GLIMPSES of how Canada worked: a writer's memoir.

11. In 1959, I begin to learn Swiss ways

MY ACCOMMODATIONS IN FRIBOURG were not to be as Gertrude predicted when she suggested I become Pax Romana's North American Secretary in the fall of 1958. My steamer trunk was addressed to "3, rue Gachoud", where she shared an apartment with the student from Jamaica. Gertrude wrote that their one-year assignments would both end in September while I was en route, but another new hire was coming and wanted to share the rent.

It turned out, however, that Thom Kerstiens, the Dutch Secretary-General of P.R., wanted that apartment for his own use.

I thought it odd that the boss himself would meet my train, but he did have some explaining to do. About ten years older than I, at least 6 foot 2, he was a lean, good-looking career diplomat who spoke English fluently with Dutch gutturals. He had arranged for me to rent a furnished room in a home he said I would enjoy much more than 3, rue Gachoud.

I didn't say I would have preferred to make the decision myself, but he must have seen by my expression that I was, let's say, puzzled. 

How would you, in totally new territory, deal with a stranger who had unilaterally revised your plans and was going to be your boss for the coming year? I chose to keep my mouth shut and wait to see where my angels were leading me.

To a magic world, that was where!

Instead of having to find a library for research materials, I was about to live and work within an amazing network of movers and shakers with access to virtually anything I could want to know about Switzerland or many other countries, the Catholic Church, several higher education disciplines, major international organizations, politics on both sides of the Iron Curtain...in a nutshell, the world!

Thom carried my suitcase to a taxi, then began telling me about the people I would live with, the family of Polish-born Mieczyslaw, or Mietek, de Habicht. As a diplomat in the Far East when WWII began, he had decided not to return to Poland and thus lost his citizenship. Although the Vatican gave him a passport (Pius XII's bureaucracy did many unusual things to make refugees' lives easier 1939-45), he was legally stateless. His wife, as Charlotte van Berckel of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, had spent two and a half years in Ravensbruck concentration camp because she helped her doctor father save Jews from Nazis. Dr. Van Berckel was executed for that but in 1945 the Allies liberated Charlotte's camp before the Germans could liquidate it as they did some others.

Thom talked for as long as a taxi ride could last in a town of 30,000. Almost as riveting as his story about my landlords-to-be was a sudden change in our surroundings:  modest 20th century low-  and highrise concrete buildings lining straight streets were replaced by weathered stone ones when we began to descend a twisting downward cobblestoned slope. The driver stopped between an unadorned public water tap splashing into a small area enclosed by a low concrete wall, and a wide, low old wooden door in a grey stone wall on our right. Beside it I saw "26" in large rusty wrought iron digits. What turned out to be my bedroom's two windows were one storey above us.

That ride, the streetscapes, my first sighting of rue des Alpes and no. 26, are among my clearest, most awesome memories.

Over time I learned that the Vatican had appointed Mietek Permanent Secretary of International Catholic Organizations, and Fribourg was an ideal location for both its office and his family. It was easily accessible by rail from all European capitals and had the bilingual (French/German) Universite de Fribourg which Jesuits established in the 16th century.

In 1958 it was run by Dominicans, a teaching order of Catholic priests. (In English, they're identified by the letters OP after their names, standing for Order of Preachers.) The de Habichts had daughters Gabrielle, 8, and Isabelle, 5, and in a couple of years the family would acquire Swiss citizenship, which required 10 years of residency and a payment of 25,000 francs.