Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone: A Novel (12 page)

After Christmas that year, I walked through the fresh snow toward the Black Mill. School was out, Holger was seen every day with a different girl and claimed that Christian was making out with the baker’s daughter. They didn’t have the time to accompany me.

The forest was quiet, and even though the skies were overcast, it seemed bright like our town hall when decorated for a dance. The snow had robbed the woods of all its dark corners. My steps and breath filled my ears.

Where the mill had to be, thin smoke rose over the tops of the trees, and I quickened my pace, gripping my walking stick tightly. Yet before I reached the river, a cat jumped out onto the path in front of me. It was a house cat, but so large was she that I took two steps backward. Her fur was black, her tail as lively as a serpent, and her round face reached up to my belly. She cocked her head as if to say, “You’re here again, Martin. I’ve seen you before.”

I remembered the tales of witches and wizards taking on the shapes of animals and haunting villagers, but I had never seen one before. “Who are you?” I stammered.

The cat kept silent but stepped ahead, her big paws sinking deep into the snow. I had trouble keeping up with her. On reaching the mill, the large wheel lay quiet, bound by ice. Only in the middle of the Droste remained a tiny sliver of open water, like a cut that wouldn’t heal. If I should vanish from this spot, who would come and look for me?

When I took my eyes off the thin column of smoke coming from the chimney, the cat was gone. Her steps ended at the front door. Christian, Holger, and I had tried many times to force it
open and had found it solidly locked every time. Now it stood ajar, tempting me. I pushed it fully open with my stick and entered.

The first room was the kitchen, with an oaken table and eight wooden chairs set around it. The pots hanging above the fireplace were old and dented and impeccably clean. A fire groaned and hissed, and after staring at this strange scene for a few long seconds, I felt the need to take off my coat. Then I shut the door to the outside.

Plates stood stacked on the table, as though someone had taken them from a cupboard but had been interrupted before being able to lay them out. Someone had written a message in the dust covering the dark oak table. “Come to me,” it read, and I gripped my stick, which was wet from the snow, with both hands.

“Bernhard?” I asked in a voice barely above a whisper. “Bernhard?”

I followed a narrow hallway. Through an open door I could look into a small bed chamber. Two beds stood there freshly made, it seemed to me. Slowly I walked toward some wooden stairs, turning my head every other second—my breathing was labored and the quiet inside the mill plugged my ears—and yet I couldn’t spy anyone.

Cautiously I climbed the stairs, and much as I tried to step without making a noise, the ruckus was terrible. Everyone inside the mill had to hear me. Soon the people living here would discover me and ask what the hell I was doing. I tried to prepare myself for that confrontation, but who would I meet? Had homeless people made the mill their refuge? Had Christian, Holger, and I in our ignorance never noticed that the old mill was indeed inhabited? Convinced as I was that the building had stood empty all these years, the smell of cabbage soup and the
fresh linens destroyed this belief. I was no longer sure what I knew, what I should believe, and in the meantime I believed both things—that the mill had been abandoned and empty and that it was still inhabited.

“Bernhard?” I couldn’t hear my own voice.

“Is that you?” a female voice said behind me.

I turned and froze. I heard a squeaking noise and only half realized that my throat had caused it. At the foot of the stairs stood a young woman in a white fur coat. Her hair was carefully done, colorful stones glittered in its locks, and she wore tiny sandals with incredibly high heels. She looked like the Snow Queen—most beautiful and terrifying.

“Martin?” asked the young woman. She seemed both surprised and disappointed, and while my heart still beat in my mouth, I slowly realized who stood on the wooden floor below me. It was Anna Frick, Alex’s sister. “How did you get in?”

“Where is Bernhard?” I asked stupidly. My fear melted from my bones, but I still gripped my stick violently. At the same time, I understood how young and silly I had to appear in Anna’s eyes.

“Bernhard? What are
you
doing here? You have to leave immediately.”

I didn’t grasp what she meant. “Why? Is the miller around? And why are you here?”

