Читать книгу Westward - Leo Schelbert - Страница 7

“Our family is like mixed greens of different ethnic groups, says my German friend. My husband David is from Sierra Leone, I am from Switzerland, and my son is married to a Chinese woman. When David and I take our grandchildren with their almond eyes for a walk in Sag Harbor, the whole world meets.” Ellen Carney laughs and uses a clasp to put up her long white hair. She wears a light airy summer dress, which she made herself as she has done with her entire wardrobe for decades.

For over twenty years the family therapist Ellen Carney-Ernst has been living with her second husband David, a former UN official, in Sag Harbor, at the eastern end of Long Island. In the 19^th century whalers lived on this island near Manhattan, later painters discovered the region, and today stars and starlets from movies and TV – such as Steven Spielberg or Renée Zellweger – have their summer residences here.

Ellen and David live in a secluded modest house that David had built in the 1950s. The glamour that surrounds the regions of the Hamptons – an area of wonderful sandy beaches – does not affect them. “In Sag Harbor, where everyone has everything, we live behind the times. We don’t need luxury. We drive a 1983 Chevy, and my Mazda is 16 years old. We came to Sag Harbor long before it became the Saint-Tropez of New York.” The Carney’s house is like a museum. It is filled to the rafters with mementoes and treasures of its widely travelled owners. Each piece has its history and tells stories from different continents – Asia, Africa, America, and Europe. Mixed among them are many textile creations of the lady of the house. “Yet at times I would like to see only white walls,” Ellen says.

The one-story house has a basement that is as long as the house and contains a huge library. “This is David’s world. He is a researcher, philosopher, and mathematician. Only he can find his way among these thousands of books about art, philosophy, medicine, politics and literature.” The Carney’s house has no microwave oven, no answering machine, no swimming pool or manicured lawn. “Status symbols mean nothing to me. Do you know how much we have gotten from the village dump? That’s where the rich people discard their good stuff. Lots of books are from there, many of our chairs and our table. Once we saw a grand piano for the taking. And a few years ago I found a Bible from which flew twelve 100-dollar bills. Isn’t this decadent? Of course, I took the money together with the Bible.”

Ellen Ernst was born on April 10, 1926, in Zurich in the car on the way to the Bethanien Hospital. “The doctors gave me little chance to survive. I was blue by the time my parents reached the hospital. I was transported to the Children’s Hospital. My heart was weak as well as my lungs. But I survived, and my parents handled me with kid gloves. I was never allowed to do gymnastics or to swim. I was always ‘wrapped in cotton’. Later in life I made up for it. Perhaps my adventurous life was my revenge; that is certainly possible. I always knew – since I was a child – that I was different; I just didn’t know how I was different.” Ellen was always sickly. “Often I would have a fever and bronchitis for weeks, bronchiectasis. Because of heart and lung problems my parents sent me several times to health resorts, to Adelboden and Ägeri. These days it is again bad with my cough at times.”

“I always knew that I was different; I just didn’t know how I was different.” (1928)

Ellen’s parents were never really settled. “Mother was a secretary, and my father came from a family of butchers. Father hated butchering, but mother thought she would always have enough to eat, blood and liver sausage. Father preferred to take pictures of guests in Swiss resorts. He developed the pictures over night, and mother had to deliver them the next day. One of my first childhood memories is from Engelberg where on ice people pushed around what looked like water bottles – playing curling. Perhaps I was about two years old. And I will never forget the woman in Wengen who had her leg in a cast on a chair and ate her lettuce with her hands. Besides living in resorts we also lived in Wollishofen, part of Zurich and in Winterthur where we had a movie theater.”

