The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

The smile vanished in a twitch. “Why?” She exhaled heavily through her nostrils. “Pia, this isn’t easy, you know. Do you have to keep picking me up on everything I say?” She glared at me, and then her face relaxed again into a defeated expression. “If we’re going to be on our own, I need to be near the family. My family.”

“We’ve got lots of family here,” I pointed out. “Onkel Thomas and Tante Britta and-”

“They’re Papa’s family.”

“But…” My voice trailed off. I was not sure how to put into words the feeling I suddenly had that the family was splitting into two halves, like medieval armies arranging themselves at either end of a battlefield. My mother seemed to be telling me that I had to be on one particular side, the one flying the English flag, but she might as well have told me I was fighting for Outer Mongolia.

“I could stay here with Papa,” I said with a sudden flash of inspiration.

“Pia, you can’t-”

“Oh, yes, I can.” I could feel my mouth thinning into a hard line.

“You can’t.” My mother’s voice was harsh. The ugly truth was coming out: like a hare breaking cover it streaked across the landscape of my mind. My mother had done with Mauselein and getting to know the English side of yourself. “You have to come to England, Pia. End of story. I’m sorry.” She didn’t sound sorry, she sounded furious. “That’s just the way it is.”

I stared at the words on the crumpled page before me. “A VISIT TO ENGLAND.” A hot feeling was welling up inside me. It felt like dough in a pan, rising and rising until it burst out over the top. My face, my shoulders, my fingers were rigid, but I could not stop the scalding tears from leaking out of my eyes. A drop fell onto the page, blurring the letters ENG. I could not prevent it now; a sob like a roar was breaking out of me. My mother tried to put her arms around me, but I fought my way out of her embrace, arms flailing. The exercise book ripped and fell to the floor, leaving me with half a page in my fist.

“Pia-”

“I hate you!” I shouted at the top of my voice, the words scouring my throat. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”

“Pia, calm down, Schatzchen, it’s going to be all right, it will be all right, you’ll see…”

My mother’s voice was now gentle and reassuring, but even through my rage I was aware that she was just trying to soothe me. She was not saying, All right, we won’t go to England, we’ll stay here. She was just trying to get me to calm down sufficiently to accept the unpalatable truth, just the same as a person might try to calm an animal down before administering an unpleasant medical treatment.

I broke away from her and actually ran to the door. She followed me to the threshold, still offering broken blandishments, but I was determined not to hear, and when I ran up the stairs she did not try to follow me. I went into my room, locked the door and put my bedside chair up against it as an extra barricade, and then I threw myself on the bed and howled like a baby.

Chapter Forty

Much later my father came up and knocked. At first I didn’t answer, but when he spoke and I knew it was him, I got up and opened the door.

“Can I come in?” he asked. I nodded. He came into the room, dragged the chair out from behind the door, and sat down heavily on it. I sat on the bed and looked at him, through eyes that felt like puffy slits from crying.

“Ach, Pia.” My father sounded tired. “I’m so sorry.”

I trembled. “Papa, we’re not really going to England, are we?”

He sighed. “Doch. I wish I could tell you otherwise.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“And I don’t want you to go, Schatzchen.”

“Then can’t I stay here-with you?”

“I don’t think so.” My father’s words were uncertain but they had the ring of doom in them.

“Why not?”

“It’s not settled yet, but your mother wants you to go with her.”

“She can’t make me.”

“Well, maybe she can’t, but the courts can. She wants-Pia, do you know what custody is?”

I shook my head.

“It means that one of the parents is allowed to take the children with them… after a divorce.”

“A divorce?”

My father nodded; he did not need to explain that one.

“Why…?” I began, but I couldn’t get any further than that. The question wouldn’t shape itself.

“It’s grown-ups’ stuff,” said my father sadly. He opened his arms and I got to my feet and went to be hugged. The feel of the hardness of his shoulder through his shirt as I laid my head on it was somehow reassuring. I sniffed noisily into the thick fabric.

“Papa, Charles and Chloe laugh at me.”

My father said nothing, but his arms tightened around me.

“And I don’t want to go to school in England.” I ground my forehead into his shoulder. “And I hate English food, even Oma Warner’s.”

I felt my father’s shoulders heaving and for a moment I wondered what I had said that was so funny. Then I pulled back and looked at his face. And that was only the second time in my life that I had seen my father cry; the first was when Oma Kristel died.

Chapter Forty-one

After that, the house took on the appearance of a vast military camp in the process of packing up and moving on, my mother playing the grim general who strode about among the crates and boxes, overseeing everything. We were not actually to move until the new year; a family with school-age children cannot be transferred from one country to another in a day or two, and furthermore my mother had agreed to stay in Germany for Christmas.

“That much she has agreed,” said my father dolefully.

At school, the news that Pia Kolvenbach was moving to England and that her parents were divorcing had circulated with lightning speed. Suddenly I was no longer ostracized for being the Potentially Exploding Girl, but the new attention was worse. I could tell that the girls who sidled up to me and asked with faux-sympathetic smiles whether it was true were doing it on the basis of discussions they had heard between their own parents, to whom they would report back like scouts. Soon there would be nothing left of me at all, nothing real: I would be a walking piece of gossip, alternatively tragic and appalling and, worst of all, a poor thing.

“Why’s your mother doing it?” Stefan asked me one morning. We were the last to leave the classroom after a hefty session of algebra. The winter sunlight streaking through the windows was white and cold. “Has she got someone else?”

I looked at him stupidly for a moment, momentarily wondering what he meant; did he mean my mother had got other children?

“Someone else?”

“You know,” said Stefan offhandedly. “Another man.”

“No,” I said emphatically, although I had never even considered the idea up until that moment. “Well, why’s she