The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (2 page)

Oma Kristel looked good that day, as my father, Wolfgang, and his brother Thomas lugubriously agreed at the funeral. Always careful with her diet, she had retained an elegant figure right into her old age, with slim legs encased in sheer stockings and fashionable little black leather shoes with high insteps and pointy toes. She wore a skirt of some velvety black material, unsuitably tight and undeniably chic, and a shocking
pink mohair sweater cinched at the waist with a thin black belt. To her bosom, which still had a jutting appearance reminiscent of a wartime pinup, she had attached a large diamanté brooch like a medal pinned to a uniform. I like to think that, as she took her final look at herself in the big bathroom mirror, she was satisfied with what she saw.

At any rate, she spent some time touching up her makeup, so that my mother was actually putting the plates on the table before Oma Kristel got to the hairspraying bit.

“Oma Kristel!” my mother called in a tentative voice, not liking to adopt too strident a tone toward her strong-minded mother-in-law.

“Mama!” bellowed Onkel Thomas, who was less sensitive on such topics, and who was no doubt looking forward to gorging himself on the goose and
Leberwurst
.

Oma Kristel patted her hair into place, and then sprayed it with the dedication of a car mechanic giving a BMW a paint job. She managed to frost her bosom and shoulders with the stuff too, until the pink mohair was glistening with tiny droplets and there was a fog of hairspray hanging over her. Then she put the can back into her bag and marched straight to the table.

The main lights were out and my father was standing ready with the box of matches poised to light the Advent crown. Oma Kristel just shot him a look that said “Who’s in charge here?” and stretched out her hand for the matches. She slid open the box, extracted a match, and struck it with a flourish.

The flame flared up in the gloom of the unlit room, a tiny golden beacon. For a moment Oma Kristel held it aloft, then the unthinkable happened. The match slipped out of her fingers and fell straight onto her pink mohair bosom. With a
whooomph!
like the sound of a gas furnace firing up, the hairspray with which Oma Kristel had doused herself ignited, obliterating her in a column of flames.

For one ghastly and endless second there was silence, and then all hell broke loose. Tante Britta let out a full-blooded horror-film scream, pressing her hands to her face. There was a crash as my father floundered around in a tangle of chairs, trying to lay hands on something that would douse the flames. Onkel Thomas, struggling to take off his jacket to wrap around the blazing figure, was swearing mindlessly, his eyes round with horror. Both Michel and Simon were howling with
terror. I think I was in the same state myself; for days afterward my throat was hoarse with screeching. My mother, who had just come through from the kitchen with the roast goose in her oven-gloved hands, dropped the whole thing on the quarry-tiled floor, where it exploded on impact.

Only Sebastian in his high chair remained unmoved by the whole thing, apparently under the impression that this was part of the normal Advent entertainment. The rest of us panicked. And then at last with a horrid finality Oma Kristel pitched forward onto the dinner table in an explosion of shattered wineglasses and broken crockery.

My father and Onkel Thomas finally sprang into action; my father upended a jug of mineral water over Oma Kristel’s smoking remains, and Onkel Thomas spread over the whole mess the jacket he had finally managed to remove. It was too late for Oma Kristel, however; she was
mouse-dead
, as the Germans say. The shock had stopped her heart with the finesse of a sledgehammer smashing a carriage clock. Her still elegantly shod legs akimbo, she looked like a shopwindow mannequin, and not like Oma Kristel at all. In the silence that followed, Sebastian at last began to cry.

I
think that’s what attracted me to the story of Unshockable Hans, the intrepid miller who was supposed to have lived in the Eschweiler Tal, the valley to the north of the town. If you believed all the local legends, that valley had to be the most haunted place on earth—it was simply chock-full of ghosts—and Hans was the only one who dared live there. That—and his singular name—made Hans a far more real character to me than any of the local historical figures such as Abbot Markward, about whom we completed endless dreary projects at school.

The idea of a person who could face down witches and ghosts without turning a hair was inordinately attractive to someone who was dragging a lurid family history around with them like a ball and chain. Now that I am nearly old enough to be considered an adult myself, perhaps I could face the gossip and the teasing more easily; at ten, being the girl whose grandmother exploded felt like the worst thing in the world, and the loneliest.

Unshockable Hans wouldn’t turn a hair if every single member of my extended family had exploded, of that I was sure. I imagined him as a big, deep-chested man, dressed in the traditional woodsman’s jacket, leaf green with horn buttons. He would have a broad, pleasant face, a bushy beard with streaks of gray in it, and twinkling blue eyes. He
would have heard the story of my grandmother’s demise, of course, like everyone else within a ten-kilometer radius. Still, he would greet me in a friendly but grave manner, not referring to the incendiary finale of my aged relative.

If anyone mentioned it, any of those old harridans who haunted the streets of the town like vampires looking for unprotected throats, he would simply look at me with those twinkling eyes, ruffle my hair, and say,
“Ach, Kind,”
as though it were merely some childish piece of tomfoolery that was under discussion. As though it were not the hottest topic in the town for the last fifty years, and the social equivalent of a leper’s bell for me.

I didn’t go back to school on the Monday and Tuesday after Oma Kristel’s accident. The school didn’t bother to telephone when I failed to appear; Frau Müller, who worked in the school office, occupied the house opposite ours, and had been out in the street with her antennae twitching the moment the ambulance siren was heard.

