Fatal Choices

by Anne Morgellyn

  ‘I’ll go and live in Switzerland with Nicky,’ I said.

  ‘What? What the hell would you do in Switzerland? I thought you’d push to stay in Wellington.’

  ‘You’ve just agreed with me that we’re in a bind here. I’m desperate to get back to Europe. Buz left money to Nicky to fund his education.’

  ‘Do you know how difficult it is to settle in Switzerland? It’s like getting into heaven, only more expensive – and probably more exclusive.’

  ‘We’ll have Buz’s legacy. We’ll find a nice apartment near Lake Geneva. You can live in London and come to us at weekends. You’ve got the flat. It’s an easy commute from City Airport.’

  ‘I won’t let you take Nick to Switzerland just to fulfil some paternal fantasy of Vrubin’s.’

  ‘You won’t let me? Get stuffed.’

  ‘You’ll both come back to London with me. I’ll sell the flat, get something bigger. We’ll be together as a family there. You complain that you don’t see enough of me, then you come out with some semi-detached living plan – you and Nick in Geneva, me in London. That’s pretty skewed thinking.’

  ‘Buz was looking out for Nicky – maybe for me as well.’

  ‘You think I don’t look out for you both?’

  ‘I think a move like this would give us all some space, Chas. We need to leave soon, before Nicky starts school.’

  ‘You pick your moments, don’t you? I can’t talk about this now. I’m still on Swiss time.’

  ‘You, you, you,’ I said. ‘What about your newsflash about Buz? He’s left me in the lurch. I can’t talk now, I’ve got to rush. Well, I’ve had plenty of time to think about this. Buz has done us a huge favour, bless his soul.’

  ‘It’s bullshit, Louise, pie in the sky. You’re deluded. I know you got close to Buz, but he was deluded too.’

  ‘It isn’t bullshit, and it isn’t a delusion. You’ll think about it because I’m not going to let it drop.’

  ‘Let’s just go to bed and sleep on it.’

  ‘I’m not going to bed yet. I’ve got to see to Nicky.’

  He gave the mirthless laugh he always used in this situation: ‘I didn’t think so.’

  3

  It all worked out the way I had configured it. Nicky was upset about leaving the guinea pigs, but I got around that when I told him they could come out to Geneva later, when we had found an apartment. In fact, a school near the faculty was going to take them, but it would not be too difficult, I thought, to source similar looking guinea pigs in Switzerland, should he remember them once we were settled. There were a few frosty moments when Androssoff announced his departure to the faculty – comments about rats leaving the sinking ship – but this did not hurt him professionally; in fact, he was compensated by a hearty welcome from the faculty in London, who feted him like a prodigal son. I could imagine the welcome committee, Janice Impawala for instance, who had replaced him as consultant pathologist; the departmental secretary who bought herself a jacket with the Harley-D logo to get his attention. There was no problem with his living arrangements. The American actor who was renting the flat in Primrose Hill agreed to move out before the lease was up; his time on the West End stage was reaching the final curtain.

  Our Geneva residence, situated on the ground floor of a spacious villa with access to a private garden, was managed by an agency, although the owner of the building, Rodolfo da Saronno, lived on the piano nobile, as befitted his aristocratic status. He paid a call on me the day we moved in to express his delight at having a young professional English family in his house. I shot him a look because Androssoff and I were getting on in years and had left it pretty late to have a baby. A United Nations official lived on the second floor with his very young wife and toddler, and student interns occupied the chambres de bonnes below the roof. When he heard I spoke a little Italian, Rodolfo was even more friendly towards me and I soon fell into the routine of taking coffee with him when Nicky started Kindergarten. These visits always began with Rodolfo apologising for the state of his home. He had no housekeeper now, he explained, just a woman who came in once a week to do some cleaning. She would clean for me too if I wanted her to, but I said I could manage. The coffee was boiled in an old fashioned pot on an old fashioned stove in his grimy kitchen, but we sipped the brew in the salon, perched on stiff-backed Rococo chairs, tightly upholstered in yellow silk brocade. Christmas decorations hung from the high ceiling in place of the chandeliers which Rodolfo had auctioned, together with most of his paintings, family heirlooms whose ghosts could still be seen in the looming patches of damp on the peeling walls.

