On Sunday, after three weeks of classes at the Jung-Institut, I took a train to Geneva to spend the day with Barbara, another student who has been counselling refugees for some years. (It always seems as though the German name for the city, Genf, is an irritable attempt at vengeance by the German-speaking on the French-speaking – honestly, have you ever heard such an ugly, unaesthetic word as Genf? Not a bit like the smooth elegance of Genève.)
Barbara and her boyfriend of the past year, Bernard, picked me up at the train station, and he drove us around the hills on the richer side of the city – then we went to the other side (which is merely fairly, rather than very, rich) where Barbara's apartment and various restaurants are located. In the car, we managed a complicated three-way conversation – Bernard speaks French and German, Barbara speaks English and French, and I can move pretty fast in German but slow down and grab for words in the middle of complicated French sentences. But we managed to chat – some cross-translation, some stories, some so-what-do-you-do-when-you're-at-home. Bernard was cheerful, civilized, friendly in a mitteleuropäische way – he dropped the two of us off at her apartment so that she and I could spend the rest of the day wandering around, as he went back to his farmhouse to do some work.
The city was at first gray and rainy, but then the sun came out and it was prettier – though it remains a visually quiet city, light grays, the dark greens of grass and trees, a narrow range of stony colors under a sky that is light and clear, but not quite bright, not a really intense blue. The high jet of water in the middle of the lake is abstractly impressive – Barbara told me that, in the nineteenth century, they needed to reduce the water pressure, and so the jet was created as an engineering/plumbing solution; somebody decided it was pretty, and voilà, now it's a symbol for the city.
In a restaurant, we had a half-French, half-Swiss lunch; Barbara asked me how the student party had gone on Friday night, and I had to tell her (of course) about my unexpected success in singing 'Lush Life'. I'd warned that night's audience that the song was incredibly neurotic/depressive, but they could have fun diagnosing the lyrics as I sang them. The pianist was wonderful – he had to hastily transpose half-forgotten quartal chords and all those weird half-step key changes, but he followed and we made a decadent tour de force out of what must be among the more atonal pieces of jazz in existence. I knew we'd have a good time when his eyes widened at my mention the song – he was definitely ready for kinky musical fun.
Barbara wanted to hear what the song was like; since we'd both already had kir royales, I started to sing it sotto voce, grinning the whole time. An elderly woman at the next table looked over in astonishment after a few bars – clearly someone with enough jazz background to recognize such a strange but famous song – and she proceeded to tell us we should definitely get married after that. (So much for Bernard... but he'll get over it. Someday.)
As the hot afternoon waned, Barbara took me to see the Reformation Wall, a monument to the great Protestants who made Geneva the center of their revolution. Like many Americans, I don't get particularly worried about the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism – yes, I know there were lots of wars and fighting and argument, but it is all so long ago.... (Although Michael, an Aussie who taught with me in Hong Kong and writes about Spanish 16th-century music, once pointed out to me the massive cultural differences between Catholic and Protestant cultures: the intensity of moving toward a more individual responsibility, and all of the resonance those differences have had across the world.)
But this Wall is truly impressive: massive, granite, so cool and calm as to be almost chilly by the standards of many monuments, it reflects a vast number of conflicts and daring declarations across northern Europe with a sort of terse pride – scenes from Dutch and French courts, declarations by German and English kings, and in the center a powerful frieze of four of the men who made it all happen.
In the tree-filtered daylight, there were Dutch guys playing ball while another one wove back and forth on a child's bike, families having mini-picnics, and people just sitting or talking, facing the Wall. Barbara played with my new iPad to see if she wanted one, and took a couple of photographs, as I wandered up and down –
but what I remember most is the incredibly charged intensity: the almost desperate, uncompromising strength of those four long-dead stone figures, who changed so many things forever.
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