“Oh, God,” was my mother’s encouraging remark. She shooed me out of the kitchen and back into the living room, where I discovered Michel eating the last of the chocolates that St. Nicholas had brought me on December 6. The ensuing rumpus lasted until dinner was ready, and my mother emerged from the kitchen with a harried expression to tell us that we could take our places at the table. She regarded Michel’s red face, blotchy with crying, and her upper lip tightened again, but she said nothing. Discretion is the better part of valor; she went back into the kitchen and finished carving the goose.
The moment my mother announced that dinner would be imminently on the table, everyone rushed to the bathroom, Oma Kristel included. Managing without a last-minute cosmetic repair job was simply not an option with Oma Kristel, whose one overriding vice was vanity. None of us had ever seen Oma Kristel without makeup, or with her hair au naturel; the latter was always set and sprayed into a sort of glistening silver helmet.
Today the hairdo had wilted slightly because Oma Kristel had been into the kitchen several times to dispense advice about the making of glazed peaches to go with the roast. She therefore took an enormous can of hairspray like some sort of torpedo into the bathroom with her, as well as her bulging bag filled with expensive lipsticks and industrial-strength wrinkle removers.
Oma Kristel looked good that day, as my father, Wolfgang, and his brother Thomas lugubriously agreed at the funeral. Always careful with her diet, she had retained an elegant figure right into her old age, with slim legs encased in sheer stockings and fashionable little black leather shoes with high insteps and pointy toes. She wore a skirt of some velvety black material, unsuitably tight and undeniably chic, and a shocking pink mohair sweater cinched at the waist with a thin black belt. To her bosom, which still had a jutting appearance reminiscent of a wartime pinup, she had attached a large diamante brooch like a medal pinned to a uniform. I like to think that, as she took her final look at herself in the big bathroom mirror, she was satisfied with what she saw.
At any rate, she spent some time touching up her makeup, so that my mother was actually putting the plates on the table before Oma Kristel got to the hairspraying bit.
“Oma Kristel!” my mother called in a tentative voice, not liking to adopt too strident a tone toward her strong-minded mother-in-law.
“Mama!” bellowed Onkel Thomas, who was less sensitive on such topics, and who was no doubt looking forward to gorging himself on the goose and
Oma Kristel patted her hair into place, and then sprayed it with the dedication of a car mechanic giving a BMW a paint job. She managed to frost her bosom and shoulders with the stuff too, until the pink mohair was glistening with tiny droplets and there was a fog of hairspray hanging over her. Then she put the can back into her bag and marched straight to the table.
The main lights were out and my father was standing ready with the box of matches poised to light the Advent crown. Oma Kristel just shot him a look that said “Who’s in charge here?” and stretched out her hand for the matches. She slid open the box, extracted a match, and struck it with a flourish.
The flame flared up in the gloom of the unlit room, a tiny golden beacon. For a moment Oma Kristel held it aloft, then the unthinkable happened. The match slipped out of her fingers and fell straight onto her pink mohair bosom. With a
For one ghastly and endless second there was silence, and then all hell broke loose. Tante Britta let out a full- blooded horror-film scream, pressing her hands to her face. There was a crash as my father floundered around in a tangle of chairs, trying to lay hands on something that would douse the flames. Onkel Thomas, struggling to take off his jacket to wrap around the blazing figure, was swearing mindlessly, his eyes round with horror. Both Michel and Simon were howling with terror. I think I was in the same state myself; for days afterward my throat was hoarse with screeching. My mother, who had just come through from the kitchen with the roast goose in her oven-gloved hands, dropped the whole thing on the quarry-tiled floor, where it exploded on impact.
Only Sebastian in his high chair remained unmoved by the whole thing, apparently under the impression that this was part of the normal Advent entertainment. The rest of us panicked. And then at last with a horrid finality Oma Kristel pitched forward onto the dinner table in an explosion of shattered wineglasses and broken crockery.
My father and Onkel Thomas finally sprang into action; my father upended a jug of mineral water over Oma Kristel’s smoking remains, and Onkel Thomas spread over the whole mess the jacket he had finally managed to remove. It was too late for Oma Kristel, however; she was
Chapter Three
I think that’s what attracted me to the story of Unshockable Hans, the intrepid miller who was supposed to have lived in the Eschweiler Tal, the valley to the north of the town. If you believed all the local legends, that valley had to be the most haunted place on earth-it was simply chock-full of ghosts-and Hans was the only one who dared live there. That-and his singular name-made Hans a far more real character to me than any of the local historical figures such as Abbot Markward, about whom we completed endless dreary projects at school.
The idea of a person who could face down witches and ghosts without turning a hair was inordinately attractive to someone who was dragging a lurid family history around with them like a ball and chain. Now that I am nearly old enough to be considered an adult myself, perhaps I could face the gossip and the teasing more easily; at ten, being the girl whose grandmother exploded felt like the worst thing in the world, and the loneliest.
Unshockable Hans wouldn’t turn a hair if every single member of my extended family had exploded, of that I was sure. I imagined him as a big, deep-chested man, dressed in the traditional woodsman’s jacket, leaf green with horn buttons. He would have a broad, pleasant face, a bushy beard with streaks of gray in it, and twinkling blue eyes. He would have heard the story of my grandmother’s demise, of course, like everyone else within a ten- kilometer radius. Still, he would greet me in a friendly but grave manner, not referring to the incendiary finale of my aged relative.
If anyone mentioned it, any of those old harridans who haunted the streets of the town like vampires looking for unprotected throats, he would simply look at me with those twinkling eyes, ruffle my hair, and say,
I didn’t go back to school on the Monday and Tuesday after Oma Kristel’s accident. The school didn’t bother to telephone when I failed to appear; Frau Muller, who worked in the school office, occupied the house opposite ours, and had been out in the street with her antennae twitching the moment the ambulance siren was heard.
As is usual in these situations, a classmate was delegated to bring the homework to me. Perhaps I should have smelled a rat when it was Thilo Koch who brought it on Monday, and Daniella Brandt on Tuesday. Neither of them were friends of mine.
Thilo was one of the oldest children in our class, having started school at seven; he was tall for his age, already carrying a large belly, and with savagely short hair and eyes sunk into the flesh of his chubby face like buttons on an overstuffed sofa cushion. Generally I kept away from Thilo, as you do from a bad-tempered animal.
Daniella Brandt was not as openly imposing as Thilo, but she could be just as dangerous in her way. She had a sharp-boned pale face and a thin, pointed nose like a beak, as though she wanted literally to peck at other people’s weak spots. Neither Thilo nor Daniella had ever shown the slightest inclination to do anything to help anyone else, nor were they the obvious choices for such an errand; Marla Frisch, who lived three houses down from us, would normally have dropped off my homework, as she did when I had chicken pox in the first grade.
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
