by Helen Grant
‘OK,’ he said.
Once the decision was made, he didn’t waste any time. He made for the crumbling hole which represented the door and the rest of us followed him. We left the box lying in the middle of the floor. Max had forgotten it already and no one else cared to pick it up. I was the last out and I watched Timo help Izabela over a pile of stones, leaving me to struggle over them as best I could.
I saw Izabela’s eyes turn to me and I made a play of swinging my torch around, as though making one last sweep of the deserted house. It looked as forlorn and dilapidated as ever. Perhaps a bright fire had once burned in that hearth, warming the house and gilding everything with a soft light, but it was utterly impossible to imagine it now. I thought the house was a dank smelly hole and I promised myself that I would never visit it again.
That was only one of the promises I made to myself that I later broke.
CHAPTER FIVE
The next day was Saturday, generally the bakery’s busiest day, when tourists mingled with the regular customers. Normally my parents let me sleep in on Saturdays. My father could never understand why I would prefer to lie in bed when I could be up and about in the bakery, inhaling the heady perfumes of yeast and rye flour, but my mother said I was a growing girl and needed the sleep, although I was now a couple of centimetres taller than she was. When she said this, I had the uncanniest feeling that she was still thinking of me as the child I had once been, that she had not really looked at me for years. Not, perhaps, since my sister, Magdalena, had left.
On that particular Saturday, however, I had to be in the bakery by eight thirty in the morning. One of the regular Saturday staff had telephoned to say that she was sick and couldn’t come in, and I was to stand in. As I dressed in the green dirndl and frilly white blouse that served as a waitress’s uniform, I sent up a silent prayer that Kai von Jülich would not come into the bakery that morning. It was unlikely, since he and his friends probably had something considerably more exciting to do than sit alongside the town’s senior citizens and eat apple strudel to the strains of ‘Edelweiss’ (instrumental version). All the same, it would be doubly humiliating to be seen working while he was undoubtedly playing, and I was looking distinctly waxen from the effects of the Kleiner Feigling.
Our flat occupied the floor above the bakery. At eight thirty-five I let myself out of the flat’s front door, went downstairs and found myself in the narrow passage leading to the seating area. It was a very plain corridor, windowless and unadorned by pictures. It reminded me of the stark backstage area in a theatre. Step through the door and you would find yourself in a place quite as flamboyant as a stage set, with enough potted plants for an entire production of The Jungle Book and canned folk music drifting through the air like some kind of poison gas, sickly sweet and stupefying. Generally I hated the moment when I stepped into the cafe and into the clutches of the dozen or so old harridans who would inevitably be sitting there, lips pursed and chins up, because their morning coffee and slices of cream gateau hadn’t reached the table within two nanoseconds of their placing an order. Today, however, I would have been pleased if I had been able to go straight into the cafe, even if it had meant coming face to face with an entire coachload of superannuated Klara Klein fans, all screaming for a cooked breakfast at the tops of their creaky old voices. It was not to be, however; someone was blocking the way. With a sinking feeling, I recognized the beefy figure of Achim Zimmer.
Achim, my father’s assistant, was dressed in his baker’s whites and was lounging against the wall in an attitude of contrived carelessness. He had a cigarette in one large pink hand and a plastic lighter in the other.
I hated Achim’s hands. He had the delicate fair skin of the natural redhead, easily sunburnt or chapped by the wind. On some people this might have had a porcelain beauty, but Achim was too solid for that. There was nothing ethereal about him; he was Hercules executed in Meissen porcelain. In summer he reminded me of a boiled lobster, with his reddened skin and pale eyes. But it wasn’t the repulsiveness of their appearance that made me dislike Achim’s hands. It was the fact that they wandered wherever they liked.
Achim had clearly left the kitchen on the pretext of taking a break to smoke, but there was no sign he intended to go outside. I wondered whether he had known that I would be working this morning and that I would be coming down at this time. Whether he had waited for me on purpose. He looked up as the flat door closed behind me and gave me a jovial nod. I saw him slide the lighter into his pocket; the cigarette also vanished somewhere inside the baker’s jacket. The two big, waxy-looking hands moved and I saw that he was actually rubbing them together, which only enhanced the impression of an evil troll gloating over his next victim.
