which should not have been rightfully posed! Not good. I was also carrying with me the item of apparent interest, with a number on the cover which was not that of a telephone somewhere in bella Italia. And that. I suspected, was a lot worse.
Sankt-Margrethen. It was worth a try. I wondered where my laptop’s journey would end. When the doors of the train hissed open it wasn’t too hard to hurl the lightweight notebook towards a freight train heading in the opposite direction on the track across the platform. A pity that there was nobody with who I could exchange a fist-bump or a high-five when the computer landed on an open waggon. It caught the light for a moment when it came to rest on the green netting covering the whatever loose cargo was being exported from Switzerland. Garbage, refuse, trash, I speculated unfairly, on its journey to some accommodating Eastern European destination.
A next-generation MacBook had been on my shopping list anyway.
At Weinfelden I left the Zurich express feeling safe. Bea had called and found a complicated way of informing me that my Google indiscretion had not set the Swiss authorities in hot pursuit. Although how on earth could she know that? No, it was Italians who were the interested party. ‘39’ was pure coincidence.
Well, Fortezza did sound Italian after all. I had jumped to the conclusion that the reference might be to the Italian-speaking Swiss canton Ticino.
Bea said that she and Dirk would be on their way in a few days, not to Tessin, but to Weinfelden. I needed their help, she said. Dirk Seehof typically found the whole book mystery compelling. While he saw it immediately from a Dan Brown perspective, Bea claimed she was due some leave. I found wouldn’t mind their company. Aunt Ursel would be the fourth at table.
My great-aunt had not shown surprise, although I had never before invited anyone to join me in Weinfelden. Ursel Lange insisted that not only she but also her housekeeper, Frau Steinemann, would be happy to welcome my guests to the big house, Säntisblick, on top of the hill overlooking the vineyard slopes. Although many homes with a view of the majestic mountain had the same name, the Lange residence was very grand, slightly forbidding behind high walls ensuring total privacy. Although it had the steeply pitched roof to deal with winter snows there were round towers at each end. The sloping site meant that below the main entrance floor there was one more, and three storeys above. For one elderly lady it had been for a long time far too big. It would be until the day she died.
I assured Frau Steinemann that Dirk and Bea were engaged to marry and that they might well find the Arvenholz pine panelled turret bedroom to their liking. It was as far removed from my own room as the house allowed. Dirk tended to shout encouragement with the vociferous enthusiasm of a football fan supporting his team when engaged in sexual congress. This Ursel would find most amusing, given that I had told her last summer that Dirk was also markedly well endowed. The term ‘porn star dimensions’ (fully warranted, I promise) had not crossed my lips, but I left my great-aunt in no doubt whatsoever. I never thought she would meet him, did I?
Why did I not prolong my affair with Dirk?
Why did Ursula Lange break off her liaison with Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger when she was in her mid-forties?
At this point in my story (for it is one of intrigue, criminality and peril, the sort that Dirk loves to read) there should already be a corpse lying somewhere. That of Herr Lessinger doesn’t count, does it? But, no, I feel I must digress and get a couple of things clear about my family.
My Swiss great-aunt, Ursel, née Ammann, was briefly married to Heinrich Lange, a German bookseller originally from Leipzig who settled in Weinfelden. There was, as they say, no issue.
After the divorce Heinrich then married Ursel’s older sister Erika. My grandmother was never called anything but Omi. My Dad turned out to be an only child, as did I. He was given the middle name Nestor, meaning ‘the traveller’ according to some sources. His first name, Adolf, was pointedly ignored and after a while forgotten.
Omi and Ursel were both of a generation of women not generally known for their independent spirit. However neither had any doubt that they were the equals of men. I cannot recall any stories told about their own father, Herr Ammann, who may have been quite insignificant to them. But there was no doubt that for the sisters it was the maternal lineage which counted. There was a very ancient photo of their mother, a woman with the same shine in her eye as my great-aunt. There was sometimes mention of the wealthy and powerful Eleanor of Aquitaine, the twelfth century successor in the Merovingian bloodline who (and this was significant) married a man nine years her junior.
“Young boys are an important part of my life!” Ursel still announces with a twinkle in a smoky voice. She is in her nineties.
Ursel loves the raised eyebrows her declaration causes. Then with perfect timing she explains that she is, of course, referring to her support of the football team, Young Boys, from the federal capital, Bern. She goes on to point out that the name is no more stupid than that of one of the Zurich clubs, Grasshoppers. If pressed Ursel admits that her true allegiance was to the very successful German club, Borussia Dortmund, whose team colours they shared with Young Boys, yellow and black.
Yellow and black diagonal stripes also decorate the shutters of the big house with a superb view of the Alps. Heinrich Lange had bought Säntisblick before the war. It had been home to Heinrich and his Ursel, then to Heinrich and his Erika, my Omi (although with Ursel still in residence), then to the two sisters on their own and in the end just to Ursel. And, in a way, it was home to me.
Aunt Ursel’s monster high-definition television set (almost always tuned to Sky Sport) was the sole modern touch in the cosy parlour, the Bauernstube, which was otherwise dominated by the traditional tiled stove. Not that Ursel Lange is an inactive stay-at-home football-crazed crone. Far from it. She had a weekly bridge evening with friends who were not all her contemporaries. She was very active in an association which had as its mission the promotion of traditional and ethnic music. Until her eyesight began to fail she enjoyed target shooting and still liked nothing better than to clean her Sig-Sauer and show off by loading it while blindfold, a trick she had insisted on teaching me as well. I was a decent shot, too.
“You never know, child. You never know!”
Her upright gait and leathery complexion speaks of plenty of fresh air, inhaled on long hikes in the hills of the neighbouring cantons, Appenzell and Sankt-Gallen.
Ursula Lange is the only family I have really. I have a very vague recollection of a father who when I was seven vanished to darkest Africa (to Burkina Fasso, Equatorial Kundu, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo or perhaps in some land even poorer and more benighted) where Dad subsequently did laudable and selfless things out of the goodness of his heart.
“Drunk on do-goodery… reading Plato to Picaninnies,” Ursel once pointed out with typical political incorrectness. Adolf Nestor Lange’s do-goodery had rarely included affection for his daughter, as I recall.
Over the years, although not for the last four or five, there had been an annual calendar which had always taken weeks to get from Africa to Weinfelden. My great-aunt explained that the delay was in part due to the fact that the calendars came to Germany in a parcel from Africa and were then sent on individually by post.
The calendars were nothing special, just a single image with small tear-off pages underneath, one for each month of whatever year. Usually it was a photo documenting some praiseworthy good work, the inauguration of a newly bored well, of a small clinic where there had been never before been any health-care facility, of a schoolroom crowed with shy, eager children.
The calendars had been issued by the Queen Sarah Foundation and in a few of the photos there was my Dad in the middle, flanked by villagers with a new source of clean water in Uganda, by a small group of grim-faced medics very much aware of the massive task before them in Equatorial Kundu or by little kids on their very best behaviour in Rwanda.
Sometimes Dad had almost smiled, but it was always strained.
I had kept one of these annual signs of life, the only one which was not a photo. It was a child’s drawing. She (somehow I intuited that it was a girl)