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.
“So what happened?”
I looked away, searching for a friendly face in the milling crowd of schoolchildren. Where was Stefan? He should be here. I risked a look back at the boy’s face; he was still looking at me, waiting to hear what I would say; you could see the avid spark of prurient interest behind those heavy features like a tea light burning in a jack-o’-lantern. I threw caution to the winds.
“It was a hand grenade.”
“A what?”
“A hand grenade.” Now I had recovered my courage. Um Gottes Willen, I thought; it couldn’t make things any worse, whatever I said. “My Opa kept it from the war.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.” I warmed to my theme. “He kept it in a box under the bed. When he died, Oma Kristel started carrying it around with her as-as a reminder of him.”
“Unbelievable,” said the boy incredulously. He looked as though he were about to start dribbling with excitement. The cigarette was burning down unnoticed in his fingers. “How did it go off?”
“Well…” I thought about it for a moment. “It was in her handbag. She always carried it around in there. She put her hand in to get her keys out, and instead of the key ring she put her finger in the ring on the hand grenade, and pulled the pin out.” I put my head on one side. “And then it went off. Boom! Just like that.”
“Scheisse.” I had succeeded in impressing a teenager. “Was there anything left of her?”
“Only her shoes and her left hand. That’s how they could tell who it was afterward, by her rings.”
“How could…” He shook his head. “That’s incredible. Wasn’t anyone else hurt?”
“My cousin Michel had his nose blown off.” How I wished that were true. “They had to make him a new one in the hospital.” I put a hand gently to my lips as though feeling the words as they came out, checking them for truth. “It looks as good as new, you wouldn’t know.”
“Did they find the nose?”
I shook my head. “A cat ate it.”
There was a long silence. The boy looked down at me, and I up at him. He flicked the long column of gray ash from the cigarette, took a last deep drag, and then dropped the butt on the ground, where he extinguished it under the sole of one grubby sneaker.
“Du bist pervers,” he said at last: you’re sick. He turned and shambled off, leaving me standing there alone, with the sound of the school bell ringing in my ears.
That was my first day at the big school.