“The miller?” she said with wide eyes. Then she caught herself and said sharply, “It’s none of your business. Get lost.”

“Where is Bernhard?” I asked again.

“Is he with you? Did you come together?” Then her face suddenly smoothed out and for a moment she was quiet. Then she asked, “Bernhard? The lost boy? Are you still searching for him?”

My face grew hot, and I stuttered, “I… I thought…”

“That I’m hiding him here?” she mocked me. And my relief over having discovered a known face turned again into fear. Maybe she really knew where Bernhard was.

“Do you know where he is? What are
you
doing here? How did you get here? What kind of coat are you wearing?” Slowly I walked back down the stairs. “Whose cat was that outside?”

“Cat?” Anna asked. “Oh, I’m a witch, you should know,” she said and laughed. “Usually she sits on my shoulder.”

What happened next I can ascribe to only my fear and the long search for my friend. Anna had made a bad joke, but my nerves threatened to snap, and I didn’t comprehend why she would stand in a fur coat and sandals in front of me. “How do you kill a witch?” I said under my breath, and in one desperate move I jumped down the last remaining steps, raised my stick, and struck that fur-clad apparition. But I had aimed badly and hit only her shoulder. Anna screamed, and maybe I knew then what a terrible mistake I had made, but I also feared her loud voice, which would alert the miller to us. I wanted to shut her up. So I hit her again.

Yet in that moment I could hear a car approaching and then stopping outside the mill.

“Oh God,” said Anna. She pressed her hands to her head where I had struck her and lay on the ground now. “Oh God,” she said again, and her face turned crimson.

And all my fears returned. Anna was a witch, Anna was my best friend’s sister, and I had attacked and beaten her. And who was outside? I dropped my stick and ran down the hallway and into the kitchen as fast as I could. I opened the door and was about to storm out into the snow, when a tall figure, clad in dark
clothes, blocked my way. But I couldn’t stop, ran into him, and together we tumbled into the snow. I was first to get back on my feet and made toward the woods. I ran, ran, a loud voice at my back ordering me to stop. But I kept going, and only after what seemed like an eternity, after I was thoroughly drained from working my way through the deep snow, did I finally stop, turn to make sure that no one was following me, and then drop to the ground. My face was hot and I welcomed the cold, buried my face only deeper in the snow. How long I lay there I don’t know, but shame, anger, and fear fought within me and cooled only after a long time.

It was dark around me when I finally got up again and slowly continued on my way home. I was cold and wet, and no matter how fast I walked my teeth chattered and my face stayed numb. How would I explain that I had struck Anna Frick? How could I confess to my father, the
Gendarm
, that his son might have to go to jail because he had assaulted the pub owner’s daughter? And this only one year after Broder had drowned in the Droste River? That time I’d been lucky, saved, because of my father’s influence, from sharing Alex’s fate.

That it had indeed been Anna Frick and not a witch was all too clear to me, but while I trudged home, I slowly gained confidence that I would get away with my crime once again. I wouldn’t have to follow in Alex’s footsteps and leave the village. Maybe Anna wouldn’t tell her dad about the mill, about Martin Schürholz and his attack on her.

When I got back to Hemmersmoor and saw the lights in the windows and the candles on the Christmas trees, which were maybe lit for the last time that year, I breathed more easily. And when I finally sat down at the dinner table and we started eating
what was left of the goose, and my mother told me that one day I would freeze to death because of my foolishness, and my dad asked where the hell I had been all this time, I told them about the Black Mill. I hadn’t found Bernhard, no matter how hard I had tried. My parents shook their heads, and my sister, Birgit, laughed. “Did you think the Black Miller was holding him hostage?” she asked.

Of my new secret, I didn’t speak to them. I didn’t say a word about Anna. Mr. Frick never came to our doorstep to talk to my father about the matter. The dark figure I had toppled back at the mill was no ghost or wizard. Only one family in Hemmersmoor owned a sedan that wouldn’t quite fit our narrow streets, a black Mercedes, which all children eyed with curiosity and jealousy. I had never seen Rutger von Kamphoff, and yet I knew immediately who was lying underneath me in the snow. And slowly I understood that, as far as it concerned me, it might as well have been a ghost. Rutger wouldn’t come after me.

