Doctor Fischer of Geneva Or The Bomb Party (9 page)

‘Oh dear,' she said, ‘I wish I'd been the first. I love an empty
piste
.'

‘Safety in numbers,' I said. ‘Remember what the road was like. Be careful.'

‘I'm always careful.'

I waited until she was on the move and waved to her as she went up. I watched her until she was out of sight among the trees; I found it easy to pick her out because of the red band on the sweater. Then I went into the Hôtel Corbetta with the book I had brought with me. It was an anthology of prose and verse called
The Knapsack
made by Herbert Read and published in 1939, after the war broke out, in a small format so that it could be carried easily in a soldier's kit. I had never been a soldier, but I had grown attached to the book during the phoney war. It whiled away many hours of waiting in the firemen's post for the blitz on London which never seemed to be coming, as the others played their compulsory round of darts wearing their gas masks. I have thrown away the book now, but some of the passages I read that day remain embedded in the wax, just as on that night in 1940 when I lost my hand. I remember clearly what I was reading when the siren sounded: it was, ironically, Keats's
Ode on a Grecian Um:

An unheard siren would certainly have been sweeter. I tried to reach the end of the Ode, but I got no further than

before I had to move out of the relative safety of our burrow. By two o'clock in the morning the words returned to me like something I had picked in a
sortes Virgilianae
because there
was
a strange silence in the City streets – all the noise was overhead: the flap of flames, the hiss of water and the engines of the bombers saying, ‘Where are you? Where are you?' There was a kind of hush at the heart of the destruction before an unexploded bomb was somehow set off and tore the silence away at street level and left me without a hand.

I remember . . . but there is nothing about that day until the evening that I can forget. . . for instance I remember the slight altercation I had at the Hôtel Corbetta with the waiter because I wanted a window seat from which I could watch the road she would come along from the foot of the
piste
at La Cierne. The table had just served a previous occupant, and there was a used cup and saucer which I suppose the waiter didn't want to clear. He was a surly man with a foreign accent. I expect he was a temporary employee, for Swiss waiters are the most agreeable in the world, and I remember thinking that he wouldn't last long.

The time passed slowly without Anna-Luise. I grew tired of reading and I persuaded the waiter with the help of a two-franc piece to keep the table for me, and I added the promise that two of us would soon be taking a snack there when lunchtime came. A lot of cars were now arriving with skis on their roofs and quite a long queue had formed at the ski-lift. One of the rescue team, who are always on duty at the hotel, was gossiping with a friend in the queue. ‘Last accident we had was Monday,' he said. ‘Boy with a broken ankle. You always get them in the school holidays.' I went to the little shop next to the hotel to see if I could find a French paper, but there was only the Lausanne daily which I had already scanned at breakfast. I bought a packet of Toblerone for us to eat as a dessert, for I knew that at the restaurant there would be only ice-cream. Then I took a walk and watched the skiers on the
piste rouge
. She was a very good skier: as I've already written her mother had taken her out for the first time and had begun teaching her at the age of four. An icy wind was blowing and I went back to my table and read suitably enough Ezra Pound's
Seafarer:

After that I opened the anthology at random and reached Chin Shengt'an's
33 Happy Moments
. To me there always seems to be a horrible complacency about oriental wisdom: ‘To cut with a sharp knife a bright green water-melon on a big scarlet plate of a summer afternoon. Ah, is not this happiness?' Oh yes, if one is a Chinese philosopher, well-to-do, highly esteemed, at ease with the world, above all safe, unlike the Christian philosopher who thrives on danger and doubt. Though I don't share the Christian belief I prefer Pascal. ‘Everyone knows that the sight of cats or rats, the crushing of a coal etc. may unhinge the reason.' Anyway, I thought, I don't like water-melons. It amused me, however, to add a thirty-fourth happy moment just as complacent as Chin Shengt'an's. ‘To be sitting warm in a Swiss café, watching the white slopes outside, and knowing that soon the one you love will enter, with red cheeks and snow on her boots, wearing a warm sweater with a red band on it. Is not this happiness?'

Again I opened
The Knapsack
at random, but the
sortes Virgilianae
do not always work and I found myself faced with
The Last Days of Doctor Donne
. I wondered why a soldier should be expected to carry that in his knapsack for comfort or reassurance and I tried again. Herbert Read had printed a passage from one of his own works called
Retreat from St Quentin
, and I can still remember the gist, though not the exact words, I was reading when I laid the book down for ever. ‘I thought this is the moment of death. But I felt no emotion. I recalled once reading how in battle when men are hit, they never feel the hurt till later.' I looked up from the page. Something was happening by the ski-lift. The man who had spoken about the boy with a broken ankle was helping another man to carry a stretcher to the ski-lift. They had laid their skis on the stretcher. I stopped reading and for curiosity I went out. I had to wait for several cars to pass me before I got across the road and by the time I reached the ski-lift the rescue team was already on the way up.

I asked someone in the queue what had happened. No one seemed very much interested. An Englishman said, ‘Some kid has fallen a cropper. It's always happening.'

A woman said, ‘I think it's a practice for the
sauveteurs
. They telephone down from above and try to catch them off their guard.'

‘It's a very interesting exercise to watch,' a second man said. ‘They have to ski down with the stretcher. It takes a lot of skill.'

I went back to the hotel to get out of the cold – I could see just as well from the window, but most of the time I was watching the ski-lift because almost any moment now Anna-Luise would be joining me. The surly waiter came and asked me whether I wanted to order: he was like a parking meter which indicated that my two francs of time had expired. I ordered yet another coffee. There was a stir among the group at the ski-lift. I left my coffee behind and went across the road.

