I began this way:
He eats in the restaurants along the lake, from Neptune in the Hotel du Rhône all the way to Perle-du-Lac, lunch or dinners—sometimes lunch and dinner—but never on weekends. He comes alone, and is taken to his favorite table, in each of the restaurants. He never checks his coat at the wardrobe, or gives it to the girl to hang up; he prefers to hoist it on the back of his chair, and when the weather is cold he stuffs his hat, mittens, and scarf in his pockets. He is neat, freshly-scrubbed before his meals, and impeccably shaven; but his attention stops at his shoes, which are scuffed, never shined. His French, of course, is perfect.
That was as far as I got. I then turned to Madame Graf.
I see Madame Graf as she comes out of the Eaux-Vives 2000 with her shopping bags; they are heavy, and brush against her knees. I think someone should help her, but she would be mortified at the suggestion: she does not think she is that old, or that weak. In her bag she has fruit and vegetables, some pasta, bread, and olive oil, and meat. She studies the wine racks at the Co-op, because she likes looking at the bottles, but she doesn’t buy any, and she can’t even think when the last time was she had a beer. Packets of tea and coffee fill the rest of her sack, and some breakfast cereal, and her one indulgence to a sweet tooth, marlo bread, plain cake, in swirls of brown and yellow.
Geneva has an English-language radio station, World Radio Geneva, or WRG (“eighty-eight point four”) F.M. Its programming is weak: amateur chat show hosts who ramble on inanely in the morning, when one’s threshold is lowest; borrowed news from Swiss Radio International; Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion” on Sunday afternoons (also borrowed); and lots of music, usually quite good, but, maddeningly for listeners, never identified. Thinking I could improve on WRG’s offerings I wrote the managing director with an idea for a weekly radio play. I would introduce five characters, each based on people I had seen—or imagined—around town. There would be Nicole, an Austrian or German or something like that, single and in her late twenties with something of a tangled private life. Not particularly bright or imaginative, she would be embarked on an uncertain, unplanned career path with an American multinational; desperately keen for self-improvement, she was always filling her evenings and weekends with courses and tennis lessons. There would also be an American, perhaps fifty years old, a banker of some elegance with a similarly elegant Swiss wife and teenage daughter, living in the plush suburbs like Cologny or Chambésy and after twenty years still not quite assimilated, in vivid contrast to his wife and child. His French was poor, would be one way to explain it. Then there was to be either—I hadn’t decided which—a Portuguese cafe owner in Paquis, or a young romand, a university student named Jacky who went to parties in Plainpalais squats; plus the two above, Madame Graf, and the unnamed elderly gentleman who ate in posh restaurants, “a citizen of Geneva,” as I called him, for in addition to being a city and canton Geneva is also, officially, a republic.
In a three-page letter I drew out each of these characters, and began writing scripts; I sent the letter off at the end of June. Two months later, I still hadn’t heard back from the station, so I rang, and after some effort got the managing director on the line. Our conversation lasted twenty seconds; flatly he stated that he wasn’t interested, that the station had all the programming it needed for the next eighteen months. I left Geneva for a while, and when I came back, the hosts on the morning coffee hour (9 to 10 a.m.) had come up with a new game, “Guess the occupation,” where a caller would ring in and the hosts had ten chances to solve the puzzle. “Are you in finance?” they began. “Are you in banking?” “Do you work for an international organization?” “Do you work in an office?” “Do you make something? Do you have a shop?” I shut the radio off.
Reading my letter much later, I was struck by how solitary the five characters I proposed were, and how apart I held them all from each other. The idea was that I would read the stories each week, twenty minutes or so developing a story on each character exclusively, as some kind of all-seeing yet invisible, finally unreliable narrator who has the goods on all of them. But how had I imagined them? All lonely, all adrift. There was no suggestion that any of the five knew each other, or that there was any intimacy in their lives, except perhaps for the student Jacky, whose role I hadn’t fully thought out yet. Was this my idea of Geneva? Furthermore, none of the characters was Swiss—except again for Jacky, and possibly Mme. Graf, a never-married forty something who might be Swiss romande, if she wasn’t Swiss-German: the ambiguity would always remain. She at least was based on a real person, my next-door neighbor in a high block of flats in Malagnou, where I had sublet a furnished studio with extraordinary views above the city’s roofs from the airport, buried below the rise of the Jura mountains, to the lake as far as Coppet. In five months she had spoken to me only once, asking me to shut the heavy iron door of the lift cage more quietly in future; and once when I knocked on her door to ask for help in using the basement washing machine she had seemed embarrassed by the request. Because I was alone in Geneva, knowing few people in town and doing little beyond my daily work, was I making the mistake of the solipsist, assuming that because I lived this way, so did everyone else? Perhaps I was playing to the stereotype of Geneva as a cold, impersonal city where everybody comes but nobody belongs, where life, in the end, is elsewhere. It bore some thinking about.