“And did you see a witch come flying out of the smokestack?” my sister sneered.

I bit my lips, shook my head, lowered it, and slowly counted to thirty.

K
äthe Grimm followed the gaze of a howling dog when she was seventeen and ever since had been seeing will-o’-the-wisps, frightful funeral processions after dark, and weddings of the undead, the faces of the bride and groom torn from the bone. We had many ghost seers in Hemmersmoor, but they could be cured by a friend’s over-the-shoulder gaze. For Käthe, it was too late, however—no spell could reverse the damage done by a howling dog.

She had been courted by many men in her youth; now, in her late thirties, she was fat, and warts disfigured her once pleasant features. Her strawberry-blond hair looked dull and was thinning. After she paid a visit to the general store or the apothecary, people found it on shelves and counters.

We all knew her middle-of-the-day outbursts, her high shrieks, wide-open and terrified eyes, her fingers pointing this way and that. Yet we didn’t see a thing, and we stopped searching. We hardly heard, anymore, her pleading with ghosts to spare her. Still, before crossing her path girls crossed themselves—we did not want to share her predicament. We wanted to get married.

In the summer four of us spent our long afternoons in
Anke’s room, clipping pictures of fantastical dresses from the catalogs her mother received by mail. We dreamed of wedding dresses made from brocade and with long trains, of millionaires in sports cars who would glance only once at us before whisking us away to other countries and continents.

Anke turned a thick notebook with hard, black covers into her wedding book. It contained not only a picture of her dress but also photos of wedding cakes, silverware, and tablecloths. She planned every small detail, and we mocked her because she had cut off the heads of the grooms and drawn new ones.

“Looks like Rutger von Kamphoff,” I said.

“He’s chasing after Anna.” Sylvia was the tallest of us and had been the first to get breasts. She’d kissed two boys, while neither Johann nor Torsten had ever asked me again if I wanted to kiss them behind the school or by the river at night.

“It can’t be,” Anke said infuriated.

“Sure can,” Sylvia replied.

“He’ll never marry her. Never ever.”

“As if you stood a chance.”

Anke closed her book and pouted.

When our dreams became too sticky, we ran to the old cloister. The Swedes had destroyed it in the Thirty Years’ War and raped and killed the nuns hiding inside. The order had moved to the south, past Bremen, and never tried to rebuild. Among the ruins we played our favorite scenes from “Sleeping Beauty,”
Romeo and Juliet
, and
Antigone
, and we loved the tragic endings of the latter, and let Sleeping Beauty die of grief over her prince’s sad fate at the hands of a wizard, dragon, or resurrected stepmother.

On our way through the village, Käthe would stammer
about nine dead children playing hide-and-seek with her. She looked more worn than usual, could always be seen eating crusts of bread as if to ward off evil spirits. Sometimes we snuck up behind her and cried “Boo!” then ran off, not listening to her curses.

“Nine dead children,” Sylvia said. “And if they really do exist?”

“She’s crazy, always was,” Anke answered. I had hardly spent any time with her last summer. On the afternoons I didn’t spend at the manor, she usually disappeared to meet the boys at the Black Mill. “Nine dead children. Where would they come from?” She never told me anything about those afternoons she spent with Martin and Christian and the others, but now she didn’t want to have anything to do with those “stupid boys.” She was way ahead of me. “Käthe says they’re all siblings.” She tipped her finger to her forehead.

“I wonder if she’s ever done it,” Heike said. She was Heidrun Brodersen’s daughter and the biggest of our small group, with large breasts and a belly. Boys were wild about her, God knows why, and we suspected she had done it, since she brought up the topic every chance she got. Her face grew red and her eyes looked expectantly at us. We liked her the least.