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

  We turned around at once, and instead of driving to the shed where he kept his tools, he drove up to the rear of the Big House. He cursed loudly, closing his eyes and pounding the wheel with his fists. “It was forbidden,” he shouted. “Forbidden. You heard it yourself. If word gets out about this. Can you imagine the gossip in our village? The real heir. Johann’s brother.” Finally he got out of the truck and approached the back entrance; he seemed to have shrunk several inches.

  What exactly happened inside I never learned. But when my father emerged again, his face was pale and without expression. He looked around as though he could find neither his truck nor me sitting by the window. For long seconds he stared into the sky, looked at the blooming hedges that surrounded the courtyard, and chewed on his dirty nails. Bruno von Kamphoff had fired him.

  On our return that night, my mother first grew quiet after hearing the bad news, then implored my dad to tell her everything. We stood in the kitchen, our dinner was cooking on the hearth, but nobody thought about sitting down at the table. My father wouldn’t talk and just kept shaking his head. I filled in my mother, who listened impatiently, kneading her bunched-up apron. “The real heir,” she whispered again and again. When I was done, she had become so agitated that she disregarded my father’s sorrow, and said, “Erich, they can’t just fire you. Your silence must be worth something to them. They can’t just throw you away. You’ve helped them. They should pay you.”

  I wouldn’t stop talking either and bombarded my father with questions. Was the stranger the real heir? Was he the long-lost brother, and where had he spent all these years? My mother stood behind me, with the hope that maybe this was our stroke of luck, that maybe we had found the key to more money, and maybe even a better house. She stood in the kitchen in her simple housedress and waited for an answer just as much as I did, maybe more. She didn’t stop me.

  My father had never slapped me, and when he did it then, it seemed to do nothing to cool his rage. He wasn’t satisfied. Maybe he realized he had hit only his daughter, that he’d picked on the wrong person, but it didn’t matter anymore. The frustrations of all the years during which my mother had nagged and harassed him came pouring out, and he grabbed my hair and pulled me this way and that until he pushed my face into the glass door of our kitchen cabinet. He pulled me back, and my skin tore when he drove my face into the shards protruding from the wooden frame like broken teeth. I screamed, and my mother’s voice drowned out mine as she begged my father to stop, but he didn’t listen. He was at a loss for answers, for words, and how much better did his hand answer what his lips couldn’t.

  Martin

  The mill on the Droste stood north of Hemmersmoor. Fir trees made it hard to spot the hunched building until you were standing right in front of it, and Jens Jensen swore that on Walpurgisnacht, the mill went up in flames without being devoured, and devils and witches had a go at each other. “Martin,” he told me, “Martin, such nasty things you can’t even imagine.” Other rumors also made it worth our while to visit the Black Mill. It was said that the miller had lived in the same spot for over three hundred years. He’d lost his wife and six children, and no one remembered where his grave was located, or if he had ever died at all.

  During the Thirty Years’ War, Swedish troops had used the mill’s mossy wheel to torture their prisoners and make them betray their compatriots and give up the secret locations of food and jewelry. They had also tortured and killed the miller’s family, and spared only the miller, badly cut and with a crack in his skull.

  In another version of the miller’s story, young men masquerading as soldiers had assaulted the family and killed his apprentices. The miller knew the truth, though, and sought revenge. Half-dead, he had sold his soul to the devil and gained great powers, and whenever a village youth came to the mill, he was lured in by witchcraft and forced to work until his death. His apprentices had been spotted around Hemmersmoor in the shape of cattle or deer. The only way to kill them, the old people taught us, was to club them. Every third blow had to strike the ground, or else the witch or wizard would not die.

  In the summers we reenacted the war, and we strapped prisoners to the wheel and made them ride high into the air and downward into the Droste’s dark waters. If you knew how to hold your breath, it wasn’t too dangerous to ride the wheel, but playing prisoner was nevertheless a punishment. After four or five full turns of the wheel, you’d beg to be released and were all too happy to show the Swedes where you’d hidden ham, bread, and your young daughters.

