Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone: A Novel (21 page)

I had imagined that Alex would get up immediately and start to dress. I had thought that he would hit me, that I might avoid being hit if I lay completely still. I had thought that as soon as he was done he would get behind the wheel once more. But he only sat up, dangled his legs, put his head out the door, and stared into the sky. The audience grew louder and louder and clapped in rhythm with the song about the
Klabautermann,
and in that moment, when I realized that I had no idea what Alex wanted from me and what he had planned, I knew I would lose my sanity. I had been paralyzed with fear, but I had been proud of myself that I hadn’t screamed and kicked, that I hadn’t given him a reason to beat me. Now, however, he sat at my feet, one hand on my leg, and leaned back in the seat. I’m not sure if he fell asleep, I think he wasn’t asleep, but he sat next to me and put his hand between my legs and I could feel how warm his hand was. Alex breathed steadily, sat next to me in the backseat, and closed his eyes.

In that moment I left my body, and I’m not sure I ever
returned. The program ended and a new one began; this one an opera, and all the members of the audience coughed and then fell quiet, and then the instruments started up. Alex and I lay on the backseat, and it started to rain. I could hear the drops fall onto the roof. And I didn’t fear anything as much as I feared the music, the bright brass section, the violins, the singers’ laughing voices.

I wished to get up and switch off the radio, but I didn’t want to alarm Alex. I could smell him now, his sweat had mixed with his aftershave. It was a terrible stench. Alex’s cheeks were soft, and he had a snub nose with large pores, and fleshy lips. His ears were small and fat.

Finally he sighed, got to his feet, and hummed along with the music. He looked over his shoulder at me, and only then did I realize how rigidly I lay in the backseat. I was a wooden puppet he had thrown in back.

Slowly, Alex pulled up his pants. He was looking for his shirt; his hair stood straight up on top, like the comb of a rooster. And as if he had noticed himself, he smoothed it with both hands. Then he nodded his head, perhaps looking to find the appropriate words, but instead he began to whistle—with too much air to produce a clear tone.

He buttoned his shirt, fastened his tie, and went to the hood of the car. I was still in the backseat, and I was overcome with panic as if I only now fully realized what had happened. But I still could not stir—the slightest movement would break me in half.

“Is my tie straight?” Alex asked. His head appeared again in the door.

I shook my head. Carefully, inch by inch, I pulled down my dress. He did not seem to notice.

“Could you…?” he asked.

I sat up, and it started dripping out of me. I stifled a scream. Carefully, I climbed out of the car and pulled at Alex’s tie.

“Thank you.” He turned around, moved his shoulders in circles, turned and twisted his neck like a boxer testing if everything felt right. Then he lit a cigarette. There was no traffic on the road to the Big House, not even a bicycle or a horse-drawn cart. It was still raining, but it did not seem to bother Alex. “As a boy I wanted to open your blouse,” he said, shaking his head. “Are you ready?” He was in no hurry.

And I realized that haste was not necessary. Not for Alex, not even for me. There was nothing I could escape from. I could still hear the music coming from inside the car, a passionate aria, a female and a male voice wrapping themselves around each other, and although I could think of nothing but this music, I knew that Alex was not afraid, and that I would never tell Rutger anything about this trip or the next. If I ever opened my mouth, Alex would be dismissed from the estate, perhaps even arrested. And Rutger? What would he do after he was finished with his driver? What words would he use to get rid of me?

With my embroidered handkerchief I wiped the backseat before getting back into the car. The rain hadn’t cooled the air, it was still soft, and Alex didn’t close the window when he got behind the wheel.

I could have told on Rutger, but I never did, not that afternoon and not later. My goal to live at his side demanded that I keep my mouth shut, and it was important that Alex keep
quiet too. After a short while, that silence gave me the feeling that I was the one who had committed a crime. I had not been raped; I had done it to another.

Sometimes, when the black car appeared at our front door, I felt weak and humiliated, but after a few weeks it seemed to me that Alex and I were allies. My disgust subsided, and from then on Alex and his car seemed to give me strength. His presence was preparing me for my new life, his touch was only a prelude to Rutger’s greed. In Alex’s car I was his accomplice. It couldn’t be otherwise.

That afternoon Alex looked once more in the rearview mirror, made sure everything was in order, and started the engine. The gravel crunched under our tires as we drove away from the old barn. Over the music he said, “Next time you can show a little more feeling.”

O
n a small chest of drawers in our living room stood the photographs of my family. Nicole and Ingrid as toddlers in our garden, both of them wearing white dresses. Nicole at her confirmation in front of the church. My parents’ wedding picture, taken in Frick’s Inn. My grandmother had kept her eyes closed, and the ring bearer’s face was blurry because he hadn’t sat still. Not a single photo had me in it. My mother had banned me from the family even while I was still living in her house.

One photo of my dad was of special interest to me in those days. It showed him as a young man wearing a leather jacket over his white uniform. Next to him stood the baker, whose right hand rested on my father’s shoulder, and who also laughed at the camera. Both men wore hats with stiff black bills, almost like the police, and they stood in front of their delivery vans, which were parked next to each other. In the background several men unloaded milk and large crates full of bread. They wore uniforms and wore their hair as short as soldiers.

My mother hadn’t removed a single picture of my late father, but it was this one I looked at almost daily. I was in love with
Sylvia Meier, the baker’s daughter, and this picture seemed to connect our families. It was a source of pleasure and a certain discomfort to see the two men smiling at me together. It seemed as though my father had meddled with my life and love even before I was born. At times when I looked at Sylvia’s face and ran my fingers over her nose and cheeks, it was as though my dad were leading my hand and Sylvia were looking not at me but him.

