Free The Vanishing of Katharina Linden by Helen Grant Page A

in my room with a book I was not really reading and a cup of cocoa that went cold on the top of my bedside table, staring out the window at the dark and mourning the sure end of a friendship.

Chapter Thirteen

    T his town!” my mother was shouting. “This town! That’s what the problem is!”
    Sebastian and I, at the kitchen table, stared at each other and listened in silence to the argument. Sebastian’s eyes were round with astonishment. He was used to my mother’s occasional explosive outbursts of temper when they were directed at one of us children—when we had done something particularly annoying, such as the time Sebastian emptied a full pot of honey into the kettle to “make hot honey for Teddy.” To hear it directed at our father was quite different, and somehow chilling, like the first icy gust of wind that signals the end of summer. I looked at Sebastian and saw from his expression that his infant mind was also groping about, trying to imagine what Papa might have done that was so
böse
.
    “This bloody town!” added my mother in English for good measure. She regarded my father balefully, a formidable sight in her plasticized apron, a stainless-steel frying fork brandished in her right hand for emphasis.
    “Ach
, this again,” retorted my father in disgust. I marveled at his courage; my mother looked as though she might beat him around the head with the frying fork.
    “What do you mean,
this again?”
my mother demanded.
    My father regarded her stolidly. “Everything is better in England,” he said.
    “Well—” began my mother, but then obviously changed her mind, thinking that even for a raging Anglophile the riposte
Well, it
is
better
was overstating the case.
    After the briefest of pauses she went on, “I know it isn’t perfect”—in tones that implied she knew the exact opposite—“but at least where I grew up kids didn’t get spirited away off the streets while their parents were two meters away.” This exaggeration was typical of my mother, and always infuriated my father, who like many Germans was completely oblivious to irony. The exaggeration was not what caught my attention about her little speech, though; it was the word
weggezaubert
, which literally means to be made to
disappear by magic
.
    But before I had time to digest this notion, my mother was ranting on. “I don’t even want to let Pia out anymore. Wolfgang, when we moved here I thought we were at least doing the right thing for the children. A small town, everyone knows each other, countryside all around. Now it seems like we’re living in the middle of
A Nightmare on
bloody
Elm Street!”
She was back into English again, as she always was when she got really angry.
    “You can’t blame the town for that,” protested my father. “These things happen everywhere.”
    “Not everywhere,” snapped my mother. “And, anyway, this thing happened
here
, didn’t it? And haven’t you noticed what’s happening to Pia in your
friendly
little town?”
    My father swung his not inconsiderable bulk around and regarded me briefly. “What is happening to Pia?”
    “All her so-called friends are avoiding her. Well, all except Stefan Breuer, and he hasn’t exactly had an easy time here either, has he?”
    “That’s hardly surprising when his father is drunk on the streets at lunchtime,” retorted my father.
    “That’s what I mean!” rejoined my mother. “Always gossiping, and everyone judging everyone else.”
    “I am not judging, I am telling the truth,” said my father. “He
is
drunk at lunchtime. It is not gossip; I have seen him myself.”
    “Ooooh!” screeched my mother. “Why do you have to be so bloody
German?”
    My father regarded her expressionlessly. Then he said quietly, “And why do you have to be so bloody English?”
    For a moment they looked at each other in silence. Then my mother opened her mouth to say something, but what it was going to be I do not know because at that precise instant we heard