Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone: A Novel (17 page)

Anna moved into the Big House, where she soon gave birth to a girl. Her husband, with a trusted steward and plenty of hired help, kept close watch over his new family, and no one in the village was able to catch a glimpse of them. Yet during the last days of summer, I received word from our teacher, Mr. Brinkmann, that I would be awarded the von Kamphoff scholarship. For a few short days, I forgot the scars that ran over my face. This was my happiest time in Hemmersmoor, a time when I believed I would escape the village. I wanted to warm myself in the glow of the Big House. I wanted to study and step out into the world. I didn’t want to share Ilse’s misery anymore. Yes, Rutger had betrayed her, but his family would pay for my studies. Ilse had failed to win Rutger’s heart, she would never move into the manor house, but I would be a welcome guest there. I would leave behind Anke and stupid dresses and bows and her saucer-eyed admirers.

For a few short days, I seemed too tall for the low houses in our street. I was able to look down on Ilse and Anke and all the women and men in our village square. For a few short days, I was somebody special.

Then when Anke betrayed me, my world imploded, and when she was offered my scholarship, I knew that I would never leave Hemmersmoor. I still remember our drive home. Every
sound seemed amplified, and I can still smell my cheap perfume and the leather of the hot car seats. I saw the green and brown fields, the hard grasses along the road, and I saw how my life was suddenly cut in two. Here I sat, Linde Janeke, on my way back to the village. Full of rage, shame, and without the least bit of hope that I might leave Hemmersmoor. And in another car that looked exactly like ours sat another Linde, whose return to the village was only the start to a new life, a life in which she would travel to foreign cities and countries, a life that lay even beyond her father’s dreams. I could see this other Linde, feel what she felt, but then she waved at me and slowly receded, very slowly, until she was driving alongside our car and turned right at the next intersection, onto the road to Groß Ostensen, and disappeared quickly from my view. I’ve never met that other Linde again.

In the fall I didn’t go back to school. In the eyes of my parents I had heaped shame on them once again. My father didn’t dare show his face at the manor anymore and found work stocking shelves in a grocery store in Groß Ostensen. Toward evening he left our house in his old truck and returned early the next morning.

While he slept and everything had to be quiet inside the house, I went to see Ilse and spent my days with her. She was the only friend who would still talk to me, and our misery brought us close again. I hadn’t wanted to share her misfortune any longer, but now I shared mine with her, and she seemed to welcome my company. Both of us had been betrayed by the Big House and by Rutger.

Anke I saw only from afar. I wanted to break her neck, tear out her brown hair, cut her skin with glass shards, but as soon as
I saw her in the street, I lost all courage. In those moments I myself believed that I had dropped Anna’s small girl.

Yet Rutger I hated even more. It was he who had readily believed Anke’s lie. It was he who had dropped me after all the years my family had worked for his. Rutger and Anna had sealed my fate. They had betrayed me.

“Wouldn’t it be marvelous if you could take revenge?” Ilse asked one day.

I had no hope. What could I do against the von Kamphoff family? “But how?” I asked.

Ilse sighed but didn’t reply.

In the fall she took me out into the fields, where kids were flying their kites. “They look so pretty,” my friend said. We watched them until dusk, until even the last straggler took his kite and went home. When one of the boys passed by us, he looked at us curiously.

“Hi there,” Ilse said.

The boy stopped, but didn’t say a word.

“Are you afraid of us?” Ilse laughed.

The boy stuck out his tongue. “You are stupid,” he said. “I’m not afraid of you.”

“Why are you on your own? Aren’t you afraid of the beggar woman’s curse?”

The boy took a few steps back. “My father says you’re a spinster. And you,” he told me, “you are a thief and so ugly that no one wants you.” Then he ran off as quickly as his legs would carry him.

I was wearing my father’s clothes, his heavy boots, his hat. Ilse had insisted. “He mustn’t recognize you. He’ll think you’re a
man.” She smiled at me, said how happy she was to have me by her side. “I’m afraid of his rage. If I were by myself, he might harm me.” She had sent Rutger a message asking for one last meeting. She had threatened to visit the Big House should he fail to appear on the moor at the agreed hour.

“What will you tell him?” I asked Ilse.

