by Helen Grant
‘Look, Kai … ’
‘He’s not a nice guy. I know. You told me.’
‘He isn’t,’ said Julius, and something in his voice made me look at him again.
‘What?’ I said, although I had a feeling I would rather not know whatever it was he had on his mind.
Julius sighed and ran his long hands through his hair so that clumps of it stood on end, making it look more like a shooting mass of flames than ever. ‘He’s going round telling people … ’ He paused. ‘That you threw yourself at him. That you and he … ’ He didn’t finish the sentence; he didn’t have to. ‘I thought you should know.’
So I can wish him dead? I thought. But I had already done that.
‘Telling people?’ I said tightly.
It felt as though my throat had constricted; it was difficult to get the words out. My worst fears were confirmed. Now I knew for certain why Max had looked at me the way he had. He wasn’t seeing me as shy little Steffi any more, the one who was afraid of her own shadow. He was seeing me as – well, I didn’t want to think what went through his mind when he looked at me.
I had forgotten about the roll. Now I picked up a slice of ham with the flat of the knife and added it to the cheese. Never mind about the salad; I just wanted to end the conversation before I died of shame. I was afraid to imagine what Julius thought, whether he was even halfway to believing what Kai was saying.
‘Nothing happened,’ I said in a low voice.
‘Steffi, I’m not poking my nose in.’ He didn’t say whether he believed me, I noticed. ‘I’m just warning you – as a friend. Kai’s got a big mouth.’
I put the finished roll into a paper bag. ‘Two euros,’ I said to the row of pastries under the glass. I was afraid to look at Julius again.
A minute later the bell jingled and the door swung shut after him as he left the bakery. I stood behind the counter with my cheeks flaming. I was afraid that I might start crying and I really did not want to do that.
Get a grip, I told myself severely. Kai’s a pig. OK. You knew that already. He thought you were going to give him what he wanted, like all his other girlfriends probably do, and you didn’t, and now he’s getting his own back. I swallowed, blinking back tears. Don’t react. Don’t even think about it. In a week it will have blown over.
But I was wrong, because the next week Frau Kessel came to call.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
She came on the Monday, and I wondered afterwards whether, in her sharp-eyed way, she had noticed that that was one of the days when I was not in the bakery but over at the college in Kall.
Before she came, I had really started to think that perhaps my life might drop back into its old groove. I had met with the others on Saturday night, but it had rained so heavily all weekend that there was no question of any further trips to Rote Gertrud’s house, whatever they may have liked. The track along the Eschweiler Tal would be brown and sticky with mud, as alluring as a strip of flypaper.
If I had worried about how Jochen would behave around me, I needn’t have bothered. He spoke to me only when necessary, but there was nothing in his manner which would have alerted the others to any possible resentment towards me. He didn’t try to get me alone to renew his request either.
Of Kai von Jülich I saw absolutely nothing. He didn’t come into the bakery and I didn’t even see the gleaming red car in the town. The absence of any news about him was reassuring, however. I had still not made up my mind whether to try to get back to Gertrud’s house on my own to remove the curse, but it seemed that nothing had come of it anyway. If it had been Kai who had dropped dead, his magnificent features buried in a plate of cherry streusel, it was inconceivable that the news would not be all over town.
When I came back from college I was not thinking about Kai; I was thinking about the bakery, and my parents, and wondering whether there would ever be a solution to the problem, one that would leave us all happy. I took my mother’s indignation and Well, miss, I hope you’re pleased with yourself less seriously than my father’s tired face and calm request that I should think about it. It seemed wrong to hurt two people for the sake of one, yet I could not bring myself to say that I would give up all my dreams.
As I came in through the front door of the bakery, swinging my bag off my shoulder, the first thing I saw was Achim Zimmer lurking by the door to the corridor which led to the kitchen and flat. He was partly obscured by a screen covered with swathes of pale green chiffon and artificial creepers which hid the indecorous sight of the door from the cafe users, but he was instantly recognizable from the baker’s whites he wore. He stood out like a member of the backstage crew who has accidentally stumbled on to the stage in the middle of a play.