  At first we went quietly about our business, trying not to disturb the miller, should his ghost still haunt the place. Hemmersmoor had long built its own mill south of the village, closer toward the lake, and while nobody had ever seen a customer on the grounds, the Black Mill was said to be in working order. On every visit we found heaps of finely ground grain near the hatches.

  Yet after a few long summer days, during which nothing stirred inside the building, we grew bolder and louder. Maybe the old ghost was deaf. Maybe the Black Miller had left the area for good or finally died; he never came out to confront us. At first we might scare a girl by shouting, “The miller, the miller is coming,” but they soon learned not to listen to our cries.

  As we got older, the last part of our war game became more important. As soon as the Swedish troops stepped out of the woods, they arrested the miller as he was about to do his work. After the torture, they followed the miller to his hideout and raped the women.

  It was Karin and Waltraud Brodersen who agreed to stay hidden in the woods behind the mill, where the miller had hidden his family and belongings. They were as plump and supple as their mother, Heidrun, their skin soft and golden. Heike, the oldest of the sisters, felt she was too mature for our game. Instead we asked Anke Hoffmann to play. In the beginning Linde Janeke had come with us as well, but after her accident, none of us boys wanted to have anything to do with her. “She looks as if she’s fallen face-first into a roll of barbed wire,” Holger said. Anke scolded him. “You’re horrible,” she said, but still let him kiss her.

  Alex Frick was missing too. He had been sent to juvenile prison during the previous winter, and so only Christian, Holger, Bernhard, and I led the girls into the woods. Our game required that boys outnumber girls, but no one wanted to play the Black Miller because he couldn’t take part in the raping. He could only watch and wish to have better luck with the draw the next time.

  Our voices were still breaking when we raped Karin, Waltraud, and Anke. They giggled when they saw our penises. We spanked their behinds, sometimes whipped them with willow twigs, and on a lucky day might be allowed to fondle their breasts while jerking off.

  “How do you kill a witch?” Christian would shout, his voice rising over the mayhem.

  “You club her,” Bernhard shouted back. He was in love with Anke and took this love out on the girl’s white back. “Every third blow must strike the ground, or she’ll never die.” Anke always died under his hands.

  Sometimes we kissed and got entangled and all bunched up, and we came in our pants while the girls were panting. Other days the girls tortured us, pinched our balls, beat us with sticks, burned our asses with cigarettes, or tied us to trees and showed us everything we weren’t allowed to touch.

  One day in July, after Holger, Christian, and I had reaped the benefits of playing soldiers and still lay in the girls’ arms, their soft hair tickling our lips and faces, their warmth heating us up again, we noticed that we’d lost our miller, Bernhard.

  It was important for the miller to stick around, and we’d never violated that rule before. It was good to be with the girls, still it was better to be watched while doling out or receiving punishment. It was painful for the miller to stand by, unable to participate, but we endured that role whenever we had to play it, for the sake of our pleasure the next time.

  So when Bernhard was found missing, we were enraged. Pulling on our pants, we stumbled out of the woods. He couldn’t be far. We shouted, r
oared, we threatened to break every bone in his body. He didn’t show.

  It was on that day, after returning to Hemmersmoor and not finding Bernhard at home and not being able to pummel him, that we asked ourselves who exactly was living inside the Black Mill. Bernhard did not come home, not this day nor the next, and by the end of the summer his parents had given up hope. The moor was treacherous and had claimed many lives, and after search parties did not find a single trace of their son, they stopped mentioning his name.

  Christian, Holger, and I, though, kept searching. We had followed our fathers across the peat bog, we had looked at every inch of the moor, but no one had bothered to search the Black Mill. We’d kept our secret. Often we went to the mill, looking for a way in. We searched for a broken window, for an unlocked door, yet the windows were shuttered and the doors wouldn’t move an inch. Each time we found fresh grain on the ground, and each time we waited, hoping Bernhard might appear, might come stumbling out of the woods, having been trapped in a fairy-tale slumber. After dark we returned home, our consciences sanded down by our efforts. We had tried.

