Wish Me Dead

by Helen Grant

  The bakery was shut for now, but I couldn’t turn the customers away indefinitely or we would lose the business. Tomorrow morning there must be fresh bread, cakes and pastries; there must be filled rolls and the aroma of freshly made coffee on the air. I thought that if I telephoned everyone, the regular waitresses and the ones who came in occasionally when we needed an extra pair of hands, I could get enough people to staff the counter and serve the cafe customers. But I could not run the dough mixing machines and the big ovens all by myself; for that I needed Achim.

  I wiped my eyes and went to the telephone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  On the second ring Achim picked up the phone.

  ‘Zimmer.’

  I rested my forehead on the cool wall of the cafe.

  ‘It’s Stefanie Nett, from the bakery.’

  I did my best not to listen to the slimy outpourings that this provoked. The worst thing about dealing with Achim was that he always managed to make me feel that I was inviting his lascivious glances, as though he were a prim curate with his hands folded and his gaze turned down, and I some mincing vixen. Useless to try to keep the conversation neutral and businesslike; from the insinuating tone in his voice you would have thought that I had somehow engineered my own father’s heart attack in order to get Achim alone.

  Eventually I extracted his agreement to come to the bakery early the following morning. He would have prolonged our conversation, which he seemed to be enjoying immensely, but I muttered something about having to go because we had customers coming in and hung up.

  After I had finished speaking to Achim, I telephoned two of the other girls who worked part-time in the cafe and asked them to work extra hours. If I were going to be stuck in the kitchen with Achim most of the time, we would need additional help in the cafe. More than that, I thought there was safety in numbers. Eventually I hung up and went back to clearing the tables. As I stacked cups and plates and mopped up the spilt coffee, I thought about the days and weeks ahead. I could not face the idea that my father might not recover. To think that he might pass away believing that his second and final child was about to turn her back on the business that lay so close to his heart was more than I could bear. If I could have been with him at that moment, I would have fallen to my knees on the hospital linoleum and promised to carry on at the bakery for the rest of my working life. All the same, I was only a bakery student, nowhere near qualified. Even with Achim’s help I was not sure how long I could keep the bakery running.

  I finally went to bed at eleven o’clock that night. After setting my little alarm clock for two thirty, I lay staring at the ceiling and willing sleep to come. I seemed to lie there for ages, and when I did eventually drop off I was sure only moments had passed before the shrill call of the alarm woke me. I crept into the bathroom, where I hung on to the washbasin, trying to repress the waves of nausea which came from wrenching myself into wakefulness after so little sleep. I hardly recognized the person staring back at me from the mirror like a drowned face drifting to the surface of a limpid pond. Under the tangled fair hair the eyes were as dull as stones, the features drawn. It was a shocking preview of the way I might look in another forty years after shovelling another few million loaves in and out of the ovens.

  I shrugged on the white baker’s jacket with my sister’s name on it and with a heavy heart, I went downstairs.

  ‘Steffi,’ said Achim insinuatingly when he saw me come into the kitchen. He had his own key and had evidently been there for some time already, as one of the big mixing machines was running.

  I frowned. He said my name the way a gourmet might say foie gras, as though the very word lingered luxuriantly on his tongue.

  ‘Morgen,’ I replied curtly.

  I didn’t look at Achim. I thought that if I saw the faux hurt on his face, the repulsive aping of wounded feelings, I would be sick. I pointedly went over to the other side of the kitchen to consult the schedule for the day.

  Achim said nothing. To my relief he seemed too busy with the morning’s work to plague me. There was a great deal to be done. We had malted Kosakenbrot to make in tins, oval loaves of Bauernbrot which had to be dusted with flour and Kyllburger bread with a row of diagonal slits along the top of each loaf. There was every conceivable type of seeded loaf: Mohnbrot with poppy seeds, Sonnenkorn with sunflower seeds and half a dozen others. Achim decided that we should also prepare Sauerteig, a type of dough which kept longer than the others and did not have to be made every day. As I would be at college tomorrow the kitchen would be short-staffed, so that seemed sensible.

