Frauleinstein

Chapter VI: Bistritz, Romania 2014

Chapter VI
Bistritz, Romania
2014

Roddy sat at the back of the shop, the small antiques store he had owned and operated for the past fifty years, sorting items in a box he had pulled from the back storeroom.

"Grandpa?" interrupted Gwen. "Can we speak to you for a moment?"

Roddy looked up from his work. "Yes, yes. Certainly," he said absent-mindedly, returning his attention to the box. He should have paid more attention, he knew. Gwen was only here to help him, after all.

She was dealing with a customer who had questions about the region, and the history of some item he had recently purchased. Every item in the store had a history, and on a good day Roddy could tell you about any of it. Unfortunately most of those good days had been about twenty years ago.

Memory is a tricky thing. Roddy was quite certain that everything he had ever done, every experience he had ever had, every conversation was in there; it was just getting them out that was the problem.

Roddy thought of his mind as a jigsaw puzzle, with every piece representing some bit of information, each firmly interlocked with others around it. Except sometimes the key piece, the piece he desperately wanted to remember, was missing. He knew everything about it by examining the connecting pieces. He could tell its exact size and shape, all the colours associated with it, what it represented and how it interacted with all the pieces around it. But the piece itself just wasn't there. Or possibly it was lost in the jumble pile of blue pieces still awaiting assembly. The analogy started to break down eventually.

It seemed a very poorly designed system, at any rate. I mean, if everything was there but inaccessible to him, then what was the point?

Gwen and her customer appeared to have found what they were after, and left together. That was odd. She didn't normally leave with customers. Roddy tried to recall their conversation, and it seemed that she may have introduced the man as a friend. They had asked a number of questions, and Roddy was quite certain he had answered, but what the questions were and what he might have said in response were a mystery.

Roddy was fully capable of holding a sensible conversation, except this morning he was distracted with problems of his own. Still, it bothered him to think that others might look at him as a doddering old man. That wasn't who he was. He had seen a bumper sticker once that read, "Inside every old person is a young person asking, 'What happened?'" Roddy had been old a lot longer than he had ever been young, but he still wondered; what happened?

This box obviously did not contain what he was looking for. Roddy repacked the items and shoved the box to the side, making way for another that he retrieved from the storeroom behind him. He opened the interwoven top flaps, and immediately recognized the contents as exactly what he had been searching for.

"Here it is!" he exclaimed on finding his old military binoculars right on top. And digging a little further he soon found the other item he would need – his Webley service revolver.

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Roddy had made the trip out to the site of the old castle, the site of his own personal battle with reality, more times than he could remember. Which wasn't saying much, he laughed to himself. Still, it was a lot of times. After the war he had practically lived out there. Watching, waiting, wondering.

They had invented words for it after the Great War, World War I. Once they decided it needed a name they decided to call it 'Shell Shock'. In his war they renamed it 'Combat Fatigue'. Nowadays they want it to sound more like a disease for some reason and so 'Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder' or PTSD is the fashionable term. But Roddy had his own term for what he had felt after the war. He called it 'Duty'.