The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (21 page)

M
ama, are we going to stay in Germany forever?”

The question had been simmering in my mind ever since I returned from England. For three whole weeks I had resisted the temptation to ask my parents about it, but finally the desire to know the answer had overcome my anxiety about somehow getting into trouble with Aunt Liz. I was sitting at the table with a plate of spaghetti Bolognese cooling in front of me when the question just tumbled out. To my surprise my mother didn’t react at all. I gathered my courage and asked again, a little more loudly.

“Mama, are we going to stay in Germany forever?”

This time my father’s head came up, and he shot my mother a glance that was heavy with meaning. My mother didn’t see it, or chose not to; she was looking at Sebastian, and busying herself wiping his chin, which was liberally smeared with sauce. When she had cleaned him up so thoroughly that not one atom of the sauce was perceptible, she put down the napkin she had been using and picked up her glass of water. I was just about to ask the question a third time when she forestalled me.

“That’s an odd question, Pia.”

She sipped the water, then put the glass slowly down. Then she said, “Why do you ask?”

“Well … I just wondered,” I said in the end. “I mean, you were born in England, and then you came here.”

“Yes, I did, didn’t I,” said my mother. She sounded as though she were talking to herself, not to me. Then she looked at me and this time she gave me a broad smile. “You never know,” she said. “People do move. One day you might live in England.”

“You mean, when I’m grown up?” I asked.

“Yes,” cut in my father. He was looking at my mother again, with a significant expression on his face. She shrugged.

“Well,” she said. She picked up her fork and made a tentative stab at the spaghetti.

“We have been through this before,” said my father in an ominous tone.

“I didn’t say anything,” said my mother. She sketched a quick bright smile on her face. “Eat up, Sebastian.”

“You didn’t need to say anything,” pursued my father. “I can see it in your face.”

“Oh, so now I have to watch how I look?” The smile dropped from my mother’s features. “What are you, the bloody Thought Police?” she said in English.

“We are not moving,” said my father; he had been holding a glass of beer and now he put it down on the table a little too hard.

“So you say,” said my mother. She rotated the fork, gathering swirls of spaghetti. “But people do move.” She looked at him evenly. “The Petersons are moving. I saw Sandra in the supermarket. They’re going after Christmas. Tom’s got a new job in London.”

My father looked shocked. “But they are happy here.”

“Seems not,” said my mother.

“They said they would never go back to England.” My father sounded as though they had personally let him down. “And they have children in the school here.”

“Ah, that’s just it,” said my mother. “Children in the school here.” She took a mouthful of spaghetti and chewed it, her eyes still on him.

My father sat back in his chair, as though he had just received a shocking piece of news. Then suddenly he sat forward again.

“Of course, Tom is British.”

“So?”

“So it is quite natural for him to take a new job in England.”

“Sandra works too,” my mother pointed out. “And she’ll have to give up her job when they move.”

“Well …” said my father dismissively.

My mother pounced like a hawk. “Well what?”

“Well, she has the children.”

There was a clatter as my mother’s fork dropped to the edge of her plate. “I don’t believe I’m hearing this.” She put the palms of her hands on the tabletop in front of her, as though she were going to push away the table and all of us with it. “Look,” she said, “apart from the unbelievable chauvinism of what you just said, you’ve totally missed the point.”

“Which was?” My father was now sounding as angry as she did.

“That it isn’t an easy decision for them to leave.” My mother brushed a strand of dark hair out of her eyes with an impatient flick of her hand. “They both loved it here. But Tom was offered this job and, well, with everything that’s been going on, they thought maybe this was the time to leave.”

“Well, I think you have missed
my
point,” responded my father stiffly. “Tom is British. He trained in England and he works for a British company. He can move back to England at any time he likes. It’s different for us.”

“Why?” demanded my mother. “Your English is good enough, we could manage.”

“I would have to retrain.”

“So, retrain.”

This time my father’s hand hit the table so hard that we all jumped. “It’s not as easy as that, and you know it.” My father saw Sebastian’s face crumpling as though he was about to burst into tears, and with an effort he lowered his voice. “Be realistic, Kate. We have to live on something.”

“I could go back to work.”

“No.”

“Don’t be so—”

He cut over her. “And we couldn’t afford to buy a house in England. Not like this one.”

My mother shot a poisonous glance around the room as though to
say,
what’s so great about this one
, but she didn’t say anything. She picked up her fork again and turned it idly in the mess of spaghetti on her plate. There was a long silence. Then she got to her feet with a great scraping of the chair legs against the floor.

“Ah, fuck it,” said my mother, and stalked out of the room.

Sebastian and I looked at each other round-eyed.

“Children,” said my father portentously, “your mother is upset. But I never wish to hear that sort of language in the house again.”

“Yes, Papa,” I said.

W
inter came early that year. I always used to think of St. Martin’s Day, November 11, as a high point in the approach to Christmas. That year, the year when Katharina Linden and Marion Voss vanished from the streets of the town, it was a cold St. Martin’s.

My mother dressed us in layers and layers of warm clothing: sweaters, down jackets, thermal boots, scarves, and mittens. I had a pink fluffy hat with a bobble on the top and Sebastian had a little navy-blue fleece hat with earflaps. We looked like a pair of fat gnomes. All the same, it was necessary; during the short walk to the Klosterplatz we could feel the biting cold on any centimeter of exposed skin. Even through the thick insulation of my mittens, the cold was seeping into the hand that held the lantern.

