Helen Grant: The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

Thilo didn’t actually get into the house, as it was my father who opened the door. Thilo was that stereotypical creature, the bully with a broad streak of yellow; he took one look at my father, who was red-eyed but still imposing, and decided not to argue the toss, although he did thrust his close-cropped head as far around the doorframe as he dared, hoping perhaps for a glimpse of sooty ceiling or blackened tablecloth. My father took the homework papers out of Thilo’s chubby hands, pushed him gently out, and closed the door.

The following day Daniella Brandt turned up and actually managed to get in. My mother, who answered the door, assumed she was a school friend. I was sitting in the living room, curled up in my father’s favorite armchair with a book I was unable to read owing to the memories that kept running through my head like a short video clip on an endless loop.

The door opened and my mother appeared. Daniella was behind her, her pointed face a white triangle in the gloom.

“Look who’s here,” my mother said in a vague-sounding voice. Her gaze seemed to trickle over me, then slide away. She was still numb. My father had been able to cry, but my mother had still not taken in Oma Kristel’s death; for days afterward she wandered around like someone in a dream, carrying the same Christmas ornaments between rooms as though preoccupied. She brushed her hands against her apron and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.

Daniella slipped into the room with the speed of a weasel. Where my mother’s gaze lingered distractedly, Daniella’s seemed to stab the air. Her eyes were everywhere; I could have sworn her long thin nose was twitching too.

“I’ve brought your homework, Pia,” she told me, but her eyes did not meet mine; she was glancing at every corner of the room with barely concealed curiosity.

“Thanks,” I said tersely. I did not put the book down; pointedly I waited for her to go.

There was a long pause.

“I’m sorry about… you know,” she said eventually.

“About what?” I said sharply. I turned one of the pages so brusquely that it tore.

Daniella gave a little laugh, like the short bark of a vixen. “About your grandmother,” she said in her best what, are-you-stupid? voice. She drew a line along the floorboards with the toe of her shoe, then shook back her mousy hair from her face. “Everyone’s talking about it,” she informed me. “We just couldn’t believe it, you know?” She lowered her voice conspiratorially, with a glance toward the door in case my mother was within earshot. “Was it here that it happened, in this room?”

I did not look up. “Go away or I’ll scream,” I said.

“Don’t be silly,” said Daniella in an offended tone. She breathed a heavy sigh, as though talking to the terminally stupid. In my place she would have been lapping up the attention, that was for sure; it would have been worth losing both grandmothers and perhaps an aunt or two as well, just to be center stage for once. “Come on, Pia…”

“Go away or I’ll scream,” I repeated.

She gave that little affected laugh again. “There’s no need to be-” She didn’t get any further because I suddenly put my head back and did scream, repeatedly, at the top of my lungs. Before Daniella had time to react, the door crashed back on its hinges as my mother charged into the room like a rhinoceros defending its young. Incongruously, she still had a blue-and-white-checked oven mitt on one hand.

“My God, Pia! What’s happened?!”

I shut my mouth abruptly and regarded Daniella balefully. My chest was heaving with exertion. My mother looked from me to Daniella and back to me again. Then, very gently, she took Daniella by the shoulder and started to steer her out of the room.

“I think you’ll have to go, dear. Pia’s rather upset,” she told the stunned girl as she opened the front door with the gloved hand. “Thank you for bringing the homework,” she added. “It was very kind of you.”

A moment later she drifted back into the living room; her sudden burst of energy appeared to have dissipated, and she looked distracted again. She came over and knelt down in front of me, as though I were a toddler.

“Did your friend say something that upset you?” She might as well have said your little friend .

“She’s not my friend,” I announced.

“Well, it was nice of her to bring your homework,” said my mother.

“It wasn’t nice at all,” I told her, feeling as though another scream might well up at any moment. “She wanted to know if this was the room where Oma Kristel… you know.”

“Oh,” said my mother. There was a very long pause while she considered. At last she patted me on the shoulder. “Never mind, Pia. It’ll be a nine days’ wonder. They’ll soon get sick of talking about it.”

My mother was right about a lot of things, but on one topic she was spectacularly wrong, and that was the fascination with Oma Kristel’s death. Even now, so much later, and after all that happened that terrible year, I am quite convinced that if you mentioned the name of Kristel Kolvenbach to anyone in Bad Münstereifel, they would instantly say, “Wasn’t she the woman who exploded at her own Advent dinner?” A nine days’ wonder it most certainly was not.

The Grundschule opened again in the first week of January. I usually walked to school with Marla Frisch. However, as I was packing my Ranzen , the capacious satchel that allows the German schoolchild to carry backbreaking amounts of schoolbooks, I was surprised to see Marla pass by our front windows without stopping, her light-brown pigtails bouncing. By the time I had shrugged on my winter coat and opened the front door, she had disappeared around the corner. I looked after her, puzzled. Well. Perhaps she thought I wasn’t coming back to school yet.

I hoisted my Ranzen onto my back, called goodbye to my mother, and stepped out into the cobbled street, closing the door behind me. It was still not quite light, and the sky was leaden. Tiny flakes of snow whirled through the air and my breath came out in little puffs. The few people who passed me pulled their coats tight about themselves, wincing against the cold.

As I reached the school gate I looked at my watch. It was twelve minutes past eight; the bell would ring in three minutes exactly. I hurried inside, took the stairs to the first floor two at a time, and shrugged the Ranzen off my shoulders. As I hung my coat on a peg, I looked up and saw the sharp-boned face of Daniella Brandt peering around the doorframe of the classroom, a second before it whisked back inside like a rat vanishing into its hole.

I stood there by my peg for a moment, wondering whether it was just my imagination, or could I hear a sudden outbreak of excited whispers from the classroom?

“Frau Koch says her grandmother really did explode!”

“Went off like a bomb-”

“Burnt to a cinder-”

“They could only tell who it was by her teeth, my Tante Silvia says.”

Suddenly I didn’t want to go in. A chilling premonition broke over me. It would be no use screaming now; Frau Eichen would never stand for it and, furthermore, against a class of twenty-two ten-year-olds it would be worse than useless-it would only serve to make me an even more irresistible target of curiosity.

Nobody cared about Oma Kristel, about the way she had tried to keep herself attractive long after Youth had packed its bags and moved out of the aging tenement, about the way she always had some little gift for me, a sample bottle of unsuitable scent or a brooch made of sparkly paste. Her love of cherry liqueur.