The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (15 page)

Repulsive though this was, it was better than Thilo’s other line of argument, that both girls had exploded.

“Don’t sit next to Pia Kolvenbach; you’ll be next.”

It was during one of these sallies that he revealed another unpleasant rumor of which I had previously been blissfully ignorant.

“My grandmother says that it was a sign.”
It
was Oma Kristel’s death.

“A sign of what?” I asked indignantly.

“A sign that Evil is at work in the town,” announced Thilo, clearly quoting his grandmother; Good and Evil as concepts were not foremost in his perception of the world, which mostly revolved around getting his own way as often as possible.

I could almost hear Frau Kessel’s words ringing in my ears:
it was Evil in Action again
. It did not seem to occur to anyone that Oma Kristel, who went to Mass faithfully every single week, was unlikely to be selected as the instrument of announcing all our Dooms.

“What absolute
Quatsch,”
declared Stefan loyally, but it was too late: the others were already staring at me as though I had personally set off my own grandmother like a Roman candle and then abducted two children as an encore.

Frau Eichen’s tardy return and terse injunction to open our math books was almost a relief. Twenty-three heads, some sleekly braided, some aggressively bristly like Thilo Koch’s, were suddenly bent studiously over their books.

I sneaked a look at Thilo; at precisely the same moment he looked up and caught my eye. He shot me a look of mock horror, and made a swift cross sign out of his two nail-bitten thumbs, as though warding off a vampire. But before Frau Eichen had time to notice what he was doing, he had whisked his hands back into his lap and was perusing with apparent absorption.

I did the same, but the figures didn’t make any sense to me; I might as well have been trying to read Mandarin Chinese. My whole body seemed to be seething. When was the teasing going to stop? Was anyone in the town
ever
going to forget that I was the girl whose grandmother had exploded?

W
hen I got home that day and let myself into the house, my father was already there. Very occasionally, if he had a meeting out of the office, he would make it home for lunch on his way back. But just at that precise moment it did not sound as though he was eating lunch, nor was my mother busying herself in the kitchen making anything. In fact, they were both carrying on an argument at the tops of their voices, my father in stentorian German, my mother mostly in German but with snatches of English thrown in whenever words failed her. As I closed the door, she was just finishing a sentence with “… this complete
arse
of a bloody town!”

My heart sank. I hated hearing my parents arguing; and arguing about whether to continue living in Germany was not only unsettling, it was pointless. Where did my mother think we would go? In the heat of the moment she sometimes said she wanted us all to move to England, but she might as well have suggested moving to the moon.

My father would counter, as he always did, by pointing out the difficulties of his finding a comparable job in Britain, the impossibility of buying a house anything like the one we had in Bad Münstereifel. It didn’t make sense, anyway; when my mother wasn’t having what she
called one of her
Down with Deutschland
moods, she used to complain about Britain, the ludicrously high cost of living, the traffic that congested the whole of the south of England, the poor state of the schools, the hospitals … the only things she missed, she said, were British tea and Tesco. German supermarkets were never properly organized; whoever thought of putting the Christmas
Stollen
next to the soap powder aisle?

As for me, I knew quite firmly that I
didn’t
want to go and live in England. Even the things that my mother spoke about with affection, such as British tea—with
milk
in it!—sounded awful. And then, as I well knew from hearing her describe it a hundred times, the school system was totally different; children started school at the age of five, and had to stay there
all day
. They had lunch in the school, and it always tasted terrible, according to my mother, who seemed to find this very amusing. Puréed potatoes and chunks of meat, without any cream sauce or anything.

I remember once we had to do a school project about where our families came from. I drew a wobbly map of Britain with my mother’s hometown on it. We had to include some information about the major products of the area, so I asked my mother what Middlesex had lots of, and she said, “Roads.”

I put my
Ranzen
carefully down on the floor of the hallway and was preparing to escape up the stairs without interrupting my parents, when the kitchen door opened and my mother stomped out. She was twisting a dishcloth between her hands as though she were wringing a chicken’s neck.

“Pia, I’m glad you’re home.”

Uh-oh
, I thought. My father appeared in the doorway behind my mother; he had composed his features into a mask of placidity, but the florid hue of his complexion gave him away.

“Kate …” he said in a warning tone.

“Shut up, Wolfgang,” was my mother’s conciliatory reply. She bent toward me, strands of dark hair flopping untidily over her eyes. “How would you like to go and visit Oma Warner, Pia?”

“She’s not going,” cut in my father over her shoulder.

“Yes, she is.” My mother’s voice was steely.

“She cannot go,” announced my father. “She has things booked
already for the summer holidays. The summer camp in the Schleidtal, the art course.”

“I’ll unbook them,” said my mother.

“Thomas and Britta are also coming,” persisted my father. “Pia should spend some time with her cousins.”

I shot him a mutinous glance at this; spending time with Michel and Simon was akin to falling into a snake pit.

“What about
my
family?” demanded my mother, shaking the hair out of her eyes. “She hardly ever sees them. She should spend some time with
them
for once.”

