by A. B. Decker
“My husband’s not an easy man. But I think there are many husbands in Switzerland who are not easy,” she said and paused to gaze out through the window for a moment, before adding with a grin “I call it ‘la condition suisse’.”
It was a grin that spoke of resignation more than amusement.
“I heard there’s a referendum to give us the vote,” she said, then asked: “Are you an easy husband?”
Frank was momentarily stung by the directness of her question. He struggled for an answer that could be squared with his conscience. But it was an unnecessary struggle. The question was purely rhetorical.
“It was when he brought Esther home for the first time that I realised it was not going to be easy,” she continued. “I asked myself if it was simply the artist in him. Or was it the man? Was it this that marked him out as the true artist and me the failed one, since I had no such wish to play the kind of games he wanted me to play?”
This confessional turn had Frank shifting his gaze uncomfortably out of the window through the white scaffold of the birch trees. The light was already beginning to fade, and the background gloom accentuated their white lines.
“It wasn’t just the games. She was a nice enough girl.”
Frank looked across at Anna. Her lips trembled slightly as she spoke these words, but he could not read any meaning into their tremor. Her eyes remained firmly concealed beneath her hair. The words were spoken for her. Not for Frank.
“‘You have to push the boundaries,’ he always says. “It’s his way to prove that he’s alive. I suppose that’s why he always invites so many people home. Many of them are not even friends. He doesn’t even like most of them. They pretend to adore him, but much of the time they just make fun of him. And I think that’s why he does it. It makes him feel better than them. So that’s okay. But when Esther moved in to live with us – to share our bed, our kitchen, our entire life together – that was very difficult. It feels almost like a prison sometimes. So I often take the little blue train out into the country and the hills where I grew up. Such happy days. Playing in the woods, making fires and grilling our cervelat in the flames. I still love the climb up to the ruins of the Landskron Castle. Such freedom up there. Standing at the top. The breeze on my face. And that clear view sweeping over the city to the Vosges Mountains in Alsace and the Black Forest in Germany. These are borders I can understand. Frontiers I can cross. Not boundaries to push. Why does he need that?”
Anna’s question hung in the air like a dead fly caught in the faintest of webs. In the awkward silence that followed, Frank’s attention was attracted by loud whispers in the background. He turned his head. Anna was still immersed in her contemplation. Beyond her, in the far corner of the room stood three white coats, deep in conversation. As they spoke, they cast occasional glances in his direction – until suddenly one of the coats became particularly agitated, turned and walked over towards him.
But Frank was not the point of interest. The coat stopped at Anna. And the other two came running over.
Anna looked up through the dark fronds of her hair. Frank caught the mumbling of voices between them. He saw what looked like smoke rising from Anna’s chair. And the commotion of white coats as they fanned the smoke and reached out to lend Anna support as she rose from her chair, chuckling. One of the white coats surreptitiously retrieved the cigarette lighter from the chair as they went.
“Tomorrow, Fredy, I will bring my writing with me and we can share our thoughts,” she said before turning to leave on the arms of the white coat.
“Frank,” he said, correcting her. But she was already out of earshot. He could now see the scorched patch on the chair where she had been sitting, and watched her shuffle slowly out of sight, before turning his mind to the notepad on his lap. The weekend in Cornwall. The breeze. The near-silent susurrus that whispered in off the sea. And Ellen’s sweet expression, which seemed more distant now than it had ever been.
Es war doch immer so. He looked at the page in his notepad. Where did that come from? What does it even mean, he asked himself.
Afternoon turned to early evening. And from somewhere in a remote corner of this large room, a light switch was flicked, accentuating the darkness outside. Anna was right. Standing out from this darkness, the white birch trees resembled ever more the bars of a cage.
***
No sooner had Professor Abegg left the room than Ellen heard a clamour of excited voices in the corridor outside. The professor’s voice was clearly audible above all the others. His anger was palpable. But almost as abruptly as the clamour had begun, it suddenly died back into a prolonged muffle of whispers. Then silence. And without warning the door instantly swung open again. The alarm in Professor Abegg’s face lent his beaky appearance the look of a startled bird. Standing timorously in the doorway behind him was another white-coated figure.
