Same in the park, or so it seemed. Legal? the passing police seemed to be asking just by their presence. Yes, legal. Genau, people would say in conversation with them, meaning exactly, a word the Swiss loved and used all the time, as in okay or sure or yeah right: exactly! and with a nod the police would pass on, the people too.
But as Frank spent more time in these two little Needle Parks, he began to see that there might be some people here functioning as nodes in some kind of refugee underground railroad. Groups of ten or a dozen people, looking like two or three families, would sit on a couple of benches, or on the grass if it was dry enough, and talk among themselves, looking around warily. They looked like they were from elsewhere; they weren’t Swiss. They could have been from the Middle East, or South Asia, or Africa, or South America. Then someone who usually looked echt Swiss would approach them, and speak in their language— Frank usually couldn’t hear well enough to tell more than the fact that it wasn’t German or English— and the group would get up and follow that person away. Given there were surveillance cameras mounted on the streetlight posts, it had to be obvious to the authorities watching, or to their algorithms, that something was going on here. And yet it went on day after day.
He couldn’t tell what it was. He couldn’t speak the languages. English was the world’s lingua franca, no doubt about it, and he heard a lot of that; but he couldn’t join in the project of finding ways to help get these people to a place of greater safety, so he kept his distance. Any kind of aid offered on the spot was inherently suspicious. Best to stay uninvolved, to pitch in with the free meals and leave it at that.
Still, he began to go to the meals wearing a hat with the Zurich cantonal shield on it, the blue and the white. Then he would walk around the two bridge parks with children’s down parkas stuffed in little bags, or little umbrellas collapsed on their stems into short squat cylinders, and if he saw foreign children shivering, he would approach the groups and say to the adults, “Für die Kinder, sehr warm,” and then quickly get away with a “Danke mille fois” said over his shoulder, this being the Zurchers’ own sweet mash-up of German and French, particular to their city. He would leave them his little bundles and often on cold evenings the adult women in the group would nod gratefully. Off Frank would go. Jelmoli sold these jackets and umbrellas for ten francs each, so it was an easy way to help a little. Switzerland was cold and raw on winter afternoons when the wind swept down the lake and through the town; crossing a bridge often felt colder to him than Antarctica had felt. It was like Glasgow in that regard. A chill raw wet wind was far colder on the skin than a dry stillness of far lower temperature. And some of these people were unprepared for that.
One time one of the refugees in the park on the eastern side of the bridge was sick, and fell, after perhaps fainting. A quick little crowd surrounded him, and Frank joined them to see what he could do, his heart racing. He saw none of them seemed to have mobile phones, or maybe they were afraid to use them, and so he went to the little phone box on the bridge end and punched the button for the local 911, then asked for help in German, giving the situation and then the address, which he assumed they already had. He felt a brief sense of accomplishment in saying all that in German, then stood at the edge of the group watching, feeling so sick he worried that he too would keel over. When the ambulance arrived with its weird European siren, most of the people surrounding the stricken man disappeared. The emergency medical people approached and then a pair of police, both women; more refugees disappeared, until it was only the stricken one and Frank. Frank gestured the police over. One of them held a scanner in front of the man’s face and clicked a photo and looked at the result. Possibly there would be an RFID embedded in the man’s skin too, there to be read by the scanner.
Then the policewoman with the scanner glanced at Frank and stood up straight, holding the scanner toward him, gesturing at him with her other hand.
The other policewoman said “Nei,” Swiss for Nein, and the one with the scanner returned to the stricken person. Frank nodded his appreciation to the one who had stopped her colleague, and when the emergency crew had the young man on a stretcher, Frank turned and walked away, shivering in the chill gray wind.
In the summers it was different. Some organization, maybe the Red Cross, maybe the Red Crescent, often set up a big open-sided tent in the western bridge park, and cooked food and gave out free meals. They were uninterested in finding out who they were serving, it was all anonymous on both sides of the table. It got hot and steamy on some days, which put Frank on edge, but he ignored that and did what he could to help. Set up, clean up. He didn’t serve food, and he tried not to look at the people eating. It was too hot, too familiar. He didn’t want to recognize what he was feeling, he looked around under the edge of the tent roof to see Zurich sights— the stone, the
