In the Country of Women. Susan Straight
the precursor to the Mennonites, plain and devout. But in the base of the stone walls, plastered over with white, are interred the bodies of four women.
Their names are inscribed on the exterior foundation. They were four mothers who all died within the space of a year, just after giving birth, their bodies wracked by fever and infection spread by a traveling doctor who never washed his hands or sterilized his equipment, back in the early 1800s. They would have been better off with a midwife. The babies had to be raised by others.
Rosa Erb was a distant descendant of one of those women. Her relatives told us this place was called the Wolf Church because the last wolf in Switzerland was killed near here. There are no large wild predators in Switzerland now—no wolves or bears, because they were all hunted a century ago. Cows and goats and sheep were always how farmers survived in the mountains. The Erb family has the most successful chicken hatchery in the area.
I remember standing in this place, the dark forest all around us, the vision of wolves and dying mothers and babies bundled in cloth and given to someone else. It felt like I had stepped inside the Grimm’s fairy tales that my mother read to us with commentary, unlike most other mothers. She had lived in the forest. She had walked with a wooden basket. She had a little apron. She had a stepmother who wished she would disappear.
My mother has returned to Switzerland only briefly, three times since she left in 1950. The first time, my stepfather sold his laundry business and took all of us to the place where she was born, which she hadn’t seen for twenty-eight years. We tried to find her mother’s grave in Wattenwil, in a tiny cemetery. We walked the rows again and again, as her face crumpled. No stone with the name Frieda Leu. On the narrow lane through the village, an older woman told my mother that after a few decades, another person is buried on top. “There is no room,” the woman said, holding a wooden basket filled with cheese.
A week later, we went to the Wolf Church with Marie Erb, who married Rosa’s brother Fritz and had six sons. The Erbs had become our Swiss family, though Rosa Erb Leu never went back home.
Rosa was born in August 1916 in Oberdiessbach, the ninth of ten children. Her mother died when Rosa was three. Her stepmother, whom the children had to call Mrs. Erb, hated the girls. Too many daughters in that family, and three of the girls were sent off to marry widowers with children. Men who needed a woman to clean and cook and run a house. Rosa had dealt with blood, injury, and disease for her entire life. She never had a chance at love, and in all my years, I never saw my grandmother smile, touch anyone with joy, or behave in any way as if happiness and pleasure were not terrible ideas, and extremely unhealthy.
Rosa’s first job, when she was sixteen, was to train as a nurse in an insane asylum in another valley, about fifty miles from her home. I found this out only when I was an adult, and she was nearly blind. I went to visit her, at her mobile home in Hemet, California, twenty miles from here, a mobile home whose décor had never changed in the thirty years she’d lived in it. I stood close to my favorite painting, the first piece of art I had truly studied, when I was very small. This was the world my mother had left: a scene by the Swiss artist Anker, a woman leading a parade of children down a rural lane with the Alps in the distance. But this afternoon, when I spoke to her about the picture, my grandmother stood beside me and pointed to a building tucked into a fold of the mountain behind the road. “I worked there. That is the krankenhaus for the people ill in their brain,” she said. As she got older, half her words went back to Swiss German. “It was a terrible place. That was mein arbeit when I was sixteen. With those terrible people. I was always a nurse.”
Then she said, “You can go see if there are tomatoes.” For Christmas, she gave us flannel pajamas. We did not live in the snow. We lived in a place where Christmas Day sometimes reached 85 degrees, but she didn’t want us to catch cold.
As a child, I loved the homes of parents from other places. Our neighbors were from Japanese cities, and they had rice-paper screens and kimonos; from the rural Philippines, with lemongrass in the garden and the smell of adobo cooking; pueblos in Mexico from which parents brought plaster statues of the Virgen of Guadalupe, veladora candles lit on altars, and pan dulce left as ofrendas for the dead; rural Louisiana, where huge electric cookers would be full of gumbo and the fathers spoke Creole French; Mississippi, where fried chicken and greens were on the stove and blues by Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf were on the stereo.
No one knew where Switzerland was, and no one had a mother and grandmother from the land of Heidi, featuring florally accessorized cows, cheese with holes that seemed to emanate stink, and a weird wooden clock.
In the only photo I had ever seen of my real grandmother, Frieda Steiger Leu was wearing the Swiss costume of her canton, smiling widely, leading a parade of schoolchildren down a rural road. Exactly like the famous painting. My mother showed us the photo maybe three times during our entire childhood. Not until I was fifty, and asked a friend to make a digital copy, did my mother point to one child and say casually, “That’s me.” She is holding her mother’s hand.
My grandfather hated mountains. What kind of Swiss man hates the Alps? The Matterhorn in a valley not far away. Chalets, waterfalls, the pristine blue lakes. Paul Leu felt claustrophobic in the deep narrow clefts between the famous mountains. He was tired of working as a train conductor. The war had made survival hard. He wanted adventure. He bought maps and planned to take the family to Venezuela, then the Belgian Congo, then New Zealand, but none of those worked out.
Frieda Steiger Leu, Burgistein, Switzerland, around 1936
He and Rosa had one daughter now, Christine—blond, blue-eyed, fragile and fairylike. In 1950, he and Rosa and the four children took a train through France, crossed the channel to England, and took a ship to Canada. In Oshawa, thirty miles from Toronto, there were farm jobs.
The Leus were given an ancient wooden house, more like a barn, split in half between their Swiss family and a Czechoslovakian family who were war refugees. My mother worked with her father and stepmother hoeing, weeding, picking corn and strawberries. The younger children went to school.
Did Rosa tell my mother she was unattractive? Not destined for love? Not deserving of love? Not living in circumstances that allowed for love?
My mother only says that shortly thereafter, Rosa told her to marry a neighboring pig farmer. The man came to inspect her. My mother refused. Then she ran away. She told me for the first time, two years ago, “Those people were idiots! My father couldn’t even handle a housepainting job. He was too short! He was forty-five years old! They said they were going to America. They were going to buy a trailer and go to Florida. So I packed my suitcase and left. I wasn’t going to live in a trailer.”
She had been babysitting in Oshawa for a family with three children. “They had a brick house,” she told me. (My mother has always loved the finer distinctions of real estate.) “They said I could live there. I babysat the children, I went to school.” She had one and a half years of high school, but quit to work as a night waitress in a hotel coffeeshop, where men came in on break from the General Motors auto plant. Men from Poland and Hungary who had been doctors and architects in a former life. Even more, my mother wanted to make enough money to escape poverty.
That year, my grandfather took Rosa, his sons Christophe and Markus and daughter Christine, across the border to Detroit. He bought a Pontiac and a travel trailer. The family headed to Winter Haven, Florida, where he thought he had another great job, but it turned out to be more crop work. Florida was a place of sandy roads, shacks, hard labor, humidity, and spiders the size of pancakes, according to Rosa. After seven months, she’d had enough. She’d seen postcards from southern California, the images famous for drawing immigrants to the Golden State—orange trees loaded with fruit in the shadow of purple mountains capped with snow. Fontana, California. But more important, someone had told her about Kaiser Steel, which was hiring nurses.
They drove across America to Fontana, parked the trailer in a court among other trailers, and Rosa was immediately hired as a nurse. This was 1952, when Kaiser Steel was a huge manufacturing plant, employing thousands of men, many from Kentucky. My uncles remember getting beaten