by Helen Grant
The woman looked at me with an expression that was at once hopeful and curiously timid. I found my annoyance evaporating. I almost wished that I had freshly brewed coffee and apple strudel to offer her.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said as kindly as I could, ‘but the bakery’s closed until further notice.’
I would have shut the door, but the woman didn’t show any sign of turning away. She just stood there, with her arms around the baby and one finger gently stroking the fluffy little head, and looked at me.
‘My father’s in hospital,’ I said. ‘There isn’t anything, I’m afraid.’
‘You’re Stefanie Nett,’ said the woman, and the way she said it made it sound as though this was a breathtaking discovery.
I didn’t reply. With a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach I wondered whether she had come, not in search of refreshment or somewhere to sit with the baby, but to see the bakery itself or, worse still, to see me. Like everyone else in the town, I was aware of the ghoulish tourists who came and pointed out the house where Bad Münstereifel’s serial killer had lived a decade before, and who tramped up and down the Eschweiler Tal looking for the place. I wondered whether this innocuous-looking mother was in fact the vanguard of a new set of sensation-seekers come to gawp at The Bakery of Horror or even The Girl Who Found the Body.
‘You are her, aren’t you?’ said the woman. ‘Stefanie.’
‘Yes,’ I said involuntarily, and then immediately, ‘No.’
I began to close the door but the woman was too quick for me. She couldn’t put out a hand, because both her arms were around the baby, but she put out a foot instead and suddenly her shoe was jammed in the door. I couldn’t push any harder without hurting her. For a moment I considered simply turning tail and fleeing into the back of the bakery, but then the woman spoke again.
‘Don’t you recognize me, Stefanie?’
‘No,’ I said, but the question gave me pause. I relaxed the pressure on the door and the woman pushed it open with her elbow. Once she was inside the bakery she looked at me expectantly. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
She was turning the baby around to face me. It was very drowsy; the little eyes were closed, the soft cheeks pink.
‘Say hello to Auntie Stefanie, Theo.’
Still I looked at them both dumbly. Auntie? I was thinking. I’m not anyone’s aunt. Maybe she was simply being twee, trying to fabricate a connection between us. Did I know her from somewhere?
Perhaps she mistook my perplexed expression for something less friendly. There was a slightly hurt tone in her voice when she said, ‘This is your nephew, Theo.’
I stared at her open-mouthed, as I finally grasped what she was telling me.
‘I’m Magdalena,’ she said.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
I showed Magdalena into the living room; somehow I couldn’t imagine taking her into the kitchen and us sitting on either side of the breakfast table with its plasticized cloth. She still didn’t feel like my sister, or seem to belong to this place, despite having lived here once. I offered her coffee, which she declined, and orange juice, which she accepted, and then I sat on the edge of one of the armchairs and watched her sitting on the sofa with the baby, carefully rearranging its blanket.
‘How’s Papa?’ asked Magdalena.
She wasn’t looking at me at the time, she was looking at Theo, and that was just as well. If she had glanced at my face she might have seen the warring emotions which were passing across it, like a bloom of silt stirred up in a pond. Nobody ever called my father Papa except me; it sounded strange coming from this woman’s lips, and I felt irrationally jealous, as though she had come to take him away from me. And then I felt both curious and awkward. She was my sister, my own flesh and blood, but when I looked at her it was hard to see the nineteen-year-old she had been; her hair had been lighter then, and she had worn it longer, and her features had been softer, more rounded. Over a decade ago, when I had last seen her, I had been a child and she had been almost grown up. Now she looked as though she had been tramping the weary ways of adulthood for years.
‘He had a heart attack,’ I said.
‘I know. I came as soon as I could.’
‘How did you find out?’ I said.
As far as I was aware, neither of my parents had spoken to Magdalena in years.
‘I have a friend in the town,’ she said. ‘She phoned me when she heard.’
I was so stunned by this piece of information that for a moment I was unable to say a thing. Magdalena still had contact with a friend in the town? I looked at her and felt the stirrings of anger. Had she no idea how our parents had suffered over the years, wondering what she was doing, whether she would ever come back? Suppose our father had died without ever knowing what had become of his eldest daughter.
‘He’s very ill,’ I said. ‘But he’s still alive.’
What did you care during the last ten years? I thought resentfully. Then I relented a little. This was my sister, after all, come back from a limbo as remote as death. Whatever the repercussions, my parents could be nothing other than thrilled to see her.
‘They’ll be so pleased to see you,’ I said impulsively. ‘And the baby.’
‘I hope so,’ said Magdalena.
Silence as cool and deep as the soft drifting of snow fell between us again. I wondered whether I should ask to hold the baby, but in truth I had hardly ever held one in my life and I felt awkward about doing it. Instead I sat and studied my sister, wishing that I had the gift of easy conversation that everyone else seemed to have.
The hands which held the baby were ringless, I noticed.
‘Are you married, then?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Magdalena, not looking up. ‘I’m living with someone.’
‘Oh.’
‘You must hate me,’ said Magdalena suddenly.
Now she did look at me and her face was flushed, her eyes bright and feverish.
