The Dark Frontier

by A. B. Decker

  “My wife says the same thing,” he said. “And maybe it’s true, because I don’t like to talk much when I drive.” And so the remainder of the journey to the Zellwegers’ house continued in silence.

  Marthe welcomed Ellen back with an air of concern and affection that was infinitely more sisterly than the reception she had received from Beth. She instantly felt at home again. Marthe had even made a pot of tea for her arrival. Dr Zellweger evidently felt it best to leave his wife alone with Ellen to break the story and withdrew to his study.

  “You must forgive me,” she said. “I could find no ginger biscuits.” (Ellen was touched by the way she always considered every little detail, like the good Swiss hostess she was.) “But try these. They’re a local speciality called Läckerli. Made with honey and spices, à la cannelle.”

  Ellen tried one.

  “They’re delicious. With cinnamon,” she said, savouring the biscuit with particular relish after the long journey back from Cologne. “I love honey and cinnamon and all those gingerbread spices.”

  It was when they were sitting there over tea and Läckerli – as if this was the most natural thing to do when someone’s life had gone haywire – that the story came out. Such as it was.

  A man answering Frank’s description, the same man the police had identified earlier as Frank Eigenmann, had apparently been found in the Kolping house. As Dr Zellweger had already intimated, ‘found’ was not quite the right word: although the man had checked into the house, he had since disappeared again; he had not checked out, his things were still in his room, but no one knew where he was. The man had apparently been behaving very strangely, and the concierge at the Kolping house called the police – whether this was because of his strange behaviour or because she was afraid he had done a bunk without paying his rent was not quite clear.

  Most worrying of all, when they searched the room, they found things which they had reason to believe were stolen. And it was this latest twist that particularly disturbed Dr Zellweger. Apparently, a man had gained access to the home of a disabled old woman a few days earlier, had entered her bedroom, scared the living daylights out of her and walked off with things that have now turned up in the hotel room.

  “Ellen, your husband is in a very unstable condition. And it is important that we find him before he does damage to himself, or to someone else. If there is anything you know which can help us, please tell Urs before it’s too late.” She paused, hopeful for a clue from Ellen. And Ellen sensed that Marthe was waiting for something very particular.

  “What can I say?” Ellen asked in desperation. “I’ve already told you our entire history.”

  “You know, this Kolping house is located close to what you might call the less wholesome part of town. Is it possible your husband may be taking drugs?”

  “That’s absurd. He keeps fit. He plays squash. You don’t do that if you take drugs.”

  “Perhaps if we knew why he went to Cologne….”

  But Ellen’s thoughts were already moving in a different direction and had long since left Marthe and her husband’s interrogations far behind. Other questions were occupying her mind. The place where Frank was supposed to be staying had caught her imagination. At last something concrete, a physical contact of sorts.

  Ellen needed to get inside the place, to see the things he left behind. She was sure that if she could get into that room, she would somehow be able to prove once and for all that it was not her Frank they were talking about. When she suggested this to Dr Zellweger, he took to the idea with a bubbling enthusiasm.

  “I’m surprised the police didn’t suggest it themselves,” he said. “Of course, we must get permission from them first, but I’m sure it can be arranged. Naturally they are wanting to speak with you anyway.”

  Dr Zellweger managed to get the necessary permission the very next day. So, together with a rather sour-faced policeman who was introduced to Ellen as Kommissar Staehelin and reminded her of Malcolm with his pencil-thin moustache, Dr Zellweger and Marthe took Ellen to the Kolping house to see where Frank was said to have lodged. It lay on the other side of the river. The streets they walked through to get there from the police station had a deeply uncomfortable feel about them. Ellen could not help noticing the used syringes that lay in the gutter, the run-down bars and groups of shady-looking people loitering outside. This was not the Switzerland she had been expecting.

  The house itself lay the other side of this less wholesome part of town, close to a church and a square surrounded by large late nineteenth-century townhouses. It was so at odds with the unsavoury streets they had just walked through that Ellen could not help feeling this was a special tour put on especially for her benefit – that they wanted to drive home the message that Frank was probably on drugs. It was an absurd idea. But the seamy streets they had taken her through gave it a plausibility that stuck in Ellen’s mind.

  As Kommissar Staehelin explained to the concierge on the desk who they were, the elderly lady became carried away by an increasingly crotchety impatience. She began to lay into him with a barrage of words that were completely incomprehensible to Ellen. But the message was clear enough, as Dr Zellweger confirmed afterwards.

  Her huffy outburst, he explained, was the umbrage of a woman worried about who was going to pay the money that was owing to her. Even with Kommissar Staehelin’s presence, they would have been no match for this piqued old dragon had it not been for Marthe. With the winning way that Ellen had come to appreciate in her, she managed to placate the old dear sufficiently to invest her with the human features she was no doubt born with, but which she obviously preferred to suppress for the purposes of her job. And once Marthe had extracted the key from her, the four of them took the stairs up to the second floor.

  “You must not think badly about her,” Marthe said defensively, as if she felt the old lady was letting her country down. “She surely has many problems with the drug addicts on the streets around here.”

