The Plague Diaries Part 3: The Long, Dark Switzerland of the Soul

It fits – quarantine in Switzerland. For my first two weeks here, I complained about the Swiss Sundays – strange, empty days when all shops, restaurants, and bars are closed, classes are cancelled, and the country grinds to a shuddering halt.

Sunday does not appear on most timetables; the day is non-extant, verboten. The inhabitants of Switzerland spend the day sharpening their army knives, drinking endless glasses of wine and staring gloomily into their fondue pots, seeking out sigils of prognostication among the burnt strands of cheese.

Unable to bear the boredom, more than a few choose to end their lives. Every Sunday morning, from my window, I watch a small column of them wade, lemming-like, into the icy waters of the lake until the waves crash over their heads, and they are gone forever, a thin trickle of bubbles the only clue to their fate.

Five weeks ago, an eternity now, I moved to the sleepy lakeside town of Montreux for a short contract as an agency copywriter. My client is a company that operates five hospitality schools across the Swiss diaspora. For a cool $150,000 a year, my client teaches students the finer points of design, event management, culinary arts, and hospitality skills.

Montreux is a nice place to take a short holiday. The views of the snow-crusted mountains over the lake are stunning, and the streets bristle with clothing stores and tourist bric-a-brac, often commemorating the town’s musical history. Freddy Mercury spent the last years of his life in Montreux, emaciated and severely sick. His statue that stands before the lake indicates the discretion of the inhabitants of this quiet Swiss town. The Deep Purple song Smoke on the Water was written as the band watched the Montreux casino burn to ashes. The town is also home to the Montreux Jazz Festival, which attempts, and ultimately fails to redeem it as clean, beautiful, and deeply, terminally boring.

In the two weeks before the escalation of the virus, I had built a life I enjoyed – working from the office, commuting into Lausanne to see the only two friends I have in the country, mingling in bars, practising my greasy French, hitting the gym and sauna, attending boxing or BJJ classes five or six times a week and preparing to fight again, and going for evening walks along the lake, staring as the snow-crusted mountain and the blue, placid water.

The cherry on top of this piece of Swiss confectionary was the free buffet meals I enjoyed three times a day – roast beef, chicken, tuna, salad, juice, coffee, fresh bread (how I missed bread in Myanmar), and no one stopping me from lurching back to the salad bar for another round. By the time you read this, I would have been almost about to leave – a brief holiday in a dull, beautiful town.

Now, like much of the world’s population, I am going nowhere fast. Over the last few weeks, the slow escalation of lockdown procedures has gently confined me more and more to my room in the Freddy. Rumours surged that last Friday, the country would enter a state of full Italian/French lockdown, and the room where I lay my head would have become my prison and perhaps my tomb, but that didn’t pan out. As of this Tuesday, I now enjoy more freedom than my countrymen in England; my daily run goes uninterrupted.

But this has been a month of Sundays. From my window in the Freddy, I watch masked Chinese students creep through the streets. Dispensing with the utopian cleanliness of the Swiss spirit, the plague laps at the marble walls and licks its tongue against the frosted glass of the jewellery stores. A lonely figure drinks a can of beer, and a plume of smoke emerges defiantly from his cigarette. Once or twice a day, kids will stand outside the nearby skate park, blast trashy hip-hop, and smoke pungent Moroccan hash. At 9 pm, the inhabitants of Switzerland open their shutters and clap and shout in solidarity. Presumably, with those affected by the virus – not the weed-smoking kids.

Numbers climb, the death toll rises, and the world becomes smaller and yet farther away. This is my life now. Before, yes, I lived in Switzerland. But now I truly understand what it is to live there. For some time, I was here physically—now I am here spiritually, too—a spiritual Switzerland—the long, dark Switzerland of the soul.