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  I always had the sense, living in Switzerland, that I was not privy to information shared by everyone else, information buried as deep as those explosives. This tacit understanding ensnared everyone like a web, but there was no way a foreigner could put it all together. The Swiss breathe their ideologies as we US citizens breathe ours, and part of their ideology is a sense of superiority. I would come to recognize this superiority many years later when I moved to Utah. Mormons believe they alone will enter the highest tier of heaven, with the result that they treat everyone else with varying degrees of disdain. Institutionalized in the church, disdain is sometimes personalized as pity.

  The Steffens also employed a Serbian couple in their early thirties. They had worked for the Steffens in Ticino. Florika, who was short and fat and smelled of sweat, cleaned rooms and did laundry and helped take care of the two Steffen children. Paul was gaunt, with acne scars. He cooked with Herr Steffen, washed dishes, and shoveled snow.

  From her pocket Florika took a dog-eared photo of the two children she and Paul had left in the care of grandparents. I recited the few Slovenian words that I knew, hoping they were close to Serbo-Croatian: dobra dan, podgana, nasvidenje (good day, rat, goodbye), and I counted my change out loud: ena, dve, tri, štiri, pet. As if I’d told a joke, she laughed the warm laughter of camaraderie. The hierarchy of Europe’s three kinds of root stock—Teutonic, Alpine, and Mediterranean—is clear: the blonder the better. Dark-haired Paul and Florika recognized my family name to mean “soot” in Slovenian—one of my ancestors was a chimney sweep—but they also knew that my father’s region had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the fact that he’d graduated from the military academy meant he had more of a chance than they did to thrive in a foreign country. He spoke six languages, five of them fluently. They spoke Serbo-Croatian and broken German.

  As a gesture of friendship, Florika offered to do my laundry even once I moved out. I knew Frau Steffen would not like it, but I acceded. We were folding sheets by holding opposite corners, dancing a little as we moved toward each other, laughing when we touched fingers, when Frau Steffen walked in on us. “I don’t want to see you in the laundry room again,” she said to me. She patronized Florika but also befriended her. Frau Steffen’s tone of voice with Florika was unlike her tone with us waitresses or with her husband. It had a tender sincerity, solicitousness. It was like the relationship between a queen and a lady’s maid. Or a mother and child, even though they were the same age. In retrospect, I realize that Frau Steffen, despite having her children with her, was lonely, and she was obviously working as hard as we were.

  Forty years ago, guest workers in northern Europe and Switzerland were mostly from southern European countries with weaker economies. These southern Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, and Yugoslavs were dark-haired and dark-eyed like me. How much education they had in their own countries made a difference in how they coped in the new one. In Europe, xenophobia is an obsession, highlighted recently during the Syrian refugee crisis. In the United States, the problem of difference is often reduced to race, although we also adopt suspicion of religious outsiders: Irish Catholics mostly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jews and Muslims then and now.

  A friend who’d worked in a large Swiss hotel in the 1970s told me that her group of American college students was required to eat with the managers, even though the students were poorly paid. When my friend sat with her coworkers, the Italian chambermaids, she was reprimanded. The Swiss state was supposed to be “born neither of race nor of the flesh but of the spirit,” yet in 2014, Switzerland passed a draconian anti-immigration law, a response to foreign labor that refused to go back home. Like the protagonist in the film Bread and Chocolate, many workers had done the math of Switzerland’s high salaries and preferred exile to insecurity. Half of Swiss voters backed the 2014 referendum to impose quotas on immigration, a response to the fact that a quarter of Swiss citizens were by then immigrants, double the ratio of Germany or the United States.

  Like Florika and Paul, I was a guest worker in Switzerland, and my visa, like theirs, was inscribed with precise entry and exit dates. We reported to the police department. But I had applied to US law schools and taken the US Foreign Service exam, and although I didn’t know what the future held for me, I knew it would not be another season at the Eigerblick. Florika and Paul would continue to shuttle back and forth between home and this country that seemed to look down its mountainous nose at them.