  It was a strange sensation for Ellen entering a room known to be occupied by a man who was said to be her husband – but was fast becoming a complete stranger to her. It was like invading the privacy of someone who bore no relation to her, and she found it slightly distasteful. The bed was neatly made. A small suitcase lay half-unpacked on a chair. And the bedside table was occupied almost entirely by an old book.

  “The room is in the condition how we found it. We wait on your man,” the Kommissar explained in his broken English.

  “He’s not my ‘man’,” Ellen insisted. She sensed an involuntary anger in her voice. But more than that, she was giving vent to her relief, because she was finally convinced beyond all doubt that this room was not inhabited by her Frank. Nothing in the room was familiar to her. She looked in the bathroom – the shaving set, the toothbrush, the toilet bag: they were all completely foreign. Ellen let out an almost hysterical laugh. She could barely contain herself. Tears of both joy and despair ran down her cheeks as she leafed through the book beside the bed – a gilt-edged Victorian tome filled with beautiful illustrations of exotic fauna and flora.

  “This book has been stolen,” said Kommissar Staehelin.

  His eyes were on her every move. He made her feel she was the culprit, that she was responsible for this whole absurd situation. She tried to ignore his cold, insensitive presence and directed her attention at the suitcase that lay on the chair beside the bed. This too was as unknown to her as every other item in the room. And the clothes she rummaged through were things she had never set eyes on in her life. She examined the labels and found they were not even English – except for one pair of underpants; these she had to admit did bring a flicker of life into her battered dog-weary memory.

  But so what? Underpants like these were probably worn by thousands of men all over Europe, she told herself. They did not even have the distinction of a pattern, but were simply brief black crotch holders. A pouch just large enough to carry the substance of its wearer’s pride and joy. Yet here was the familia
rity that disturbed her. It did not strike her at first when she looked at the label. It was only as she put the pants down and her hand slipped for an instant under the black cotton cloth of the pouch that she noticed it. A hole about a quarter of an inch in diameter where the cloth had been worn through. She knew that hole so well. How often she had teased Frank about it, and joked about what on earth he had been doing to make a hole in a place like that. What were the chances of another man walking around the city at this very moment with a hole a quarter of an inch wide in the pouch of their black English-labelled briefs? She rummaged further. And at the very bottom of the case, she came across two pairs of socks that also looked familiar. No, not familiar – she knew them intimately. It was not only the design, but the pattern of wear; day in day out she had put his socks in the washing machine, taken them out again, hung them up to dry, and tucked them away in his drawer – she knew every worn thread like she knew the lines on her hand.

  At that moment, she became more aware than ever of the vast gap that had opened up between them, as she gazed at these socks and underpants. Garments that she had known so intimately now lying in a strange suitcase with a lot of strange clothes in a strange room in a foreign country. It was as though she had years of divorce behind her, and all the pain and emotion of the separation were still there, fresh as ever. She sat on the edge of the bed, a sock still in one hand, and finally submitted to an uncontrollable deluge of tears. The despair was echoed in the doleful bawling of her words.

  “Where is he? I can’t stand this any longer. Please just tell me where my Frank is.”

  She sensed Marthe’s comforting arms around her shoulders and heard her voice. But the words laboured in vain to get through. Ellen was hopelessly at sea in her distress.

  Her recollection of what followed was very vague. Even fainter and more garbled than a half-remembered dream on the edge of sleep. It was not until she was woken the next morning by Marthe bringing her a cup of tea in bed that she learned how Marthe and her husband had taken her home, completely overwrought, after assuring Kommissar Staehelin that she would be in good hands and that he could interview her as soon as she had recovered. The Kommissar had apparently proved to be completely out of his depth and was hopelessly embarrassed by her outburst. Like two overgrown schoolgirls, Ellen and Marthe both giggled at the poor man’s ineptitude, as if they had caught him with his trousers down.

  “Marthe, you’ve been so kind. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

  “Please.” Marthe place a reassuring hand on Ellen’s arm. So warm. So tender. Her affection sent a thrill coursing through Ellen’s veins – a closeness she had not felt in months. Then, leaving her smile with Ellen as she went over to the window, Marthe pulled back the heavy curtains.

  “Look. Today we have the sun. Urs has clinical duties today. So we will go for a daytrip into the country, have lunch together somewhere, and forget all our problems for a few hours.”

  Ellen suspected where the journey into the country was taking her soon after their car left the city boundaries. They were on the same road as before on that day when Dr Zellweger drove out to visit his mysterious protégé in the country and left Marthe and Ellen in a little village up in the hills. Ellen fell in love with these hills the first time she was here. A little sombre in its winter coat perhaps. But it was a coat with promise in its pockets and the contentment of knowing the promise would be kept. So elegant and peaceful the brown wooded hills and limestone rocks against the blue sky. Nature at her tidiest and most reassuring. Ellen had no choice but to put everything to the back of her mind and to forget. If only for a few hours.

  Marthe was right. This trip was just what she needed. Ellen’s newfound friend, who showed such an uncanny sense of timing and offered the sisterly affection that she had found so lacking when she most needed it, exuded a mood that Ellen had never seen in her before. She had always been incredibly accommodating and friendly. But today she seemed to Ellen especially carefree and light-hearted. So full of life.

