Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone: A Novel Read online

  “Of what?”

  “That he keeps watch over us, and that everything will be fine.”

  I handed back the picture and promised not to tell anyone about it. That same night, though, when my mother came to my room and wouldn’t stop asking me about the Madelungs, I broke that promise. Friedrich had seen his father’s ghost, I told her; my cheeks were glowing with excitement. My mother listened greedily. She sat close to me, stroking my hair and listening intently. When I had told her everything I knew, her fingers trembled, and as though she was trying to gain control of her feelings, she bit her hand until she was bleeding. “A gift,” she said with a hoarse voice. “What a gift.”

  “She thinks it’s a good sign.”

  “My mother stared at me with wide-open eyes. “Certainly. Yes, there’s no question.”

  That night the wind turned and rattled our windows, and when I looked outside the next morning, everything was buried under a fresh blanket of snow. Our truck refused to start, and when my father finally managed to bring the engine to life, the snow fell so heavily that we had to turn around after only a kilometer or two and head back home. As if the winter wanted to make up for lost time, it snowed without interruption for four days. The blossoms on the hedges froze and broke, the tree branches burst, and finally the canals froze over and Hemmersmoor ground to a halt.

  That first morning Jens Jensen, the old peat cutter, was lying drunk in a ditch, only his face and chest protruding from the snow. The children, who found him half-naked and half-frozen, threw snowballs at the slowly awakening man. “Where are my pants?” he asked in a rusty voice. “What have you done with them?”

  My mother sighed in relief—for her the snow was a godsend. My father had to stay home and couldn’t see Inge Madelung anymore. And every morning she waited for the mailman, stood by the window, and couldn’t quiet her hands. When, on the third day, he finally fought his way through the snowdrifts and told her that he’d been to the manor house and delivered a thick envelope from the authorities to the widow, she hugged him. “Has to be her pension,” he said and winked at her. “They must have declared her husband dead.” After he left us, my mother stood by the window and cried for a long time.

  That winter I understood very little of what was going on around me. I understood my mother’s sorrow and the fears and suspicions she harbored, but the visits from the neighbors’ wives and the mailman’s curious behavior I couldn’t explain. Something monstrous was happening under our roof, but I couldn’t make the various parts fit. Instead I wished I could have gone with Anke to Groß Ostensen. I wished we could have owned a larger house, one that looked more like the Hoffmanns’. I wished I could have seen the ghost of Friedrich’s father with my own eyes.

  When, two days before Epiphany, the roads were accessible once again, I drove with my father to the manor house one final time. To my surprise Inge didn’t greet us, and when I knocked on the Madelungs’ door, everything stayed quiet. Inge had not waited for the snow to melt. The old owner came to deliver the news. “She left us,” he said. Inge had packed the same suitcase with which she had arrived in Hemmersmoor. She had wrapped Friedrich in his thick coat and left for Hamburg. “I promised her a better room, but she didn’t want to listen. God knows what got into her.”

  When I told my mother, she hugged me fiercely, kissed my cheeks and forehead, and made my father’s favorite dish—pork roast with salt potatoes, carrots, and peas. Her steps were as light as a ballerina’s. And even if my father remained silent during the following days, slowly peace was restored in our house.

  Only in February did the weather break, and at the beginning of March the peat cutters were once again out on the canals. My mother had feared that Inge might return, but with every new day she gained more confidence. And even my dad, who for weeks had rarely said a word at the dinner table, smiled again when I showed him my homework or what I had painted in class. Inge Madelung had found a better home. She was able to start a new life. The women in our village didn’t miss her.

  It was a mild afternoon in April when we learned that Inge had never arrived in Hamburg. Peat cutters found her on their trek across the moor. The widow must have lost her way during the snowstorm, they said. Inge and Friedrich had died two kilometers from the road to Groß Ostensen. Klaus Schürholz found a letter from the Groß Ostensen authorities in Inge’s pocket. It was exactly as the mailman had said. The good news about receiving her pension, the Gendarm reported, had caused the widow’s death.

