Free Doctor Fischer of Geneva Or The Bomb Party by Graham Greene Page B

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 météo 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.
    â€˜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 météo 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.
    â€˜Oh dear,’ she said, ‘I wish I’d been the first. I love an empty piste .’
    â€˜Safety in numbers,’ I said. ‘Remember what the road was like. Be careful.’
    â€˜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 Hôtel 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 Um:
    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