‘No –’
‘You must think I’m a heartless bitch, leaving and not getting in touch all this time. Don’t you?’
I just stared at her.
‘It’s not like I haven’t thought about it,’ she said passionately. ‘I’ve been thinking about it all the time.’
‘So why didn’t you?’ I asked her.
‘Because – because I just couldn’t come back. And if I’d stayed in touch I would have had to, sooner or later. I know Papa needed me in the bakery … and it would have been so much easier, that’s the thing. It was really hard at first, managing on my own. Really hard.’ Her voice shook. ‘But I couldn’t come back here. I had terrible rows with Mum, you know. She was so angry with me.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘She’s so sorry, really she is. She still blames herself.’
‘I was angry with her too,’ said my sister. ‘I was so angry I didn’t ever want to see her again. I wanted to hurt her. That’s not a good thing to have done.’ Her voice broke and now I saw that she was crying. ‘But it wasn’t her. She wasn’t the reason I couldn’t come back. It’s this town. This bloody town. Everyone knowing what had happened. Having to stand in the bakery every day when they came in, knowing what they were saying behind my back. I just couldn’t stand it. All those good Catholics, all those self-righteous citizens. And Frau Kessel –’
‘Frau Kessel is dead,’ I said.
Magdalena stared at me. ‘Thank God.’
‘She was murdered,’ I said, and my mouth was suddenly so dry that the words felt like ashes on my tongue. I remembered that no conclusion had been reached about the cause of death so far, not publicly anyway. ‘At least, some people think she was murdered. It wasn’t quite clear.’
‘I hope she was murdered,’ said Magdalena. ‘The poisonous old witch.’
‘Don’t say that,’ I said faintly.
‘Why not?’ said my sister defiantly. ‘I’d have done it myself if I could.’
My mind sped back to the day, long ago, when she had taken me up to the house in the
woods. Yes, I thought, I suppose you would have done it. You would have done as much as I did anyway.
I was thinking about this when Magdalena said, ‘Stefanie, where is Papa? Mechernich?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
I noticed that she didn’t use the name everyone else did – Steffi – but then why should she? She didn’t know.
‘We should go there,’ said my sister. ‘Can you come with me?’
I nodded. ‘There’s a bus in … oh, half an hour.’
‘No need,’ said Magdalena. ‘I’ve brought the car.’ She glanced at me. ‘Let’s go, right away.’
‘Don’t you want to finish your orange juice?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Thanks, but I’m not really thirsty. Anyway,’ she said, getting to her feet with the baby clasped carefully to her, ‘I don’t have that long.’
I stared at her. ‘Aren’t you staying?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s a long drive back.’
I said nothing to that, but I could imagine the pain it would cause my mother and father. Magdalena herself didn’t say another word as I led her to the front door and we went downstairs. I locked the bakery door behind us and followed her a short way up the street. There was a neat little Volkswagen parked in one of the spaces by the wall which skirted the river. Magdalena opened a rear door and began to settle Theo in his car seat. I looked at her bent back as she worked, pulling on the tiny straps and fastening the little buckle. She could have been anybody, a stranger.
She straightened up, gave me a quick glance, and then opened the passenger door for me. I looked around the familiar street, as though I were trying to impress it all upon my memory before I too set off on a long journey, then I got into the car. Magdalena was already inserting the key into the ignition. The vista of half-timbered houses and worn cobblestones seemed to hold no interest for her at all and as we drove away she didn’t so much as glance in the rear-view mirror.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
I had not recognized Magdalena, but my mother did at once. She gave a tiny cry at the sight of Theo and if her gaze slid to the naked ring finger, as mine had, she gave no sign of it.
‘How long are you staying?’ was almost the first thing she asked.
‘I can’t,’ said my sister.
‘You’re not going?’ My mother sounded aghast.
‘I have to drive back this afternoon,’ said Magdalena.
My father was asleep – or unconscious, I was not sure which – so the pair of them went out into the corridor to continue their discussion, my mother’s voice rising in a trill of sorrow and disappointment, Magdalena’s response too low for me to pick out the words.
I stood by my father’s bed. I would have liked to take his hand, but I hardly dared to. He looked so old and frail, and, besides, there were tubes and wires sprouting everywhere, as though his battered heart were the junction box for some mighty network. Instead I pulled up one of the dismal grey plastic hospital chairs and sat looking at the pale face on the pillow.
Get better, I willed him silently. Don’t die.
I thought of the times I had been up to the witch’s house, the curses I had laid on people, first as a game and then in deadly earnest. I thought that if my last wish were to come true, if my father pulled through, it would somehow all be worth it. I would have repaid a debt.
The past few weeks felt like a journey through a nightmare landscape peopled with ghouls who had familiar faces and overgrown with temptations which blossomed like evil flowers. I thought of my last wish and I saw myself bursting out into open country, into clean air, into brightness and light. I could put it all behind me, like the fever dream it was. My father would be well and we would all be at home again. If Magdalena would only agree to stay …
I got to my feet and went to the door. My mother and Magdalena had gone, but I could see them across the corridor, through the big plate glass window of the visitors’ waiting room. The thick glass deadened any sound, but I could see what was happening. My mother was holding Theo, and she was looking at his tiny face, and with one hand she was stroking his fluffy little head, but her lips were moving and she was clearly weeping.
