The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (22 page)

“Hallo, can I see your lantern?”

She showed it to me. It was made of papier mâché, and I think it was supposed to be an apple, but somewhere along the way it had been dented or crushed. Now it looked more like a plum tomato.

“Schön,”
I said anyway.

She peered at my lantern. “My mother bought it,” I said hastily. “Oh. What has your brother got?”

“A caterpillar.”

Up ahead, the band had finished “Ich gehe mit meiner Laterne” and started on “Sankt Martin, Sankt Martin.” Dutifully, I glanced behind me to check that my father was still there, and then I fell into step with
Lena’s class. The procession was reaching the little intersection where King Zwentibold stood atop his fountain, now drained for winter in case the pipes froze and cracked.

“Do you like it at the new school?” asked Lena, who would be moving up herself next year.

“It’s great,” I lied. Actually, the school was all right; it was the past that kept hanging around me like a bad smell, but I didn’t want to raise that with Lena. “Are you coming to Sankt Michael next year?”

“Probably Sankt Angela.”

“Oh.”

We passed out of the town walls through the Werther Tor and back in again by the Protestant church, its starkly modern design strident against the traditional form of the buildings that flanked it. A couple of minutes and we would be back in the Klosterplatz, warming ourselves around the bonfire and watching St. Martin reenact his good deed with the beggarman.

“Mein licht ist aus, ich geh’ nach Haus,”
we sang.
“Rabimmel rabummel rabumm bumm bumm!”

“Hurry up,” called Frau Diederichs, Lena’s class teacher; she was no doubt keen to get back into the Klosterplatz and unload her charges back into the care of their parents. She moved up and down the line of children, patting a shoulder here and there or stooping to peer into a well-muffled face. She jabbed me in the upper arm as she went past but did not see my look of indignation; she had already moved on.

As we turned into the square the bonfire was revealed in all its glory. The piled wood and kindling must have been three meters high, and the flames shot into the air above it in a great flaring corona, with sparks peeling off in all directions. I would have made a beeline for it and warmed my hands, which were aching with cold, but Frau Diederichs was shepherding her class determinedly toward the side of the square, where the drama of St. Martin was to take place.

“Do you want to come?” Lena asked me, and I nodded, glad to be included for once; who cared if it was with a class from the baby school? I glanced behind me. The substantial form of my father was still in tow, shadowing me like a bodyguard.

I crowded into the ranks of waiting children. St. Martin was before
us, astride the chestnut horse, which was becoming a little restless surrounded by flaming torches and the shrill voices of several hundred children. As it moved, the sound of its iron-shod feet rang out on the cobblestones. St. Martin leaned forward and patted its neck.

The man who had used the bullhorn earlier in the evening addressed us again, not much more audibly than before, though we all knew the story so well that we hardly needed his commentary. St. Martin wheeled his horse about and rode it a little way, ascending the ramp at the side of the square so that we could all see him. He made a big deal of adjusting his fine crimson cloak for warmth; his golden helmet glittered as he moved. We all waited expectantly for the beggarman to appear.

Someone was pushing through the ranks of children; Lena was shoved into me, and trod on my toes.

“Ow.” I grimaced, then smiled at her sheepishly, not wanting to spoil the friendly atmosphere that had bloomed between us. Whoever it was who was shoving had created a ripple through the crowd of assembled children, like a Mexican wave. It caught Frau Diederichs’s eye, and she looked up disapprovingly.

A stout woman with a crop of henna-red hair, teased so that it stood upright like the spines of a hedgehog, was forcing her way through the crowd. I did not recognize her, but Frau Diederichs did. “Frau Mahlberg,” she said in a tone that balanced friendly recognition with mild disapproval; the woman was disrupting the class and blocking the view of St. Martin.

Frau Mahlberg’s head turned, and she began to wade toward Frau Diederichs through the ranks of schoolchildren as though through waist-deep water; indeed her brawny arms moved vigorously as though she would sweep them out of her way. When she reached Frau Diederichs she did not bother with any niceties.