I wondered whether I could concoct some excuse to go back into the flat, but a glance at my watch showed that I was already late. I hesitated as usual, and as usual I was lost.
‘Guten Morgen, Steffi,’ Achim said in an over-familiar tone. He had an insinuating expectant air about him, managing to convey without words the conviction that it was I who had planned this meeting and not he.
‘Morgen,’ I muttered.
I looked longingly past him at the door to the cafe. There was only one way to get there and Achim was standing right in the middle of it.
‘Won’t you say, “Morgen, Achim”?’ he asked me, with a nauseating attempt at a beseeching expression.
I said nothing. If Hanna had been in my place, I knew she would have said something which would have taken that leer off his face. But I stood there, dumb and paralysed as always, every word which came to mind as useless as a coin on the tongue of the dead.
‘I didn’t hear anything,’ said Achim.
I bit my lip. Was he ever going to drop it? I eyed the space between Achim and the wall, estimating my chances of slipping past him without further annoyance. Achim was about thirty, but he had the belly of a man ten years older, pregnant with beer and Wurst. It slowed him down, but it also made him a formidable obstacle.
I made myself speak up. ‘I have to go to work.’
‘I’m not stopping you,’ said Achim, but he didn’t move a centimetre.
The passage was so narrow that to be a real gentleman and let me pass entirely freely he would have had to flatten himself against the wall like a gunman in an action movie. Of course there was no question of that. Between that straining belly and the wall there was so little clearance that I fully expected I would be squeezed through the gap like a lump of dough going through the rollers of a pastry machine.
I thought about trying to push past Achim and the inevitable necessity of coming into actual contact with him. I also thought about my mother, waiting impatiently behind the counter, and of my father leaning out of the kitchen with his brown hair turned salt-and-pepper by the dusting of flour in it, wanting to know where the devil Steffi had got to.
‘Dad’s calling you,’ I said as loudly as I could.
Achim gave me an unpleasant smile. ‘No, he isn’t.’
I took a deep breath. ‘Dad?’ I called at the top of my voice. ‘Did you want Achim?’
The smile melted into an ugly sneer, but Achim took the point. Before my father had time to come out of the kitchen, Achim opened the connecting door himself and lumbered inside, not without giving me a backward glance which clearly telegraphed, I’ll see you later.
I slipped through the door into the cafe, vowing that I would come downstairs with my mother every day from now on. As the door swung shut behind me I did my best to look calm, smoothing down my apron and trying to breathe deeply and slowly.
‘What’s the matter with you? And where have you been all this time?’ said my mother, who was passing with a tray laden with coffee cups and dirty plates. She paused for a moment, regarding me with her lips slightly pursed. I guessed that I was looking pink in the face and dishevelled, whereas she had not a single blonde curl out of place.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘The coffee machine is playing up agai
n,’ added my mother. ‘God knows we could do with a new one. I need you downstairs on time, Steffi. I can’t do everything myself.’ She shook her head. ‘Frau Lanzerath on table six wants another hot chocolate with cream and a Nuss-striezel. I know she normally has a Plunderteilchen,’ she added, as though I had been about to argue, ‘but not today.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
I went behind the counter and picked up a plate. Out of the corner of my eye I could see restless movement to the left, which meant that Frau Lanzerath was working herself up into a state of red-hot impatience. Still, it was not Frau Lanzerath and her irritating manners that preoccupied my mind as I slid the yearned-for Nuss-striezel on to the plate. It was Achim and his clammy hands.
It was a shame, I thought, that our attempt to wipe out Klara Klein by witchcraft was just a game, that it couldn’t possibly have any effect on real life. If it had been genuinely possible to strike someone down by leaving a note for Rote Gertrud, I wouldn’t have chosen Klara Klein for my victim at all. It would have been Achim.