  Almost as if wanting to put the flourish of a signature to her vivacious mood, she accelerated the car out from the sombre light of a narrow treelined gorge that Ellen recognised from her earlier trip out here and into the bright expansiveness of the plateau where they had walked before.

  “You’re not Catholic, are you?’ Marthe Zellweger asked as she swung the car to a standstill under one of the trees in the village square.

  “I’m not into religion at all,” Ellen replied.

  “Yes, I remember you felt uncomfortable when we were here last. You said you didn’t like churches.”

  Ellen nodded.

  “I went to a Catholic boarding school,” she said. “And that told me all I needed to know about religion.”

  “But I would like you to try once more,” Marthe insisted. “There are not many people here during the week, so I think you will not find it so uncomfortable. You must see this. For me it is one of the most beautiful places in this part of Switzerland.”

  There was a trace of reverence in Marthe’s voice that Ellen found oddly unlike the woman she had come to know.

  This place had been a holy site for hundreds of years, she explained – ever since a child fell from the rocks into the gorge below and was caught in mid-flight by the Virgin Mary. A chapel of mercy was carved out of the rock to celebrate the miracle, which eventually led to a whole industry of religious construction – a Benedictine monastery, a convent.

  Marthe giggled quietly, speculating on what the nuns and monks got up to together in the cold winter nights, as she led Ellen into the church.

  When Marthe now led her through the door off the side of the building and into the long windowless passageway, Ellen sensed her pulse quicken. She remembered the dimly lit walls, showing pious inscriptions in all kinds of languages that she was only partly able to decipher. And the coolness of the air, as it wafted off the marble walls with a hint of incense. The powerful atmosphere of mysticism in the passageway was overwhelming. But – unlike before –she did not feel the same light-headedness when they came to the top of the steep staircase.

  “We’re lucky,” Marthe said in a whisper that restored that reverential tone after her brief foray into titillating speculation.

  “If you would come at a weekend, there would be very many people here,” she explained, before leading Ellen down the long staircase into the bowels of the rock on which the church stood. From a window halfway down, Ellen saw that the stairs were actually cut into the face of the rock. She judged that they were now about fifty or sixty feet below the abbey. At the bottom of the steps, Marthe took her arm and guided her through an iron gateway into a small dark grotto lit in one corner by the flicker of candles.

  “On a Sunday, you would find this whole chapel lit by candles,” she said, adding a quietly earnest “Excuse me” as she left Ellen standing just inside the iron gateway to the chapel and went to light a candle herself. For a moment, Marthe had returned to her more serious mode. And although it was true to the character Ellen had come to know, it surprised her, because she had never imagined that Marthe would entertain religious leanings in any direction.

  “Oh, I think it’s in the blood since a very early age,” Marthe explained, as they came back along the passageway and up the last flight of steps into the fresh winter air. “Most of my school years I spent at a Catholic boarding school in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. A very strict education which you never forget. Perhaps that explains why I have never taken my husband’s psychiatry as seriously as he does.”

  “Well, you certainly talk like a psychiatrist sometimes,” Ellen said, as she recalled the grilling Marthe had given her at times about her relationship with Frank.

  “Do I? How awful.” She laughed with a hint of embarrassment.

  “That’s because I live with one,” Marthe added. “I also considered studying it at one time. It seemed so intriguing. But I could never really believe in it like Urs. He could not live w
ithout it. He believes it has the key to all our problems. It has an explanation for everything. Even the things it cannot explain at the moment, he is confident to find an explanation soon. It began with sex and psychoanalysis, but now it has become more complicated. Now everyone is talking about biological psychiatry and neurotransmitters. In a way, I think it is worse than it has ever been. We seem to have forgotten that psychiatry has to do with people, individuals.

  “But it still fascinates me. Like the Catholic religion. It makes all the same mistakes. Catholics have an explanation for everything also. Like why that little boy survived his fall from the rocks 500 years ago. It has its dogma. But it still fascinates me. Not because of its explanations. But the things which it is trying to explain. That’s what fascinates me.

  “Urs is very sweet,” Marthe continued, “but he has no imagination. For him, a life after death is unthinkable, because it cannot be scientifically demonstrated. He is just like the Catholic priests who have studied their dogma. I think this is why he finds your husband’s case so irritating.”

  “What do you mean?” Ellen felt oddly offended by this last remark.

  “He talks about your husband almost every night when he comes into bed. He cannot understand it. And this annoys him, because it does not correspond to any of his explanations.”

  “And what do you think?” Ellen asked.

  “I? What I think about your husband’s case?”

  The bells above them began to chime, and Marthe was compelled to pause for reflection before committing herself to a reply. Ellen had the impression she welcomed this reprieve.

  The bells grew fainter as they walked, but still they were loud enough to keep the two of them locked in the privacy of their own thoughts, until a few minutes later the chiming stopped altogether, and she admitted: “It fascinates me for the same reason it irritates my husband. I have no explanation for what has happened with Frank. Maybe psychiatry can help, but we need to find him first.”