The following morning dawned gray and uninviting. I looked out at the damp street, the cobblestones gleaming wetly, and my heart sank. Sunday seemed to stretch out before me like some uncrossable wasteland; Monday was a million years away, and I was going to spend every one of them shut indoors with no one but Sebastian to play with.
I looked into the living room, but my father was in there, reading a newspaper. He said nothing, but the slight raising of his eyebrows signaled that I was surplus to requirements, so I shut the door. Then I hung about on the staircase for a while, swinging on the newel post and scuffing my feet on the stairs. My mother, hearing these irritating noises, stuck her head around the kitchen door to remonstrate with me, but before she had time to fire off a remark, there was a loud knock at the front door.
Stefan! was my first thought as I sprang down from the stairs and headed for the door; the second was the surprising realization that I was actually looking forward to seeing him-to seeing StinkStefan.
“Pia, your hair-” began my mother in an irritated voice; she also made for the door, but I was too quick for her. I pulled down the heavy handle and swung it open.
The smile died on my face. It was not Stefan.
“Oh,” was all I could find to say as I stood there in my scruffy jeans with my unbrushed hair hanging around my face in tangled hanks.
“Guten Morgen, Frau Kessel,” said my mother, with more presence of mind; she elbowed her way past me, wiping her hands on a tea towel, and held out her hand, which Frau Kessel shook, somewhat gingerly.
“Guten Morgen, Frau Kolvenbach,” replied Frau Kessel with aplomb. She was a small woman in her seventies, comfortably compact, with a bosom almost as intimidating as Oma Kristel’s had been. She always dressed very neatly, but in a slightly old-fashioned style; today she was wearing a moss-green wool suit with a large and ugly Edelweiss brooch pinned to the front of it. She had a mass of pure white hair that had become as thin and gauzy as cotton candy; she habitually wore it piled on top of her head. Today it had been back-combed and stacked up so high that she had rather a Marie-Antoinette effect.
Underneath this improbable confection beamed her chubby face, with its twin flash of well-polished spectacles and expensive false teeth. She looked like an adorable old Oma; in fact she was the most vicious gossip in the whole of Bad Münstereifel.
“Won’t you come in, Frau Kessel?” said my mother, not betraying the effort it must have cost her to utter those fateful words. My mother could have cleaned and scrubbed for a week, and presented two charming children with neatly brushed hair and matching outfits (me in a dress, of course), and still Frau Kessel’s beady old eyes would have found something to complain about to the next person she visited.
“Thank you,” said Frau Kessel, stepping carefully into the house, looking around her with avid-eyed interest.
“Please, do come into the living room,” said my mother in a bright voice, and opened the door. My father got to his feet, folding the newspaper he had been reading, and extended his hand.
“I didn’t see you in church this morning, Wolfgang,” was the first thing Frau Kessel said to him once the greetings were out of the way. She spoke in an arch tone.
“No,” answered my father, refusing to be drawn; Frau Kessel knew perfectly well that my father went to church only when absolutely necessary-for family weddings and funerals, for example-and that my mother being Protestant, evangelisch as it is called in Germany, she was not likely to see the rest of us in Sts. Chrysostom and Daria at all.
Still, she was never one to pass up an opportunity to needle someone; she kept the hundred-candle power smile going for half a minute as the silence stretched out between them, before finally conceding defeat and saying, “I do so miss seeing dear Kristel there every week.”
“Yes,” said my father, and sighed.
“Would you like some coffee, Frau Kessel?” interposed my mother, before the old woman could advance further on the topic of Oma Kristel’s churchgoing habits. “Freshly ground coffee,” she added, seeing Frau Kessel hesitate.
“Thank you, I will,” said Frau Kessel with the gracious air of one granting a favor.
She took the seat my father offered her, and settled herself in it with some care, like an elderly hen preparing to lay.
My mother departed for the kitchen, still smiling tautly-she couldn’t stand Frau Kessel-and my father and I looked at the old lady expectantly. We were under no illusion that this was a purely social visit. Frau Kessel had come over because she had Something to Say.
