The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

by Helen Grant

  “… you owe me that…!” boomed my father’s voice from the hallway.

  My grandmother, I wrote, and stopped again. I had been going to write My grandmother lives in Middlesex, but the raised voices from the hallway had reminded me of the major row that was surely heading my way when Oma Warner got her phone bill. My flesh prickled uncomfortably at the thought. The bill must have come in by now; I had stayed with her in the long summer vacation, and now it was nearly Christmas.

  The door opened. It was my mother. “Can I come in?” she said, as though it were my bedroom she were entering, and not the living room. She slid into the room and closed the door very carefully. Then she came over to the couch and sat down beside me.

  “Where’s Papa?” I asked.

  “Upstairs,” said my mother. “He’ll come down later. Then you can talk to him.”

  She looked at me, flashed me a tight smile, and then glanced out the window. An old woman was walking along the street; she kept turning and stooping, and I guessed she was dragging an unwilling dog along with her.

  I shuffled in my seat. “I’ve got English,” I said eventually, touching the open exercise book.

  “Hmmm,” said my mother, and then: “That’s sort of what I want to talk to you about, Pia.”

  “My English homework?”

  “No, not that.” She folded her arms across her chest. “Pia, your English is really good, even though I know we don’t speak English at home as often as we should.”

  “Charles and Chloe make fun of me when I speak English,” I said.

  “Well…” said my mother, “try not to take any notice of your cousins. Your English is good.”

  “They can’t speak German,” I pointed out, but my mother was not to be diverted down that route.

  “You could manage-in England, I mean,” she said. “You did really well with Oma Warner in the summer.”

  “Ye-es,” I said warily, wondering whether in some roundabout way this was leading up to a showdown about the telephone bill. But my mother didn’t seem angry with me; if anything she seemed nervous, as though she was afraid I would be angry with her.

  “If you… I mean, if you lived there, you’d soon be speaking it perfectly. At your age, you’d be able to lose the accent. Then people wouldn’t laugh, they probably wouldn’t even notice.”

  I picked up my exercise book and stared at the empty page with “A VISIT TO ENGLAND” emblazoned across the top. “Are we going to visit Oma Warner again?”

  “Well, no, not exactly.”

  “Mama?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t really like going to England. I really like Oma Warner, but…”

  My mother sighed. “Pia, we can’t always choose.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. An unpleasant realization was surfacing in my mind like some ghastly waterlogged thing that refused to sink however hard you pushed it under. When Aunt Liz and my mother had discussed our moving to England, the idea had not been hypothetical at all.

  “You’re half English,” said my mother, as though that explained everything. “We’ve lived in Germany for years, but there was always a chance… you need to get to know the English side of yourself.” Her tone was pleading.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said stubbornly.

  “We’d see lots more of Oma Warner. She is my mother, you know, and I’d like to spend more time with her. It would be nice for you, too, now that Oma Kristel isn’t…” She paused, and rubbed her palms together as though suddenly embarrassed. “You might even find you like your cousins.”

  I won’t ever like my cousins, I thought, but I did not say anything out loud. I just looked at my mother fidgeting and smiling nervously. I felt cold, as though she had been a complete stranger offering me stupid lies, lies designed to hurt.

  “You know what I’m saying, don’t you, Mäuselein?” I registered the endearment with a faint stab of irritation; it was years since she had called me her little mouse-why was she doing it now? “We’re… well, we’re probably going to live in England.”

  “Probably?”

  “Well, we are going, but there are a few things to sort out first, and-”

  “What about Papa’s job?”

  “Papa…” My mother paused, and once again she was rubbing her hands together, rubbing and rubbing as though she were trying to brush something off them. “Papa probably isn’t coming.” She realized she had said probably again, and amended it to: “Papa isn’t coming with us.”

  “But he can’t stay here without us,” I protested. “And, anyway, I don’t want to go to England.”

  “Pia.” My mother sighed. “I know you think you don’t want to go there. But we really can’t stay here.”

  “Why not?” I demanded.

  “Because… well, because I need Oma Warner and Aunt Liz nearby. Sebastian’s still very little and I’m going to need help, otherwise I don’t see how I can go back to work.” She sketched a quick smile on her features, and reached out to touch my shoulder. I drew back, still trying to assess whether my mother was in earnest or making some horrible joke. “Why don’t you go back to work here?”

  The smile vanished in a twitch. “Why?” She exhaled heavily through her nostrils. “Pia, this isn’t easy, you know. Do you have to keep picking me up on everything I say?” She glared at me, and then her face relaxed again into a defeated expression. “If we’re going to be on our own, I need to be near the family. My family.”

  “We’ve got lots of family here,” I pointed out. “Onkel Thomas and Tante Britta and-”

  “They’re Papa’s family.”

  “But…” My voice trailed off. I was not sure how to put into words the feeling I suddenly had that the family was splitting into two halves, like medieval armies arranging themselves at either end of a battlefield. My mother seemed to be telling me that I had to be on one particular side, the one flying the English flag, but she might as well have told me I was fighting for Outer Mongolia.

  “I could stay here with Papa,” I said with a sudden flash of inspiration.