Geneva’s statistics break down rather neatly: near1y 175,000 live in the city, and the same number again in the canton. A third are natives, a third Swiss from somewhere else, and a third are foreign. Arriving in September 1996 for extended stays lasting on and off for the next year and a half, I was reminded of The Hague, where I grew up. Here again I confronted the phenomenon of the American church, also the English church; the various amateur choirs, theatre companies and musical societies, the American library, the English-language book and video shop, the American grocery store, a place of women's clubs and newcomers’ guides and helpful lists of English speaking plumbers, satellite TV installers, marriage counselors and psychotherapists. This was a world I knew from childhood, of furtive lives isolated by language, marking time for the statutory three years before moving on, the dead hand of internationalism. The teenagers I saw on the regional train each day between the city and its suburbs on the north side of the lake, heading for their international schools in Bellevue, Versoix, and Founex, were like others I had known in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, all speaking multiple languages and bearing two or more passports, their Danish mothers married to Brazilian fathers whom they had met in a third country, Britain perhaps, now, of course, living in Switzerland. On Friday nights, with the last train running at five minutes past midnight, these children would crowd the compartments of the regional, spilling over the armrests into the aisles, smoking cigarettes, snogging, listening to Walkmen buried deep inside baggy trouser pockets (their skateboards they carried only by day), drinking tinned beer as they made their way home before the parental curfew. I remembered this too, from The Hague, when the midnight exodus from the Hofkwartier pubs became a rush at Central Station for the last bus to the expatriate ghetto of Wassenaar. It could still be a shaky trip home for some people, I could tell. Once I thought I caught—I may be wrong—my boss’s 16-year-old son stumbling off the train behind me at Coppet, where supported by a similarly uneasy friend, he fell to his knees and threw up over the tracks. In the morning the composition of the regional changed completely, with all seats on the 9:02 occupied by dark middle-aged Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking ladies who chatted noisily among themselves en route to the same houses in the same suburbs, where they cooked and cleaned for the teenagers’ parents.
In those first few months, Geneva seemed all young people to me—teenagers of privileged background; slightly older au pairs who congregated in the so-called Irish pubs in the city center, Flanagan’s and Mulligan’s: in my radio play I had a place for these two necessary centers of expatriate social life, which I proposed to call Doherty’s and Flaherty’s. In the area around Plainpalais extending to Carouge and across to Champel, near the hospital, with another little pocket on the near side of the lake in Eaux-Vives, were the city’s university students, who seemed defiantly un-Swiss. They rode the trams and lived in rundown flats, and floated from squat to squat, looking for parties. They listened to underground bands in a converted palace of a factory named “Usine”; Saturdays they walked through Plainpalais flea market, browsing among the used clothing and second-hand CD sellers. In parts of Geneva you could see gaily-wrought pastels and freewheeling patterns painted onto ramshackle buildings, graffiti and angry slogans daubed on walls, and anarchist newspapers in racks there for the taking. Posters advertised forthcoming demonstrations, or more often, “meetings,” against the United States, racism, or some hapless international outfit: the World Trade Organization seemed to be a particular target. They could take just as easily against their own, as was evident each time the Swiss Army assembled for parades or exercises in town. In the meantime people I knew, hearing that I lived in Geneva, asked, “Isn’t it quiet? Isn’t it boring?” And also people who lived in Geneva, some of those same people who attended the university and partied in squats and went out to Usine or the Chat Noir in Carouge. . . they were asking the same thing, among themselves, “Isn’t it boring here? Aren’t weekends and holidays terrible, when everybody leaves town?” Genevans wore their awful dissatisfaction on their face; it was not a city where people smiled, and the laughs, when they came, were few and invariably pained.
