The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries by Jessa Crispin

Author:Jessa Crispin [Crispin, Jessa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226278599
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-08-04T04:00:00+00:00

Lausanne / Igor Stravinsky

“You know they’ve hollowed out some of the mountains, don’t you?”

It sounds like some sort of marvelous conspiracy theory, but the Irish writer I’m talking to is of reasonable sanity despite the extensive collection of swords that line his walls and almost cut off my toes when I stumbled around in the dark looking for the bathroom early one morning and laid my hand on the wrong thing to try to steady myself.

“They have bomb shelters for something like 95 percent of their population. You know how many Americans would be saved by shelters in a nuclear attack? Less than 5 percent.”

“Is that something we still have to worry . . .”

His wife breaks in. “And the bridges in and out of the country are wired with explosives, so they can isolate themselves in a minute in case of attack.”

At the time of the conversation, it sounded like they had both read a New Yorker article and retained the wrong information, but a little poking around proved them accurate, with only a little exaggeration. Switzerland is ready, at all times, to cut itself off from the rest of the world. A country that declares neutrality had better be able to enforce that neutrality, and Switzerland most certainly can, from its mandatory conscripted army to its collapsible bridges—not actually wired with explosives, although there is a plan in place for every bridge built on how to bring it down in an instant. New construction projects may not be planned out on the foundations of paranoia anymore, but much of the country’s existing infrastructure was put in place when they were.

It’s not as if the impulse has died, it seems only to have shifted. Sharing a border with Germany will make a girl nervous, sure, but the extremes the country has gone to, and the whole populace nodding their heads and saying yes, that seems reasonable, let’s hollow out some mountains, I’ll vote for that, reveals something a little more internal. And when we are in the grips of an unconscious urge, we can stop one behavior but another simply forms in its place, manifesting the same urge wearing a different dress.

So when Switzerland makes the international news these days, it’s for banning the construction of minarets while comparing the shape of the structure to a nuclear missile, or for strictly limiting the number of immigrants, or for some other gesture out of line with the European talking point of inclusivity and fluid borders. Switzerland knows: there is more than one way to build a fortress.

* * *

No tunnels collapse nor bridges fall as I pass from the German border into Switzerland, and so I guess that means they do not see me as a threat. I have been in Switzerland before, always while in an emotional lull. This is a very good place to come when one is falling apart; the solidity of the place, the physicality of those mountains that snugly close you in, becomes something of an emotional exoskeleton.

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