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‘Beautiful,’ Martha begins. ‘We haven't told this story for a long time. But we both like to bathe in these memories.’ She is wearing a wine-red woollen suit with a silk blouse with black embroidery underneath. She looks at Heiri expectantly. The man radiates calm and contentment. He's dressed up for the trip into town with a béret, bow tie and braces to go with his checked shirt. Both are eighty. They have travelled from their home in Burgdorf to Bern for a day out at the Zibelemärit and have made time to come to nearby Bern Bümpliz for a few hours to tell their own personal lift story.
Martha and Heiri sit on their chairs like a couple newly in love. They have been married since 1964, but really got together two years earlier. However, the first time they saw each other was much earlier, at the end of 1955, they tell each other. ‘It was a cold, windy day in November, very similar to today, and the trees were already without leaves,’ remembers Martha. They can't remember the exact day. They can remember every detail, but not the date. It wasn't until seven years later that they met again, at a dance in Bern. ‘And when I saw him again, those long seven years flew by - as if only a week had passed.’ - ‘Yes,’ confirms Heiri, ‘she hadn't changed at all.’ Martha smiles. ‘My fiancé at the time, Urs, was in a bad mood after that evening. I would have always stood by that man. Urs was a nice guy, but when I saw my Heiri again ... I was over it.’
Emch lift from the late 1920s:
Cabin with scissor-grille end and shaft door made of wire mesh.
They turn a little more towards each other on their chairs, Heiri explains: ‘And this time I was clear-sighted enough to go with Martha to one of the waiters and ask for a pen and paper to exchange addresses so that I wouldn't lose sight of this woman again. I never again had such an intense experience as that in the lift in Kornhausstrasse in Bern in 1955.’ When Martha first opened the lift door and then pushed the wooden scissor grille of the lift cabin together, they both realised that it would be a tight fit with the parcel. Heiri let Martha go first, then stood next to her in the cabin and tucked the parcel into the other corner. They stood close together. Martha, who had the control panel next to her, asked which floor he needed to go to. Heiri aimed for the top, third floor, Martha for the second. ‘Not much travelling time, I thought immediately.’ Martha's voice is slightly agitated. ‘But I still don't know what drove me to press the red stop button with such brazen abandon.’ She thinks for a moment: ‘It was probably this rapid alternation of expectation and disappointment. First the joy of being alone with this man, and the next moment the thought that the journey would be over in a few seconds.’ - ‘I had seen that red button too,’ says Heiri, ‘but I would never have dared - perhaps she would have feared an attack. So I was electrified when Märtheli stopped the lift. I took her in my arms and kissed her.’ Martha looks at him and squeezes his right hand with both of hers: ‘Just like in the film. Eye contact, smiling, touching. I was seventeen, it was the first real kiss of my life. I forgot everything around me. Until someone shouted very loudly and indignantly that a lift wasn't a toy. And he banged on the bars from above.’ - ‘For both of us, it was as if we had been torn from a dream,’ says Heiri. ‘We pressed the button for the second floor again and travelled up the remaining few metres. Martha stepped out - there was that last longing look.
And even on the way down, when I had delivered the parcel upstairs, it didn't occur to me to ring the doorbell of the flats on the second floor and ask for her. But I felt and knew that I would see her again. But the fact that seven years had passed by then was a bit long.’ - ‘Yes,’ agrees Martha, ‘but without that lift and the sudden intimate proximity to each other, without those stolen seconds between floors, we would never have known that we belonged together.’
Martha and Heiri Küpfer, Bern 2017.
