Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone: A Novel (2 page)

Now that our village belongs to the ordinary world around it, the pale boy from the past looks like a ghost. Maybe it’s for the better, maybe this is what allows me to stay. Maybe I would choke otherwise. But the absence of what I can still see so clearly in front of me makes it hard for me to breathe anyway.

The Big House stands upon the sandy hill that marks the grave of Hüklüt the Giant. He carried a large sack of fine sand, to avoid sinking into the treacherous moor. Yet it didn’t matter, and the manor of the von Kamphoff family is his headstone. The gables and turrets, the yellow stone and the gravel driveway—they remain incomprehensible to the villagers.

It’s the first time I’m driving out to the Big House. The
spring day is a puppy, unconcerned and playful, and I roll down a window, and the air is soft and ticklish, and I rub my face again and again. Clouds hang low above the moor. It may rain later on but they’re still shimmering faintly pink. The grass along the road is already green again.

When my family still lived in Hemmersmoor and Johann von Kamphoff still reigned over the manor, only very few villagers had the pleasure of walking through the gardens or entering the house. From time to time, the von Kamphoffs’ black sedan arrived in our village, which seemed much too small for such a car, and most of the time it was Rutger, the old master’s grandson, who stepped out of the car and onto our cobblestones to go after one girl or another.

The gardens of the manor are neglected, but the vastness of the property proves the old legend right. The bushes are covered with bright-green spots, and the lawns don’t seem to end. In the distance I can make out the maze. Guests at Frick’s Inn often whisper that people have disappeared inside; its hedges are thick and impenetrable and higher than the tallest man.

Alex Frick’s Opel stands in the gravel courtyard, and he leans against its fender and smokes a cigarette. He’s a tall man, a bit stooped by now, bulky but not cloddish. His dark suit is custom tailored; his tie is made from silk. Alex is taking care of his brother’s widow, has been married to her for many years, and together they have expanded Frick’s Inn. In the summer you can see vacationers on the new terrace, where they sit over strawberry cake and coffee and talk about the picturesque backwater. Alex’s eyebrows have grown together, and are almost white, but his face remains boyish. A smile is playing in the corners of his fleshy lips.

“Are you trying to push up the price and jeopardize my business?” he asks and laughs. “You know you can’t outbid me. Don’t make life harder for me than it already is.”

I shake my head. “Are we the only ones?”

He nods toward the road leading down to our village. A small van becomes visible in the distance and slowly makes its way toward us. I know the van. It belongs to our schoolfellow Martin Schürholz. His father, Klaus, once our country constable, is long since dead, and Martin runs a small store in the village, where he sells souvenirs and paintings by local artists.

The manor must have been impressive once, but the courtyard is full of weeds, and weeds and moss are climbing the walls. The yellow stone has blackened and crumbled in places. Some of the windows are missing, and the holes have been filled with cardboard and trash bags. The stables, which stand to our left, have collapsed. “She must have had money enough,” I say and shake my head.

Alex gives a short laugh. It sounds like a bark. “Always paid her bill. God knows where she kept that money hidden. In twenty years she never once left the house.” I have heard the rumor too, the one about the money still being hidden somewhere, but also the whispered suspicion that Alex is trying to buy the manor only because of the secret treasure.

Martin parks his rusty van and gets out, nodding at us. His hair is red, parted neatly, and he’s wearing round wire-rimmed glasses. He joins us reluctantly and accepts the cigarette Alex offers only after a moment of hesitation. Martin is our age, but his trim body makes him look like a schoolboy next to Alex. Sometimes I see him running through the village in yellow trainers. He and his wife never visit Frick’s Inn, and they avoid
Alex, even though they are invited to every event at his house. Whenever seeing Alex is unavoidable, Martin shows up by himself.

But today we are paying our respects to our old friend Anke, and together we wait for the hearse from Groß Ostensen. After a few empty exchanges about business and the weather, we fall silent and stare at our cigarettes, as though they contained answers to life’s mysteries.

Anke was a proud woman, and she was one of us. She went to school with us, and her mother participated every year in Hemmersmoor’s cooking contest. Already as a young girl she had wanted to move into the Big House, and no advice, no tragedy, and no friendship could keep her from reaching that goal. Just like me, she escaped our village, and although the manor was only a few kilometers outside of Hemmersmoor, it was always very much its own world.

