The Year is Almost Over

I'm Still Here!

"...perhaps his rival had been sitting beside us throughout our conversation, and had written the message when Nathan wasn't looking."

By the end of 1933, I think I could say that I was an experienced traveller. I had seen and heard enough so that I wasn't panicked by the unpredictable, and I had developed a level of equanimity that enabled me to enjoy seeing new places, but withstand their ordeals as well. Yet there were always more mysteries to contemplate.

One morning, as I finished a curiously spiced breakfast of scrambled eggs in the dining room of my hotel in Zagreb, I was given a letter by the concierge. It was covered in stamps and forwarding instructions, indicating that it had been following me for some time, and had finally managed to catch up with me. The letter was from my second cousin Mathilda, who lived in Bath - I had only met her a handful of times, and couldn't imagine why on earth she was writing to me. I ordered more coffee, put on my spectacles and opened the letter.

Dear Albert,

I hope this finds you as well as can be hoped for, and that you are continuing to recover from the loss of your dear wife.

I have heard that you are travelling the continent, and I hope that this letter may catch up with you. Will you be travelling anywhere near Hamburg? It would mean a great deal to me if you could find the time to meet with Nathan. He was engaged to be married, but it has been broken off, I suspect due to her wishes. He has been sending me letters of an increasingly erratic nature for quite a while now, but he seems unwilling to travel home to visit. Since my husband died some years ago, I have been unable to afford such luxuries as the means to travel to Hamburg to see Nathan. I have asked him if he would meet you, and he is happy to do so, but for some reason is quite adamant that if you meet, it must be in January. He will not say why. If, Heaven forbid, Nathan's behaviour takes a turn in some nasty direction, I fear something terrible could occur. If you should be able to visit him, and let me know how he is, I would be immensely grateful. I have included his card, which will enable you to contact him.

With all my love,

Mathilda

Nathan was Mathilda's son, an only child, and he had moved to Hamburg to study for a biology degree at the university. Giving my assistance in what was likely to be a delicate matter made me uncomfortable, as I didn't know Mathilda well, but it seemed she had nobody else to help her, so it was clearly the honourable thing to do. The ad hoc nature of my travel habits meant a trip to Hamburg was no disruption, and as January was only two weeks away, I made the necessary arrangements and arrived there on the 11th, with a view to meeting Nathan the next evening in the sitting room of my hotel.

When Nathan was little he had been an uncommunicative child, and did not warm to other children. He had a love for animals, and insisted that the family own the maximum number of dogs and cats allowed by the local authorities, plus many other small animals and insects that he could secretly adopt and cherish. He had found a vole in the garden which had been mauled by a cat, and he stayed up through the night to tend to it, until it expired, unsurprisingly, in the morning. He had suffered from bullying at school - his way of coping with it was to not respond to the bullies, as if they weren't there, hoping they would grow bored and leave him alone. But the bullies would take his behaviour as a display of snobbishness, and it only served to perpetuate Nathan's suffering.

The Nathan I knew as a little boy had grown to become a thin, neatly presented young man, with a long nose and close-set, clear blue eyes. I found that throughout our conversation, he seemed to meet my eye only with an act of will, and at other times his gaze would fall. The sitting room was large and comfortable, with a high ceiling, luxurious furniture and walls of polished oak - but there were not too many people there, so I didn't anticipate the need for us to keep our voices down.