It was only in 1930, when their second child Fritz was born in Altstetten, that the family more or less settled in Zurich. (1932)

It was only in 1930, when their second child Fritz was born in Altstetten, that the family more or less settled in Zurich. But even then, the family kept on moving around town, to the Weststrasse, the Gertrudstrasse, the Grüngasse and eventually to the Badenerstrasse. “My father moved us and his business to various locations. My memories from that time have faded. My parents did not talk about it much. We did not discuss the past. And we rarely had spontaneous guests and there was never much food on the table. My mother always cooked precise amounts. She did not want leftovers. But we always went on vacations, at a time when this wasn’t fashionable yet. We drove to Alassio, to Cattolica, and to the Appenzell during the war. Simply going away: this was different from the families of the children with whom we grew up.”

For health reasons Ellen was not able to attend kindergarten. “I remained in my world of thoughts and phantasies. Our parents had little time for us children. Just the other day Fritz said to me on the phone: ‘You know, our parents simply left us to ourselves.’ But therefore we became independent. This was unusual; it was an adventure. As a child I learned to look around. I observed and drew my own conclusions. As a child I was an introvert.”

Going to school turned out liberating for Ellen. “I devoured books as soon as I was able to read. Emil und die Detektive by Erich Kästner was my first book. Soon I also read newspapers and the Pestalozzi Calendar, which contained pictures and also some cultural items. I was an outsider, hardly had any girlfriends. I had to stay home all the time. My brother says even today that I was too good as a child. I embarrassed him. He always got the spankings that – actually – I deserved.” Becoming a doctor was Ellen’s only dream. “Probably, because I was always sick. My doctor impressed me, and especially our neighbor, Dr. Schnabel, an unmarried woman, who had founded the hospital in Lambarene together with Albert Schweitzer. I had a crush on Albert Schweitzer.”

Ellen’s teacher in primary school realized that this intelligent girl was cut out for the Gymnasium, the college prep school. “He tutored me privately, thus I passed the entrance exam for the Töchterschule, the Gymnasium for girls, on the Hohe Promenade in Zurich. Before the war this was unusual for girls from my social milieu. At the beginning we were about 40 students; at the end it was about a dozen that went all the way to the Matura [the final exam which guarantees entrance to any university]. One became an architect, another a gynecologist. For the last half year before the final exam I had no report card; I was always sick. Out of the six and a half years of the curriculum I probably have report cards for about four years. My classmates knew what would be expected at the final exams; I had not the faintest idea. I simply took the exams without any extra tutorials. But I did pass the finals with Latin, English and Italian.”

During WWII their English teacher encouraged her students to go to the Red Cross Club in the Hotel Eden on the Bahnhofstrasse. “There American GIs on furlough in Switzerland would speak English with us, dance with us. I didn’t need to hear this twice. These evenings were fascinating. I met a lot of interesting people. To meet people who would freely discuss topics we were not allowed to broach at home, that was an incredible experience. At the end of my Gymnasium years the war had ended; it was also the end of those evenings – but my fondness for Americans remained.”

Ellen’s parents did not want to hear about her going to university. “And I had no idea what I could do after graduation. My father took me into his photo shop, which he had opened at the Badenerstrasse in Zurich’s 3^rd district and in which he had set up a portrait studio. But taking portraits was not my cup of tea. Nevertheless, one day he sent me on a picture hunt with an empty roll of Kodak film. I was to take pictures of people in the Landesmuseum (Swiss National Museum).”

There she met two GIs, a black man from New York and a white one from Philadelphia, they were super models for her. “And once again I was able to speak English. I offered the two a guided tour through the museum. Howard from Philadelphia – who had seen action in Northern Africa and Italy – insisted on getting my address. And soon we wrote letters back and forth and talked about Chinese philosophy. I found this very adventurous.”

One day in 1947, a few months after his discharge, Howard appeared on the doorsteps of her family’s apartment in the Badenerstrasse. “Self-confident, he announced that we should get married.” Howard was an American Quaker who, enraged about Hitler, had volunteered for the Army; he stayed in Switzerland for three months to get to know Ellen. “And he persisted in wanting to marry me. I saw things differently. I felt too young and too inexperienced as I was just 21 and Howard Gillespie was 19 years older. ‘You came here to see how you would like it. Now I will first go and see how I would like America’, was my answer.”

