Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone: A Novel (19 page)

“I’m ugly as hell,” Jan said as he took his glass from the bar and sat down at our table. “But I’m not holding a grudge. It’s done. Glad you didn’t take off my whole arm.” The stump was now covered in leather, and Jan said he might be fitted for an artificial hand.

Alex frowned at Jan’s words and seemed ready to pounce on him if necessary. He was taller than Olaf and the strongest among us. Yet no fight broke out. Jan and Olaf did not become friends, but they kept the peace. Jan had been allowed to stay at Brümmer’s, and even suggested Olaf apply once more. Yet Olaf had talked to the owner of the local repair shop, and since he
wasn’t getting any younger and had recently lost his best repairman, he’d agreed to sell his business to Olaf once the addition to the inn was finished.

The village made it easy on him—the young girls stopped after school to gawk at the strange drawings on Olaf’s arms and back, the neighbors came to lend a hand, and Liese Fitschen often brewed coffee for Olaf or cut him slices from the cakes she baked twice a week.

“Just like in the old days,” he said. As a boy he had liked the Fitschens almost better than his own parents, and Liese had given him cookies and candy as often as he came to their door.

“Yes,” Liese answered. “You were such a rascal, and now look at you.”

Veronika, the youngest of Liese’s girls, sometimes stopped at the hedge that separated the two lots, looking up at Olaf without saying a word. Olaf waved each time he spotted the girl, and each time the kid ran off. Olaf laughed and said, “She will still be young enough to play with my own kids.”

Veronika’s older brothers were more outspoken. Olaf had known them when they hadn’t been old enough to attend school, but now he caught them smoking cheap cigars and making passes at girls.

“Did you see the
Klabautermann
?” they wanted to know. “How big was it? Did you see the maelstrom? How did you escape? Did you have many women? How are black women? Yellow ones? Are there really islands where everyone walks about naked?”

The house was finished in July, after school recess had begun, and Liese’s children had all day to watch Olaf and bombard him
with questions despite their mother’s admonitions. Every morning Liese took her youngest to the bakery and let the girl carry the bag with fresh rolls and bread, and shortly afterward the whole family spilled onto the lawn and into the village.

I felt very proud when the topping-out wreath swayed in the light breeze. I stood with a beer in my hand, and my dad patted my back and offered me a cigarette. Bernd Frick seemed satisfied with the work—he poured rye for the neighbors and let himself be photographed with Olaf, Alex, and Hilde. His children had caused him so much pain, but that July night everything seemed changed. Alex and Olaf had come back to Hemmersmoor, and they would finally make him proud.

Only Hilde’s face had not brightened when the bottle of rye had been passed around, and she kept to herself all evening. The joyful atmosphere didn’t seem to lift her mood, she made a dour face.

“Is it not what you wanted?” Olaf asked.

“It’s nice enough,” she answered. “I just have to get used to it.”

“Do you not love me anymore?” he asked with a smile.

“It’s not that.” With one of her white, short fingers, she’d traced the grinning demon, drawn in black ink in Shanghai two years before, and refused to hear the story of how and why he’d gotten it. From Alex I knew that Hilde insisted Olaf sleep in his sister’s old room, because his tossing and turning kept her awake at night. She showed him bruises from where he’d hit her in his sleep.

“Then what is it?” he asked.

“We were kids when we got married,” she said, but before he could hold her back, Hilde rushed off. Olaf saw that I had listened to their conversation and smiled, embarrassed, and
shrugged. Even though it was nearly dark, I could see that he was blushing.

Finally the couple moved into the new house and shared the large bed Alex and his father had built together. And to please Hilde, Olaf had a large vanity shipped from Hamburg. Hilde showed it to all the women, and my sister, Birgit, couldn’t say enough about the gold-framed mirror. “You can watch yourself combing your hair, doing your makeup, and if I had a husband like Olaf to watch me, I would rub lotion into my skin all day and braid my hair.”

“Nonsense,” my mother replied. She wasn’t impressed by the vanity. “What do you need a golden mirror for? You hair is as coarse as straw, and no matter how much makeup you rub onto your face, you can’t hide those freckles.”

