Walking up the Orchheimer Strasse I felt as though every eye in the street must be upon me. I dared not think what would happen if we ran into anyone we knew-such as Frau Kessel, for example. What a field day she would have if she found out the pair of us were playing truant.
“This is a crap idea,” I hissed under my breath.
“Stop worrying,” said Stefan. He smiled beatifically at a passerby. “Guten Morgen.” He sounded disarmingly polite and as innocent as a lamb.
Herr Düster’s house was almost opposite Hilde Koch’s. There was no sign of the old lady, but still I felt uncomfortable, as though the small windows of her house concealed piggish little eyes that were watching our every move. Even the drooping remains of flowers in the window boxes seemed to be craning forward to listen.
“Look.” Stefan nudged me in the ribs, then gave a low whistle of wonderment.
Someone had indeed broken one of Herr Düster’s front windows; it had been hastily boarded up with what looked like a piece of white Formica. Never the tidiest house in the street, now it looked positively disreputable, like an old seaman with a dirty patch over one eye.
Stefan wandered over to the house, with me following, trying desperately to restrain the urge to shoot furtive glances around me.
The cellar trapdoor was more or less as I remembered it: two small doors that had once been painted crimson but were now the color of dried blood. There was a small metal handle on each; fastening them together was a heavy padlock. Looking at it, I felt relief.
“We’ll never get that open.”
Stefan squatted on the cobblestones and fingered the padlock. “We won’t have to.” He hooked a finger under one of the metal handles and pulled. “Look.” The handle was coming away from the door, flakes of rust crumbling off it.
“Stefan!”
“Shhhh…” He got to his feet, brushing the brown flakes from his fingers. I opened my mouth to tell him exactly how crazy I thought he was, but before I managed to get a single word out, someone interrupted me.
“Pia Kolvenbach.”
For a moment I really felt as though my knees would buckle under me.
“Frau Kessel.”
I turned with a horrible sensation of inevitability and found myself staring at a familiar Edelweiss brooch of quite stunning ugliness pinned firmly to a brown woolen bosom. With reluctance I raised my eyes to Frau Kessel’s face. Under the towering confection of white hair, the twin lenses of her glasses flashed as she tilted back her head, the better to look down her nose at me.
“What are you doing?” She regarded me with distaste, but the glance she shot Stefan was pure poison. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”
It was Stefan who saved us both from a fate worse than death, namely, being hauled back to the school in public by Frau Kessel, probably by the ears.
“We’re doing a project.”
Frau Kessel swiveled toward him with the oiled precision of a machine-gun post rotating to face its target.
“Indeed. Didn’t your mother teach you any manners, young man?” When Stefan looked at her blankly, she added tartly, “I have a name.”
“We’re doing a project… Frau Kessel,” said Stefan with a sangfroid that took my breath away. How he could remain unmoved under that basilisk glare was beyond me. He flourished a slim ring binder that he had managed by some sleight of hand to remove from his schoolbag. “Old buildings in Bad Münstereifel.” Frau Kessel looked as though she might take the binder from him, but he was too quick for her; it had already disappeared back into his bag.
“And what precisely does this project have to do with this house?” demanded Frau Kessel, nodding toward Herr Düster’s house; I had the impression she avoided saying Herr Düster’s house on purpose, the same way she would have avoided greeting him by name.
“We have to write down the words on the front,” said Stefan without missing a beat.
Automatically we all looked upward. Sure enough there was an inscription carved into one of the horizontal timbers, though it had weathered badly; all that could be read now were the words In Gottes Namen: in God’s name.
“Hmmph,” said Frau Kessel disapprovingly. She eyed us suspiciously over her spectacles. “Couldn’t you have found a better example?”
“They’ve already been done,” said Stefan.
“Is that so?” said Frau Kessel. She sniffed. “I don’t believe anyone has written down the inscription on my house. I am sure,” she added, “that I would have noticed if any young people had been hanging around outside.”
“Your house has one too?” asked Stefan in tones of intense interest. I shot him an evil glance: Don’t go overboard, or the old Schrulle will make us go and look at it. It was too late.
“Of course it has. I’m surprised you didn’t know, especially if you are supposed to be doing a project about it,” Frau Kessel informed him. She patted her monstrous coiffure. “It is considered significant, I believe.”
“Fascinating,” said Stefan in such an enthusiastic voice that even Frau Kessel was suspicious; her eyes narrowed. “No, really,” he went on earnestly. “I would love to see it.”
“Hmmm.” Frau Kessel eyed us both doubtfully. “Well,” she said eventually in a grudging voice, “I suppose you can come and look at it. But you can make yourselves useful and carry these.” She handed us each a bulging cloth bag.
“Yes, Frau Kessel,” we chorused obediently. I adjusted my grip on Frau Kessel’s shopping bag, as ever apparently stuffed to the brim with bricks and lumps of iron. She wheeled about and set off up the street with the pair of us trotting behind her.
“Stefan-” I hissed under my breath.
“Yes?” he answered from the side of his mouth, without turning to look at me.
“What are you doing?”
He kept his eyes fixed on Frau Kessel’s brown woolen back. “I want to find out what she knows.”
“What, you think she did it?”
“No, Dummkopf. But she knows every single thing that happens in this street.”
“You’re nuts.” I shook my head.
With relief we dumped Frau Kessel’s shopping bags on her doorstep. She unlocked the door and carried the bags inside; for a moment I thought she was going to shut the door on us and Stefan’s efforts would be wasted, but her vanity got the better of her. She could not resist coming back outside again to point out the most interesting features of her house. We duly admired the inscription, which simply read, God protect this house from evil. Evidently a previous inhabitant of the building had shared Frau Kessel’s obsession with Evil in Action.
