Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone: A Novel (11 page)

I believed he was playing a prank on me, but when he moved closer toward me and took good care to be as careful as a thief at night, I understood that he was serious.

“I dug this hole to reach the other side, where dark people walk on their heads, but I’m afraid I might not be able to hold on to the earth once I get there. Maybe you could.”

“I brought you food,” I said, not knowing how to respond to the rubbish he’d told me.

“I’m not fond of the night,” he said, making an important face. “The stars are cold and behind them angels are hiding and trying to suck in your breath to warm themselves.” He unwrapped the bread and ham and said, “It’s quite coarse,” but ate nevertheless. He didn’t wash his bloodied hands and chewed quite noisily.

“How will I pay you?” he asked when he had finished the last crumb and was scooping jam from the glass with two fingers.

“I don’t need any pay,” I said. “But answer me. Are you the real heir? The one everyone is talking about?”

“The real heir,” he said. “Of what?”

“Of the Big House.”

“Of course it’s mine,” he said. “All this is mine.” He flailed his arms, which I took as a sign that he meant the whole manor.

“Then where have you been all these years? Why aren’t you the master of it all?”

He looked at me with large eyes, seemingly uncomprehending. “It’s mine,” he repeated, “it’s all mine, and I will make you my mistress.” From the depths of his shirt he produced a leather bag, and from it he pulled a large golden key. “This gives you reign over my manor once I’m gone. It’s my will, and you will be richer than the caliph of Baghdad.”

I took the key and put it in my pocket. “How come I’ve never seen you before? Not once. All my life I’ve visited this place, but you weren’t here.”

“I’ve never seen you myself. And I’ve been here all my life.” He laughed at his own remark, pleased with himself.

I waited for him to continue, but he fell silent, sitting in his hole, afraid to get up lest he might fall through the earth.

At last I left him, scrambled up and promised to bring him more food the next day. He responded by putting one jam-smeared finger to his mouth.

That evening my father was in a glum mood. As our truck bounced and coughed its way home, dad cursed Bruno von Kamphoff and his greed, he cursed the steward for interfering with his work, mother for always wanting more than he could provide, and he berated himself for being a lowly gardener and a poor husband. “I always thought I’d be blessed with all the good things,” he said. “When I was a boy, I dreamed of adventures in the Far East and the Wild West. I’d travel the world like men do in novels. It was just a matter of growing up. And what happened? I became a gardener.”

I knew this mood of his well. Maybe he had drunk from a flask he carried with him, or else my mother might have given him a hard time the night before. I shouldn’t have paid attention to this mood, which came and went like bad weather. I shouldn’t have done what I did next, but I was burning to share my secret and thought it might help my father at least forget his sorrows for the evening. I showed him my treasure.

“What is it?” he asked.

“We’re rich,” I said. “The Big House is ours.”

“Nonsense,” he said, but his curiosity was piqued. He stopped the truck, stared at the key, then took it and weighed it in his hand.

“It’s ours, all ours,” I said. “You think the key really counts? You think we can keep it? I didn’t steal it.”

My father turned to me without saying a word. His face was marked by confusion and the clouds that ran over it promised the worst of storms.

“Who gave this to you?” he asked.

“It’s his will,” I said. “I’m the heiress.”

“Who gave this to you?” he asked again, holding the key up to my face. Then he pulled it apart. In one hand he now held the bit, and in the other a corkscrew. “Who?” my dad asked, and I knew better than to keep my silence.

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.

T
he 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, roared, 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.