Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone: A Novel (5 page)

When I turned seven, however, I had to braid my hair and attend school, and let Dad do his work without my good cheer and companionship. Instead of lending him a hand, I sat in the classroom, next to my best friend, Anke Hoffmann, and learned how to write and do math. I felt very important with my new books and my large schoolbag, and instead of collecting acorns or raking leaves I spent my afternoons at Anke’s house. I spent so much time with her that I started to feel like a stranger in my own home.

The winter after I started school was no winter at all. In the fall Martin Schürholz had often played with Anke and me, but since our Thanksgiving celebration his visits had become less frequent. When he came to Anke’s room, it was only to braid our hair and put his face in our laps. Or we played wedding, and he was the groom and had to kiss us.

The Vierksen family had been buried on a sunny September day, and at the end of October the sun still made us sweat when we went in our black dresses to Ingrid Bobinski’s funeral. Then the November storms never came, and even on the first Sunday in Advent the windows of our houses were still open and the candles on the pine wreaths put no one in a festive mood. The boys in our village met at night to go swimming in the Droste River.

That December the villagers got quickly used to the warm weather, but when it was almost Christmas and they still hadn’t rummaged through the dark corners of their closets to retrieve
their mothballed winter coats, they started to get worried. They enjoyed the mild days and even tolerated the flies, which sat on their doors and windows and crept into their bedrooms and hummed around their sleeping babies, but how long could such a blessing last? Winter had to come after all. It had to snow; the canals had to freeze over. The warmer the days got, the more worried the farmers became. Had Helga Vierksen put a curse on Hemmersmoor? Was it time to pay for our sins? The trees blossomed, grass and grains started to push out of the soil—a sudden frost would cost them their harvest. My father shook his head and sighed. In winter he often came home early; the gardens could do without him. Yet the warm weather would not allow him to rest.

The only woman in the village wearing her black coat was the widow Madelung. She wore black all year, and it was her only coat. Even though the woolen fabric had to be too warm, she wore the coat whenever she left the von Kamphoff manor to walk into the village.

After the last war, the administration in Groß Ostensen had insisted that the von Kamphoff family take in war refugees. This was how Inge Madelung and her young son, Friedrich, came to live in a tiny room at the Big House. She was a small woman, with white, curly hair that, it was said, on the evening before her escape from East Prussia had still been flaxen. Inge Madelung wasn’t yet forty years old, and even though her face looked tired and drawn, she was met with suspicion by the women in Hemmersmoor whenever she came to buy a few things for herself and her son. She didn’t have a husband, she held herself straight, and she had kept her youthful figure.

Hermann Madelung, who had worked as a waiter before the
war, had never come home from the Lithuanian front, Mrs. Meier told her patrons. As long as his death wasn’t established, the small woman would not receive a pension. What a cruel fate, sighed Mrs. Meier, and the women in the bakery sighed with her a bit too heartily.

In the summer Inge Madelung worked in the fields around the Big House, and in the fall and winter she did the laundry and helped in the kitchen. She was a good worker, diligent, conscientious, and quiet.

Friedrich grew and started going to school in the village. He was needled because of his mended shirts and socks. He always wore the same pair of pants—clean, mended at the knees, and a bit shabbier every month—until he was finally too tall for them.

Friedrich often bragged about his father, told stories of his daring adventures in the last war. One day his father flew in an attack on Moscow, on another he saved his men by jumping out of a trench and storming toward the enemy all by himself. He’d been a high-ranking officer, Friedrich told us, and had received many medals. Friedrich was the only one in our class whose father wasn’t around, and his stories grew ever more fantastic. But Alex and Bernhard called him a bastard, and he often went home from school crying after fighting with Martin and the others. Rumors were flying that neither Friedrich nor his mother knew who the boy’s father was. She had been too friendly with soldiers or maybe something much worse had happened, something the women in Hemmersmoor never named. They said Inge should be happy that her son didn’t look like a Mongol or a Moor.