After a few minutes, during which Alex has walked around the house and stooped here and there to inspect the walls, a distant roar and rattle startles us out of our thoughts. We haven’t expected her, but Linde Janeke is driving toward us in her old Volkswagen. Her hair hasn’t been brown for a long time, and her features have suffered just like ours and have lost their sharpness. Yet in Linde’s case, her wrinkles hide the scars that once disfigured her. Her dark eyes still sparkle. “Can’t complain,” she says when Alex asks about her well-being, yet it sounds like a complaint. She looks at Martin and sneers. “You too, Professor? Is Anke really worth such fine company?” Then she squints at the house and the blind-and-broken windows. “What a tragedy,” she says and almost looks happy.

Martin decides to ignore Linde’s remark and watches her with
a mixture of suspicion and contempt. Linde is the only one in our village who’s still talking about witches and ghosts. She wears loose-fitting dresses and shirts, which she dyes herself. On some days she points into the air and describes the things none of us can see. Howling dogs and wailing mothers with empty eye sockets. She claims the ghosts confide in her; she claims there are still more things between heaven and hell than the vacationers in our village can imagine. Alex and Martin claim she’s lost her mind.

The cemetery of the Big House lies hidden behind tall hedges; the hinges of the gate screech as it swings slowly open. Lime trees offer a little shade, and stone benches stand next to the graves. The old owner and his wife lie buried here, as do their only son and his wife, who, it is said, was once famous in the red-light district of Hamburg’s port. And Anke’s husband, underneath whose name her own has been waiting for years.

Together we walk toward that small cemetery, and Alex starts searching for a particular headstone. He finds it off to the side, as though it doesn’t really belong. It’s the grave of his sister, Anna, and her small daughter. “Wouldn’t make room for them,” he says and picks a few dead branches off the soil. “Not even after their deaths did they know where to put them. And that one”—he points toward the house as though Anke were still living inside—“even moved the headstone once she got here. Didn’t want to be reminded of her predecessor.” He straightens up again and looks around. “Anna was the mistress of the house, and they made me the chauffeur.” He laughs and spits on the ground. He has plans to convert the dilapidated farmhouse into a hotel and riding stable. His lawyers and accountants are already inspecting the von Kamphoffs’ accounts.

It was Alex who became aware of Anke’s death. It was he
who delivered groceries every Friday to her locked door and picked up the empty crate from the week before, plus a sealed envelope with the money she owed him. “Never saw the old hag,” he says. “When they finally forced open the door, one of the cops had to barf. The smell inside was that bad. She didn’t bother to find a bathroom anymore.”

In the old days, no one from our village would have been invited to attend a funeral here, but today the four of us are the only ones to keep the undertaker and his men company. The black Mercedes bumps over the old road that connects the Big House with Groß Ostensen, and the men get out of the hearse and nod to us. Alex helps them carry the white coffin to the open grave. The family crest has been painted in gold on its sides. Even in death Anke observes strict etiquette.

After the men have lowered the coffin into the grave, the undertaker, a man in a black suit and with thinning hair, says a few words. He talks about solidity, character, a strong will, and a belief in community and charity. He’s from Groß Ostensen and doesn’t know us. His words come from the well-meaning calendars we get every year for free at the gas station. Alex, Linde, and Martin listen with stern faces, but I think Linde’s mouth is twitching from time to time—whether from grief or bemusement I can’t say. When the undertaker ends his speech, the grave is filled in. In the background the pink edges of the clouds turn dark and the air smells sweet; perhaps it is the coming rain, perhaps the tastefully gaudy wreath the men lay onto the dark soil.

When the undertaker has gone and the black hearse is back on its way to Groß Ostensen, Linde steps closer to the headstone, inspects the inscription, and rounds the grave, as though
to make sure that Anke won’t be able to get out. Her dress is as gaudy as the wreath, only its colors are more washed out. Loudly she coughs up some phlegm and spits it out. “You piece of shit,” she says. “There you go.” She stomps around on the loose soil.

