The Dark Frontier

by A. B. Decker

  As she returned from the cooking niche, she was carrying a tray that contained not only two bowls of soup and two glasses of wine, but also a small yet deliberate display of camembert cheese and two apples. She put the tray with studied care on the table in front of Frank.

  “I’m afraid it’s Maggi soup,” she said apologetically.

  “I’ve no quarrel with Maggi. Their soup may not be great, but they’re a socially minded corporation. Even Frank Wedekind worked for Maggi. He wrote advertising copy for them before he made his name in the theatre. So we’re in good company.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Patricia, raising her glass with a “santé.” And savoured a modest sip of the wine, looking over her glass at Frank with those mysteriously sparkling ebony eyes that had so captivated him the very first time they met.

  “A Riesling from across the border,” she said. “A little more interesting than the Chasselas we had at lunch the other day.”

  Frank was not used to a knowledge of wine being expressed by a woman, especially one who exuded such uncompromisingly feminine charm. He watched every subtlety of expression, every nuance of movement on her lips as she sipped her wine, as she spoke her words. He was not listening to what she had to say. It was her curiously melancholic beauty that enthralled him. And he was not willing to sacrifice the piquancy of the moment for the dullness of small talk. But she insisted, and once again she succeeded in surprising him.

  “I was born in January 1913. Quite a good year I’ve been told. My father has a whole crate of 1913 Chateau Haut-Brion at home, which he says he’s keeping for the day I get married.” She smiled. “How long do you think a good Bordeaux will keep?”

  Her question had a strangely prismatic quality about it – a simple statement that her beguiling smile managed to break down into a whole spectrum of possible meanings. She was like a traveller passing through customs and immigration, her only item of luggage a suitcase with a false bottom, and when she opens up the case with a smile, she appears to be laying bare every intimacy that she carries with her on her journey. But in truth, all her secrets remain as well concealed as they ever were.

  This careless image reminded him of the half-hearted bargain he had struck with Achim and his initial motivation in seeking out Patricia’s company. But her manner left him uncertain how to broach the subject. And the existence of Léandre had created a new dimension of insecurity to cope with. He approached the situation cagily, skirting the issue with an ineptitude that did not escape her attention. He should have read the label on the display of camembert and apples. It was clear enough. But instead he allowed his unease to continue until these had long been digested by the acid in his stomach. And eventually he had to rely on her to save him from his own awkward clumsiness.

  “What did you come here for, Frank?” she asked at last.

  A simple enough question. But it was the way she wrapped her sensuous lips around the words that did it. And the way she used his first name. It was the cue he had been waiting for. As so often with seduction, the moment came unsuspectedly, leaving no space for cautious manoeuvres. And he jumped in with both feet, willing and easy prey, to deliver a basket of detail that seemed to capture her imagination and instil in her expression an intentness and energy that he had not seen in her before. And she seized on the story of his involvement with Achim with the eagerness of a hungry child. He had the impression that her estimation of him was growing with every mouthful. When at length he reached the announcement of his intention to play courier for Achim, the spell was complete – as if this was what she had been waiting for since they first met.

  She leaned the slightness of her body towards him, took his hand, and pressed her lips gently to his cheek. The seducer was seduced.

  “I’m glad,” was all she said.

  From here to a final consummation of her regard for him was only a short distance. But he was not yet ready to go down that path.

  She was too important. He needed to know more about her. About why his decision made her glad. But everything remained securely locked away, and he had no idea where he should start looking for the key. She seemed so rootless in every way. So hard to pin down.

  “You know, when I was a little boy,” he said at last, “I had dreams of growing a huge oak tree at the bottom of our garden that would get as tall as our house and outlive me by hundreds of years. It would be my gift to posterity.”

  “I can just imagine you as a little boy. You must have been very sweet,” she laughed with a gentle sparkle in her voice. It was a laugh that appeared to be born of the purest affection. And it left him with an exquisite tingling sensation. Like bubbles of the finest champagne.

