Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone: A Novel Page 3

  We set fire to home and barn. Helga’s husband—having admitted his guilt by staying home—was struck down with an axe and dragged back into the house, where his remains were buried under falling beams and collapsing walls. The whole village watched and cheered the fire and helped a neighbor when flames from Helga’s barn began licking his own.

  After the pangs and the hissing had finally died down though, an eerie silence fell over the village. Our tongues were still black, but our rage had subsided. We stood around the still smoldering house like children, embarrassed, silent, but ready to attack anyone who would point a finger. The boys and girls of the village had screamed so much they had lost their voices and were now searching the ashes for little treasures. Anke and Linde stood to one side. They had pulled a badly singed hat with a colorful bow and a necklace with a green stone from Helga’s house, and their white dresses were soiled and their braids hung limply at their sides.

  That night Frick, against his custom, served a second round of free beer, and more bloodshed was avoided, even though many swore that next year it would be Heidrun’s turn. Even when Jens Jensen claimed that Frick poured water into the beer, people answered with nothing but laughter.

  The only person in Hemmersmoor who was not satisfied with Thanksgiving was my mother. No winner had been declared in the Butterkuchen contest, and the jurors, after acknowledging that their black tongues were in no shape to come to a sound judgment, refused to award first prize.

  My dad welcomed the outcome. He was fond of pastries and did not want any misgivings between him and the baker. My mother, though, was not to be consoled.

  When Anke and Linde asked me the following afternoon if I would come home with them to play, I answered in a loud voice, so Alex and the other boys could hear me, “I don’t play with girls. I’m not stupid.”

  * German Thanksgiving is celebrated in late September or early October.

  Christian

  In the fall of Helga Vierksen’s death, I was seven years old. She and her five children were clubbed to death in our village square, and their remains—what was left of them—were buried in a small lot in the cemetery outside the village. The cemetery was a windy affair, square and barren, and sometimes a few of us would approach it cautiously at night and watch little flames scurry over the graves.

  That fall I should have been in school, but my parents had pleaded with the authorities, and it was agreed that I was to be given a year’s reprieve. I wasn’t allowed to be present during the talks, and I can’t imagine what they hoped might change me during that one year. I had a lot of time on my hands, since Alex and Martin, my two loyal friends, were now learning math and reading and geography.

  Just outside of Hemmersmoor stood Brümmer’s tool factory. For reasons unknown, a huge window, not unlike a shop window, had been set into the wall just left of the office entrance. The factory had nothing to offer the villagers, nor did the villagers come to the factory to shop. About twenty men worked inside the cream-colored building, and none of them could say why the window had been inserted or who’d come up with the idea in the first place.

  Even stranger was the setup of the window. It was impossible to peer into the office because on the inside a kind of alcove had been built, and a set of doors shut out our gazes from what lay beyond that alcove.

  The sides, top, and bottom of the alcove were angled, lending a false perspective to the display, as though you were looking through a short tunnel or doorway. The most astonishing thing, however, lived inside the window. Otto Nubis, the foreman at Brümmer’s, displayed his marionettes there, three or four at a time. This was not a gaudy display. The wooden people on the other side of the glass were not beautiful, their clothes shabby and discolored, their faces rough, serious, and more intimidating than the pictures of tortured saints in our church. They had a strange effect on my young mind: I feared them and yet couldn’t keep myself from returning time and again.

  The monotony of my days was interrupted during only two months. In March and October, in a sandy lot next to Frick’s Inn, a small carnival set up its tents. We dreamt of Astro Blasters, the Galactic Loop, and the House of Primal Fear, but we were treated to shabby carousels and shooting stands where the BB guns were rusty and the barrels bent. Nobody ever won one of the five giant bears that dangled above those willing to pay.

  While Alex and Martin were at school, I watched the carnies set up their tents. I knew the candy vendors and the mirrored maze, and I strolled past the groups of men and women who had fewer teeth and fingers than even the poorest peat cutters in Hemmersmoor.