“Nun, it has been an exciting week for the town, don’t you think, Wolfgang?” was her opening sally. I looked at my father, puzzled. What was so exciting? My father also looked blank. Frau Kessel looked from my father to me, and then back to my father again. Her eyebrows lifted a little, and she cocked her head to one side, as though considering; could it really be that we were the only people in Bad Münstereifel not to have heard?
“An exciting week?” repeated my father eventually. There was something inevitable about conversation with Frau Kessel; she would throw out the bait, and then wait until the victim couldn’t bear not to bite. Now she sat back in her armchair, as though to express astonishment, folding her hands together in her green woolen lap.
“Where there’s smoke, there’s also fire,” she said in a voice loaded with meaning.
“Did something catch fire?” I asked.
“No, Schätzchen,” said Frau Kessel, giving me a soulful oh-you-poor-child look.
“Then why-” I began, but she cut me off.
“I really think you can’t have heard,” she announced in tones of artificially heightened surprise; her eyebrows were now so far up her forehead that they looked as though they might scurry into the towering thicket of white hair. She looked at my father reproachfully. “Of course, if you had been in church this morning, you would have heard Pfarrer Arnold mentioning it.”
She put up a hand and patted her hair. “That is to say,” she went on, “he didn’t mention it directly, but we all knew what he was referring to, and there were those who thought that it was in rather doubtful taste to be launching straight into a sermon of forgiveness.” She sniffed. “I mean, it isn’t as though they’ve found the child, is it?”
Frau Kessel, whose confidences were always labyrinthine, had now lost me completely. I looked at my father again; he appeared mystified too.
“Found the child?” repeated my father ponderously.
“Doch, the little Linden girl.”
My father considered for a moment, then gave in. “Frau Kessel, what are you trying to tell us?”
Frau Kessel looked slightly affronted. “About Herr Düster, natürlich.”
“What about Herr Düster?” asked my father patiently.
“Why, they’ve arrested him,” said Frau Kessel with relish. “Yesterday morning, at eight.”
“They’ve arrested him?”
Frau Kessel made a little moue of impatience; she was clearly tired of my father repeating everything she said, and wanted to get to the meat.
“Yes, they came yesterday morning and took him away in a police car.” Frau Kessel spread out one hand and studied her immaculately manicured fingernails, as cool as the expert witness in a murder trial.
“Did you see it?” I asked with interest.
“Not personally,” said Frau Kessel, in tones that implied this fact was of no consequence; she had her spies everywhere. “Hilde-that is to say, Frau Koch-saw it, with her own eyes. She was watering her flowers at the time.”
Frau Koch was Thilo Koch’s grandmother, and almost as toxic a personality as her grandson. Of course, the flower watering was a pleasantry; Hilde Koch was very likely up at dawn spying on her neighbors, and at the first sign of anything as interesting as a police car she would have been out of doors with all sensors on red alert.
“What happened?” asked my father.
“Well,” said Frau Kessel, “Hilde said that they came at eight o’clock, two of them, in a police car. She thinks they came early in order not to be seen. Of course,” she continued conspiratorially, “not everyone would feel happy about living next door to someone who… well, you know. So perhaps it was as well. She said she knew Herr Düster was at home; he’d already been out once, to take the paper in or something. When they knocked, he opened up straightaway, and they all went inside. They were in there for quite a time; Hilde said she had watered all the flowers twice before they came out again, but she couldn’t go inside; she said she was transfixed.
“Anyway, eventually they came out and Herr Düster got into the back of the police car and off they drove; Hilde said he was sitting there as rigid as a figure on a meerschaum pipe, didn’t show any sign of emotion at all. She said it made her feel quite ill.”
“Well,” said my father, at a loss for any other remark. Then he looked up thankfully; my mother was in the doorway, carrying a tray laden with coffee cups, a pot of coffee, and a stack of cookies, the standard offering to placate visiting demons. He rose to help her.
“It’s all right, I can manage,” she began when Frau Kessel’s voice rose above hers.
“I was just telling Wolfgang-Herr Düster has been arrested.”
“Really? What for?”
Frau Kessel flashed her glittering false teeth. “The little Linden girl-what else?”
My mother set down the tray on the coffee table, her face serious. “That’s terrible. Are you sure?”
