February in Zürich

Here’s a story. One evening last summer I stood on the balcony and for reasons unknown looked south through the multitude of Art Nouveau Mehrfamilienhäuser stretching away from our new home into the distance and into past centuries, instead of west across Zürisee towards the sun settling precariously atop Uetliberg where the sky makes an absolute mockery of me and my little ideas. Every afternoon now I stand in the kitchen to watch the clouds drown themselves in the last of the light, putting my awe between my body and the cold. But I am getting ahead of myself. On that night, of course, the air was mild. Perhaps it was the swallows that drew my attention, riding the day’s heat as it rose off the metal rooftops like everything I now offer up during these interminable winter nights. But I’ve gotten ahead of myself again. I recently learned that a dissimulation of swallows flying close to the earth presages rain, but they have been gone for months now and so the frozen patina spreading over the Meisenknödel I hung from the wrought-iron railings and Rollladen grips came as an unwelcome surprise to me, and in this dour half-light no birds have come to my windowsill after all. I’m not doing a very good job, am I. Let me begin again. One evening last summer I stood on the balcony and looked south and right there were the Alps, looming over the city, their horrible weight, the audacity of distant snow stunned pink. Distant, I ought to say, in time—the way last winter seemed distant on such a temperate, lovely night, when the clarity of summer had finally lifted the scrim from those distant mountains—distant now, I ought to say, in space—though no more distant, I am coming to know, than this winter watching me from the future, where I stand dreaming of another light that now seems like only a vision, or a warning, or maybe just another story I haven’t been able to tell.

Read more from Issue 22.1.