Doctor Fisher of Geneva

7

‘Do you hate your father?’ I asked Anna-Luise after I had told her all the events of that day, beginning with my lunch with the Spanish confectioner.

‘I don’t like him.’ She added, ‘Yes, I think I do hate him.’

‘Why?’

‘He made my mother miserable.’

‘How?’

‘It was his pride. His infernal pride.’ She told me how her mother loved music, which her father hated - there was no doubt at all of that hatred. Why it was she had no idea, but it was as if music taunted him with his failure to understand it, with his stupidity. Stupid? The man who had invented Dentophil Bouquet and founded a fortune of many million francs stupid? So her mother began to slip away to concerts on her own and at one of them she met a man who shared her love of music. They even bought discs and listened to them in secret in his flat. When Doctor Fischer talked of the caterwauling of the strings she no longer tried to argue with him - she had only to walk down a street near the butcher’s, speak in a parlophone and take a lift to the third floor and listen for an hour happily to Heifetz. There was no sex between them - Anna-Luise was sure of that, it was not a question of fidelity. Sex was Doctor Fischer and her mother had never enjoyed it: sex was the pain of childbirth and a great sense of loneliness when Doctor Fischer grunted with pleasure. For years she had pretended pleasure herself; it wasn’t difficult to deceive him since her husband was not interested in whether she had pleasure or not. She might well have saved herself the trouble. All this she had told her daughter in one hysterical outburst.

Then Doctor Fischer had discovered what she was about. He questioned her and she told him the truth, and he didn’t believe the truth - or perhaps he did believe, but it made no difference to him whether she was betraying him with a man or with a record of Heifetz, a record of all that caterwauling he couldn’t understand. She was leaving him by entering a region into which he couldn’t follow her. His jealousy so infected her that she began to feel he must have a reason for it - she felt herself guilty of something, though of what she wasn’t sure. She apologized, she abased herself, she told him everything - even which record of Heifetz pleased her most, and ever after it seemed to her that he made love with hatred. She couldn’t explain that to her daughter, but I could imagine the way it went - how he thrust his way in, as though he were stabbing an enemy. But he couldn’t be satisfied with one final blow. It had to be the death of a thousand cuts. He told her he forgave her, which only increased her sense of guilt, for surely there had to be something to forgive, but he told her also that he could never forget her betrayal - what betrayal? So he would wake her in the night to stab her with his goad again. She learnt that he had discovered the name of her friend - that harmless little lover of music - and he went to the man’s employer and gave him fifty thousand francs to sack him without a reference. ‘That was Mr Kips,’ she said. Her friend was only a clerk - he wasn’t important - he was no better than a clone that you could replace with another clone. His only distinguishing feature had been his love of music, and Mr Kips knew nothing of that. To Doctor Fischer it was an added humiliation that the man earned so little. He wouldn’t have minded being betrayed by another millionaire - or so her mother believed. He would certainly have despised Christ for being the son of a carpenter, if the New Testament had not proved in time to be such a howling commercial success.

‘What happened to the man?’

‘My mother never knew,’ Anna-Luise said. ‘He simply disappeared. And my mother disappeared too after a few years. I think she was like an African who can just will herself to die. She only spoke to me once about her private life and that’s what I’ve told you. As I remember it.’

‘And you? How did he treat you?’

‘He never treated me badly. He wasn’t interested in me enough for that. But do you know, I think the little clerk of Mr Kips had really pricked him to the heart, and he never recovered from the prick. Perhaps it was then he learned how to hate and to despise people. So the Toads were summoned to amuse him after my mother died. Mr Kips, of course, was the first of them. He couldn’t have been happy about Mr Kips. He had in a way exposed himself to Mr Kips. So he had to humiliate him like he humiliated my mother, because Mr Kips knew. He made him his lawyer, because that shut his mouth. ‘

‘But what did he do to Mr Kips?’

‘Of Course you don’t know what Mr Kips looks like., ‘I do. I saw him when I tried to see your father the first time.’

‘Then you know he’s bent almost double. Something wrong with his spine.’

‘Yes. I thought he looked like the number seven. ‘

‘He hired a well-known writer for children and a very good cartoonist and between them they produced a kind of strip-cartoon book called “The Adventures of Mr Kips in Search of a Dollar”. He gave me an advance copy. I didn’t know there was a real Mr Kips and I found the book very funny and very cruel. Mr Kips in the book was always bent double and always seeing coins people had dropped on the pavement. It was the Christmas season when the book appeared and my father arranged - for money of course - a big display in every bookshop window. The display had to be at a certain height, so that Mr Kips bent double could see if he passed that way. A lawyer’s name - especially an international lawyer who doesn’t deal in popular things like crime - is never very well known, even in the city where he lives, and I think only one bookshop objected for fear of libel. My father simply guaranteed to pay any costs. The book - I suppose most children are cruel - became a popular success. There were many reprints. There was even a strip-cartoon in a newspaper. I believe my father - and that must have given him great pleasure - made a lot of money out of it. ‘

‘And Mr Kips?’

‘The first he knew about it was at the first of my father’s special dinners. Everyone had a small and magnificent present - something in gold or platinum - beside his plate, except Mr Kips who had a big brown paper parcel containing a specially bound copy of the book in red morocco. He must have been furious, but he had to pretend to be amused before the other guests, and anyway he could do nothing because my father was paying him a very large retaining fee for which he did nothing at all and which he would lose if there was a quarrel. Who knows? Perhaps it was he who bought up so many copies that the book became a success. My father told me all about it. He thought the story was very funny. “But why poor Mr Kips?” I asked. Of course he didn’t tell me the real reason. “Oh, I’ll have fun with all of them in time,” he told me. “Then you’ll lose all your friends in time, ” I said. “Don’t you believe it,” he said. “All my friends are rich and the rich are the greediest. The rich have no pride except in their possessions. You only have to be careful with the poor.”’

‘Then we are safe.’ I said. ‘We aren’t rich.’

‘Yes, but perhaps we aren’t poor enough for him.’

She had a wisdom which I couldn’t match. Perhaps that was another of the reasons why I loved her.