There was a high pitch of excitation to those days, when l was certain that so much was going on, only just beyond my reach, that a current ran very fast immediately below the surface. It is a common young person’s mistake to believe this of new surroundings, and if not so young myself I had too many of the kind around me to appreciate the more sober truth: that Geneva was not so young as it seemed; that, in fact, it was not a young person’s town at all. At some point, comparisons with The Hague broke down. The Dutch are lively people, and The Hague is a lively city. It is also much larger than Geneva, with fewer international organizations and companies. Finally The Hague is resolutely Dutch, fully a part of the country it happens to govern. Geneva, of course, governs the world, not in a practical sense but by way of suggestion, all those kind thoughts and good examples flowing down from WHO, ILO, WIPO and the rest of them; and it is an old person’s game. More than that it is a tired person’s game, the exhaustion borne of frustration, of being, in the end, on the periphery of events, able to speak up but not really to influence. Not everyone in Geneva was so old or tired, but ultimately the energy to change the world drained away; or more often those people who had it simply moved away.
I mentioned earlier, obliquely, my boss. I was working in the suburbs, in an old village close to Nyon, showing up every weekday for work in a converted farmhouse that had a one-room cell, or office, fronting the main road, and an apartment above, where I lived for a few months before moving into the city. I worked properly, that is to say regular hours for regular money and with some semblance of a professional life, but illegally, which is to say without a permis, for the fifteen months I was there. And so another Swiss myth was disabused, that of Switzerland as a police state where papers are checked and comings and goings rigidly controlled. I slipped in and out of the office, the city and the country, working openly, carrying papers, driving vehicles, commuting to work, all with a bare minimum of deception, only a lie in my mind handy in case I was ever stopped and needed to explain myself. Still I felt like some kind of criminal, perhaps like the Russian mobster arrested at Geneva airport who, it was discovered, lay on the verge of gaining Swiss residency through the good offices of a retired Lausanne police captain my employers occasionally used when they needed permits. And then I realized that to feel like a criminal is part of the package one accepts on arrival as a foreigner in Switzerland, as part of the choice of living in this country of lakes and alpine peaks; and I wondered why I hadn’t provided for a criminal in my radio play. Geneva is a place to advance one’s career—a fact as true for Kofi Annan and Mary Robinson as for the dozens of young interns working for no money in the Palais des Nations—and criminals are careerists no less than other people. Geneva had plenty of crooks, real or invented, from the Lyon street gangs who crossed the border to burgle apartments or cars, to the newly rich mafiosi of Eastern Europe and other places who came to Geneva to spend money—I doubted they banked—although never in the right places, their sense of style defective in regard to shops, nightclubs, and restaurants. I didn’t know any of these people, but felt nevertheless that I shared something with them. Nothing I did was quite on the level, it seemed, always some deception or obfuscation involved, skulking by day, drinking by night in the stand-up bar of Flanagan’s or Mulligan’s, waiting, inevitably, to be exposed. The efficiency of the Swiss system meant that the police never had to work very hard—in Switzerland they clearly don’t—the chill was already in the air, the onus on you to justify your presence there. Pressure never had to be applied; it was assumed, inevitably, you would crumble.
One evening in Flanagan’s I met Claudia. This is not her real name. She was German and had come to Geneva years ago with a Swiss boyfriend she later married. The marriage didn’t last a year—although still not divorced, she had moved on to other boyfriends, including, for the briefest time, me. As a consequence of her long time in Geneva she knew lots of people, yet still preferred to frequent anglophone pubs like Flanagan’s, and she became the model for my radio character Nicole, a small act of revenge on my part for the weeks of distraction I suffered on her account. In my isolation I clung to her, my new-found friend who would be my key to the city. She spoke of the people I would meet through her, an architect-girlfriend, a “hilarious” (she said) Irishman who worked for the European Broadcasting Union, financial traders and women like her, some English lads who drifted into Mulligan’s or Pickwick’s on Saturday afternoons to watch the football or rugby from home on satellite TV. I never met any of these people, for within a month we had fallen out; she was angry with me, and I lonely for her. I went to America for two weeks in June, and returned with a new pair of Rollerblades, and in those cloudy, unseasonally damp afternoons of early summer when I was alone again, I skated up and down the lake, around from Geneve-plage below Cologny all the way to Perle-du-Lac, past the promenading people of Geneva, notably ethnic families from Paquis, women in gold-speckled sunglasses walking chichi little dogs, and Americans who looked vaguely like me in their gray college sweatshirts, walking bikes along the Quai Wilson while their women-friends trotted to heel.