In late summer Alex applied for a job at the manor, but the only position his former brother-in-law offered him was that of substitute driver. With a special permit, he started the job in September. “If not for my dad, they wouldn’t even have hired me as a stable boy,” he cursed when I met him one day in full uniform in the village square.

I had bought a moped and was able to drive at night to Groß Ostensen. When we were thirteen, we believed owning a moped was the way into a girl’s heart, but the girls in Groß Ostensen didn’t care about my moped. As soon as I got off, they could smell Hemmersmoor on me. It was my gait, my face, my way of talking. I carried our village like a yoke.

“Don’t waste your time with the pretty ones,” Alex advised me. His hair was full of grease, his shined shoes were as large as the boats on the peat bog. “Only the ugly ones put out.” That
made sense to me, and after two more girls complained that I didn’t have any hair on my chest and that my teeth were crooked, I got involved with Linde Janeke. I had kissed her a few times when we were younger, but not once since her accident. None of the girls could stand her, and she never came to any of the dances at Frick’s Inn, but after dark we drove out onto the moor. After dark the scars in her face vanished, and her skin glowed very white, and she wrapped herself around me and demanded that I slap her face or hit her with my belt. Only when I obeyed her did she allow me to unbutton my pants.

When we drove through the village at night, we could often see Olaf standing outside the inn or walking the streets. He always seemed to be alone. Hilde was nowhere to be seen, and I couldn’t imagine what kept him awake. Perhaps he was missing the sea, I told Linde, but she laughed at me.

“What else could it be?” I asked.

“Silly boy,” she said. “If you can’t figure it out, I won’t tell you.”

One night, when I was waiting for her outside the village, Olaf came walking toward me. He was carrying a bundle, and when he recognized me, stepped closer. It was almost midnight, my dad was making his rounds on his bicycle, but here he wouldn’t see us. Olaf asked how I was doing and looked at my moped, but my answers were all too short. I was afraid that Linde wouldn’t come if she saw him with me, and I hadn’t been with her in two days.

“Are you waiting for someone?” he finally asked and smiled.

I nodded, relieved. “What do you have there?” I asked and pointed to his bundle. I didn’t want to appear ungrateful.

“Oh,” he said. “Knickknacks. I have no use for them anymore.”
He opened the package, and I recognized the Buddha, the blue scarab, the Statue of Liberty.

“Why do you want to get rid of them?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Hilde can’t stand them. And to me they look unreal now, as though I invented them. Souvenirs are supposed to remind you of things, but here they just look foreign to me. There are no other countries anymore.” He was silent for a few moments; then he said, “Here,” and put the bundle into my arms. “I wanted to bury them, but maybe you can keep them for me.”

“Sure,” I said, without knowing what I would do with Olaf’s treasures.

Olaf grinned lopsidedly. “Well, I’m gonna leave you now,” he said and continued his walk.

“Hey,” I shouted. “Thank you.”

He turned to look over his shoulder and waved at me.

What happened later at Frick’s Inn is often discussed in our village but never questioned. Some speculate that Olaf had fallen ill on one of his long journeys and could be a husband for Hilde no longer. Others suspect that Olaf met too many women in those foreign ports and could never again be happy with just one. A few claim that Olaf had always been a ne’er-do-well and that his father threw him out to prevent further disasters. Nobody tries too hard to find out the truth. The possibilities are too ugly.

That night I waited until Linde arrived, and together we drove to an old barn near Brümmer’s factory. “I’m not made from sugar,” she soon complained. I tore open her shirt and squeezed her breasts, which were as small as macaroons, their tips as dark as chocolate. Her first blow hit my right ear, and for
seconds I could hear only a loud ringing noise. I tried to grip her arms, but her forehead hit my mouth, and I tasted blood and she laughed at me. “You’re like a drizzle—I don’t get wet.” Then she hit my shin, stomped with one of her heels onto my toes. This time I punched her in the face, right on the chin. I hit her harder and she fell quiet, froze. I tore her panties, slapped her thighs and her face. She trembled without making a sound, waited for my blows, and I obeyed. Finally she turned around, propped herself up on the seat of the moped and stuck her ass out for me. But the ground was sandy, and the kickstand gave way, and Linde and the moped fell down.

