The next day was Saturday, generally the bakery’s busiest day, when tourists mingled with the regular customers. Normally my parents let me sleep in on Saturdays. My father could never understand why I would prefer to lie in bed when I could be up and about in the bakery, inhaling the heady perfumes of yeast and rye flour, but my mother said I was a growing girl and needed the sleep, although I was now a couple of centimetres taller than she was. When she said this, I had the uncanniest feeling that she was still thinking of me as the child I had once been, that she had not really looked at me for years. Not, perhaps, since my sister, Magdalena, had left.
On that particular Saturday, however, I had to be in the bakery by eight thirty in the morning. One of the regular Saturday staff had telephoned to say that she was sick and couldn’t come in, and I was to stand in. As I dressed in the green dirndl and frilly white blouse that served as a waitress’s uniform, I sent up a silent prayer that Kai von Jülich would not come into the bakery that morning. It was unlikely, since he and his friends probably had something considerably more exciting to do than sit alongside the town’s senior citizens and eat apple strudel to the strains of ‘Edelweiss’ (instrumental version). All the same, it would be doubly humiliating to be seen working while he was undoubtedly playing, and I was looking distinctly waxen from the effects of the Kleiner Feigling.
Our flat occupied the floor above the bakery. At eight thirty-five I let myself out of the flat’s front door, went downstairs and found myself in the narrow passage leading to the seating area. It was a very plain corridor, windowless and unadorned by pictures. It reminded me of the stark backstage area in a theatre. Step through the door and you would find yourself in a place quite as flamboyant as a stage set, with enough potted plants for an entire production of The Jungle Book and canned folk music drifting through the air like some kind of poison gas, sickly sweet and stupefying. Generally I hated the moment when I stepped into the cafe and into the clutches of the dozen or so old harridans who would inevitably be sitting there, lips pursed and chins up, because their morning coffee and slices of cream gateau hadn’t reached the table within two nanoseconds of their placing an order. Today, however, I would have been pleased if I had been able to go straight into the cafe, even if it had meant coming face to face with an entire coachload of superannuated Klara Klein fans, all screaming for a cooked breakfast at the tops of their creaky old voices. It was not to be, however; someone was blocking the way. With a sinking feeling, I recognized the beefy figure of Achim Zimmer.
Achim, my father’s assistant, was dressed in his baker’s whites and was lounging against the wall in an attitude of contrived carelessness. He had a cigarette in one large pink hand and a plastic lighter in the other.
I hated Achim’s hands. He had the delicate fair skin of the natural redhead, easily sunburnt or chapped by the wind. On some people this might have had a porcelain beauty, but Achim was too solid for that. There was nothing ethereal about him; he was Hercules executed in Meissen porcelain. In summer he reminded me of a boiled lobster, with his reddened skin and pale eyes. But it wasn’t the repulsiveness of their appearance that made me dislike Achim’s hands. It was the fact that they wandered wherever they liked.
Achim had clearly left the kitchen on the pretext of taking a break to smoke, but there was no sign he intended to go outside. I wondered whether he had known that I would be working this morning and that I would be coming down at this time. Whether he had waited for me on purpose. He looked up as the flat door closed behind me and gave me a jovial nod. I saw him slide the lighter into his pocket; the cigarette also vanished somewhere inside the baker’s jacket. The two big, waxy-looking hands moved and I saw that he was actually rubbing them together, which only enhanced the impression of an evil troll gloating over his next victim.
I wondered whether I could concoct some excuse to go back into the flat, but a glance at my watch showed that I was already late. I hesitated as usual, and as usual I was lost.
‘Guten Morgen, Steffi,’ Achim said in an over-familiar tone. He had an insinuating expectant air about him, managing to convey without words the conviction that it was I who had planned this meeting and not he.
‘Morgen,’ I muttered.
I looked longingly past him at the door to the cafe. There was only one way to get there and Achim was standing right in the middle of it.
‘Won’t you say, “Morgen, Achim”?’ he asked me, with a nauseating attempt at a beseeching expression.
I said nothing. If Hanna had been in my place, I knew she would have said something which would have taken that leer off his face. But I stood there, dumb and paralysed as always, every word which came to mind as useless as a coin on the tongue of the dead.
‘I didn’t hear anything,’ said Achim.
I bit my lip. Was he ever going to drop it? I eyed the space between Achim and the wall, estimating my chances of slipping past him without further annoyance. Achim was about thirty, but he had the belly of a man ten years older, pregnant with beer and Wurst. It slowed him down, but it also made him a formidable obstacle.
I made myself speak up. ‘I have to go to work.’
‘I’m not stopping you,’ said Achim, but he didn’t move a centimetre.
The passage was so narrow that to be a real gentleman and let me pass entirely freely he would have had to flatten himself against the wall like a gunman in an action movie. Of course there was no question of that. Between that straining belly and the wall there was so little clearance that I fully expected I would be squeezed through the gap like a lump of dough going through the rollers of a pastry machine.
I thought about trying to push past Achim and the inevitable necessity of coming into actual contact with him. I also thought about my mother, waiting impatiently behind the counter, and of my father leaning out of the kitchen with his brown hair turned salt-and-pepper by the dusting of flour in it, wanting to know where the devil Steffi had got to.
‘Dad’s calling you,’ I said as loudly as I could.
Achim gave me an unpleasant smile. ‘No, he isn’t.’
I took a deep breath. ‘Dad?’ I called at the top of my voice. ‘Did you want Achim?’
The smile melted into an ugly sneer, but Achim took the point. Before my father had time to come out of the kitchen, Achim opened the connecting door himself and lumbered inside, not without giving me a backward glance which clearly telegraphed, I’ll see you later.
I slipped through the door into the cafe, vowing that I would come downstairs with my mother every day from now on. As the door swung shut behind me I did my best to look calm, smoothing down my apron and trying to breathe deeply and slowly.
‘What’s the matter with you? And where have you been all this time?’ said my mother, who was passing with a tray laden with coffee cups and dirty plates. She paused for a moment, regarding me with her lips slightly pursed. I guessed that I was looking pink in the face and dishevelled, whereas she had not a single blonde curl out of place.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘The coffee machine is playing up again,’ added my mother. ‘God knows we could do with a new one. I need you downstairs on time, Steffi. I can’t do everything myself.’ She shook her head. ‘Frau Lanzerath on table six wants another hot chocolate with cream and a Nuss-striezel. I know she normally has a Plunderteilchen,’ she added, as though I had been about to argue, ‘but not today.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
I went behind the counter and picked up a plate. Out of the corner of my eye I could see restless movement to the left, which meant that Frau Lanzerath was working herself up into a state of red-hot impatience. Still, it was not Frau Lanzerath and her irritating manners that preoccupied my mind as I slid the yearned-for Nuss-striezel on to the plate. It was Achim and his clammy hands.
It was a shame, I thought, that our attempt to wipe out Klara Klein by witchcraft was just a game, that it couldn’t possibly have any effect on real life. If it had been genuinely possible to strike someone down by leaving a note for Rote Gertrud, I wouldn’t have chosen Klara Klein for my victim at all. It would have been Achim.