 A Onthe Way to Feed the Swans By Hannelore Hahn Dedication
To my mother and my daughter, Elizabeth Julia… and special thanks for love and support to Ellen Resch and John R. Lawrence Author’s Note I am inclined to liken the writing of this book to the shaping of a bell. Everyone has his bell. This is to say, we all have our individual lives and those things which have happened to us. And even though we shape this material into a bell and put a clapper to it, it might not ring at all, or at best make only a dull sound. Facts alone do not make a story. Plot is a device for the writers of fiction. But an autobiography which plots the course of one’s life must have a ring to it—a timbre, a cadence. At the beginning, that special sound may just be heard inside your head and only for a moment. Something may occur to you, as in a dream, except you sense it was not a dream, but a visitation. Such moments are rare and fleeting. Generally, the geology of our lives is a layered mass…a labyrinthed mineshaft of compressed memory, charred meteors imbedded in brain cells. Still, in order to write reconectively, these blackened nodules must be visited. Then, when contact is made, they must be sensed beyond personal property and reset within a landscape whose topography may be traveled by all. What has helped me was the image of the earth as seen from outer space by the astronauts. A new view of something very familiar, a distant perch. This gave perspective to the canvas. What also helped was the continual buffing of the bell. The continual working of the material from the inside. It was the sound I heard from a section which had been buffed right, that kept me going.
It took a long time to ring the bell.
Chapter One By New York time it was seven in the morning. I had been traveling for thirteen hours and had eaten twice on the plane. But who could refuse lunch in an elegant Swiss dining car on its way from Zurich to Milan? The Italian-speaking head waiter seated me next to two Swiss ladies and inquired if I would have some wine. Salute! The dining car ritual which has been described and redescribed in countless books and depicted in movies, had begun. Between sips of Beaujolais, I watched the scenery at my window change like the courses on the menu. Swiss chalets dotted with red geraniums were followed by Oxtail Claire en Tasse. Green meadows surrounded by snow-capped mountains came with Cote de Veau Milanaise, gulps of blue lakes and Spritzers of white waterfalls. And, between bites, there were tunnels to give the eyes and stomach a moment of rest. In an hour and a half I would be in Lugano where, at the Kurhaus C., I had arranged to meet Hertha. When I was a child she had served in our household in Dresden as a cook and nanny and had, despite Nazism, Fascism and Communism, not to mention the fire bombing and destruction of Dresden itself, maintained a loving contact with my family, particularly with me whom she had loved as her child. This connection was never severed. *** ”Do you remember,” she would write, “When you and I had breakfast on Sundays by ourselves on the kitchen balcony? Your Pappi and Mutti still slept, of course, but we had the world to ourselves.” Or,
Do you remember the day I sent you to the greengrocer to get some parsley and you came back with a bagful of old lettuce? I was just about to scold you, but then I found the parsley at the very bottom of the bag. Herr Benke told me later that you had asked him to put the old lettuce on top to play a trick on me. ‘Fill the bag up with some rotten vegetables,’ you had said to him, ‘so Hertha will think I brought the wrong thing.’ Oh, you were a devil. But those were good times, the best times of my life. If only Hitler hadn’t come, I would still be with you. *** The train stopped in Lugano. Soon we would meet. Our first meeting in forty years.
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