  “Every spring for about three years,” he continued, “I would plant acorns in pots and watch them strike root, pushing out the first two leaves on their way to heaven. Then, when they were big enough to survive on their own, I would secretly put the seedlings in the ground in a distant corner of the garden. But every time my mother found them, she pulled them up. ‘We don’t want these growing in the garden, they’ll destroy the foundations of the house before too long’ she used to say. Goodness knows how long she was hoping to live. But I never gave up, and every spring I tried again, until my dream faded.”

  “Is that why you decided to go to Cologne for your friend? So you can finally plant your oak tree?”

  He sensed she was mocking him.

  “You remind me of those acorns I was always trying to plant,” he said. “The way I kept hopelessly trying to help them strike root and was constantly being thwarted.”

  Patricia broke into a new kind of laugh.

  “That’s the first time anyone has likened me to an acorn. What does that make you? A squirrel come to sneak me off to your lair?”

  “You mean my nest. Foxes have lairs.”

  She was making fun of him. But she did it with such magic that he found it impossible to take offence. He lifted his empty glass.

  “Is there any more wine?” he repeated.

  “I think I’ll call you my squirrel from now on,” she said.

  The sense of possession implicit in these words sent a ripple of excitement through his chest. Bewitched by her mysterious beauty – which was all the richer for its modesty – he followed the line of her body with an impatient eye as she rose, still laughing to herself, and fetched the bottle from the cooking niche.

  She bent forward slightly to pour the wine. Frank watched with rapt attention, drinking in the beauty of her slender wrist and her straight black hair as it cascaded over her face and concealed for a moment the enigma of her smile. The way her fingers flexed around the stem as they chinked glasses reflected the tantalising amalgam of vulnerability and strength of purpose – a paradox that teased his desire for her. He leaned forward and, before she could put the glass to her mouth, took it in his left hand to savour the soft sweet flesh of her lips on his.

  Her response was not so much reciprocation, more a passive lingering. This encouraged him in the belief that it signalled at least a mild appreciation of his advances. Until his hands travelled down to the curvature of her waist and started slowly working back up the buttons of her blouse.

  “What are you doing?”

  Her words did not wholly convince him of the surprised innocence in the inflection of her voice. An impression that was reaffirmed when his continued unveiling of her slender body failed to elicit any further words of protest or bewilderment. On the contrary, as she let her blouse drop to the floor, a shy smile of acceptance flickered over her face. He took her in his arms, carried her over to the bed and laid her on the quilt cover as carefully as he might set down an injured dragonfly on a lily pad.

  For a moment, which lost all shape of time, not a word was spoken.

  Frank ran his fingers gently over the flesh of her lips. He let his middle finger lie in the exquisitely deep furrow of her philtrum.

  “We call it the mark of an angel in French,” she whispered. “Placed there by La
ilah according to Jewish tradition.”

  “I can believe it,” he said.

  In a gesture of sweet surrender, her eyes followed the movement of his arm as his fingers explored further, gently skimming over the contours of her body. He sensed a frisson of tension as he did so – like a gentle pulse of lightning between the touch receptors of their skin – from the dainty, perfectly proportioned anatomy of her feet, over the soft black fleece protecting her virtue, to the muted ridges of bone that adorned her neck and put him in mind of the delicate collar worn by a certain kind of dove that he could not put a name to. The faint trace of a flush came into her cheeks, and she smiled.

  “It seems to me that you have an unfair advantage.”

  She reached over and began to unbutton his shirt. He allowed the gentle touch of her fingers to work his garments loose and watched in silent passion. But not without a certain discomfort.

  “I thought we were on a pretty equal footing already. After all, until I set eyes on you in all your nakedness, you knew far more about me than I did about you. I’ve simply redressed the balance. And now you’re trying to tip the scales back in your favour.”

  “No,” she said playfully. “Simply undressing the redressed balance.”