  Rodolfo was in his late seventies, homosexual, I guessed, but very discreet. His only visitors, apart from a Catholic priest, were his mysterious adopted son, his friend Donatienne, a Greek countess who lived in another grand villa at the far end of the park, and Naomi, a distant relative, who lived under the roof in one of the chambres de bonnes. She was studying French and English at a sort of finishing school in the old town on the banks of the Rhone; Rodolfo was meant to be keeping an eye on her.

  After I’d got to know him a bit, I confided in him about Buz and how shocked and upset I had been about the nature of his passing. Rodolfo commiserated with me most sincerely before telling me he applauded the Swiss clinics and the assistance they gave to people in extremis.

  ‘Buz wasn’t in extremis,’ I said. ‘The week before he went to Zurich, he was messing around in our garden with Nicky.’

  Rodolfo was one of those elegant smokers who punctuate their conversation with filmy stops and commas. ‘Maybe his health was bad. I will do the same if things get bad for me. I have made arrangements.'

  ‘With the priest?

  ‘For my funeral, yes. And with a clinic.’

  ‘Not the Charon Clinic?’

  ‘Not them, no, they are mostly for foreigners, and they have had some problems with their neighbours. But if people have the human right to live, they should also have the human right to die. What does your husband think, the professore?’

  ‘I’m not sure where he stands on the ethics of assisted-dying. He was very upset about Buz. He was angry. What does the priest think?’

  ‘One makes the decision beforehand, when one is still competent. You should not regret your friend. He has found his peace, I think.’

  We saw far more of Androssoff than we had done in New Zealand and he was making an effort to be supportive. He came over to Geneva every weekend, taking Nicky on the chocolate train, playing frisbee in the park, driving him around in my new Citroen. He was there to accompany us on Nicky’s first morning at the Kindergarten, missing an important meeting of the hospital trustees so he could take a later flight to London. And when I got the part time job at the trafficked women’s project, he seemed to approve. I had expected him to be contemptuous of this job, as he was of all my big issues, but he said he was glad to see me using my languages.

  There were three of us based at the project office which was located in one of the smaller buildings that dotted the grounds of the United Nations complex. The researcher, a bossy Englishwoman with the ridiculous name of Persephone – Penny – Pocock, had spent a long time working in West Africa on a religious mission – quite how this qualified her to report on trafficked women from Eastern Europe destined for the sex trade, I wasn’t sure. Masha Svertlova was her executive assistant, a Ukranian from Odessa who had been tricked into prostitution by the promise of a new life in the West. She had fled to the Red Cross from the Chechen mafiosi, who had made her work in a brothel in Hamburg, giving her a scar above her left eye and the authority of a bitter life experience. I was the administrative assistant responsible for filing and collating information about human rights abuses pertaining to women in the project field. The abuses included rape, forced prostitution, beatings, killings, child molestation and transportation of bought women to other countries to work in the sex trade. It all made for harrowing reading, and sometimes I had to force myself to put on a brave face when I col
lected Nicky at the end of the afternoon. The Kindergarten was in a one-storey building at the edge of the park, painted sky blue. The infant school was in the red and white building behind. He would transfer over there in the autumn. He soon began to use French words, although the staff spoke English to the children as well. I was struck by the natural way they communicated, language being no barrier to learning through play - they used the Montessori method. Buz would have approved of this internationalism. He would have liked the seclusion of the school in its quiet covert at the edge of the park, with views down to the lake. It was just a fifteen minute walk from there to the UN complex.