  Phone calls were expensive. I called my parents only once a month from Frau Jaun’s kitchen. I didn’t tell them I was miserable. Because of the way they’d struggled during our early years in the United States, and because my father made it clear that the money he earned was his alone to spend, I never wanted to ask for any. Without discussion, my father would buy himself Franklin Mint coins or a new tractor while he gave my mother a pittance to run the household, out of which she had to scrimp spending money for herself.

  I received mail at the hotel. “Ha, ha, look at the mighty dollar,” Herr Steffen sniggered at the weak American currency when he handed me correspondence from schools I’d applied to or from the State Department about my foreign service interview. My mail was evidence that I would have a future, although the law school letters were almost all rejections. With my only moderately above-average LSAT score, why did I apply to Yale? I’d had no guidance, either in high school or in college, and my parents hadn’t a clue about the American system.

  A friend sent me a paperback copy of Gabriel García Márquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude, and since we had Christmas Eve off, I lost myself in Rabassa’s translation, devouring the entire book in one night. He began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror. When someone asked Rabassa if his Spanish was up to the task, he replied, “It’s my English that you should be worried about.” Reading the novel, I thought, My language is my country. That language was English. I didn’t practice the daily habit of writing, but I wrote many letters to friends. I would be disappointed by the banality of those letters now, no doubt, just as I’m dismayed when I see in photos how fat I looked after three months at the Eigerblick.

  Two hundred francs were deducted from our paychecks for food. Employees ate early, in the kitchen: rice with bits of sausage or pasta with tomato sauce or, on especially bad nights, muesli. The kitchen refrigerator had a lock to which only the Steffens had a key. I envied Frau Steffen’s salat-teller—leaf lettuce, cucumbers, grated carrot, and celery root that she enjoyed at a dining room table. We didn’t get a fresh vegetable except carrots all winter, and the only fruit was cottony, flavorless, cellared apples. The Steffens were, of course, trying to profit from our diets as well as our labor.

  Each morning, the only time my access to food was unrestricted and unobserved, I made myself an ice cream shake with Ovaltine. In college, I’d kept a food diary: 14 M&M’s = 71 calories. One strawberry Twizzler = 40 calories. In Grindelwald, I didn’t reckon the extra calories I was consuming: chocolate bars in my room, morning milkshakes, and afternoon cake. I was trying to eat my loneliness, or fill it.

  Frau Steffen looked at me, disgusted. “What are you eating that you are getting so fat?” My black wraparound skirts started to flap open. My body seemed to belong to someone else.

  During holiday weeks and most of February, business was so brisk we couldn’t take days off; we would be paid for them when we left. We were on duty either from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. or 11 a.m. to midnight, with two hours off in the afternoon. I worked so many hours between Christmas and the beginning of March, I saw Ursula only once. She and I had become friends five years earlier, when she au-paired for the Gallup-Kingsley family and I cooked for the Lovejoys next door in Old Black Point, a community of turn-of-the-twentieth-century summer homes overlooking Long Island Sound. We arranged the same day off, and our friendship blossomed on day trips to M
ystic seaport or to the Shakespeare Festival.

  That job seemed so familial compared with the Eigerblick. I didn’t eat with the Lovejoys and I slept in the attic, but they allowed me time to enjoy the beach. They took me waterskiing. They trusted me with a supermarket credit card. Their world of polo ponies, Park Avenue, and Palm Beach put them in the upper class, even though Mr. Lovejoy worked. He was a lawyer. Investments enabled them to give their household employees in New York City and New Jersey the month of August off while they rented a house and staffed it with temporary workers like me. They weren’t trying to economize. They hosted their sons and grandchildren in an easy, August-beach-vacation way. They drove a station wagon with battered wood-paneled sides. The food they asked me to cook was simple: baked fresh fish and boiled vegetables and local tomatoes. No dessert.

