The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (9 page)

“Pia.” The word was heavily loaded with reproach. “What did you say? Tell me exactly what you said.”

“Mama …”

“Pia, what did you say?”

“Well, I didn’t say anything rude. Honestly, I didn’t. I just asked him about the stuff that’s been happening in the town. You know, about Katharina Linden.”

“Oh, Pia.” Now her lips relaxed but her brows were knitted and her chin drawn back, as though she were seeing something shockingly sad. Then she sighed very heavily and reached out a hand to touch my shoulder. “Well, I suppose you couldn’t have known.” She shook her head. “Come into the kitchen for a minute.”

Mystified, I followed her, wondering what I had done. Were Katharina Linden and Herr Schiller somehow related?

“Sit,” said my mother, indicating the bench seat by the table. Obediently I sat, as she settled herself on the other side. So it was clearly going to be another little talk; two in one week was a record even for me.

“Look, Pia, perhaps I should have told you this before, but I didn’t think it would be helpful. I’m not surprised Herr Schiller was upset when you asked him about Katharina Linden’s disappearance. Did you know that he had a daughter who disappeared?”

“No.” I was genuinely shocked.

“Well, he did, so obviously it’s not the best topic to discuss with him. That’s partly the reason I didn’t mention it before. I was afraid you might be curious and ask him about it.”

I was indignant at this—how could she think I would do such a thing?—but to be honest, if I had known about it, I
would
have been consumed with curiosity. It might have been difficult to stay right off the topic, and a ten-year-old’s attempts to approach the subject in a subtle, roundabout way would have been picked up a mile off by someone as sharp as Herr Schiller. Still, the cat was out of the bag now; I might as well ask my mother all the questions that were seething to the surface of my mind.

“Is Herr Schiller married?”

“He’s a widower,” explained my mother.

“When did his wife die?” I wanted to know.

“Oh, I’m not sure …” A funny look passed across my mother’s face; I’m almost sure she was about to say,
You’ll have to ask Oma Kristel
, and stopped herself just in time. “I think it was during the war.”

“How old was the little girl?”

“Oh, Pia. I really don’t know that. I only know what Oma Kristel told me a long time ago. I think the little girl disappeared
after
her mother died, but I don’t know what age she was.”

“Did they ever find her?”

“No,” said my mother. She seemed lost in thought for a moment.

“What happened to her?” I persisted.

“Nobody knows,” my mother said. “She just … vanished. It was wartime, you know. All sorts of awful things happened. Your granny”—by this she meant her own mother in England, Granny Warner—“told me a house in her street was hit by a bomb and they never found a body at all. It must have been vaporized.” She glanced at me. “This is rather a gruesome topic, isn’t it? Shall we change the subject?”

But I wasn’t finished yet. “Was she in a house that got bombed?”

“No, she wasn’t. It wouldn’t be a disappearance if they knew what had happened, would it?” said my mother. She sounded a little impatient. “Why don’t you ask—no, listen, Pia, this was precisely the reason I didn’t tell you about it in the first place. You can’t start asking questions about it. You’ll hurt Herr Schiller terribly.” She shook her head again. “It sounds as though you have already offended him by asking about Katharina Linden.”

“I didn’t mean to …”

“I know you didn’t, but I think you have offended him. Perhaps I should call him and apologize …”

In fact she
did
try to telephone him later that evening, but although she let the phone ring twenty times there was no reply. At length she decided to leave well enough alone; after all, what could she say to apologize that would not include mentioning the taboo topic? And I—I sat upstairs in my room with a book I was not really reading and a cup of cocoa that went cold on the top of my bedside table, staring out the window at the dark and mourning the sure end of a friendship.

T
his town!” my mother was shouting. “This town! That’s what the problem is!”

Sebastian and I, at the kitchen table, stared at each other and listened in silence to the argument. Sebastian’s eyes were round with astonishment. He was used to my mother’s occasional explosive outbursts of temper when they were directed at one of us children—when we had done something particularly annoying, such as the time Sebastian emptied a full pot of honey into the kettle to “make hot honey for Teddy.” To hear it directed at our father was quite different, and somehow chilling, like the first icy gust of wind that signals the end of summer. I looked at Sebastian and saw from his expression that his infant mind was also groping about, trying to imagine what Papa might have done that was so
böse
.

“This bloody town!” added my mother in English for good measure. She regarded my father balefully, a formidable sight in her plasticized apron, a stainless-steel frying fork brandished in her right hand for emphasis.

“Ach
, this again,” retorted my father in disgust. I marveled at his courage; my mother looked as though she might beat him around the head with the frying fork.

“What do you mean,
this again?”
my mother demanded.

My father regarded her stolidly. “Everything is better in England,” he said.

“Well—” began my mother, but then obviously changed her mind, thinking that even for a raging Anglophile the riposte
Well, it
is
better
was overstating the case.

After the briefest of pauses she went on, “I know it isn’t perfect”—in tones that implied she knew the exact opposite—“but at least where I grew up kids didn’t get spirited away off the streets while their parents were two meters away.” This exaggeration was typical of my mother, and always infuriated my father, who like many Germans was completely oblivious to irony. The exaggeration was not what caught my attention about her little speech, though; it was the word
weggezaubert
, which literally means to be made to
disappear by magic
.

But before I had time to digest this notion, my mother was ranting on. “I don’t even want to let Pia out anymore. Wolfgang, when we moved here I thought we were at least doing the right thing for the children. A small town, everyone knows each other, countryside all around. Now it seems like we’re living in the middle of
A Nightmare on
bloody
Elm Street!”
She was back into English again, as she always was when she got really angry.

