The true Hegnauer stories

Hegnau had long felt that its little church stood too close to the road. The Untervogt declared that something must be done, and the schoolmaster had the answer: nearly two hundred strong men could surely push it back.

They pushed. The Untervogt walked round, could not honestly say that anything had moved, and laid his green Sunday coat by the wall to mark the spot. While the men heaved again, a passing journeyman took the coat with him.

The Untervogt came back, found no coat, and drew the only possible conclusion: the church had moved, and was standing on it. Nobody suggested pushing it back. The village bought him a new coat, which he wore to church on Sunday.

The council went to Zürich to order a bell for the Chappeli, and since the commune was paying, they dined at a guild house. The Gemeindeammann watched a gentleman spread a little mustard thinly, decided it must be the costliest thing in the house, and ordered a bowl. He began with a spoonful and wept; the schoolmaster reminded him that the commune was paying.

At the market they bought a donkey’s egg, expensive and very like a pumpkin, due to hatch in six weeks. On a hill every voter took a three-hour turn sitting on it, until on the forty-second day the schoolmaster tripped over it. It rolled downhill and burst against a tree, and a hare shot out from behind it. All Hegnau ran after it, calling the little donkey home.

When war came close to Zürich, Hegnau’s first thought was for its bell, the most precious thing the village owned. No army would find it at the bottom of the Greifensee. With great effort it was loaded into a lake boat, taken out and heaved over the side, and a far-sighted villager marked the place on the boat’s bow, so that it could be found again.

The war passed. There were Hegnauers left alive, the boat was still afloat and the mark as plain as ever, but the bell is in the lake to this day. Jacques Frei, who told the story, had it from his father, who once almost lost his heart to a woman from Hegnau, and he invited doubters to go and see for themselves.

One dry summer all eight of Hegnau’s wells ran low. The Untervogt, Andreas Gull, promised that this time the neighbours would have nothing to laugh at. First, the well would be measured.

No rod was long enough, so Gull proposed a living one. He would hang from a beam across the well, the next man from his feet, and so on down to the water; then the tailor would measure each man with the ell, and the schoolmaster would add them up.

Down went Gull, then Ueli Reutlinger, then Jakob Fischer. As the fourth man joined the chain, Gull called out that he needed a better grip, let go, and spat on his hands. The depth of the well was never recorded.

The Untervogt wished to know how many people lived in Hegnau. It seemed simple enough. Everyone was called to the village square and counted, and counted again, and every count came out different.

Then a clever villager noticed a large cowpat by the fountain, nicely half-dried, and saw the way. Each person would press his nose into it once, and the prints would be counted. No one could be counted twice, since anyone who had taken his turn could be told by his nose. It worked perfectly. When the last nose was brown, the prints were counted, and Hegnau knew at last exactly how many it was.

Hegnau once ran out of nails, and had no money to buy more. A thoughtful villager went back to first principles. Every spring you put a small piece of potato in the ground, and every autumn you dig up large potatoes. Nature, clearly, makes large things out of small ones; she only needs the right seed.

So the next spring the whole village turned out and planted pins, in straight and careful rows, and settled down to wait for the nail harvest. The tale is silent on the yield.

When the Chappeli was built on the road to Uster, digging its foundations left a great heap of earth, and what to do with it became the question of the day. Hegnau called a village meeting, as it did for all serious matters, and after due debate the meeting found the answer. They would dig a good deep hole, and bury the spoil in it.

A young day-labourer came up the road from Schwerzenbach, looking for harvest work and curious about Hegnau’s reputation. By the well outside the Stammbaum inn (the name means “family tree”) he found old Heich and friends, and pointed out the chapel next door, its spire shingled and the damp north side of its roof green with grass. It was nearly a sin, he said, to waste grazing like that. Why not put a goat up there?

Heich knew how. A rope went round the goat’s neck and over a pulley on the tower, and up it went, its tongue hanging out, which Hegnau took for hunger. It reached the roof in no condition to eat anything. When Hegnau understood, the stranger was long gone.

One winter was so hard that the woodpiles ran low and not a parlour in Hegnau could be got properly warm. s’Hannisse Heiri had an idea. Instead of every household nursing its own small fire, let everyone bring a few logs to the village square, and the whole village could share one great one.

It was a magnificent blaze. The moment it was roaring, everyone hurried home and threw open every door and window to let the warmth in.

It rained all summer, and Hegnau longed for a few dry days, if only to bring in the second cut of hay. A traveller mentioned that an apothecary in Zürich sold hay weather, so the village sent a man to buy some.

The apothecary heard him out, thought it over, and handed him a small box that was on no account to be opened on the way. It was a long walk home. Somewhere near Schwerzenbach the man could bear it no longer and lifted the lid. Out flew a hornet, and he ran after it across the fields, shouting “Heuwätter, flüg uf Hegnau zue!”: hay weather, fly to Hegnau!

A farmer from Zimikon sat on the school board, and it fell to him to inspect the school in the Chappeli, where Traugott Vogel was then the teacher. He chose a grey, damp day, which also happened to be ideal for spreading liquid manure, and being a practical man he saw no reason to waste it.

He drove up on the manure cart behind his horse, Fritz, and cracked his whip in the road until an exasperated teacher threw open the window. Would he kindly pass out the visitation book? From his seat on the barrel the inspector wrote up his visit, composed in advance and full of praise for teacher and pupils alike, and drove on to his fields.

A poor man, whose cow a rich neighbour had killed, got his own back with a cowhide, a band of robbers and an imaginary dwarf, and ended with a farm by the Greifensee, a fine herd, and all Hegnau muttering about robbery.

The lake, he confided, was an enchanted pasture, and by full moon he showed them his cattle in the water. The Vogt’s farmhand went in first. The splash sounded like chumm, come on, so the Vogt followed, and so did the village.

They crawled out, went home to bed with elderflower tea, and for over a century no Hegnauer would go near a lake. They kept to wine, and the Vogt’s was the one inn in the district that never watered it.