Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party

  ‘Oh no, I won’t ruin your little joke, Doctor Fischer. Give me the salt. It can’t make the porridge any worse than it is.’

  Within a minute or two to my wonder they were all eating in silence and with a grim intensity. Perhaps the porridge clogged their tongues. ‘You don’t attempt yours, Jones?’ Doctor Fischer asked me and he helped himself to a little more caviare.

  ‘I’m not hungry enough.’

  ‘Nor rich enough,’ Doctor Fischer said. ‘For several years now I have been studying the greediness of the rich. “To him that hath shall be given” – those cynical words of Christ they take very literally. “Given” not “earned”, you notice. The presents I hand out when the dinner is over they could easily afford to give themselves, but then they would have earned them if only by signing a cheque. The rich hate signing cheques. Hence the success of credit cards. One card takes the place of a hundred cheques. They’ll do anything to get their presents for nothing. This is one of the hardest tests I’ve submitted them to yet, and look how quickly they are eating up their cold porridge, so that the time for the presents will arrive. You, I am afraid, will get nothing, if you don’t eat.’

  ‘I have something of more value than your present waiting for me at home.’

  ‘Very gallantly put,’ Doctor Fischer said, ‘but don’t be too confident. Women don’t always wait. I doubt if a missing hand aids romance. Albert, Mr Deane is ready for a second helping.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Mrs Montgomery said, ‘no, not second helpings.’

  ‘It’s for the sake of Mr Deane. I want to fatten him so that he can play Falstaff.’

  Deane gave him a furious look, but he accepted the second helping.

  ‘I’m joking, of course. Deane could no more play Falstaff than Britt Ekland could play Cleopatra. Deane is not an actor: he is a sex object. Teenage girls worship him, Jones. How disappointed they would be if they could see him without his clothes. I have reason to believe that he suffers from premature ejaculation. Perhaps the porridge will slow you down, Deane, my poor fellow. Albert, another plate for Mr Kips and I see Mrs Montgomery is nearly ready. Hurry up, Divisionnaire, hurry up, Belmont. No presents before everyone has finished.’ I was reminded of a huntsman controlling his pack with a crack of the whip.

  ‘Watch them, Jones. They are so anxious to be finished that they even forget to drink.’

  ‘I don’t suppose Yvorne goes well with porridge.’

  ‘Have a good laugh at them, Jones. They won’t take it amiss.’

  ‘I don’t find them funny.’

  ‘Of course I agree that a party like this has a serious side, but all the same . . . Aren’t you reminded a little of pigs eating out of a trough? You would almost think they enjoy it. Mr Kips has spilt some porridge over his shirt. Clean him up, Albert.’

  ‘You revolt me, Doctor Fischer.’

  He turned his eyes towards me: they were like the polished chips of a pale blue stone. Some grey beads of caviare had lodged in his red moustache.

  ‘Yes, I can understand how you feel. I sometimes feel that way myself, but my research must go on to its end. I won’t give up now. Bravo, Divisionnaire. You are catching them up. You ply a good spoon, Deane, my boy, I wish your female admirers could see you at this moment, guzzling away.’

  ‘Why do you do it?’ I asked.

  ‘Why should I tell you? You are not one of us. You never will be. Don’t count on your expectations from me.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You have a poor man’s pride, I see. After all, why shouldn’t I tell you. You are a sort of son. I want to discover, Jones, if the greed of our rich friends has any limit. If there’s a “Thus far and no further.” If a day will come when they’ll refuse to earn their presents. Their greed certainly isn’t limited by pride. You can see that for yourself tonight. Mr Kips, like Herr Krupp, would have sat down happily to eat with Hitler in expectation of favours, whatever was placed before him. The Divisionnaire has spilled porridge down his bib. Give him a clean one, Albert. I think that tonight will mark the end of one experiment. I am playing with another idea.’

  ‘You are a rich man yourself. Are there limits to your greed?’

  ‘Perhaps I shall find out one day. But my greed is of a different kind to theirs. I’m not greedy for trinkets, Jones.’

  ‘Trinkets are harmless enough.’

  ‘I like to think that my greed is a little more like God’s.’

  ‘Is God greedy?’

  ‘Oh, don’t think for a moment I believe in him any more than I believe in the devil, but I have always found theology an amusing intellectual game. Albert, Mrs Montgomery has finished her porridge. You can take her plate. What was I saying?’

  ‘That God is greedy.’

  ‘Well, the believers and the sentimentalists say that he is greedy for our love. I prefer to think that, judging from the world he is supposed to have made, he can only be greedy for our humiliation, and that greed how could he ever exhaust? It’s bottomless. The world grows more and more miserable while he twists the endless screw, though he gives us presents – for a universal suicide would defeat his purpose – to alleviate the humiliations we suffer. A cancer of the rectum, a streaming cold, incontinence. For example, you are a poor man, so he gives you a small present, my daughter, to keep you satisfied a little longer.’

  ‘She’s a very big alleviation,’ I said. ‘If it’s God who gave her to me I’m grateful to him.’

  ‘And yet perhaps Mrs Montgomery’s necklace will last longer than your so-called love.’

  ‘Why should he wish to humiliate us?’

  ‘Don’t I wish to humiliate? And they say he made us in his image. Perhaps he found he was a rather bad craftsman and he is disappointed in the result. One throws a faulty article into the dustbin. Do look at them and laugh, Jones. Have you no humour? Everyone has an empty plate but Mr Kips, and how impatient they’re all getting now. Why, Belmont is even finishing up his plate for him. I’m not sure it’s quite in accordance with my rules, but I’ll let it pass. Bear with me a moment longer, my friends, while I finish my caviare. You can untie their bibs, Albert.’

  10

  ‘It was revolting,’ I said to Anna-Luise. ‘Your father must be mad.’

  ‘It would be a lot less revolting if he were,’ she said.

  ‘You should have seen them scrambling for his presents – all except Mr Kips – he had to go to the lavatory first to vomit. Cold porridge hadn’t agreed with him. Compared with the Toads I must admit your father did keep a kind of dignity – a devilish diginity. They were all very angry with me because I hadn’t played their game. I was like an unfriendly audience. I suppose I held a mirror up to them, so that they became conscious of how badly they were behaving. Mrs Montgomery said that I should have been sent from the table as soon as I refused to eat the porridge. “Any of you could have done the same,” your father said. “Then what would you have done with all the presents?” she asked. “Perhaps I would have doubled the stakes next time,” he said.’

  ‘Stakes? What did he mean?’

  ‘I suppose he meant his bet on their greed against their humiliation.’

  ‘What were the prizes?’

  ‘Mrs Montgomery had a fine emerald set in platinum with a kind of diamond crown above it as far as I could see.’

  ‘And the men?’

  ‘Eighteen-carat gold watches – quartz watches with computers and all the works. All except poor Richard Deane. He had that photograph of himself in a pigskin frame which I saw in the shop. “You’ve only to sign it,” Doctor Fischer told him, “to get any teenage girl you want.” He walked out in a rage and I followed him. He said he was never going back. He said, “I don’t need a photograph to get any girl I want,” and he got into his Mercedes sports car.’

  ‘He’ll go back,’ Anna-Luise said. ‘That car was a present too. But you – you’ll never go back, will you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You promise?’

  ‘I promise,??
? I said.

  But death, I was to argue later, annuls promises. A promise is made to a living person. A dead person is already not the same as the one who was alive. Even love changes its character. Love ceases to be happiness. Love becomes a sense of intolerable loss.

  ‘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.