Mavis Gallant - The Pegnitz Junction

What I wanted to comment on was children — children in Switzerland. I rent a large room in a chalet seven minutes from my school. Downstairs is the boisterous Canadian who married her ski instructor when she was a pupil here eleven years ago. She has a loud laugh and veined cheeks. He had to resign his post, and now works in the place near the sawmill where they make hand-carved picture frames. The house is full of animals. On rainy days their dining room smells of old clothes and boiled liver. When I am invited to tea (in mugs, without saucers) and sit in one of the armchairs covered with shredded chintz and scraps of blanket, I am obliged to borrow the vacuum cleaner later so as to get the animal hairs out of my skirt. One room is kept free for lodgers — skiers in winter, tourists in summer. In August there were five people in the room — a family of middle-aged parents, two boys, and a baby girl. Because of the rain the boys were restless and the baby screamed with anger and frustration. I took them all to the woods to gather mushrooms.

“If a mushroom has been eaten by a snail, that means it is not poisonous,” said the father. Rain dripped through the pine trees. We wore boots and heavy coats. The mother was carrying the bad-tempered baby and could not bend down and search, but now and then she would call, “Here’s one that must be safe, because it has been nibbled.”

“How do you know the snail is not lying dead somewhere?” I asked.

“You must not make the boys lose confidence in their father,” the mother said, trying to laugh, but really a little worried.

“Even if it kills them?” I wanted to say, but it would have spoiled the outing.

My mother said once, “You can tell when mushrooms are safe, because when you stir them the spoon won’t tarnish. Poisonous mushrooms turn the spoon black.”

“How do you know everyone has a silver spoon?” said my father. He looked at her seriously, with his light eyes. They were like the eyes of birds when he was putting a question. He was not trying to catch her out; he was simply putting the question. That was what I was trying to do. You can warn until your voice is extinguished, and still these people will pick anything and take it home and put their fingers in their mouths.

In Switzerland parents visit their children sometimes, but are always trying to get away. I would say that all parents of all children here are trying to get away. The baby girl, the screamer, was left for most of a day. The child of aging parents, she had their worried look, as if brooding on the lessons of the past. She was twenty-six months old. My landlady, who offered to keep her amused so that the parents and the two boys could go off on their own for once, had cause to regret it. They tricked the baby cruelly, taking her out to feed melon rinds to Coco, the donkey, in his enclosure at the bottom of the garden. When she came back, clutching the empty basket, her family had disappeared. The baby said something that sounded like “Mama-come-auto” and, writhing like a fish when she was held, slipped away and crawled up the stairs. She called upstairs and down, and the former ski instructor and his wife cried, “Yes, that’s it! Mama-come-auto!” She reached overhead to door handles, but the rooms were empty. At noon they tried to make her eat the disgusting purée of carrots and potatoes the mother had left behind. “What if we spanked her?” said the former ski instructor, wiping purée from his sleeve. “Who, you?” shouted his wife. “You wouldn’t have nerve enough to brain a mad dog.” That shows how tough they thought the baby was. Sometimes during that year-long day, she forgot and let us distract her. We let her turn out our desks and pull our letters to bits. Then she would remember suddenly and look about her with elderly despair, and implore our help, in words no one understood. The weeping grew less frightened and more broken-hearted towards the end of the afternoon. It must have been plain to her then that they would never return. Downstairs they told each other that if she had not been lied to and deceived, then the mother would never have had a day’s rest; she had been shut up in the rain in a chalet with this absolute tyrant of a child. The tyrant lay sleeping on the floor. The house was still except for her shuddering breath. Waking, she spoke unintelligible words. They had decided downstairs to pretend not to know; that is, they would not say “Yes, Mama-come-auto” or anything else. We must all three behave as if she had been living here forever and had never known anyone but us. How much memory can be stored in a mind that has not even been developed? What she understood was that we were too deaf to hear her cries and too blind to see her distress. She took the hand of the former ski instructor and dragged it to her face so that he could feel her tears. She was still and slightly feverish when the guilty parents and uneasy boys returned. Her curls were wet through and lay flat on her head. “She was perfect,” the landlady said. “Just one little burst of tears after you left. She ate up all her lunch.” The mother smiled and nodded, as if giving thanks. “Children are always better away from their parents,” she said, with regret. Later, the landlady repeated, to me, as if I had not been there, a strange but believable version of that day, in which the baby cried only once.

That was an exceptional case, where everyone behaved with the best intentions; but what I have wanted to say from the beginning is, do not confide your children to strangers. Watch the way the stranger holds a child by the wrist instead of by the hand, even when a hand has been offered. I am thinking of Véronique, running after the stranger she thought was making off with the imitation-leather bag that held her cardigan, mustard, salt, pepper, a postcard of the Pont-Neuf, a pink handkerchief, a peppermint, and a French centime. This was at the air terminal at Geneva. I thought I might help — interpret between generations, between the mute and the deaf, so to speak — but at that moment the woman rushing away with the bag stopped, shifted it from right hand to left, and grasped Véronique by the wrist.

I had just been disinherited by my aunt, and was extremely sensitive to all forms of injustice. I thought that Véronique’s father and mother, because they were not here at the exact moment she feared her bag was being stolen, had lost all claim to her, and had I been dispensing justice, would have said so. It was late in June. My ancient aunt had made me a present of a Geneva — Paris round-trip tourist-class ticket for the purpose of telling me to my face why she had cut me out of her will: I resembled my father, and had somehow disappointed her. I needed a lesson. She did not say what the lesson would be, but spoke in the name of Life, saying that Life would teach me. She was my only relative, that old woman, my mother’s eldest sister, who had had the foresight to marry a French officer in 1919 and spend the next forty years and more saying “Fie.” She was never obliged to choose between duty and self-preservation, or somehow hope the two would coincide. He was a French officer and she made his sense of honour hers. He doted on her. She was one of the lucky women.

Véronique was brought aboard at Orly Airport after everyone else in the Caravelle had settled down. She was led by a pretty stewardess, who seemed bothered by her charge. “Do you mind having her beside you?” she asked. I at first did not see Véronique, who was behind the stewardess, held by the wrist. I placed her where she could look out, and the stewardess disappeared. This would be of more interest if Véronique were now revealed to be a baby ape or a tamed and lovable bear, but she was a child. The journey is a short one — fifty minutes. Some of the small girls in my school arrive alone from Teheran and Mexico City and are none the worse for the adventure. Mishaps occur when they think that pillows or blankets lent them were really presents, but any firm official can deal with that. The child is tossed from home to school, or from one acrobat parent to the other, and knows where it will land. I am frightened when I imagine the bright arc through space, the trusting flight without wings. Reflect on that slow drop from the cable car down the side of the mountain into the trees. The trees will not necessarily catch you like a net.