  “A tragedy,” the women in Meier’s bakery called it when my mother and I went shopping after school had let out. “She wouldn’t have had to pinch every penny anymore,” Mrs. Meier said. “How foolish to walk across the moor during all that snow. A shame,” Mrs. Schürholz cried. “That old von Kamphoff should have driven her to Groß Ostensen, the old cheapskate.” My mother didn’t know what to say to all this and completely forgot what it was she had come to buy. She stammered, stuttered, looked stunned at Mrs. Meier, and swayed lightly until her friend said, “Pull yourself together.”

  It was an accident. A foolish mistake. That’s what everyone in the village said. And yet, wasn’t it peculiar that my mother, who had wished nothing more than to see Inge Madelung driven from the manor, took the news of her death so badly? Wasn’t it strange that she walked home from the bakery with her face all pale and drawn and that she buried her head in her hands all afternoon and cried bitterly?

  Christian

  Our father was a slight man, working as a foreman for the small dairy in Hemmersmoor.

  In his youth, he had dreamt of leaving his village for Australia or Canada. He’d bought illustrated books about those countries and studied the photographs with his characteristic seriousness, as though it took a straight face and an inquiring mind to leaf through their pages. He would never have relaxed that face to smile or joke about the strange uniforms the police were wearing in the pictures, not for anything in the world. It might have shattered him to hear his own laughter in Canada’s wild mountains.

  Before getting married, he’d been driving a motorcycle, and he and my mother had been going to dances in the surrounding villages. A photo of them sat on a chest of drawers in the living room, and next to it was one in which my father stood in a leather jacket next to his milk-delivery van. Mr. Meier, the baker, had his right hand on my father’s shoulder, and behind them several men who looked like soldiers were unloading bread and milk. The picture was taken during the war, but my dad and the baker had stayed in Hemmersmoor. They smiled at the camera.

  My father was well liked in the village and among my friends. He was charming, friendly, and the year I turned eleven and my sister’s belly swelled up was a good one for him.

  By November, Nicole’s belly stuck out like a watermelon, and she wasn’t allowed to leave the house. “Who was it?” I asked her, like my mother had countless times before. Yet I didn’t shower her face with punches, I didn’t bang her head against the bedpost. My sister Ingrid had died four years ago in the fall. “And now we’re losing this one too,” my mother lamented.

  I stroked Nicole’s belly, which I could barely stand to look at but had to touch nonetheless. I couldn’t keep my fingers off it. What was inside knocked against my hand, and my sister’s face grew terrified; another person possessed her like a demon. She was fifteen.

  “Who was it?” I wanted to know. She had to have done it—I knew how people were made. I had watched Alex’s sister do it with an apprentice from Brümmer’s factory. It was an ugly business, brutal, and yet Alex and I had used every opportunity we’d gotten to watch through his floorboards how the young guy shook and groaned and how Anna’s flesh quivered like pudding.

  My sister smiled at my questions and kept silent. My mother announced to Hemmersmoor that Nicole was sick, and kept a close eye on me. “If you don’t watch your mouth,” she promised, “you will forever regret it.” Since my sister Ingrid’s death, she had nothing but harsh words for me. My toes bled whenever she tri
mmed my nails, and one day in the fall she had poured boiling water onto my lap and later said the saucepan had slipped out of her grip. Whenever she caught me in Nicole’s room, she cursed at me and called my sister a whore.

  My dad was more forgiving and devoted himself to my sister’s care. They’d always been close; he’d taken naps with her in the afternoon until she was eight, and he called her Mieze. Now he brought her dinner when she felt too weak to come down from her room.

  I could have put it together myself if I had known how to connect my thoughts, moods, and observations. Yet it was Alex who, one day after school, asked, “What are you going to do with the bastard?”

  I stared at him; I hadn’t told him about the baby. “Nicole is sick,” I said dutifully.