Inge Madelung, however, ignored these rumors and mended her son’s pants after every fight. When she came into the village, she held her head high, even though the other women’s hostility
was palpable and can’t have escaped her. They worried about their men, called her the Crow behind her back, but loudly enough so she could hear it. She never came to our Thanksgiving celebrations.

No matter how much Inge wished for a friendlier reception in Hemmersmoor, she understood the women’s hostility all too well. She felt the men’s stares like needles on her skin, and was treated without any respect by them, as though she had personally caused her husband’s death.

All that would probably have escaped me—Anke and I had better things to do than to worry about the adults’ affairs—if my father had stayed home like every other winter, if his hedges and flower beds had been buried under a thick layer of snow. But the old owner insisted that my dad work long hours in the gardens of the Big House, and the strangest thing was that it didn’t seem to bother my father. Quite the opposite. Each morning he seemed to get up a little bit earlier than the previous one, and my mother started to complain about his early rising, his good spirits, and loud voice. When my father returned home in the evenings, she was in such a foul mood that I left the house to make Christmas decorations from colored paper and straw with Anke.

What I didn’t know, but what my mom told me all too soon in a low whisper, was that Inge Madelung was helping my dad with his work. In the fall Inge had helped in the fields, just like the previous year, but one day the overseer had approached her and asked if she would like to help the gardener with his work. Inge had agreed and had been happy to escape the sun beating down on her without respite. My father had shaken his head when the overseer introduced him to Inge, had complained to my mother that she couldn’t lift and carry like a man.

But after the first week, he had been surprisingly satisfied with her work, and after another week, they could often be seen working side by side until my father drove home at night in his beat-up truck.

My mother’s face was dark, her eyes shimmered, and something that appeared to be a smile, but was so much more dangerous, played on her lips while she told me all this two days before our Christmas recess. “The worst,” she said, “is that he won’t talk about her at all anymore. He’s keeping her a secret. He can’t wait to be alone with that hussy. Your father is not himself anymore. He’s long forgotten about the two of us.”

I didn’t answer my mother. No word could have consoled her or changed the plan she had come up with. As soon as school let out for Christmas, I was to accompany my dad to the Big House again. “You have to keep your eyes open and tell me everything you see,” she said.

“Can Anke come with me?” I asked.

My mom nodded. “Just don’t let on.”

On December 21, at five o’clock in the morning, my dad and I left the house and picked up Anke, who was already waiting outside her house, freshly washed and groomed. Together we trundled through the darkness toward the Big House.

Anke carried a small leather bag that her mother had packed for her, and she stared intently through the side window. She wore a dress, which was, unlike my own, much too nice to wear for work or play, and she looked all pretty and smelled as if her mom had rubbed her whole body with cologne. “Can we go into the maze?” she asked.

“As long as you don’t get caught,” mumbled my father. Last summer my presence had still cheered him up, but this winter
morning he was moody. “Don’t do anything foolish and, above all, be courteous to old man von Kamphoff. Curtsy when you see him.”

Three generations of the von Kamphoff family lived in the manor house. The old owner had served as an officer in two wars. He was missing an arm and had a pronounced limp. It was he who had first hired my dad, when my father was a young man with a pregnant bride, and he treated Dad with the same benevolence one might show to a favorite dog. His legs were white and crisscrossed by varicose veins and scars, and one shirtsleeve was rolled up and fastened to the shoulder with safety pins.

Some days he stood next to my dad, who was digging up weed trees or planting rhododendrons, and rambled on good-humoredly about the battles he’d fought in. He explained why we should have won the wars and which mistakes and coincidences had prevented us from claiming what was destined to be ours.

My father agreed. He might have been a good, gentle man, but if his bad eyes had not kept him out of the service, he would readily have fought for the
Vaterland
. He was poor, Hemmersmoor was poor, someone had to be responsible for the misery in the world, and it couldn’t be us. Not us.