  One attraction I didn’t recognize. The red-and-white tent stood in back of the ship swings, and I saw a lanky man who looked old, but not in the way my parents did, standing in front, attaching a sign. “Ricos Reise Durch Die Hölle,” it read: “Rico’s Journey Through Hell.” I stood and gaped.

  “What’s that?” I finally asked.

  The man turned to face me. He wore a suit made from rough brown material, and his white shirt stood open at the neck. His skin was tough and wrinkled. He had a strong nose, a high forehead, and a chin with a deep cleft. Most impressive, though, were his eyes. They were watery and of such a light gray they seemed white. What could such eyes see? I wondered, and took two steps back.

  “Who’s asking?” the man said.

  “I am,” I said stubbornly.

  The man, who I thought had to be Rico, laughed. “Do you have a name?”

  “Christian Bobinski. Is that you?” I pointed to his sign. “What can I see in hell?”

  “You can’t wait, can you?” Rico said. “But hell isn’t interested in you. You have to be eighteen to see my marvels.”

  “Rubbish,” I said. “I’m old enough.”

  Rico laughed again. “Come tonight after midnight. If you do, and if you do me a favor, I will take you through hell.”

  Even at seven I knew that hell wasn’t supposed to travel in a tent, and yet I couldn’t find any rest throughout the day. I tied a tin can to my cat Melchior’s tail and watched him take off in terror into the woods behind our garden. When my sister Ingrid, who was ten and in fourth grade, came home in the afternoon, I slipped a frog into her dress, and my parents promptly sent me to my room and locked the door. My eldest sister, Nicole, slid a note under my door. It read, “I hope they’ve thrown away the key.”

  Hell. What did Rico have to show me? I climbed through my window, jumped into the lime tree, and dropped to the ground. I had to find Alex and Martin.

  They were at Alex’s house. The teacher had told them to collect colorful leaves and dry them between sheets of blotting paper inserted into the pages of large and heavy books. Now they were trying the method on lizards and blindworms.

  “Hell?” Martin asked. He was wiry and the tallest of us. His cropped hair and eyebrows were very red, his face full of freckles. He was the son of the Gendarm. “And he’ll let you in?”

  “If I do him a favor,” I said.

  Alex’s lizard was still squirming, the tail twitching inside the Brockhaus Encyclopedia, volume A–D. Alex was Mr. Frick’s son, and he was sturdily built and his eyebrows were bushy and growing together above his nose. His older brother, Olaf, should have inherited the inn, but he had no mind for working behind the bar and entertaining customers, and had moved out with his young wife. He was now working in Brümmer’s tool factory.

  Alex didn’t concern himself with the family feud. He immediately moved into his brother’s room. “What a fool,” he said, whenever the grown-ups mentioned Olaf, and each and every time he did his father slapped his face. But the inn was his small kingdom. He knew how to get us food whenever we felt hungry. He’d stolen liquor from his father too.

  “Is he the devil?” Alex asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. It didn’t seem likely, yet his eyes had fascinated me. I had to get a pair of them.

  At midnight I met my friends behind Frick’s Inn. It was a Friday night, and the noise inside the pub would co
ntinue until the last drunk had been thrown out. There wasn’t any rumor, any gossip that escaped Alex. Whatever secret the people of Hemmersmoor thought safe, alcohol finally dug it up and shouted it out, and in time Alex told Martin and me.

  “It’s the most amazing thing he’s ever seen,” he told us, about Jens Jensen, the peat cutter, who loved his Bommerlunder and who’d confessed many times to having sex with witches on the moor. “He saw the damned and their tortured souls, he says, and he says it could scare the devil himself.”

  The carnival had closed at midnight, and we were safe from the gazes of adults. Only the carnies were still milling around the tents, and they didn’t look at us twice. What did they care about Hemmersmoor’s children?

  Rico’s Journey Through Hell seemed to be deserted, the entrance locked, but after my third shout, Rico appeared from the darkness and smiled. “I didn’t say you should bring them.” He pointed at my friends. “Are you scared?” he asked me.

  “I’m not scared,” I said. “I want to see the souls.”