The Englishman whom I had heard making his guess that a child had been hurt was now telling everyone triumphantly, ‘It's a real accident. I was listening to them in the office. They were telephoning for an ambulance from Vevey.'

Even then, like the soldier at St Quentin, I didn't realize I had been hit, not even when the
sauveteurs
came along the road from La Cierne and laid the stretcher down with great care for the sake of the woman on it. She was wearing quite a different kind of sweater from the one I had given Anna-Luise – a red sweater.

‘It's a woman,' somebody said, ‘poor thing, she looks bad,' and I felt the same momentary and automatic compassion as the speaker.

‘Pretty serious,' the triumphant man told us all. He was the nearest to the stretcher. ‘She's lost a lot of blood.'

I thought from where I stood that she had white hair and then I realized that they had bandaged her head before bringing her down.

‘Is she conscious?' a woman asked and the Englishman who knew all about it shook his head.

The small group diminished in number and curiosity as people took the ski-lift up. The Englishman went and spoke to one of the
sauveteurs
in bad French. ‘They think she's hurt her skull,' he explained to all of us, like a television commentator translating. I had a direct view now. It was Anna-Luise. The sweater wasn't white any more because of the blood.

I pushed the Englishman to one side. He grasped my arm and said, ‘Don't crowd her, man. She has to have air.'

‘She's my wife, you bloody fool.'

‘Really? I'm sorry. Don't take it rough, old man.'

It was a matter of minutes, I suppose, though it seemed hours, before the ambulance arrived. I stood there watching her face and seeing no sign of life. I said, ‘Is she dead?' I must have seemed to them a bit indifferent.

‘No,' one of them assured me. ‘Just unconscious. A crack on the head.'

‘How did it happen?'

‘Well, as far as we can make out, there was a boy who fell up there and sprained his ankle. He shouldn't have been up on the
piste rouge
– he should have been on the
piste bleu
. She came over a rise and she hadn't much time to avoid him. She would have been all right probably if she had swung right, but I suppose she had not much time to think. She swung left towards the trees – you know the
piste
– but the snow is hard and tricky after the thaw and the freeze and she went right into a tree at top speed. Don't worry. The ambulance will be here any moment now. They will fix her up at the hospital.'

I said, ‘I'll be back. I've got to go and pay for my coffee.'

The Englishman said, ‘I do apologize, old man. I never thought . . .'

‘For God's sake go and piss off,' I said.

The waiter was more surly than ever. He told me, ‘You reserved this table for lunch. I have had to turn away customers.'

‘There's one customer you'll never see again,' I told him back, and I threw a fifty-centime piece on the table which fell on the floor. Then I waited by the door to see if he would pick it up. He did and I felt ashamed. But if it had been in my power I would have revenged myself for what had happened on all the world – like Doctor Fischer, I thought, just like Doctor Fischer. I heard the scream of the ambulance and I returned to the ski-lift.

They gave me a seat beside her stretcher in the ambulance and I left our car behind. I told myself that I would pick it up one day when she was better, and all the time I watched her face, waiting for her to come out of this coma and recognize me. We won't go to that restaurant, I thought, when we return, we'll go to the best hotel in the canton and have caviare like Doctor Fischer. She won't be well enough to ski, and by that time probably the snow will have gone. We shall sit in the sun and I'll tell her how scared I was. I'll tell her about that damned Englishman – I told him to piss off and he pissed off – and she'll laugh. I looked again at her unchanging face. She might have been dead if her eyes had not been closed. Coma is like deep sleep. Don't wake up, I urged her in my mind, until they've given you drugs so that you won't feel pain.

The ambulance went crying down the hill to where the hospital lay and I saw the mortuary sign which I had seen dozens of times, but now I felt a dull anger about it and the stupidity of the authorities who had put it just there for someone like myself to read. It's got nothing to do with Anna-Luise and me, I thought, nothing at all.

The mortuary sign is all that I can complain about now. Everyone, when the ambulance arrived, was very efficient. Two doctors were waiting at the entrance for our arrival. The Swiss
are
very efficient. Think of the complex watches and precision instruments they make. I had the impression that Anna-Luise would be repaired as skilfully as they would repair a watch – a watch of more than ordinary value, a quartz watch, because she was Doctor Fischer's daughter. They learnt that when I said I must telephone to him.

‘To Doctor Fischer?'

‘Yes, my wife's father.'

I could tell from their manner that this watch carried no ordinary guarantee. She was already being wheeled away accompanied by the older doctor. I could see only the white bandages on her head which had given me the impression of old age.

I asked what I should tell her father.

‘We shall know better after the X-ray.'

‘You think it may be serious?'

The young doctor said with caution, ‘We have to consider any injuries to the skull as potentially serious.'

‘Shall I wait to telephone till after the X-ray?'

‘I think as Doctor Fischer has to come from Geneva you should perhaps tell him at once.'

The implication of his advice didn't strike home to me until I was dialling. I could not at first recognize the voice of Albert when he answered.

I said, ‘I want to talk to Doctor Fischer.'

‘Who shall I say is speaking, sir?' This was his servile voice which I hadn't heard him use before.

‘Tell him Mr Jones – his son-in-law.'

At once the voice became the familiar Albert voice. ‘Oh, Mr Jones, is it? The doctor's busy.'

‘I don't care if he is. Put me through.'

‘He told me that he was on no account to be disturbed.'

‘This is urgent. Do as I tell you.'

‘It might cost me my job.'

‘It will certainly cost you your job if you don't put me through.'

There was a long silence and then the voice returned – the voice of the insolent Albert and not the servile one. ‘Doctor Fischer says he's too busy to talk to you now. He can't be interrupted. He's preparing a party.'

‘I've got to speak to him.'

‘He says as how you are to put what you want in writing.'