With an immigration visa Ellen Ernst travelled on her own to America in April 1948. “I had asked a saddler to make two large oversea bags – duffle bags – with stable zippers and handles. My father took me by car to Basel. In the train to Amsterdam I met a nice lady who invited me to spend the night with her and her husband, the town-physician of Amsterdam, before continuing my journey toward the Atlantic the next day. In a hotel in Rotterdam, before embarking, I was served something that looked like grubs – shrimp. How would I have known what they were? Still I felt very grown up. I had no fear. And I knew that I would make it, that somehow I would be able to overcome any obstacles.”

Where did she find such courage? “Inside. I was firm and secure in myself; I knew what I was able to do. And quite frankly, my savings of 800 dollars in my pocket also helped!” The crossing on the New Amsterdam was stormy. “But I was never seasick. The doctor who treated me all my life in Switzerland and who subscribed to anthroposophy had advised me: ‘Breathe in when the ship goes up, and breathe out when she goes down.’ It worked.” Ellen shared the cabin with three women. “One came directly from a concentration camp. She did not say much about it, but told me that a priest on the ship made a pass at her and wanted to sleep with her! “When I saw the statue of Liberty in New York, I felt as if I were growing some more inside. I felt liberated. But when we docked in Hoboken, I would have preferred to turn around right away. Everything was so dirty and chaotic in this harbor.”

Howard met his Swiss girlfriend, but he did not come – as she had expected – with a car. They traveled by train to Philadelphia where Howard lived with his parents – in an old part of the city where African Americans who had come up from the South during the war had settled.

“Everything was suddenly so different. Howard’s mother came from one of the first Quaker families of America. Now I was with people who were religious, but not in the way I had experienced in the Swiss Reformed Church. They were not religious in a church going sense. Yet the ways of the Quakers were somehow familiar to me. I understood them in their ‘meetings for worship’ in which they assembled for silent prayer and experienced these assemblies devoid of ceremonies as divine worship. All this impressed me, and especially the fact that many Quakers think and feel very differently – for me this was deeply religious, a religion without complicated dogmas. Yet I never became a Quaker myself.” About herself she says, “Never in my life did I pursue obstinately any firm goal. Everything always moved, flowed. I only had to say yes or no.

“In Chester County, a hilly rural area thirty miles west of Philadelphia, Howard planned to establish a ‘utopian community’ together with conscientious objectors and their families, a community that did not exclude persons of any racial background. We were a large, extended family and created our own rules in the settlement of Tanguy Homesteads. We simply wanted to ‘drop out of the rat race.’“

It was a totally new and fascinating world with professors, librarians, teachers, and nurses and their families. “Interesting people such as Martha Jaeger, the psychologist of the writer Anaïs Nin, lived with us. Exciting. I felt very much at ease. When a five year old girl came to me during my pregnancy and told me how I had made this child and how it would later come out of my belly, I thought that these were truly unusual people!”

The first members of the community lived in an old farmhouse. “Howard and I moved from the beginning into a house of our own; but we had many meals together. Few members of the community owned a car, the women shopped together, and we used vegetables and fruit from our large garden. The men built the houses. I felt at home there. Yet today I know: in reality I do not belong anywhere. I feel at home in the entire world. Wherever I live at the moment, I feel at home, and so also in our settlement.

“Howard and I did get married. And when I became pregnant, they told me: either an abortion or heart surgery. Already at the age of 13 I had heard that I could die because of my heart or my lungs. Therefore I thought that I could die in either case, by giving birth or by having the surgery. I chose what was good for me. I had nothing to lose. Imagine this! And now an old woman is sitting across from you. It is really strange how things happen in life.”

Ellen Carney was told that she was the first pregnant woman in America who underwent heart surgery. “I was seen as a special case in the University Hospital in Philadelphia and I became a media star overnight.” The surgery was successful, but asthma and coughing have been her steady companions until today. “My lungs could not recover; they were too heavily damaged.”