  “Pia, you can’t-”

  “Oh, yes, I can.” I could feel my mouth thinning into a hard line.

  “You can’t.” My mother’s voice was harsh. The ugly truth was coming out: like a hare breaking cover it streaked across the landscape of my mind. My mother had done with Mäuselein and getting to know the English side of yourself. “You have to come to England, Pia. End of story. I’m sorry.” She didn’t sound sorry, she sounded furious. “That’s just the way it is.”

  I stared at the words on the crumpled page before me. “A VISIT TO ENGLAND.” A hot feeling was welling up inside me. It felt like dough in a pan, rising and rising until it burst out over the top. My face, my shoulders, my fingers were rigid, but I could not stop the scalding tears from leaking out of my eyes. A drop fell onto the page, blurring the letters ENG. I could not prevent it now; a sob like a roar was breaking out of me. My mother tried to put her arms around me, but I fought my way out of her embrace, arms flailing. The exercise book ripped and fell to the floor, leaving me with half a page in my fist.

  “Pia-”

  “I hate you!” I shouted at the top of my voice, the words scouring my throat. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”

  “Pia, calm down, Schätzchen, it’s going to be all right, it will be all right, you’ll see…”

  My mother’s voice was now gentle and reassuring, but even through my rage I was aware that she was just trying to soothe me. She was not saying, All right, we won’t go to England, we’ll stay here. She was just trying to get me to calm down sufficiently to accept the unpalatable truth, just the same as a person might try to calm an animal down before administering an unpleasant medical treatment.

  I broke away from her and actually ran to the door. She followed me to the threshold, still offering broken blandishments, but I was determined not to hear, and when I ran up the stairs she did not try to follow me. I went into my room, lock
ed the door and put my bedside chair up against it as an extra barricade, and then I threw myself on the bed and howled like a baby.

  Chapter Forty

  Much later my father came up and knocked. At first I didn’t answer, but when he spoke and I knew it was him, I got up and opened the door.

  “Can I come in?” he asked. I nodded. He came into the room, dragged the chair out from behind the door, and sat down heavily on it. I sat on the bed and looked at him, through eyes that felt like puffy slits from crying.

  “Ach, Pia.” My father sounded tired. “I’m so sorry.”

  I trembled. “Papa, we’re not really going to England, are we?”

  He sighed. “Doch. I wish I could tell you otherwise.”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “And I don’t want you to go, Schätzchen.”

  “Then can’t I stay here-with you?”

  “I don’t think so.” My father’s words were uncertain but they had the ring of doom in them.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not settled yet, but your mother wants you to go with her.”

  “She can’t make me.”

  “Well, maybe she can’t, but the courts can. She wants-Pia, do you know what custody is?”

  I shook my head.

  “It means that one of the parents is allowed to take the children with them… after a divorce.”

  “A divorce?”

  My father nodded; he did not need to explain that one.

  “Why…?” I began, but I couldn’t get any further than that. The question wouldn’t shape itself.

  “It’s grown-ups’ stuff,” said my father sadly. He opened his arms and I got to my feet and went to be hugged. The feel of the hardness of his shoulder through his shirt as I laid my head on it was somehow reassuring. I sniffed noisily into the thick fabric.

  “Papa, Charles and Chloe laugh at me.”

  My father said nothing, but his arms tightened around me.

  “And I don’t want to go to school in England.” I ground my forehead into his shoulder. “And I hate English food, even Oma Warner’s.”

  I felt my father’s shoulders heaving and for a moment I wondered what I had said that was so funny. Then I pulled back and looked at his face. And that was only the second time in my life that I had seen my father cry; the first was when Oma Kristel died.

  Chapter Forty-one

  After that, the house took on the appearance of a vast military camp in the process of packing up and moving on, my mother playing the grim general who strode about among the crates and boxes, overseeing everything. We were not actually to move until the new year; a family with school-age children cannot be transferred from one country to another in a day or two, and furthermore my mother had agreed to stay in Germany for Christmas.

  “That much she has agreed,” said my father dolefully.

  At school, the news that Pia Kolvenbach was moving to England and that her parents were divorcing had circulated with lightning speed. Suddenly I was no longer ostracized for being the Potentially Exploding Girl, but the new attention was worse. I could tell that the girls who sidled up to me and asked with faux-sympathetic smiles whether it was true were doing it on the basis of discussions they had heard between their own parents, to whom they would report back like scouts. Soon there would be nothing left of me at all, nothing real: I would be a walking piece of gossip, alternatively tragic and appalling and, worst of all, a poor thing.

  “Why’s your mother doing it?” Stefan asked me one morning. We were the last to leave the classroom after a hefty session of algebra. The winter sunlight streaking through the windows was white and cold. “Has she got someone else?”

  I looked at him stupidly for a moment, momentarily wondering what he meant; did he mean my mother had got other children?

  “Someone else?”

  “You know,” said Stefan offhandedly. “Another man.”

  “No,” I said emphatically, although I had never even considered the idea up until that moment. “Well, why’s she going?”

  “I don’t know. Can you shut up about it?”

