Doctor Fischer of Geneva Or The Bomb Party (7 page)

‘And you didn't laugh at them?'

‘There was nothing to laugh at.'

‘That must have disappointed him,' she said.

No further invitation came: we were left in peace and what a peace it was that winter, deep as the early snow that year and almost as quiet. Snow fell as I worked (it came down that year before November was out), while I translated letters from Spain and Latin America, and the silence of the settled snow outside the great tinted glass building was like the silence which lay happily between us at home – it was as if she were there with me on the other side of the office table just as she would be there in the late evening across another table as we played a last gin rummy before bed.

11

At weekends in early December I would take her up to Les Diablerets for a few hours' skiing. I was too old to learn, but I sat in a café and read the
Journal de Genève
, glad to know that she was happy, looping like a swallow down the slopes in the below-zero whiteness. The hotels had begun opening to the snow as flowers to an early spring. They were going to have a wonderful Christmas season. I loved seeing her come in to the café to join me with the snow on her boots and the cold like candles lighting up her cheeks.

I said to her once, ‘I've never been so happy.'

‘Why do you say that?' she asked me. ‘You were married. You were happy with Mary.'

‘I was in love with her,' I said. ‘But I never felt secure. She and I were the same age when we married, and I was afraid always that she would die the first and that's what she did. But I've got you for life – unless you leave me. And if you do, that will be my fault.'

‘What about me? You've got to go on living long enough so that we can go away – wherever it is one goes – together.'

‘I shall try.'

‘At the same hour?'

‘At the same hour.' I laughed and so did she. Death was not a serious subject to either of us. We were going to be together for ever and a day –
le jour le plus long
we called it.

I suppose, though he had given us no sign of his continuing existence, that Doctor Fischer lingered all the same somewhere in the cave of my unconscious, for one night I had a vivid dream of him. He was dressed in a dark suit and he stood beside an open grave. I watched him from the other side of the hole and I called out to him in a tone of mockery, ‘Whom are you burying, Doctor? Is it your Dentophil Bouquet that did it?' He raised his eyes and looked at me. He was weeping and I felt the deep reproach of his tears. I woke myself and Anna-Luise with a cry.

It is strange how one can be affected for a whole day by a dream. Doctor Fischer accompanied me to work: he filled the moments of inaction between one translation and another, and he was always the sad Doctor Fischer of my dream and not the arrogant Doctor Fischer whom I had seen presiding at his mad party, who mocked at his guests and drove them on to disclose the shameful depths of their greed.

That evening I said to Anna-Luise, ‘Do you think we've been too hard on your father?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘He must be a very lonely man in that great house by the lake.'

‘He has his friends,' she said. ‘You've met them.'

‘They are not his friends.'

‘He's made them what they are.'

Then I told her my dream. All she said was, ‘Perhaps it was my mother's grave.'

‘He was there?'

‘Oh yes, he was there, but I didn't see any tears.'

‘The grave was open. In my dream there was no coffin, no minister, no mourners except himself – unless I was one.'

‘There were a lot of people at the grave,' she said, ‘my mother was much loved. All the servants were there.'

‘Even Albert?'

‘Albert didn't exist in those days. There was an old butler – I can't remember his name. He left after my mother died, and so did all the other servants. My father started life again with a lot of strange faces. Please don't let's talk about your dream any more. It's like when you find an end of wool on a sweater. You pull at it and you begin to unravel the whole sweater.'

She was right, it was as if my dream had started a whole process of unravelment. Perhaps we had been a little too happy. Perhaps we had escaped a little too far into a world where only the two of us existed. The next day was a Saturday and I didn't work on Saturdays. Anna-Luise wanted to find a cassette for her player (like her mother she loved music), and we went to a shop in the old part of Vevey near the market. She wanted a new cassette of Mozart's ‘Jupiter' Symphony.

