II. People

My experience with people has been a bit more successful. At the very least, it has been less servile.

First, where I am: Rolling, deep green hills backed by a range of Alps that shows misty and pale behind a curtain of hazy blue sky. The landscape is dotted with little red and white churches and farmhouses as far as the eye can see. Narrow dirt paths rise and fall across the countryside, blooming suddenly into existence and then disappearing just as furtively into mystery. Overhead a vast and seemingly endless blue sky yawns limitless, as if threatening to overtake the rest of the scene. But aside from that, and the sun drenched pathways and farmhouses, everything is green. When the sun breaks at the start of day, it feels not so much like a beginning, as a renewed invitation.

Urs and Nadja

Urs and Nadja

I’m being hosted here by the kindly, young couple of Urs and Nadja. Nadja is a Swiss born, Canadian-raised, marketing agent, now living with Urs in the house he grew up in. Urs is the third owner of the farm, buying it from his father ten years ago, and, along with his sisters, he has lived here all his life. He speaks most times in an excited, high-pitched German accent, is enthusiastic, curious, and like most young men in Switzerland, has a passion for biking, hard work, and exploring.

Also living on the farm are Urs’ parents, Franz and Emilie, who daily cook the most amazing Swiss cuisine for me. When I say I am full, they both look disappointingly at the three helpings left until I relent. I laugh and tell them that they are trying to fatten me up. They nod vigorously and see nothing wrong with the statement.

Franz and Emilie

Franz and Emilie

This farm is in it’s third generation. Started by Urs’ grandfather, then passed to Franz who ran it for thirty years before passing it on to Urs. It’s gone through a number of transformations, but the most noticeable are the technological advancements (hay mixers, automated milking) and the added property. Franz and Emilie now live in a house a mere 200 meters from the one they raised Urs in. The whole place seems filled with memories that I can’t really tap into, but I try to imagine what it must be like – this passing of labor and land from one generation to the next. The continuous accumulation of meaning into one location, like the pouring of some liquid into a giant pitcher. All these self contained histories. And the privileged view of Franz and his wife – for them the rubies of their struggle must glint brightly against the juxtaposition of time and place. In short the growth and change of this farm seem not to diffuse over time but to grow inward, more compact, more deep. It’s all a sort of palimpsest of movements and lives and past tasks that I only wish I had the German to fully ask about.

I couldn’t have asked for nicer hosts, but by far my favorite is Franz. He is sixty-nine and probably stronger than I will ever be, still going off every few days to hike, or ice climb, or rock climb, or generally be awesome in the mountains. Urs and Nadja joke with me that I’m slightly obsessed with him, but how could one not be? He has big, round spectacles, and a jolly expressive face that usually accompanies a wide range of “oooh!’s and “ohhh!”s. But even these are mere overtures to his hand gestures, which elevate almost every phrase to the absurd. In fact, he looks a lot like a slightly younger Gipetto, and he bears that same gentle kindness and joyful wisdom. He likes to brag that he is a master of the English language, despite the fact he knows about as much English as I know German. (Actually, I take that back. I had him teach me how to count to ten in German, and then he proudly rattled off 1-11 in English.) But he takes great joy in using random English words when he knows them (out of nowhere one day he turned to me and said “Rolling Stones?” It took me a few minutes to realize he was talking about the band and not the large pile of stones I was removing from the garden. He didn’t stop saying “Rolling Stones” until I nodded and said one of the few things I can say successfully: “ist gut!” He was very pleased.) When English randomly comes on the radio during the workday, he yells “SCHTOP!” holding up a defiant hand for silence until it is done. Then he points to me and says with the curiosity of a child “Translate?”

If it isn’t obvious already, he is hilarious to watch, and underneath all this he clearly cares deeply about the farm and his family. A few “Classic Franz” moments that stand out:

-At the end of lunch, when it came time for desert and coffee: Emilie arriving at the table with a tray of deserts for us, holding it out on one hand, waiting patiently for Franz to place it on the table for her.

