Read Doctor Fischer of Geneva Or The Bomb Party for Free Online

After all, it’s only one party. He can’t hurt us really. You aren’t Mr Kips and you aren’t rich and we don’t depend on him. You need never go to another.’
    â€˜I certainly won’t,’ I said and I believed it. All the same the date was approaching fast. A great cloud lay over the sea, the island had gone from sight and I should never know the latitude and longtitude to mark it on any map. The time would come when I would doubt if I had ever really seen the island.
    There was something else we bought in that bout of shopping, and that was a pair of skis. Her mother had taught Anna-Luise to ski when she was four years old, so that to ski was as natural to her as to walk, and the season of snow was approaching. When she joined me in Vevey she had left her skis at home and nothing would induce her to return and fetch them . . . And there were boots, too, to find. It proved a long shopping day and we were still, I suppose, quite happy; as long as we were occupied we had no eye for clouds. I liked watching her expertise when she chose skis, and her feet had never seemed prettier than when she was trying on the heavy boots she needed.
    Coincidences in my experience are seldom happy. How hypocritically we say ‘What a happy coincidence!’ when we meet an acquaintance in a strange hotel where we want very much to be alone. We passed a librairie on our way home, and I always look in the window of any bookshop – it is almost an automatic reflex. In this one there was a window full of children’s books, for in November the shops are already preparing for the Christmas trade. I took my automatic glance, and there in the very centre of the window was Mr Kips, head bent to the pavement, in search of a dollar.
    â€˜Look.’
    â€˜Yes,’ Anna-Luise said, ‘there’s always a new edition in time for Christmas. Perhaps my father pays the publisher or perhaps there are always new children to read it.’
    â€˜Mr Kips must wish the pill was universally used.’
    â€˜When the skiing’s over,’ Anna-Luise said, ‘I’m going to drop the pill myself. So perhaps there’ll be another reader of Mr Kips.’
    â€˜Why wait till then?’
    â€˜I’m a good skier,’ she said, ‘but there are always accidents. I don’t want to be pregnant in plaster.’
    We couldn’t avoid the thought of Doctor Fischer’s party any longer. ‘Tomorrow’ had almost arrived and was already there in both our minds. It was as though a shark were nuzzling beside our small boat, from which we had once seen the island. We lay awake in bed for hours that night, a shoulder touching a shoulder, but we were separated an almost infinite distance by our distress.
    â€˜How absurd we are,’ Anna-Luise argued, ‘what on earth can he do to us? You aren’t Mr Kips. Why, he could fill all the shops with a caricature of your face and what would we care? Who would recognize you? And your firm isn’t going to sack you because he pays them fifty thousand francs. That’s not half an hour’s income to them. We don’t depend on him for anything. We are free, free. Say it aloud after me. Free.’
    â€˜Perhaps he hates freedom as much as he despises people.’
    â€˜There’s no way he can turn you into a Toad.’
    â€˜I wish I knew why he wants me there then.’
    â€˜It’s just to show the others that he can get you to come. He may try to humiliate you in front of them – it would be like him. Bear it for an hour or two, and, if he goes too far, fling your wine in his face and walk out. Always remember we are free. Free, darling. He can’t hurt you or me. We are too little to be humiliated. It’s like when a man tries to humiliate a waiter – he only humiliates himself.’
    â€˜Yes, I know. Of course you are right. It is absurd, but all the same I wish I knew what he had in