bright business logo inside a circle. Their faces carried identical frowns, as if they were concentrating on a daunting problem. It wasn’t as though they were in pain. Their legs ran easily. It just looked like serious work.
Their faces were so similar that they might as well have been siblings: spare features and narrow, straight lips. Her lower lip was wider and droopy; his was rigid, so it looked like a horizontal slash inside his narrow, long face. Their hair was an indeterminate brown, rather like a non-color, a well-arranged camouflage. His hair had begun to thin back from his forehead and, what there was, looked fine and limp. Her hair was equally limp, but it was held in a tight ponytail away from her face should she allow herself to sweat.
Emma was trying to read them. Had they had a fight? Maybe they were irritated at finding someone on their path. Maybe they felt she was intruding, and that their important job of running on the path at this time of day was not to be interrupted by frivolous walkers. Maybe it was just that they had to make space for her, adjust their steps, and mess up their routine. Whatever the reason, the woman fell back, the man sped up, and they ran past Emma single file. After passing her, they matched up again and ran abreast. It didn’t seem as though they did it so they could speak. Emma could not hear any voices. Maybe it was a competitive thing—they figured out they’d get along as long as they did not try to outsprint each other.
The trim, hairless four legs disappeared around the corner. The air was still again except for a slight murmur of water against the pilings of the footbridge. Emma walked up the four concrete steps and out onto the bridge. The water moved imperceptably underneath. When she looked down, she couldn’t see fish, water spiders, nor anything else alive, but the water was clear, obviously clean, with a few brown leaves and a couple of small sticks on the river bottom. Otherwise, there were only pebbles and grayish mud.
All in all, it was a study in gray, brown, and black. The water was gray; the river bank brown; the sky dark-gray; the concrete bridge girders were gray; and the railing against which she leaned was black, painted metal. Finally, a silver glint: A tiny fish swam busily past and disappeared downriver. A brown leaf drifted after it. and then everything settled into gray again.
Emma blurred her gaze and imposed a tropical reel onto the scene. A black and white convict fish darted past a parrotfish, red-lipped and shimmering like a gaudily painted prostitute. Then a school of tiny, yellow-dotted angelfish appeared and, from under the rock, the red and black antennae of a crawfish. She could almost see them, but then a thought interfered. If fish couldn’t see color, why would nature waste a whole rainbow? Not only that, even if the fish had been able to see bright-red, blue, and yellow, why waste all that color deep underwater where the sun couldn’t reflect it? If there was a God, why didn’t she distribute some color to this gray prison? Maybe then people might smile or, at least, not frown so much.
“Hey.”
The voice came from behind her. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t exactly aggressive, but she had been so lost in her questioning that she had forgotten her usual vigilance. Her head jerked in the direction of the sound, and she saw a gray man standing below her on the steps that led up to the bridge.
“I say, you’re not going to jump, are you?” he queried once he was sure he had her attention.
“What?” Emma was so surprised she thought she had misheard.
“It’s not high enough a bridge, and the water isn’t all that cold. All you’d do is get wet and feel like a fool if you jump.”
“Why would you assume I’d do that?”
“You mind if I join you on the bridge?” he asked, slowly moving up the steps in her direction. Emma drew back a couple of feet but then decided it would look as if she were frightened.
He raised his arms as if to demonstrate he was not carrying a weapon. “I just don’t like to yell,” he said soothingly. He stopped once he was on the bridge itself, still about six feet away from her, and leaned over the railing.
“It’s just that not many people stare at the water for as long as you did unless they’re getting up the courage to do something … like jump … ”
Emma leaned her arms on the railing as well, and, for a while, they contemplated the view in silence.
“I’m Andy,” he said. “I live down here.” He pointed vaguely along the path in the direction where the joggers had disappeared. “I come down to the water a lot, and I rarely see anyone stopping on this bridge.”
As Emma still didn’t pick up on the conversation, he went on, “It’s funny. The busiest time down here is on weekends … late … you know, like midnight or so.”
“Yeah, I’ve been down here on a Saturday night myself,” Emma finally said. “We had a school party in the tower.” She indicated the direction with her head.
“They don’t allow that anymore. Safety reasons they claim, but they should make it into a historic site or something. People love that kind of stuff.”
”I remember when I first learned about it. Fourteenth-century prison tower. They said it was the place where they dumped the condemned prisoners.”
“The last slide. Disney could’ve learned from the old Swiss how to create a memorable scenario! At least as good as the walking the plank among pirates.”
“So it’s true?” Emma asked.
“Yep. I read court records. If you were found guilty, they put you back into the prison up there where the police station is now, and then they opened the trap door and off you went, sliding down the tunnel a couple of hundred meters into this dump … probably break a few bones on the way. If not, there were those spikes you landed on. And if that still didn’t do you in, you simply starved to death.”
“Far enough from the city so the smell would be no big deal, and they didn’t have to clean up. The fluids and stuff simply drained into the river. Yuck!” Emma shivered at the image her words created.
“Yes, but it has a sort of honest cruelty, don’t you think?” he said and added, “These days, everyone here is safe. No one gets put to death, and our citizens are the most cosseted, ensured, and protected in the known world. And what do we do? We whine. We are known to be Europe’s least-grateful country.”
Emma shrugged and said, “I just thought about that. But then, the Italians and Spaniards can smile and party. They have the climate for happiness. All we get is gloom. Just look around!” Then, as if she felt guilty for proving his point, she added, “Maybe it’s about preventing calamity. If you smile too much, fate will strike, since you obviously don’t understand that life is about work and suffering.”
“How Protestant of you! Toil and trouble, pain, suffering, and expulsion from paradise? You know, that’s very Huldreych Zwingli. He was way worse than Luther, an unforgiving fanatic who believed in government, the covenant with God, and who fought the Anabaptists as hard as he fought the Catholics. In his image, we became a righteous, stingy, and petty populace embodying the worst of his revolutionary fervor.”
“A bit harsh, isn’t it? And what do you mean ‘we’ embody his shadow?” Emma wasn’t sure she should provoke this gray little man with his unexpected fervor. He might well be insane, but she was interested despite herself.
“You are aware that we Swiss pride ourselves—with little proof, I might add—with knowing more languages, being better educated, and knowing more about the world than almost any other people. We travel the world, but stay in hostels in order not to be ostentatious. We eat the foods of all nations but finally come back to roesti and fondue, because, after all, too much luxury is unhealthy. The French use too much cream. The Germans drink too much beer, and their food is too heavy. The Italians guzzle wine and smell of garlic. The Spaniards and Portuguese are as bad as the Italians: eat too much fish, too much olive oil, and too much grease in general. Ditto the Greeks. And thus we dismiss all of Europe and, by default, become the only nation with insight, balance, and healthy eating habits.”
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