The spiritual leader of the Muslim world in the Swiss Alps

After our run-in with Basil Fawlty, K and I met up with K's parents in Zermatt. After Zermatt, we would need to kill time before I flew back to the U.S. and K gave a plenary lecture at a math conference in Germany in late September.

A friend had advised us to go to the Lötschental, a secluded valley in the Swiss Alps. From a list of holiday homes to rent, I found one that looked appealing and in my price range. It was at the end of the valley, in Fafleralp.

I phoned the chalet's owner from the Zermatt hotel. She didn't speak English, and spoke to me in what I presume was a Lötschental dialect of Schwiizerdütsch. I spoke to her in rudimentary Hoch Deutsch.

Given how primitive my friend had said the Lötschental was, the one thing I wanted to verify was that the chalet had electricity, so that K could use his laptop to prepare slides for his upcoming lecture.

I asked the owner whether the chalet had Strom (electricity). She paused, and then gave what seemed like an overly complicated answer. I continued to press her. Why was she being evasive? It seemed like a simple yes-or-no question. The holiday home either had electricity, or it didn't. When pressed for a yes or no answer, she eventually said yes.

We left Zermatt by train, and arrived in Fafleralp on a slow bus that stopped to pick up tiny grizzled women, each carrying a pail of milk from her cow to drop off at the dairy. Finally, we arrived at the end of the line.

The owner was technically correct that the chalet had electricity. The place was lit with electric light bulbs, but they were powered by a 12-volt car battery that sat in the kitchen!

Fafleralp seemed like a cross between "Heidi" and "Brigadoon". Each morning a little old woman climbed the steep grassy hill to milk her cow, carrying the pail on her back. She was bent in half at a 90 degree angle, perhaps from a lifetime of battling the strong winds, and didn't seem able to straighten up.

K prepared his slides until his laptop's battery ran out. We decided to see if we could "borrow" electricity from the very modern-looking chapel. We never found a light switch, and didn't have flashlights since we didn't have cell phones in 1994, but I found an outlet by crawling around and feeling for it.

We took some lovely walks. One day we walked down the river, exploring the valley's villages. We arrived at a church where some event was taking place. Channeling Alice in Wonderland, we wandered in and sat in a pew.

There was a display of fancily braided bread at the front of the church, with a banner that told us, in French, that this was the graduation ceremony from the national confederation of French breadmakers, for some high level of bakers of fancy French breads. We imagined it was something like a Masters degree or PhD in bread baking. We learned that the ceremony rotated through towns and villages in France and Switzerland that came under the jurisdiction of this school of bakers.

Speeches were given by dignitaries, and the (adult) students received their degrees. Every so often, the members of a brass band, who sat in a back corner of the church, would stand up ostentatiously. The band had a diverse collection of musicians of all ages. The conductor raised his baton, and the audience went silent in anticipation. The band then played a four-note fanfare. Silence, and more anticipation. But the musicians always just sat down. K and I kept waiting for them to play more, but they never did. Why did they need a big brass band to play four notes?

This seemed so ridiculous, that we had trouble suppressing our laughter. We didn't understand why the rest of the audience wasn't rolling on the floor in hysterics, until we realized that we were probably the only people there who weren't dignitaries, family members of the students, or part of the extensive lighting and camera crew.

That crew seemed to consist of people from all over Europe, shouting to each other in Italian, French, Swiss, German, and English, among other languages, during the breaks.

At the end, I grabbed a lighting person and asked him who the blond female dignitary was who gave the keynote speech. She had alluded to being English, though she spoke in what sounded to me like perfect French.

He replied, "the spiritual leader of the Muslim world."

Looking confused, I asked again. He mumbled something about the Aga Khan. When I next had access to the Internet, I decided that she was Begum Salimah Aga Khan (née Sarah Frances Croker Poole), the (soon-to-be ex-) wife of the Aga Khan.

I wanted to attend the reception afterwards and introduce myself to this "spiritual leader of the Muslim world". I thought that would be great fun, and pressured K to join me, but K was too much of a wimp to do it, so I didn't either. (K suggested that I include this info, with this wording. He now regrets that he wasn't more adventurous.)

Sometime during our stay in the Lötschental, someone told us that the bus that would take us out of Fafleralp stops running when it starts snowing, and bus service doesn't start again until everything thaws in the spring. And it can snow in September.

We packed up on the evening of September 15, ready to take a bus the next day. When we awoke, heavy flakes of snow were falling, and staying on the ground. As the snow built up on the ground and the trees, making for a lovely scene, we wondered whether we'd missed our chance and would be stuck there until spring, unable to contact our department chair to explain why we couldn't teach our courses.

The bus did show up, and we made our way out of the valley, with mixed feelings about having to return home.