“Mrs Goss.” The professor abruptly stopped at her name. He had to catch his breath. There was a hint of panic in his eyes. But he remained outwardly calm. “I would like you to meet my assistant, Dr Zellweger.”
The sheepish man in the doorway behind him took a step closer to Ellen. She was struck by the firmness of his handshake – it completely contradicted her impression of him. Although he was quite tall and must have been some ten years younger than Professor Abegg, his timid manner made him appear rather frail and lined. Was this the price he paid for taking up psychiatry? Or did it have something to do with the news he bore?
“Dr Zellweger admitted your husband,” Professor Abegg said, “and he is more familiar with your husband’s case than anybody.”
Dr Zellweger smiled nervously, but said nothing. His mouth hovered half open in hesitation. Ellen had the impression that he was struggling with the English. Or perhaps he is simply intimidated by the professor, she was thinking, when suddenly he spoke:
“Unfortunately, Mrs Goss, we are in a slightly embarrassing situation.”
“Please just tell me what’s going on.”
Ellen was surprised by her own composure. She really wanted to scream. Her irritation at the caginess of these psychiatrists had already pushed her patience way beyond endurance. Dr Zellweger cleared his throat.
“I’m afraid your husband discharged himself early this morning without informing anyone. We have no idea where he is at the moment.”
“What?!”
Ellen stared at the two men in disbelief.
“How is that possible? He’s injured, he’s confused. How can he just walk out without anyone even noticing?”
Her voice rose in impetuous anger. But it was a temper born of despair. She felt suddenly cast adrift in a vast, empty ocean. Nowhere to go. Nothing to guide her. In her desperation, she still clung to the conviction that this could not be Frank they were talking about.
But then she asked herself: if this was not Frank, then where was he?
1 A present not quite palpable
is long since past;
leaves only a misty hint of that legend,
while our life becomes a slow drift
through the Dardanelles.
Yet it was always thus,
only the legend was different
Now let us forge a legend of our own,
breathe our own faint mist
on the mirror and rewrite this story
with the tallows of our fingers on the glass
2 And among the ruins
the wind whispers its message without a word
over the first two leaves of an oak
unfolding already from what remains.
Chapter 4
Frank stood on the bridge over the Rhine. It put him in mind of Ellen and Putney Bridge. He recalled the day they stood there watching the seagulls. Enthralled by the dense green of the trees around Fulham Palace with a hint already of colours changing. Intimations of the autumn to come that were carried by the westerly breeze down the Thames. It was the day they decided to get married.
But here on this day, on th
is bridge, it was a chill northerly breeze that blew off the river. It carried with it a hint of chemicals from the industry downstream that lined the border districts of the city. He shivered. And gazed down at eddies of water as they emerged from under the bridge on their slow journey to the North Sea. The water level was low. The river sluggish. It would not revive until the spring, when the mountains released their snow and ice. But for now, winter still held the river in its grip.
The wind. The water. The drift beneath his feet. This bridge seemed to be all that separated him from oblivion. The way it balanced him precariously on the arch of its back made his head swim. The river skyline began to spin. He sensed himself losing control. And looked about for a marker to latch onto. A secure peg to steady him. He found it in the gleam of a statue. A bronze Amazon that stood at the head of the bridge, leading her horse proudly into the city. It seemed almost as if she was offering her support – inviting him to join her, to escape the dullness that hung over the river beneath the louring sky.
The flatness of the scene was matched by a drab Baroque-style edifice that was trying to be something it was not as it abutted the grand hotel Les Trois Rois. The diffident lettering above the doors – Basler Kantonalbank – that coyly advertised its quintessential Swissness seemed no less out of place. An aloof end-of-terrace loner that no one was inclined to invite to the party. Meanwhile, the sumptuous lights of the hotel next door still flickered out across the water. They spoke of cosy conviviality. And came to him like sharp pinpricks of warmth and comfort that gnawed at his own solitude on that bridge.