A small elderly man came to serve us from the back of the shop. (I don't know why I write ‘elderly', for I don't suppose he was much older than myself.) I was looking idly at an album of discs by a French television singer and he came to ask me if he could help. Perhaps what made him appear old to me was a kind of humble look, the look of a man who had reached the end of any expectation except of a small commission on the sales he made. I doubt if there was anybody else in that shop who would have heard of the ‘Jupiter' Symphony. Pop music formed the main part of the stock.

‘Ah, the 41st Symphony,' he said. ‘By the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. A very good rendering, but I don't think we have it in stock any more. There is not much demand, I am afraid,' he added with a timid smile, ‘for what I call real music. If you don't mind waiting I will go down and have a search in the stock room.' He looked over my shoulder to where Anna-Luise stood (her back was towards us) and he added, ‘While I'm there, isn't there perhaps any other symphony of Mozart . . .?'

Anna-Luise must have heard him for she turned. ‘If you have the Coronation Mass,' she said and stopped, for the man was staring at her with what to my eyes seemed almost an expression of terror. ‘The Coronation Mass,' he repeated.

‘Just let me see any symphonies you have of Mozart.'

‘Mozart,' he echoed her again, but he made no movement to go.

‘Yes, Mozart,' she said impatiently and she moved away to look at the cassettes on a revolving case. The man's eyes followed her.

‘Pop music,' she said, ‘nothing but pop music,' revolving the case with her finger. I looked back at the assistant.

‘I am sorry, monsieur,' he said, ‘I will go at once and see.' He moved slowly towards the door at the back of the shop, but in the doorway he turned and looked back, first at Anna-Luise and then at me. He said, ‘I promise . . . I will do my best . . .' It seemed to me like an appeal for help, as though he would be facing some terror down below.

I went towards him and asked him, ‘Are you all right?'

‘Yes, yes. I have a little heart trouble, that is all.'

‘You shouldn't be working. I'll tell one of the other assistants . . .'

‘No, no, sir. Please not. But if I may ask you something?'

‘Of course.'

‘That lady you are with . . .'

‘My wife?'

‘Oh, your wife . . . she reminded me so much – I must seem absurd to you, impertinent – of a lady I once knew. Of course it was many years ago, and she would be old now . . . nearly as old as I am, and the young lady, your wife . . .'

And suddenly I realized who it was who stood there, supporting himself with one hand on the doorway, old and humble with no fight in him – there never had been any fight in him. I said, ‘She's Doctor Fischer's daughter, Doctor Fischer of Geneva.' He crumpled slowly at the knees as though he were going down on them to pray, and then his head struck the floor.

A girl who was showing a television set to a customer came running to help me. I was trying to turn him over, but even the lightest body becomes heavy when it's inert. Together we got him on his back and she opened his collar. She said, ‘Oh, poor Mr Steiner.'

‘What's wrong?' Anna-Luise asked, leaving the turntable of cassettes.

‘A heart attack.'

‘Oh,' she said, ‘the poor old man.'

‘Better ring for an ambulance,' I told the girl.

Mr Steiner opened his eyes. There were three faces looking down at him, but he looked at only one and he shook his head gently and smiled. ‘Whatever happened, Anna?' he asked. In a few minutes the ambulance came and we followed the stretcher out of the shop.

In the car Anna-Luise said, ‘He spoke to me. He knew my name.'

‘He said Anna not Anna-Luise. He knew your mother's name.'

She said nothing, but she knew as well as I did what that meant. At lunch she asked me, ‘What was his name?'

‘The girl called him Steiner.'

‘I never knew his name. My mother only called him “he”.'

At the end of lunch she said, ‘Will you go to the hospital and see that he's all right? I can't go. It would only be another shock for him.'

I found him in the hospital above Vevey where a notice welcomes a new patient or an anxious visitor with a direction to the Centre Funéraire. Above on the hill the autoroute plays a constant concrete symphony. He shared his room with one old bearded man who lay on his back with wide-open eyes staring at the ceiling – I would have thought him dead if every now and then his eyes had not blinked without changing the direction of their stare at the white sky of plaster.