Fafleralp became inaccessible starting in May of 2025 due to a rockfall and glacier collapse that buried the village of Blatten and cut off access to the end of the valley, though it looks as if Hotel Fafleralp reopened for the 2026 summer season. 

Basil Fawlty in the Swiss Alps

The only way to get to the Swiss hotel was to take the cable car up to Kühboden. I had made the reservation weeks in advance by phone from Germany, where I was spending several months in 1994 doing research at a German university.

It was a short walk from the top of the cable car to the hotel. Over the icy snow, K and I lugged two enormous suitcases and two large packs, which held everything we had taken to Europe or had accumulated during our stay in Germany.

An enormous cow pat curdled on the walkway just outside the reception desk, blocking the entrance to the hotel. From the size, color, and runniness of the cow pat, I was worried about the health of the cows.

I picked up the two heavy suitcases, walked back a few yards, ran straight towards the cow pat as fast as I could, and did a flying leap over it. Luckily, I got across safely.

No one was at the reception desk. I rang the bell and called out. No reply. I climbed the stairs and wandered around, but couldn't find a soul.

As was customary at European hotels, there was a row of keys on wooden pegs behind the reception desk. After waiting a while, I took down two or three keys, went upstairs to explore the rooms, chose one to my liking, and returned the other keys to their pegs. K and I moved in to that room. We didn't see anyone else that day.

Unfortunately, there was no heating that night, but we made do with whatever duvets we could find.

The next morning we went downstairs. Still no one at the desk. We eventually came across a tall Dutch lad, perhaps 20 years old, who had a summer job at the hotel. He told us that the owners had decided that since my booking was the only one, they might as well close the hotel and give the staff some time off. Everyone but the Dutch lad had taken the cable car down to the village at the foot of the mountain. The owners weren't back yet, since they had spent the night at a house they owned in the valley. The Dutch guy kept talking about the "Chef", which interested us greatly because we were very hungry, but it turned out that he meant his boss (the hotel owner), not the cook.

Though he wasn't the cook, and wasn't on duty, the Dutch guy made us a rudimentary breakfast. He said he felt bad that we had been stood up by the hotel owners. They shouldn't treat us that way. He believed that if we had been Swiss instead of American, the hotel would have stayed open for us.

As we had planned, K and I hiked from the hotel to a view of the longest glacier in the Alps.

The owners returned, and presented us at breakfast the following day with the bill for two nights. No apologies for closing the hotel on us. I protested that we shouldn't have to pay the full rate for the night with no heat, with no full breakfast or other services.

I can only describe the reaction I got from the "Chef" as exactly what you would expect if he were Basil Fawlty from the 1970s British sitcom "Fawlty Towers" (brilliantly played by Monty Python comedian John Cleese).

The "Chef" blew his top. We had a tremendous row in the middle of the dining room, surrounded by tables of breakfast-eating guests, "Basil" speaking the local dialect of Schwiizerdütsch, and me starting out in rudimentary Hoch Deutsch, but quickly switching to English since as a New Yorker I could only do our argument justice if I could fully use the speed and colorful vocabulary of my native tongue.

His wife "Sybil" tried to calm him down, if only to save face in front of the other guests, saying things that presumably translated as "There, there, Basil. Not in front of the guests," but to no avail.

When I had made the hotel reservation, it sounded promising that we'd be able to extend our reservation for a third night. But "Basil" told us that a traditional Swiss singing troupe from Winterthur had booked the entire hotel, and even though they booked at the last minute and I booked well in advance, they of course had higher priority than I did.

I insisted on paying only a partial rate for the night when the hotel was closed. We managed to get a room for the third night at the more expensive hotel next door (the only other lodging up there).

When we went back down on the cable car I was horrified to see, on the nametag of the cable car operator, the unusual last name of our curmudgeony hotel owner. It dawned on me that in this part of Switzerland, everyone was probably related to everyone else. Perhaps we were lucky that Basil hadn't put us on a blacklist that forced us to walk down the snowy slope with our heavy suitcases and packs.

"What happens when we have an evil government that we can't trust?"

 Mathematician colleagues have encouraged me to apply to the summer SCAMP programs at the Center for Communications Research (CCR), or to consult for CCR, since they thought I would be interested in the mathematics problems worked on there.

Over the years, I've looked at the security clearance forms. To consult for CCR, I'd need to provide lots of personal information that I didn't think was any of their business, obtain permission to travel (at least to certain places) even after severing ties with CCR, and promise never to divulge their secrets. Some of the promises were irrevocable, so one couldn't say "Oh, I made a mistake. I've changed my mind. Let's clean the slate and roll back time to before I agreed to this."

My recollection is that one had to give all of one's telephone numbers and addresses for the previous 15 years. In the years after I got my PhD, I moved from place to place, changing phone numbers each time. I surely couldn't remember all those phone numbers.

