by Helen Grant
Even Max was silent as the six of us stared at the walls. None of us said a word and outside the house there was not even the sound of a bird singing. And yet I thought that Gertrud’s house was an unquiet place. It teemed with the distant voices of all those who had scratched their words laboriously on the stone, their messages of desperation and love and hatred. I thought that if I strained my ears I would hear them, the buzz and crackle of anxious voices, radio signals from the past. I looked at the walls and I felt cold. Did it even matter whether I believed in the witch or not? It looked as though the whole town did.
‘This place gives me the creeps,’ said Timo eventually.
‘No kidding,’ said Hanna ironically.
A broad smile crossed Max’s face. ‘People,’ he said in his most expansive voice, ‘it’s supposed to give you the creeps.’ He turned, taking in every angle of the densely inscribed walls. ‘What would be the point of coming here otherwise?’ He looked at Jochen. ‘Right?’
Jochen shrugged. ‘So, what are we going to do?’
‘I’m not wishing anyone dead,’ said Izabela suddenly. Her face was very pale but it had a stubborn expression, a hardness which made me think of white marble.
‘Izzi.’ Max sounded as though he were talking to a little child. ‘We’re not going to wish anyone dead.’
‘Then what are we going to do?’
‘We’re going to try a little experiment.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Perhaps it really started there, with Max’s experiment. Klara Klein was a fluke, after all; we had just been fooling about when we put the hex on her. It was something to do on a dull evening in a town where nothing was happening, nothing for anyone our age, anyway. We could just as easily have decided to go bowling in the alley at Schönau or to hang out at Max’s house, an enormous white villa paid for by the car dealership, with a well-stocked drinks cabinet that Max’s parents never bothered to check. Klara Klein just got in the way somehow, as though we had been a bunch of young kids playing with someone’s father’s hunting rifle and had accidentally shot a passer-by. We didn’t really intend anything to happen to her.
Now it was different. Logic said that a few words scrawled on a piece of paper couldn’t hurt someone, yet here was Klara Klein as dead as a stone. It shouldn’t be possible and yet it was so. And now Max wanted, in a parody of scientific technique, to test the application of this apparent power. It can’t work – but suppose it did? seemed to be his line of argument.
He found the carved box which had been hidden in the hole in the floor. It was still lying where we left it; evidently no one had been to the house since our first visit. He undid the catch and raised the lid. Before Max could react I put my hand into the box and grabbed the paper. Without bothering to read it, I tore it into tiny pieces. When I was satisfied that nobody could possibly piece the message together again I opened my hands and let them go, like a fall of paper snowflakes. Max didn’t try to stop me; he seemed amused at my alarm.
Weren’t there two pieces of paper in the box? I thought suddenly as the white scraps drifted to the ground. I stared at them. Was it possible that one piece of paper had been inside the other and I had torn them both up? If not, which one remained? It was too late to tell now, I realized with a shiver. With a sense of vague unease I tried to dismiss the matter from my mind and concentrate on what Max was saying.
Max’s plan was that we should write another message. At Izabela’s insistence, nobody was to put a hex on any other person. Max accepted this quite mildly. More problematical was the matter of what we should actually ask for. Jochen’s and Max’s ideas all seemed too stupid to me – wishes for expensive motorbikes and holidays and dates with people they had never even met, models and actresses. Timo refused to say what he would wish for. Hanna claimed not to have any ideas at all. Izabela was so fearful of the whole thing that her suggestions were far too vague and general to be of any use; she would have wished for world peace if Max had let her. As for me, I had wishes of my own, but not ones I was prepared to share with Max and Jochen.
‘Why don’t we all write something?’ suggested Hanna in the end.
‘We’ve only got one piece of paper,’ objected Max.
‘We’ll tear it up,’ said Hanna firmly.
She took the paper and folded it carefully, then tore it down the folds. There was enough for one strip of paper each, but we only had one pen between us, so we had to take turns.
Max went first, of course, writing with a great flourish. The pen was passed from hand to hand and last of all it came to me. I looked down at the piece of paper. It doesn’t really matter what you put, I told myself. Because it’s not going to happen anyway. The Klara Klein thing, that was just a coincidence. Still, I wondered what I would write if I knew my words really would come true. My grip on the pen felt slick, as though my fingers were damp with perspiration.
‘Come on, Steffi,’ said Jochen, peering over my shoulder.
‘Can’t you think of anything?’ asked Hanna.
There was a curious emphasis to her tone, insinuating yet sympathetic, that brought warmth to my face. I wondered if she knew what was in my mind, if she could read my thoughts in my hesitation. I kept my head down, not meeting her eye.
You have to put something, I thought, and at that moment my mother’s words floated through my mind: The coffee machine is playing up again – God knows we could do with a new one …
Five hundred euros, I scrawled quickly. I was surprised how satisfying it felt putting the words down on paper. Don’t be stupid, I told myself. It can’t possibly work. All the same, it was pleasant to imagine my mother crooning with delight over a new coffee machine. It was something to put in the balance against my guilt-inducing lack of devotion to the bakery.
I folded the paper in two and then folded it again, although there was nothing to hide. I handed it to Max.