  As the days grew shorter and colder, Christian and Holger lost interest in the mill. Bernhard, Holger said, had left Hemmersmoor of his own accord. “Maybe carnies picked him up,” he mused, “or circus people. Maybe he went to Bremen to live as a beggar or a musician. He did play the flute.”

  Christian chuckled at such ideas. “He’s dead. Couldn’t stand watching us with Anke, ran off, stepped into the swamp, and whoosh! In a hundred years the peat cutters will dig him up, as fresh as the day he died.”

  I wasn’t convinced by either theory and made the half-hour trip to the mill by myself. What I expected to find in the end I never asked myself, and even if I had, I wouldn’t have been able to answer. Perhaps I wanted to find Bernhard and carry him home like a treasure chest. Maybe the legends of the mill brought me back. Slowly the mill became more important than ice skating with Anke Hoffmann. I still dreamt of our afternoons with the girls, still wished to be near them and crawl under their skirts, but as soon as I saw one of them in the village, the spell was broken. We talked for a minute or two, nodded, and went our own ways.

  After Christmas that year, I walked through the fresh snow toward the Black Mill. School was out, Holger was seen every day with a different girl and claimed that Christian was making out with the baker’s daughter. They didn’t have the time to accompany me.

  The forest was quiet, and even though the skies were overcast, it seemed bright like our town hall when decorated for a dance. The snow had robbed the woods of all its dark corners. My steps and breath filled my ears.

  Where the mill had to be, thin smoke rose over the tops of the trees, and I quickened my pace, gripping my walking stick tightly. Yet before I reached the river, a cat jumped out onto the path in front of me. It was a house cat, but so large was she that I took two steps backward. Her fur was black, her tail as lively as a serpent, and her round face reached up to my belly. She cocked her head as if to say, “You’re here again, Martin. I’ve seen you before.”

  I remembered the tales of witches and wizards taking on the shapes of animals and haunting villagers, but I had never seen one before. “Who are you?” I stammered.

  The cat kept silent but stepped ahead, her big paws sinking deep into the snow. I had trouble keeping up with her. On reaching the mill, the large wheel lay quiet, bound by ice. Only in the middle of the Droste remained a tiny sliver of open water, like a cut that wouldn’t heal. If I should vanish from this spot, who would come and look for me?

  When I took my eyes off the thin column of smoke coming from the chimney, the cat was gone. Her steps ended at the front door. Christian, Holger, and I had tried many times to force it open and had found it solidly locked every time. Now it stood ajar, tempting me. I pushed it fully open with my stick and entered.

  The first room was the kitchen, with an oaken table and eight wooden chairs set around it. The pots hanging above the fireplace were old and dented and impeccably clean. A fire groaned and hissed, and after staring at this strange scene for a few long seconds, I felt the need to take off my coat. Then I shut the door to the outside.

  Plates stood stacked on the table, as though someone had taken them from a cupboard but had been interrupted before being able to lay them out. Someone had written a message in the dust covering the dark oak table. “Come to me,” it read, and I gripped my stick, which was wet from the snow, with both hands.

  “Bernhard?” I asked in a voice barely above a whisper. “Bernhard?”

  I followed a narrow hallway. Through an open door I could look into a small bed chamber. Two beds stood there freshly made, it seemed to me. Slowly I walked toward some wooden stairs, turning my head every other second—my breathing was labored and the quiet inside the mill plugged my ears—and yet I couldn’t spy anyone.

  Cautiously I climbed the stairs, and much as I tried to step without making a noise, the ruckus was terrible. Everyone inside the mill had to hear me. Soon the people living here would discover me and ask what the hell I was doing. I tried to prepare myself for that confrontation, but who would I meet? Had homeless people made the mill their refuge? Had Christian, Holger, and I in our ignorance never noticed that the old mill was indeed inhabited? Convinced as I was that the building had stood empty all these years, the smell of cabbage soup and the fresh linens destroyed this belief. I was no longer sure what I knew, what I should believe, and in the meantime I believed both things—that the mill had been abandoned and empty and that it was still inhabited.

