by Helen Grant
The thought seemed to strike Stefan. “Maybe he is.” He pushed himself away from the parapet of the bridge and began to walk slowly toward the Marktstrasse. This time it was my turn to tag along after him. It was almost dark now, and as we passed the red Rathaus the first few flakes of falling snow were dancing in the air.
“Stefan, I have to get home. My mother will go nuts-it’s already dark.”
“I know. It’s all right.”
Stefan didn’t need to make any remark about his own mother. I remember thinking that Frau Breuer probably wouldn’t notice if Stefan didn’t come home at all, a thought that seems horribly callous in the light of what came afterward, when other children really did fail to come home.
We stopped for a moment by the old pillory in front of the Rathaus. Stefan kicked it idly with the scuffed toe of his sneaker as we stood there, awkwardly saying our goodbyes. Eventually I said, “See you tomorrow, then,” and turned to walk away.
I had hardly taken three steps when I found there was someone blocking my path. I looked up, snowflakes whirling into my face, and found myself looking up into the gargoyle features of Herr Düster. In his dark coat he looked like an undertaker. His expression was hostile. Heart thumping, I froze.
Herr Düster’s eyes slid over me and then his gaze seemed to snag on Stefan, half visible in the colonnade behind me. With a snarl he pushed past me and disappeared into the Fibergasse, the alley at the side of the Rathaus.
“What did he say?” said Stefan, coming back up to me.
I shook my head. “He said, go home.”
“Go home?” Stefan shrugged. “That’s all? He looked like he was swearing at you.”
“No, that’s all,” I said, and shivered.
Stefan looked at me. “You want me to walk you back to your house?”
I glanced at him. StinkStefan, my knight in shining armor.
“Yes,” I said, and meant it.
Chapter Ten
I remember once, when I was quite little, asking my mother about Herr Schiller and Herr Düster. I was puzzled about them because someone had told me they were brothers, but they didn’t look at all alike, and they had different names.
Herr Schiller was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with a large-featured, benevolent face. His startlingly blue eyes were overhung with bushy white eyebrows that would not have disgraced St. Nicholas. His hair, which was dead white, was still abundant and always neatly groomed. His mouth was wide and amiable, although when he smiled he rarely opened his lips, perhaps being self-conscious about his teeth, which were stained yellow from decades of smoking.
Herr Schiller was always immaculately turned out. Sometimes he wore an ordinary dark suit with a crisp white shirt and a silk tie, and at other times he wore a traditional costume, a dark green woolen jacket with pale horn buttons, matching breeches, and woolen socks. He was considered something of a local character-not an eccentric, something still frowned upon in German society, but a gentleman of the old school, the sort you no longer see anymore, with perfect manners and a dash of gallantry. Not, as Oma Kristel used to observe in a tone of frigid disapproval, like that Herr Düster.
Were it not for the uncertain notion that he and Herr Schiller were brothers, I would never have taken them for blood relatives. Although Herr Schiller was tall, Herr Düster was of medium height and had a skinny, paltry look about him, as though he had never eaten well in his life. In fact Pluto looked glossier and better fed than he did.
Only in his eyes could one discern any point of similarity with the urbane Herr Schiller-they were the same bright cornflower blue. But they were overhung with iron-gray brows that gave Herr Düster a surly expression, as though he were permanently glowering at someone, which in actual fact he very often was.
The popular legend among the local children (and probably their parents, too, when they were schoolchildren) was that Herr Düster had been a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, who’d somehow managed to escape justice. He had been having an affair with the Bürgermeister’s fiercely ugly daughter, and she had somehow got him off the hook; or he had been certified temporarily insane by a doctor he was blackmailing; or he had spent three years after the war hiding out in the ruins of the old castle on the Quecken hill, creeping out at night to steal chickens to eat raw: all these were cited as genuine reasons why Herr Düster had never been brought to justice.