It was never a pleasure to see Achim; passing through the kitchen on the days he was there was like crossing a field with a bull in it. Aside from the general feeling of dislike which welled up inside me whenever I saw him, there was something about the way he was standing that aroused little prickles of suspicion in my mind. His posture was furtive and I guessed that this meant something undesirable for someone.
Achim must have heard the bell over the front door jingling, because his head turned my way and a slow smile spread over his heavy features. He looked me up and down very deliberately. Achim’s habit of eyeing me up was never pleasant; the way his gaze seemed to slither all over me had all the charm of walking close behind a muck spreader. Today, however, there was something especially nasty about it, a smug knowingness which seemed to glisten out of every pore of his pallid skin.
I saw from the corner of my eye that my mother was a metre or two away, on the other side of the screen, talking to someone I could not see. It was probably her presence which prevented Achim from saying anything to me, though it did not prevent him from giving me a lascivious wink. After that he lounged through the door into the corridor and vanished from sight.
I was in no hurry to follow him. Instead I lingered in the cafe, thinking that if I spent a few moments greeting my mother, by the time I went into the corridor Achim would have retreated into the kitchen like a slimy marine creature hauling its tentacles back into a crevice in the rock.
My mother, however, seemed very unwilling to talk, or even to catch my eye. This could not be because she was overwhelmed with customers, since it looked as though the person she was talking to was one of only two visitors to the cafe. The other was a corpulent woman of about seventy whom I recognized as Frau Schneider, a neighbour of Timo’s. She had a large cup of coffee and a slice of plum streusel in front of her, but she wasn’t taking any notice of either. Instead she was leaning forward with an avid expression on her face, doing her best to listen in to my mother’s conversation.
This instantly piqued my curiosity. I had been a denizen of Bad Münstereifel long enough to know that this meant something significant was occurring, some new name was being painted on to the glorious roll of characters who featured in the town’s oral history. I slowed my pace as I approached the spot where my mother stood.
Now she turned around and saw me, and a look of dismay crossed her face. She took a step back and, as she did so, I saw that the customer with whom she had been speaking was Frau Kessel. My mother’s gaze went from me to Frau Kessel and back again, and then, puzzlingly, I saw it drop to my midriff.
I looked down automatically, wondering whether I had spilt something down myself, but could see nothing. When I looked up, my mother had turned back to Frau Kessel.
‘I think I should prepare your bill, Frau Kessel,’ she was saying.
Her voice was very cold and hard, which struck me as odd. At home with my father and me, my mother could be acid-tongued, but with the customers she was always determinedly polite and charming, even with the ones who complained about everything, like Frau Kessel.
Frau Kessel was peering past my mother, her gimlet eyes glittering behind her spectacles. It was impossible not to shrivel under that gaze, like an ant under a magnifying glass in the sun. I recal
led the last time we had spoken, the way she had grasped my arm with her skinny claw. The impulse to flee overcame my curiosity. I nodded vaguely at the pair of them and made for the door. To my eternal relief there was no Achim on the other side. Evidently he had vanished into the kitchen, so I was able to escape up the stairs to the flat unnoticed.
I dumped my bag just inside my room and went into the kitchen to scavenge something to eat. I was searching the fridge when I heard the flat door open and close. A moment later there were footsteps and my mother came into the kitchen. She had such a peculiar look on her face that I straightened up and stared at her.
‘Who’s looking after the cafe?’ I asked.
‘I’ve closed it,’ said my mother.
I gaped at her. This was completely unheard of.
‘Frau Schneider?’ I said.
‘Gone,’ said my mother tersely. ‘Sit down.’