In their utopian community of intellectual leftists Ellen blossomed. “We were different from the average Americans, and I appreciated it. We were looking for a different path, an interior rather than an exterior one, watched each others’ children and functioned as nurses for each other. We were almost self-sufficient, created our own little world.

“In 1949 I gave birth to our son Fred, in 1953 to our daughter Hester. For 30 years I lived in this community, until 1978. These were years that deeply shaped me. Howard worked as an engineer in the large harbor of the US Navy in Philadelphia. We participated in political protest marches to Washington in support of black Americans and protested against the War in Viet Nam.” Ellen did not have a profession “until there was a need for a kindergarten teacher for all the children in our settlement. I thought, I would try it and opened a kindergarten for our community that was also open to children from outside. It was great fun. With the children I did everything that as a child I had not been allowed to do myself. We even burned the Böög of the Zurich Sechseläuten near our creek.” [Following an old custom, old man winter is burned publicly one day in early spring when all the church bells toll the summer hour of 6 p.m.]

“I was one of the first hospital teachers in the United States, and in our team I had equal status with psychologists and psychiatrists.”

Then Ellen started feeling a great thirst for knowledge. She went back to school and became an American citizen “so that later I would be able to work as a teacher.” As an American with a bachelor’s degree, which she had earned at a black college, she obtained a position at a hospital for children with mental illnesses. “I worked especially with autistic children; I was one of the first hospital teachers in the United States, and in our team I had equal status with psychologists and psychiatrists – this was totally new at that time.” She continued to take courses and earned a Masters degree in special education in 1962.

Yet she continued to be involved in her community. “At Christmas we used to invite foreign students from various universities, mostly blacks. That’s how I met David, an economist, who had grown up in Sierra Leone, taught math in America and subsequently worked at the UN Planning Institute in Senegal as well as in posts in the Caribbean and in East Africa. While in the US he used to spend Christmas holidays with us.”

When Ellen became ever more independent and earned more money than her husband, he had had enough. “I was too lively for him because I wanted to experience more of life. As visionary as Howard basically was – in his relationship with me he was not open-minded. He did not like the ways in which I had developed and that I paid for our children’s college education and our vacations.”

They decided to divorce. Howard stayed in the community. And Ellen opened a private practice as family therapist in Paoli near Philadelphia. “I was successful. Once almost half of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra came to my practice. I made good money.” And: “America gave me a second life, and my heart lived again – both in the literal and figurative sense.”

David Carney’s wife died, and Ellen visited the widower in 1977 in Dakar where he worked for the UN. “In 1978, the year of my divorce, I married David. My mother got along well with him but said ‘if only he were not all that black…’ One of the first things my husband taught me was not to be so nosy. ‘White people are nosy. Don’t ask so many questions!’”

Years with David in Africa followed – an adventurous and fascinating period in several UN missions. “We were in Burkina-Faso, Cameroon, Chad before the civil war. Everywhere I felt at home. Often I came to places where people had never seen a white person. I had to learn that their uneasiness in my presence was not directed at me personally but was simply a result of this unusual experience. Already at age 16 my hair had turned white, though not as white as it is today. This had to do with my illness.”

For many years Africa was Ellen’s home. “After some time in Maroua, in northern Cameroon, I realized that tourists did not find anything to take back to their children. Thus I began to make toys from shreds of cloth that were not sold on the market. Together with tailors – all men – I created animals, giraffes, elephants, Kasperli puppets as well as greetings cards decorated with cloth. As time went by, we were able to hire five to six tailors who sewed the toys. A Dutch organization handled the sales. I was simply spontaneously creative.”

In 1984 David retired. “We didn’t know where we should live. In his house in Sag Harbor certainly just for a time – but then we stayed forever!” Ellen resumed her creative crafts: “I began with patchwork and quilts, sewed pillows and vests. A neighbor provided me with cloth samples and covers, which she fished out of the containers of various interior decorators in Manhattan. My creations were sold in a store in Sag Harbor and even in some art galleries – until patchwork became very fashionable. Then I stopped. Later I described the memories of my Swiss childhood in a book that I also illustrated.”

