Therefore Choose (21 page)

George wrote to Werner's parents
in Konstanz and received a reply from his mother, who said that Werner had suffered a breakdown after being released as a prisoner of war and was in a clinic in Geneva. She gave the address and mentioned that Werner was thinking of going into teaching. George wrote to Werner to ask if he could come to see him. Werner replied, somewhat tepidly George thought, that he would appreciate the visit.

George took some leave and made his way by train to Switzerland. Worse than the delays and inefficiency of the railways were George's doubts. Why was he doing this? What would Werner be like, a soldier of a defeated nation? Where had Werner been in the war? Fighting against the British, in Belgium and Holland, perhaps, where George had been? Had he come to hate the English? Or had he been on the Eastern Front, his troops smashed by the Russians? Why was he in a clinic? Would anything of their friendship remain? Would Werner be jealous, still, of his relationship with Anna? Would he be depressed? Or angry and destructive, as happened with some patients, needing to be kept in a straitjacket?

More than once, George thought that his visit was stupid. He stopped wondering about Werner and started wondering about himself. Would he still feel jealous of Werner? What was the point of this?

The clinic was decent enough. It was in a substantial villa, with formal gardens, and a view of the lake about a mile away. George was shown into a comfortable sitting room where guests were received. There was Werner, in an armchair beside a wide, latticed window, with a closed book on his lap. The title was large enough for George to read: Goethe's
Faustus
.

“Here we are,” said George. “I'm pleased to see you.”

“Here we are.”

George wondered whether to reach out his hand towards Werner but decided not to. He pulled up a straight-backed chair to a place beside the window, a few feet from Werner's armchair.

As George sat down, Werner raised his head rather slowly, held his chin in his hand, and regarded him. George was shocked at Werner's appearance. He was thinner, less alert. His face was lined. What George remembered was the face of a young man in a Renaissance painting.

Why have I come? George thought. That connection we had … I've not seen him since he went off with Anna. That fact is there, between us. George didn't want the meeting to be like this. He searched within himself for a spark of warmth.

“You're reading Goethe.”

“They say I'm suffering from depression.”

“How are you, really?”

“The defeat … I was drained.”

“Where were you during the war? Were you in Germany, or North Africa? Where were you?”

“Russia, the Eastern Front.”

In the worst of the fighting, thought George.

Werner seemed suddenly to make an effort. “I may start to play the piano,” he said.

“Is there a piano here?”

“I had the idea last week.”

“Is there a piano?”

“Everything is controlled by the matron.”

“Do you want me to ask?”

“There is a piano, probably no good.”

“Were you wounded?”

“Shrapnel in the shoulder. Apparently it can stay there.”

“How are you, in yourself?”

“I had the idea of the piano last week. Is that a sign of anything?”

“Can I get you some music?”

Werner didn't reply. He seemed distant, abstracted. There was a blankness about him. It was as if, for Werner, George was not there, or that it was a nuisance that he was there. Werner was not distracted in the manner of some patients George had seen when he did his stint of psychiatry, attending to some inner voice. Werner's absence seemed more profound.

“Are you tired?” George said. “Shall I come back tomorrow?”

“I don't know.”

There was a question George had to ask. “How is Anna? Is she here in Geneva?”

Werner flashed a look of anger. George felt suddenly alarmed, and tense. Was Werner going to attack him? Still dangerous, he thought, like an animal about to spring. Formidable … or is it just me thinking, German soldier?

They sat in silence for a minute, maybe two.

“Is she in Berlin?” asked George.

“I don't want to talk about her.”

“Is that where she is?”

Werner made a grimace and nodded.

“Is she working?”

“No idea.”

“I'll come back tomorrow. I'll find out when would be a good time. I'll look in the town to find a music shop, to get you some music. I wondered about bringing you a book, but everything I have ever known about literature, you have already read. I thought I'd ask you what you would like.”

As George returned to his hotel, he realized he was trembling still, from when he thought that Werner was going to strike him. Stupid, he thought. I must calm down, get a grip.

Why is Werner reading
Faustus
? thought George. Goethe, of course, but why that strange fairy tale, that if you hazard your soul you'll get the prize. What could one possibly want that would be like that? Perhaps power. Is Werner wondering if that was what happened to Germany? Or could you make a wager to achieve love? How could that be? Love involves another person, a marriage of true minds.

Anna's alive. Doesn't he have her to love? Why won't he?

A thought occurred that George barely allowed himself to articulate. If Werner's no longer with Anna, does that mean a new chance for me? It was an unworthy thought…George tried to banish it. He knew he shouldn't be thinking such things. He should be thinking about their friendship. In any case, he thought, the state he is in is temporary. What is that state?

He thought back to his brief training in psychiatry, to the patients he had met, people who lived partly in this world and partly in some other. Now Werner was one of them.

