by A. B. Decker
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 she saw as a missed vocation by playing physician.
“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 sym
pathy 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 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 peacocks, jambu trees and rose-ringed parakeets were striking enough and hinted at a romantic side to his father’s character which Frank had never even suspected. But what especially caught his eye were
some loose leaves in the book that became dislodged by his thumbing of the pages and, on closer inspection, revealed a large sepia brown photograph of an attractive Indian girl fetchingly attired in her traditional sari. On the back of the photo he found the words: With regards to you and your family, Neeti.
This intriguing discovery begged so many questions that Frank would never be in a position to answer. But the very thought that his father might possibly have had some kind of a liaison with this Neeti woman filled him with a curious gladness. Was this perhaps the true reason for his father’s many travels? Was this his escape from the straitjacket of his mother’s regime, which he was certain must have been as harsh for his father as it was for him?
Frank searched the shelves for more clues. But of his other books – which appeared to be mostly dry tracts on the art of building bridges and the like – none surrendered any further glimpses of his father’s romantic nature. Nonetheless, he began to feel that his journey had not been entirely in vain after all. He tucked the photograph carefully back inside the book, wrote a brief note to the nurse, giving her Patricia’s flat as his contact address, then left. He had no desire and saw no reason to speak with the dragon again. And he felt sure that she had nothing of any consequence to report about his mother that he had not already seen with his own eyes. The book he took with him under his arm. Whether this was out of sentiment or curiosity he was not certain, but he felt in some inexplicable way that it belonged with him. And it was presumably this possession of his mind by thoughts of the unsuspected love knots of his father that blurred his mental faculties and obscured the stupidity of this last act of leaving behind his address.