As for the dislike between himself and Herr Schiller, for a long time I just took it for granted. It was after seeing them pass each other in the Werther Strasse one afternoon, Herr Schiller inclining his head with frosty civility and Herr Düster slouching past as though he hadn’t noticed, that I asked my mother about their relationship.
“Are Herr Schiller and Herr Düster brothers, or aren’t they?” I wanted to know.
My mother looked up with mild interest.
“Yes, they are brothers.” She thought about it. “Not very close brothers, though. Your Oma Kristel is always saying that Herr Düster must be a terrible trial to poor Heinrich”-that was Herr Schiller’s Christian name.
“So why have they got different last names, then?” I asked, still not having got to the bottom of the matter.
“Funny,” said my mother, “I once asked Oma Kristel that.”
“What did she say?” I asked.
“She sniffed, and said some people had to change their names after the war, and that it didn’t stop those who were around at the time remembering who was who and what was what. I suppose she meant people who belonged to the Nazi party,” she mused. “The older people in the town must remember who some of them were.”
“So was Herr Düster one?” I persisted. “Is that why Herr Schiller doesn’t like him?”
“I don’t think so,” said my mother. “I had the impression it was something more personal than that, a family feud or something.” She eyed me suspiciously. “We don’t know any of this for a fact,” she said. “I don’t want you going around telling people Herr Düster is a war criminal or something, Pia. Understand?”
“Yes,” I said impatiently. “But if it was a family feud, what was it about?”
My mother put down her work and looked at me askance. “What is this, twenty questions or something?” She shook her head. “It’s no use asking me. Oma Kristel’s the expert on Bad Münstereifel gossip.”
I never did ask Oma Kristel about it. I couldn’t imagine asking my grandmother prurient questions about “poor Heinrich’s” past. Besides, Oma Kristel did not like to talk about the war and the postwar period; it was too painful a topic. Evidently other adults felt the same, because the page on the town’s history in the annual tourist brochure mentioned such interesting events as the building of the B51 highway in 1841 but leaped neatly from the 1920s to the 1950s without one reference to the horrors in between.
Truthfully, it was hard for me to imagine anything as awful as the Second World War touching the town; looking at the half-timbered buildings and cobblestones you would think the twentieth century had bypassed it altogether. It was strange to think that so many of the old town houses had been bombed flat. It was a miracle really that the medieval walls, the old red Rathaus, and the church survived.
After the war there was a time of terrible hardship and the nuns of the local convent set up a sort of soup kitchen to feed schoolchildren who would otherwise have been too famished to apply themselves to learning. This was not a topic that was covered in my fourth-grade project about the history of the school. It was my mother who told me about it, rather to my father’s disgust-the British tendency to put “Germany” and “the war” in the same sentence had not escaped him, and he suspected her of making a sly dig at her adopted country. Photographs of the postwar period showed children of my age dressed in ill-assorted and tatty clothing: saggy sweaters made from wool unraveled from older items, and hand-me-downs too big for their recipients. Apart from anything else, it was all horribly dowdy. I could see why Oma Kristel spent the rest of her life in an et
ernal quest for Glamour.
Quite often she went to Herr Schiller’s house looking like some sort of movie star, even affecting a little fur collar that looked like a real animal, with jeweled eyes and a tail hanging down at one end. She wore heels so high that they were a positive endangerment to a woman of her age; she could so easily have broken an ankle. But Oma Kristel refused to believe in osteoporosis. She continued to mince about with her heels clacking on the cobblestones and the tail of the dead fox swinging from her shoulder, looking like Marlene Dietrich.
She first took me along to Herr Schiller’s dimly lit old house when I was too young to put up a fight about being dragged out to visit one of Oma’s ancient friends, and later on I was quite happy to go with her anyway. Herr Schiller’s house was fascinating, full of strange old items, such as a sepia funeral photograph from about 1900, showing someone lying in their coffin surrounded by flowers, and a miniature ship in a bottle, tacking eternally across a sea of frozen blue putty.