  I only worked for three hours in the afternoons – for pin-money, as Androssoff put it but I wasn’t in it for the salary. Pocock belonged to an English church in the city and acted as their informal liaison with the Cathedrale de Saint-Pierre. She produced a bulletin in English, and on my first day in the job, she brought in some flyers for a talk at the cathedral. ‘You wouldn’t want to go,’ she said as I was about to take one. ‘It’s a lecture on Russian icons.’ I told her my husband was Orthodox, although Androssoff wasn’t interested in anything to do with the church. I could see that she disliked me but resigned myself, for the sake of the job. At least I got on well with Masha, whose straightforward attitude to her past, and to the sickening reports of abuse that came into the office on a daily basis, intrigued and inspired me. I was in awe of her courage and her determination to make a new and purposeful life in Switzerland. After I’d been in the job a couple of weeks and we had developed a tentative friendship, she invited me for a drink at a bar in the Paquis quarter of Geneva before her spinning class on Wednesday evening. I said I could only go for an hour, assuming I could get a babysitter for Nicky; but when I mentioned my prospects of a social life to Rodolfo, he suggested Naomi. She had done some babysitting for the family who lived on the second floor and was used to young children. He assured me he would be on hand to keep an eye on them both.

  4

  Naomi made such a big fuss of Nicky every time she encountered him in the garden or on the stairs he had no objection to being looked after by her while I went out. I left him bashing a pinata she had brought, a papier maché donkey painted in candy stripes, a sweet surprise at its heart. I wasn’t sure about a game involving such a violent thrashing, even though the donkey hardly looked real, but Nicky got straight into it. He was a boy, after all, and Androssoff said I shouldn’t mollycoddle him. I was anxious, though, because this was the first time I had left him with a babysitter. I hadn’t done it in New Zealand, and Switzerland was a new country for him. But the bar was a ten minute walk away, and I had my mobile phone.

  Masha was already there when I arrived, talking to a blonde Swiss-German girl in her twenties whom she introduced as Sonia Wengli – Zonni for short. The bar had a good ambience, though restrained somehow, in spite of vintage blues-rock on the sound system, spicy Oriental snacks, and a young clientele. Loss of inhibitions was not a Swiss thing. In Geneva, even a party in a private home had to be sanctioned beforehand by the police. It was a somewhat restricted way of living, but it felt safe.

  Zonni, like most Swiss people, spoke very good English. She asked me why I had moved to Geneva. I told her it was because of Buz.

  ‘That’s really quite a coincidence,’ she said. ‘I worked for Fondation Charon. I helped with the disposals.’

  ‘The disposals?’

  ‘Yes. They dump the ashes in the lake. I complained about it to Moulenc – he’s the director – and he fired me. Now I am helping the Greens with their campaign to close his clinic. Take a look.’ She pushed a newspaper across the table. A grainy photo showed the murky bed of a lake; resting on the mud, among the fronds of weed, were a number of black funerary jars.

  ‘They are all from the same crematorium in Zurich. No names, just a bar code. There are many of them. They affect the little plants and animals in the lake – the flora and fauna. Divers from the federal water company took these pictures.’

  ‘Is this what happens to all of them?’ It had not occurred to me to ask about Buz’s ashes. I hoped they were not in the lake with these others.

  ‘Only the ones that aren’t collected. We are making a protest on Saturday,’ Zonni went on. ‘It’s a protest about the pollution of the lakes, not just by the clinics – the pharmaceutical companies are just as bad. We want a government enquiry, though that will take some time. It’s funny because our Swiss economy is all about keeping time – watches, clocks, but enquiries into businesses and organisations here are always slow.’

  ‘I think it’s terrible,’ I said. ‘Giving people drugs to kill themselves.’

  ‘That’s not my objection,’ she returned. ‘People here are cool about assisted suicide – I totally agree with it, that’s why I took the job with the clinic. But Fondation Charon is making a profit out of the clients, and that’s against the law. Moulenc turns a good thing, a humane thing, into a bad thing, all about the money.’

  ‘Did you meet Buz Vrubin? I mean, were you still working at the clinic when he died?’

  ‘No, I left last year, but I can tell you who would have handled it.’

  I could hear Masha tapping her feet under the table. We had been talking over her, rudely.

  ‘Could you write down the contact details? I’ve got some paper in my bag.’

  ‘Surely. His name is Dr Schlosser. He was uncomfortable like me about Moulenc. - Have you also a pen?’