“Where is Julia?” she demanded. Her voice was sufficiently strident that several of the children looked around and someone behind us hissed
“Shhhh!”

I could not hear Frau Diederichs’s reply, but she seemed to be saying something placatory, and she made a small gesture, a sweep of her hand taking in the crowd of children.

I turned my gaze back to St. Martin for a moment; the beggarman
had appeared, suitably dressed in rags, and was pantomiming cold and hunger, stooping and rubbing his hands up and down his upper arms. This was the part of the play that we all looked forward to: St. Martin would unsheathe his sword and cut his magnificent cloak in half. I saw him reach to his side and begin to slide the gleaming blade out of the sheath—and then suddenly I couldn’t see him at all, because someone had bumped into me again and I had staggered down on one knee, dropping my lantern in the melee. I snatched it up again as quickly as I could, but it was too late; it had already been trampled and the broadly smiling sun face had acquired an oddly sunken look.

“Wo ist meine Tochter?”
someone was yelling. It was Frau Mahlberg. It was she who was responsible for shoving several of us over; she was wading around among the assembled children like a farmer at a shambles, grasping shoulders and pushing at backs, all the time peering fiercely into the upturned faces, some of them now wearing uncertain expressions, others indignant.

“Frau Mahlberg, Frau Mahlberg!” That was Frau Diederichs, the teacher, now following behind and wringing her hands ineffectually. Behind us, more voices were raised in protest at the interruption to the play.

“Shhhh!”

“Julia!” Frau Mahlberg was bellowing, oblivious to them. I glanced back at the ramp where St. Martin and the beggarman were posed in a tableau, looking rather nonplussed at the racket. I had missed the critical moment when the cloak was divided; half of it was now draped over St. Martin’s hands, which were frozen in the act of handing it down to the beggar. The other half, truncated, hung from his shoulders.

The man with the bullhorn said something, and then repeated it in a slightly irritated voice. Still St. Martin did not react, and eventually in a departure from tradition the beggar reached up and helped himself to the cloak. There was a crackle of interference from the loudspeaker, but the narrator was lost for words for once, perhaps stunned by the beggar’s rapacious behavior. Someone was approaching us; it was the granite-faced policeman I had seen with Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf.

“Hallo.”

It was a command, not a greeting. Frau Mahlberg whirled around and caught sight of him. She pounced like a vulture. For a moment I
thought she was going to physically catch hold of him, but at the last moment he put up a hand and stopped her in her tracks.

“My daughter!” She gestured wildly at Frau Diederichs, flailing a brawny arm. “She’s supposed to be in charge of my daughter!”

“Well, I am, I …” Frau Diederichs was flustered; she could see that most of the people within earshot were no longer watching St. Martin and the beggarman, but were all listening to the exchange between herself and Frau Mahlberg.

“And you are …?” said the policeman.

“Frau Diederichs. I’m Julia’s class teacher.”

“Julia is my daughter,” said Frau Mahlberg.

“Verstanden,”
said the policeman.

“And she’s not here.” Frau Mahlberg’s voice was beginning to rise, hysterically. “This woman was in charge of her, and now she’s not here, and God only knows what’s happened to her.” She made a wild gesture in Frau Diederichs’s direction, as though to strike her. “After all that’s happened! How could she let my daughter wander off?”

“I didn’t let her wander off,” protested Frau Diederichs. “I’ve been with the children every single moment of the procession. I’ve counted them at least six times.”

“Where is she, then?” demanded Frau Mahlberg.

“Are you sure Julia isn’t here?” cut in the policeman. He glanced at Frau Diederichs, who was the less hysterical-looking of the pair.

“Well …” She pulled her coat closer around her body, as though she wished she could disappear down into it, and then she began to count the children again, stabbing the air with her finger as she did so. “One … two …”

“What was Julia wearing?” cut in the policeman as Frau Diederichs continued to count.