CHAPTER SIX
It was not until Tuesday morning, the Tuesday after our trip to Gertrud’s house, that the news broke. On Monday I had been at the college in Kall, filling my head with more unwelcome information about the science of baking. This was a process which always made me feel like the unwilling recipient of brainwashing in a totalitarian state. Study, work, home, all seemed to be pushing me in the same direction. One day in the distant future I would be standing in the Werther Strasse outside the cafe, wearing the hated dirndl and watching a man on a ladder painting AND DAUGHTER after KONDITOREI NETT on the facade. There would be no escape then; I would be stuck in Bad Münstereifel forever. In my very worst nightmares, a middle-aged Timo would be standing next to me with a proprietorial air and I would have his ring on my finger. If that happened, I thought, I would not care how soon I gorged myself to death by comfort-eating the cream cakes.
The Tuesday morning was bright and sunny, and from my post behind the glass counter displaying the day’s gateaux I had a clear view out of the bakery’s front window. Across the street, on the other side of the River Erft, was an enormous May tree, fixed outside one of the half-timbered houses. The multicoloured crêpe streamers danced in the breeze. Someone, some girl perhaps the very same age as I was, had got up on May morning and looked out of her bedroom window to see the tree waiting there, a gesture of true love. I sighed. Timo would never have thought of such a thing, not in a million years. Not that I wanted him to, I told myself. What I wanted … I slid my hand into the pocket of my apron and felt the piece of paper folded there, the paper with the ragged edge. Could I stretch out my hand and take what I wanted? Could I summon up the courage to do that?
From this dismal reverie I was awakened by my father coming in through the bakery’s front door with a thick bundle of newspapers in his arms. The bakery sold them in the morning alongside the breakfast rolls in paper bags and the Styrofoam cups of coffee.
‘Late,’ my father was grumbling. ‘We’ll never sell even half of these now.’ He put the stack of papers down heavily on the nearest table. ‘Steffi, can you put these out? Not that there’s any point now,’ he added as he stumped off towards the kitchen.
I didn’t look at the papers for at least another half an hour. A large group of customers came in and opted for the full works: sliced ham, smoked bacon, boiled eggs, buttered rolls, coffee with cream, coffee without cream, rosehip tea, apple juice. They kept me running backwards and forwards so busily that when another customer came in and asked for a newspaper with his morning roll I directed him to the stack on the table without so much as glancing at it myself.
‘Sad, isn’t it?’ the customer said, brandishing the paper as he took the bag containing his order.
‘Yes,’ I said automatically. My head was still full of the previous order. Someone had asked for a latte macchiato and I had given her an ordinary Milchkaffee by accident, a disaster of titanic proportions judging by her expression. I hastened to make the latte and spilt half of it down my apron. I had to leave the other two staff to hold the fort and make another latte while I went to get a clean apron. Still I did not look at the newspapers.
When I got back the latte had been delivered and peace restored, but another large group had come in. This time they were foreign, and since they spoke no German and I spoke no French, it took a long time to serve them. By the time I had worked out that a pain au chocolat was a Schokobrötchen the little clock which hung behind the counter was chiming nine thirty. I wiped my hands and had started moving around the counter to tackle the stack of newspapers when the front door opened and Izabela came in.
Instantly I was struck by how terrible she looked. Izabela was always pale – she had the dark hair, the pallid skin and ice-blue eyes of Snow White. Today, however, she had an almost greyish tinge to her face. With her dark hair straggling over her shoulders, she reminded me of nothing so much as a drowned girl, face and limbs bleached white by the icy water. As I stood by the counter staring at her, she stumbled forward, her hands outstretched as though she wanted to clutch on to me. I glanced swiftly around the cafe. To my relief, my mother was not in sight; I guessed she had gone into the kitchen. I went to Izabela, not knowing what to say, conscious that whatever this was, it could not be good news.
‘Have you heard?’
