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

served to underline the cold disquiet of the nostalgia he was beginning to feel. While it was not the street he had grown up in, the architecture of the buildings and their opulent gardens were very similar to where he used to play, the trees he used to climb. It brought back memories of the friends he used to call on. One he remembered in particular was Volker Schmidt. He was a year older than Frank, and very bright.

He recalled that they would often play together in his garden just like those he was passing now. The tangled overgrown shrubbery always impressed Frank with its neglect and provided them with the perfect setting for constructing all kinds of secret hideaway and indulging every manner of fantasy. It was a place that established a special bond with Volker, but sadly the tie was very quickly severed just a few weeks later when he was taken off to a psychiatric clinic.

Volker had had something of a scientific bent. At the time, he showed a deep passion for chemistry. During one of their afternoons in the secrecy of his garden, he demonstrated how to make a simple, but very effective explosive device by packing a jar with equal measures of sugar and sodium chlorate, which he had found in his neighbour’s garden shed. As he lit the fuse and impressively proved the blasting power of his bomb, Volker’s eyes displayed a proud look of achievement.

“You just wait till Wassermann crosses my path again,” he muttered, a hint of gleeful vengeance in his eyes.

Heinz Wassermann was the local neighbourhood bully, a large and exceptionally dull-witted animal who resented the vast intellectual distance between him and Volker. And he made Volker suffer – until that explosive discovery, when Volker saw the opportunity for a real counterblast to end Wassermann’s bullying once and for all. In the event, Wassermann was badly injured. He lost the sight of one eye and gained the dubious honour of a permanently scarred face. But he knew instinctively how to turn his disfigurement to advantage, and he paraded his scars as trophies of his manhood – to great effect. Frank could well imagine that he had joined the ranks of the SS by now.

Volker on the other hand, who had initially seen his achievement as a triumph of science over ignorance, was quickly disabused of this idea. Once again, it was he who was made to suffer, betrayed by the stupidity of his intellect. Frank never saw him again after he was admitted to psychiatric care. But he heard some years later that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and gone steadily downhill since his admission.

Frank dwelled on the history of these two as he walked now along the avenue towards his mother’s house. And the disquieting nostalgia that was trailed before him by this train of thought remained with him as he stood at the door and rang the bell.

When eventually the door was opened, he was greeted by a woman in her fifties who was a complete stranger to him. Severe, surly and spinsterish in appearance. Her manner and the very presence of foreignness about her drew a curtain of silence around Frank, until she finally gave way to her impatience.

“Well?”

“Götz Eigenmann,” he said, aware that the name Frank would mean nothing to her. “Mrs Eigenmann’s son.”

She looked him up and down with a suspicion that would not have been out of place at the station where he had boarded the train.

“She’s never talked to me of a son.”

“Has she not? And who are you if I may ask?”

“I’m the nurse,” she said, as if every home should have one. And she punctuated this assertion with a firmness that claimed supreme authority. At best, he was an unwelcome intruder; at worst, a contemptible wretch who deserved all manner of vilification for daring to arrogate special privileges for himself as the son of the household, when he could obviously not even be bothered to keep himself informed about his mother’s health. However she saw him, she made no secret of her desire to shut the door in his face. But Frank persisted.

“Well, if you would be kind enough to take me to my mother, I think you will find that she will confirm who I am.”

“An identity card would be sufficient.”

When he handed her his passport, she examined it with the careful suspicion that reminded him once again of the immigration officer at the border. It seemed to him that fear and suspicion had become cherished commodities. And reminded him of all the reasons why he had left.

At length, she handed it back to him with the words “Follow me” and led him into a room that he instantly recognised as his father’s study. He had only been admitted to the sanctum of his father’s study on the rarest of occasions. And although this room was not that very same study, it was immediately identifiable as his father’s by its design.

When his father died a few years after Frank left home to study in Berlin, his mother sold the family house in Freiburg and moved to Cologne to be close to her sister. And she had taken his father’s study with her. Every book, every item of furniture and even the curtains were installed in an almost identical room of her new house in Cologne. Frank was able to recollect every detail of the heavy, learned inventory. Everything still in its place, as if in memoriam to his father’s achievements. Only on his desk did he see a change, where the nurse had lined a row of what he presumed to be her own books, behind which she now took her seat. And she beckoned him to make himself comfortable on the opposite side of the desk.

“I think it would be wise, Mr Eigenmann, if we had a talk before I take you to see your mother.”

She gave Frank the impression that she was trying to catch up on what