“Well?” said Frau Kessel, hands on hips. We gaped at her. “Aren’t you going to write it down?” Dutifully we pulled out pens and notebooks and copied down the words. I hoped Frau Kessel would not notice that I was writing across the top of my English homework.
“Hmm,” she said grudgingly, “it’s nice to see the school encouraging an interest in local history for once.” She sniffed. “There are few enough people around here who take an interest in their own town.”
“Yes, Frau Weiss-she’s one of our teachers-she says a lot of important stuff is being forgotten,” said Stefan. “She says once the old people of the town have died, it will all be lost forever.”
I observed signs of an internal struggle on Frau Kessel’s face at this point; the desire to prove that she, too, was a repository of invaluable information about the town was fighting with the reluctance to be styled one of the old people of the town.
If Stefan noticed this, he gave no visible sign of it, but went on innocently: “We’re going to interview some of them if we can. Frau Koch, well, everyone says she knows everything about the town.”
“Do they?” said Frau Kessel grimly.
We both nodded enthusiastically as though our heads were on springs.
“Hilde Koch may look old,” said Frau Kessel severely, “but it may surprise you to know that she is actually seven months younger than I am. I am sure there is nothing she could tell you about the town that I couldn’t.”
“We didn’t think of that,” said Stefan. “We thought you were a lot younger than that.”
I shot him a sideways glance: Don’t overdo it. Surely even Frau Kessel wouldn’t swallow a blatant piece of flattery like that? But she did.
“Well,” she said, favoring Stefan with a grisly smile, “the years have been kind.”
Privately I wondered what she would have looked like had they been unkind, but I stifled the thought before it could creep into my expression.
“Of course, I can’t spare more than half an hour,” she went on. “And don’t think I won’t be watching you every second you’re in my house.”
“Of course, Frau Kessel,” said Stefan politely.
“We promise not to touch anything,” I added.
Frau Kessel regarded me with disfavor. “I should think not, Pia Kolvenbach.” She turned on her heel, and we trooped after her into the house.
Frau Kessel’s kitchen proved to be just as intimidatingly tidy as it had the first time I had been inside it. Stefan and I sat together on one side of her table, pens dutifully poised to take down whatever pronouncements she cared to make: these poured forth in such abundance that I could barely record a third of what she told us.
She began with the history of her house, which as far as I could see was almost phenomenally boring. It had never been inhabited by the town alchemist, it had never had treasure hidden in it during the French invasion or been burned down during any of the wars that had touched the town during its long history. Ghosts sensibly chose somewhere else to haunt. It had experienced a brief moment of excitement in the 1920s when Frau Kessel’s Great-Aunt Martha’s pet dog had fallen in the well in the cellar and drowned, but disappointingly the well had been capped in the 1940s when running water was installed.
“What about the other houses in the street?” asked Stefan, which earned him a disapproving look; Frau Kessel hated to be interrupted once she was in full flow.
“The wells in those were capped too,” she said shortly.
“No, I don’t mean about the wells. Can you tell us anything about the people?” asked Stefan. “How about the house we were looking at before?”
“Which house?” said Frau Kessel sharply. Stefan glanced at me. “Herr Düster’s house.”
There was a pause that stretched out uncomfortably while I looked up at the crucifix hanging over the countertop, at the brown wallpaper, out the tiny window, anywhere in fact but at Frau Kessel.
“What do you want to know?” said Frau Kessel. Her voice was hard.
“Well…” Now that he had the opportunity, Stefan seemed lost for words. “How long has he lived… I mean… has the same person been in it…”
“Since before the war, yes.”
Stefan looked down at the scrawl on his notebook as though consulting a list of interview questions. “And did anyone else live in it…?” I think Stefan meant, Who lived in it before Herr Düster? but Frau Kessel replied, “No, he’s always lived on his own. No family.” She laid a curious emphasis on these last words, as though they explained everything.
Stefan said nothing; he seemed uncertain how to proceed. I guessed he had assumed that once we were sitting cozily around Frau Kessel’s kitchen table she would let fly with a torrent of local gossip, out of which deluge we would pick some critical nuggets of information, like miners panning for gold. Instead the conversation seemed to be grinding to a halt. Frau Kessel looked at each of our faces in turn, her eyes bird-bright behind her spectacles, her arms folded ominously across her brown woolen bosom.
“Suppose you show me that file,” she said eventually.
“Which file?” said Stefan.
“The one with your school project in it.”
Instinctively Stefan clutched the top of his schoolbag, holding it closed. “Umm… it’s not finished.”
“I know it’s not finished,” said Frau Kessel acidly. “Nevertheless, give it to me, please.”
For a moment I almost thought Stefan might reach into his bag and extract a ring binder full of notes about the old buildings in Bad Münstereifel; up until now he had seemed so confident, so in control, that I could imagine him having prepared the whole thing as backup. Instead he just sat there gaping at her.
“I thought so,” said Frau Kessel. She leaned toward us like an ancient eagle craning forward on its perch. “There is no project, is there?” Her voice was steely. “I may seem old to you, but I’m not stupid. What did you think you were going to get out of me?”
“Nothing,” stammered Stefan. “I mean… we just wanted to ask you some things, that’s all.”
“About my house?”
“Well…”
“I don’t think so.” The lenses of Frau Kessel’s glasses glittered; I could not see her eyes behind them. “You wanted to know about Herr Düster, didn’t you?”
Reluctantly, Stefan nodded.
“Well, I’ll tell you all I know about him.” Frau Kessel squeezed her bony hands together, as though crushing something between her palms. “But first I want to know something. I want to know why you were trying to break into his house.”