George had a sudden image: a viva voce examination in which he was given five minutes with a patient and had to make a diagnosis and justify it to two examiners. The patient was Werner. Involutional melancholia? Was that it? A condition of people past middle age. No, that wouldn't be it. The experience of being under fire, of facing implacable Russians? Would that be it? George remembered something about traumatic neurosis, but apart from anxiety and nightmares, he couldn't think of the symptoms.

“Acute depression with marked retardation and paranoia,” he announced to the examiners.

“Why do you say acute, Mr. Smith? What can you tell us about the duration? … You say retardation and paranoia. Describe specifically first the symptoms, then the signs as you have observed them.”

The time before the war — the time of lectures, the time of swotting for exams — seemed now a play of marionettes.

George thought of how, when he and Werner were together as undergraduates, Werner became interested in parapsychology as he started to develop his ideas about whether minds can meet. He wanted to find out whether there could be something in spiritualists' beliefs. It was interesting enough for George to go along with him for a while, and they went to some meetings in the suburbs of Cambridge, at which mediums were introduced. Although they all looked like women whom one would see standing in a queue at the grocer's, they were described as special people, extraordinary people, very gifted.

After the medium had been introduced, she would enter a trance. Then people would ask her questions about their loved ones who had passed over to the other side. It was fascinating that people should attend these meetings and try to make contact with loved ones who had died — the terrible yearning of it. Answers from the other side tended to be something like “I'm all right, Elsie, don't give up hope.” Why did no one ask those on the other side what it was like over there?

Suddenly, and only now, after seeing Werner in the clinic, George knew the answer to this question. One might as well ask a week-old baby, What it is like? It's all very new, the baby would say. Even if people could speak from the other side, they couldn't describe it. There would be nothing that they could have any experience of describing in words. It was the same for people whose life had been transformed by war. A life could become indescribable by cruelty and killing, by desecration of that same human body that had been brought caringly into the world by a mother, placed in a family, loved. Was that other side, which is war, a life of contempt for others? Was it a side discovered by people who have been in combat, discovered not just in others but in themselves? There's nothing to be said about what it is like there. It is as far away from civil society and the patterns of ordinary language as death is from life.

Not a psychiatric diagnosis, thought George. A state of being.

George wondered about himself. Several times he had come to the barbed-wire fence between the world of civilian society and that world on the other side, the world of mechanized destruction of life. He had been close and looked through the fence. Twice he had done so when his unit had shelled a village as German troops retreated. As they overran the village, there were houses demolished by his shells, shattered lives, dead bodies in the street. Some men in uniform, but more who were not: women, children, old people. His men had done that on his orders, and he had acted on his orders. He could take responsibility for those consequences … almost. He had joined the artillery. It was what he had trained for. If he'd not been able to do that, he shouldn't have joined up.

Then there was a time when the Germans had stood and fought and advanced against them, and after the engagement he counted bodies of men he had known, men to whose wives and mothers he wrote, to whom if he had been a better commander he would not have had to write.

Each of these was a going to the edge, peering through the wire fence, not quite crossing over to that other side, that bourn from which no traveller returns, or returns only as a ghost. He had not crossed to become that man, no longer a man, who can think only of killing or of being killed.

Meeting with Werner, his friend, he suddenly thought, Werner has crossed over. There's no talking with him. Will he be able ever to tolerate civil life again?

There was a music shop in Geneva
, and George bought Werner the score of the
Goldberg Variations
. He was pleased to find it, but when he gave it to his friend next day, Werner glanced at the cover without turning the page and laid it on one side.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You know what? I'm going to take you out. I've got a taxi waiting outside, and I've asked the matron. The weather's warm. You don't need an overcoat. We're going into town.”

Werner rubbed his forehead with his left hand.

“Come on,” said George.

“You're going to say it will do me good.”

“It will.”

Werner rose from his chair, not reluctantly, but not eagerly. George picked up the music score that Werner had laid down. The taxi drove them into the middle of Geneva and dropped them next to the cathedral, with its two square towers and its spire.

“Do you want to walk, or find somewhere to have a cup of tea?”

“You wanted to walk.”

They walked, away from the cathedral.

“Your mother said you're considering teaching,” George said.

“She said that?”

“She didn't say where, or whether in high school or university.”

Werner did not reply.

“You've thought of teaching?”

“Konstanz wasn't bombed, you know.”

“Neither by the RAF nor the Americans.”

“It was too near Switzerland. Wouldn't want to bomb the Swiss by mistake.”

“So do you think you might teach, perhaps in a secondary school?”

“Education.”

“Doesn't the country need that?”

Werner looked at George, suddenly, as if startled.

“Are you all right?”

“Education,” he said.