“He only has to listen to me. I haven’t had a chance to talk to him in all these months. It’s as though we’d never met. But he should hear that I haven’t forgotten him.”

Despite the cold November night, I was sweating in my father’s heavy clothes, and my feet slid around in the large boots. “If he recognizes me, he’ll make my parents’ life a living hell.”

“Just keep your distance,” Ilse said. “But I need your eyes and ears. You shall be my witness. Just make sure he doesn’t hurt me.”

We were early, but as soon as we arrived at our meeting point, a dark figure came rushing toward us. My heart hammered terribly. How could I keep Rutger from harming Ilse? Only then did I fully realize how stupid I had been to follow my friend onto the moor.

Yet it wasn’t Rutger who approached us. With bafflement I recognized that it was Anna, who walked toward us with a bundle in her arms. Her coat was made from fur, her boots from shiny leather. On her head she was wearing a round fur hat, and her gloves were thin and elegant.

“What is she doing here?” I asked Ilse, but she motioned for me to keep quiet.

Anna didn’t seem afraid of Ilse, but when she noticed me, her steps slowed. “Who’s that?” she asked.

“A friend,” Ilse said. “He has to help with the magic.”

Now she came close, and I saw that the bundle she was bearing was her daughter, Charlotte. “I’ve worried myself sick since the shadow of the beggar woman was seen over the Big House. It’s so scary. All these small children. They are not to blame.” She was cradling sleeping Charlotte.

I had no idea what was happening. Magic? What did I have to do with the curse of the beggar woman? What did Ilse claim to know about it? Confused, I stepped closer to the two women, and when Anna looked up from her daughter, she barked, “It’s you?”

“I… I didn’t…,” I stuttered. This was the first time I’d seen Anna since that fateful summer day at the Big House, and no words would come. “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me,” was all I could say.

Anna looked at me in exasperation. “What a bunch of hogwash,” she said. Yet before Anna could turn away, Ilse stepped forward, tore the fur hat from her head, grabbed her by the hair, and pressed one of her large hands over Anna’s mouth. The girl dropped her bundle, flailed her arms, but even though she tried to fight off Ilse, she couldn’t make a sound.

“What are you doing?” I shouted in fear. “What does that mean?”

Ilse didn’t reply. She put both hands around Anna’s neck and squeezed. A pained moan escaped Anna’s throat. Her legs buckled.

“Stop it!” I yelled. “Stop. You’ll kill her.”

“Not me,” Ilse said.

Charlotte cried. She shook her little arms and soon began to
scream. When Anna’s movements slowed, I started to hit Ilse and demanded she let go. I pulled her hair until she finally dropped Anna to the ground.

“What have you done?” I bent down and looked at Anna’s red face. She was gasping for air, too weak to get up. Ilse stood above us and breathed heavily.

“What has she done to you?” Still I didn’t comprehend.

Ilse looked at me as if I had lost my sanity. “You have no choice.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“If you don’t do it, she’ll run back to the manor and tell on us.”

“I haven’t done anything,” I yelled. “What do you want from me?”

“You are a thief and so ugly that no one wants you. Who will believe you? You have killed them all. The small girl by the river, Martha Dinter’s child. You killed them.”

“That wasn’t me,” I screamed, but when I saw Anna starting to stir and regain conscience, I knew how bad my position was. While I pinned her to the ground, I knew that I would never let go of her again. While I pinned her to the ground, Ilse went in search of a rock.

How Rutger’s face changed when he bent over the lifeless body and saw what Ilse had done. He had come at the agreed hour; I had failed to run away. Dazed and full of fear, I watched as he got up.

Ilse shook the child in her arms, and it started to cry again. How his eyes gleamed, how rage and fury twisted his limbs. Yet he had to tame himself—she was holding his daughter.

I don’t know how long they stood like that. My lips trembled, my teeth chattered violently, and the November cold paralyzed my limbs. Even if I had been able to form a clear thought, my legs wouldn’t have carried me away. “What is my revenge worth if I can’t share it with anyone?” Ilse had said. Tears were streaming down my face, and I crouched unnoticed on the ground.

Before Rutger could seize Ilse, she broke the little girl’s neck. It took Rutger a moment to understand, and for a moment I believed that she had broken his spirit too. But then I watched how rage overcame him, shook him, how his eyes stared at her and how his gaze got stuck in those eyes as though he would never be able to extract her image from them again. Ilse waited, dangled the dead child in front of him.