“You can’t blame the town for that,” protested my father. “These things happen everywhere.”

“Not everywhere,” snapped my mother. “And, anyway, this thing happened
here
, didn’t it? And haven’t you noticed what’s happening to Pia in your
friendly
little town?”

My father swung his not inconsiderable bulk around and regarded me briefly. “What is happening to Pia?”

“All her so-called friends are avoiding her. Well, all except Stefan Breuer, and he hasn’t exactly had an easy time here either, has he?”

“That’s hardly surprising when his father is drunk on the streets at lunchtime,” retorted my father.

“That’s what I mean!” rejoined my mother. “Always gossiping, and everyone judging everyone else.”

“I am not judging, I am telling the truth,” said my father. “He
is
drunk at lunchtime. It is not gossip; I have seen him myself.”

“Ooooh!” screeched my mother. “Why do you have to be so bloody
German?”

My father regarded her expressionlessly. Then he said quietly, “And why do you have to be so bloody English?”

For a moment they looked at each other in silence. Then my mother opened her mouth to say something, but what it was going to be I do not know because at that precise instant we heard someone knocking loudly on the front door.

Now, when I finally come to tell the story of that strange premillennium year, I am years older, almost an adult myself. Even so, people often do things that I struggle to understand. Their motives are hard to fathom.

When I was ten, adult behavior seemed completely incomprehensible. You could say something apparently quite innocent, or repeat something that you had heard adults saying, and find that you had caused horrible offense. You could have something hammered into you by one set of adults and find another set apparently propagating the exact opposite.

Adults: they were so unpredictable that nothing they did should have been able to surprise me anymore. Still, that morning something did.

The knocking was Herr Schiller. My mother, still flushed from the argument, and still clutching the frying fork, opened the door and found Herr Schiller standing on the doorstep, as always looking as though he had been dressed by a personal valet.

“Guten Morgen
, Frau Kolvenbach,” said Herr Schiller, making a very slight bow. He lifted his hat and extended a hand to my mother.

“Herr Schiller,” said my mother, sounding surprised, but remembering to take the hand and shake it politely.

Still sitting at the kitchen table, I heard the exchange of greetings and my heart sank. This could mean only one thing: I was in trouble. Herr Schiller must have come to make a complaint to my mother about my offensive behavior. I felt hot with guilt and embarrassment, and also a little indignation: after all, I hadn’t
meant
to upset him. If my mother had told me about his daughter beforehand, I wouldn’t have asked him about Katharina Linden.

At that moment I almost felt I hated him; it was so unfair, and so
typically adult. I slipped down from the bench seat and was brushing crumbs from my trousers when my mother came back into the kitchen.

“Herr Schiller is here to see you,” she announced.

I was incredulous. To see
me?
I wondered whether this was some sly introduction to the inevitable scene. Did he want to make sure that the complaint was made in front of me? Unwillingly, I followed her into the living room.

Herr Schiller had been sitting in my father’s favorite armchair, but as we entered the room he stood up. As he did so, I noticed with surprise that he was carrying a little posy of spring flowers. For a second, the idea floated through my head that my mother had given them to him as some sort of reconciliatory gesture. Then I saw that he was holding out the flowers to me.

“Fräulein Pia, these are for you,” he said, and smiled. Behind me, my mother quietly slipped out of the room and went to investigate Sebastian’s progress with his breakfast. I merely stood and stared at my visitor, unsure how to react.

“Please, take them,” said Herr Schiller. He took a step toward me and there was nothing to do but accept the flowers. I stood there, bewildered, burying my nose in the soft petals, more to hide my embarrassment than to smell their delicate scent.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted out at last, not quite daring to raise my eyes to his face. “I didn’t mean to …” My voice trailed off; I was not sure how I could complete the apology without straying onto forbidden ground.
I’m sorry I mentioned disappearances … I didn’t know your daughter disappeared … I didn’t mean to upset you by talking about people disappearing …
In the end I said nothing, but Herr Schiller came to my rescue.

“Please don’t apologize, Pia.” His voice was kindly. “It is I who should apologize, for asking you to leave so abruptly.”

I did look at him then, as it was so unexpected, an adult apologizing to a child like that, especially when the adult had reached such a respectably old age, whereas I was only ten years old and the school pariah to boot. Herr Schiller was smiling at me, the map of wrinkles on his ancient face all seeming to turn upward so that they looked like the tributaries of a spreading delta.

“I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to say anything wrong,” I ventured at last. “I didn’t know …”

The words sounded lame to me; in Bad Münstereifel everyone knew everyone else’s business, so ignorance was no defense.

“Of course not,” said Herr Schiller, a little sadly, it seemed to me. “You are a good child, Pia, a kind child.”

A little encouraged, I tried to explain myself: “I only asked you about—you know—because you know so much about the town … and about all the funny stuff that’s happened here in the past.”

“The past?” repeated Herr Schiller. He frowned slightly, and my heart seemed to lurch—did he think I was referring to his own past again?

“The miller and the cats … and the treasure in the well … and the one about the huntsman—all the strange things like that. So I thought you might have some clues …”

Herr Schiller stared at me for several seconds. Then, very carefully, he lowered himself back into my father’s armchair, his hands clutching the armrests for support. When he had settled himself, he said, “So, Fräulein Pia, you think that the witches took the little girl away, or something like that?”

I eyed him; it did not look as though he was making fun of me, as a lot of adults would have. It looked as though he was taking me seriously, actually considering the idea as a real possibility. Still, I replied rather carefully, “I don’t know.”