  We moved back and forth across the kitchen, each on our own track like the little figures in a weather-house. As the morning progressed I began to feel very warm. Opening the ovens to slide loaves in and out was like hanging over a furnace. All the same I kept my white jacket tightly buttoned up to the neck, not wanting to give Achim the slightest excuse to ogle me.

  Now and again I would turn around, expecting to see him standing nearby, leaning against one of the metal counters with that insinuating look on his face. I brushed my elbow against something while carrying a tray of rolls across the kitchen to the cold store and jumped like a cat, thinking he had sneaked up on me.

  Get a grip, I told myself, leaning against the door of the cold store with my hands over my face. You can’t carry on like this. You might be working alone with him for a month, or longer. You have to stand up to him.

  I was tempted to linger there among the metal trolleys, with their shelves of uncooked rolls as pale and spongy as fungi in the low light, but already I was becoming chilled. Reluctantly I carried the tray back into the main kitchen, keeping an eye open for Achim. To my relief, he was standing by the back door with his lighter and a packet of cigarettes in one beefy hand. He raised them to show me, nodded and stepped outside. With a lighter heart I went across the kitchen and set the rolls down. I hoped Achim would take a good long cigarette break. In fact, in spite of my objections to the habit, I hoped he would stay outside and smoke the entire packet. Perhaps he might immolate himself, I thought; there was always hope.

  An hour later I began to feel a slight twinge of guilt for wishing him ill. Achim had not directed so much as a single inappropriate glance at me and his comments had been confined to the topics of dough mixing and baking. Perhaps he had decided to leave off tormenting me in deference to my father’s situation, or perhaps he had got the message and decided to stop altogether. Later on I was to regret this naivety, but of course by then it was too late; a butterfly crushed in the jaws of a toad might just as well have wished itself out again.

  It was not until the very end of the morning shift that Achim made his move. My mother telephoned at ten. My father’s condition was stable but she didn’t want to leave the hospital, so she wouldn’t be coming back before the evening. At eleven o’clock we finished work and there was a break until three. I felt that we had completed a Herculean task that morning. Achim knew the bakery routine well and I had worked in the kitchen once or twice a week since I started my training, but still it was my father who normally led the day’s work. However, here we were at the end of the shift with everything produced to order. None of our regular customers had had to do without their favourite Nussecke or Speckstange, nothing had burned or sagged in the middle, and, what’s more, Achim’s behaviour towards me had been nothing other than gentlemanly. In spite of the dark clouds that hung over me, I felt a sudden blooming of pride. We had done the best we could for my father; we had run his kitchen like clockwork. In an uncharacteristic burst of camaraderie I went over to Achim and held out my hand.

  Achim held out his hand too, but not to shake mine. His big fingers, as thick and fleshy as Knackwurst, closed around my wrist. He reeled me in like a fish. I saw what was coming and wrenched my head around, so that the slobbering kiss that was aimed at me with the soggy gracelessness of a water bomb landed not on my lips but somewhere in the region of my ear. I tried to drag my hand out of Achim’s grasp but he
was not finished yet. He was leaning towards me, fumbling for my other hand, trying to back me up against the kitchen wall, and now, revoltingly, his tongue was actually exploring my ear. I reacted as though someone had tried to feed a live snake into it, struggling frantically, but it was no good. Achim was not particularly fit – most of his bulk was fat – but his sheer size and weight made him impossible to throw off. I felt as though I had walked through the back room in a butcher’s shop and a whole side of beef had fallen off its hook and landed on me.

  I was revolted – and furious. Furious at myself for being such a fool, for thinking that it would ever be possible to treat Achim like an ordinary, decent human being. Furious at Achim for what he was trying to do. When Kai had put his hands all over me in his car, I had been panicky and shocked, desperate only to put as much space between us as was humanly possible. Even when I had written out the curse against him, I had felt numb, with no other thought than to protect myself from my tormentor, to put him away from me forever. Now all the suppressed rage of that moment came boiling up inside me like a geyser, scaldingly hot and stinking of brimstone.