She didn’t run. She took all his rage and let him ravage her. But I ran, ran for my life. As soon as Rutger gripped her, I jumped up and ran back toward the village, ran until the air burned like fire in my lungs. I lost one of the large boots, my father’s hat flew off, but never did I look over my shoulder.

In quiet moments I am shaken with disgust for myself, and I grow afraid of my mirror image, which glows pale and looks inquiringly at me as though I were but a reflection. So we often stand for minutes, gazing at each other, until dark sounds rise up inside me, scratch my throat, and open my lips. Then the woman in the mirror hushes me with one gesture of her hand and a furious stare. I avert my eyes.

T
hey were married young: she fifteen and the daughter of the poor widow Klein, he seventeen and an apprentice at Brümmer’s factory. At their wedding my father wore his uniform and told everyone who would listen that Olaf Frick had only his dick for a brain and would surely ruin the family.

Olaf was drunk with love for Hilde—her flaxen braids; the red spots his fingers left on her supple arms; the tiny, almost translucent fuzz at the nape of her neck; and a spot only he was allowed to see. At work he dreamt of her sturdy legs, at night he tried to squelch his desire, but however tired he was in the morning, however often he yawned at work and went outside to have a smoke along the railroad tracks, his desire could not be extinguished.

Olaf was Frick’s firstborn, but he wanted nothing to do with the family’s inn. He didn’t enjoy talking to patrons, didn’t enjoy serving them. He hated sweeping and mopping and waxing the pub’s floors after closing. He would earn his own money; he would take the silver spoon from his mouth and work his way up. His father, Bernd, shook his head—such ingratitude. But he
had personally talked to Otto Nubis, the foreman of Brümmer’s factory, and put in a good word for his son.

Olaf was let go when his drowsiness cost Jan Hussel his left hand. He rode the ten kilometers to Groß Ostensen on his bike and visited Jan and tried to apologize, but Jan did not want to hear what Olaf had to say.

“It’s your fault, Olaf, no matter how sorry you are. Look at this hand!” He held up the bandaged stump, blood still seeping through the white gauze. “You think my wife wants me to touch her with that? Do you? So when you go home to your Hildchen, think of that hand. I wish it had been yours.”

Olaf’s money, and whatever little Hilde brought home from helping out on one farm or another, had been enough to support them in their own little place, a heap of stones that once had been the gatehouse to the von Kamphoffs’, long before the Big House was built. It stood on the moor, a kilometer from Hemmersmoor, and come January, no matter how hard you looked around the snow-swept landscape, you couldn’t find the place.

Work was scarce, his reputation shot, and after a few months of living off his parents’ goodwill, Olaf’s father took him aside. “It’s time you thought of your wife,” he said. Bernd Frick was a head shorter than his son and his movements slow, as though weights were pulling at his arms and legs. He was nearly sixty and held himself erect. He still worked every day behind the bar, and if not for the generosity he showed toward Otto Nubis, his son would never have been hired in the first place.

Olaf was at a loss for an answer. He knew his father felt responsible for what had happened to Jan and wanted to make things right. “What should I do?”

“You can start here again whenever you want. It’s your inheritance.”

Olaf nodded quietly. It all seemed so easy. But then he said, “I can’t do that. Especially after what just happened.”

Bernd sighed deeply, he hadn’t expected anything different. “Then you need to leave.”

The next week Olaf left Hilde with his mother and father in Hemmersmoor, and went to Hamburg to look for work. He’d save enough money to furnish a place, then send for his wife.

Alex and I were ten years old when Olaf left the village, and we didn’t pay him any attention. Alex loved the inn and often kept his father company behind the bar. He stole liquor and cigars for us, and we watched his sister through a crack in the floorboards whenever she smuggled a boy into her room.

Slowly news from Olaf began to arrive. The first few months were rough for him. He slept in a flophouse, worked at the docks when help was needed, but couldn’t save enough to even think of supporting a family. Then he took a chance and signed on as a sailor on a freighter going to America. He did not have time to visit Hilde, only sent her a letter explaining that he would be back within a few months. The message informing him of his mother’s death arrived at his former dwelling just as the
Brunhild
reached the open sea.