  Alex’s bushy eyebrows met above his nose—he stared that hard at me. He was one class ahead of me in school and knew everything a year in advance. “My mom says she knows that kind of sickness. She also says it’s strange that your parents haven’t tried to pin it on someone. She says that if she were your mom, she’d be all over town defending her daughter’s honor.”

  “Nicole won’t tell me who it was,” I said.

  “Mom says there’s no one your folks can blame. It’s either God’s baby, or the devil’s, and the former hasn’t happened in two thousand years, so it’s the devil’s.”

  “The devil’s?” I asked.

  “Your dad’s,” Alex said. “I think that’s what she means.”

  The suggestion was so utterly impossible that I immediately knew it was true. That night at dinner, all the glances, silences, and quiet words suddenly made sense to me, as if I had learned a new language and for the first time was able to follow the conversation.

  I realized that my mother administered her beatings, not to find out the truth, but solely to punish, and that my dad’s smiles were not fueled by forgiveness but expectations. He was looking forward to seeing his child.

  I sneaked into my sister’s room after my parents had gone to bed. I pushed up her nightshirt and put my ear to her belly. My father was in there, small and unborn.

  “What is going to happen to him?” I asked.

  Nicole shook her head. She was beautiful in a quiet way. You wouldn’t have noticed her in a crowd, and yet once you’d spied her, you realized she could beat out any girl in Hemmersmoor. I was convinced we had to act quickly. The baby was due in March, and who knew what Mom and Dad had planned? There was only one way to make sure neither Nicole nor her child would be harmed.

  I did not tell Nicole of my plans; I did not want to burden her. No, I had to do it all by myself. Yet what could I possibly do without arousing suspicion? I tried to remember spells I’d heard mentioned in the village. I asked my friends to recount what they knew about ghouls, witches, and wizards. Time passed uneasily, and still I hadn’t come up with a solution. Soon it would be Christmas.

  On the first day of Advent, I ran over to Frick’s Inn to visit Alex. His mother had died the year before, and he helped in the pub in the afternoons and on weekends. His brother had long since left the village and sailed to New York. Nobody knew if and when he would return, and Hilde, his young wife, had moved into the apartment above the inn. “I had to move back to my old room,” Alex complained.

  While I was waiting for my friend, I overheard a conversation at the bar. A candle had been lit in the pine wreath hanging from the ceiling. Jens Jensen, who’d come right after church as always, sat at the bar with a fresh glass of beer in front of him.

  “You’ve got to be careful that night. It’s the darnedest thing,” said the old man, while drinking his beer and scratching his gray stubble. “If you drink wine that night, you’ll be dead by Epiphany.”

  “What night would that be?” I asked. Alex was getting gloves and a hat from upstairs, and I couldn’t let this chance go by.

  “Who wants to know?” Jens Jensen turned away from the farmer’s wife he’d been talking to, a woman with broken veins webbing her face. Her husband slept peacefully by the fireplace.

  “It’s me, Christian.”

  “The Bobinski boy,” he said, looking me over. “Christmas Eve, of course.”

  “What happens on Christmas Eve?” I said.

  Jens Jensen took a long drink from his beer, foam gathering on his lip. “Why, when you get up during the night before Christmas,” he said with importance, “you’ll notice an enormous thirst.”

  “You always have an enormous thirst,” the farmer’s wife said and laughed boomingly at her own joke.

  “Right you are,” Jensen said, and slapped her knee affectionately. “Go to hell, sweetheart.” Then he turned once more to me. “On Christmas Eve you can drink nothing but water.”

  Alex arrived with his hat and gloves and started pulling me away, but I shook him off.

  “So what if you don’t drink water?” I said.

  “If you drink wine that night,” the old peat cutter said, lowering his voice for effect, “you won’t stop drinking. You’ll drink yourself to death before the star singers are home.” He grinned, exposing more gaps than teeth. “When I was your age—”

  “You were born old,” the farmer’s wife boomed, slapping her hand on the counter.