Today Ellen no longer likes to cook. “Often we eat at the Senior Center where one can get a lunch for $2.50. You have to be at least 55 to go there. At the beginning people there didn’t like me, I probably used too many foreign words. But in time they accepted us. Recently I edited a book about the people who frequent the center. They come from Poland, Germany, Ireland – it is a multi-cultural project about mostly simple, but interesting people who have so much to tell if you take the time to listen to them. Everyone has his or her own story to tell. There are so many people here who experienced a lot. Americans are often more profound than we think. They are easygoing. As a nation they think that they are powerful – but as individuals they are sensitive, more sensitive than the Swiss, I think.”

Then once more, Ellen looks back farther in her past. “When I arrived in America, the women here seemed different from those in Switzerland. They did what they wanted, were more independent. But they did not have much power. And it seemed they had only little political interest. In America political topics were not publicly discussed. That was somehow taboo at any rate among the people with whom we lived. This only changed in the 1960s.”

Ellen is tired. “My lava flows more slowly – though I really was a volcano. I never felt fear. My life probably was somewhat more colorful than the lives of others. Life is a spider’s web. Events surface which I had not considered for a long time. Thus there is sufficient material for me to digest. I have no regrets. Of course, there are things that I could have done better. But at the time I did the best I could, I did what I felt was right and necessary.”

Does she feel her age? “Yes. David and I are old. We only travel in our minds nowadays. Many of our friends are living in senior’s residences. For David, that would not be good. He wants to stay where his books are, he would not be able to part with them. He writes much, philosophical books and political letters to the editor of the local newspapers. The corruption in his home country worries him, yet from a distance he sees the difficulties there a bit less. Africans have a dense social network, here and throughout the world, this is good. David is highly educated and wise. And I like living with him.

“I don’t have any great dreams anymore. All is well as it is. Strange, isn’t it? Many people say ‘If only I had… but I couldn’t.’ The last time I was in Switzerland five years ago I thought that I would have become a mediocre woman, a Bünzli woman if I had spent my life there. Perhaps my life would have revolved around food and vacations. And perhaps I would have died of my illness much sooner. I feel that in Switzerland I would not have had all the opportunities I had here in America.

“Would I have married with my heart problems? I am sure I would not have dared to have children. And I would never have gotten into the circles I did if I had not studied. Thanks to my emigration I experienced a second birth.

“Here in America people deal with life in simpler, more easy going ways. For me Switzerland was traditional and predictable way back then. Today it may be different. But in my time – everything had its fixed routine.

“When I talk about Switzerland I always say ‘at home.’ Even today I like to make Rösti [sort of hash browns] and Birchermüesli. My daughter Hester says that I am still very much connected to Switzerland even though I have lived in foreign countries for 60 years.

“I have little contact with Swiss people here. But every day I am reading the Tages Anzeiger and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung online. Both Fred and Hester are proud of their Swiss heritage. Both are American citizens but speak Swiss dialect. Fred studied at the University in Basel and is active in Swiss-American events; and he is good at Jass, a Swiss card game that my father taught them. Probably it is the first years of life and one’s mother tongue that shape our sense of ‘home’. Everything else is just sauce for the roast.”

Ellen says that she still can delve into each layer of her life; “I have only given you excerpts. I took life as it presented itself; I lived according to the Greek expression panta rhei – to let one self be carried along. This requires no courage. The process, the development, was always more interesting and more satisfying to me than the end result.

“I was mother, wife, teacher, therapist and handicraft artist. And with this versatility I was probably little suited for a professional career. Even today I take each day as it comes. This is wonderful. And actually it is even more interesting today than in earlier times. Looking back I see how everything fits together. Is this wisdom? I have no idea! This is the time for me to look back, time too, to check out the apples in the basket and to throw out the rotten ones.”