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

  The scolding from my mother hardly registered with me, and I took her lamentations over my wet and muddy pants and boots in silence. I didn’t complain about the hot bath, or about the beating I received at her hands, and how my ears started to ring because I didn’t fend her off. I didn’t complain about the stiff collar of my shirt or about my pants being too short and tight. I felt defeated by the task ahead of me.

  After eating the goose my mother had been cooking since the afternoon and then washing the dishes, we opened our presents. My sister received wide shirts and loose-fitting dresses, as well as big bras and panties. She was very quiet while unwrapping them, shrinking from the enormous items. She feared the person who would wear them. She remained quiet while I unwrapped books and a toy train, stared at them with greed.

  Around ten we blew out the few remaining lights on the tree and prepared to go to sleep. I’m not sure anyone did. My mother had to notice the empty space next to her, even though by now she’d grown accustomed to it.

  Myself, I waited near the door of my sister’s room until the silence I could feel coming through the wall and door, dense as the cooking smells that had come all day from my mother’s kitchen, grew thin and cold. Moments later my father emerged, heading to the bathroom.

  I sat on the stairs until he reemerged, and then kicked the banister.

  “Who’s there?” he asked.

  I slunk down the stairs, waiting for him to follow me. Sure enough, by the time I sat next to the Christmas tree, holding the train in my hands, he had made his way down the stairs.

  “Is that you, Christian?” he said, relieved. He was holding a slipper in his hand like a weapon, his left foot was naked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Couldn’t sleep, huh?” He asked softly. “Are the gifts the right ones?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I had to look again.” After a pause, I added, “I’m thirsty.”

  “Me too,” my father said. He put on his left slipper, and in the faint glow of the room seemed to smile. “Let’s have a little midnight snack, shall we?”

  From the fridge, he took sausages and milk, and I got the bread from the breadbox. “Is there some mulled wine left?” I asked.

  The question made my dad chuckle. “You had a glass already.”

  “Please?”

  Soon we reheated the wine. While I was careful only to raise my glass without drinking, my father emptied his while chewing on the leftover sausages. We ate like two starving beggars, as if we’d never before eaten goose and stuffing and potatoes and greens and pudding. We ate and he drank.

  By one o’clock I lay in bed wide awake. I didn’t feel guilt over what I had done, but my plan seemed too enormous to think through. Just like the sausages and bread and goose, my thoughts kept me awake all night, until gray light scurried over the floor like mice.

  My father never made it to breakfast. He refused to eat, stayed in bed all day. Yet he drank. My mother had to go down to the cellar and carry bottles of wine upstairs. She was concerned, bewildered, yet after refusing at first and earning harsh words, she relented.

  For the two days of Christmas, my father drank. He ate little, and what little he ate, he emptied into the toilet bowl shortly. On the twenty-seventh he went to work but was sent home early after fainting. The doctor came and prescribed medicine, and my father took the powders and tablets and drank. He drank and drank, and after he’d gone through the modest reserves of our cellar, he made my mother buy more. He drank until his sweat turned pink and the bedroom reeked like Frick’s Inn. Still he didn’t stop. He didn’t seem to get drunk. He didn’t grow loud. He drank only to sleep feverishly, wake up, and drink more.

  On the last day of Christmas, January 6, he died. A shadow lifted from our house; his revenge, which I’d felt would destroy me should he recover, died with him. He was buried in our cemetery, and half of Hemmersmoor came out to pay him their last respects.

  Despite the dark, stuffy clothes I was wearing, I felt unburdened. I watched the burial with a sense of success, and I slept soundly that night.

  I still visited my sister, who’d not been allowed to attend the funeral, and who looked scared and miserable. I should have kept quiet, but the ease with which I had accomplished our liberation went to my head. One day in late February, a day before I turned twelve, my sister was crying in fear of her giant belly, and I told her what I had risked for her sake. She didn’t have to be afraid anymore, I said. He was gone, and I would take care of her once I was old enough to earn money.

  “I saved you,” I told Nicole, and explained how I had done it.