Magdalena was crying too. I saw her put her arms around our mother, encircling her and the baby. Now I could see that she was speaking too, trying to offer words of comfort, of reconciliation. But the tears told their own story: Magdalena was going to go away again, whatever my mother said to try to make her stay. The rifts that Frau Kessel had caused in our family could not be so easily mended. My sister had a life elsewhere now, with Theo and his father, the boyfriend we had never met.
* * *
Magdalena spent more than an hour with my parents. She stayed for most of the day, and my father was awake and conscious for long enough to know that his prodigal daughter had returned. But she had said that she had to go, and go she did. She dropped me off at the Orchheimer Tor, the great gate at the southern end of Bad Münstereifel, and as I stood there on the cobblestones, she turned the little Volkswagen around and drove away, towards the roundabout at the end of Trier Strasse, the turning to Euskirchen and ultimately the motorway which would carry her the hundreds of kilometres to the place she now called home. I watched the car dwindling into the distance and finally disappearing around the curve of the roundabout. I wondered at Magdalena’s willingness to face the prospect of driving so far with a young baby in the car and briefly I thought of the empty hours stretching ahead of her, with the Volkswagen’s headlights picking out yellow tracks on the grey of the road. But Magdalena had already vanished from our lives again, just as if she had never visited at all.
I stayed where I was for another minute, staring at the distant roundabout, and then I turned and went back into the town, heading for the bakery. I passed Frau Kessel’s house and then the rival bakery, where she always purchased her Graubrot, but there was no danger of running into her now, or ever again. I felt the fever touch of guilt and tried to turn my thoughts away from the old lady and her demise. A moment later I had rounded the corner by the old brewery and our own bakery came into view. Home, I said to myself, but the word gave me little comfort.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
That night it was hard to sleep. I had spent the greater part of the day hanging around the hospital, confined in my father’s room, with no further distance to roam than the vending machine in Reception. If my body was restless, my mind was worse. It ran with sickly persistence on my father’s illness, on my sister’s arrival and departure and on Achim’s death. I reminded myself that he had figuratively and almost literally pushed me into a corner. He had forced me to hex him. If the curse had worked, and his death was not some perverse coincidence, he had only himself to blame. And yet whenever I tried to close my eyes to sleep I saw him, the great grey-white adipose bulk of him, propped up in the corner of the cold store, his skin almost the colour of the metal walls, a rime of ice crystals around his bluish lips, as though his last breath had frozen there, which I supposed it had.
The police thought it was suicide – perhaps accidental suicide – although they had carefully bagged and taken away the two bottles with their bright labels and their innocent-looking residue, as clear as water but as dangerous as poison – with that much alcohol in your blood the cold would kill you so much more rapidly than if you were sober, not to mention the fact that you would be too stupefied to think about what was happening.
Perhaps it was suicide, I told myself, but the idea was unconvincing. The police – certainly the Kriminalpolizei, who came down from Bonn – hadn’t known Achim as it was my misfortune to have done. All the aggression and rapacity which had been crammed into that vast bulk, as the stuffing is crammed into a sausage skin, had been directed outwards, at others. Achim would cheerfully have tormented me until I was suicidal, but I didn’t believe he would ever have taken his own life. And then there were the sounds I had heard on the night he died and the night before. I did not believe that it was Achim I had heard laughing.
The shutters and the curtains were open. If my mother had been here, she would have let down the shutters before she went to bed. It was late enough now that it was fully dark outside, and the moon was a mere sliver like a thumbnail clipping, so that the only light came from the street lamps. Bad Münstereifel is a dead town, a ghost town, at that time of night. I could see a good way up and down the street from my vantage point and nothing was moving at all, except the end of a thin white curtain at an open upstairs window in one of the houses opposite, which sucked gently in and out with the night breeze, as though the house itself were breathing deeply in its sleep.
I sipped my tea. I had forgotten to put sugar in it and it tasted bitter. I went back to the kitchen and heaped a great teaspoonful in, then I returned to the living-room window to resume my silent vigil.
I glanced up the street towards the old brewery and all was as before. Nothing moved; the street was still, with the yellow light of the street lamps picking out individual cobblestones like scales. I glanced the other way, in the direction of the Werther Tor, expecting the same unchanging tableau, and almost jumped. There was someone coming up the street.
There was no reason to think that it was anyone other than some honest citizen making their way home, even if the hour was unusually late. All the same, I had no desire to be spotted standing there in my nightclothes. I slipped behind the curtain, where I could see whoever it was approaching but could not be seen myself, or so I hoped.
He was walking quickly, whoever he was, and as he stalked along on his long legs the hem of his dark coat swirled around them. I saw one of the metal buttons on the coat wink in the light of a street lamp and even before he had come close enough for me to see the shock of red hair I knew it was Julius Rensinghof.