  “Sorry.”

  I shoved my math books into my schoolbag. “She says she hates Germany and she hates Bad Münstereifel.”

  “Na, I hate it too sometimes.”

  “Well, she really hates it,” I said, straightening up. “But I hate England, and I can’t see why I have to go and live there, just because she…” I bit my lip, willing myself not to burst into humiliating tears.

  “It’s Scheisse,” agreed Stefan sympathetically. He hefted his bag onto his shoulder, and cocked his head toward the door. I trailed out after him, disconsolately. As we walked across the courtyard, he said, “Have you told Herr Schiller yet?”

  I shook my head. “He probably knows.” Resentfully, I added, “Everybody in the entire town seems to.” It was true. Even though the adults were not quite as shameless as my schoolmates in approaching me with questions, I could tell that they were thinking about it when they looked at me. The attention was almost unbearable. When Frau Nett in the bakery gave me a free ice cream, an unprecedented piece of kindness, I knew it was just because she was thinking Poor Pia Kolvenbach. I would rather have dispensed with both the ice cream and the sympathy.

  Walking up the Orchheimer Strasse, Stefan said, “We have to do something about… you know.” He threw a significant glance toward Herr Düster’s house.

  “Stefan.” I felt exhausted. “I’m going. Don’t you understand? I’m going to stupid verflixten England.”

  “That’s exactly why we have to do something.” Stefan sounded excited.

  Without even looking at him, I knew he would have that eager expression that I found exciting and infuriating by turns, his eyes alight with enthusiasm. “We have to do something now, otherwise you’ll never know what happened.”

  “I am never going to know,” I said bitterly.

  “We have to find out before you go,” said Stefan.

  “Oh, what does it matter?”

  I looked up at the leaden skies, rolling my eyes in frustration. Our futile investigation, which now seemed like a child’s game in comparison to the fresh woes descending upon me, was just one more item on the long list of things I was never going to finish in the town where I had always lived. I was never going to sing at the school concert in the spring, I was never going to start a new school year at the Gymnasium, I was never going to take part in another St. Martin’s procession.

  All the things that seemed so reassuringly solid around me were going to vanish like a dream, be rolled up like a map and stuffed into the storage space of my mind. When I was far away and in my unimaginable new life I could take the map out and unroll it and pore over the marks on it, the shapes, the figures, the landmarks, but they would all be theoretical, like something in a book about dead cultures. I would come back at some time in the future and visit the town, but my friends would be grown up, and I-I would be like Dornröschen, the sleeping beauty, who had slumbered for a hundred years while everyone outside the castle grew old and died, and the hedge of thorns grew higher and thicker until there was no way through it anymore. When at last I came back to the world I had known before there would be nothing to recognize.

  “Pia?”

  I realized I was crying and hurriedly began to search through my pockets for a tissue.

  “I’m all right,” I said crossly. I blew my nose and we resumed walking.

  For a while Stefan said nothing, then: “Pia, if you don’t want to come, I’m going on my own.”

  I did not reply.

  “We have to do something.”

  “Why is it always we?” I retorted. “Why don’t the police sort it out, or someone else?”

  “They aren’t getting anywhere with it,” Stefan pointed out.

  “And what makes you think we’re going to get anywhere with it?” I realized I had said we, as though I were still involved with the whole idea, and winced.

  “We have
to try.”

  “We don’t have to try,” I snapped. I rounded on him. “The whole idea is Scheisse. Supposing he did do it? Then it’s crazy to even think of going in his house. We might be next.”

  “Not if you come with me. The kids who’ve disappeared, they were all on their own.”

  “Look,” I said irritably, “it’s absolutely crazy to even think about it. He’s put a new lock on the cellar door, anyway. So what are we going to do-walk up to his door, knock on it, and ask if we can come in?”

  “Of course not.” Stefan sounded offended.

  “Well, what?”

  “We wait until after dark when everyone’s gone to sleep, and then we-”

  “No,” I said emphatically, shaking my head. “No way.” I glared at him. “You really are stupid. I can see why-”

  I was going to say I can see why they call you StinkStefan, but in spite of my anger something held me back, the muffled voice of conscience telling me that none of this fury I felt was really Stefan’s fault at all. My voice trailed off for a moment, and then I rallied. “Anyway, maybe your mother lets you wander all over town at night, but mine certainly doesn’t.”

  I saw a shadow cross Stefan’s face and realized that I had hit a nerve with my gibe about his mother’s lack of interest, but I was feeling too raw myself to apologize.

  Stefan looked at me for a long moment. When at last he spoke, his voice was low and urgent and not angry at all.

  “Why do you care what your mother thinks anymore?” he said.

  Chapter Forty-two

  The plan was simple: we would wait until it was late in the evening and the white Christmas lights that were strung across the Orchheimer Strasse had been switched off. At a prearranged time we would slip out of our houses and meet in the narrow alleyway that ran between two of the old buildings on the east side of the street. If either of us arrived much earlier than the other, the alleyway would provide cover from any prying eyes, and we could also hide our bicycles in it.

  “Bicycles? What do we need bicycles for?” I asked.