Franz: “OOOH!” Reaches out excitedly to grab, not the tray, but one of the pastries on it. It is not yet halfway to his plate when Emilie yells “Franz!” and slaps his hand. Grumbling, he returns the pastry and obediently places the tray on the table.

-One morning at 7am, me shooting up out of my bed, my heart racing, because it sounded like the world was ending, or a cow had exploded, or the farmhouse was collapsing. What it really was, was Franz shouting for about five minutes URS! (two second pause, during which he waited for a response) URS! (two second pause) URS! (two second pause) URS! with the faithfulness of a metronome, until Urs, who had not been in the house, but out by the stable, came by. This only has happened once so far, but I am told it is a regular occurrence.

-And then once, after dinner, evening already fallen and Urs had taken me out to the barn to show me the work for the next day. We encountered Franz plodding around in sandals, boxers, and a dark blue bathrobe, looking like half king, half court jester. He motioned Urs over and began to lecture him about all the things that needed to be done. After fifteen minutes, Urs, saying “Ok! Ok!” (after all, he does own the farm now) bid him good night and we began to walk away. However, with every step we took, Franz, remembering something else, shouted out yet another thing. Something about this image: us receding into the night, Franz standing in his blue bathrobe and sandals, getting smaller but no less present, shouting out at two-second intervals reminders that echoed across the sky, accompanying us through the night. It is both hilarious and full of subtle meaning and beauty.

In short, he is my hero. If I suddenly learned German and could choose to speak to only one person in the entire world, it would be, without a doubt, Franz.

But I don’t know German. Not yet at least. And this brings me to the language here, which is fascinating in its own right. Switzerland’s three main languages are German, French, and Italian. I am in the German speaking part, but that doesn’t stop the possibility that when you greet someone (Gruzi), you won’t hear any one of those three in response. For a reason I can’t quite put my finger on, I love that. Maybe because it feels like the impossible has been achieved- a union between disparate elements that integrates but does not conquer, that emboldens but does not separate. Even within the traces of German there are French and Italian phrases thrown in and it’s little details like this that give Switzerland the feeling of being less an amalgamation of a series of cultural and semantic habits, than a special and surreal entity, always uniquely its own.

Of course, making connections with people involves learning these languages. I’ve picked up a number of German words while here, and I use them as frequently as possible, much to the disappointment of passersby who expect from my enthusiastic “Gruzi” (I’ve gotten quite good at it) a greater depth of vocabulary than some pronouns, talk about the weather, the classic “Sprechen zie English?”, and a few choice verbs thrown in for good measure.

This hasn’t stopped me, though, from meeting some interesting people here. There is a bartender at the local pub I talk with quite a bit. However, my inability to speak anything but English and Russian, and an embarrassingly small amount of French, and her ability extending only to Italian, Spanish, and German, have led us (after about a half hour of hand gestures) to communicate on her iPhone. She brings up a translating site. I type in three hundred characters in English. The iPhone translates. She types in three hundred characters in one of her three languages depending on her mood. The iPhone translates it. It’s like a slightly flashier Pony Express. Then there is Marcus, a German-born emigre who lives and works here and sends back money to his children, visiting them when he can. I also met him at the pub, and he goes around sporting bleached hair, an industrial earring, and various soccer jerseys. He’s thirty and carries gives off that teenage Euro-partier look, but, like most people here, is infinitely kind and gentle and interesting. There are, of course, also the whole slew of random passersby that I have accosted with faltering German when I need to know how to get somewhere. If nothing else, I will be remembered by them.