I started to ask her what she meant, what I was supposed to have heard, and then the words died on my lips. Standing this close to her, I was level with the table where my father had dumped the stack of newspapers. All of them were copies of the Kölner Express. Glancing at the headline upside down from where I stood, I could pick out the two capital Ks in the glaringly large type.
I had the strangest feeling in the pit of my stomach, a dropping sensation as though I had taken a step on to ice, innocently thinking that it was solid ground, and gone right through. I moved away from Izabela and reached for the newspaper at the top of the pile, flipping it around to read the headline properly. Even before I had done so, I knew what it said.
KLARA KLEIN DEAD.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I am a quiet person, a shy person if I am honest, but I am not stupid. It would have been very easy to crumble at that moment, to scream or to become distracted, as Izabela was. I knew that if I did any of those things I was lost. My mother would be back in the cafe at any moment and she would ask questions. Probably she would go and fetch my father, and he would ask questions too; they might insist I went into the kitchen, away from the avid gaze of the assembled customers, so that they could question me the better. Even if I managed not to tell them anything, they would be suspicious. Trying to discuss anything with my parents was like arguing with an unholy partnership between a prosecuting lawyer and a Jesuit priest. With this in mind I bit back the hysterical babble that came to my lips.
I put the paper back on the pile. I looked down at my own hands smoothing the front page, straightening the stack of papers so that they looked tidy again. I felt as though I were observing someone else doing this. Then I turned to Izabela.
‘Go and sit outside at one of the tables,’ I told her. My voice was surprisingly calm. I spoke firmly too; the fear that Izabela might drop some incriminating words into the waiting ears of the customers was enough to give me a little courage for once. ‘I’ll come out,’ I added, seeing her hesitate. Still she did not move, so I gave her a gentle push, and then she stumbled slowly back outside as though sleepwalking.
My heart was thudding in my chest, so violently that it was almost painful. The witch, I thought. The wish we made – the witch has granted it. The idea was dizzying. I made my way very carefully back around the counter, walking slowly because I felt so unsteady that I was really worried I might trip. I could feel the gaze of dozens of pairs of eyes on me, like insects crawling over my bare skin. All the same, by some miracle nobody called me over – nobody wanted to order another coffee or pay the bill at that precise moment. I was able to retrieve an order pad and penc
il from their place by the till and carry them outside without hindrance.
Izabela was sitting bolt upright at one of the outside tables. I wondered whether I looked the same as she did: white and wild-eyed with shock. If so, there was no way it would escape my mother’s notice.
‘I don’t want anything,’ said Izabela when she saw me with the pad.
‘I can’t just stand out here chatting. Have a Coke or something.’
‘I’m not thirsty.’ She looked stricken. ‘I feel awful. I feel like we killed her.’
‘Shhhh.’ I couldn’t help looking around to see if anyone was listening, even though I knew this must make me look as though I were up to something suspicious. ‘Izzi, this can’t possibly have anything to do with – you know.’ My voice was steady but my stomach was churning as though I were standing on the deck of a ship on a stormy sea.
‘But, Steffi –’ Izabela was shaking her head. ‘It’s so – don’t you think it’s too much of a coincidence, what we did on Friday night and now this?’ She put her hands up and pushed the dark mass of hair back from her face. ‘What are we going to do if someone finds out?’
The sheer absurdity of this brought me back to myself. I looked around at the street, at the view that was as familiar to me as the lines on my own hands. The sun was shining, the pansies and primulas in the window boxes made bright splashes of colour on the monochrome facades of the half-timbered houses. Two doors up from the bakery the bulky figure of an old woman in a floral housecoat was bent over her broom, sweeping vigorously. Everything looked reassuringly normal. Bad stuff happens everywhere, even in neat little towns like Münstereifel; nobody thought otherwise, not since those murders a decade before. But people don’t die because someone puts a hex on them. They die because they don’t see the lorry coming when they step out into the road, or they have something malignant growing inside them, or they are simply so weighed down with years that one day their heart just gives out.