‘Are we going to say something, the same as we did last time?’ asked Hanna.
She was watching Max, her arms folded. Perhaps, I pondered, she was attracted to him. But Max would never look at Hanna, with her dumpy figure and predilection for jeans and worn-out sweatshirts. Stop it, I thought. She’s your friend. Nevertheless, I hoped that I was wrong, that she wasn’t interested in Max at all, because I was terribly afraid she was doomed to disappointment otherwise.
Max eyed her back, his stance casual. Then he shrugged. ‘If you like.’
‘Can’t we just go?’ asked Izabela.
Inevitably, that decided the matter. Max shook his head. ‘Got to do it right.’
Reluctantly we joined hands. ‘Rote Gertrud … ’ intoned Max.
I put my head back and focused on the sky above, clear blue beginning to deepen as day moved to twilight. I didn’t want to be in this place, with its mean little messages scrawled everywhere like bitter whispers heard in corners, with its burden of yearning and hopelessness and malice. I could feel the weight of other people’s desires – Max’s, Timo’s, Hanna’s – and the silent clamour of the inscribed walls. It felt too much like my life: the family bakery, the future my parents had mapped out for me.
Five hundred euros, I thought. If it works, what else could I wish for?
CHAPTER TWELVE
On Friday I worked in the bakery kitchen. The aim of my studies, as my father frequently reminded me, was for me to be able to run the bakery one day, not simply dispense apple strudel and coffee to the elderly customers. Once or twice a week I would get up when my father did, when it was still pitch dark outside, even in summer, and help him run the machines that mixed the bread dough. There was a great oven for the larger loaves, like a stack of shelves, close together and radiating a heat that was glorious in winter and torture in summer. There was a smaller one for the rolls, with a conveyor belt that carried them along like a row of fat ducks at a fairground shooting range.
On the whole I preferred the kitchen to serving in the cafe itself. Generally I worked there on Achim’s days off, so there was litt
le chance of running into him. I was spared the dispiriting experience of hours spent under the customers’ critical eyes and I didn’t have to wear the hated green dirndl.
On the other hand, the white baker’s jacket which I wore had the legend Magdalena Nett embroidered on the breast pocket in green silk. Whenever I put it on I had the uncomfortable sensation of stepping into dead man’s shoes. I had tried asking my father for a new one, but the answer was always the same: ‘We’re a small family business and we can’t afford to waste.’ Once he added ‘Magdalena’ without thinking, and when I stared at him he snorted and asked me why I didn’t get on with my work.
I was thinking about that this morning as I went to the cold store to fetch another tray of uncooked bread rolls. It could so easily have been different. It could have been Magdalena standing here, shivering in the chilly air, manhandling trays of rolls. I looked at them with distaste, puffy little hemispheres of pallid dough sprouting in the dark like great mushrooms.
It was meant to be Magdalena, not me, that was the thing. Magdalena was the one who had been going to take over the bakery. I was the afterthought, the also-ran. The accidental heir. When it came down to it, everything about me was accidental. My mother had been twenty-five when Magdalena was born; when I arrived she was thirty-six. She said I was a ‘surprise’, but I thought she was being euphemistic.
I closed the door of the cold store with my elbow and went back into the main kitchen with the rolls. Another hour and the morning’s work would be finished. My father would go to bed and sleep until mid-afternoon. I ought to do the same, but I rarely did. I relished the hours of freedom, even if I spent them yawning and rubbing my eyes. Sometimes I met Timo, or Hanna and Izzi, if they were free, but quite often I went off by myself, to walk along one of the woodland tracks which surrounded the town, or sit in a quiet spot under the medieval walls. Then I would look up at the open sky and formulate complicated plans for escaping the town – plans which always ran aground on the simple fact that there was no one else to take over the bakery when my parents retired.
Magdalena, I thought. She was hardly a person to me now, more an idea. What would it have been like to have a real sister? If she were here now, I thought, even if she refused to have anything to do with the bakery, at least I could talk to her. At least we could share the problem.
‘Post,’ said my mother, bustling into the kitchen, blonde curls bouncing, her shoes with the edelweiss flowers on the toes clicking smartly on the tiled floor. She looked at the fan of letters in her hands, looked again and said, ‘There’s one for you, Steffi.’
I was mildly surprised at that. Hardly anyone ever wrote to me, not a letter anyway. An email or a text, yes – but nobody I knew bothered with pen and ink and paper and envelopes. It might be a letter from the college, I supposed, but it didn’t look official, and the envelope was the wrong size. I put down the tray and held out my hand.
‘I don’t know who it’s from,’ said my mother, musingly.
When I said nothing, but continued to hold out my hand, she put the letter into it with slightly bad grace. She looked at me for a moment and then she turned her attention back to her own letters.
I turned the envelope over. The address had been typed on to a sticker. Whoever had sent the letter had addressed it to STEFFI NETT, which struck me as a little strange. When the college or the doctor’s surgery or anyone else sent me an official letter, it was always directed to Frau Stefanie Nett. Officialdom never called me anything as familiar as Steffi. And there was no stamp. I wondered whether someone had delivered it by hand.