As is usual in these situations, a classmate was delegated to bring the homework to me. Perhaps I should have smelled a rat when it was Thilo Koch who brought it on Monday, and Daniella Brandt on Tuesday. Neither of them were friends of mine.

Thilo was one of the oldest children in our class, having started school at seven; he was tall for his age, already carrying a large belly, and with savagely short hair and eyes sunk into the flesh of his chubby face like buttons on an overstuffed sofa cushion. Generally I kept away from Thilo, as you do from a bad-tempered animal.

Daniella Brandt was not as openly imposing as Thilo, but she could be just as dangerous in her way. She had a sharp-boned pale face and a thin, pointed nose like a beak, as though she wanted literally to peck at other people’s weak spots. Neither Thilo nor Daniella had ever shown the slightest inclination to do anything to help anyone else, nor were they the obvious choices for such an errand; Marla Frisch, who lived three houses down from us, would normally have dropped off my homework, as she did when I had chicken pox in the first grade.

Thilo didn’t actually get into the house, as it was my father who opened the door. Thilo was that stereotypical creature, the bully with a
broad streak of yellow; he took one look at my father, who was red-eyed but still imposing, and decided not to argue the toss, although he did thrust his close-cropped head as far around the doorframe as he dared, hoping perhaps for a glimpse of sooty ceiling or blackened tablecloth. My father took the homework papers out of Thilo’s chubby hands, pushed him gently out, and closed the door.

The following day Daniella Brandt turned up and actually managed to get in. My mother, who answered the door, assumed she was a school friend. I was sitting in the living room, curled up in my father’s favorite armchair with a book I was unable to read owing to the memories that kept running through my head like a short video clip on an endless loop.

The door opened and my mother appeared. Daniella was behind her, her pointed face a white triangle in the gloom.

“Look who’s here,” my mother said in a vague-sounding voice. Her gaze seemed to trickle over me, then slide away. She was still numb. My father had been able to cry, but my mother had still not taken in Oma Kristel’s death; for days afterward she wandered around like someone in a dream, carrying the same Christmas ornaments between rooms as though preoccupied. She brushed her hands against her apron and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.

Daniella slipped into the room with the speed of a weasel. Where my mother’s gaze lingered distractedly, Daniella’s seemed to stab the air. Her eyes were everywhere; I could have sworn her long thin nose was twitching too.

“I’ve brought your homework, Pia,” she told me, but her eyes did not meet mine; she was glancing at every corner of the room with barely concealed curiosity.

“Thanks,” I said tersely. I did not put the book down; pointedly I waited for her to go.

There was a long pause.

“I’m sorry about … you know,” she said eventually.

“About what?” I said sharply. I turned one of the pages so brusquely that it tore.

Daniella gave a little laugh, like the short bark of a vixen. “About your grandmother,” she said in her best
what, are-you-stupid?
voice. She drew a line along the floorboards with the toe of her shoe, then shook
back her mousy hair from her face. “Everyone’s talking about it,” she informed me. “We just couldn’t believe it, you know?” She lowered her voice conspiratorially, with a glance toward the door in case my mother was within earshot. “Was it here that it happened, in this room?”

I did not look up. “Go away or I’ll scream,” I said.

“Don’t be silly,” said Daniella in an offended tone. She breathed a heavy sigh, as though talking to the terminally stupid. In my place she would have been lapping up the attention, that was for sure; it would have been worth losing both grandmothers and perhaps an aunt or two as well, just to be center stage for once. “Come on, Pia …”

“Go away or I’ll scream,” I repeated.

She gave that little affected laugh again. “There’s no need to be—” She didn’t get any further because I suddenly put my head back and
did
scream, repeatedly, at the top of my lungs. Before Daniella had time to react, the door crashed back on its hinges as my mother charged into the room like a rhinoceros defending its young. Incongruously, she still had a blue-and-white-checked oven mitt on one hand.

“My God, Pia! What’s happened?!”

I shut my mouth abruptly and regarded Daniella balefully. My chest was heaving with exertion. My mother looked from me to Daniella and back to me again. Then, very gently, she took Daniella by the shoulder and started to steer her out of the room.

“I think you’ll have to go, dear. Pia’s rather upset,” she told the stunned girl as she opened the front door with the gloved hand. “Thank you for bringing the homework,” she added. “It was very kind of you.”

A moment later she drifted back into the living room; her sudden burst of energy appeared to have dissipated, and she looked distracted again. She came over and knelt down in front of me, as though I were a toddler.

“Did your friend say something that upset you?” She might as well have said
your little friend
.

“She’s not my friend,” I announced.

“Well, it was nice of her to bring your homework,” said my mother.

“It wasn’t nice at all,” I told her, feeling as though another scream might well up at any moment. “She wanted to know if this was the room where Oma Kristel … you know.”

“Oh,” said my mother. There was a very long pause while she
considered. At last she patted me on the shoulder. “Never mind, Pia. It’ll be a nine days’ wonder. They’ll soon get sick of talking about it.”

My mother was right about a lot of things, but on one topic she was spectacularly wrong, and that was the fascination with Oma Kristel’s death. Even now, so much later, and after all that happened that terrible year, I am quite convinced that if you mentioned the name of Kristel Kolvenbach to anyone in Bad Münstereifel, they would instantly say, “Wasn’t she the woman who exploded at her own Advent dinner?” A nine days’ wonder it most certainly was not.