When my mother caught me one morning with that photo in my hands, she hit my face repeatedly. My nose started to bleed, and one of her rings cut my forehead. The teacher often admonished me not to brawl—I looked all raw, he said. My white, almost translucent skin was a map of my mother’s wrath.

At night I left the house to meet Sylvia at our usual spot on the banks of the Droste. Sylvia had kissed many boys, and she had already done it with several of them. She was experienced. I was barely her height, but she said I was special and had not once missed an appointed meeting. She felt the small hills of my scars, kissed my burns, my bruises, and licked them. In the dark she ran her tongue over every bump of my skin, and since spring was near, we were half-naked and panting. Sylvia unbuttoned my pants and pulled down my underwear. She showed me how to unclasp her bra, asked if I weren’t curious to see how she looked without her pantyhose.

Often our encounters lasted several hours, but that night Sylvia soon told me to put my clothes back on, and then walked away from the river.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

She laughed, her legs naked and stockings stuffed into
one of her coat pockets. We strode past the last houses of Hemmersmoor, across barren fields. The night was damp, thousands of fine drops clung to our bodies. But we were warm.

“Are we meeting someone?” I asked.

Sylvia kissed me, pulling my hand down to touch her. “Be quiet, Christian,” she whispered.

I trusted her, and yet I grew concerned as we made our way farther and farther out onto the moor. After a while the rows of drying peat bricks grew scarce, and only hard grasses covered the soil. Clouds as large as continents blew over our heads. Hemmersmoor had long since disappeared behind us.

After half an hour she finally slowed. In front of us scraggly trees rose and waved their branches, and after a few more steps, we came to a gate, rusty barbed wire curling at our feet.

“You’re not scared, are you?” Sylvia scaled the iron gate, her legs shining even in the dark.

I followed her. “What is this?” I asked. “Do they have dogs?”

Sylvia shushed me. “Don’t be afraid. No one’s here.”

We were walking along a narrow paved road, and soon we reached a low barrack. Its door was locked, but Sylvia opened a window on the far side of the building, and we climbed inside. She flicked a switch, and we stood among thirty bunk beds, their mattresses bare, some stained. The room smelled of dust, yet the overall effect was one of cleanliness.

Sylvia’s blond hair was glittering with moisture under the single bare bulb that dangled from the ceiling. Her cheeks were red.

“Who lives here?”

“No one,” she said, and kicked off her shoes.

Three weeks later she said she’d fallen in love with someone else, a twenty-year-old soccer player, and that we couldn’t see each other anymore.

I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t tell anyone. My mother was not allowed to know; my sister Nicole had no time for “that monster.” She had a little baby to take care of and couldn’t be bothered. Whatever I confessed to her would go straight to my mother.

Images of Sylvia doing what we had done with a new boy, an older boy, kept me sobbing at night. But even worse was when, after two days of mourning, I plunged into such hopelessness that I didn’t even have the strength to conjure up any haunting images. My world turned black.

After a week I decided to go to the place Sylvia had shown me. Just the thought of returning to that barrack revived my pain, and I felt grateful for it. I would spy on her, I decided. I would watch Sylvia with her new lover. I’d be so close to her, so close.

My task turned out to be more difficult than I had imagined. A walk after school one May afternoon proved futile. The daylight barricaded my way; after an hour of crisscrossing the moor, I stood in ankle-deep mud, with nothing in sight. My memory was useless.

During supper, I tried to steer my family’s conversation toward the subject of a gated area, an empty barrack somewhere north of our village. Maybe my mother or sister knew of that place.

“A barrack?” Nicole asked. Her son had fed and was sleeping in her lap; she never let me come close to him.

“Thomas said, in school, that he’d seen one outside the
village. He said there was a gate.” I stared at my salami sandwich, unable to meet her eyes.

“Maybe he’s seen one of the vacation homes around here,” Mother said. My dad’s chair at the table was not to be touched or moved, and every evening she put out a plate for him.

“Probably just a barn,” my sister replied. “Thomas isn’t all that bright. Neither are his parents.”

I tried again to reach that gate after nightfall. How strange that once it had grown dark, my feet knew just where to go and my eyes followed my memories. Sylvia, of course, was not with me, but I hoped to see her at the barrack.

I scaled the fence once more, found the barrack dark and locked. I listened for sounds from inside but heard nothing. Instead of climbing through a window, I headed down the paved road.

After only fifty yards, another barrack appeared to my right, then another. A fourth one, and the road was still leading ahead. To my left a large barnlike structure shot up, and through an unlocked gate, which I slid open, I entered. It was darker than night inside, but after a few moments, I made out large machines, squatting like reptiles. Tiny feet scurried over the floor, glass crunched under my shoes. My whistling came echoing back at me, and I hurried outside.

I was still following the road when I came to a railroad crossing. Hemmersmoor’s only track ended at Brümmer’s factory—did this track extend to Brümmer’s? Or was it unconnected to the appearance of the small steam engine we boys had admired for so long?

Walking from one end of Hemmersmoor to the other took me twenty minutes. I had walked twenty minutes on the
winding road when I came to a barrack whose front door was busted. On entering I found that, just like in the first building, the light was still working. In the back, I stepped into an enormous kitchen with several stationary frying pans, gas burners as big as the stove surface at my own home, and pots into which I still would have fit entirely. Enormous cooking spoons and whisks lay strewn on the floor, like the toys of some ancient race of giants.

A large hall with wooden floors and long wooden tables lay adjacent to this kitchen, and while some of the chairs had been broken, this hall still seemed to wait for hundreds of hungry eaters. Who had been living here? I didn’t dare switch off the light.