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

nouveau frames. In the dimness, one photo in particular stood out as being vaguely familiar to him. He moved closer to examine it. Taking it in his hand, he flinched as a shock of light from the window brought all the memories flooding back. In the picture, a girl of about six in a long pinafore dress and bonnet, sitting on her mother’s knee, was clutching a china doll. She might have looked quite sweet, had it not been for the expression of fear in her eyes. How vividly, after all these years, Frank recalled being dressed up for the occasion and being taken to the photographer’s studio in town for the portrait to be done. They had taken the tram into Freiburg, and no sooner had they alighted and he set foot on the pavement than he took to his heels, struggling desperately to cope with the unaccustomed folds of cloth that twisted around his ankles in his futile efforts to escape the cruel games of his mother. She of course was not only used to coping with the hindrances of women’s attire. She also had longer legs and quickly got the better of him. In no time at all, Frank was being dragged back down the street screaming:

“No, Mama, please. Not today. Please, Mama. I’ll go tomorrow. I promise.”

His appeals were in vain, to which this photograph now bore poignant testimony. It opened up a wound in the deeper recesses of his memory that he had fondly imagined was long since healed beyond all possibility of pain. It was soon after this incident that his mother gave up her dressing games with him. But seeing the framed photo for the first time now after all these years imbued his memory of the shame with an unpalatable freshness and immediacy.

It occurred to him that it was probably this photo that the nurse had in mind when she talked of his mother’s “daughter”. And he wondered what fantastic tales his mother must have been spinning around this irrefutable photographic evidence.

“What are you doing over there, young man?”

The voice startled him with its abrasive crackle. He turned and saw the woman who was his mother still propped in the same position against the pillow – her eyes now open. They gave her face a mild quality of expression that allowed him at least very vaguely to relate to her as the woman for whom he had been a living disappointment.

“Hello mother. It’s me, Götz.”

Those simple words did not come easily to him. And they were rewarded with a bafflement and frustration which he almost welcomed.

“Götz?”

The lips of her flaccid, involuted mouth began to quiver. And the crackle of her voice intensified as she reinforced the dismay in her words: “Who are you? What do you want?”

He could give his mother no satisfactory answer, and in her growing consternation she called for her keeper.

“Nurse! Nurse!”

She could not repeat this desperate, crackling cry often enough. Her words rang in his ears like the sound of a sadly loose violin string in the hands of a frantic novice who imagined that – if he kept plucking at it – then in time it would ring true. Frank pre-empted the arrival of the Prussian matron by leaving the room and met her on the stairs outside. She paused briefly to pierce him with her steely expression.

“I suggest you wait in my office,” she said, then resumed her rise to the call of duty. He could hear the incongruously mollifying tones of her harsh and jagged voice attempting to comfort his mother as he continued downstairs to the study.

This visit to discharge his filial duties had developed into a depressing and irritating affair. He had come to say farewell to his mother, only to find she had already gone – and been replaced by a demented product of her own fantasies, complete with supporting vulture eager for the pickings. The way this particular connoisseur of decomposing carrion claimed possession already of territories that were hard pressed even to tolerate the arrogance, let alone smile upon it, drove his indignation to new heights.

It was only a taste for schadenfreude that compelled him to follow the woman’s instructions and wait for her in the study. A malevolent desire to see the disappointment on her face when he told her that his mother was in no position to bequeath this property to the first Samaritan who chanced along and that this study in which she had already staked her claim was not hers but his.

In many respects, his father might not have been the model parent. By the nature of his job, which took him away from home for long periods, he had been very distant. And their relationship had consequently been very business-like. But he was nothing if not correct, and he knew his duties as a father. So, when he knew he was about to die, as if preparing to set off on his last great voyage – this time never to return – he saw to it that his son should at least be in a position to enjoy the fruits of his father’s years of labour. And he did not rest until every loose end of legal necessity had been tied up.

Frank often wondered why it was he had felt compelled to spend so much of his time in the far-flung outposts of civilisation. Whether it had been a reflection of his relationship with the woman who now lay helpless and demented in her bedroom upstairs. Whether they had never really loved each other. And perhaps he found the answer in that study among the various items on the shelves, which he browsed through now in casual, unconscious search of a clue to his father.

One clue in particular attracted his attention. It was a large, beautifully bound and gilt-edged volume on the fauna and flora of India – a Victorian tome in English from the days of the British Raj. The elaborate colour engravings of