Anyway, so I had to go to Zurich again for a few days. My mother urgently wished to see me. On the phone she’d said I had better come quickly, please, which was so disturbing that I became terribly anxious and constipated the whole weekend long. Then there was this: I’d written a novel a quarter century ago called Faserland—a forgettable title—which ends in Zurich, out in the middle of the lake, somewhat traumatically. 

The whole story came back to me again, in Zurich, down on Bahnhofstrasse, where I’d bought a dark-brown, scratchy wool sweater at a sad little wooden stall, not far from Paradeplatz. It was already evening, and I’d taken some valerian, and the effect of the pills and the despair of an autumnal Switzerland and the twenty-five preceding years weighed, leaden beyond measure, on my mood. 

Just before that I had been out in the old town. Over in Niederdorf there’d been an underground screening of In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, the last film by Guy Debord, completed just before his suicide. Four or five people had come, which was a miracle on account of the still radiant evening warmth and that bloodless, soporific movie. 

And after the audience, which is to say a pair of professors, the projectionist, and a homeless man who’d wanted to doze in the cinema seat for a while, had said their goodbyes and hands were shaken, I must have walked back down into the night toward Paradeplatz, without aim or purpose. And there, on the other side of the river Limmat, I came across a makeshift stall run by some Swiss commune, where two bespectacled women of indeterminate age and a kindly bearded young man were selling heavy wool sweaters and blankets in natural colors, which they had knitted themselves. 

Compared to the clothing shown in the windows of the long- closed but still brightly illuminated boutiques on Bahnhofstrasse, these simple woolen items possessed for me a homespun sort of authenticity, just as the women’s smiles seemed, there’s no other way to put it, suffused with reality and meaning. Certainly more real than the rest of Bahnhofstrasse, with its dozens upon dozens of Swiss flags hanging left and right, and the luxurious and useless baubles in the display cases. And, for a brief moment, when I handed them the hundred-franc bill, after taking off the sweater I’d impulsively tried on despite the chill, and accepting it, folded inside a light brown paper bag, I had the impression, perhaps also false, of having derived something meaningful from this transaction. 

At any rate, I was handed the bag and a faded color brochure, which I accepted with mild embarrassment. I could dispose of it later unnoticed, I’d thought, and I said goodbye with an awkward smile and strolled toward Münsterplatz, shivering slightly, with the idea of having a drink at the bar of the Kronenhalle before returning to the hotel, climbing into bed, taking another herbal sleeping pill, and turning out the light. 

I now understand that my mother’s affairs, which had forced me to visit Zurich every other month, this city of posers and braggarts and debasements, had completely paralyzed me for years. The whole thing had become vile, altogether heinous, it had become more than I was able to bear, than one should normally have to bear. My mother was very sick, in the head, too—not just there, but primarily there. 

In order not to lose her, and so as not to succumb to resignation and hopelessness, I’d decided at some point to visit her every other month. In fact, I’d simply decided to accept the misery in which my mother had been wasting away for decades in her apartment, surrounded by empty vodka bottles rolling about, unopened invoices from various Zurich sable-fur warehouses, and the crinkling foils of her packs of pain medication. Now, though, she had contacted me of her own accord and summoned me to her; as a rule she had always just waited until I showed up, in that two-month rhythm, in Zurich. Usually she would ask me to tell her some stories. Her phone call made me, as I said, even more anxious than these visits already did because she must have had some ulterior motive. She suddenly had the upper hand; she had taken the initiative, whereas she would otherwise always keep silent and wait. 

She had neither e-mail nor a mobile phone, and she spurned the internet. Too complicated, she would say, and the buttons were too small. I guessed, however, that she refused it all out of arrogance and not out of the simple inability to use a phone. She pretended to like reading the newspapers and Stendhal. Her skin had the texture of dry silk, and she was always slightly suntanned despite never sitting outside on the terrace, among the hydrangeas. Her housekeeper stole from her. Every other day her wallet was empty. Although she almost never spent any money, it was all invariably gone, just as her black Mercedes was gone one day, too: taken from her apartment building’s garage and transported off to Macedonia by the Macedonian husband of her Macedonian housekeeper. It was miserable, but at least she wasn’t in Winterthur anymore. 

For that was where she’d had to celebrate her eightieth birthday, on the closed psychiatric ward. If one were to have a sense of humor about it, the scene was like something out of Dürrenmatt, only it was much sadder than in Dürrenmatt because this was not just anyone’s mother, but my mother, and not just any psychiatric ward, but the one bearing the darkest and cruelest name of all: Winterthur. 

I had forgotten or repressed that the clinic had another name, something like Frankenstein. It was something along those lines, but I couldn’t recall anymore. In any case, they’d released her from Winterthur—had been forced to release her, because only a court order could keep her in the mental hospital, and there wasn’t one and there never would be one. You see, by her cunning manipulations, her brusque sangfroid, my mother knew how to persuade whoever was examining her that everything was perfectly fine, that she had only to be allowed back into her apartment and everything would remain that way. She had only to be left to her phenobarbital, her cases of deplorable Fendant—white wine in screw-top bottles at seven francs fifty—her subscription to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, discontinued every week and promptly ordered again, and those mediocre Expressionist paintings that her husband, my father, had given her during their marriage, while he’d of course kept the Noldes, Munchs, and Kirchners he’d filched in East Germany rolled up under his bed in the château on Lake Geneva, where he lived after divorcing her. 

Thoughts of my late father’s lost collection tormented me every time I learned that this or that work had been auctioned off at Grisebach in Berlin or at Christie’s in London or at Kornfeld in Bern. They were pictures I had known since my earliest childhood, from our chalet in Gstaad. Every viscid brushstroke, every bluishyellow cloud trimmed in black remained painfully familiar to me. And so, whenever I visited my mother, I was faced with the insolence of those third-rate German Expressionist paintings hanging in her apartment, left over from our family’s extraordinary collection. Pictures by Georg Tappert, for instance, or Max Kaus, and it’s impossible to say what was more wretched: my mother’s condition or those sorry daubs hanging on her walls in Zurich, like framed mockeries. 

The disintegration of this family had a fathomless despair about it. And its low point was my mother’s eightieth birthday in the common room of the Winterthur mental hospital. She had sat there, clutching her knees, her greasy ash-blonde hair in a ponytail, wearing a pale blue terrycloth tracksuit. The eight-hundred-franc bouquet of flowers from Bahnhofstrasse on the table in front of her; the sunken palimpsest of her face bruised by a drunken fall and coated with deep-red crusts of blood, her eyebrows barely discernible now, covered by the zigzag of lacerations stitched up with dark thread. This was the katabasis: the decline of the family expressed in the topography of her face.