per capita GDP is almost twenty-five per cent higher than even Japan’s and more than double Britain’s.) Money is everything in Switzerland – the country has more banks than dentists – and their quiet passion for it makes them cunning opportunists. The country is land-locked, 300 miles from the nearest sniff of sea, and yet it is home to the largest manufacturer of marine engines in the world. The virtues of the Swiss are legion: they are clean, orderly, law-abiding and diligent – so diligent that in a national referendum in the 1970s they actually voted against giving themselves a shorter working week.

And this of course is the whole problem. They are so desperately dull, and wretchedly conservative. A friend of mine who was living in Geneva in 1968, when students all over Europe were tearing the continent apart, once told me that the students of Geneva decided to hold a riot of their own, but called it off when the police wouldn’t give them permission. My friend swears it’s a true story. It is certainly true that women didn’t get the vote in Switzerland until 1971, a mere half-century after they got it everywhere else, and in one of the cantons, Appenzell Innherhoden, women were excluded from cantonal votes until 1990. They have a terrible tendency to be smug and ruthlessly self-interested. They happily bring in hundreds of thousands of foreign workers – one person in every five in Switzerland is a foreigner – but refuse to offer the security of citizenship. When times get tough they send the workers home – 300,000 of them during the oil shocks of 1973, for instance – making them leave their homes, pull their children from schools, abandon their comforts, until times get better. Thus the Swiss are able to take advantage of cheap labour during boom times without the inconvenient social responsibilities of providing unemployment benefit and health care during bad times. And by this means they keep inflation low and preserve their own plump, complacent standard of living. I can understand it, but I don’t have to admire it.

* * *

On the second day, I went for a long stroll along the lake-side – leafy, spacious, empty – past the old and largely derelict League of Nations building, where young boys with stones were trying without much success to break the windows, through the tranquil Jardin Botanique, and to the gates of the vast Palais des Nations (larger than Versailles, according to the tourist brochures), now home to the United Nations Organization. I hesitated by the gate, thinking about paying the multi-franc entrance fee to go in for a guided tour, and aren’t you glad I didn’t? I am.

Instead I noticed on my city map that just up the road was the Musée International de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge (International Museum of the Red Cross and Red Breakfast Roll), which sounded much more promising to me. And so it proved to be. It really was a surprisingly nice place, if that isn’t too inappropriate a term to apply to a museum dedicated to human suffering in all its amazing and manifold variety. I mean that it was thoughtfully laid out, with a confident and accomplished use of multi-media resources, as I believe they would call it in the trade. It was virtually empty, too, and generally effective at putting its story across, considering that everything had to be explained in four languages and that they couldn’t be too graphic in their depictions of disasters and human cruelty lest it unsettle young visitors.

Clearly too the organization’s hands were tied by certain political considerations. One of the displays was a replica of a cell no bigger than a cupboard in which Red Cross workers had discovered seventeen prisoners being held in conditions of unspeakable discomfort, unable even to lie down, for no reason other than that their political views did not accord with those of the rulers. But nowhere did it hint in what country this cell had been found. At first I thought this constant discretion craven, but on reflection I supposed that it was necessary and prudent. To name the country would have jeopardized the Red Cross’s operations there, wherever it was. The scary thing was to realize just how many countries it might have been.

I spent the rest of the day shuffling around the city, wandering through department stores, fingering the merchandise (this drives Swiss sales clerks crazy), dining on the only affordable food in town (at McDonald’s), visiting the cathedral, exploring the old town and gazing in the windows of antique shops that sold the sort of over-ornate objects you would expect to see in, say, a House Beautiful article on Barry Manilow’s Malibu hacienda – life-sized porcelain tigers, oriental vases you could put a large child in, oversized Louis-Quatorze bureaux and sideboards with gilt gleaming from every curl and crevice.

In the evening, having scrubbed the mashed figs of Locarno out of my last clean shirt, I went for a beer in a dive bar around the corner, where I waited weeks for service and then spent the next hour gaping alternately at the largeness of the bill and the smallness of the beer, holding the two side by side for purposes of comparison. Declining the advance of Geneva’s only prostitute (‘Thanks, but I’ve just been fucked by the management’), I moved to another semi-seamy bar down the street, but found precisely the same experience, and so returned with heavy feet to my hotel room.

I went into the bathroom to see how my shirt was drying. The purply mashed-fig stains, I noted with the steady gaze of someone who knows his way around disappointment, were coming back, like disappearing ink. I dropped the shirt in the wastebin then went back to the bedroom, switched on the TV and fell onto the bed all in one movement and watched a 1954 film called The Sands of Iwo Jima, featuring John Wayne killing Japanese people while talking in French using someone else’s voice – an acting skill I never knew he possessed.

It occurred to me, as I lay there watching this movie of which I could understand nary a word other than ‘Bonjour’, ‘Merci bien’ and ‘Aaaaagh!’ (what the Japanese said when John stuck them in the belly with his bayonet), that this was almost boring enough to cause brain damage, and yet at the, same time – and here’s the interesting thing – I was probably having as much fun as anyone in Switzerland.

I took a morning train to Bern, two hours away to the east. Bern was a huge relief. It was dignified and handsome, and full of lively cafés and young people. I picked up a city map at the station’s tourist office and with its aid found a room in the Hotel Kreuz in the centre of town. I dumped my bag and went straight back out, not only eager to see the town but delighted at my eagerness. I had begun to fear in Geneva that my enthusiasm for travel might be seeping away and that I would spend the rest of the trip shuffling through museums and along cobbled streets in my Willy Loman posture. But, no, I was perky again, as if I’d just been given a booster shot of vitamins.

