It’s cloudy and gray this morning. I’ve been sick for going on a week now, and I am missing work today for it. I feel an uneasy mixture of guilt and exhaustion. Bodies have always maddened me - they never do what you want them to, and they are, ultimately, beyond the reach of my control.
I see flashes of a vision, a memory: seated on a train, the landscape flashing by through weathered windows. The blue sky, green pastures. The peaks of mountains reaching into the distance. That faint smear of gray on the horizon, the storm that ever lingers, ready to roll in right after dinner. The feeling of adventure, of movement, of novelty, of possibility. There is a coffee on the small table in front of me, cheap, black. I bought it at the train station for a franc twenty. There is a bread roll, half eaten, in a crumpled paper bag beside it. Under both of these things is a newspaper, half open, half read. The Zürcher Zeitung, not the most liberal of news reporting sources, but fairly reliable nonetheless.
I am tapping my foot impatiently, looking at the clock, checking where we are on the map. The woman’s voice on the speaker system calls out the name of the next stop first in German, then in French, then in Italian, and finally in English. I listen to all of them, noting the slight differences in translation, wondering why they chose to omit a certain modifier in the Italian version, changed the phrasing in the French.
I look up as an elderly woman approaches my cluster of seats, asks in a thick Bernese accent whether the seat across from me was free. I tell her that it is, ja, sicher, making sure to emphasize the gutteral ch, the hardness of the r. I try to sound as Swiss as I can muster and seems to buy it, smiles, sits down.
I look out the window for a moment longer and then hesitate, glance down at the bag beside me. It’s filthy, I’ve never washed it - the bottom is gray with dirt and grime, the large black letters spelling out Orell Fussli starting to fade at the edges. I rummage around inside of it, my fingers searching, feeling desperately for what it is I’m looking for - and there! Finally.
I take the book out and set it on the table in front of me, take a sip of my coffee. The woman across from me glances over, trying to be discreet, but I see her eyes squinting to make out the title. I smile. “Es ist auf Englisch,” I say, almost apologetically, and silently curse myself for the clarity with which I said the ist, the sharp and undeniably German pronunciation of es. She looks at me enquiringly, surely wondering about my sudden change in dialect. Was I not Swiss after all? A German in disguise? Austrian, perhaps? Or another type of foreigner - the most suspicious kind, the culturally ambiguous ones?
I clear my throat and look away, back down to my book, then out the window. I try to look normal, unbothered, innocent. Not that I’m not any of these things - I’m not guilty of anything. Yet speaking in other people’s mother tongues always leaves me with a feeling of embarrassment, a subtle shame, an unspoken yet embodied apology for having the nerve to think that I was good enough to speak in their language, muddle their history, trample about inside their world.
What gives me the right to speak Swiss German? I am not Swiss - not even close. I’m just an American, an ignorant, a wannabe. I spent years lusting after a language that was unknown to me, a world that felt closed off, a culture that I at once longed to be a part of and simultaneously knew I could never join.
It is a particular kind of sadness, the one that accompanies a realization like this. It is bittersweet, melancholic - but more than that it is resigned. It is a resignation of the self, an admittance of improbability, a white flag of defeat. I will never be one of them. As much as I wanted to, as much as my child self had longed to be, that world will never truly belong to me. I have accepte this, and with that acceptance comes the heaviness of impossibility.