  “Bernhard?” I couldn’t hear my own voice.

  “Is that you?” a female voice said behind me.

  I turned and froze. I heard a squeaking noise and only half realized that my throat had caused it. At the foot of the stairs stood a young woman in a white fur coat. Her hair was carefully done, colorful stones glittered in its locks, and she wore tiny sandals with incredibly high heels. She looked like the Snow Queen—most beautiful and terrifying.

  “Martin?” asked the young woman. She seemed both surprised and disappointed, and while my heart still beat in my mouth, I slowly realized who stood on the wooden floor below me. It was Anna Frick, Alex’s sister. “How did you get in?”

  “Where is Bernhard?” I asked stupidly. My fear melted from my bones, but I still gripped my stick violently. At the same time, I understood how young and silly I had to appear in Anna’s eyes.

  “Bernhard? What are you doing here? You have to leave immediately.”

  I didn’t grasp what she meant. “Why? Is the miller around? And why are you here?”

  “The miller?” she said with wide eyes. Then she caught herself and said sharply, “It’s none of your business. Get lost.”

  “Where is Bernhard?” I asked again.

  “Is he with you? Did you come together?” Then her face suddenly smoothed out and for a moment she was quiet. Then she asked, “Bernhard? The lost boy? Are you still searching for him?”

  My face grew hot, and I stuttered, “I… I thought…”

  “That I’m hiding him here?” she mocked me. And my relief over having discovered a known face turned again into fear. Maybe she really knew where Bernhard was.

  “Do you know where he is? What are you doing here? How did you get here? What kind of coat are you wearing?” Slowly I walked back down the stairs. “Whose cat was that outside?”

  “Cat?” Anna asked. “Oh, I’m a witch, you should know,” she said and laughed. “Usually she sits on my shoulder.”

  What happened next I can ascribe to only my fear and the long search for my friend. Anna had made a bad joke, but my nerves threatened to snap, and I didn’t comprehend why she would stand in a fur coat and sandals in front of me. “How do you kill a witch?” I said under my breath, and in one desperate move I jumped down the last remaining steps, raised my stick, and struck that fur-clad apparition. But I had aimed badly and hit only her shoulder. Anna screamed, and maybe I knew then what a terrible
mistake I had made, but I also feared her loud voice, which would alert the miller to us. I wanted to shut her up. So I hit her again.

  Yet in that moment I could hear a car approaching and then stopping outside the mill.

  “Oh God,” said Anna. She pressed her hands to her head where I had struck her and lay on the ground now. “Oh God,” she said again, and her face turned crimson.

  And all my fears returned. Anna was a witch, Anna was my best friend’s sister, and I had attacked and beaten her. And who was outside? I dropped my stick and ran down the hallway and into the kitchen as fast as I could. I opened the door and was about to storm out into the snow, when a tall figure, clad in dark clothes, blocked my way. But I couldn’t stop, ran into him, and together we tumbled into the snow. I was first to get back on my feet and made toward the woods. I ran, ran, a loud voice at my back ordering me to stop. But I kept going, and only after what seemed like an eternity, after I was thoroughly drained from working my way through the deep snow, did I finally stop, turn to make sure that no one was following me, and then drop to the ground. My face was hot and I welcomed the cold, buried my face only deeper in the snow. How long I lay there I don’t know, but shame, anger, and fear fought within me and cooled only after a long time.

  It was dark around me when I finally got up again and slowly continued on my way home. I was cold and wet, and no matter how fast I walked my teeth chattered and my face stayed numb. How would I explain that I had struck Anna Frick? How could I confess to my father, the Gendarm, that his son might have to go to jail because he had assaulted the pub owner’s daughter? And this only one year after Broder had drowned in the Droste River? That time I’d been lucky, saved, because of my father’s influence, from sharing Alex’s fate.