Just below him a sudden cacophony of seagulls ripped through his quiet reflection. A momentary shard of pain shot through his left temple. He winced. Instinctively putting his left hand to the side of his head, he looked down at the landing stage by the waterside. A vast squawking flurry of white gulls wheeled erratically around the water. A dense inflating mass that enveloped everything around it and eventually encompassed even the grumbling bowels of the bank that loomed above the landing stage. So dense that he failed to see the focus of their menacing encirclement: a man lost amid the screeching mass. A solitary, slightly hunched figure in a long dark coat and black homburg hat by the water’s edge. Rooted to the spot, undismayed, the man paid no attention to the gulls around him. Seemed oblivious to the commotion.
Frank’s heart missed a beat. This figure was so familiar to him. The homburg hat, the coat, the posture. He shouted out.
“Achim!” But his voice was instantly drowned by the squawking of the gulls. In a sudden feverish excitement, he turned and dashed to the end of the bridge as best he could with the bruises from his accident. It was a good hundred metres to the strutting Amazon with her horse. Breathless with anticipation, his heart in his throat, he skirted around the bronze statue. Headed for the steps down to the landing stage. And stopped.
As he stood there looking down the steps to the river, his excitement instantly washed away. The sound of a tram navigating the bend onto the bridge behind him squeezed out the squawking of the gulls. The birds had vanished. The landing stage was bereft of life. There was no one there. No Achim. No anyone.
Had he imagined it?
He wandered the streets nagged by this thought for much of the morning. Plagued by the image of his friend. The image of quarry caught like a fish in a dense white net of gulls. A phantom cast adrift at the foot of the bridge.
It was Frank’s aching feet that eventually urged him through the doors of a quiet-looking restaurant just off the marketplace in the centre of town. It defied the outwardly quiet impression the moment he opened the door and pushed through the heavy curtain that was keeping out the cold. He recognised it instantly as just the kind of place for him in his present state of mind. It had character ground into the floor by decades of weary, homeless feet. Down-and-outs and drifters, students and labourers, men on benefits, would-be philosophers and armchair revolutionaries. The place was packed – charged with the kind of atmosphere that drags you with it, holding an ostentatious mirror to your detachment. He found an obtuse, uncomfortable sort of security here. Felt at home in a way that he could not quite put his finger on. A deep sense of belonging in the thick smoke of cheap cigarettes and garbled, broken conversations.
He found space on a long bench seat at the window by the door. A waitress pushed through the crowd and placed a menu on the table as he sat down.
“’ne Stange, bitte” he said without touching the menu, “- und Kalbsläberli mit Röschti.”
The words rolled over his lips with an Alemannic timbre as familiar to him as the beer she placed in front of him a minute or two later.
“’S chalbsläberli chunnt”, she said to reassure him that his plate of calf’s liver and rösti was on its way, then turned and vanished back through the crush towards the bar.
He watched her getting swallowed up by the crowd until he found his line of vision was suddenly obscured. A tall dark figure had swept aside the thick curtain over the door and stood in front of him, surveying the scene. The faces in the crowd turned, descended into a low murmur and made space for him. The man strode through the impromptu path to a table at the far end of the room that had been vacated the moment he entered the tavern. He removed his hat and long black leather trench coat, hung them on a peg beside his table and sat down with a newspaper. He looked about the room, and his gaze caught Frank’s. He had the look of a predator. Steely lupine eyes beneath a head of black, neatly brilliantined hair. And a pencil-thin moustache that highlighted his cold razor-like lips. They exuded a dark conceit about them as he turned his gaze back to the newspaper, opened it out on the table before him and lit a cigarette.