  “When I was your age,” Jensen said again, “we knew these things.” He extended a hand, maybe to touch my face, but I pulled back. He laughed. “We all knew these things, and they’re still true, but no one remembers.” He looked at me with eyes that didn’t even seem to recognize me anymore. “We’ve forgotten the traps.”

  “Let’s go,” Alex said impatiently, and this time I followed him outside.

  The weeks before Christmas were as serene and light filled as they had ever been, but that year I hardly noticed the smell of gingerbread cookies, of cinnamon, vanilla, and oranges. The people of Hemmersmoor seemed to live in a story of good cheer and happy preparations, a story of warmth and expectations I couldn’t squeeze into. I still went to school, still helped my dad cut a tree near the ruins of the Black Mill, still helped Mom with baking cookies, but I didn’t understand what I was doing. It didn’t register. Because Advent was just as it always had been, it didn’t make any sense to me anymore.

  Mom’s attacks on Nicole receded like a tide. I tended to my sister and her belly every evening, and should Nicole fall asleep before I had left, I would talk to the baby. I let my hand rest above the navel and murmured words to the infant, who was growing bigger, making a room for itself inside Nicole. “You’re safe,” I’d say. “Don’t worry. I’ll make it right once you get out.”

  I made a point of being obedient to my parents, especially my dad. When we cut down the pine tree, I let him tell me the story of the Black Miller again, as though I’d never heard it before. The mill had been empty for centuries but still withstood wind and rain and snow; the miller’s ghost kept everything in working order and was still out for revenge. Halfway through the tale of how Swedish soldiers had raped the miller’s daughters, my father stopped to look at me sideways, from under his fur-lined hat.

  “Have you any interest in girls yet?” he said.

  I stared at him, clutching my axe. He was still taller and stronger than me, but in that moment my thoughts focused on how to split his skull in half. It was a possibility. I shook my head.

  “Never too early,” he chuckled. “It’ll come soon. Just make sure to marry a girl that’s not all used up. You can have fun with many, but those you can’t marry.”

  I nodded.

  “The best way to start is with an experienced woman,” he said, cleaning off the lower branches of our tree. “A married woman.” And then he told me how he’d been initiated as a fifteen-year-old boy by an older cousin in Groß Ostensen and how he was still thankful to that woman. “She made me a man,” he said. I gritted my teeth.

  On the ride home, he nudged me with his elbow. “I’m glad we had this talk. I want to be your good friend. If you have problems with a girl—I know a thing or two. Just ask.”

  On Christm
as Eve my nerves were strung so tight that my head ached and I couldn’t sit still. I endured the morning chores, chewed through the obligatory lunch of sausages and potato salad. In the afternoon I bundled up. Under the pretense of having something important to do in preparation for the Bescherung, the exchanging and unwrapping of gifts that evening after dinner, I hurried outside.

  We hardly ever had snow on Christmas. In our village snow and ice would arrive a week or two later and stay until February. Now it was merely cold, and rain was falling softly. Yet the weather did nothing to soothe me. I was a prisoner in my body. I should have been able to rip it open and escape, but I was stuck in my flesh, stuck in my family, stuck in Hemmersmoor. Nothing fit.

  I ran down to the Droste, where Sylvia, a girl some years older than me, was standing on the bank, throwing small stones and branches into the water.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” she said without interest.

  “Aren’t you home?” I asked stupidly.

  She laughed at the question, but nicely. “No, I’m not. I’m waiting,” she said.

  “For what?” I asked.

  “For someone,” she corrected me, blushing.

  “For whom?” I asked.

  “Don’t be nosy.”

  “You could bless me,” I said.

  “Like a priest?”

  “Yes.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied.

  She stepped closer and put her hand on my hair. “I bless you,” she said, and before I could stop her, she had kissed my forehead. “Merry Christmas,” she said.

  I left her without saying good-bye, suddenly feeling ashamed. I ran as fast as I could until my shirt clung to my skin and the sweat turned icy. If I got sick, I wouldn’t have to do a thing. Sickness was the only thing that came close to leaving one’s body. I ran.