The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

by Helen Grant

  “I’ll try,” said Stefan, and I had to be content with that.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The summer vacation, seemingly interminable, finally came to an end. My much-loathed cousins Chloe and Charles came to Oma Warner’s house for the afternoon, ostensibly to bid me a fond farewell, though there was no affection wasted between us. Oma Warner sent us into the garden to play so that she could drink tea with Aunt Liz. As usual, we went down to the bottom of the garden to climb up the railings and watch the trains speeding by on their way to London.

  There was just enough room on the one stretch of railings not obscured by bushes for us all to squeeze in if we squashed up together. Charles and Chloe, first to climb up, did not want to squash together with me. I tried to climb up anyway, just to annoy them; there was a short struggle and Chloe fell off, with an affected shriek.

  “You did that on purpose,” said Charles, and gave me an almighty shove with his meaty hand, intending to push me into the dust, quantities of which his sister was now brushing off her pink sweater with disgust. I hung on for grim death, and then I kicked him in the shins.

  “Fuck, fuck,” he squealed, then he flung himself upon me and began prizing my fingers off the railings.

  I tried to kick him again, missed, let go of the railings, and slid down to the ground. Undeterred, I gave him some of his own medicine. “Fuck away!” I hissed, taking a swipe at him with my open hand.

  “Fuck away?” Charles laughed contemptuously. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “She means fuck off,” supplied Chloe. They looked at each other and laughed theatrically.

  “Can’t she speak English?”

  “No, she can’t.”

  “Ner-errr…” They both flopped up and down in displays of simulated imbecility. “Fuck away!”

  “No, you fuck away!”

  “Scheissköpfe,” I told them; having reached the borders of my knowledge of English there was no option but to relapse into German. “Ich hasse euch beide, ihr seid total blöd.”

  “That’s German, is it?”

  “Fuck away back to Germany, you… German.”

  “You Kraut,” added Charles, dredging up a word he could only have learned from Uncle Mark. “Fuck off with the other Krauts.”

  “Go back where you came from.”

  “Gerne,” I told them. “England is Scheisse, Middlesex is Scheisse, und ihr beide seid auch Scheisse.”

  “Kraut, she’s talking Kraut,” said Charles delightedly. “Hey, Chlo’, I can’t wait until she tries that at school.” He pulled a face. “Hey, Mrs. Vilson, I don’t vont to do zis homeverk.”

  “God, she’s not going to be in my class,” said Chloe in disgust. “They’ll put her in Batty’s.” She glared at me. “With all the other dummies who can’t speak English.”

  “Good, I am not going to your school,” I said disdainfully.

  Chloe shrieked with malicious delight. “Oh, yes, you are.”

  “No, I am not going.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  They looked at me expectantly. Then Charles elbowed his sister in the ribs. “She doesn’t know.”

  “I don’t know what?” I demanded.

  They both burst into laughter. “Look,” said Charles eventually, in the voice of someone speaking to the terminally stupid, “where do you think you are going to school?”

  “Sankt Michael Gymnasium,” I answered suspiciously.

  “And where’s that, then?”

  “Bad Münstereifel.”

  “You’re going to need a plane to get there,” Charles taunted me.

  “I don’t understand,” I said resentfully.

  “You want me to spell it out, dummy?” asked Chloe, hands on her almost nonexistent hips. “You’re coming to live in England.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” chanted Charles.

  “Quatsch,” I told him.

  “Quack? What’s that?”

  “German for ‘duck,’” supplied Chloe. They guffawed at me. I stood there in silence and looked at them. “I am not living in England.”

  “Oh, yes, you are. Hasn’t Aunt Kate told you yet?”

  Impulsively, I turned on my heel. “I will ask Oma Warner.” I started up the garden path toward the house. Behind my back I heard Chloe and Charles hissing at each other. “Idiot-she doesn’t know.”

  “Mum didn’t say not to tell. Anyway, you started it.”

  “Stop her. Mum’ll go mad.”

  “You stop her.”