I was left with the feeling that I could be hung for treason if I forgot a former phone number or inadvertently broke a promise. There probably wasn't actually any wording about hanging, but I'm pretty sure the word "treason" was there, and I found it both memorable and scary.

When I complained that I didn't see why my work colleagues had a right to know details of my personal life, a Director of CCR La Jolla assured me that the completed security forms are kept in an ultra-secure vault for which the only people who have access are a small number of staff who have a need to know and who are required to keep it confidential.

When I went to CCR Princeton in March of 2001 to gave a talk, in a conversation in a hallway the Director and some members encouraged me to consult for CCR. I told them some of my misgivings about signing the security forms.

"It seems to me that I would need to sign away much of the Bill of Rights. I like the Bill of Rights, and I don't want to give it up," I said. The CCR members didn't seem pleased with that response, possibly taking it as an accusation that they didn't care about the Bill of Rights as much as I did. But at that moment I realized how strong an attachment I had to the U.S. Constitution and the principles held dear by the country's founders.

I expressed concern about the scary threats of treason if I misremembered something and accidentally filled out a form incorrectly. They thought that was a silly concern; no one would punish me for an honest mistake.

I asked, "What happens when, sometime in the future, we have an evil government that we can't trust, and it uses such a mistake as an opportunity to harm me?"

"That will never happen," the Director and his co-workers replied, laughing at what they probably thought was unreasonable paranoia. I wasn't as trusting as they were (and it's now tempting to say "I told you so").

Referring to a then-recent revelation, I said it wasn't so clear to me that it was sporting for the U.S. to bug the Soviet Embassy; after all, the U.S. hosts the U.N., and a good host doesn't spy on its guests. The CCR Princeton Director then agreed with me that if those were my views, it wouldn't be a good idea for me to work for them.

On September 12, 2001, stunned by the September 11 attacks, some friends and I wondered what we could do to help. One of them thought this might be a good time to start consulting for CCR, and we dug up an application and the security clearance forms one of us had been given. We paged through them to see what they entailed, and came across a (presumably misplaced) filled-out page of personal information for a mathematician I vaguely knew. So much for the locked vault. That was enough to stop me from applying.

"Under God"

Separation of church and state was taken so seriously in my New York City public school that in the line "march into hell for a heavenly cause" from the Man of La Mancha song "The Impossible Dream", one of our teachers replaced "hell" with "fire". I wonder how many kids from Queens were sent into the world confused about popular songs whose lyrics our teachers changed.

When I started school, we learned the Pledge of Allegiance with the phrase "under God". My recollection is that around first or second grade (in the mid-1960s), our teachers told us we couldn't say "under God" any more, due to the separation of church and state (I'm guessing it was due to the Engel v. Vitale case).

When I learned the Pledge, I was too young to understand what I was saying, so I simply memorized it as if it were one long word. When "undergod" was removed, no one taught us kids how to close up the gap, so we silently thought the words "under God", and kept the cadence the same as before.

Some student would invariably screw up and say "under God" out loud, and the teachers would yell at us. As a result, whenever I hear "to the Republic for which it stands" I have a Pavlovian fear response --- I cringe in anticipation that someone will angrily yell at me.

The Invisible Naked Woman

I almost burst out laughing when I saw the painting of a naked woman reclining on a green and yellow striped comfy armchair, peeking over the shoulder of a former Harvard Dean in his video tribute during the "anecdotes" session at a conference at Harvard in 2025. The conference commemorated the 100th birthday of the late John Tate, a mathematician from whom I took many courses when I was an undergraduate.

During the conference coffee breaks the next day, I remarked to my friends how amusing it was that the naked woman was the only representation of women at the anecdotes session.

All the women I spoke to about it remembered seeing the naked woman. All of the men denied having seen a naked woman. I asked my female friends how that could be. They told me, "Of course they saw it. How could they not see it?" The painting indeed took up a non-trivial portion of the screen, near the center, and was at least partly visible for all of the former Dean's 8-minute video. There was no mistaking it for anything other than a naked woman.

I asked the conference organizers if they could add me to their list of people who would give reminiscences about John Tate after the conference banquet, and they graciously agreed. I told them I was asking to do it so that students who were influenced by John while they were undergrads would be represented. What I didn't mention was that one reason I asked to speak at the banquet was the lack of female mathematicians in the anecdotes session.

One of the stories I told in my after-dinner remarks was about how John couldn't tell the difference between the two women (me and my friend Miriam) in a class he taught. I had told that story, with Tate in the audience, at the dinner for the conference to celebrate his 90th birthday, and he found it funny. I knew from the "only one door" story that John had a good sense of humor.

Thinking about the invisible naked woman has led me to recall how invisible I feel when colleagues ignore what I say, or misunderstand me because they don't bother to pay attention.