Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone: A Novel (22 page)

The road ended, and a small path continued on. By the time I found myself walking among bushes and small trees, I had given up thoughts of Sylvia and her new boyfriend. I had discovered a village larger than my own, but with no streetlights and no one around. It lay so close to Hemmersmoor, and yet the place didn’t seem to know that. I saw no cars, no bicycles or mopeds. I had often been out and about at night, meeting Sylvia in one dark corner of Hemmersmoor or another. Even if all lights were extinguished by the time we held each other, there was a certain thickness we could feel on our skin, people in their beds not far away dreaming bad dreams, their stomachs churning. I could feel their presence just like I felt the night on my skin when Sylvia pulled open my shirt. Here the air felt empty. Only echoes of the people who had once lived here remained.

The dirt path ended in front of a field much larger than the soccer field behind our school and framed by high hedges. If it
was at all possible, this place seemed quieter even than the rest of the dark village. Stone slabs on the ground led me across the field to the far end of it. Wreaths lay rotting around a monument. It was too dark to read the inscription, but when I stooped to look at one of the wreaths, I could decipher a word on one of the smudged bows. “Souvenir.” I was standing in a cemetery. The cemetery of this town I knew nothing about. Who had left the wreaths? Where had they gone?

On my way back, I ran, not out of fear, but a sense of wonder. I sped along the narrow road, past the barracks, making sure everything I had discovered was still there. I shook my head in laughter and disbelief. How was it possible that a whole village could be so close to my own and yet unknown? I felt like an explorer, having found the last white spot on the map. Better still, I had accessed it, I believed, through a secret door. I had found a magic opening in the confines of my petty life and slipped into a parallel Hemmersmoor. I felt powerful that night, as though I had made everyone in my village disappear. The master of a world only I could see and enter.

I was wrong, of course. It dawned on me when I saw a flag fluttering from one of the schoolboys’ bikes. It was attached to a rod the boy had wired to the frame, so it would stick out behind his seat. On this little flag, I could read “enir,” and I instantly knew where he had found his treasure. That same afternoon, feeling that my mysterious kingdom had been invaded, I followed the railroad track from Brümmer’s factory north, and after half an hour I ended up in my ghost town. Everyone had known about it, long before Sylvia had led me there. My face turned crimson, even though no one was around.

When Sylvia and I got back together, for a few short weeks in the summer, we did it in the cemetery, and only later noticed that the monument had been smeared with blood. Entrails, pigs’ hooves, and pigs’ heads hung from the stone. Sylvia couldn’t find her panties.

Broken windows, graffiti, overturned beds—in the next two years I noticed how much traffic my ghost town attracted. I never met anyone else there, and yet I was never alone. Then the town was turned into a camp for youths from that other Germany. I had heard stories about it, had seen it on maps. Our Germany was depicted in pink, theirs in red.

They appeared in small groups in Hemmersmoor, hanging out in front of Frick’s and getting in fights with the apprentices of Brümmer’s factory. Alex had been released from juvenile prison after three years, and when he didn’t work as the von Kamphoffs’ driver, he got involved in the fights as well. Nobody wanted the strangers, not even Mr. Meier, the baker, seemed happy about delivering hundreds of rolls every morning to the other village.

This was my last year of school, and with some luck, I would graduate. What would happen afterward I couldn’t say. Martin made plans to attend university in Hamburg. Alex would start managing Frick’s Inn. Rumors made the rounds, ugly rumors that Hilde had given birth to a bastard child, and that the old owner was paying large sums of money to suppress the truth. But the rumors didn’t seem to bother the Fricks; their inn was always crowded. Rumors proved good business.

I was standing in our village square one morning when Mr. Meier returned from one of his deliveries to the camp and started unloading the empty crates with a sour face. When he
noticed my presence, he beckoned to me to come closer. I didn’t know whether he knew that Sylvia had slept with me, and I approached his van with hesitation. Yet the baker only asked if I wanted to earn some fresh rolls, and I helped him carry the crates into the bakery. “Say hello to your mother,” he said when we were done and entering the store. Several women were standing in front of the counter and talking to Mrs. Meier. He patted my back and told his wife to bring me a bag of rolls.

And it was in this moment, when rouged and brightly smiling Mrs. Meier was handing me the rolls and Mr. Meier was putting his hand once more on my shoulder, that I remembered the photograph of my dad and knew at once where it had been taken. I tore the bag from the baker’s wife’s hands and ran home.

It was still early. My sister hadn’t taken her place on the kitchen bench yet. Her son’s voice wasn’t yet filling the room. I ran into the living room and grabbed the photo in which my father and the baker laughed at the camera. Only one man in the background was wearing a real uniform, a peaked cap and a rifle. The other men, whom I had taken for soldiers all these years, were wearing gray clothes, their heads had been shaved. And the building in front of which the two vans were parked I had entered myself not long ago—with awe I had picked up the large spoons and ladles.

Shame and humiliation painted my face red. Not only had I been dead last to discover this building and the village in which it stood, but also my father had entered it long before me. Before Sylvia had led me to the barracks, and the people from this other Germany came to live there, my father and the baker had delivered milk and bread to this village. Soldiers had policed the people living there.

That night I ran to Sylvia. She said she had no time for me—she had to meet her new boyfriend. She unbuttoned my shirt and searched my skin for scratches and burn marks. Her hair hadn’t been combed, and she smelled of summer and sweat. The hairs in her armpits were wet and I rubbed my face in them.

“I will leave Hemmersmoor soon,” I said, and tried to get used to the sound of these words. “You want to come?” I wanted to leave, but whenever I thought about what lay behind our village, I saw only half-dreamed thoughts and glittering landscapes without contours or colors. And whenever I managed to visualize the streets of Hamburg or some other big city, I was nowhere to be seen. However beautiful the picture was, I remained invisible.