  Her immodesty, the way in which she made no secret of her appetite, took him by surprise. Yet it was not this, but the indescribable beauty of her that made him hesitate.

  “How I’d like to stretch this moment to the end of time,” he said. The remark appeared to please her. But Frank sensed that she did not fully grasp his meaning, and he tried hopelessly to expand on his words.

  “There’s something so pure and exciting about the erotic line of a woman’s body. And when it shows this kind of perfection,” he continued, as he ran his fingers the full length of her delicate frame, “then I just want to keep that moment of purity open for as long as possible.”

  “You mean you don’t want to make love to me.”

  The bluntness hurt. And was compounded further by a sudden, fierce pounding on the door.

  “Mademoiselle Roche!”

  The voice from the other side of the door was ugly, but ineffectual. It repeated Patricia’s name several times before eventually conceding defeat. They remained motionless on the bed and listened to the footsteps disappearing down the stairs. Then lay in complete silence. Like laboratory mice in an anechoic chamber.

  “That was Lutz,” Patricia whispered at last. This remained the extent of her words, until she saw that the name failed to make any impression on him.

  “Didn’t you meet him when you were at Breitner’s place?” she asked. “He’s what Breitner likes to regard as his private secretary. I’ve never been quite sure whether Lutz is his first name or his family name. Everyone just calls him Lutz. But it’s certainly not a term of endearment. He’s smarmy and thoroughly unlikeable.”

  “What do you think he wanted?”

  “What he usually wants at this hour.”

  “Which is what?”

  “To take me to Breitner.” A cold despondency came into her expression with these words, and a blankness clouded the melancholy sparkle of her eyes.

  “Why? To sleep with him?”

  “You know, my first-ever acting role was a terrific success.”

  Was this another of her evasions, Frank asked himself. Or was it a relevant digression? He was rankled by the studied avoidance of his question.

  “It was in my last year at school,” she added. “We put on a stage play of Tristan and Isolde, which our teacher had adapted especially for the occasion. I was asked to play Isolde. By all accounts I did it quite well. My teacher said I had a natural talent. But I think my performance had more to do with the fact that I was madly in love with the boy who played Tristan. And I found the whole story so beautifully sad, so full of love and betrayal, just the kind of thing an adolescent girl adores.”

  Patricia smiled wistfully through her private reminiscence. It was a smile that seemed to shut Frank out entirely.

  “Isolde taught me a lot about life and betrayal. Sometimes I think that life is just one long series of betrayals. But you know, it’s not the big betrayals that are important. They can be excused by the schemes of history. The ones that matter are the small betrayals – the ones we commit in the course of a day without really giving them very much thought. It’s those that gnaw away at our fibre and slowly destroy us.”

  “What happened to your Tristan?”

  “Oh, I went off him shortly after that, when I saw him with a gang of his friends all in lederhosen. I can’t abide lederhosen.”

  “And where does Breitner fit in?”

  It was a clumsy question, but having brought her back to earth with Tristan’s lederhosen, Frank felt the timing, if not the wording, was quite apt.

  “He doesn’t fit. He just forces his way in.”

  Frank sensed anger in these words as she slipped out of bed, tiptoed over to the door and opened it just a crack. He saw her crouch down and pick something off the floor outside. It was a single red rose. She closed the door, walked over to the table, put the flower in the vase with the other rose and crept back into bed.

  Lying back into her pillow, pensive and unapproachable, Patricia left Frank to hang like a bat at dawn waiting for night to fall.

  He regretted his earlier clumsiness. And, intrigued though he was by the significance of the scene he had just witnessed, he said nothing. Simply waited patiently for her to continue. When at last she appeared ready to admit him to her thoughts again, she spoke with a flatness and detachment that only served to underline his regret.

  “My father has no time for all the talk we hear about race and religion these days. The woman he fell in love with and married, my mother, is classed a Gentile. But that makes him no less of a Jew. And Breitner has some useful connections. In exchange for certain favours, he promised to see that my father would be all right.”