I knew I was in trouble, so I elected to sit in one of the chairs on the outside of the table, thinking that if I slid on to the bench jammed up against the wall, I would be trapped with little chance of escape. My mother manoeuvred herself opposite me on to the bench. In her green dirndl and with her face puckered with some disturbing emotion, she looked like Snow White catapulted into middle age and weighed down with worldly cares.
She didn’t bother with the niceties, coming straight to the point.
‘Steffi, Frau Kessel has just informed me not only that you are pregnant, but that Kai von Jülich has left the town because of it.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I felt a wave of shock so strong that it was like nausea. I leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands clamped to my face, covering my open mouth. For about a minute I was completely incapable of saying anything.
I think my mother had the sense to realize that Frau Kessel’s pronouncements could not always be taken as gospel, but my silence began to alarm her. Her face seemed to sag with the accumulation of her fears, fears that Frau Kessel was not only telling the truth but also going to proceed to tell it to everyone she knew.
‘Steffi … ’ she began.
‘She’s lying,’ I blurted out.
I was horrified to see an expression on my mother’s face that I recognized as relief. Surely she had not really entertained the idea that what Frau Kessel had told her was true?
‘She says she saw you with him,’ said my mother.
‘She did,’ I spluttered, torn between a feeling of towering indignation and the insane impulse to laugh.
‘Are you seeing him?’
‘No,’ I said instantly. I saw my mother open her mouth to question this and added, ‘We just went out once.’
I looked at my mother and saw that peculiar look on her face again. She opened her mouth and then closed it again without saying anything, but the air around us was thick with unarticulated questions which hung over us like poison gas.
‘Mum,’ I said firmly, ‘I didn’t sleep with him.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of asking,’ she said hastily, but she didn’t look me in the eyes.
‘Frau Kessel is just an old … ’ Bitch, I was going to say, but I remembered it was my mother I was talking to.
‘I know,’ said my mother. She put out a hand across the table towards me. ‘So there’s nothing you want to tell me?’
‘No!’ I almost screamed. Now I was not just indignant, I was beginning to feel very anxious. If my own mother was carrying on like this, what about all the other people into whose ears Frau Kessel would inevitably pour her poisonous suggestions? I made an effort to lower my voice. ‘Look, Mum, I’m not pregnant. I only went out with him once and I’m not seeing him again. In fact I haven’t seen him since we went out, so I’ve no idea why he’s left town, but it’s got nothing to do with me.’ I looked at her pleadingly. ‘Now, can we forget about it?’
My mother sat looking at me for several moments, her face grave and thoughtful. I had never seen her look so old. I saw how the grey at the roots of her blonde hair drained the colour from her cheeks, how the corners of her mouth turned down, giving her whole face a melancholy look. At last she said, ‘No … I don’t think so.’
‘Mum –’
‘Steffi!’ I saw her face crumple. ‘I can’t go through this again.’ She put a hand to her cheek, rubbing at the skin, as though she were suffering the worst migraine of her life. ‘I don’t want to see you get hurt, like Magdalena did.’
Now I was staring at her. My parents rarely mentioned Magdalena’s departure from the town. It wasn’t some kind of never darken my door again I no longer have a daughter type of thing. I had the feeling it was simply too painful, a wound that neither of them wanted to reopen.
I was still at the primary school when she went, but even now I remembered her as a teenager, fair-haired like myself and my mother, though her smiling face was becoming blurred in my memory with the passage of time, as an old photograph fades in the light. I suppose when she first left I must have pestered my parents to know why and where she had gone, how long she would be away, whether she would ever come back – but somewhere along the line I had understood that the questions would never be answered, that my parents would prefer me not to ask them at all. My sister had been transformed into an absence; I had become an only child. In time curiosity had faded into a kind of sad emptiness whenever I thought about my sister.
How would it have been, I sometimes wondered, if Magdalena had stayed? If I had had an older sister waiting there for me at the school gates when the boys in my class followed me out, calling me names because they knew I was too quiet and shy to fight back? If there had been someone to share the long afternoons after school, when both my parents were downstairs in the bakery and the hands of the kitchen clock seemed to creep around so slowly as I sat at the table, struggling my way through my homework on my own?