Frank jumped when the waitress slapped the plate down in front of him. The dark figure with the newspaper momentarily vanished from his thoughts. Frank cast his eyes over the calf’s liver and golden, straw-like strands of fried potato. He had heard a lot about rösti (it conjured the fleeting memory of a meeting that never was – with a newspaper editor – and in the hubbub of the tavern around him the recollection was washed away as quickly as it had appeared). But he had never tried the dish until now.
And from the casual way the waitress banged the plate down on the table – producing some cutlery from the folds of her apron almost as an afterthought – Frank sensed it was not about to do a lot for him. But after the nightmares of Jack, Baschi and the clinic, his appetite was ready for anything. So it was not the memory of Baschi and the shrinks in the clinic that put him off his meal. What really did it for him was the cluster of short black hairs. Each one cooked into place in the golden strands of fried potato with a true eye for detail. He felt his stomach heave. And pushed the plate to one side. He ordered another beer instead.
The waitress slopped the new glass in front of him. He watched the handsome head of froth spew onto the beermat. When he looked up, she had already moved on to the next table. And his gaze instead met the predatory eyes of the brilliantined stranger. The eyes briefly turned their attention to the ashtray on the table as he tapped the ash from his cigarette. Then returned their scrutiny to Frank. The conceit on those razor-thin lips had veered now into a new realm of sentiment. It smacked of malice. And instantly set Frank’s heart pounding.
Unnerved by the menace, he looked away. His gaze rested instead on a petite Irish-looking lady who had just entered the tavern, dark anxious eyes peering from under a fringe of jet-black hair. She was selling red roses. Someone even greeted her by a name that sounded to him very much like Molly. But this was a long way from the streets of Dublin. And a long way too from Putney Bridge and Ellen. Frank opened the pouch in his wallet and took her lock of hair between his fingers. The only remaining handle on the world as he knew it.
The rose seller’s fringe of jet-black hair put him in mind of Anna. The clinic. The white coats. And the Valium. He recalled the endless questions by the doctor. The cage of white birch trees. His head ached with every image. Everything began to spin as the noise in the restaurant
began to obtrude. The scraping of knives and clacking of forks that cut through the thick curtains of chatter. The screech of knives across cheap porcelain seared through his head. And the spin refused to let up. The entire room appeared to be in overdrive. The crowd of people, the brown nicotine-stained furniture, everything that had been there just a few seconds before now vanished. Only the image of the white coats stayed with him, taunting his every turn, growing steadily black as the spin accelerated.
“Oh Achim, bitte.” The words erupted again. And he reached out for the only anchor in sight that seemed capable of preventing him from being swept away altogether: the coat, now black, around which everything else rotated. He clutched at it. Held it fast. And felt like a lost baby desperately holding on to the only security the little mite thought it knew. He wanted to bawl and yell until the world stopped.
And it did.
He felt the grip on his shirt collar tighten round his neck. Sensed himself reeling through the doorway. And landing face first on the cold hard asphalt of the street outside.
“Hau ab, huere Schiessdrägg!” The malicious bellow telling Frank to get the hell out brought the spinning thoughts in his head come crashing to a halt. He caught the outline of a large figure that filled the entire doorway of the tavern. It was the tall dark stranger in his hat and black leather trench coat. The teeth between his razor-thin lips glinted faintly in the light. He flicked his cigarette to the ground, turned and walked on up the street.
The bruising, it seemed, would not let up. Frank surveyed the street around him. It was empty and dimly lit. He recognised it as the street where he had met Jack and Baschi. This recollection, the sense of familiarity, prompted him to head for the only place he knew that was not too far from here. The bridge.
The northerly wind off the river stung his cheeks. His eyes prickled in the cold. He felt a shiver course through his entire body. And standing on the bridge again, contemplating the Rhine on its journey to the North Sea, Frank tried focusing his mind now on the thought that it would not be long before the eddying current of water below his feet met the water from the Thames – that he was not as far from Ellen as he felt. But the north wind on his cheeks was a chill reminder that, even so, this river was not the Thames. The bridge was not their bridge. And the eddies of water below sent his mind into a bewildering spin once more.