  “What sort of favours?”

  Frank’s indiscretion was met with a partly worried, partly disparaging look which he found hard to fathom.

  “Breitner sees himself as a businessman with interests in every corner of the city. He has a lot of contacts in the Swiss chemical companies here, for example, and other organisations that do business in Germany. And he keeps an eye on the students here as well. Especially German students. All for his masters in the party over the border. So I feed him with useless information about student activities.”

  “And where does he take his meals? In bed?”

  “You know, it seems to me that you’re very inquisitive when it comes to things that don’t concern you. And not nearly curious enough about the things that really matter.”

  Her words were right on target. And they stung. The two of them fell into silent contemplation. Frank could sense the tension in the slight touch of their bodies as they lay side by side on her bed.

  “Where do the roses come in?” Frank asked at last, unable to let his urge for interrogation lie still for any longer.

  “Ah, les fleurs du mal.” A wry smile crossed her lips as Patricia whispered these words. They came with a deep sadness in their tone that accentuated her French accent in a way Frank had not heard in her before. “Lutz leaves a rose outside the door whenever Breitner wants to see me.”

  Frank bristled at her words. They sent a shiver through his spine.

  “It’s a dangerous game you’re playing, Patricia.”

  She smiled, and ran her fingers over his chest.

  “No more so than yours,” she rejoined, and punctuated this statement with a kiss on his right nipple, which she teased with her tongue and tugged at with her teeth. The way in which she could suddenly banish her sadness sent a pulse of excitement coursing through his veins.

  “Frank, I have an idea. If you want to move out of your hotel and find somewhere else to live, why don’t you come and stay here? I have to go away next week, and will be gone for some time. So, when you get back from Cologne, you could come and stay
here until my return. You would be safe from Breitner for a time. He would never think of looking for you here while I’m away.”

  Frank was not so sure that his tormentor would be so easily duped. But in his erotic enchantment he had put any threat from Breitner to the back of his mind. And had even forgotten about the promised trip to Cologne. Yet Patricia’s unexpected invitation now lent a new urgency to his plans. He vowed to himself that he would make his preparations the following morning.

  They did not make love on this their first night together, but lay in each other’s arms enjoying the beauty of the moment. The exquisite touch of skin upon skin. The perfumes that gather around the triangles of the neck. A sense of deep tenderness that Frank took with him into the timeless reaches of sleep.

  It was close to dawn when a rude hand fetched him back from this paradise. His immediate impression of that waking instant was of a fierce ache tearing his head apart. No matter how his head was positioned on the pillow, he felt that his brain was being dragged from the comfort of his skull and pummelled beyond recognition. But he sensed it was not this so much as the noise that woke him from his sweet dreams – a deafening, repetitive clanging above his head that seemed to fill the entire room.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Only bells. Just damned church bells.”

  He looked down at the face on the pillow beside him, and caught the scent of a familiar perfume in the air. The flame-red curls of her hair draped over the green polyester satin. And her lips still moved vaguely in the wake of her words. But her eyes remained firmly shut. Who was she? The scene threw him into the tangled arms of a dream state that he struggled to unravel, until eventually sleep returned to save him from the clutches of his desperation.

  By the time the full brunt of wakefulness finally forced itself upon him, this discordant interlude in the night had already faded. He gazed on the delicate, sleep-entrained features of Patricia’s face on the pillow beside him: her long dark lashes keeping the seductive charm of her eyes still firmly closed to the morning light; her lips in a beguiling, asymmetric pose, as if forming words that wanted to be spoken; and her raven hair curled around her ear in a way that accentuated the fleshy fullness of the lobe. He had never realised until that moment what beautiful perfection there was to be found in the earlobe. Even the perforation made in the tender flesh of the lobe to accommodate an earring displayed an impeccably neat precision.