Things were coming to a head. This fugitive’s life, as I saw it, had begun, after a year, to pall. I wanted to hold my head high, and say I belonged here, in this city of the world: once I knew I couldn’t, I resolved to leave. An initial step toward this would have been a permis, but none was forthcoming. On Halloween, which Flanagan’s celebrated with a costume party, their orange-and-black bunting and decorations provided courtesy of Guinness, I gave my notice; three days after that, I moved into my last Geneva residence, a businessman’s hotel in the genteel end of Paquis near the Pare Mon Repos, a place popular with Korean coach parties that turned over every second weekday. Donning my wide-brimmed hat and leather airman’s jacket, I assumed, even at half his age, the life of the Citizen of Geneva of my radio play, fashioning a routine of moderate work balanced by walks around the lake for my last six weeks; a period culminating, appropriately enough, with a dinner at the Lion d’Or-one of the elderly gentleman’s preferred restaurants, to be sure—in Cologny, with my three oldest friends in Switzerland, none of them Swiss, of course, or even francophone: British, instead. Playing the host, I was presented with a mighty bill, and I wished afterward that I had ordered better wines.
Once when I asked Claudia why she preferred Geneva to Lausanne, thirty miles down the lake and friendlier to young people than Geneva, she replied, “Too Swiss.” Whatever Geneva’s faults, it is not that they are Swiss. It was, and remains, the least Swiss town in Switzerland. In Geneva the army is not revered, nor the banks; no one feels they must report unusual happenings to the police. The workings of the federal government in Berne are ignored; people do not follow the success or failure of the national ski team. The Geneva newspapers, the most vigorous in Switzerland, gleefully pounce on the nation’s missteps and failures: some of the best coverage of issues to do with Jewish gold and bank accounts, or business transacted with the Nazis during the Second World War, could be found in the pages of the Joumal de Geneve and the Nouveau Quotidien (now, regrettably, consolidated into one newspaper); also the most plaintive and searching editorials. The Victorinox knives, watches, and chocolate bars one sees in every shop window are for the consumption solely of tourists, as Geneva, in a larger sense, is for the consumption of its foreign residents and distinguished visitors. To know Geneva well is to see the city’s identity fragment. The airport is partly in France; the obscure Eaux-Vives train station is French, run by the SNCF. French ski resorts are the closest, most easily accessible from the city; for those with cars, more shopping for food and basic items is done in France than in Switzerland. One aspect of life in Geneva is the constant feeling that, without quite realizing it, you have somehow crossed into France and French mores, and thus French preoccupations. But Geneva is not French, it is Genevese, and on the greatest day in the local calendar—the December weekend of the Escalade commemorating the failed attempt in1602 by the Savoyards to storm the city walls—the celebratory procession through the old town ends in a roaring bonfire on the cathedral steps where patriotic songs are sung: the patrie being not Switzerland, but Geneva, city, canton, and Republic. In the end, Calvin’s city on a hill remains its own inviolable kingdom, and outside each individual’s sphere of work, his own little international organization absorbed in the election of its next director or general secretary and the newly announced pension plan, no one knows what is going on, except if it has to do with traffic, or parking regulations. Their eyes are watching elsewhere.
In my home town of The Hague, which is really no more my home than Geneva, the most characteristic statue is a five-and-a-half foot tall Frenchified dandy in a frock-coat with cane, doffing his bowler hat to one and all. Named “Flaneur,” the Stroller, he stands exactly half-way between the American and British embassies on the Lange Voorhout, outside the Hotel des Indes which, although not in the same league as Geneva’s thirteen five-star hotels, is still the most luxurious accommodation in the Dutch seat of government. A caption engraved on the statue's base reads, in Dutch, Ik zie rond en glimlach. “I look around, and I smile.” Flaneur belongs to The Hague, a city long influenced by the French, but not to the Netherlands: His extravagance and status as a toff do not go down well in this egalitarian culture, where the rich keep their heads down and the royal family, supposedly, ride bicycles. A transplanted Parisian, Flaneur could equally be transplanted to the city on the lake, where he becomes instantly my Citizen of Geneva, imprisoned in bronze, who instead of tipping his hat to the ladies between restaurant meals chucks breadcrumbs to the ducks and swans from the footbridge over the Ile Rousseau. His small stature and diminished position notwithstanding, he is indubitably gracious and elegant in his declining years. Keeping his own counsel as always, he stands immobile, forever contemplating his failure of imagination. Je regarde, et je souris.
(Published in Harvard Review, no. 18, Spring 2000)