The walk from Hotel Jungfrau to Kleine Scheidegg was not steep, a mere stroll to a mountaineer, but Lara and Oscar had made their way carefully, slowly, as if they were waiting for something to happen. They had paused often. A rumbling noise coming from the side of the mountain was the echo of a small avalanche, they saw it rolling towards them in slow motion, innocently far off, in a landscape sculpted by avalanches.
Excitedly, she pointed to a group of chamois high on the flank of the Jungfrau.
“Were those goats what you were looking at with your binoculars?”
She smiled and laid her hand on his sleeve.
“Such curiosity! No, that was not what I was looking at, because they weren’t there. I was trying to spot a party of mountain climbers I had talked to in the village. One of them reminded me of Harold.”
She had told him about Harold, the man she had lost, to what or to whom she was not sure. The years with him had been wonderful and exciting. And they had ended as abruptly as they had begun. Three years ago she received a letter from him saying that he would not be returning to Switzerland. They had both been working in Basel when he was suddenly called away. He was a petrochemical engineer, she had a job at the university, they lived quite near each other and they had never married. Still, he had been her anchor among all those Swiss. In his last letter he said he had joined the army, special branch, he did not go into any detail. As an Englishman he could not refuse the call of duty. He had asked her to give notice to his landlord and to sell off his furniture; the proceeds were hers to keep.
“I dream about him quite regularly, always the same dream. That he’s right there all of a sudden, and I want to scream at him, but no sound comes out of my mouth.”
Oscar was put in mind of Kate, who had used the same terms to describe her years with Roy, her first husband: wonderful and exciting. As she had told him little else, those years had assumed mythical proportions: the prime of Kate and Roy in the gilded early years of the twentieth century. Later, she had rebuilt her life with Oscar, a life of measure, a life of appointment diaries and dinners and much waiting. Waiting for a new posting, for Emma, for news from a world in disarray. Berlin had been the watershed. Kate had cast off convention and expectation to become a theatre assistant in the Charlottenburg hospital. There, the flood of insanity came pouring in by ambulance and stretcher: stab wounds, gunshot wounds, broken bones, smashed arms and legs, bleeding heads. An unending stream of casualties, victims of the violence perpetrated by the bullies against Jews or Communists. Kate knew more about what was going on than all the diplomats around her dinner table combined. She had first-hand knowledge of how far the hatred had progressed.
What was the time? Settled on his sub-tropical café terrace, Oscar whiled the afternoon away. Time had little meaning there, the siesta cancelled out all sense of urgency. He was easily drawn into the slow rhythm of a Portuguese day. He settled the bill and strolled to the tram stop. The Alfama was waking from a deep afternoon slumber, doors were opened, there was shouting and laughter. From a radio came fado music, the pride of the nation. He was not impressed. Misjudged melancholy came to mind. He remembered an evening with Envoy Sillem and his entourage, and having to endure never-ending rounds of those mournful songs. Still, Lisbon was a breath of fresh air after Berne. The city of light with the tang of brine in the breeze, the squares with palm trees, the men with their arms around each other, the gesticulations, the women in colourful dress. And no sign of war, no threat, just a strip of land on the margin of the continent, overlooked. All over Europe the lights were going out, but not there. Portugal was a lighthouse in a darkened landscape.
The downhill ride took much longer than going up, with many more people getting off and on as the tram made its leisurely, summery way to the centre.
Equally leisurely had been the cog-wheel train to Lauterbrunnen, nosing down the track towards the valley, down to the mainline station and ordinary trains, back to their ordinary lives. To the parting of their ways. He sat opposite Lara, his travel bag leaning against hers, which gave him the odd sensation of having achieved something. Bag nudging bag was not such a big leap from hand in hand. The thought of her clothes folded up in her luggage was pleasing in itself. Their knees touched from time to time; the compartment was small and the incline steep. They had not spoken, they had looked out of the window, seen nothing but fir trees, top-heavy with snow. In the glass Oscar caught his reflection and Lara’s in the illuminated interior, their faces averted and quiet. Two days in comparison with a lifetime was nothing, two days could not amount to much.