‘It's kind of you to inquire,' Mr Steiner said, ‘you shouldn't have troubled. They are letting me out tomorrow on condition I take things easy.'

‘A holiday?'

‘It's not necessary. I don't have to carry any weight. The girl looks after the television sets.'

‘It wasn't a weight that caused the trouble,' I said. I looked at the old man. He hadn't stirred since I came in.

‘You needn't trouble about him,' Mr Steiner said. ‘He doesn't talk and he doesn't hear when you speak to him. I sometimes wonder what he's thinking. Of the long voyage ahead of him perhaps.'

‘I was afraid in the shop that you'd embarked on that voyage too.'

‘I'm not as lucky as that.'

It was obvious that no conscious will in him had fought against death. He said, ‘She looks exactly like her mother did when she was that age.'

‘That gave you the shock.'

‘I thought at first it was my imagination. I used to look for likenesses in other women's faces for years after she died, and then I gave it up. But this morning you used
his
name. He's still alive, I suppose. I'd surely have read in the papers if he had died. Any millionaire gets an obituary in Switzerland. You must know him as you married his daughter.'

‘I've met him twice, that's all, and it's enough.'

‘You are not his friend?'

‘No.'

‘He's a hard man. He doesn't even know me by sight, but he ruined me. He as good as killed her – though it was no fault of hers. I loved her, but she didn't love me. He had nothing to fear. It would never have happened again.' He looked quickly at the old man and was reassured. ‘She loved music,' he said, ‘Mozart in particular. I have a disc of the Jupiter at home. I'd like to give it to your wife. You could tell her I found it in the stock room.'

‘We haven't a gramophone – only a cassette player.'

‘It was made before the days of cassettes,' he said as a man might have referred to ‘before the days of motorcars'.

I asked him, ‘What do you mean – it would never have happened again?'

‘It was my fault – and Mozart's . . . and her loneliness. She wasn't responsible for her loneliness.' He said with a touch of anger (perhaps, I thought, if he had been given enough time he might have learnt how to fight), ‘Perhaps he knows now what loneliness is like.'

‘So you
were
lovers,' I said. ‘I thought from what Anna-Luise told me it had never come to that.'

‘Not lovers,' he said, ‘you mustn't call it that – not in the plural. She spoke to me next day, on the telephone, while he was at the office. We agreed it wasn't right – not right, I mean, for her to get mixed up with a lot of lies. There was no future in it for her. There wasn't much future for her anyway as it turned out.'

‘My wife says that she just willed herself to die.'

‘Yes.
My
will wasn't strong enough. It's strange, isn't it, she didn't love me and yet she had the will to die. I loved her and yet I hadn't enough will to die. I was able to go to the cemetery because he didn't know me by sight.'

‘So there was somebody there to cry for her – besides Anna-Luise and the servants.'

‘What do you mean? He cried. I saw him cry.'

‘Anna-Luise said he didn't.'

‘She's wrong. She was only a child. I don't suppose she noticed. It's not important anyway.'

Who was right? I thought of Doctor Fischer at the party whipping on his hounds. I certainly couldn't imagine him crying, and what did it matter? I said, ‘You know you'd always be welcome. I mean my wife would be glad to see you. A drink one evening?'

‘No,' he said, ‘I'd rather not. I don't think I could bear it. You see, they look so much alike.'

There was nothing more to be said after that. I never expected to see him again. I took it for granted that he had recovered this time, though his death would not have appeared in any paper. He was not a millionaire.

I repeated to Anna-Luise what he had told me. She said, ‘Poor mother. But it was only a little lie. If it only happened once.'

‘I wonder how
he
found out.' It was odd how seldom we named names. It was generally ‘he' or ‘she', but there was no confusion. Perhaps it was part of the telepathy that exists between lovers.