Only a few people in the village had ever visited the manor, and even fewer had set foot inside. Yet this fact added spice to the rumors that swirled around the von Kamphoff family. It was said that the old Johann von Kamphoff had murdered his father in his sleep to become lord of the manor, and that a black woman he had captured during the last war was imprisoned in the basement. The patrons of Frick’s Inn again and again talked about the true heir. They claimed that Johann had had a
younger brother, and that this brother, against all customs, should have inherited the manor. But after the death of his father, Johann hadn’t wanted to cede what he thought was his and had killed his brother. In a different version of the story, Johann had imprisoned his brother, just like the black woman. Yet nobody could remember what the true heir had looked like. All this had happened before the first of the wars, and birth certificates weren’t archived in Hemmersmoor.

Today, though, it wasn’t old von Kamphoff who greeted us when we arrived at the manor house. It was Inge Madelung, and as soon as my dad had climbed out of his truck, he introduced us to her. “Winter recess,” he mumbled. “They’re in the way at home.”

Inge shook hands with us as though we were already grown up. “You must be going to school with my Friedrich,” she said.

“Yes,” Anke said. “He’s in our class.”

“How nice,” said the widow. “Maybe you’d like to play together.”

“Maybe,” I said without enthusiasm, but my dad looked sternly in my direction, then sent me and Anke to get rakes, garden shears, and buckets from the toolshed. “You can give us a hand,” he said, and soon we were pulling weeds and raking the lawn.

“This is stupid,” Anke said. Her hands were already covered in blisters. “My mom is baking cookies today.”

I stuck my tongue out and said, “Why don’t you run home?”

“And later we have to play with that bastard,” she complained.

“Yeah, that’s really stupid,” I agreed. I couldn’t tell her the true reason why we had come to the manor. My mom had
forbidden me to make a single peep, but her admonishment hadn’t been necessary. “When the old man joins us, we can go and play.” I tried to appease her.

Last summer Mr. von Kamphoff had come into the garden two, maybe three, times a week, but now my dad was complaining about his constant presence. “Here he comes again,” he said under his breath when, around nine o’clock, the old owner made his way toward us. He seemed to abhor the many visits his employer made, and I noticed that Johann von Kamphoff’s appearance had changed. His hair was neatly cut and glistened with grease. He had stopped wearing his worn and shapeless pants, and his shoes had been shined. He greeted me and Anke, and we both curtsied; then he turned to the widow and asked, “Mrs. Madelung, busy again?”

“Let’s go,” I whispered into Anke’s ear, but my friend shook her head silently.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, but I still didn’t receive an answer. Instead Anke stared at the old man, and whenever he looked in her direction, she smiled diligently. Finally she stooped and pretended to pull weeds while listening intently to the adults’ conversation.

While Johann von Kamphoff was talking about his war adventures, my father’s face grew increasingly somber. “Didn’t have to kill them,” the owner sighed. “Could have simply disowned them.” He still wore his shirtsleeve rolled up and pinned to the shoulder, but the shirt was made from silk, and he wore an expensive tie.

“Absolutely,” my father agreed. “Would have been better for the war effort.”

“Damn mess,” cursed Mr. von Kamphoff, and then looked
at Inge, who quickly turned away and pretended not to have overheard the men’s conversation.

“Erich,” the owner said, and pointed to my father. “Erich thinks he’s the only one who knows anything about garden work.” He laughed jovially. “But I wasn’t always a silly old man. I traveled the world. Saw Africa, the desert, the Muslims, the black devils. A fascinating continent.”

Even I was listening to the old man now, just like Anke. Maybe the black woman in the basement wasn’t just a rumor after all. Maybe the people in the village had been right all along.

Inge smiled. “How are your grandchildren doing?” she asked. “My Fritz worships your Rutger.”

Anke’s face lit up as soon as the widow mentioned Rutger von Kamphoff. The owner’s grandson had to be thirteen or fourteen, and all my friends wanted to marry him. He didn’t go to school in Hemmersmoor, but from time to time a black Mercedes appeared in our village, and when the von Kamphoff family stepped out onto our cobblestone streets, the villagers dropped whatever they were doing and stared open-mouthed at the spectacle. After each and every of Rutger’s visits, all the girls claimed he had winked at them.

Yet the old man didn’t seem to have heard the question. “It’s a shame that a young woman like you has to fend for herself,” he said. “Your husband was a soldier?”