  She slapped me, took the teapot from her nightstand, and broke it on my head. She beat me with her fists and wouldn’t have stopped had the child not started to move inside her.

  After that night I was only reluctantly tolerated in our house, and soon my back was scarred, my arms burned, my body full of bruises. Whenever someone commented on my cuts and scabs, I shrugged and said, “A real boy needs scars.”

  My mother and sister raised the child, a boy, together. A refugee from that other Germany had taken advantage of my sister, they said when they wheeled the baby through the village. They told me to keep my dirty mouth shut. And so I repeated what they had taught me: a kid from the East had done it.

  Martin

  After the New Year, the canals crisscrossing the peat bog froze, and as soon as school was out we chased each other across the ice. I had inherited my father’s red hair and hid it underneath black woolen hats, which I pulled down over my forehead. But I couldn’t do anything about the freckles, which spread on my face even in the dead of winter. I was thirteen and felt alternately ugly and invisible.

  As soon as the ice was thick enough, lovers chose the night to glide to far and hidden corners of the bog, and our parents still talked about the winter when Julian Fitschen and Anna Jensen melted through the ice because they had lost control of their feelings. The lovers were lifted from the water frozen solid, carried into the village like a pagan statue, and left to stand in back of the Fitschens’ farm until spring.

  Sometimes my friends Alex, Christian, Holger, Bernhard, and I would go to where the Droste River slowed and widened into a lake, and ice fish. We’d pick holes in the ice and cast our lines. Yet we ran out of patience soon and rarely caught a fish.

  On one of these trips, Broder, the Hoffmanns’ youngest son, accompanied us, carrying an axe as tall as his lithe body. It had been years since I had played with his sister, Anke, and Linde Janeke and braided their hair. We had often watched the girls with a mixture of repulsion and amusement, had pulled at their braids and pushed and teased them after school. Now, however, we looked at them with new interest. Last year Alex had fallen mortally in love with Anke and had tried to get her to unbutton her blouse, and she had declined. He’d tried the whole fall and had enlisted Broder as the messenger for his lovelorn letters. Alex had since found a new object for his pursuits, but Broder still clung to him, no matter how hard Alex tried to get rid of the boy.

  “I’ll bring you luck,” Broder crowed happily. He’d been a star singer, caroling in a cardboard crown painted gold, his voice bright and high.

  We laughed. Our own voices were a mess; we preferred silence. We were going to high school in Groß Ostensen, ten kilometers to the south. We were old enough to wish ourselves beyond Hemmersmoor, yet we were too young to buy mopeds and drive to Groß Ostensen’s movie theater and ice cream parlor. When the townspeople talked about us, the word “incest” cropped up frequently. We looked at their world and their girls, and they didn’t look back.

  When we reached the Droste River, we put on our skates and took off toward the middle, where the ice responded with shrieks and pangs to our weight. It was around three o’clock in the afternoon, and groups of kids slid or skated over the lake. The sun had not bothered to come out, and the light was already fading. Snow fell, tickling our faces.

  “What happens if the ice breaks?” Broder asked.

 
“We’ll drown,” I said.

  “Why, Martin?” he asked. “I can swim.”

  “Your skates,” I said. “They’re too heavy. Your clothes will pull you down.”

  Alex took out a pack of cigarettes and offered them around. His father gave him money for the work he did around the inn; the rest of us couldn’t afford to smoke. We skated lazily, smoked, on the lookout for a good spot to fish. The snow rendered the small kids near the banks invisible and turned us invisible to them. We could have been on a vast ocean, lost in the middle of the Baltic Sea. It was a good feeling.

  “Here. That’s our spot,” Alex said.

  “Here. That’s the spot,” Broder echoed. We picked and hammered away.

  “Look how thick it is,” Broder said.

  “Look how thick it is,” Alex mocked him, but the boy laughed it off.

  In time we cast our lines, sat on our haunches, smoking. We enjoyed the solitude until we were shivering. You’re supposed to have a hut or a fire, and we didn’t have either. Our bones rattled, our teeth chattered. Nobody caught a thing.

  “So where’s the luck you promised?” Alex said.

