Helen Grant: The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

Five minutes later, Stefan and I were contentedly enthroned on the long bench behind the kitchen table, our mouths ringed with chocolate. For the time being, Katharina Linden was forgotten.

It was fully dark when my father finally came home. He was still in his Scarecrow outfit, although his brown face paint was all smeared, as though he had been wiping the back of his hand across his face like a little child. As he stood stamping his feet on the doormat, my mother came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a tea towel.

“And?” was all she said.

My father shook his head. “Not a sign of her anywhere.” He bent to unlace his shoes, breathing heavily. When he straightened up, he said, “Someone thought they saw her up near the Orchheimer Tor, but it was another child in a similar costume. Dieter Linden’s still out looking, but I don’t think he’ll find much now it’s dark.”

I was listening to this from the kitchen table, where I was working my way through my supper: gray bread, a slice of cheese, and a smear of Leberwurst . My father’s choice of words struck me as odd even at this stage: he didn’t think Herr Linden would find much , as though he were not looking for a person but a thing, or worse, pieces of a thing.

“I wonder what-” my mother began, then glanced back into the kitchen to where I was sitting and hastily added, “I expect she’s gone home with one of her friends and forgotten to call her mother.” Then she and my father went through into the living room and closed the door.

Their voices resumed, but at such a low level that I couldn’t have made sense of any of it unless I had pressed my ear to the door, which would have been far too risky. I looked down at my piece of Leberwurst- coated bread, with a neat semicircle bitten out of it in the shape of my teeth. I wondered whether Katharina Linden really was at a friend’s house. If not, where was she? It didn’t make sense. People don’t just disappear , I thought.

The next morning being Rosenmontag, there was no school. My parents had half promised to take Sebastian and me to another parade some kilometers away, but when I got up at half past nine it was to discover that my father had already gone out. My mother was in the living room, dusting the furniture with a grim expression. I didn’t need to ask whether our excursion was off. My mother was attacking the cleaning with the zeal of someone gritting their teeth and undergoing some particularly unpleasant therapy.

“Where’s Papa?” I asked.

“Out,” said my mother tersely. She straightened up, rubbing the small of her back. “He’s gone to help someone with something.”

“Oh.” I wondered whether he was going to look for Katharina Linden again. “I think I might go around to Stefan’s after breakfast and see if he can come out. Is that OK?”

My mother paused for a moment. “How about you stay here today, Pia?”

“But, Mama…” I was dismayed.

“Pia, I really think it would be best if you stayed home.” My mother sounded weary but firm. “If you can’t think of anything to do, you can help me with the cleaning.”

“I’ve got homework,” I informed her hastily, and beat a retreat to the kitchen before she could rope me into anything.

The day dragged by horribly slowly. I wondered what Stefan was up to. Was he outdoors somewhere, or had his parents also imposed a curfew on him? I wondered if it had anything to do with the Katharina Linden thing that seemed to be sending all the adults temporarily weird.

At five o’clock, when it was dark, my father came home and almost instantly disappeared into the living room again with my mother. They were in there for about half an hour, after which my father went upstairs for a shower and my mother came looking for me, with a serious expression on her face. I recognized this as her here-comes-a-little-talk look. I was sitting on the living-room floor with a magazine; she came in, sat down carefully on the sofa, and patted the cushion next to her. With an inward sigh, I got up and went to sit next to her.

“What?” I said.

“Don’t say ‘what?’” said my mother automatically.

“Sorry,” I said, equally automatically; it was an exchange we had had a thousand times. “Is it about Katharina Linden?” I asked immediately.

My mother cocked her head on one side. “Yes. I’m telling you about this because you’re bound to hear about it when you get back to school,” she began.

“They haven’t found her, have they?” I said.

“Well, no, they haven’t, not yet,” said my mother, laying emphasis on the last word as though to imply perfect confidence that Katharina would be found at any moment. “But I hope they will find her, very soon.” She sighed. “There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. Perhaps she went home with a friend and didn’t tell anyone.”

She stayed overnight and still didn’t tell anyone? I thought skeptically.

“All the same,” my mother was going on, “we should all be just a little… careful for a while. We don’t really know what’s happened.” She reached out and rubbed my arm almost absently. “I’m sorry we even need to have this conversation,” she said. “But you never know… Pia, you must promise me not to go anywhere with anyone without telling me first. You remember that book you had in the second grade?”

“Ich kenn dich nicht, ich geh nicht mit,” I quoted, then looked a little askance at my mother. “Do you think someone’s taken Katharina, then, like in the book?”

“I hope not,” said my mother. She seemed momentarily at a loss how to proceed. “Just be careful,” she said at last. “And if you see anything odd, Pia, you come and tell me or Papa, understand?”

“Hmmm,” I said noncommittally. I was not sure what she meant by odd . “Sebastian’s crying,” I pointed out, tuning in to a muffled wailing from upstairs.

My mother got to her feet. “All right, I’ll go and see to him. Just remember, won’t you?”

“Yes, Mama.” I watched her leave the room and start up the staircase. I didn’t move from the sofa, but sat there swinging my legs against the front of it and thinking over what she had said. Anything odd .

Now that I’m older, I can see what my mother meant by odd . Adults think something is odd if it doesn’t fit the normal routine. The person who puts down a package on a railway platform and walks away from it. The car that’s still behind the lone woman driver even when she’s made four or five turns and maybe even doubled back on herself. Things that don’t fit the usual pattern. Danger signs.

But to me, when I was ten, odd , or the word my mother actually used, seltsam , which means “odd, peculiar, strange, weird,” could signify a great many less tangible things. It could mean, for example, the deserted locked-up house by the Werkbrücke, which the schoolchildren always scurried past at top speed, deliciously afraid of seeing some unspeakable face pressed against the dusty window glass.

It seemed to me-if not to the adults-that Katharina Linden’s disappearance could be attributed to some supernatural agency. How otherwise could she have been spirited away from under the very noses of her family, in broad daylight too, in a town where everyone knew everyone else? I did not know-I did not know yet , I told myself, for I was determined to find out-who or what it was that had taken Katharina. Still I was now convinced, correctly as it turned out, that she would never be seen alive again.