Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

That house on Chemin Bonvent (Goodwind Lane) was my home for fifteen years and remains a beacon in my misty land of memories. Like Rebecca, last night I dreamed I went to Manderley—only instead of Manderley it was No. 42, Chemin Bonvent that I found myself sweeping up to, in my dream-Bentley. But, unlike Rebecca, my house-dreams are banal affairs, usually just replays of reality. Nothing much happens, except an upsurge of obscure longing, or the gentle nibbling of imminent failure. As in life, Mum’s small French car, a Renault or Simca (successor to the Ford Squire of yore) sits in the graveled drive; perhaps I’m washing it, as I often did. The wooden garage doors, slumping then on their rusted hinges, slump at a slightly steeper angle. A Siamese cat frolics about, or lies dozing in the sun: the dream-descendant of Pete Toy, best cat a boy ever had. God bless his little cat-soul; I hope he dozes happily yet, in feline paradise. The house itself, as in life, is half-hidden behind its tumbledown fence and fruit trees and willows and silver birches (on whose branches one winter a family of great horned owls, driven down from the mountains by the cold, came to perch, and perch again in my dreams), with a glimpse, over the trees and neighboring rooftops, of the Jura mountains, in France. I loved those mountains. In winter they were thickly snow-covered and loomed forbiddingly above the rooftops, as majestic as the Urals or Caucasus. In spring the snow slowly receded to the peaks, and the mountains seemed to shrink slightly as the warmer weather exposed their purple slopes threaded with veins of limestone and streams of snowmelt and carpeted here and there with forests in which our owl visitors, as well as deer and foxes and wild boar—and, it was said, wolves—made their home.

     Yes, it’s all there; no elaboration, nothing extraneous, except the longing. In those dreams I stare across an unbridgeable abyss. (Vladimir Nabokov once said the most beautiful word in the Russian language was nostalghia, thinking perhaps not so much of the word itself as of the condition it evoked, the shimmering memory of youth and the places and palaces we all leave behind.) The existence of that farmhouse next door is a clue that our neighborhood had recently been rural and had only just, since the war, started to acquire the character of a suburb of smallish middle-class houses, grandly called villas in French. They all looked alike, but were lived in by a varied population typical of Geneva. One nearby villa, on a section of the street frequently blocked off by police cars, housed the Israeli consulate; another was inhabited by a gloomy Swedish family whose gloomier son, many years later, committed suicide by jumping off the top of the Kaknästornet, the tallest building in Stockholm; another, two doors down, was the residence of a secretive Swiss ham-radio operator, on whose roof an immense antenna lapped up the radio waves emanating from Moscow and East Berlin and Red China. (He might have been a spy; espionage is, or was, one of Geneva’s cottage industries. Or he could have been a mere short-wave enthusiast. But Dad always saw the hand of the KGB at work, ceaselessly spinning the dials.) In the farmhouse itself lived a farmer. One day I watched him skin a rabbit. The rabbit was alive at the beginning of the process and dead at the end and must, I thought, have suffered unimaginable agonies. It was the first time I realized how the infinite cruelty of humans can be either casual, as with the farmer, who only wanted the ingredients of a good stew, or deliberate, as with the Gestapo, who only wanted to rid Germany of Jews. And I realized, too, that cruelty is the worst thing in the world.

     The farmer had two daughters, Georgette and Claudine. One of my early infatuations was with Claudine, but in my standard scared-shitless way I merely peeped and leered and once or twice screwed up the courage to wave awkwardly; she only laughed, and passed on by; and went on, no doubt, to become a first beauteous, then plain, Swiss housewife, with pretty Claudines of her own. I can hardly remember what she looked like now. A younger Juliette Binoche?

    On the other side of our house, away from the street, was the last local redoubt of the rural life in the face of encroaching suburbanization: a long and wide sloping field inhabited by sheep that were my baa-ing, grass-chewing companions as I made the rounds of my miniature garden-wilderness. I had names for the brutes: Stinko, the big black chief ram; his wife, Bianca, the off-white ewe; meek Stueckenschmidt, the timid brownish-black Beta ram, possibly a gay uncle; Micro the fleecy frisky lamb who became Stinko II upon the extinction of Stinko I….and in every flock there was an idiotic alarmist–very human, like a global-warming or end-of-the-world loony–who would bleat hysterically at the sight of me and canter crazily off, while the others phlegmatically stared at me with their yellow-marble eyes and chewed and chewed, indifferent. They were right: I never harmed them, nor wanted to. But once or twice a year the owner of the sheep and his two sons would come bouncing up the path on three battered VeloSolex mopeds and, wielding mechanical shears, would chase the agitated beasts up and down the field for shearing, a ritual punctuated by lengthy breaks for chocolate-and-cheese sandwiches (a Swiss ploughman’s lunch: a heavily buttered baguette containing two thick slices of Emmental or Gruyère and a half-slab of bittersweet black chocolate, preferably Lindt) and, when the lads were older (but not much), a beer and a smoke each. Then they’d resume, the air vibrating with baa’s for the duration. Finally, when the three shearers left, the shaken and shorn sheep would follow humbled Stinko I or II into their ramshackle shed at the bottom of the field to recover their composure. Next day, looking out the window of the bathroom overlooking their field, I’d see them all at their posts again, stolid lumps of brown and white and black, heads lowered, munching rhythmically away at the sparse grass, the whole hellish experience forgotten.

    Still looking out the bathroom window, as I often did, being then as now a great looker-out-of-windows, across the sheep field I’d see posher houses than ours, villas more in the Italian sense atop a high ridge beyond which lay the city, in a vast bowl and so invisible from our house except as a great purplish glow in overcast night skies. In the distance was the humped elephant’s back of Mont Salève, limestone-yellow and bluish-green in spring and summer and snowy white-and-gray in the winter, and at night identifiable by the vertical chain of lights up the cliff face that marked the route of the téléférique, or cable car. Closer at hand, in one of the upscale villas on the other side of the sheep field, was a teenage girl who thought nothing of—or perhaps thought much about—cavorting nude in front of her window. I was about twelve, and highly susceptible. I never saw the girl elsewhere, or otherwise; she appeared, like one of my flimsily-clad Aphrodites, lit the flame, and vanished. At first, incredulous, I gaped from the bathroom window. Then, determined to get a better view, I tossed caution to the winds and climbed onto the roof, binoculars in hand. There—while struggling to maintain a grip on the steep slippery tiles—I tormented myself with the alluring spectacle, which became quite a striptease once she’d realized she had an audience of one bug-eyed spotty twit on a nearby rooftop. It never occurred to me to conceal myself, and she must have been hoping for the cries of alarm and sudden tumble into the bushes that appeared inevitable and would have served me right. But I always had the dangerous illusion, typical I think of the solitary, that I lived entirely in a world of my own making, and that I was invisible when I chose to be, impervious to the designs of others, protected somehow from the natural laws of things. It took me years to conquer that feeling, and down deep at times I doubt that I really have. Perhaps a bit more bullying early on would have helped. Or maybe I should have gone into the military (but which country's?)….