  The American family Ursula worked for, the Gallups, also owned a house in the Bernese Oberland. Ursula had three children to take care of, but she, too, was treated well. We were learning—in my case, cooking, in hers, English—while making a little money. We were also observing the habits of the American upper class, such as the tradition of naming a girl after her mother’s maiden name (“Kingsley,” for instance) or drinking scotch on the rocks before dinner. Our employers discussed politics and art with ease and depth. The opera singer Frederika von Stade was one Lovejoy son’s best friend. Conversely, the Steffens never mentioned art, and Herr Steffen talked about politics as if he were mouthing bumper stickers.

  My loneliness turned into contempt for the Steffens and the waitresses, who, by mid-January, were not getting along. I felt a twinge of pity for Suzanne. All winter I was looking up at one of the highest mountains in the Alps while looking down at this dysfunctional group of misfits, including me. Our displacements were partly the cause of that dysfunction, but the other part was economic, struggling to pay bills and working fourteen-hour days.

  During my two hours off, I walked to the village, often to the celadon-colored glacier. I wanted to take off my glove, touch the ice, and put my fingers to my tongue, but it was just beyond my reach. I was reminded of José Buendía in García Márquez’s novel, who thought a cake of ice was the largest diamond in the world and paid to touch it. Forty years after my winter season, that glacier has melted dramatically, and the Swiss worry about climate change, something they cannot control.

  The glacier was near the other hotel that had offered me a job, albeit for one hundred francs less. Larger than the Eigerblick, with wings added to the original building, the Gletschergarten was decorated with wood carvings, painted furniture, and Persian rugs.

  “What’s it like to work here?” I asked a waitress.

  “Chic,” she said, meaning a combination of “nice” and “fun.” “The hotel’s been owned by the same family since the last century.” I didn’t have the heart to hear more.

  Once a week I took skiing lessons, along with an ever-changing group of tourist children. The instructor, in his seventies, called me “Mami,” sometimes “Grossmami.” He raised an eyebrow when he learned I worked at the Eigerblick.

  My ski lessons consisted of learning how to get on and off the various lifts, unbuckle gear, and maneuver poles. It was boring and not at all aerobic, and it exemplified the Swiss mania for training, for learning in tiny, laborious steps. It took the entire winter before I was permitted to ski on a real slope. At the end of the season, Ursula met me for an afternoon of skiing. She chose a black slope with a decline so steep that I had to take off my skis and slide down on my butt while she zigzagged down carrying my skis and both sets of poles on her shoulders. I didn’t question her choice then. Was she making sure I knew I’d never be as good as she was? Or did she simply miscalculate the value of ten lessons? She had learned to ski when she learned to walk. I thought I would learn to ski that winter, and instead I learned—what did I learn? I learned what it’s like to be a guest worker in a strange land, and I learned how to cope or fight back—not in a communal, heroic Norma Rae kind of way, but in a personal This is what I need to do to get through way. You’ll be dead soon, I told myself, a Zen-like nugget I’d picked up from a Dick Cavett interview with Maya Angelou.

  One afternoon in the dining room, guests were transfixed by the sight of climbers trying to scale the mountain, which looked like a grainy black-and-white photograph, rock poking out from under ice and snow. The climbers were black insects crawling slowly up the white face. Herr Steffen rushed out of the kitchen with binoculars. While we stood, squinting, one spiderlike climber fell, except there was no web to hold him. Everyone gasped. Helicopters attempted a rescue. Later we heard the climber had died. The mountain was nicknamed Mordwand (death wall), a rhyme with Nordwand (north wall). The Greeks considered mountains divine, the home of the gods. Climbing them seemed like hubris to me.

  By the third week of March, the number of tourists had dwindled, and Frau Steffen called a meeting of the waitresses. We sat together at a dining room table as though we were guests, the first time since Christmas Eve. Frau Steffen turned to me and asked, “Would you like to end your service this Saturday?” She paused. “You have accumulated enough days off so that I can pay you for the month.”

