The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (11 page)

O
f course, it was Stefan who broached the idea of going up to the Quecken hill at night; knowing my mother’s probable response, I would as soon have thought of asking to ride the train into Köln to go nightclubbing.

I thought it might be possible to visit the castle ruins in the daytime; we might even tell my mother it was for a school project. But Stefan was adamant that there would be no point in going up there if we couldn’t go at night.

“You know,” he said suddenly, “we should go up there on Walpurgis eve.”

“Stefan …” I began reluctantly; the entire concept was so unrealistic as to be not worth considering. But he was already caught up on a wave of his own enthusiasm.

“No, really. We must.” His eyes were shining; a lock of his dirty blond hair fell over his face and he brushed it back impatiently. “It’s the witches’ night, right? If there’s anything to see, it has to happen then.”

This made sense to me, but still did not get over the fact that it would take some genuine magic to get me out of the house and up the Quecken hill at night.

“My mother is
never
going to let me go up there after dark,” I pointed out.

“Can’t you make up some excuse?”

“Like what?” I could not think of any possible circumstances under which it would be allowed.

“We’ll—we’ll say we’re going to put up a
Maibaum.”

“A
Maibaum?”
I had to admit this was a stroke of genius.

A
Maibaum
—or May tree—was a tree, usually a young silver birch, chopped off at the base, the branches decorated with long streamers of colored crêpe paper. Every village in the Eifel had one on May Day, but it was also a tradition that young men would put a
Maibaum
up outside the house of their girlfriend on the night before May Day, so that she would see it when she got up in the morning. This meant that the last night of April had to be the only night of the year when half the youth of the town could be creeping about in the small hours with legitimate cause. All the same …

“Who would we be putting a
Maibaum
up for?” I asked. “And, anyway, girls don’t usually put them up at all.”

“Easy,” said Stefan, who was obviously developing the plan at breakneck pace. “We’ll say we’re helping my cousin Boris.”

“Hmmm.” I still had my doubts.

Boris was a hulking monster of an eighteen-year-old, with long hair that looked as though it had been styled with motor oil, and mean little eyes so deep-set that they seemed to be peering at you through slits in a helmet. As far as I knew he had no girlfriend and, even if he had, he did not give the impression that he would be the sort who offers flowers and opens doors and puts up May trees. Certainly, I couldn’t imagine him asking two ten-year-olds to accompany him on a romantic mission of that kind. Still, in the absence of any more inspired idea, I agreed to suggest the plan to my mother.

“Schön,”
said Stefan airily, as though it were already fixed. He got to his feet. “Come on, let’s go and ask her now.”

“Absolutely not,” said my mother, predictably. Both Stefan and I stood before her in the kitchen, like two kindergarten kids getting a ticking-off from the teacher. My mother had been in the process of frying some meat for a casserole, and the neglected pan sizzled alarmingly behind her as she faced us.

“But, Frau Kolvenbach,” said Stefan in the polite voice he used with such good effect upon susceptible adults, “we’d be going with my cousin Boris.”

His efforts were wasted, however; my mother was flint-hearted. “I don’t care, Stefan. Pia isn’t going out God-knows-where after dark.”

“Boris is—” began Stefan, but my mother cut him off.

“Boris is going to have to put up his May tree by himself,” she retorted. She eyed Stefan skeptically. “Is Boris that tall boy from the
Hauptschule
, the one with the long hair and the biker jacket?”

“Yes, but—” began Stefan again, but in vain.

“Then he looks quite big and hefty enough to carry his own
Maibaum,”
said my mother with finality. I opened my mouth to say something, but she raised her hand warningly. “No, Pia. The answer is no. Now, I don’t want to discuss it anymore,” she added, turning back to the stove. She prodded the meat with a frying fork, shaking her head. “I’m surprised your mother is letting
you
go out after dark, even with your cousin, Stefan.”

“Um,” said Stefan noncommittally. He looked at me; it was time to make our escape.

Up in my room, we regarded each other gloomily.

“I told you,” I snapped.

He shrugged. “It was worth trying.” For a while we just pondered.

“What now?” I said in the end, in a somewhat listless voice.

Stefan looked up. “I’m going on my own, of course.”

“Really?”

“Well, your mother’s never going to change her mind, is she? I can tell you all about it afterward,” said Stefan. And I had to make do with that.

As it happened, the last day of April 1999 was a Friday, which lent an advantage to Stefan’s plan; should his mother choose that day to shift a little within the haze of smoke and alcohol in which she was always enveloped, and inquire into her son’s proposed excursion, at least she couldn’t complain that he had school the next day. I made Stefan promise to come over as early as possible on May morning to tell me what he had seen. The plan finalized, we clattered downstairs.

“Can Stefan come over tomorrow morning?” I asked my mother.

“If he comes at a civilized hour,” she replied.

“Seven o’clock?” I said hopefully.

“Ten o’clock,” said my mother firmly, and disappeared back into the kitchen.

Stefan did not come over at ten o’clock that morning, nor did he come at half past ten, eleven o’clock, or noon. I sat by the window in the living room, nursing a comic book and peering out into the damp street, hoping to see him come running up through the rain.

The day wore on, and eventually I was persuaded to go finish my homework; my mother promised to call me the instant Stefan arrived. By the time I had finished the last page and was slipping the folder back into my overstuffed
Ranzen
, it was half past three, and still no Stefan. I went downstairs and found my mother energetically mopping the kitchen floor; Sebastian was perched out of harm’s way in his high chair, looking a little like a tennis umpire as he watched the mop head whisking back and forth across the tiles.

“Did Stefan come?” I asked in a slightly accusatory tone. Maybe he had turned up and been sent away again because I was doing my homework.