“Not really,” Sylvia said. She put my dick inside her and sighed as though she had tasted a particularly nice piece of cake.

I stayed in Hemmersmoor the next day and the next week. My packed suitcase stayed under my bed. And before it was winter, the youths from the East were gone; the barracks hadn’t been built for them anyway.

Nobody shed a tear for the youths, and what had happened to the people who had lived in the camp before them, nobody was interested in either. Despite the photo in my living room, despite the vans that had delivered groceries to this other village on a daily basis, and despite the railroad track that led right through it, nobody in Hemmersmoor could say who the people in the camp had been. Nobody remembered the ones who had lived there, slept in the barracks, and died. There had never been such people.

T
he night after the funeral, when I stop by the inn for a glass of beer, Hilde, Alex’s wife, is behind the bar and nods at me. She is plump and her hair is cut short and dyed a shade of red, with blond highlights running through it. Hardly anyone remembers that she was once married to Alex’s brother, Olaf. Hilde’s second marriage has not produced any children, and Alex worries about the future. He complains about heartburn. Who will inherit the inn and the new hotel and riding stables?

Autographed photos of regional celebrities hang behind the bar. They are made out to Alex, praising his food and his liquor. A singer in a white suit and with curly hair, who once crooned about warm nights in Naples and the starry skies above Capri, smiles down at me; a newscaster looks serious in black and white, and the mayor of Bremen watches me from behind his dark glasses and bares his teeth.

Yet Martin has spurned Alex’s invitation and hasn’t come. From time to time, Alex buys pricey oil paintings from his school friend, pictures of local landscapes with threatening clouds and blooming moorlands. In them the skies take up nearly the whole canvas and maim houses and farms. Alex
claims that Martin’s store wouldn’t survive without his patronage. He’s told me that he’ll take care of his friend’s family should something tragic happen to Martin. He has created trust funds for Martin and Veronika’s children, but he has never spoken to them. Martin makes sure that Alex sees them only from afar.

Linde has not come to Frick’s Inn either. Maybe she has found peace; maybe she’s finally even with Anke. Or maybe she’s still waiting for her scholarship, still waiting for the black Mercedes to slowly drive into the village and pull up in front of her ramshackle house, and for Anke to get out of the car, open the gate to the garden, and knock on the door. But maybe she hates Alex even more and can’t forgive him for what he once did to her hated friend.

I look around and overhear a young man talk with contempt about the legends of giants and wizards. “What a dreadful landscape,” he says to his female companion. He has pushed his sunglasses up into his hair, even though it’s dark outside and pouring relentlessly. “It’s flat, swampy, and always gray. And look at the people.” He doesn’t lower his voice as he continues his tirade. “Incest. Narrow shoulders, wide hips, and large feet. Everybody is everybody else’s cousin. And they still believe in ghosts.”

“I’ve seen the will-o’-the-wisps with my own eyes.” I should keep my mouth shut, but the funeral feels like a giant rock in my stomach. One fight is as good as the next.

The young man turns around to face me. “Really?” he says and laughs tauntingly. “How much have you had to drink, old man?”

I glare at him, and the girl at his side talks to him in a whisper. I lift my glass and say, “Sometimes you can still see them today.”

The young man laughs too loudly. “Boo,” he says. “How terrifying.”

Yet at that moment Alex appears behind the bar. “Shut up,” he bellows at the young man. “If you don’t like it here, then piss off.”

Then he takes a construction blueprint from behind the bar and spreads it in front of me. “I’ll tear down the old stables, build better and bigger ones.” He points with a thick finger to a point on the paper. “The house is rotted through. The rats have pissed and shit on every floor and every beam. But the foundation is still solid. We’ll rebuild the house just as it was. I retrieved the old blueprints. Outside everything will look like in the old days, only on the inside we’ll modernize. Everything will be top notch. Twenty hotel rooms, all of them with a good-sized bath, a few with Jacuzzis. The rooms will be made to feel authentic. All the materials will be first class.” He continues talking this way, but he suddenly seems to have lost interest. He casts down his gaze, then looks at me questioningly. “That Linde—she’s one crazy old hag, isn’t she? ‘You killed her.’” He rubs his cheek—he’s still feeling her hand slap him. His eyes are waiting for an answer, and I don’t provide him with one. “Well,” he says and grunts. “It wasn’t my fault the two of them didn’t get along.” He looks as though he’s been badly wronged. “It’s the truth.”

Hilde joins us later. She will run the hotel, she says. Alex will have to look for someone new to help out at the inn. “Not too young, not too plump,” she adds with a smile, and strokes her husband’s cheek. Her lips open in a kiss. Alex puts his arm around her shoulder. “She worries about my heart,” he says. “When God takes away our ability, why doesn’t he also take our desire with it?” His teeth are full of gold.

Time is of no importance. Despite the rain, I don’t walk straight home. Only at night, when the noise of the cars abates and the streets are empty and I walk out onto the moor, can I be alone with the old pictures I carry in my head. Then I can spread my memories out over Hemmersmoor and find my way around. Far away from the village square and the smells that pour out of Frick’s modernized kitchen, the scent of peat still hangs in the air. After dark the witches still gather on the moor. Heidrun Brodersen still struts through our streets. At night lovers meet by the canals.

Not far from the village I run into a dark figure. My first impulse is to turn off the path, but after a moment’s time, I stand and wait; not too many people seek out the peat bog during a downpour.

Linde is wearing a long coat over her dress; her hair is wet and plastered to her head. “Christian,” she says. “Still awake too?”

“What are you doing here?” I ask. “Why didn’t you come to Frick’s?”

“Do you have a cigarette?”

I offer her one but manage only after several tries to light it. Wind and rain extinguish the lighter again and again.