Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party Read online

  Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

  Are sweeter . . .

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

  And, little town, thy streets for evermore

  Will silent be . . .

  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:

  Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew,

  There I heard naught save the harsh sea

  And ice-cold wave . . .

  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 coffe
e.’

  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.’

  Before I had time to reply he had broken the connection.

  The young doctor had slipped away while I was on the telephone. Now he came back. He said, ‘I’m afraid, Mr Jones, there has to be an operation – an immediate one. There are a lot of out-patients in the waiting room, but there’s an empty room on the second floor where you could rest undisturbed. I’ll come and see you immediately the operation is over.’

  When he opened the door of the empty room I recognized it, or I thought I did, as the room where Mr Steiner had lain, but hospital rooms all look the same, like sleeping tablets. The window was open and the clang and clatter of the autoroute came in.

  ‘Shall I close the window?’ the young doctor asked. From his solicitude you would have thought I was the patient.

  ‘No, no, don’t bother. I’d rather have the air.’ But it was the noise I wanted. It is only when one is happy or undisturbed that one can bear silence.

  ‘If there is anything you want just ring,’ and he showed me the bell beside the bed. There was a thermos for iced water on the table and he checked to see whether it was full. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ he said. ‘Try not to worry. We have had many worse cases.’

  There was an armchair for visitors and I sat in it and I wished that Mr Steiner lay in the bed for me to talk to. I would even have welcomed the old man who couldn’t speak or hear. Some words of Mr Steiner came back to my mind. He had said of Anna-Luise’s mother: ‘I used to look in other women’s faces for years after she died and then I gave it up.’ The awful thing in that statement was ‘for years’. Years, I thought, years . . . can one go on for years? Every few minutes I looked at my watch . . . two minutes gone, three minutes gone, once I was lucky and four and a half minutes passed. I thought: Shall I be doing this until I die?

  There was a knock on the door and the young doctor entered. He looked shy and embarrassed and a wild hope came to me: they had made a gaffe and the injury wasn’t serious after all. He said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m afraid. . .’ Then the words came out in a rush. ‘We hadn’t much hope. She didn’t suffer at all. She died under the anaesthetic.’

  ‘Died?’

  ‘Yes.’

  All I could find to say was, ‘Oh.’

  He asked, ‘Would you like to see her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shall we get you a taxi? Perhaps you wouldn’t mind coming to the hospital tomorrow. To see the registrar. There are papers which have to be signed. Such a lot of paper work always.’

  I said, ‘I’d rather finish with all that now. If it’s the same to you.’

  14

  I sent to Doctor Fischer the letter that he required. I wrote the dry facts of his daughter’s death and I told him when and where she was to be buried. It was not the hay fever season so that I could expect no tears, but I thought he might possibly turn up. He didn’t and there was no one to watch her being put into the ground, except the Anglican padre, our twice-weekly maid and myself. I had her buried in Saint Martin’s cemetery in Gibraltan ground (in Switzerland the Anglican Church belongs to the diocese of Gibraltar) because she had to be put somewhere. I had no idea what religious faith Doctor Fischer would have claimed to hold or her mother – or in what church Anna-Luise had been baptized – we had not had sufficient time together to learn such unimportant details about one another. As an Englishman it seemed the easiest thing to bury her according to English rites, since nobody so far as I know has established agnostic cemeteries. Most Swiss in the Canton of Geneva are Protestant, and her mother had probably been buried in a Protestant cemetery, but Swiss Protestants believe seriously in their religion – the Anglican Church, with all its contradictory beliefs, seemed closer to our agnostic views. In the cemetery I half expected Monsieur Belmont to appear discreetly in the background as he had appeared at our wedding and again at
the midnight Mass, but to my relief he wasn’t there. So there was no one I had to speak to. I was alone, I could go back alone to our flat, it was the next best thing to being with her.

  What to do when I was there I had decided beforehand. I had read many years ago in a detective story how it was possible to kill oneself by drinking a half pint of spirits in a single draught. As I remembered the story, one character challenged the other to drink what was apparently called a sconce (the writer was Oxford educated). I thought it I would make certain by dissolving in the whisky twenty tablets of aspirin which was all I had. Then I made myself comfortable in the easy chair in which Anna-Luise used to sit and put the glass on the table beside me. I felt at peace and an odd sense of near-happiness moved in me. It seemed to me that I could spend hours, even days, like that, just watching the elixir of death in the glass. A few grains of the aspirin settled to the bottom of the glass and I stirred them with my finger until they dissolved. As long as the glass was there I felt safe from loneliness, even from grief. It was like the interim of relief between two periods of pain, and I could prolong this interim at will.

  Then the telephone rang. I let it ring for a while, but it disturbed the peace of the room like a neighbour’s dog. I got up and went into the hall. As I lifted the receiver I looked back at the glass for reassurance, that promise of no long future. A woman’s voice said, ‘Mr Jones. It is Mr Jones, isn’t it?’