  I felt around with my free hand, groping for something to use as a weapon. It was lucky for Achim that my father was a baker and not a butcher. At that moment I was so angry that if I had laid hands on a meat cleaver I doubt I would have hesitated to use it. My fingers closed over an enamel mixing bowl and, grasping it as firmly as I could, I brought it down on the side of Achim’s head with a clang like the note of a single cracked bell. The grip of those sausage-like fingers slackened for an instant and I wrenched myself free.

  I was sorely tempted to aim another blow at Achim, but even though I was beside myself with rage, I knew better than to tangle with him again. His skin, normally as pale as a corpse’s under its sprinkling of freckles, had turned an ugly shade of red, signalling his state of mind as clearly as the ruff of a frill-necked lizard.

  ‘Don’t play games with me,’ he growled.

  I backed away, still clutching the enamel bowl. I dared not take my eyes off Achim to look at the bowl, but I sincerely hoped there was a large dent in it.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ I said, wishing that my voice sounded strong and confident like Hanna’s, instead of tremulous.

  ‘There’s no point acting the innocent,’ Achim spat. His face twisted unpleasantly. ‘What’s the matter? An honest working man not good enough for you now you’ve been with Herr High-and-Mighty von Jülich?’

  How I wished at that moment that I had a searing retort on my lips, some remark so flayingly acidic that Achim would shrivel under it like a salted slug. All that I could manage was a pitifully childish, ‘I hate you.’

  ‘Oh no. No, you don’t,’ said Achim with repulsive emphasis. I heard him breathing heavily through his nose and thought that he reminded me of nothing so much as a great flabby boar. ‘You’re going to like me a lot. You’ll see.’ He stared at me with those boiled-lobster eyes.

  I’ll never like you a lot, or even a little, I wanted to say. You could be the last man alive on earth and I’d spend my whole life running from place to place rather than spend two minutes in your company. I’d rather fall naked into a pit of black mambas than touch even your little finger. And I’d rather eat my own weight in festering maggots than ever let you touch me.

  As usual, however, these words were trapped inside my head, like the silent screams of recalcitrant spinsters walled up in a nunnery. I backed away from Achim, still holding the enamel bowl in one hand and wiping my other hand, the one he had grasped, on my white coat, as though trying to scrape off a coating of slime. It took every ounce of self-control I had to walk calmly towards the door without breaking and making a run for it.

  Once I had made it into the passageway and the door had swung shut behind me, I sagged against the wall and put a hand over my face. I was trembling all over. I knew that I ought to go upstairs to the apartment before Achim had a chance to follow me out of the kitchen, but at that moment I doubted my legs would carry me.

  What am I going to do? I asked myself silently.

  I was still standing there leaning on the wall when I heard a door open. My head jerked up and my whole body tensed as I prepared to run for it, but then I saw that it was not the kitchen door that had opened but the one leading to the cafe. A waitress was standing there with a coffee pot in her hand. I recognized her as Bianca Müller, a fair-haired, slender girl a year or two older than I was. Bianca had always struck me as a little stand-offish and normally I would have made some excuse to scurry off rather than expose a display of raw emotion to her superior gaze. Now, however, I was simply glad to see someone other than Achim. I didn’t care if she noticed my flushed face and trembling limbs.

  ‘Stefanie?’ She looked at me uncertainly. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘No,’ I told her succinctly.

  She took a couple of steps towards me. ‘What’s the matter?’

  I meant to blurt the whole thing out, to say Achim Zimmer tried to kiss me, or possibly worse. But when I opened my mouth, all that came out was, ‘Achim Zimmer.’

  We had never been at all close, Bianca and I, and somehow I expected her to brush this off. But instead she came right into the corridor, letting the door swing shut behind her.