“We invited your mother for the summer, but she would not come,” my father pointed out. This was perfectly true; Oma Warner could rarely be lured over the Channel to visit us in Bad Münstereifel. She claimed that both flying and sailing brought on her “funny turns,” and she couldn’t stand either German sausages or German bread, which she said tasted soggy.

“That’s beside the point,” snapped my mother.

“What
is
the point, then?” barked my father back at her.

“The point is …” began my mother, and stopped. “The point is …” She put her hands up as though to clutch her brow. “I don’t want Pia staying here all summer. It’s not …”

“Yes?” said my father in a loaded voice.

“It’s not
safe,”
said my mother eventually.

“Ach
, this again!” said my father, throwing his hands up.

“Yes, this again!” my mother snapped back. “If you want the honest truth, Wolfgang, I’d like to pack up
right now
and move somewhere else, somewhere you can let your kids out of the house in the morning and know that they’ll come home again in one piece, not bloody vanish like that poor Voss kid.” She turned to me. “Pia, Oma Warner would love to have you when the holidays start. Would you like that?”

I looked at her dubiously. “Ye-es … but what about the summer camp?”

“You can do that next year.”

“I really wanted to go.”

“You heard her,” cut in my father. “She wants to go.”

“I know,” said my mother. “I’m not deaf. But”—turning to me
again—“I think this time it would be better if you went to Oma Warner’s, Pia. Maybe your English cousins can visit. It will be fun.”

“Mmmm,” I said noncommittally.

“And you can practice your English,” she went on. She shot a look at my father; this was her trump card. “She can practice her English,” she told him. “It will give her a really good start when she goes to the
Gymnasium
in the autumn.”

If I had dared, I would have rolled my eyes at this. In my opinion, my English was perfectly acceptable, and it was certainly ten times better than the English of any of my classmates, since my mother spoke so much English at home. But it was sort of uncomfortable speaking it when I could be speaking German—a bit like putting your tights on the wrong way around; you could still walk about but it felt funny.

Unwillingly, I allowed myself to be dragged to the telephone while my mother dialed Oma Warner’s number; perhaps she thought my father might manage to talk her out of the idea if she did not settle everything right away.

“Mum? It’s Kate.” The voice at the other end of the line said something tinnily, and my mother held lightly on to my shoulder as though to prevent me from running away. “Yes, I’ve spoken to Wolfgang”—
spoken
seemed an understatement considering the haranguing she had been giving my father when I came home—“and she’s definitely coming.” There was another explosion of crackling at the other end. “Would you like to speak to her?”

Now I stood in my mother’s clutches in resigned dejection; she was going to make me talk English to Oma Warner on the telephone. There was no escape.

“Pia?” My mother handed me the receiver and I put it gingerly to my ear.

“Hallo, Oma.”

“Oma?” said my grandmother. “Who’s Oma? Omar Sharif?” She always said this, and I was never sure whether I was supposed to laugh or not.

“Ich meine … Grossmutter,”
I managed uncertainly.

“Granny,” prompted my mother, poking me in the shoulder with a finger.

“Granny,” I repeated dutifully.

“That’s better, darling,” said Oma Warner, chuckling. She clucked with her tongue. “Ooh, you do sound German, Pia.”

“Yes,” I said seriously. “I am German.”

“Dear me,” said my grandmother. “So you’re coming to see your old granny?”

I tried very hard not to heave the sigh I could feel coming.

“Yes,” I said.

A
fter lunch, which was a decidedly stiff affair, I dashed through my homework and then announced that I was going to visit Herr Schiller. I was looking forward to seeing my old friend, although I was still not sure whether I should tell him about what Stefan and I had seen on the Quecken hill. One moment I was full of an icy excitement, believing that we had found a clue to the strangeness that seemed to be overwhelming the town; the next I was convinced that it was nothing, just kids’ imagination: the world was still the reassuring one of homework and my mother’s cooking and Sebastian under my feet all day long.

I was not sure I even wanted to know what Herr Schiller would make of the affair; if he laughed, it would be awful, we would feel like idiots—but if he took it seriously, wouldn’t that be
worse?
I was still cogitating the matter when I literally bumped into someone. It was Frau Kessel.

“Vor-sicht!”
she screeched, then saw it was me. “Pia Kolvenbach.” She studied me disapprovingly over the glinting moons of her spectacles.

“Tut mir Leid
, Frau Kessel,” I said, doing my best to sound contrite.

“You shouldn’t be running in the street like that,” she informed me severely.

“Um.” I looked at my shoes.

“Where were you going in such a hurry, anyway?”

“Nowhere,” I said mendaciously.

“Hmm,” sniffed Frau Kessel. She regarded me speculatively. “Well, if you
really
have nothing to do, you can help me carry my shopping.”

“Aber …”
I began, but then stopped. Why not? I could never get to Herr Schiller’s undetected now anyway, and besides, there were dozens of questions I had been dying to ask her the day she came over to tell my parents about Herr Düster. In her way, Frau Kessel was just as much of an expert on local folklore as Herr Schiller, although all her stories definitely emanated from the Dark Side. If the story of any of the subjects of her much-retailed gossip had appeared to be coming to a happy end, she would have disapproved it out of existence for sure.