  “Just a little longer,” Broder replied. “You’ll see.” He closed his eyes so tightly that his small face was all wrinkles. “I can feel it.”

  “You didn’t bring me any luck with your sister,” Alex said.

  “She didn’t like you,” Broder said brightly. We all laughed; it was the truth. Even quiet Christian laughed. He was a pale boy, his hair and eyebrows so light he looked naked. He had lost his father two years before, and when he changed his sports clothes at school, we could see scrapes and bruises on his arms and back. But he never complained.

  “No girl likes you,” Bernhard said. “Your mind’s too dirty.” Bernhard still had no beard but was the tallest and heaviest of us all. His face was as pretty as a girl’s.

  “Shut up,” Alex said. “Anke hurt me.”

  Holger grunted. He was heavyset and had short dark hair and a red face with even redder cheeks. His feet were already larger than those of most grown men. “Anke won’t go for you.”

  “Why not?” Alex asked. His brown mustache was frozen, his small eyes framed by icy white lashes. “If my brother doesn’t return, I’ll inherit the inn and the land and will be richer than the Hoffmanns.”

  Alex’s brother was a sailor, and after leaving for New York one day, he had never returned to his wife. Postcards from around the world arrived irregularly in our village.

  “Why shouldn’t he come back?” I asked.

  “Maybe he’s contracted leprosy or maybe he’ll drown. Who knows? If it were up to me, the ship’s kobold could carry him off.”

  “But if he returns?”

  “I’ll deal with him then. The inn is mine, and if Anke won’t have me, I’ll buy her family’s farm and have her brothers cut my peat.” He focused on Broder. “Right?”

  “Right,” Broder said. “I’ll cut peat.”

  “She won’t be able to find a better man,” Alex said, more to himself.

  I nodded. I wasn’t as strong as Holger or as pretty as Bernhard. Nor was my family as well-heeded as Alex’s, which owned Frick’s Inn. Yet I had kissed Linde Janeke before Christmas break and considered myself ahead of the others. Linde wasn’t as beautiful as Anke, but she had been seen with a boy from Groß Ostensen who rode a moped and was seventeen. That counted for something.

  It was around the time we lost any feeling in our feet that Alex dropped his hatchet in the water.

  “What’d you do that for?” Holger said.

  “You’re stupid,” Bernhard chimed in. “That hatchet is gone.”

  “Maybe.” Alex pulled out a ten-mark bill. “Maybe someone is willing to dive after the hatchet for ten.”

  We laughed at his offer. Christian tapped his finger to his forehead and rolled his eyes.

  “Okay,” Alex said, pulling out another bill. “Twenty. I’ll give you twenty if you can get the hatchet.”

  “Keep your money,” I said, stretching my legs. I was ready to head home.

  “I could,” Broder said. His eyes were large; the things he could buy for twenty marks! You could see his mind at work, his head filling with possibilities. “But I won’t. I’m not stupid.”

  We laughed. “Good call,” Bernhard said. “No one’s that stupid.”

  “But I’ll do it for fifty.”

  We shook our heads, still grinning, gathering our lines and tools.

  “I’ll do it,” Broder repeated, more loudly. He took off his coat. “For fifty.”

  “Man,” Bernhard said, “put your coat back on. You’ll freeze to death like that without having to dive.”

  “Fifty,” Broder crowed.

  “Wait,” Christian said and fished in his pockets. “I have a five, a ten, and three ones.” He lay the bills and coins on the ground, then grabbed Alex’s two tens and put them on top.

  Bernhard whistled. “Guys, that’s dumb. Look, even if he doesn’t die from the cold, he’s not going to find that damn hatchet, and he’s not going to find this shitty hole again when he comes up for air.”

  “I can do it.” Broder took off his skates and shoes.

  Holger came up with another eight marks, and I provided the rest. Alex put Broder’s shoe on top of the pile and looked at the kid. “Fifty,” he said.

  “Wait!” Bernhard raised his right hand like a teacher, begging for silence. “How are we going to dry him off? If he comes back up.”

