I changed trains along the Rhine where it elbowed away from France along the north border of a weird country. I was next told to catch what people called the Gleitenbahn, the Glide Rail, all the way to The Academy, a long arm of a new UK university system. As a new non-British initiate, I was requried to matriculate upfront with my passport.
I walked dutifully down a long, sterile corridor – you know, the kind in airports that would hypnotise you or turn you into a Zenner if you weren’t so stressed about making your plane. By the time I reached the end of the wing, I was forced to walk through a narrow gap of opaque, bullet-proof dividers until I reached a British official’s desk. Each officer was dressed in dark blue – almost black like a bruise. We did an heroic exchange of paperwork and I came away with an ornate visa stamped in my passport. The stamp was shaped like an octagon on an axis.
When I exited into the night air, I craned my neck to see the tops of fir trees. Their rows blinded my vision – I reeled back and flung back my head, trying to see their tops. They were so blue-black they were schwarrrz. Yes, schwarrrz, the way a German lecturer once pronounced the word when he was describing the Black Forest. The trees hemmed in the Academy Campus, blocking my view.
Then I looked south. I saw one silver top, a sharp peak. It began to spin on an axis. I stepped through the trees and into the high, black air. The stars glinted near my fingers. As if I’d the eyes of a satellite camera, I saw pinprick lights over a land of pinnacles. The land turned like a ragged wheel. It ran spinning up its own axis, then spun back down, then stood still. The national borders gleamed beneath me like a puzzle frame made of lazer, making the shape of one helluva cookie – Helvetia.
She stood there still under the midnight, a gleam of icy lake and mercury mountains. Her land rolled out beneath me, then grew bigger and bigger until my feet stood firm. I bent over, fingered the groove of a valley, massaged a mountain peak, trolled my fingernails on the bottom of an icy mere. I crouched down to dip my hand in the southwest depths of the Bodensee, the Bottom Sea – Lake Constance. Then I sat down inside a stone amphitheatre as wide as the nation. Three sat in the audience. One, an Alemannian, got up and walked over to me. He spoke Switzer, High Alemannic – no French, no Italian, no Rhaeto-Romance.
‘Don’t you need a Bierhalle? Turn around.’
I obediently turned my back and saw a steep-gabled lodge of wood, high as a mountain, built on a plateau of sheer rock. A spire of mountain, like a conical helmet, spiked upwards from the top of the lodge. I strode to the west flank and stepped onto the plateau – one step. I stood hundreds of feet above. I gladly gripped the weight of the door. It was as thick as the length of my arm. Made of cherry maybe? I was possessed with a desire for red – red wood, red leather, red ale, red flesh, red faces. I clopped over the planked floor. My feet sounded like hooves. My face beamed. I looked at my hand – it was ruddy in the red light. The guests were fiery, but no one howled or bellowed. Instead, they droned in deep voices like instruments planted in the roots of the Beer Hall. They whispered like Finns in a sauna. They sang. Not like hoarse-skreaking sportsmen, or lung-belting soldiers: They sang like wolves on the tundra.
They weren’t quite Swiss – they were High Bavarians of the Silvretta Alps, skirting the interzone between Austria and Switzerland. Their hall was made wholly of wood and stone. They sat on benches, on tables, in seat-niches carven into the walls. The hall’s central axis was a black mountain, also shaped and shelved, filled with beakers, goblets, tankards, truncheons, flagons. Along the outer walls sat Gesellen – ‘hall companions’ – splayed over benches draped with deerhides. They sat in chairs built into recesses inside the walls, with seat-backs shaped like boars, wolves and stags. Whenever my eyes met theirs, the Gesellen would lean their upper bodies sidelong off their seats, crane their heads sideways, nod, shout my health, then sit down hard as they dashed their tankards on the wood.
‘Prost!’ I nodded, holding their gaze longer than the Anglo-American world allowed. I sat down in the human sway of the benches. The voices rose and fell like rivers, babbling to a trickle, at last to a single draught. The banter was poured straight down, fearless, straight up.
My bench-fellow leaned his head toward mine. ‘What do you think, mein Bube? Want to join our firehood, our heartwood, our hot souls? Want to be raked over good hot coals?’
I opened my passport and fingered my student visa. The Bavarian Geselle looked at me with wry amusement:
‘Ach, Akademie, Akademos - Of a Silent Place. Used to mean that, you
know that. Your island Academy's silent - buckets of beer but no
Biergärten. There's drink but no fellowship. You get drivel from the
betters drunken by the lowers, the drunken lowers. There’s always an
offish druid leering over his loud crowd. Silence above. Bellowers
below. It's the loudness of ... Loud Silence. They scream about
everything but each other. They know everything but each other.’
At last I got up to leave. One of my companions stood up, set a weighty hand on my right shoulder, looked up the mountain and spoke out in strange Bavarian: ‘Du, hiar schraibmma Komerodschoft med gross’m K.’ Here we spell Kameradschaft with a Big K. A great big K.
I went downstairs, beneath Beer Hall and deep inside Beer Hall Mountain. I walked into a living room parlour. A colossal Kachelofen, a tile stove, rose from ground to roof and spanned the height and bredth of a wall. Doors of cast iron opened at its mouth – the rest was tawny tile, smooth as marble. Its perimeters formed benches and seats. I sat down on the hot tiles to warm my middles. I peered through a tiny passage and saw a wide-hipped woman boiling water. She turned and stared at me where I sat near her kitchen. I fidgeted, and asked, ‘Entschuldigen Sie mir bitte, darf ich hier rein? Pardon me, ma’am, may I come in?’
‘Du darfst, You’re allowed.’
-composed by Nathan Paul Hillman, 17 October 2011 & 14 April 2011
