The Dark Frontier by A. Decker (best books to read non fiction .txt) 📕

“I must apologise,” the man continued, “we have not even introduced ourselves. My name is Jan, but my friends call me Jack.”

“And I am Baschi,” the jovial one chipped in, offering Frank his hand.

“Thanks, I’ll have a beer,” he said. Then: “Why Jack? You’re not English surely.”

“My family name is Hruby. With an H. Jack’s the name people called me after Lee Harvey Oswald was shot. And I’ve been carrying the name around with me ever since. It sounds macabre. But I can live with it. And it’s better than Donát.”

“That doesn’t sound very Swiss either.”

“Maybe not. But what does that even mean? My father was originally from Bohemia. My mother is Irish. But I’m as much Swiss as anything. My father wanted to call me Donát. But my mother by her own account hated the name. It sounded too much like a doughnut to her. So they compromised with Jan. And now I’m stuck with Jack.”

“He grow up here and go to the school here,” added the man called Baschi. “He is Swiss just like me.”

“So Frank, what are you doing here in Basel?” asked Jack, as the waitress placed a beer down in front of Frank along with a bottle of red wine and two glasses for his hosts.

“God, I need this,” said Frank. He put the beer glass to his mouth with a craving that surprised even him in his slightly unhinged state.

It was a lager. Not his idea of a good beer. But the initial coolness of the liquid was enough to slake his thirst. And the unexpected chink of light that this encounter now shone onto his dark confusion lit up his memory of why he had even come here in the first place.

“Cheers,” he said and put down the glass. He pulled the notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket and placed it on the table. “You have a big referendum here tomorrow.”

“News travels,” Jack said. “At last the country is dragging itself into the twentieth century.”

“Will you be voting?” asked Frank. Jack stared into his glass.

“What do you think, Baschi? Will we be voting?”

Baschi shrugged.

“They tried twelve years ago. And failed then. Why will it be any different now? Politics is a dirty business. Not for women. And many women do not even want to vote. They trust their men.”

“Baschi doesn’t talk to many women,” Jack explained, “What he’s really trying to say is that women don’t have to do military service like men do, so why should they get the vote? Isn’t that so, Baschi?”

Baschi just smiled.

“I’ve been given some names of women I might talk to,” said Frank, flicking through his notebook. “Gerhard and Späth-Schweizer, for example.”

“Späth-Schweizer”, Baschi chuckled. “What kind of a woman is a Späth-Schweizer?” he added slamming his right hand down on the table with a guffaw. His left hand held the buttons of his waistcoat in place just as a precaution.

“Baschi likes his jokes,” said Jack indulgently. “It’s a name that translates as Late Swiss.”

“I know,” Frank said, irritated by Jack’s assumption of his ignorance.

“I don’t know these women myself. Frau Gerhard is very old now, and I know she learned a lot from your suffragettes in England. She also saved many Jewish children before the war. They like to hold her up as a shining example of the great humanist tradition in this city, say it’s because of people like her that women have already had the vote in local elections here for some years. But if you want to know what the average Swiss woman thinks about voting in national elections, you’d do better speaking to my wife.”

“Most countries gave women the vote years ago. Why’s it taken so long for Switzerland? Your women can’t be happy with that.”

Jack frowned over the table at Frank.

“That sounds a tad like a rebuke old chap. Women are beautiful creatures and they can rejoice in that. As we men can too.”

“And that sounds rather like a no vote,” Frank reciprocated.

“Let’s talk of more interesting things,” Jack said, paying no attention to Frank’s words. “What do you think of the beer?”

“What you write?” asked Baschi with suspicion, when he saw Frank scribbling in his notebook. Frank ignored the curiosity.

“Lager’s not really to my taste.”

“You see this place?” Jack asked, as he made a sweeping gesture with his right arm to encompass the entire room. “They were serving wine here 500 years ago. The oldest pub in the city. They have sold many kinds of wine and ale over the centuries. Let me get you something special, which might be more to your taste.”

As the sweeping gesture reached the end of its trajectory, he raised his arm again, clicked his fingers and called over the waitress.

Frank was unable to hear what Jack said. But as he was speaking, he cast a sideways glance at Frank, who could not escape the expression in those dark, deep-set eyes. A look that lay somewhere between mischief and villainy. He could not be sure which was closer to the truth. Within a short time, the waitress returned to the table, took the lager from Frank and replaced it with a slender, tulip-shaped glass of cloudy-looking ale that boasted an impressive head.

“Danke schön, Lisbeth. Und was hältst Du von der Abstimmung morgen?” Jack said to the waitress, asking her in a clear High German – for Frank’s benefit – what she thought of the vote for women. And that look still lingered in the smile on his lips.

The waitress’s answer came in an impenetrable dialect that left Frank flummoxed. He looked quizzically at Jack.

“It seems our friend Baschi is right. She said she leaves that kind of thing to her husband.”

Baschi laughed. Jack meanwhile pulled a hipflask surreptitiously from the inside pocket of his jacket and poured a shot into the glass while Frank was still gazing at the waitress.

“Now what do you think of this beer?” Jack asked, nodding at the tall glass