The envelope felt thick, as though there were several sheets of paper inside, or perhaps something folded several times. I glanced at my mother, then tore the corner of the envelope, just enough so that I could peep inside.
It took me a few seconds to realize what was inside. I must have inhaled sharply or made some movement, because my mother looked at me.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘It’s nothing,’ I managed to say.
‘Are you sure?’ She was looking at me quizzically.
‘Yeah. Some of my friends are just … messing about.’
I jammed the envelope into the pocket of my baker’s jacket. I had no intention of opening it right up in front of my mother. ‘I have to … ’ I couldn’t think of anything plausible to say. In the end I just turned on my heel and fled back to the cold store.
I didn’t close the door completely. There was an inner handle as well as an alarm, but even so I didn’t like to feel shut in. I turned my back on the door in case my mother tried to follow me inside. Then I fumbled the letter out of my pocket and tore it open, the whole length of the envelope.
The contents spilt out, tumbling through my trembling fingers. I knelt to gather them up, the wad of euro notes that had been stuffed inside. There were a lot of them – they were mostly fives and tens – but I knew even before I started counting them. Five hundred euros.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
That afternoon I went up to the woods to walk by myself. At home, there was my father, filling the flat with his snores, and there was also the risk that Max, Jochen or one of the others would drop in. I had to think and I had to do it alone.
The moment I’d counted the money I realized that things were not going to be so easily settled as I had imagined. I could not give my mother five hundred euros without questions being asked, and no immediate explanation sprang to mind. I had no way of earning so much extra money, but if I said I had found it she would insist I take it to the police station. If I told her it had been delivered to me she would ask who had sent it, and to that I had no reply.
I had turned the envelope over and over, checked it inside and out, but there was no note, no return address, nothing except my name and address, and those were typed, not handwritten. I folded the envelope into a tiny fat square and slid it into the mobile phone pocket of one of my bags. The banknotes I rolled together and shoved into my jeans pocket, as deeply as they would go. I dared not leave them lying around.
I left the bakery and walked up to the old spa building, then took the well-worn footpath up the hill. I had taken that path many times when I was younger; in autumn the brambles were always thick with juicy blackberries and the hedges so high that a child could gorge itself to its heart’s content, far from reproving adult eyes. I rarely met anyone there and today was no exception, but it was a relief when I had reached the top of the hill unseen. I crossed the road and turned up the little cut-through to Gut Vogelsang. Within five minutes I was in the forest.
There was a little-used track I knew which was almost grown over with brambles and weeds. I went up it, following the vague traces of ruts long covered with a blanket of rotting leaves. Eventually I came to a fallen tree. There I sat down and put my head in my hands.
Was it a joke? That was the obvious answer. It had to be one of the others playing a trick on me. Any of them could have returned to Gertrud’s house afterwards and read the notes we had written. None of us had signed them, but my handwriting was easily distinguished from Hanna’s bold hand and Max’s untidy scrawl. But five hundred euros … Nobody could afford to use that sort of money playing a trick on someone. Not even Max, whose parents were really wealthy; Max’s father, a self-made man, was determined that his children should be the same and was not free with his cash.
So who had sent the money? If it wasn’t one of us, that left two possible options, the second of which was so bizarre that I hardly even wanted to consider it. First, someone outside the group could have sent it. Someone could have seen us going up to Gertrud’s house; they could have gone inside after we had left and found the slips of paper with our scrawled messages on them. It was stretching credulity, though, to think that they could have worked out which was mine and decided to send me the money I had casually requested. Why would anyone do that? Five hundred euros – that was a lot of money to anyone. If you were rich and wanted to give your money away, why not give it to ch
arity instead, or to one of your own relations? Anyway, rich philanthropists didn’t spend their time hanging out in dank woods, standing in the undergrowth with dark glasses on, clutching a bag of banknotes, waiting for potential beneficiaries. It was ridiculous.
The other option – that was the one my mind kept skirting around. I knew it was impossible, insane even to consider that Rote Gertrud might have anything to do with the money. For goodness’ sake, I reminded myself, it arrived in an envelope with a typewritten address. Dead witches don’t type things. An image rose unbidden into my mind, of the spirit of flame-haired Gertrud rising from the detritus of her house, floating unseen into the town and descending upon some unsuspecting person, sliding herself into them, working herself into each limb, each finger, as though she were putting on gloves, and then –
No. The idea was ludicrous, something out of a trashy film. I groaned with frustration. There was no explanation that felt right. I put my head back and stared up at the pine trees towering skywards, the patch of blue sky visible at their crowns.
It had to be one of the others. But I still couldn’t see how any of them could have laid hands on five hundred euros just to play a joke on me. Unless they had somehow clubbed together to do it – and that was another place I didn’t want to go, the thought that my friends would conspire like that to trick me. The idea of them huddling round, grinning and whispering, plotting together to make a fool out of Steffi – gullible, unsuspicious Steffi – chilled me. No, I told myself. It’s too much money to find for some stupid joke, even if they clubbed together. How could they be sure that they would get the money back again? Suppose I denied ever receiving it? None of it hung together, but it seemed the most plausible explanation. The question was what was I going to do about it?