months, Charles’s at four. Anna slipped her thumb into Polly Jean’s mouth and confirmed the presence of a small white nub. Polly countered with a string of wild infant curses. Anna picked her daughter up, shushed her, rocked her, tried to lull her back into sleep. Or a version of sleep.
Make no mistake: everything has a variant. Like versions of truth, like versions of love, there are versions of sleep. The deepest sleep is meant only for children and perfect fools. Everyone else must pay each night her restless due.
The sky was still dark and the neighborhood silent. From the square of window above Polly’s crib, the modest spire of the parish church was visible. The Benzes resided, quite literally, in the shadow cast by Dietlikon’s Swiss Reformed church. They lived in its figurative shadow as well. For a thirty-year tenure that ended only at his death, Oskar Benz, father to Bruno and Daniela and husband to Ursula, was the congregation’s
Pfarrer.
Its pastor.
Churchgoing in Switzerland is a matter of custom, not zeal. Even a practicing Swiss Christian won’t engage in religious swagger. That’s an American antic. Swiss faith seems more bureaucratic. You are baptized in a church, you wed in a church, you are eulogized in a church, and that’s it. Still, when Bruno and Anna went to the
Gemeinde
to file the papers for her residence permit, she was asked her religious preference. The churches are funded by taxes; money is distributed according to citizen affiliation.
As in America, while most Christian Swiss don’t regularly attend, even the smallest towns have at least one
Kirche.
In Dietlikon there were three: the congregation Oskar Benz oncepastored, a Catholic church half a kilometer away from Anna and Bruno’s house, and an Orthodox group so thinly populated that the church didn’t have a permanent address and met instead in a rented, unremarkable building just across the street from the cemetery. Ursula went to church on Sundays and sometimes took her grandsons with her. Bruno and Anna stayed home.
Anna had a cursory, teetering knowledge of religion. Her parents, in a moment of conviction during Anna’s youth, flirted briefly with the Episcopalians. They attended church sporadically for almost a year before finding other things to occupy a Sunday morning’s empty hours (for Anna’s mother it was ladies’ brunch and for her father it was golf). It was a case of dispassion rather than one of theological opposition. They simply didn’t care enough to continue. So Anna’s spiritual formation was relegated to cultural expressions of faith: the Christmas Baby Jesus and his gifts, the Easter risen Christ and his chocolate bunnies, and a copy of
The Thorn Birds
pulled from her mother’s bookshelf.
Anna didn’t oppose religious belief. She endorsed it in principle, if not in practice. While she wasn’t sure if she believed in God, she wanted to believe. She hoped she believed. Sometimes, anyway. Other times, belief seized her with terror.
From God there are no secrets. I’m not sure I like that.
Except she
was
sure: she didn’t.
But anyone might feel that way on a walk through downtown Zürich; Altstadt is clotted with historically significant churches. Everywhere you turn the Eye of God is on you. The Fraumünster is famous for its Chagall-designed stained glass windows. The clock face on the steeple of St. Peter’s is oneof the largest in all of Europe. The Wasserkirche was built on the site where Felix and Regula—Zürich’s patron saints—were martyred. And the gray, imposing Grossmünster was erected on the very spot where those same martyrs are said to have delivered their severed heads before they finally (and with no further business to attend to) released their souls to death.
Felix and Regula. Happiness and order.
How Zürich of them to carry their own heads up the hill!
Anna thought.
A perfectly Swiss way to die—pragmatic and correct!
Pragmatic, correct, efficient, predetermined. It
Make no mistake: everything has a variant. Like versions of truth, like versions of love, there are versions of sleep. The deepest sleep is meant only for children and perfect fools. Everyone else must pay each night her restless due.
The sky was still dark and the neighborhood silent. From the square of window above Polly’s crib, the modest spire of the parish church was visible. The Benzes resided, quite literally, in the shadow cast by Dietlikon’s Swiss Reformed church. They lived in its figurative shadow as well. For a thirty-year tenure that ended only at his death, Oskar Benz, father to Bruno and Daniela and husband to Ursula, was the congregation’s
Pfarrer.
Its pastor.
Churchgoing in Switzerland is a matter of custom, not zeal. Even a practicing Swiss Christian won’t engage in religious swagger. That’s an American antic. Swiss faith seems more bureaucratic. You are baptized in a church, you wed in a church, you are eulogized in a church, and that’s it. Still, when Bruno and Anna went to the
Gemeinde
to file the papers for her residence permit, she was asked her religious preference. The churches are funded by taxes; money is distributed according to citizen affiliation.
As in America, while most Christian Swiss don’t regularly attend, even the smallest towns have at least one
Kirche.
In Dietlikon there were three: the congregation Oskar Benz oncepastored, a Catholic church half a kilometer away from Anna and Bruno’s house, and an Orthodox group so thinly populated that the church didn’t have a permanent address and met instead in a rented, unremarkable building just across the street from the cemetery. Ursula went to church on Sundays and sometimes took her grandsons with her. Bruno and Anna stayed home.
Anna had a cursory, teetering knowledge of religion. Her parents, in a moment of conviction during Anna’s youth, flirted briefly with the Episcopalians. They attended church sporadically for almost a year before finding other things to occupy a Sunday morning’s empty hours (for Anna’s mother it was ladies’ brunch and for her father it was golf). It was a case of dispassion rather than one of theological opposition. They simply didn’t care enough to continue. So Anna’s spiritual formation was relegated to cultural expressions of faith: the Christmas Baby Jesus and his gifts, the Easter risen Christ and his chocolate bunnies, and a copy of
The Thorn Birds
pulled from her mother’s bookshelf.
Anna didn’t oppose religious belief. She endorsed it in principle, if not in practice. While she wasn’t sure if she believed in God, she wanted to believe. She hoped she believed. Sometimes, anyway. Other times, belief seized her with terror.
From God there are no secrets. I’m not sure I like that.
Except she
was
sure: she didn’t.
But anyone might feel that way on a walk through downtown Zürich; Altstadt is clotted with historically significant churches. Everywhere you turn the Eye of God is on you. The Fraumünster is famous for its Chagall-designed stained glass windows. The clock face on the steeple of St. Peter’s is oneof the largest in all of Europe. The Wasserkirche was built on the site where Felix and Regula—Zürich’s patron saints—were martyred. And the gray, imposing Grossmünster was erected on the very spot where those same martyrs are said to have delivered their severed heads before they finally (and with no further business to attend to) released their souls to death.
Felix and Regula. Happiness and order.
How Zürich of them to carry their own heads up the hill!
Anna thought.
A perfectly Swiss way to die—pragmatic and correct!
Pragmatic, correct, efficient, predetermined. It
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