‘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 Funeraire. Above on the hill the auto route 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.
‘You needn’t trouble about him,’ Mr Steiner said.
‘He doesn’t talk and he doesn’t hear when you speak to him. I sometimes wonder what he’s thinking. Of the long voyage ahead of him perhaps.’
‘I was afraid in the shop that you’d embarked on that voyage too.’
‘I’m not as lucky as that.’
It was obvious that no conscious will in him had fought against death. He said, ‘She looks exactly like her mother did when she was that age.’
‘That gave you the shock.’
‘I thought at first it was my imagination. I used to look for likenesses in other women’s faces for years after she died, and then I gave it up. But this morning you used his name. He’s still alive, I suppose. I’d surely have read in the papers if he had died. Any millionaire gets an obituary in Switzerland. You must know him as you married his daughter. ‘
‘I’ve met him twice, that’s all, and it’s enough.’
‘You are not his friend?’
‘No.’
‘He’s a hard man. He doesn’t even know me by sight, but he ruined me. He as good as killed her - though it was no fault of hers. I loved her, but she didn’t love me. He had nothing to fear. It would never have happened again.’ He looked quickly at the old man and was reassured. ‘She loved music,’ he said, ‘Mozart in particular. I have a disc of the Jupiter at home. I’d like to give it to your wife. You could tell her I found it in the stock room.’
‘We haven’t a gramophone - only a cassette player.’
‘It was made before the days of cassettes,’ he said as a man might have referred to ‘before the days of motorcars ‘.
I asked him, ‘What do you mean - it would never have happened again? ‘
‘It was my fault - and Mozart’s… and her loneliness. She wasn’t responsible for her loneliness.’ He said with a touch of anger (perhaps, I thought, if he had been given enough time he might have learnt how to fight), ‘Perhaps he knows now what loneliness is like.’
‘So you were lovers,’ I said. ‘I thought from what Anna-Luise told me it had never come to that.’
‘Not lovers,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t call it that - not in the plural. She spoke to me next day, on the telephone, while he was at the office. We agreed it wasn’t right - not right, I mean, for her to get mixed up with a lot of lies. There was no future in it for her. There wasn’t much future for her anyway as it turned out.’
‘My wife says that she just willed herself to die.’
‘Yes. My will wasn’t strong enough. It’s strange, isn’t it, she didn’t love me and yet she had the will to die. I Ioved her and yet I hadn’t enough will to die. I was able to go to the cemetery because he didn’t know me by sight.’
‘So there was somebody there to cry for her - besides Anna-Luise and the servants.’
‘What do you mean? He cried. I saw him cry. ‘
‘Anna-Luise said he didn’t.’
‘She’s wrong. She was only a child. I don’t suppose she noticed. It’s not important anyway.’
Who was right? I thought of Doctor Fischer at the party whipping on his hounds. I certainly couldn’t imagine him crying, and what did it matter? I said, ‘You know you’d always be welcome. I mean my wife would be glad to see you. A drink one evening? ‘