  ‘You too?’ she said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  After I had finished speaking to Bianca I went upstairs to the flat and locked the door behind me. I put my baker’s whites into the washing machine and sat down at the kitchen table to think. I had made myself a sandwich but I couldn’t face eating it. The moist pink slice of ham in the middle of it reminded me irresistibly of Achim’s face, flushed with unspeakable ardour. After that thought had occurred to me I couldn’t even look at it any more. I got up and tipped the whole lot into the bin.

  It’s not just me, I thought. If what Bianca said was true, Achim was systematically harassing every single one of the girls in the bakery. I had got off lightly so far, it appeared, probably because I was the boss’s daughter. On one occasion when Bianca had gone into the kitchen when Achim was alone there, he had put both of his repulsively clammy hands right down the front of her blouse. Now that my father was out of the picture altogether for some time to come, there was no knowing what he might try.

  But that was not all. Bianca told me that Achim had the unpleasant habit of relieving some of the girls of their day’s tips. Even before she had finished describing what he did, I could very well imagine it: the slimy remarks sliding inexorably towards implied threats and finally outright bullying. She had ended by warning me to keep a close eye on the takings. Now that both my parents were absent, she thought there was no knowing what Achim would do.

  The question was, what was I going to do about it?

  Think, think, I told myself. I tried to consider all the options again, mentally spreading them out before me like a deck of cards. It was really impossible to consider speaking to my parents, a fact that Achim was no doubt depending on. Could I talk to Max? I quickly rejected that notion. If I approached Max for anything he would be bound to use it as a bargaining chip to try to get me to wish something for him in return. Julius? I dismissed that idea too. Assuming that I could get over the awkwardness between us, I was quite sure that Julius would want to help, but I had the instinctive feeling that he would suggest something honest and reasonable, like talking to Achim, which I knew perfectly well would do no good at all. I had to act now, or the next attempt he made would be worse. I didn’t want to think what might happen next; my imagination simply shied away from it.

  In the end there was really only one answer and it lay hidden in the woods to the north of the town, a grey and crumbling bulk whose walls were carved with silent screams of hate and fury. I thought about Kai, his handsome face twisted with anger into an ugly gargoyle. I thought about Achim Zimmer saying, You’re going to like me a lot. You’ll see. And I thought about Rote Gertrud, dragged out of her house by a shrieking mob. I supposed most of them had been men to
o. I wondered if the accusations of child murder had been true. Perhaps they simply couldn’t stand the fact that a woman was living there alone, independent of any of them. Perhaps she had turned some of them down, laughed at them even, tossing her gleaming red hair. So they had burned her, working their own brutal magic, turning living flesh into ashes and sticks, a heap of black cinders to be torn away by the wind, up into an empty sky.

  Why me? I thought. Why does the magic work for me and only me?

  In stories, heroes and heroines always discover that the reason why strange things happen around them is that they are marked out in some way, that something sets them apart from other people: elvish blood, for example, or special powers handed down from father to son. I couldn’t think of a single thing that set me apart from anyone else. I was an ordinary girl, with an average education and possibly the most uninspiring prospects in the world. I wasn’t a mysterious orphan, nor even the eldest child; in fact, I strongly suspected that I had been an accident and wasn’t even supposed to be here at all. There was nothing I could see that would single me out for the witch’s blessing – or curse.

  But I had wished Frau Kessel dead and she died.

  There was no escaping from that. However I looked at it, the thing was too much of a coincidence, especially when you considered that my malign powers had apparently wiped out Klara Klein too.

  My mind skipped back to the ruined house in the wood, to the day my sister had taken me there. Magdalena had wished Frau Kessel dead too, but it hadn’t worked for her. So it wasn’t just the house and it wasn’t something to do with my family. It was me. I was the focus for whatever was happening. There was no point in saying that I had never asked for this ability; it seemed I simply had it. I was like the shard of glass lying in a dry summer meadow that refracts the sun’s rays and causes the fire that ravages the field, turning the gold to black.