The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

“Ner-errr…” They both flopped up and down in displays of simulated imbecility. “Fuck away!”

“No, you fuck away!”

“Scheisskopfe,” I told them; having reached the borders of my knowledge of English there was no option but to relapse into German. “Ich hasse euch beide, ihr seid total blod.”

“That’s German, is it?”

“Fuck away back to Germany, you… German.”

“You Kraut,” added Charles, dredging up a word he could only have learned from Uncle Mark. “Fuck off with the other Krauts.”

“Go back where you came from.”

“Gerne,” I told them. “England is Scheisse, Middlesex is Scheisse, und ihr beide seid auch Scheisse.”

“Kraut, she’s talking Kraut,” said Charles delightedly. “Hey, Chlo’, I can’t wait until she tries that at school.” He pulled a face. “Hey, Mrs. Vilson, I don’t vont to do zis homeverk.”

“God, she’s not going to be in my class,” said Chloe in disgust. “They’ll put her in Batty’s.” She glared at me. “With all the other dummies who can’t speak English.”

“Good, I am not going to your school,” I said disdainfully.

Chloe shrieked with malicious delight. “Oh, yes, you are.”

“No, I am not going.”

“Yes, you are.”

They looked at me expectantly. Then Charles elbowed his sister in the ribs. “She doesn’t know.”

“I don’t know what?” I demanded.

They both burst into laughter. “Look,” said Charles eventually, in the voice of someone speaking to the terminally stupid, “where do you think you are going to school?”

“Sankt Michael Gymnasium,” I answered suspiciously.

“And where’s that, then?”

“Bad Munstereifel.”

“You’re going to need a plane to get there,” Charles taunted me.

“I don’t understand,” I said resentfully.

“You want me to spell it out, dummy?” asked Chloe, hands on her almost nonexistent hips. “You’re coming to live in England.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head.

“Yes, yes, yes,” chanted Charles.

“Quatsch,” I told him.

“Quack? What’s that?”

“German for ‘duck,’” supplied Chloe. They guffawed at me. I stood there in silence and looked at them. “I am not living in England.”

“Oh, yes, you are. Hasn’t Aunt Kate told you yet?”

Impulsively, I turned on my heel. “I will ask Oma Warner.” I started up the garden path toward the house. Behind my back I heard Chloe and Charles hissing at each other. “Idiot-she doesn’t know.”

“Mum didn’t say not to tell. Anyway, you started it.”

“Stop her. Mum’ll go mad.”

“You stop her.”

By the time they had finished arguing and started after me, I had reached the back door. They piled into the house after me, and were so close on my heels that when I pushed open the living-room door the three of us almost fell into the room.

“Oma Warner,” I blurted out, “I don’t want to live in England.”

Aunt Liz and Oma Warner turned startled faces toward me. Aunt Liz put her cup down on its saucer with a rattle and looked furiously toward Chloe and Charles.

“Chloe? Charles?” There was a silence. “What have you been saying to Pia?”

“Nothing,” said Chloe quickly.

I glared at her mutinously. “She says I am going to school in England, not in the Sankt Michael Gymnasium.”

“Oh, Chloe.” Aunt Liz made a sound like a long sigh. She looked at Oma Warner and rolled her eyes. “Where do they pick these things up? I haven’t discussed it in front of them, not even with Mark.”

“Little pitchers have big ears,” said Oma Warner grimly.

“It’s not true,” I said. It was a question, not a statement. Oma Warner looked at Aunt Liz.

“Chloe and Charles shouldn’t have said anything to you, Pia,” said Aunt Liz eventually in the soulful listen-to- me-little-girl tone that I sometimes heard from my mother when she had something serious to impart. “Your mother and I were really just discussing what it would be like if you ever did come back to England to live. You know, the idea. Maybe your family won’t always want to stay in Germany. People move, you know.”

I pursed my lips and shook my head as emphatically as I could.

“Bad Munstereifel is very pretty, but it’s just a small town, you know, and besides…” Her voice trailed off.

“Yes, Aunt Liz?” I said. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Oma Warner shaking her head. Aunt Liz saw it too and a frown flitted across her face.

“There are other nice places to live,” she finished.

“Not like Bad Munstereifel,” I said.

Chapter Twenty-seven

I flew back to Germany a few days before the autumn term at my new school started, my English much improved and my bags laden with British delicacies that Oma Warner had insisted on packing for my mother- unpalatably strong tea and pots of gravy powder. My head was still full of the twitterings of Aunt Liz, who had impressed upon me not to say anything about moving to England to anyone; she had not actually come out and forbidden me, but she had gone on and on in such a wheedling tone that I had got the message. Somehow it did not make me feel any better. If it was just an idea, why the secrecy? But soon I had other problems to deal with, more immediate ones.

“Are you Pia Kolvenbach?”

I turned around and found myself looking at the front of a battered black leather cycle jacket; looking up, I saw a face upon which the adult features were already sketched: the big jaw, the heavy-lipped mouth, the beginnings of stubble. I didn’t know him, but he looked old enough to be in the upper end of the school, maybe the Abitur year. A faded gray backpack was slung over one shoulder by a fraying strap. A cigarette-strictly forbidden in the school yard-dangled from thick fingers.

“Sorry?”

“Are you the Kolvenbach kid?”

I looked at him dumbly, and he shook his head impatiently.

“You deaf?”

“No.” I shook my head.

“Well, are you?” He flicked ash from the cigarette onto the ground between us. “Are you Pia Kolvenbach?”

“Yes.”

“The one whose grandmother exploded?”

“She didn’t-” I started, then stopped short. What was the use? If I said she had just burned herself by accident, or if I said she had spontaneously combusted, or even gone off like a Roman candle in a shower of multicolored sparks, what was the difference? I stood still and silent and waited for the inevitable.