As a grown-up
Gymnasium
pupil, I would normally have dispensed with a lantern as being seriously uncool, but at the last minute my mother had bought me one and I hadn’t the heart to refuse it. It was a round yellow sun face made of crimped paper. Sebastian had a much grander lantern, constructed by my mother along with the other parents at his playgroup. It was a green caterpillar with pink and purple spots, made of tissue paper on a skeleton of black cardboard. The caterpillar
had an insane leer on its face because my mother had cut the pink mouth out as a wiggly line. She said it was “a blow against uniformity;” my mother never could stand the German fad for sitting in a group and all making exactly the same item. In fact she hated arts and crafts. Sebastian should probably have been grateful that my mother had made a lantern for him at all, considering the agonies she had to go through to do it.

When we got to the Klosterplatz it was already full of people milling around, stamping their feet and blowing on their hands. The fire brigade was there as usual, the firemen hanging around the gleaming fire engine parked at one side, and doing their best to look nonchalant. An enormous bonfire had been built in the middle of the square. It would be lit by the firemen when the procession was under way around the town, so that it would be burning merrily when we all got back.

As well as the firemen, there was an unusually high number of policemen. Normally Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf and perhaps one of the other local policemen would be in attendance, just in case anything went awry, like the time Thilo Koch’s brother Jörg set off a fire alarm and the firemen had to abandon their posts by the bonfire and dash off to the rescue. This year, however, the police seemed to have dragged every spare officer from here to Euskirchen into the town for the evening, including the granite-faced one from outside. They were being discreet, but they were everywhere.

I noticed Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf talking quietly to one of the schoolteachers who was supervising the
Grundschule
children. All the teachers and the police officers had a grim look to their faces, as though about to undertake a military maneuver; only the children were as unconcerned as usual, waving their glowing lanterns about and jumping up and down with excitement. I saw Frau Eichen, who was now in charge of a new class of first-graders, counting her charges, her finger stabbing through the air as she did so. She counted them once, and two minutes later she was counting them again.

Now the penny dropped. The adults were all so twitchy because they were afraid something might happen again, like it had at Karneval. Nobody wanted to be the one who was in charge of a child who vanished.

“Is anyone from your class here?” my mother asked suddenly. I guessed she was wondering whether things were going any better in the new school than they had in the previous one. Dutifully, I scanned the square for familiar faces.

“No,” I said. It was a relief in a way; Stefan was the only one who would have spoken to me, and I knew he wasn’t coming.

“There’s someone waving,” said my mother, pointing. She sounded pleased. I followed her gaze. It was Lena Schmitz from the fourth grade, the year that had been below mine in the
Grundschule
. The Schmitzes lived only a few doors away from us and Lena’s mother worked in the hairdresser’s where my mother periodically had her gray roots covered, so we knew each other slightly. I waved back enthusiastically, conscious of my parents’ eyes on me.

It was almost time for the procession to begin. The local brass band, resplendent in hunter-green uniforms and peaked caps, was assembling at the corner, hoisting trombones and trumpets and horns, which glittered in the light of the lanterns and torches. Someone tried out the opening notes of one of the songs, a song so familiar that the words formed themselves inside my head as I listened:
Sankt Martin, Sankt Martin, Sankt Martin ritt durch Schnee und Wind …
It finished with a squeak that sent a ripple of laughter through the crowd.

Someone from the town council had climbed the steps at the side of the square and was talking inaudibly into a bullhorn. Then we heard a clatter of hooves on the cobblestones and St. Martin rode into the square.

Of course, all the spectators except the very youngest knew that St. Martin was really someone from the town, dressed up in a red velvet cloak and Roman helmet; in fact my parents even knew the family who lent the horse. But there was always something magical about St. Martin; he was real in a way that St. Nikolaus and the Easter Bunny weren’t. For one thing, he was undeniably solid, and so was the horse: if you followed too closely behind it you had to look where you stepped.

As we watched, St. Martin wheeled the horse around and began to ride slowly out of the south side of the square, the crimson cloak undulating on the horse’s hindquarters as it moved, the torchlight making the great golden helmet glitter. The band fell in behind him, and struck up with the first bars of “Ich gehe mit meiner Laterne,” the signal
for the schoolchildren to follow. As the rest of us surged forward, I could see Frau Eichen counting the children again.

“Can I go on ahead?” I asked my mother hopefully, seeing that she was making woefully slow progress with Sebastian in his buggy. I was afraid we would be stuck right at the back, where we could hardly hear the band, and we would be last back into the square to see the bonfire.

She shook her head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Pia.” I didn’t bother to ask why.

“I’ll go with her,” said my father, turning up his collar. He looked at me sternly. “And stay where I can see you, Pia. No running off.”

“Yes, Papa.”

I fell into step beside him; with his long legs we made good progress, and were soon pushing our way further up the procession. First it wound up the Heisterbacher Strasse and past our front door, then it followed the line of the medieval defensive walls west toward the great gate, the Orchheimer Tor. I looked about me at the excited faces, the flickering torches and glowing lanterns, and the ancient stones of the walls, interspersed with arrow slits. We could have been back in the Middle Ages, on our way to a coronation—or a witch-burning.

Trotting along beside my father, I found that we were overtaking the fourth-grade children, who were swarming along with their three teachers running around them distractedly like sheepdogs. I picked out Lena Schmitz from the sea of faces. At the same moment she saw me. “Hallo” was all she said, but it was enough. It was such a relief to be treated even with that courtesy after nearly a year of being the class pariah. I slowed my pace a little to keep level with her.