Doctor Fisher of Geneva

by Graham Greene

  ‘I can see that.’

  Indeed I had seen it at the very first glance. There were references to Prague and Skoda, and Skoda to all the world means armaments. Switzerland is a land of strangely knotted business affiliations: a great deal of political as well as financial laundering goes on in that little harmless neutral state. The technical terms which had to be translated were all connected I could see with weapons. (For a short while I was in a world far removed from chocolates.) Apparently there was a firm called I. CF. C. Inc. which was American and it was purchasing weapons, on behalf of a Turkish company, from Czechoslovakia. The final destination of the weapons - all small arms - was very unclear. A name which sounded as if it might be Palestinian or Iranian was somehow involved.

  My Turkish is more rusty than my Spanish because I have less practice (we don’t do much business with the land of Turkish Delight), and the letter took me quite a long while to translate. ‘I will get a fair copy typed,’ I told Mr Kips.

  ‘I would rather you did it yourself,’ Mr Kips said. ‘The secretary can’t read Turkish.’

  ‘All the same…’

  When I had finished typing, Mr Kips said, ‘I realize you have done this in office time, but all the same perhaps a little present…?’

  ‘Quite unnecessary.’

  ‘Might I perhaps send a box of chocolates to your wife? Perhaps liqueur chocolates?’

  ‘Oh, but you know, Mr Kips, in this business we are never short of chocolates.’

  Mr Kips, still bent nearly double so that his nose approached the desk, as though he were trying to find the elusive dollar by the smell, folded the letter and the original and tucked them away in his notecase. He said, ‘When we meet at Doctor Fischer’s, you won’t, of course, mention… This affair is most confidential.’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll ever meet there again.’

  ‘But why? At this season of the year, if the weather is fine, never mind the snow, he usually gives the most magnificent party of all the year. Soon, I expect, we shall be getting our invitations.’

  ‘I’ve seen one party and that is enough for me.’

  ‘I must admit that the last party was perhaps a little crude. All the same it will go down in the memory of his friends as the Porridge Party. The Lobster Party was a good deal more entertaining. But then you never know what to expect with Doctor Fischer. There was the Quail Party which rather upset Madame Faverjon…’ He sighed. ‘She was very attached to birds. You can’t please everybody.’

  ‘But I suppose his presents always do, please I mean.’

  ‘He’s very, very generous.’

  Mr Kips began to make his bent-pin way to the door: it was as though the grey moquette were a map printed with the route which he had to follow. I called after him, ‘I met an old employee of yours. He works in a music shop. Called Steiner.’

  He said, ‘I don’t remember the name,’ and continued without pausing along the route which had been traced for him on the moquette.

  That night I told Anna-Luise of my encounter. ‘You can’t get away from them,’ she said. ‘First poor Steiner and then Mr Kips.’

  ‘Mr Kips’s business had nothing to do with your father. In fact he asked me not to mention our meeting if I saw your father.’

  ‘And you promised?’

  ‘Of course. I don’t intend ever to see him again.’

  ‘But now they’ve attached you to him by a secret, haven’t they? They don’t intend to let you go. They want you to be one of them. Otherwise they won’t feel safe.’

  ‘Safe?’

  ‘Safe from being laughed at by someone on the outside.’

  ‘Well, the fear of being laughed at doesn’t seem to deter them much.’

  ‘I know. Greed wins every time.’

  ‘I wonder what the Quail Party can have been that so upset Madame Faverjon.’

  ‘Something beastly. You may be sure of that.’

  The snow continued to fall. It was going to be a very white Christmas. There were blocks even on the auto-route and Cointrin airport was closed for twenty-four hours. It mattered nothing to us. It was the first Christmas we had ever had together, and we celebrated it like children with all the trimmings. Anna-Luise bought a tree and we laid our presents for each other at its foot, gift-wrapped in the shops with gay paper and ribbons. I felt more like a father than a lover or a husband. That didn’t worry me - a father dies first.

  On the eve of Christmas the snow stopped and we went to the old abbey at Saint Maurice for midnight Mass and listened to that still more ancient story of the Emperor Augustus’s personal decree and how all the world came to be taxed. We were neither of us Roman Catholics, but this was the universal feast of childhood. It seemed quite suitable to see Belmont there, listening carefully to the decree of the Emperor, all by himself, as he had been at our wedding. Perhaps the Holy Family should have taken his advice and somehow evaded registration at Bethlehem.

  He was waiting at the door when we came out, and we couldn’t avoid him, dark suit, dark tie, dark hair, thin body and thin lips and an unconvincing smile. ‘Merry Christmas,’ he said, winking at us, and pressed an envelope into my hand like a tax demand. I could tell from the feel that it contained a card. ‘I don’t trust the post,’ he said, ‘at Christmas.’ He waved his hand. ‘There’s Mrs Montgomery. I felt sure she would be here. She’s very ecumenical.’

