If you’ve read The Tanners, you’ll recall that the novel ends on a winter night, in an inn on a hill overlooking the city:
Around Christmastime [Simon] went walking up the slope of the mountain. It was getting on toward evening and terribly cold. A biting wind whistled about people’s noses and ears, which grew red and inflamed from the cold. Simon automatically chose the path that once had led to Klara’s woodland home and now had been cleared and widened. Every where the trace of transforming human hands was visible. He saw a large but nonetheless charming building on the very spot where the wooden chalet used to stand where he had gone so often when Kaspar was still painting there, with the dear peculiar woman living in it. Now a health resort had been established there, and it appeared to be quite popular, for any number of well-dressed people were going in and out. Simon spent a moment considering whether he too should go inside, but the bitter cold alone was enough to make the thought of a warm room filled with people agreeable, and so he went in.
Simon has no money and is afraid he will be sent back into the cold, but the proprietress notices his tattered clothes and takes pity on him, and orders her staff to bring him food. At the end of the evening she sits and speaks with him, and he tells her the story of himself and his siblings, which rehearses, in part, the story told by the novel itself.
It’s a beautiful ending, though somewhat odd and unexpected. But the oddness of the ending wasn’t what made me pause the other night when I reread it. What made me pause was the realization that I had actually stayed in that inn when I visited Zurich in 1997.
Here’s a picture I took. This place is that place.
The modern-looking addition on the left is of course new, but the building on the right is the original inn constructed in 1900 by the Zurich Women’s Club, as noted on the website of the Sorell hotel group, which operates the inn today as the Hotel Zürichberg:
In 1898, innovative Zurich townswomen, who had previously made a name managing alcohol-free inns, ambitiously resolved to set up a spa center on the Zürichberg mountain just outside the city. It was to be a place where the population of Zurich could come to relax on the weekends and during holidays. After an intensive construction phase, the spa center was completed in 1900 and the Hotel Zürichberg was opened. The construction costs amounted to around half a million Swiss francs – a huge sum at that time. Nevertheless, guests were charged only three Swiss francs per overnight stay, including full board.
Is the “proprietress” in the book Susanna Orelli, who founded the inn and is remembered today as a temperance leader and humanitarian?
Anyhow, I thought it was extremely uncanny that the only time in my life I had ever been to Zurich (until last month, when I visited a second time), I had stayed in the building in which the final chapter of The Tanners takes place — and never knew.
On a less trivial note, that last chapter of The Tanners, particularly at the end, when the proprietress proposes to lead Simon back out into the winter night, reminded me of Bede’s sparrow:
The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant.
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Sam :: Nov.22.2009 ::
The Tanners ::
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