“No,” said my mother, pausing in her metronomic motion. She rubbed the back of her hand across her chin and glanced at me. “Perhaps he can’t come today, Pia.”

“He
promised
he would,” I said stubbornly.

“You’ll see him on Monday at school. What’s so important about today anyway?”

“Nothing,” I said, biting my lip.

“Well—” She was starting to sound exasperated. “Can’t you call him?”

“Mmmm.” The thought of getting Frau Breuer’s irritable, smoke-roughened voice at the other end of the phone was daunting.

“Out from under my feet, anyway,” said my mother, and the discussion was closed.

I wandered through to the living room and looked at the telephone extension as though it might bite me. It was now three thirty. Time seemed to have slowed down. Monday morning was an eternity away. Where on earth was Stefan? Had he completely
disappeared?

As the thought occurred to me, it sent a shiver through me like a tiny electric shock. Perhaps he
had
disappeared—just like Katharina Linden.
No. Don’t be so stupid
. But the idea grew on me, the more I tried to convince myself that it was utter rubbish. Supposing he had gone up to the Quecken hill, and whatever it was that had got Katharina had got him, too, while he sat up there in the dark, waiting and watching?

I imagined him sitting there on one of the broken and mossy chunks of masonry, hugging his knees, shivering a little and peering into the dark. Had something crept up on him? Had it taken him with it, carried him off on its endless sweep through the darkened woods? An image of the spectral hunt formed in my mind’s eye, only instead of a knight it was Stefan who clung to the horse’s mane, his face like a pale moon and his eyes pits of darkness.

At last, even I could see that there was nothing for it; I’d have to telephone the Breuers. I hoped that Stefan would answer, so that I could bawl him out for not showing up, and then pump him for information. If not Stefan, then Frau Breuer was the lesser of two evils; she was bad-tempered but at least she was comprehensible: you could tell exactly how rude she was being to you.

Stefan’s father, Jano, on the other hand, had such a strong Slovakian accent that I could hardly understand his German. To converse with him was to pick your way through a thicket of stunted phrases and mangled vowels in the sure knowledge that if you said,
“Wie, bitte?”
once too often he would lose his temper. So as I dialed Stefan’s number I was praying that it would not be Jano who answered.

The phone rang eight times, and then suddenly it was picked up.

“Breuer,”
barked a voice in my ear.

“Frau Breuer?” I quavered. “It’s Pia Kolvenbach.”

There was a short pause at the other end, during which I could hear Frau Breuer breathing heavily into the receiver, a sound reminiscent of a Rottweiler panting.

“You can’t speak to Stefan,” she eventually informed me.

“But—” I frantically tried to summon up the right words, afraid that she would hang up on me. “But—is he
there?”

She snorted in disgust.
“Doch
, he’s here. But you can’t speak to him.”

T
he following morning dawned gray and uninviting. I looked out at the damp street, the cobblestones gleaming wetly, and my heart sank. Sunday seemed to stretch out before me like some uncrossable wasteland; Monday was a million years away, and I was going to spend every one of them shut indoors with no one but Sebastian to play with.

I looked into the living room, but my father was in there, reading a newspaper. He said nothing, but the slight raising of his eyebrows signaled that I was surplus to requirements, so I shut the door. Then I hung about on the staircase for a while, swinging on the newel post and scuffing my feet on the stairs. My mother, hearing these irritating noises, stuck her head around the kitchen door to remonstrate with me, but before she had time to fire off a remark, there was a loud knock at the front door.

Stefan!
was my first thought as I sprang down from the stairs and headed for the door; the second was the surprising realization that I was actually
looking forward
to seeing him—to seeing
StinkStefan
.

“Pia, your hair—” began my mother in an irritated voice; she also made for the door, but I was too quick for her. I pulled down the heavy handle and swung it open.

The smile died on my face. It was not Stefan.

“Oh,” was all I could find to say as I stood there in my scruffy jeans with my unbrushed hair hanging around my face in tangled hanks.

“Guten Morgen
, Frau Kessel,” said my mother, with more presence of mind; she elbowed her way past me, wiping her hands on a tea towel, and held out her hand, which Frau Kessel shook, somewhat gingerly.

“
Guten Morgen
, Frau Kolvenbach,” replied Frau Kessel with aplomb. She was a small woman in her seventies, comfortably compact, with a bosom almost as intimidating as Oma Kristel’s had been. She always dressed very neatly, but in a slightly old-fashioned style; today she was wearing a moss-green wool suit with a large and ugly Edelweiss brooch pinned to the front of it. She had a mass of pure white hair that had become as thin and gauzy as cotton candy; she habitually wore it piled on top of her head. Today it had been back-combed and stacked up so high that she had rather a Marie-Antoinette effect.

Underneath this improbable confection beamed her chubby face, with its twin flash of well-polished spectacles and expensive false teeth. She looked like an adorable old
Oma;
in fact she was the most vicious gossip in the whole of Bad Münstereifel.

“Won’t you come in, Frau Kessel?” said my mother, not betraying the effort it must have cost her to utter those fateful words. My mother could have cleaned and scrubbed for a week, and presented two charming children with neatly brushed hair and matching outfits (me in a dress, of course), and still Frau Kessel’s beady old eyes would have found something to complain about to the next person she visited.

“Thank you,” said Frau Kessel, stepping carefully into the house, looking around her with avid-eyed interest.

“Please, do come into the living room,” said my mother in a bright voice, and opened the door. My father got to his feet, folding the newspaper he had been reading, and extended his hand.

“I didn’t see you in church this morning, Wolfgang,” was the first thing Frau Kessel said to him once the greetings were out of the way. She spoke in an arch tone.