  By the time they had finished arguing and started after me, I had reached the back door. They piled into the house after me, and were so close on my heels that when I pushed open the living-room door the three of us almost fell into the room.

  “Oma Warner,” I blurted out, “I don’t want to live in England.”

  Aunt Liz and Oma Warner turned startled faces toward me. Aunt Liz put her cup down on its saucer with a rattle and looked furiously toward Chloe and Charles.

  “Chloe? Charles?” There was a silence. “What have you been saying to Pia?”

  “Nothing,” said Chloe quickly.

  I glared at her mutinously. “She says I am going to school in England, not in the Sankt Michael Gymnasium.”

  “Oh, Chloe.” Aunt Liz made a sound like a long sigh. She looked at Oma Warner and rolled her eyes. “Where do they pick these things up? I haven’t discussed it in front of them, not even with Mark.”

  “Little pitchers have big ears,” said Oma Warner grimly.

  “It’s not true,” I said. It was a question, not a statement. Oma Warner looked at Aunt Liz.

  “Chloe and Charles shouldn’t have said anything to you, Pia,” said Aunt Liz eventually in the soulful listen-to-me-little-girl tone that I sometimes heard from my mother when she had something serious to impart. “Your mother and I were really just discussing what it would be like if you ever did come back to England to live. You know, the idea. Maybe your family won’t always want to stay in Germany. People move, you know.”

  I pursed my lips and shook my head as emphatically as I could.

  “Bad Münstereifel is very pretty, but it’s just a small town, you know, and besides…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Yes, Aunt Liz?” I said. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Oma Warner shaking her head. Aunt Liz saw it too and a frown flitted across her face.

  “There are other nice places to live,” she finished.

  “Not like Bad Münstereifel,” I said.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  I flew back to Germany a few days before the autumn term at my new school started, my English much improved and my bags laden with British delicacies that Oma Warner had insisted on packing for my mother-unpalatably strong tea and pots of gravy powder. My head was still full of the twitterings of Aunt Liz, who had impressed upon me not to say anything about moving to England to anyone; she had not actually come out and forbidden me, but she had gone on and on in such a wheedling tone that I had got the message. Somehow it did not make me feel any better. If it was just an idea, why the secrecy? But soon I had other problems to deal with, more immediate ones.

  “Are you Pia Kolvenbach?”

  I turned around and found myself looking at the front of a battered black leather cycle jacket; looking up, I saw a face upon which the adult features were already sketched: the big jaw, the heavy-lipped mouth, the beginnings of stubble. I didn’t know him, but he looked old enough to be in the upper end of the school, maybe the Abitur year. A faded gray backpack was slung over one shoulder by a fraying strap. A cigarette-strictly forbidden in the school yard-dangled from thick fingers.

  “Sorry?”

  “Are you the Kolvenbach kid?”

  I looked at him dumbly, and he shook his head impatiently.

  “You deaf?”

  “No.” I shook my head.

  “Well, are you?” He flicked ash from the cigarette onto the ground between us. “Are you Pia Kolvenbach?
”

  “Yes.”

  “The one whose grandmother exploded?”

  “She didn’t-” I started, then stopped short. What was the use? If I said she had just burned herself by accident, or if I said she had spontaneously combusted, or even gone off like a Roman candle in a shower of multicolored sparks, what was the difference? I stood still and silent and waited for the inevitable.

  “So what happened?”

  I looked away, searching for a friendly face in the milling crowd of schoolchildren. Where was Stefan? He should be here. I risked a look back at the boy’s face; he was still looking at me, waiting to hear what I would say; you could see the avid spark of prurient interest behind those heavy features like a tea light burning in a jack-o’-lantern. I threw caution to the winds.

  “It was a hand grenade.”

  “A what?”

  “A hand grenade.” Now I had recovered my courage. Um Gottes Willen, I thought; it couldn’t make things any worse, whatever I said. “My Opa kept it from the war.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.” I warmed to my theme. “He kept it in a box under the bed. When he died, Oma Kristel started carrying it around with her as-as a reminder of him.”