Herr Schiller himself was an absolute mine of weird and interesting information. I don’t remember how he first fell into the role of storyteller; perhaps Oma Kristel had marched off to the kitchen to take charge of coffee-making, and he had felt obliged to amuse me somehow. At any rate, it soon became a regular thing of ours, that I would demand that he tell me “a scary story” and he would bring out some nugget of local history or some gruesome snippet of Eifel legend.
The story of Unshockable Hans and the cats, told to Stefan and me after Katharina Linden’s disappearance, was his most lavishly embellished so far. He set out to thrill us, to take us with him into a world of darkness and spirits, a realm of ghosts, witches, and monsters, where danger lurks but a stout heart and a strong faith will always conquer, where Good wins and Evil can be vanquished with a flourish of a rosary. And for a while it worked and we were comforted. That is, until later, when the next child vanished.
Chapter Eleven
In some far-off, terminally optimistic part of my mind I had thought that the disappearance of Katharina Linden, which was naturally the talk of the town, would have superseded the sorry tale of Oma Kristel’s combustion. If this sounds callous, I can only say that at that time none of us as yet really believed in her disappearance. Bad Münstereifel was, after all, the town where Pluto’s attack on an overfed dachshund was front-page news.
I hoped in vain, as was evident from events on the first morning back at school after Karneval. It did not make anything better-if anything, it made things worse.
The headmistress, Frau Redemann, had called a meeting in the school hall for all classes. A good deal of elbowing and whispering went on while we waited for Frau Redemann. Even the first grade knew what had happened, though I doubt their parents would have been edified to hear the loving and entirely fictitious description Thilo Koch poured into their waiting ears, of how Katharina Linden’s corpse had been found in the Erft, chopped into such tiny pieces her own mother didn’t know her. By the time Frau Redemann appeared we had worked ourselves up into a fever pitch of anticipation.
“Good morning, everyone,” she began. “I am sure you all know why you are here this morning. Katharina Linden, from fourth grade, has been missing since the Karneval parade on Sunday. We are, of course, hopeful that Katharina will be found in the near future, safe and well.”
She paused, and some of the smaller children turned around to look at Thilo Koch rather dubiously. Thilo smiled smugly, like an odious policeman who has been first to discover the corpse.
“Obviously, this is an extremely worrying time for the Linden family. Daniel Linden is not attending school today. However, when he does return I do not want any of you mentioning Katharina’s disappearance in front of him. In particular, I do not wish to hear repeated any of the unpleasant and lurid stories that I have already heard being circulated in the school this morning.” At this, Thilo’s smile wavered a little. “I would also urge anyone who thinks they may have any genuine information about Katharina’s whereabouts to come and see me in the school office.
“I would like to add that until we know exactly what has happened, we should all take a little more care than usual.” Take care of what? I wondered. That Thilo Koch’s mad axeman doesn’t sneak up on us?
“I also ask all of you to remember: Never go with anyone you don’t know. Go straight home after school. Keep your parents informed of where you are going. And if you see anything that seems strange in any way, come and talk to me or to your teacher.”
Again that word seltsam. As we all trooped out of the hall, I wondered what Frau Redemann would say if I told her about Pluto’s sudden and sinister appearance, which now seemed like some sort of omen, a sign that something malevolent was afoot. However, I was not able to pursue this train of thought for very long before my own woes overtook me again.
“Look, it’s her,” said a voice from behind me that I recognized instantly as Thilo Koch’s. “The exploding girl.”
“The walking bomb,” said another voice, that of Thilo’s arch-ally Matthias Esch, a boy who was almost as tubby and malicious as Thilo himself.
I feigned deafness, but knew the reddening of the back of my neck would show them that I had taken in every word. I put my head down doggedly and began to mount the stairs to my classroom.
“The walking bomb,” repeated Thilo’s repellent voice from close behind me. There was a scuffle on the staircase as he jostled Matthias. “Hey, maybe that’s what happened to Katharina Linden. Maybe she just got too close to the exploding girl here, and she caught it.”
