The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

approach to Christmas. That year, the year when Katharina Linden and Marion Voss vanished from the streets of the town, it was a cold St. Martin’s.

My mother dressed us in layers and layers of warm clothing: sweaters, down jackets, thermal boots, scarves, and mittens. I had a pink fluffy hat with a bobble on the top and Sebastian had a little navy-blue fleece hat with earflaps. We looked like a pair of fat gnomes. All the same, it was necessary; during the short walk to the Klosterplatz we could feel the biting cold on any centimeter of exposed skin. Even through the thick insulation of my mittens, the cold was seeping into the hand that held the lantern.

As a grown-up Gymnasium pupil, I would normally have dispensed with a lantern as being seriously uncool, but at the last minute my mother had bought me one and I hadn’t the heart to refuse it. It was a round yellow sun face made of crimped paper. Sebastian had a much grander lantern, constructed by my mother along with the other parents at his playgroup. It was a green caterpillar with pink and purple spots, made of tissue paper on a skeleton of black cardboard. The caterpillar had an insane leer on its face because my mother had cut the pink mouth out as a wiggly line. She said it was “a blow against uniformity;” my mother never could stand the German fad for sitting in a group and all making exactly the same item. In fact she hated arts and crafts. Sebastian should probably have been grateful that my mother had made a lantern for him at all, considering the agonies she had to go through to do it.

When we got to the Klosterplatz it was already full of people milling around, stamping their feet and blowing on their hands. The fire brigade was there as usual, the firemen hanging around the gleaming fire engine parked at one side, and doing their best to look nonchalant. An enormous bonfire had been built in the middle of the square. It would be lit by the firemen when the procession was under way around the town, so that it would be burning merrily when we all got back.

As well as the firemen, there was an unusually high number of policemen. Normally Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf and perhaps one of the other local policemen would be in attendance, just in case anything went awry, like the time Thilo Koch’s brother Jorg set off a fire alarm and the firemen had to abandon their posts by the bonfire and dash off to the rescue. This year, however, the police seemed to have dragged every spare officer from here to Euskirchen into the town for the evening, including the granite-faced one from outside. They were being discreet, but they were everywhere.

I noticed Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf talking quietly to one of the schoolteachers who was supervising the Grundschule children. All the teachers and the police officers had a grim look to their faces, as though about to undertake a military maneuver; only the children were as unconcerned as usual, waving their glowing lanterns about and jumping up and down with excitement. I saw Frau Eichen, who was now in charge of a new class of first-graders, counting her charges, her finger stabbing through the air as she did so. She counted them once, and two minutes later she was counting them again.

Now the penny dropped. The adults were all so twitchy because they were afraid something might happen again, like it had at Karneval. Nobody wanted to be the one who was in charge of a child who vanished.

“Is anyone from your class here?” my mother asked suddenly. I guessed she was wondering whether things were going any better in the new school than they had in the previous one. Dutifully, I scanned the square for familiar faces.

“No,” I said. It was a relief in a way; Stefan was the only one who would have spoken to me, and I knew he wasn’t coming.

“There’s someone waving,” said my mother, pointing. She sounded pleased. I followed her gaze. It was Lena Schmitz from the fourth grade, the year that had been below mine in the Grundschule. The Schmitzes lived only a few doors away from us and Lena’s mother worked in the hairdresser’s where my mother periodically had her gray roots covered, so we knew each other slightly. I waved back enthusiastically, conscious of my parents’ eyes on me.

It was almost time for the procession to begin. The local brass band, resplendent in hunter-green uniforms and peaked caps, was assembling at the corner, hoisting trombones and trumpets and horns, which glittered in the light of the lanterns and torches. Someone tried out the opening notes of one of the songs, a song so familiar that the words formed themselves inside my head as I listened: Sankt Martin, Sankt Martin, Sankt Martin ritt durch Schnee und Wind… It finished with a squeak that sent a ripple of laughter through the crowd.

Someone from the town council had climbed the steps at the side of the square and was talking inaudibly into a bullhorn. Then we heard a clatter of hooves on the cobblestones and St. Martin rode into the square.

Of course, all the spectators except the very youngest knew that St. Martin was really someone from the town, dressed up in a red velvet cloak and Roman helmet; in fact my parents even knew the family who lent the horse. But there was always something magical about St. Martin; he was real in a way that St. Nikolaus and the Easter Bunny weren’t. For one thing, he was undeniably solid, and so was the horse: if you followed too closely behind it you had to look where you stepped.

As we watched, St. Martin wheeled the horse around and began to ride slowly out of the south side of the square, the crimson cloak undulating on the horse’s hindquarters as it moved, the torchlight making the great golden helmet glitter. The band fell in behind him, and struck up with the first bars of “Ich gehe mit meiner Laterne,” the signal for the schoolchildren to follow. As the rest of us surged forward, I could see Frau Eichen counting the children again.

“Can I go on ahead?” I asked my mother hopefully, seeing that she was making woefully slow progress with Sebastian in his buggy. I was afraid we would be stuck right at the back, where we could hardly hear the band, and we would be last back into the square to see the bonfire.

She shook her head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Pia.” I didn’t bother to ask why.

“I’ll go with her,” said my father, turning up his collar. He looked at me sternly. “And stay where I can see you, Pia. No running off.”

“Yes, Papa.”

I fell into step beside him; with his long legs we made good progress, and were soon pushing our way further up the procession. First it wound up the Heisterbacher Strasse and past our front door, then it followed the line of the medieval defensive walls west toward the great gate, the Orchheimer Tor. I looked about me at the excited faces, the flickering torches and glowing lanterns, and the ancient stones of the walls, interspersed with arrow slits. We could have been back in the Middle Ages, on our way to a coronation-or a witch-burning.

Trotting along beside my father, I found that we were overtaking the fourth-grade children, who were swarming along with their three teachers running around them distractedly like sheepdogs. I picked out Lena Schmitz from the sea of faces. At the same moment she saw me. “Hallo” was all she said, but it was enough. It was such a relief to be treated even with that courtesy after nearly a year of being the class pariah. I slowed my pace a little to keep level with her.

“Hallo, can I see your lantern?”

She showed it to me. It was made of papier mache, and I think it was supposed to be an apple, but somewhere along the way it had been dented or crushed. Now it looked more like a plum tomato.

“Schon,” I said anyway.

She peered at my lantern. “My mother bought it,” I said hastily. “Oh. What has your brother got?”

“A caterpillar.”

Up ahead, the band had finished “Ich gehe mit meiner Laterne” and started on “Sankt Martin, Sankt Martin.” Dutifully, I glanced behind me to check that my father was still there, and then I fell into step with Lena’s class. The procession was reaching the little intersection where King Zwentibold stood atop his fountain, now drained for winter in case the pipes froze and cracked.

“Do you like it at the new school?” asked Lena, who would be moving up herself next year.

“It’s great,” I lied. Actually, the school was all right; it was the past that kept hanging around me like a bad smell, but I didn’t want to raise that with Lena. “Are you coming to Sankt Michael next year?”

“Probably Sankt Angela.”

“Oh.”

We passed out of the town walls through the Werther Tor and back in again by the Protestant church, its starkly modern design strident against the traditional form of the buildings that flanked it. A couple of minutes and we would be back in the Klosterplatz, warming ourselves around the bonfire and watching St. Martin reenact his good deed with the beggarman.