  “Unbelievable,” said the boy incredulously. He looked as though he were about to start dribbling with excitement. The cigarette was burning down unnoticed in his fingers. “How did it go off?”

  “Well…” I thought about it for a moment. “It was in her handbag. She always carried it around in there. She put her hand in to get her keys out, and instead of the key ring she put her finger in the ring on the hand grenade, and pulled the pin out.” I put my head on one side. “And then it went off. Boom! Just like that.”

  “Scheisse.” I had succeeded in impressing a teenager. “Was there anything left of her?”

  “Only her shoes and her left hand. That’s how they could tell who it was afterward, by her rings.”

  “How could…” He shook his head. “That’s incredible. Wasn’t anyone else hurt?”

  “My cousin Michel had his nose blown off.” How I wished that were true. “They had to make him a new one in the hospital.” I put a hand gently to my lips as though feeling the words as they came out, checking them for truth. “It looks as good as new, you wouldn’t know.”

  “Did they find the nose?”

  I shook my head. “A cat ate it.”

  There was a long silence. The boy looked down at me, and I up at him. He flicked the long column of gray ash from the cigarette, took a last deep drag, and then dropped the butt on the ground, where he extinguished it under the sole of one grubby sneaker.

  “Du bist pervers,” he said at last: you’re sick. He turned and shambled off, leaving me standing there alone, with the sound of the school bell ringing in my ears.

  That was my first day at the big school.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Pia,” said Herr Schiller, peering around the door. “How kind of you.” He stepped back to let me into the house. Herr Schiller had been unwell; that was why he had declined my mother’s invitation to come and share coffee and cakes with us to celebrate my transition into the big school. Instead I had brought him a slice of cheesecake in a box.

  “I’m sorry you had to miss the party,” I said shyly.

  “I am sorry too, Pia,” said Herr Schiller. He raised his hands in a gesture of regret. “What can I say? The years are catching up with me.” Certainly he did look as though every one of his eighty-odd years was weighing him down today. Although his clothes were as dapper as ever, they seemed to hang off his broad shoulders; even the flesh of his face seemed to hang loosely, as though he lacked the energy to smile.

  I looked up at him doubtfully.

  “I brought you some of the cake.”

  “Danke, Pia.” He held out a hand to indicate that I should go into the living room.

  “Do you want the cake now?” I asked, plumping myself down in one of his armchairs.

  “No, thank you.” Herr Schiller subsided into his favorite chair with a seismic effect on the springs. We regarded each other for a moment. He did look pale, I noticed.

  “Herr Schiller…?” I said uncertainly.

  “Yes, Pia?”

  “You’re… I’m sorry you’re sick. You’re not…?”

  “Dying?” supplied Herr Schiller in a dry voice. He chuckled slightly; in my imagination I saw puffs of dust coming out with each wheezing breath. “My dear Pia, we are all dying.” He must have seen my face, because his tone softened as he added, “I’m sorry, Pia. But when you are my age, you will see that everything comes to an end. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s nature.”

  He patted the arm of his chair with a gnarled hand. His eyes were focused elsewhere, not on me; he was thinking. “The important thing to do,” he said eventually, “is to live every day as though it were your last one.” He looked at me. “I expect they tell you that at the children’s Mass, don’t they?”

  I nodded, not liking to say that I never went to the children’s Mass.

  “Live every day as though it were your last one,” he repeated. “You know what that means? It means if there is something you want to do, something you have to do, you should do it now, before the chance has gone away forever.”

  “Mmmm,” I concurred uneasily. I could not think what else to say.

  There was a long pause, and then at last Herr Schiller said in a brighter tone, “And how are you finding the Gymnasium, Pia?”

  I stopped myself from saying Scheisse just in time. “It’s all right,” I said noncommittally.

  “Just all right?” Herr Schiller raised his eyebrows.

  “Well…” I hesitated. “School is all right. But some of the other kids… they’re mean.”

  “Oh?”

