The Dark Frontier A. Decker (i like reading TXT) 📖

sensation. As she looked up through the flurry of snow at the mountain peaks above, she wrapped an arm around Marthe.

“This is another world,” Ellen said.

The audible thrill in her words concealed a nervous tension. It really was another world. So remote from life as she had known it until a few weeks ago – and from Frank himself, who with every twist and turn in the search for him had become increasingly unfamiliar, her memory of him vanishingly faint. It was almost as if he had ceased to exist, while she was discovering a new part of herself each day. If it had not been for that mop of dark brown hair.

But Marthe only heard the thrill in Ellen’s words and smiled with her sparkling, sapphire-blue eyes.

“Tonight is our last night before we head back home,” she said, “and I think we should dine in style this evening. So I’ve booked a table at Badrutt’s Palace.” There was an air of defiance in her voice that struck Ellen as odd. Was this a rebellion against her husband, she wondered, or against the ordered life Marthe’s sister led with her watchful accountant and neatly kept cash book.

“But for now,” she added, let’s walk back up to the chalet before the sun goes down completely.”

They were less than halfway back and the sun had already tucked itself firmly behind the mountains. The light was fading fast. They quickened their pace past the shops and luxury hotels and on up the hill to the lodge.

“What’s that?” Ellen asked, pointing at a building on the other side of the road. They had walked this way every day since arriving here, but this was the first time the modest domed construction tucked away in the wooded slope above them had caught her attention.

“It’s the Segantini Museum,” Marthe explained, then added in response to Ellen’s blank expression: “Segantini was an Austrian artist. Or Italian, whichever way you want to look at it. Born an Austrian in an Italian region. But the Swiss also like to think of him as one of theirs, because he lived so much of his life here, where he painted all his great work. But he remained stateless his entire life. A true citizen of nowhere, who spent much of his time crossing borders. A frontalier all his life. I wonder what the member of parliament behind you at lunch earlier in the week would have thought about Segantini if they had lived at the same time…

“But it’s closed now,” Marthe added, raising her voice as Ellen wandered over to take a closer look.

At the entrance to the museum stood an imposing marble sculpture. The beautiful naked form of a young woman with long flowing hair rose from a marble crag that was populated in relief by a group of sheep and lambs. Inscribed on the base of the sculpture were the words: La bellezza liberata dalla materia.

“Why didn’t I notice this place before?” Ellen asked, turning to Marthe, who by now had caught up with her.

“You were too preoccupied perhaps,” Marthe suggested.

“It’s so beautiful.”

“Beauty liberated from the material world,” Marthe said.

Ellen gave her a mystified look.

“That’s what the inscription means. It was originally made for his tomb. I have no idea why it ended up here. He’s actually buried in a village not far away called Maloja, close to the Italian border.”

Ellen was transfixed. In that moment, the sentiment carved into the marble appeared to encapsulate exactly the feelings that imbued every sinew of her soul.

“Come on Ellen.” Marthe tugged at her arm. “It will be getting dark very soon, and we need to change for dinner.”

The jerking motion of Marthe’s hand brought Ellen back from her dreamy captivation.

“Not far from here, high up on the mountaintop, is the hut where Segantini lived and painted,” Marthe added. “It’s still standing after all these years. When you come back in the summer, we’ll take a walk up there. As you put it earlier, it’s another world.”

‘When I come back,’ Ellen repeated quietly to herself, sensing a tingle of anticipation at the idea. “But it’s not my world, is it?” she said.

Her words were tinged with sadness.

“I mean, I’m sure it’s beautiful in the summer as well. But will I have found Frank by then? Will my world have returned to the way it was until a few weeks ago?”

Marthe placed a comforting hand on Ellen’s left arm. But had no answers for her.

For the rest of the evening, Ellen continued to turn these questions over in her mind. Even the haute cuisine at Badrutt’s Palace, which Marthe had hoped would mark the perfect end to their stay, failed to put these questions to rest.

“I recommend the Capuns,” Marthe said. “They’re a local speciality, and I’m told they do it perfectly here.”

Ellen could not say whether it was the troubling uncertainties on her mind or the spaetzli dough wrapped in Swiss chard leaves that wreaked havoc with her digestion. But whatever the cause, she was left feeling uncomfortably bloated.

“Try this,” Marthe said, when the waitress placed two small glasses on the table. They contained a concoction that looked as toxic as a solution of Congo red salvaged from some long defunct chemical laboratory. “We call it Röteli. It’s good for the digestion.”

Ellen looked askance at the glass in front of her. She was unconvinced. Only when Marthe picked up her glass and downed the contents in one was she reassured that at least it was probably not poisonous. Gingerly she followed Marthe’s example and downed the potion. The sweet medicinal flavour may have lent credence to the claims of digestive relief. But it brought an expression of disgust to Ellen’s face. And in fact did nothing for her indigestion.

Yet she managed a smile through her discomfort as she recalled the digestive woes inflicted on her by Frank’s culinary skills.

“You see,” said Marthe, “I told you it was good for the digestion.”

“It’s not that,” Ellen explained. “I was just thinking of the meals