“A dark-blue jacket, a pink hat …” Frau Mahlberg screwed her face up as if the effort of staying calm was almost killing her. “… white woolen mittens …”

I turned to Lena, to say something about Julia, to ask her whether she had seen her, so for a moment I didn’t notice that Frau Diederichs had stopped counting. “Isn’t that her?” she said suddenly in a voice made tremulous with excitement. I looked up and saw that she was pointing at me. I looked at Lena and then half turned to look behind
me. There were no children behind me, only the dark bulk of my father in his winter coat. I swiveled back to look at Frau Diederichs. She was still staring at me, and her hand was still outstretched.

“The pink hat,” she said.

Suddenly all eyes were upon me. The next second, Frau Mahlberg had stepped forward and with a sharp jerk of her hand had pulled the pink hat from my head, almost taking a handful of hair with it.

“Ow,” I said, but nobody heard me. Frau Mahlberg was screaming at the top of her voice, screaming like a stuck pig. She grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me until my teeth chattered. “She’s not Julia!
She’s not Julia!”
she was shrieking, centimeters away from my face.

I froze in her grip like an animal caught in the lights of an express train, unable to move as doom bore down upon me. My head snapped back; as the hurricane of Frau Mahlberg’s fury swept across me, I imagined my eyes popping from their sockets and bouncing across the cobblestones like marbles.

“Hör auf!”
boomed my father’s voice. For a moment, insanely, I thought it was
me
he was telling to stop it, whatever it was that I had done to outrage Frau Mahlberg. Then he was pulling me away from her, and the granite-faced policeman was holding on to her while she struggled in his grasp like a madwoman. His face still looked impassive.

Frau Diederichs was standing beside this tableau, looking white-faced and shocked. She kept looking from me to Frau Mahlberg and back again, as though she could not really believe what she saw.

“I counted them,” she kept saying. “I counted them.”

“You counted this child,” the policeman said, nodding at me. “Is she from the class, or isn’t she?”

“No,” said Frau Diederichs. “I don’t know …” She approached me tentatively, as though she suspected me of some criminal act, of having spirited Julia Mahlberg away in order to take her place. Then she said, “It’s Pia Kolvenbach. The girl whose grandmother …” She faltered.

“The girl whose grandmother what?” said the policeman, but I didn’t hear any more.

My father was pulling me into his embrace, as though I were a kindergarten child and not a great big girl of eleven. I buried my head in the front of his coat; I could still feel the vibration of his chest as he spoke determinedly to the policeman, but mercifully the words were
muffled. I thought I would go mad if I had to listen to Oma Kristel’s accident being dragged up all over again. I clung to my father until finally he stopped speaking and prized me off.

“Pia, you can go home now.”

My mother had surfaced from somewhere in the crowd, with Sebastian in his stroller.

I didn’t bother to listen to the brittle exchange between her and my father, nor did I bother to look around for my lantern, which I had dropped while in Frau Mahlberg’s tempestuous grip, and which was almost certainly trampled beyond repair. I let my mother lead me away from the row that was still continuing, her arm around my shoulders while with her free hand she negotiated the stroller over the cobblestones.

My father remained with the policeman and Frau Mahlberg; I glanced at him over my shoulder as my mother walked me away from them, my chest tight with the horrible conviction that I had somehow got us all in trouble, that my father was having to face the music for me.

“What’s happening?” I asked my mother.

She looked at me, and her face was grim in the low light, but she only shook her head. People were milling all about us; the man with the bullhorn was standing on the steps with it in his hand, looking startled. No one seemed disposed to leave the square, but the usual buzz of excited voices was replaced with curious looks and whispers. The policemen who had been stationed at intervals along the procession route were all coming back into the square; I had never seen so many policemen in Bad Münstereifel before; it looked as though they were expecting a riot. Some of them were speaking into walkie-talkies.

My mother increased her pace, pulling me along. When we reached the corner, I looked back to see whether St. Martin was still there. But the ramp at the side of the square was empty. He had gone.