  I heaved a great sigh that sent strands of hair floating about my face. “They want to know about Oma Kristel. About… you know. Why can’t people just forget it? Why does everyone have to keep going on about it? Well-not you,” I added hastily.

  “People have trouble letting the past go,” remarked Herr Schiller. He leaned over to the coffee table that stood between us and pushed the box with the cheesecake in it toward me. “Perhaps you should eat this, Pia. I think it will do you more good than me.”

  “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “No.”

  I opened the box and extracted the plastic fork that my mother had laid neatly alongside the slice of cake. Licking smears of cheesecake off the handle, I said, “Herr Schiller, would you tell me another story… please?”

  “Well…” Herr Schiller seemed to consider. “What sort of story would you like?”

  “Something really scary,” I announced. “Something…” I pondered, then with a sudden burst of petulant inspiration: “Something with a boy who says something stupid, and then something horrible happens to him.” I thought of cigarette ash drifting to the ground at my feet, grubby sneakers grinding out a butt on the stones. “Something really horrible.”

  “Something really horrible…” repeated Herr Schiller. He leaned his head back against his chair for a moment and looked upward as though seeking inspiration. Then he looked at me, and his eyes were bright. “Did I ever tell you about the Fiery Man of the Hirnberg?”

  “No,” I said. “Is it horrible?” I felt in the mood for a really terrifying story today: one with lots of rending and screaming. The fact was, I felt like doing some rending and screaming of my own.

  “Pretty horrible,” said Herr Schiller drily, and I had to be content with that. Settling himself more comfortably in the chair, he began:

  “You know where the Hirnberg is, don’t you?”

  I did; it was a thickly wooded hill adjoining the Eschweiler Tal and crisscrossed with woodsman’s tracks.

  “The Fiery Man dwells in the woods on the Hirnberg, in a cave lit by fires that burn deep within the hill, night and day.”

  Herr Schiller reached slowly for his pipe and began stuffing
it with tobacco. “He burns eternally and is never consumed by the flames, and if he embraces you with his fiery arms you will be burned to cinders in an instant.”

  Herr Schiller struck a match, and for a second his craggy features were lit up by the spurting flame. He puffed at the pipe, keeping his eyes on me. Then he continued, “Now, what I am about to tell you happened in the village of Eschweiler, to the north of Bad Münstereifel. One summer evening, many years ago-”

  “When?” I interrupted.

  “Many years ago,” repeated Herr Schiller, lifting his bushy eyebrows. “A great many years ago. One evening, the young people of the village were sitting out on the grassy hillside telling stories and eventually the discussion turned into something of a contest, with increasingly gruesome tales of ghosts, witches, and monsters. They spoke of treasure guarded by a specter on a glowing horse, and of the Fiery Man who is supposed to live in the Teufelsloch-the Devil’s Cave-on the Hirnberg.

  “The contest went on until one lad stood up and announced recklessly, ‘Well, I would give the Fiery Man of the Hirnberg a Fettmännchen if he would come here and fetch it himself.’ A Fettmännchen, you know, was a small coin that they had in those days.

  “The moment the words were out of the lad’s mouth he knew his mistake by the expressions on the others’ faces. The argument was forgotten; the merry chattering was finished, and the girls gathered their shawls around them and scurried away home like frightened mice, in spite of all that the young men said to try to make them stay.

  “Well, it was coming into twilight now and the shadows were deepening, so it was not long before one of the young men noticed a light that was burning at some distance in the woods. Faint at first, it burned slowly more brightly, until it became clear that the light was not gaining in size but coming nearer.

  “The young men watched it with growing dismay until it came out from under cover of the trees, and they could clearly see what manner of thing it was. It was a man-at least, it was something in the shape of a man-but it was all over molten fire, which blazed and spurted from every part of its body; and its eyes were two dark pits, like sunspots in the glaring sun of its face. Slowly it came on, wading through fire like a fisherman wades through flowing water, until the horrified young men could hear the sizzle of the burning feet as they charred the grass black.