Frau Kessel gave her a look that should by rights have curdled the cream in the milk jug. She hated her nuggets of gossip to be questioned. “Hilde Koch saw him being driven away by the police.” She accepted a cup of coffee with a large quantity of cream and spiked with two lumps of sugar. “Of course,” she added, after taking a cautious sip, “it did not come as a surprise to those of us who have lived in the town as long as I have.”
A wrinkled hand embossed all over with rings hovered for a moment over the cookies, and then retreated without selecting one.
“Once you have seen Evil in Action, you never forget it.” You could hear the capital letters in that portentous voice; Frau Kessel’s delivery was nothing if not dramatic.
I reflected that if she wanted to see Evil in Action she had only to look in the mirror every morning, but wisely I kept this to myself.
“Well, he is a little-er-unfriendly,” suggested my mother cautiously.
“Unfriendly!” Frau Kessel was outraged at this understatement. Then she collected herself, leaned forward, and patted my mother on the knee.
“Of course, you could not be expected to know.”
She managed to make the remark sound insulting; my mother could not be expected to know anything because she was a foreigner, probably with a comically poor grasp of German. Seeing my mother heating up for a tart retort, my father stepped in and rescued her.
“I don’t know either, Frau Kessel.”
“Ach, Wolfgang!” Frau Kessel shook her head. “And when Kristel was so close to poor Heinrich-Heinrich Schiller, I mean. We always thought it was so charming that she took Pia to visit him-since he lost his own daughter, of course.” She heaved a theatrical sigh, and then, perhaps noticing that her whole audience was still looking unsatisfactorily bewildered, she decided to put her cards on the table. “We all knew Herr Düster was responsible.”
“You mean for…?” began my father, his brows furrowed.
“For taking Gertrud,” finished Frau Kessel. She shook her head. “I don’t know why he wasn’t put away then. That poor little thing-no older than Pia, and such a beautiful child. Poor Heinrich was never the same afterward-and how should he be? With Herr Düster living a few meters away, and nobody doing anything about it.”
“That’s a terrible accusation.” My mother sounded shocked.
Frau Kessel shot her a narrow glance; had she overreached?
“I’m not making an accusation,” she retorted, tossing her head. “I’m repeating what is common knowledge in the town. Ask anyone.”
“How did they know it was him?” I asked.
Frau Kessel looked suddenly uncomfortable, as though she had only just remembered that I was there. She reached out one of her jewelencrusted claws and would have patted me on the head like a small dog if I had not ducked out of her way.
“Never mind, Schätzchen,” she told me. “Just remember that you should never, ever go anywhere with a stranger.”
I remembered something. “But isn’t Herr Düster Herr Schiller’s brother? Then he wasn’t a stranger, was he? He was her uncle. It’s OK to go with someone if they’re your family.”
“Doch,” said Frau Kessel curtly, irritated at being contradicted. “But how poor Heinrich came to have a brother like that, I cannot imagine.” She sniffed. “No wonder he changed his name.”
So it was Herr Schiller who had changed his name? I was opening my mouth to ask another question when my mother cut me off. “I don’t think this is a suitable topic for Pia,” she said firmly. Before I could protest, she said, “Can you go into the kitchen and make sure Sebastian is all right, please, Pia?”
I slouched off reluctantly to find that Sebastian had got into one of the food cupboards and torn open a packet of asparagus soup; he was now sitting in the middle of a little snowdrift of the stuff, drawing squiggles in it with a wet finger, which he occasionally inserted into his mouth. By the time I had extricated him I could hear my mother talking to Frau Kessel in the hall, and then the front door closed firmly behind the old woman.
“Thank God for that,” said my mother with a sigh. I was disappointed, however. There was so much more I would have liked to ask Frau Kessel, but now she had sailed off like a little ship laden with Pandora’s boxes of other people’s secrets. My mother saw me looking wistfully at the door.
“Pia,” she said sternly, “I don’t want to hear you repeating any of that to anyone, understand?”
“Why not?”
“Because we don’t know if any of it is true.”
“Do you think Frau Kessel was lying?” I asked doubtfully.
“Not exactly,” said my mother, and I had to be content with that.