  Mrs Montgomery wore a pale blue scarf over her pale blue hair, and I could see the new emerald in the hollow of her scrawny throat. ‘Ha ha, Monsieur Belmont and his cards as usual. And the young couple. A very happy Christmas to you all. I didn’t see the General in church. I hope he’s not ill. Ah! There he is.’ Yes, there the Divisionnaire certainly was, framed in the church doorway like a portrait of a Crusader, stiff as a ramrod in the back and in one rheumatic leg, with his conquistador nose and his fierce moustache - it was difficult to believe that he had never heard a shot fired in anger. He too was alone.

  ‘And Mr Deane,’ Mrs Montgomery exclaimed, ‘surely he must be here. Why, he’s always here if he’s not filming somewhere abroad.’

  I could see we had made a very bad mistake. Midnight Mass at Saint Maurice was as social as a cocktail party. We would never have got away if at that moment Richard Deane had not appeared from the church, swollen and flushed with drink. We just had time to notice that he had a pretty girl in tow before we escaped.

  ‘Good God,’ Anna-Luise said, ‘a party of the Toads. ‘

  ‘We couldn’t have known they would be there.’

  ‘I don’t believe in all this Christmas business, only I want to believe - but the Toads… Why on earth do they go?’

  ‘I suppose it’s a Christmas habit like our tree. I went last year alone. For no reason. I expect they were all there, but I didn’t know any of them in those days - in those days - it seems years ago. I didn’t even know that you existed.’

  Lying happily in bed that night in the short interval between love and sleep, we could talk of the Toads humorously, as though they were a kind of comic chorus to our own story which was the only important one.

  ‘Do you suppose that the Toads have souls?’ I asked Anna-Luise.

  ‘Doesn’t everyone have a soul - I mean if you believe in souls?’

  ‘That’s the official doctrine, but mine is different. I think souls develop from an embryo just as we do. Our embryo is not a human being yet, it still has something of a fish about it, and the embryo soul isn’t yet a soul. I doubt if small children have souls any more than dogs - perhaps that’s why the Roman Catholic Church invented Limbo.’

  ‘Have you a soul?’

  ‘I think I may have one - shop-soiled but still there. If souls exist you certainly have one.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ve suffered. For your mother. Small children don’t suffer, or dogs, except for themselves.’

  ‘What about Mrs Montgomery?’

  ‘Souls don’t dye their hair blue. Can you imagine her even asking herself if she h
as a soul?’

  ‘And Monsieur Belmont?’

  ‘He hasn’t had the time to develop one. Countries change their tax laws every budget, closing loopholes, and he has to think up new ways to evade them. A soul requires a private life. Belmont has no time for a private life.’

  ‘And the Divisionnaire?’

  ‘I’m not so sure about the Divisionnaire. He might just possibly have a soul. There’s something unhappy about him.’

  ‘Is that always a sign?’

  ‘I think it is.’

  ‘And Mr Kips?’

  ‘I’m not sure about him either. There’s a sense of disappointment about Mr Kips. He might be looking for something he has mislaid. Perhaps he’s looking for his soul and not a dollar.’

  ‘Richard Deane?’

  ‘No. Definitely not. No soul. I’m told he has copies of all his old films and he plays them over every night to himself. He has no time even to read the books of the films. He’s satisfied with himself. If you have a soul you can’t be satisfied.’

  There was a long silence between us. We should in the nature of things have fallen asleep, but each was aware that the other was awake, thinking the same thought. My silly joke had turned serious. It was Anna-Luise who spoke the thought aloud.

  ‘And my father?’

  ‘He has a soul all right,’ I said, ‘but I think it may be a damned one.’

  13

  I suppose there is a day in most lives when every trivial detail is held in the memory as though stamped in wax. Such a day proved for me to be the last day of the year - a Saturday. The night before we had decided to drive up in the morning to Les Paccots if the weather proved fine enough for Anna-Luise to ski. There had been a slight thaw on Friday, but Friday night it was freezing. We would go early before the slopes were crowded and have lunch together at the hotel there. I woke at half-past seven and rang the meteo to find out the conditions. Everything was OK though caution was advised. I made some toast and boiled two eggs and gave her breakfast in bed.

  ‘Why two eggs?’ she asked.

  ‘Because you’ll be half dead of hunger before lunch if you are going to be there when the ski-lift opens.’ She put on a new sweater that I had given her for Christmas: heavy white wool with a wide red band round the shoulders: she looked wonderful in it. We started off at half-past eight. The road was not bad, but as the meteo had announced there were icy patches, so I had to put on chains at the Chatel St Denis, and the ski-lift was open before we arrived. We had a small argument at St Denis. She wanted to make a long round from Corbetta and ski down the black piste from Le Pralet, but my anxiety persuaded her to come down the easier red piste to La Cierne.

  I was secretly relieved that a number of people were already waiting to go up at Les Paccots. It seemed safer that way. I never fancied Anna-Luise skiing on an empty slope. It was too like bathing from an empty beach. One always fears there must be some good reason for the emptiness - perhaps an invisible pollution or a treacherous current.

  ‘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 Hotel 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 Urn: 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 Hotel 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 Tobler one 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 hailstones flew, There I heard naught save the harsh sea And ice-cold wave…”

  After that I opened the anthology at random and reached Chin Shengtan’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 Shengtan’s. ‘To be sitting warm in a Swiss cafe, 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 t
hought 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.