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

“As I say, your mother has never mentioned a son to me. She spoke often of her daughter, but never a son.”

“Daughter? What daughter?” he asked.

“She died at a young age I believe.”

“She never had a daughter.”

Frank was growing impatient with the woman. He had not wanted to come here in the first place. And now that he was here, all the reasons for his not wanting to come were being aggravated beyond endurance. Achim had plainly felt disinclined to warn him of the need for dragon-slaying. He had not even intimated just how serious his mother’s condition appeared to be, which made Frank wonder whether he had visited her at all. All of which nourished the idea in his mind that the whole story was part of his old friend’s plan to make Frank play courier for him.

“Would you please tell me what it is that’s ailing my mother?” he asked the nurse. “The last time I saw her was about six months ago. And apart from the usual debilities of old age she seemed to be in reasonably good health. I had no idea that she was in need of a housekeeper.”

“I am not a housekeeper, Mr Eigenmann. I am a nurse.”

Her voice betrayed the insecure edge of wounded pride. This pleased his sense of irritation with the woman.

“If it was six months ago, then probably it was not long after you last saw her that it happened,” she continued, her professional pride restored by a sharp intake of breath and a composure probably learned in some Prussian finishing school. “She was out walking her dog not very far from here when she was accosted by a gang of youths who for some reason took it into their heads that she was Jewish. So they decided to teach her a lesson. It’s disgusting what the young people get up to nowadays.”

“And what did they get up to?”

“It’s too horrible.”

She was drawing again on the strength of her well-tutored composure and spoke with a flat calmness that seemed completely at odds with the scene she now described.

“They swooped on her like carrion crows and snatched up the dog. Then they hung it from a tree by its lead and slowly tortured the innocent creature to death before her very eyes, pecking at it with sticks and knives. The poor woman was admitted to the clinic in the most appalling state of shock. She was quite beside herself. And she has never really recovered.

“After a few weeks it was decided that she should be discharged in the hope that she might improve in the familiarity of her home surroundings. And so she was entrusted to my care – thus far to no avail. Let us hope,” she added, with little sign of conviction in her voice, “that your coming will prove to be of some help.”

Her words breathed a miasma of expectant, unfulfilled duty into his face, which mingled with the acrid memories of the house and stuck in his throat, teasing him with a certain bitterness. This was his mother she was talking about. Yet it was difficult to feel more than a passing sympathy for someone who had been such a dire reference point in his life. He was more inclined to be moved by newspaper reports of some calamitous event in the life of a perfect stranger.

His mother’s keeper led him out of the study and up the heavy staircase with a solemnness that seemed to be born more of an obtuse reluctance than of any concern for her charge. Then suddenly she stopped and turned to him with new life in her voice.

“She called her dog Götz.”

Frank had the impression she expected a response. But he kept his counsel. And they continued up the stairs.

His mother appeared to be dozing when he entered the room. Propped up in bed, her eyes closed and her long grey hair untidy with sleep, she could have been any old woman. She bore little resemblance to the person he had known as his mother. Her teeth had been removed and lay poised in a glass of water like a hungry clam. It was the first time he had ever seen her without teeth, and their absence changed the shape of her face in a way that gnawed at his own identity. Yet it was not only this that made her seem so different. It was the age that had been carved into her face with such savage disrespect for the governance of time. Not months, but years – a lifetime – lay between this encounter and the last occasion when they had met.

An irresistible urge pressed him to leave now while there was still time. But he hesitated. In disbelief, he stood watching her sleep. Her bed was bedecked with a brown, chenille drape that he recalled having always been used to cover the dining-room table. It seemed oddly out of place here. An evidently bewildered look on his face prompted the nurse to explain that his mother had insisted on using this instead of an eiderdown.

Frank remembered spilling some red paint on it as a child and being severely scolded. In its new role as bed cover, the brown fabric still sported the vestiges of this clumsy blemish, albeit less obviously. And he wondered what on earth could be the significance of taking this drape onto the bed.

The room, too, was not at all as he recollected the way it was when he was last here. The fusty narrow darkness remained. But the mahogany furnishings had been rearranged and – apart from the ectopic chenille table cover – betrayed the fussy touch of the Prussian nurse, who by now had at least shown sufficient discretion to withdraw from the painfully strange intimacy of this scene.

On the large dresser beside the window hung with heavy velvet curtains, which admitted only the minimum of light, stood an arc of photographs in elaborate art