  “Shut up,” Alex growled. “My grandpa used to take baths in the Droste all winter long, and he’s still around.” He turned to Broder. “Okay, we’ve got fifty marks.”

  The boy stripped to his underwear, then stood by the rim of the ice. Around us the air was filled with snow and darker than the ground, and it was very quiet, except for Broder sucking in the air and blowing his nose. The snow must have been a shower of a thousand needles.

  “I can do it,” he said and looked once more at the pile of money. Then he jumped, feet first, pinching his nose. The water took him.

  We soon found ourselves crouching at the hole, our hearts louder than the protesting ice. We were feverish, we suddenly knew that we’d have to explain later, and that no one would forgive us for what we’d done, and we knew in our hearts that Broder would never come up, had never stood a chance. And yet. And yet as long as we could hold our breaths with him, he might pull it off. He might. The fifty marks said so.

  The Droste River was only three to four meters deep where we stood, and we had often touched the bottom on lazy summer days, but this was January; this was an eight-year-old boy. And yet.

  We expected to hear knocking, and searched the ice. Was Broder caught under the thick sheet? Had Bernhard been right? Was it impossible to find the opening?

  “He’s dead,” Bernhard finally said, his mouth twitching.

  “He’s dead,” I said, having counted slowly to sixty. My four marks lay in the snow. What would I have given to never have offered them?

  Bernhard didn’t stop crying when Broder’s head appeared in front of us. He cried louder, and we all shouted in rough voices and lifted the boy out of the water. He was red as if we’d boiled him. In his right hand he held the hatchet. “It was so dark,” Broder stammered. “So dark. I couldn’t see a thing down there, and when I came up, I didn’t know where I was. A moment longer and I would have swallowed water.” He went on like this, while we tried to wipe him dry with his shirt. “So dark I had to feel for the hatchet on the ground. And there were slimy things, and once I felt that something was grabbing my leg and pulling me farther down. It pulled and pulled and wouldn’t let go.” His whole body twitched and shivered, and words poured from him, in awe of being with us again, in awe of what he had just done and how he had shown us.

  Holger took off his brown scarf and helped dry the boy, rubbing his face and hair.

  “Wait,” Alex said. He took the wet hatchet and threw it back down in our fishing hole. “You did it once,”
he said. “Fifty marks. It’s a lot of money for a bit of cold. Come on, Broder, it’s easy. Just once more.”

  The boy turned to Alex and grinned, not sure whether or not it was a joke. I stared at Alex, stared at Broder. We held wet scarves and shirts in our hands and stared from one to the other. There didn’t seem to be a single sound left in this world.

  Then Broder jumped.

  We threw his shoes and clothes after him that night, along with the fifty marks. We made a solemn pact to keep quiet forever.

  Bernhard didn’t keep his word though, and the Hoffmanns went to the police and refused to take the money Alex’s father offered them. All five of us were guilty, but the Hoffmanns went easy on the rest of us. They wanted Alex. It had been his idea. It had been his axe.

  After dark Mr. Frick came to see my father, the Gendarm, and I could hear them talking heatedly. They kept the door to the living room closed for long hours. My dad wanted to help him, but in the end he had no say in the matter. The Hoffmanns insisted on their rights. His hands were tied; he had to think of his own son. At the end of March, Alex was sent away for three years and the rest of us wished we could have left Hemmersmoor too.

  Linde

  Three generations of the family had lived in the manor house by the time I was thirteen, but the old master no longer managed the place and had handed the reins over to his son. Bruno von Kamphoff was in his forties and looked more like his mother. He had nothing of his father’s harshness of features. His eyes were big, brown, and melancholy, his fingers and limbs pale and long. He played the piano as frequently as the old mistress. He was not well liked in the village because he was “weak.” He was “effeminate.” Be that as it may, he knew how to handle his vast staff comprising a cook, maids, several butlers, a chauffeur, and farmhands working the land. Finally, of course, they had my father, who came every day in his cranky old truck with only one wheel in front, a once innovative design that already in my early childhood had been an object of much ridicule. Bruno never paid my dad more than the old von Kamphoff had.