Later, when I was older and the memories of my sister had become fainter, until she was little more than an idea, I had even felt a twinge of resentment. If Magdalena were still here, I would not be the one facing a lifetime making Florentiner and Plunderteilchen. But by then I had almost given up speculating why and where my sister had gone; it was news to me that someone had hurt her.
I frowned. ‘What happened to Magdalena?’
‘Frau Kessel,’ said my mother bitterly. ‘That woman is a menace. A few hundred years ago they would have tried her for a witch and serve her right.’ If my mother saw me react to the word witch she gave no sign of it. ‘She happened to come into the bakery a couple of mornings in a row and saw Magdalena looking unwell. In fact I think Magdi had to go out once when she was serving her.’
I’m not surprised. She’d make anyone sick to the stomach, I thought privately.
‘The next thing we knew, people were asking us if it was true that Magdalena was expecting. Frau Kessel had put two and two together and decided that Magdalena had morning sickness, and instead of keeping her surmises to herself she’d gone and retailed them all over town.’ Now that my mother had decided to tell me what had happened, the floodgates opened. ‘She sees sex and babies wherever she looks, the dried-up old baggage. Sticking her nose in where it’s not wanted.’
‘Magdalena left because of Frau Kessel?’ I asked.
My mother nodded wearily.
‘But why?’ I said. ‘Couldn’t she just tell people it wasn’t true? And anyway, whatever they’d said, if she had just waited, it would have been obvious it wasn’t true.’
For a moment my mother didn’t reply. She just sat there staring at the table, as though there were some universal truth hidden in the pattern on the plasticized cloth. I looked at her and was appalled to see that her eyes were brimming with tears.
Then she said, ‘But it was true, that was the thing.’
I was dumbfounded. ‘It was true? She really was pregnant?’
‘Yes.’ My mother looked at me now and I saw more than grief in her eyes; there was anguish. ‘She was … and that old – that old bitch guessed it.’ The hand whi
ch lay on the table curled into a fist. ‘She guessed it right away, even though Magdi wasn’t showing. And she couldn’t keep it to herself. It was too good a story, and what did she care whose life she ruined by telling it?’
‘But –’ I was struggling with this new piece of information. ‘But, Mum, it’s not a crime to have a kid before you’re married. Maybe it was, back when Frau Kessel was born, in the Dark Ages. But now … couldn’t Magdalena just have ignored what people said? I mean, they couldn’t do anything to her.’
‘They could make her life very difficult,’ said my mother. ‘They could make it unbearable.’ She gave a strangled cough and I realized that she was trying to choke back a sob. ‘And I … ’ she began. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I know I didn’t react the way I should have. I just kept thinking about what people were saying – and I was angry with Magdi for letting it happen. I shouldn’t have been, but I was. Angry, and scared for her too. We rowed all the time.’ My mother put her head in her hands. ‘Your father was angry too. He kept asking her why she hadn’t been more careful, why she had to do that in the first place. Said she was too young to get married – and anyway, the boy wasn’t the sort of husband you’d want. And Magdi just got quieter and quieter and then she wouldn’t talk to us at all.’ Now she really was weeping. ‘It was our fault she went. My fault. She needed help and I just shouted at her.’
I sat for a moment and watched my mother crying. It was almost too much to take in. My mother very rarely said she was wrong about anything; generally she went through life with a brisk air of self-righteousness. Now I saw that this was a shell, a facade she had erected to conceal feelings that she hardly dared acknowledge to herself. I felt a terrible pity for her, even at the same time as I felt a growing sense of indignation on my sister’s behalf.
‘So she went away to have the baby?’ I asked.
My mother looked up at me with red eyes. ‘This is the thing, Steffi. She didn’t keep the baby.’
