Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone: A Novel (7 page)

The holidays were even worse, and the atmosphere so poisonous that on the morning of December 26, I went to Anke’s to play with her new dolls. She was the Hoffmanns’ only daughter, and her mother showered her with gifts, all of which she showed me the second I stepped into the house. Instead of playing in the living room as usual, we sat on a bench in the garden, placing the dolls on chairs around us. It was so warm that the boys ran through the village in shorts and without shoes. After the previous day’s rain, the streets were soft and muddy, and there were large puddles all over the village square. Mr. Frick had carried chairs outside, and the men were drinking their beer under the oak trees, their collars open.

“My mother is going to Groß Ostensen the day after tomorrow,” Anke told me. “She wants to buy fabrics. You want to come with us?”

“Yes,” I said immediately, but then thought better of it. “Another time. I have to help my dad.”

Anke rolled her eyes. “Do you have to play with Friedrich again?”

I shrugged. “He doesn’t have anybody else to play with during recess.”

“Serves him right. My mother says he needs a father. But of course that’s not going to happen.” She tapped her forehead. “Where would he get one?”

Only in the late afternoon, after the sun went down, did I return home. My dad was nowhere to be seen, but my mom had visitors. When I stepped into the lighted kitchen, Mrs. Meier,
the baker’s wife; Mrs. Schürholz, the
Gendarm
’s wife; and the mailman’s wife were sitting around the table. This was no coffee klatch, however. A marble cake stood between them, but my mom hadn’t used the good china; the women drank their coffee from the plain blue-and-white cups.

They fell silent while my mother piled the rest of our Christmas dinner onto my plate and sent me to my room. Once there I closed my door from the outside, but loud enough for the women to notice, then put down my plate and listened to their voices from an armchair in our living room. They sounded very serious and secretive, so I couldn’t overhear much, but I heard the word “crow” several times, and when the women finally said good night, Mrs. Schürholz reassured my mom, “Klaus can get you the forms. We’ll deal with that in the New Year. You’ll see.” And the mailman’s wife said, “My husband can arrange that. He’ll deliver it personally.”

“You should have come to us earlier,” Mrs. Meier said. “No need to be ashamed.”

My dad seemed relieved when the holidays were over. His face smoothed out for the first time in three days, and the closer we got to the manor, the brighter his eyes shone from behind his thick glasses.

But Inge did not join us in the garden; instead Friedrich came running. “She has a fever and is sleeping.” He himself looked all gray.

My dad listened to him and nodded. “That’s fine. Tell her to rest.” Then he paused before asking, “Does she need any medication? Shall I get the doctor for her?” He took a few steps
toward the manor house, but then stopped. “Linde,” he instructed me. “You go and see if Mrs. Madelung needs anything.”

“You don’t need to come,” Friedrich said once we were out of earshot. “It’s not a real fever.”

“Not a real fever?”

“Well, she’s sick, but in a different way.” When I looked at him without comprehending, he added, “She hasn’t slept all night. I think she saw my dad.”

“But he’s dead,” I said out loud, and then put my hand quickly over my mouth.

He shrugged. “She really saw him though, I think.” And then Friedrich told me what had happened. His mom had given him a new pair of pants for Christmas, and against her wishes he had worn them to play outside. But after hanging around the stables, he had slipped on a muddy path and torn a big hole in the left knee. He hadn’t dared go home for a long time, and when he finally returned, after dark, Inge struck him repeatedly. But still her rage wouldn’t subside, and she scolded him, called him an ungrateful brat who only caused her pain. She paced her room, up and down, and up and down, and cursed her fate, cursed the death of her husband, cursed Hemmersmoor and old Mr. von Kamphoff. “And your dad as well,” Friedrich added. “She was beside herself, and then she started to cry and got only more furious, until she finally ran outside.”

The night air was damp but hadn’t cooled off. On her way into the gardens, Inge had not once looked over her shoulder, and Friedrich had hurried from bush to bush and followed her at a safe distance. Near the parkway that led to the road to Hemmersmoor, where you could no longer see the lights from
the manor house, Inge had stopped. “She was yelling at my father,” Friedrich said. “‘Hermann,’ she was yelling, again and again. And then she said that he was to blame for all her misery. That he had been only a stupid waiter, and that he had left us voluntarily to go to war. He had been nothing more than canon fodder and left us without money or help, and she had had to escape without him.”

His mother had cried loudly and finally she had shouted, “Hermann! Where are you? What have you done to me, Hermann? What were you doing on the battlefield? You couldn’t even shoot properly. How could you be so dumb and die in a foreign country? What is going to happen to me? To your son? Come back, Hermann, come and help me. It’s all your fault. Come and help me!”

Friedrich was too afraid to leave his hiding place. He was afraid for his mother, but he feared her wrath even more. Yet he kept watching her and suddenly became aware of a white figure among the trees along the parkway. It seemed to scurry from tree to tree without ever touching the ground. “Hermann?” Inge asked, and when the white figure approached her, she screamed, “Hermann!” and began to cry. “Forgive me. I didn’t want to wake you. Go back, Hermann, go back to sleep. I will manage on my own. Forgive me, Hermann, I will let you sleep. I won’t cry anymore, Hermann.”

What had happened afterward, Friedrich couldn’t say. “I ran away,” he said quietly and without looking at me. With the tips of his shoes, he was drawing lines into the sand.

“Was it really your dad?” I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. “I didn’t imagine all this.”

“Maybe it was one of the von Kamphoffs,” I suggested. “Or
maybe Johann’s brother, the true heir. Maybe he escaped from the basement.”

“Those are old wives’ tales,” said Friedrich.

“They’re not,” I insisted.

“In any case don’t tell my mother I told you,” he admonished me. “Don’t let on.”

Together we stepped into their room. Mrs. Madelung slept and didn’t awaken when we tiptoed to her bed and made sure that her eyes were closed and that she was breathing regularly. Her cheeks looked all red, and her wrinkles had smoothed out. From time to time she snored a little.

Friedrich pulled me back and cautiously opened a drawer and took out a photograph, which he showed me once we got outside. “It’s the only one we have,” he said, and let me hold it. It showed a man with thinning hair, wearing a dark suit. He had a fine smile and large, dark eyes. The edges and corners of the picture were bent and worn.

“Was he an officer?” I asked.

Friedrich shook his head. He blushed and said, “I lied.”

“How did he die, then?”

“We don’t know,” he said. “And my mother never visited Lithuania. We don’t even know where exactly he died. I can’t remember his face. Only this picture. When I was little, my mother told me a story about him trying to conquer a large city and dying during the attack. But I think she made that up. This morning she said that last night was a sign.”

“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?

O
ur 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.