  “Of course you do,” he answered. “But first you have to earn your journey through hell.”

  “How?” Alex said.

  “Not you,” Rico said. “Only this one here.”

  “That’s not fair,” Alex said. “I want to see hell too.”

  “You don’t have anything I want,” Rico told him. His eyes opened wider, their white color as sharp as steel. Alex shrank back.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  Rico was tall, taller than my dad, taller than Jens Jensen. He was also thinner than anyone in Hemmersmoor. He still wore his brown suit, and I thought I could hear his bones clatter under the rough cloth.

  “That’s between the two of us,” he said.

  “We want to know,” Martin insisted.

  Rico looked at him for a second, and then, with a graceful bow, pulled off his right shoe. Alex and Martin ran. They abandoned me in front of Rico’s Journey Through Hell. The air now smelled of sulfur, and Rico’s eyes quieted down. He put his shoe back on, to conceal his hoof.

  “You’re not running?” he said.

  “I want to see hell.”

  “I’ll promise I’ll show you. But first bring me the soul of your sister.”

  “How do I do that?”

  Rico stooped and put a glass vial in my hand. “You steal into your sister’s room and sit down on her bed. You say the words I’m going to tell you, and when her soul appears on her lips, you catch it for me.” He pressed his lips to my ear and whispered the nine words it took to call the soul.

  “Why didn’t you want the souls of Alex’s and Martin’s sisters?” I asked before we parted.

  “They are coarse. Their souls don’t give any light. Your sister, now, she’s different. Your sister’s soul will shine.”

  “Young one,” he called me back.

  “Yes?”

  “You have to do it tomorrow night. We’ll meet here, and you shall see hell.”

  I feigned sickness the next day and stayed undisturbed in my room. In the afternoon Alex came to visit me. “What did he want?” he asked. He was ashamed of running off the night before. I could see it. But his curiosity was stronger.

  “Where is Martin?” I asked him.

  “He’s at Anke’s house. He plays with her and Linde’s dolls,” he sneered. “What a coward. He’s a girl himself.” He sneered once again. “So, what did Rico want?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Do you have to sell your soul?” Alex asked.

  “No.”

  “He is the devil, isn’t he?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “I knew it. I knew it. This morning Old Frieda found two of her roosters dead. They had turned black, inside and out, and she said it was a sign.”

  “Of course,” I said again.

  “And Jens Jensen was found in a ditch, unconscious, and he claimed he’d fought with the devil, who’d come to take him.”

  “Of course,” I repeated.

  “They’re trying to shut Rico’s tent down, but some say they won’t take it up with the devil. They say they won’t touch him.”

  “They won’t,” I said.

  They didn’t. Rico’s tent stayed open, and everyone went to see hell’s wonders. As for me, I waited until Ingrid had gone to bed. At eleven I stood by her side. Cautiously I leaned over her face and listened to her breathing. Her eyelids fluttered from time to time, but she remained silent. I took my mother’s empty laundry bag and pulled it slowly over Ingrid’s face. Then I felt for her nose, pinched it shut and put my hand over her mouth. Ingrid awoke with a start and froze for a moment. Then she thrashed about. Her legs kicked out, her fingers tore into my face and scratched my cheeks. Ingrid pulled my hair and punched my nose. She twisted and turned, and I sat down on her chest and wouldn’t let her escape. Her body jerked a few times, then her fingers fell away and she lay motionless in her bed. I pulled the bag, which was made from oilskin, off her face and tied it carefully shut. Whatever it was Rico wanted from me, I had caught it in this bag.

  My sister’s eyes stood open, but they remained without expression, dark, and without the faintest shimmer. I put an ear over her mouth, smoothed out her hair, and pulled the comforter over her body. But her right leg stuck out from underneath, and her foot seemed icy and green like spoiled milk. I took her big toe between my lips and sucked on it. Then I also stuffed her other toes into my mouth. I stuck my head under the comforter and under Ingrid’s nightgown. I lay on top of her body, as though I could warm her, put my head on her breast and kissed her neck. Nothing seemed enough.