But I suppose the main concern I’ve been wrestling with, is just how much you miss when you don’t speak the language somewhere. I keep thinking back to when I lived in Russia. When I became proficient in the language, how delighted I was to mine the depths of hidden meaning behind each sentence. Things like attitude and culture and biases (whether justified or not) all coalesced and were found buried like little treasures throughout the language. There is a texture there that is lost otherwise, even to the most expert reader of body language and expression. And I remember a rather self-congratulatory snobbish moment I had when, in the Russian University, I overheard an American woman tutoring a Russian student in English. At one point, during a break, they discovered some shared experience or shared love. Now, the American did not speak any Russian, but I remember how she lovingly said to the young boy – “See, we don’t need language to understand each other. We aren’t all that different anyway.” And I remember feeling pompously indignant at such a statement. Because, from a human standpoint, she was right, but that such a claim of understanding could be made? Without her even knowing the language? And after all of the work I had done to even begin to understand? Fool, I thought, there are a million different nuances and intonations that slip through your fingers, and in each of them you miss worlds, histories, all the meanings you so desperately claim to feel beating in your heart. What did she know of the endless manifestations of the Russian tongue from its deep soothing bubble of tenderness to its congested Slavic grumblings? What did she know of the psychology inherent in its structure – the Dative case bespeaking the sacred martyrdom of a people obsessed with Theodicy? What did she know of the slang, which is a poetry in its own right, a poetry that pulses with an anarchistic nod to the habits of the day? I was twenty-one, American, and selfishly protective of what I was beginning to understand.

And of course such flawed entitlement has little place when it threatens to dethrone an encounter that carries with it its own purity. The woman meant no harm, she made a real connection with the boy, one that in any other situation I should have felt my soul jump to see. But in a way, in some other sphere, there was a harm that her statement carried with it, a harm to the intricacies and complexities of any interaction. Even to this day I can’t make up my mind about the situation. On one hand, I praise all that is sanctified and made sacred by the universally human, by the shared, the communal. On the other, there is a practical depth of understanding that cannot be reached without language, one just as sacred, no less emotional. Perhaps they are two different types of understanding that arise. And in the same way that a good psychologist can read aspects of a person’s life in his expressions, one tuned to the emotional cues of body language and expression has more than a chance of making deep meaningful connections across cultures. It’s not something I intend to try and figure out in this article. But it is a good example of what I’m wrestling with here. I would never claim to understand the Swiss people, no matter how close I feel to any of them. And that plagues me. I carry a dual awareness – one of joy at the connections I make, and one of knowledge of my own limitations. It is for this reason that I fervently try to acquire more and more German each day. But I know, by the time I leave I won’t have even acquired enough to have broken the surface. And so I find my satisfaction and my connections in moments whose meaning is carried by something other than language: in the smiling nods of Franz and Emilie as I gesture and motion to compliment them on their meal, in the shared laughter of physical humor as Franz watches me struggle with a cow, or in staccato conversations carried back and forth behind a small plate of glass on a pink iPhone in a tiny Swiss pub.

I know these moments are not everything, I know they are not often, enough, but they are something. And what is more, they are good things, pure in their own right, because they are sincere. And in that childlike space between sound, where meaning occasionally seeps through in a pure and strange form, and can be held and shared deep and well, these are good things to have.

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About The Author

Greg Fulchino is a Blast reporter spending the year working a month at a time in 12 different countries around the world. He can be reached for questions or comments at [email protected]

2 Responses

  1. mary clancy

    Hey Greg,
    I love your writing style, thoroughly entertaining. I have to say that your description of your relationship to the cows is very similar to that of parent and child. One would think that the parent were more “overlord” to the children “subjects”. Trust me when I tell you this is not the case. The parallels here are solid.
    For the first 2 years of their lives, one of my primary jobs was to clean up the pooh that the kids produced, as they remained blissfully unconcerned and I sadly, unacknowleged.
    My chlldren are much older now and I am still here to serve them. Only now they tell me how better to serve them and I am met with great disapproval if I should not fulfill expectations. Otherwise I can still go unacknowleged. Come to think of it, they’ve always been able to let me know if I were not adequate. I clearly remember the hours of them crying unconsolably, testifying loud and clear that I was not able to provide them comfort.
    Bottom line, be grateful that all they can say is “moo”!! xoxoxoxox m

    Reply
  2. Amanda

    Maybe try speaking to the cows in French. You are in Switzerland after all. 🙂

    Reply

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