Alex steps toward her, talks to her, tries to lead her away from the grave, but Linde shakes off his arm. “Go fuck yourself, Alex. Don’t get all holy on me now. You couldn’t stand her.” When he still won’t leave her, she slaps him in the face. She has to get up on her toes to do it. “Don’t touch me again,” she says. “You killed her.” With legs wide apart, she bends over, hikes up her skirt, shows us that she isn’t wearing any underwear, and pisses onto the grave. Alex shakes his head and brushes his suit with his hands as though it suddenly has become dirty. Martin turns away without a word and walks toward his van. Alex raises one hand and shouts, “Stop by the inn tonight,” but Martin doesn’t react. Surely he doesn’t want to have heard.

“Done,” Linde finally says, then lets down her skirt and straightens it. Angrily she stares after Martin’s van, until a tiny smile scurries over her face. “The coffin should have had a window. A large, round window. Hell, the whole lid should have been made from glass.” Once more, she steps toward the grave and looks at what she’s done. “I just hope she can see me from hell.” The smile spreads on her face. You could almost call her beautiful.

I
n September we celebrated Thanksgiving in Hemmersmoor,
*
and mass was followed by festivities at Frick’s. In the afternoon, after beer stuck to every surface, the villagers spilled into the square to take part in the yearly cooking contest.

“For the first one death, for the second starvation, for the third one bread”—that old proverb described the colonization of the Devil’s Moor, but our bread remained as hard and gray and sour as our soil.

To enter the cooking contest was costly, because the rules stated that each dish had to feed at least four dozen people. Hemmersmoor had three categories: best stew, best roast, and best
Butterkuchen
, the buttery, sugar-sprinkled sheet cake our baker, Meier, was famous for and that he sold for funerals and weddings alike. Meier always won the contest, uncontested that is, because who would dare go up against him?

The stew contest was, for the imaginary outsider—there were never any real outsiders present during the cooking contest—an unappetizing affair. You need to have lived in the
North to appreciate
Labskaus
, an old sailor dish, or Pears, Beans, and Bacon, another favorite.

The roast contest was maybe our favorite, and the more contestants entered, the better the feast that followed in the village square. Nobody in the village could resist the doctor’s wife’s pork roast or help stuffing themselves with beef dished out by the mailman’s wife. And this year the competition was unusually fierce and promising. Four families had entered the stew contest, five the roast contest, and Meier faced his first rival in fifteen years—my mother, Käthe Schürholz.

Fueled by compliments on her
Butterkuchen
—my father, the
Gendarm
, insisted it could compete with any cake anywhere—my mother, with fingers trembling and her hair refusing to stay curled, announced her entry the week before Thanksgiving.

During the days leading up to the contest I stayed in school as long as I could, then went home with one friend or another. If Alex had to help at his father’s inn and Christian was nowhere to be found, I followed Anke Hoffmann to her house and played all afternoon with her and Linde Janeke. Patiently I combed the hair of their dolls and listened to stories about cursed princes and princesses immortally in love with young men of low birth, only so Mrs. Hoffmann would invite me for dinner. All the dolls had names. Some were called only Dolly or Baby, but the better ones had names like Rosemarie and Kunigunde. Two of the dolls looked very similar, and both wore flowered dresses; they were Anke and Linde. The real girls almost looked like twins, and they often wore the same colors to heighten that impression. But Anke wore shiny barrettes and necklaces, and her shoes always looked freshly polished. Even her dolls looked
more glamorous than Linde’s, and she had twice as many as her friend and a whole drawer full of dresses for them. She insisted that her dolls wear fresh clothes daily.

I never mentioned those afternoons to Christian or Alex, and hoped the girls and Anke’s brothers wouldn’t tell on me. Yet each day I stayed as long as the Hoffmanns would have me. Only after nightfall did I return home, and neither my father nor my mother ever noticed my absence.

Each day my mom baked several small sheets of cake, trying to improve on the moistness of the dough, its texture, butteriness, or even the way to sprinkle it with sugar. If she noticed me at all in those days, it was only to put a plate with a large piece of
Butterkuchen
in front of me. “Try it, Martin,” she’d say, but I couldn’t enjoy the treat. One false expression on my face would bring her to tears; no praise would appease her.