“Caught what?” Matthias Esch was as dim as he was nasty.
“The exploding, stupid.” Thilo’s voice was ecstatic; he had tapped into a new vein of spite and it proved to be a rich one. “Maybe that’s why they can’t find her. She just exploded-went off like a tonne of dynamite, and blew herself into such little bits you wouldn’t know it was her.”
“Klasse,” said Matthias, overcome with admiration for the concept so neatly described.
“We definitely shouldn’t have to sit next to her,” continued Thilo in a voice that probably traveled the length of the school. “It might be one of us next.”
“Yeah, sure,” cut in a voice. “It probably will be one of you two. Eat one more Wurst and you most definitely will explode, you Fettsack.”
It was Stefan; StinkStefan to the rescue. My heart sank further; it seemed it was still me and StinkStefan against the World.
The days ran on, and before you knew it we were at the end of a week and Katharina Linden had still not been found. As far as the adults’ conversations went, the gloves were now off, and her disappearance was being freely discussed on every street corner and in every boutique as an “abduction.”
Those of us who were still walking to school, as opposed to being driven by anxious parents, were treated to a gauntlet of photographs of our former schoolmate on the newsstands and the police posters scattered about the town. There was even a blurry one of Katharina in her Snow White costume under the terrible headline Who Gave Her the Poisoned Apple?
Green-and-white police cars appeared at every corner or cruised slowly past the school bus stops, and on Friday morning Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf, one of the local policemen, came to give us a talk at the school. His usually jolly face was sober as he went over the by-now familiar ground of not getting into anyone’s car and not talking to strangers.
Looking back, I don’t think at that stage anyone expected another child to disappear. The police cars, the escort to the school buses, the serious talks were all meant to make the local community think that something was being done. Even assuming that something sinister had happened in the first place and Katharina hadn’t fallen down a manhole or something, no one believed that anything else would happen.
My mother still allowed me to walk the short distance to school, but on the second or third morning, when I happened to glance back, I caught her hanging out of the front doorway to keep me in view until I had come safely to the c
orner of the street and within sight of the school gates.
School itself was dismal. Thanks to Thilo Koch I was even more of a leper than before. Home was little better, since my mother was reluctant to let me go out alone. I sometimes thought that were it not for the diversion of Stefan and my visits to Herr Schiller’s house to hear his gruesome tales, I would have died of boredom. As it was, though, I nearly wrecked my chances of going there again.
Chapter Twelve
Tell us another story, Herr Schiller.” This was from Stefan, who was sitting on the edge of a claw-footed and overstuffed armchair that looked as though it had been made for Herr Schiller’s grandmother.
“Bitte,” I corrected him in a disapproving tone that Oma Kristel would have been proud of. Not that I was such a stickler for manners-but I knew people of Herr Schiller’s generation were.
“Please.” Stefan corrected himself. “The one about the cats was cool.”
Herr Schiller raised one eyebrow and regarded Stefan quizzically over the top of his spectacles. “I seem to remember that at the time you told me it was not scary at all, young man.” His expression was stern but his voice was cheerful.
Stefan looked down, temporarily at a loss, but when his head came up again he was smiling, rather shyly. He and Herr Schiller regarded each other in silence for several moments, and then I was surprised to see Herr Schiller’s craggy face break into a smile, too.
A little flush of annoyance ran through me, like a tiny electrical charge traveling along a wire. Sometimes the two of them made me feel like an unwelcome third. And besides (said a mean little voice at the back of my mind), who did Stefan think he was, anyway? He was still StinkStefan, the most unpopular boy in the class, if not the entire school.
“I don’t want to hear a story today, actually,” I cut in, and instantly felt self-conscious at the edge in my voice. Still, it worked; both their heads had turned my way and they were now looking at me, Stefan with a look of irritation at the interruption and Herr Schiller with a smooth expression that betrayed no recognition of my rudeness.