  She was being careful, I realized, lest I contact the lawyer again. I had grown used to my indenture, but the timing was right.

  To celebrate, Ursula and I took the rail line up to Jung-fraujoch, the tallest outlook point in the Oberland and the highest railway station in Europe, at more than eleven thousand feet. It is the site of the chase scene in the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Ursula snapped a photo of me, chubby-cheeked, surrounded by white peaks and drifts. (Sadly, even the Ewiger Schnee, snow that never melts, is unnaturally melting now.)

  A night later we boarded a train to Rome. The Pensione Terminus, where we stayed, had fourteen-foot ceilings and rooms so large you could roller-skate in them. Run by an Italian in his fifties and his younger German wife, the place had a genteel charm, with furnishings from the 1920s. I imagined the owners had met when she was a tourist.

  On the Vatican side of the city, I made sure we found the white granite apartment building of the Roman countess for whom I could have worked as an au pair. I stood on the sidewalk, trying to glimpse life inside the handsome structure. I would have learned Italian, I thought, and maybe even fallen in love, like the woman at the Terminus. I certainly would have eaten better food. But I would not have saved thousands of Swiss francs.

  I walked off those twenty pounds in the eternal city and during my subsequent months of travel. Savoring the difference between solitude and loneliness, I visited Greek ruins and Spanish villages. A part of me had hardened, the way cheese left uncovered becomes tough as plastic. I often wonder why that season, such a relatively short time in my life, had such a lasting effect on me. That winter, time passed in the slow and inexorable increments of a melting icicle. Perhaps I realized, although I am able to articulate it only now, that hard work enables one to appreciate the luxury of leisure. And that I had to make my own happiness.

  Several summers later, I visited Grindelwald again. Ursula and I had kept in touch, and that afternoon we walked along trails dotted with gentian and speedwell and shepherd’s purse, flowers whose names she knew. She carried her first baby in a backpack. We were both married by then, both in bloom with love and adulthood. I’d dropped out of law school, and my foreign service interview had been a disaster, but I had earned a master’s degree in writing and discovered I loved teaching, which was a way I could read and talk about books and call it work. And teaching is not unlike waitressing, wherein the server must figure out what the guest needs, despite what the guest says she wants.

  “I must go up the hill,” I told Ursula, as she settled on a bench to nurse her daughter.

  The new management at the Eigerblick hadn’t heard of the Steffens. I walked through the dining room to look at the north side of the mountain. The winter when I worked there, the view was like wallpaper for me. I’d only paid attentio
n to it when humans were climbing the mountain or falling to their death from it. Now I noticed that the shape was somewhat concave, like half a cone, a shape that put one side of the mountain in constant shadow, even if the sun was shining. The shape also made it hard to climb, requiring a rappel almost all the way down. Half the cone was air: thin and invisible air. Not even ice to hold on to. I imagined holding on to a rope and facing that wall of inaccessible rock and ice. Dangling, I wouldn’t know that people were watching, that someone was hoping I would make it.

  Auntie

  If the moon looks larger here than in Europe, probably the sun does also.

  —THOREAU

  WHEN I WAS ALMOST FIVE, WE MOVED FROM NEW YORK City into the ground-floor apartment of a house in Roselle, New Jersey. A relic of when the street had horses and carriages, the Victorian house sat close to the now-busy road. Railroad tracks bordered the backyard, and the sound of trains punctuated days and nights. Helen Severs, a childless sixty-six-year-old widow, lived on the top floor. “Call me Auntie,” she said. She was shorter than my mother, with sinewy arms and legs that extended from small-print cotton dresses that she wore with brown tie oxfords and sheer stockings. Her close-clipped and thick steel-gray hair was curly with a “permanent.” She had returned to New Jersey to be near her sister, after Auntie had found her husband dead of a heart attack on the toilet in their Clearwater, Florida, house. This fascinated me, as I had never seen a dead person and I couldn’t imagine what it’s like to find one on the toilet, of all things, a place where no one should be seen.