  ‘Who is looking after your son?’ Masha asked.

  ‘My landlord’s cousin. She babysits for the family upstairs. She’s Italian, but Rodolfo is a Swiss citizen.’

  Masha made a sour face. ‘He must be rich. I’ve been here six years and I am still citizen of Ukraine.’

  Zonni gave me back the scrap of paper. ‘This doctor, Dr Schlosser, wants only to help people – he works pro bono, he doesn’t even bill Moulenc for his expenses.’

  ‘Will he be at the protest?’

  ‘No – he doesn’t want to make a scandal. He will not make a public protest because he agrees with the mission of the clinic which is to relieve suffering. He thinks it is the responsibility of the Swiss Medical Council to take care of the other problems.’

  ‘What time is the protest?’

  ‘Ten o’clock, in front of the Beau Rivage hotel. The delegates from the pharmaceutical fair will all be staying there.’

  ‘That’s the sort of thing my husband goes to, but not this week end.’

  Ecological arguments cut no ice with Androssoff because everyone in his particular scientific community knew about the Swiss pharmaceuticals’ record on pollution and accepted it as a necessary evil, like animal testing, because these drugs had the potential to save lives – as well as reap huge profits from the patents.

  ‘We’re taking Nicky on a boat trip on Saturday. Otherwise, I might have joined you.’

  I saw that they were waiting politely for me to finish my drink so they could get off to their spinning session. Zonni said that Dr Schlosser was in Geneva every Friday so I should call him tomorrow to fix a meeting. She would call him in the meantime to explain I was a friend of Professor Vrubin. I wished her luck with the protest.

  Nicky had smashed up the donkey when I got home and found the surprise – a water pistol and a bag of Haribo sweets. I didn’t like him eating stuff like this, but let him have them since they were a gift from his babysitter. Naomi kissed him a swift goodbye; she was going to a club with her friends from the language school. Rodolfo, she said, had spent half an hour with them and then went out to a pompous soiree at the Italian Consulate. I offered her thirty francs but she gave them back to me. She said it had been her pleasure.

  5

  I met Dr Schlosser at the station cafe in Cornevin. He was a softly-spoken Swiss-German with grey, receding hair and tired eyes. He told me he was a semi-retired paediatrician who offered his services gratis to the Fondation Charon because he sympathised with the humanitarian aims of the organisation.
He was speaking to me off the record as a friend of Sonia Wengli’s, who had explained to him that I had been very close to Professor Vrubin. He trusted that I would respect his anonymity; I assured him that I would. He had seen Professor Vrubin on two occasions, the first six months ago, when the professor was in Switzerland attending a conference in Zurich; the second on the day of the assisted suicide. Dr Schlosser was satisfied about proceeding; he had seen the professor’s medical report – Buz had been examined in Geneva, and supported his conclusion that a diagnosis of Huntington’s Disease was a sound enough reason for him to want to terminate his life. Apparently, the professor’s father and brother had both died from the disease after a long deterioration. I was shocked. I had had no idea about Buz’s condition. It must have been very early-onset because he had hidden it so well, from Androssoff, from the rest of the medical faculty, and from Human Resources.

  I asked Dr Schlosser about the period between his first consultation with Buz and the actual procedure. The Clinic’s website tabled a second consultation, when the client could discuss alternatives to assisted dying, before making the final appointment. He said that many people did indeed change their minds at a second consultation, after considering other options put to them by the clinic’s advisors, such as setting up a support network, taking advantage of developments in treatments, the possibilities of palliative care etc; but none of these had appealed to Professor Vrubin. He had made his decision and was absolutely resolved to end his life while he was still fully competent, to avoid the suffering that would surely come with the progression of the disease. Dr Schlosser then examined him, wrote out a prescription for the sodium pentabarbitol that would kill him, and took him in a taxi to a chalet at Lake Zug, this being the current venue for the suicides. The clinic often had to change venues, he said, because of complaints from neighbours who objected to the disturbance of the peace caused by the ambulance, the police, the removal of the body, etc.