Bern is built on a bluff above a broad loop of the River Aare, and the views from the bridges and vantage points are quite splendid, especially back towards the old town – a jumble of orangeish tiled roofs broken up with church spires and towers that look like mutant cuckoo clocks. Most of the streets are arcaded in a way I’ve never seen before: the ground floors are set back and the upper floors jut out over them, their heavy weight supported by thick arched buttresses, creating a covered walkway over the pavements. The shops along them were infinitely more varied and interesting – even more classy – than those in Geneva. There were antiquarian bookstores and art galleries and antique shops specializing in everything from wind-up toys to clocks and binoculars to Etruscan pottery.

Culturally, Bern is on the dividing line between French-speaking Switzerland and German-speaking Switzerland, and there is a mildly exotic blending of the two. Waiters greet you with ‘Bitte’, for instance, but thank you with ‘Merci’. Architecturally, it is stolidly Swiss-German, with severe (though not disagreeable) sandstone buildings that look as if they were built to withstand a thousand earthquakes. Bern has the air of a busy provincial market town. You would never guess that it is a national capital. This is partly because of the peculiar nature of Swiss politics. So many powers are devolved to the cantons and to national referenda that Switzerland doesn’t even feel the need to have a prime minister, and the presidency is such a nominal and ceremonial position that it changes hands every year. They wouldn’t have a president at all except that they need somebody to greet visiting heads of state at the airport. The Bundeshaus, the national parliament, looks like a provincial town hall, and nowhere in the city – even in the bars on the nearby streets – do you have a sense of being among bureaucrats and politicians.

I spent a day and a half wandering through the streets of the old town and across the high bridges to the more modern, but still handsome, residential streets on the far side of the Aare. It was a wonderful city for random walking. There were no freeways, no industry, no sterile office parks, just endless avenues of fine homes and small parks.

I attempted just two touristy diversions and failed at both. I crossed the high, arched Nydegg Bridge to see the famous bear pits – the city name derives from the German word for bear, so they like to keep several bears as mascots – but the pits were empty. There was no sign to explain why and locals who arrived with their children were clearly as surprised and perplexed as I was.

I tried also to go to the Albert Einstein museum, housed in his old flat on Kramgasse, one of the main arcaded streets. I walked up and down the street half a dozen times before I found the modest entrance to the building, tucked away between a restaurant and a boutique. The door was locked – it was dusty and looked as if it hadn’t been opened for weeks, perhaps years – and no one answered the bell, though according to the tourist brochure it should have been open. It struck me as odd that nowhere in the town had I encountered any indication that Einstein had ever lived there: no statue in a park or square, no street named in his honour, not even his kindly face on postcards. There wasn’t so much as a plaque on the wall to tell the world that in one year, 1905, while working as an obscure clerk in the Swiss patent office and living above this door, Einstein produced four papers that changed for ever the face of physics – on the theory of Brownian motion, on the theory of relativity, on the photon theory of light and on the establishment of the mass-energy equivalence. I have no idea what any of that means, of course – my grasp of science is such that I don’t actually understand why electricity doesn’t leak out of sockets – but I would have liked to see where he lived.

In the evening I had a hearty meal, which is about as much as the visitor can aspire to in Switzerland, and went for another long walk down darkened streets and through empty squares. As I returned to the city centre along Marktgasse, one of the main pedestrian venues, I discovered that all the bars were shutting. Waiters were taking chairs and tables inside and lights were going out. It was nine-twenty in the evening. This gives you some idea of what a heady night-life Bern offers.

Quietly distraught, I wandered around and with relief found another bar still open a couple of blocks away on Kochegasse. It was crowded, but had an amiable, smoky air, and I was just settling in with a tall glass of golden Edelweiss and the closing chapters of The Black Death, when I heard a familiar voice behind me saying, ‘D’ya remember that time Blane Brockhouse got the shits and went crazy with the Uzi in the West Gollagong Working Men’s Club?’

I turned around to find my two friends from the Geneva train sitting on booster seats behind frothy beers. ‘Hey, how you guys doing?’ I said before I could stop myself.

They looked at me as if I were potentially insane. ‘Do we know you, mate?’ said one of them.

I didn’t know what to say. These guys had never seen me before in their lives. ‘You’re Australian, huh?’ I burbled stupidly.

‘Yeah. So?’

‘I’m an American.’ I was quiet for a bit. ‘But I live in England.’

There was a long pause. ‘Well, that’s great,’ said one of the Australians with a measured hint of sarcasm, then turned to his friend and said, ‘D’ya remember the time Dung-Breath O’Leary hacked that waitress’s forearms off with a machete because there was a fly in his beer?’

I felt like an asshole, which of course is a pretty fair description of my condition. Something about their diminutive size and warped little minds heightened the sense of quiet humiliation. I turned back to my beer and my book, the tips of my ears warm to the touch, and took succour in the plight of the poor people of Bristol, where in 1349 the plague so raged through the city that ‘the living were scarce able to bury the dead’ and the grass grew calf-high in the city streets.

Before long, with the aid of two more beers and 120,000 agonized deaths in the west country of England, my embarrassment was past and I was feeling much better. As they say, time heals all wounds. Still, if you wake up with a bubo on your groin, better see a doctor all the same.