  When it was time to leave, I stuffed the laundry bag under my jacket and hurried out of the room. Then I climbed once again through my window and into the garden, full of fear that I might lose Ingrid’s soul.

  Rico awaited me behind his tent. “Yes, you have come back. I knew,” he said.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “You caught it,” he said, but it sounded like a question.

  “Of course.” I patted my pants’ pocket, in which I carried the empty vial. “Now show me everything.”

  “I want to see it,” he demanded.

  “Later,” I said.

  He nodded, but couldn’t take his eyes off me. Then he shook his head and pushed open the entrance.

  The walls were covered with paintings of the different chambers of hell. In one you could see sinners being stripped of their colorful clothes and pushed into vats of hot oil. Another picture showed naked sinners being cut open by hordes of devils and being hung from sharp hooks and roasted above great fires.

  “Are you scared?” Rico asked.

  “No,” I said. “Show me.”

  He led me to several shelves of vials just like the one he had given me to capture Ingrid’s soul. They shone faintly in the relative dark of the tent. “These I keep before I toss them into my eternal flames,” Rico whispered hoarsely.

  “What else have you got?” I asked.

  Rico led me to a heap of bones, the remains of sinners who had died in hell’s fires. The bones were charred, blackened.

  “What else?”

  He took me into the farthest corner of his tent. “Here,” he said. “You can look directly into hell.” He pulled the large black cloth off a barrel and had me look inside. “It sits right above hell’s entrance,” Rico said. “Hell’s entrance is in Hemmersmoor.”

  Fog and steam rose from the barrel, and as soon as I pushed my face over its opening, I could hear voices coming from deep below. The voices were mourning, lamenting their deaths, screaming in agony. “That’s hell,” Rico said. “Now you’ve seen it.”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “I kept my promise,” he said. He flipped a switch and hell stopped moaning. No more steam rose from the barrel. The glass vials on the shelves stopped flickering.

  “I kept mine.” I pulled the glass vial out of my pocket and handed it to him.

  He stared at it intently. �
�It’s empty,” he said. “Didn’t you use the nine words I gave you?” His voice was coarse.

  “Of course not.” I unbuttoned my jacket and handed him the laundry bag. “Words are not enough.”

  His hands started to shake when he took the bag from me. “What is this?” he asked. Slowly he began to untie it.

  The sky was hung with stars, the air, after Rico’s sulfuric tent, dewy and calming. Fall had retained a hint of warmth, and I walked home at a leisurely pace and without any disturbance. Shouting and angry voices came from Frick’s Inn, not unlike the noise that had emanated from Rico’s hell.

  I climbed up the lime tree and jumped onto my windowsill. The house was quiet, my parents asleep. My bed was damp and cold to the touch.

  They found Ingrid early the next morning, when they tried to wake her for church and couldn’t. For the rest of the day, our house was filled with visitors, mourners, and relatives. I was put in a black suit and wasn’t allowed to leave the house or attend the funeral the following week.

  Linde

  I cannot remember my father’s hands without dirt under his nails. He was a small, wiry man with a shiny scalp that he protected with a handkerchief in the summer. My parents’ marriage was not happy, largely because he never made much money from keeping the grounds at the von Kamphoffs’ manor. Our house was a rickety one-story affair with hardly enough yard space for a few flowers.

  “At least they could have put you up at the Big House,” my mother, Therese, said so often that my dad and I would finish that sentence aloud for her. This, I see now, could have been a moment of harmony, one in which he could have acknowledged his shortcomings as a provider, and she her futile aspirations. They could have laughed at themselves. Yet my mom’s face grew so hard at our antics that the lightest touch would have caused it to crack and fall away. It was the end of any conversation, any meal, any warmth.

  Of my earliest trips to the Big House, I remember next to nothing, but after I turned four I spent every summer with my father, and every morning I ran along the hedges and bushes and inhaled the strangely heavy scent of the still-closed blossoms. Even though I wasn’t technically allowed to wander the grounds, the von Kamphoffs liked my father well enough not to say a word. They knew that no one else would have done so much work for so little.