I pulled her up, pushed her aside, and inspected my moped. Was something bent, had Linde stepped on the spokes? I wiped off the handlebars with her panties, and everything still seemed intact. To be sure, I started the moped, but when the engine roared to life, I noticed that Linde was no longer inside the barn. I called her name, but she didn’t answer. In my ears I could still hear her laughter, her sneer. I didn’t go to the trouble of looking for her.

Shortly after handing me his bundle, Olaf returned home. At least that’s what Alex has told me. The whole affair disgusted him, he said, but he seemed hell-bent on telling me his story. And when I later jumped up and said he better shut his mouth, he insisted I hear him out.

He had arrived home from work in the evening, and was sitting at the bar, when Olaf entered the pub and joined him. The brothers didn’t say a word to each other, but shortly after his arrival, Olaf felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Shouldn’t you be at home with your wife?” It was Jan,
smiling, holding a glass of beer in his right hand and touching Olaf with his new prosthetic left. Olaf disregarded the fact that Jan was not his friend. Perhaps his tongue wanted to get rid of the words that clogged his throat and mouth. “That’s just it,” he exclaimed. “Ever since I’ve come back, she treats me like a stranger.”

Alex got up to pour the men another shot of rye. Jan sat down next to Olaf, slumping over his glass of beer, looking up at the young sailor with sympathy. “You were gone for many years, a long time even for a godforsaken village like ours. You were gone more years than you were ever together.”

“Yet it won’t get any better,” Olaf said. “I tried, and yet she resists me.”

“It still might,” Jan said. “It still might. My wife and I,” he raised his new hand into the air and waved it in front of Olaf’s face, “we’ve had our ups and downs. When we’re alone, she kills all the lights so she doesn’t have to see who’s touching her.”

“But you…,” Olaf said and immediately stopped himself.

“I am crippled, sure.”

“I’m sorry, Jan,” Olaf said. “I really am.”

Jan continued without listening to Olaf’s apologies. His voice became quieter and sweeter still. “But there are far more ugly things than my hand.”

“What are you saying?” Olaf said, and Alex could see his brother’s face flush and his shoulders tighten.

“You were gone for a long time, a long time for a young girl. People doubted you’d be back. She is beautiful.”

“You’re drunk,” Olaf said. “I won’t stand for your talk.”

“Oh you want to punch me like your old man did? First you cripple me and then you hit me? But you’re right,” he said and
got up from his stool, smiling once more, his voice still as quiet and pleasant as before. “I’m drunk.” He left Olaf to rejoin the small group of workers from Brümmer’s. But before he did, he turned to Olaf once more. “All the bad things I could wish on you, you’ve already done to yourself. Go home, Sailor. Tell Liese Fitschen her Veronika looks just as cute as her mother.”

That night Olaf did not go to sleep. Alex kept him company long after the inn had closed. The two brothers were alone and drank; Olaf did not dare enter his wife’s bedroom.

In the early morning, they were already standing outside the Fitschens’ gate, waiting for Liese and her little girl to appear. Alex has assured me that he tried to dissuade his brother from doing so, but he wouldn’t listen. When Liese and Veronika finally stepped out onto the street and greeted their neighbors, they didn’t receive an answer. Instead Olaf picked up the child and stared at her face.

“What are you doing?” Liese asked with suspicion in her voice, but Alex motioned for her to keep quiet.

“She looks nothing like you,” Olaf said.

“Let go of her,” Liese demanded. “She’s mine.”

The girl started to cry. She had Hilde’s mouth, her round cheeks. She even had the same large blue eyes.

“It can’t be,” Olaf said and turned to his brother. But Alex nodded without a word. The likeness couldn’t be denied.

“You can’t take her,” Liese said and started to cry herself. “She’s mine.”

“When was she born? I’ll strangle her if you don’t answer me.” Olaf took hold of the girl’s soft braids.

“Four years ago, in March, four years. She’s mine, she’s mine I swear. I swear to you, Olaf, she’s mine.”

“You’re lying,” Olaf said, but finally he set down the girl, whose face was wide with fear. “She’s her daughter, Hilde’s girl. Jan knows the truth. Probably the whole village knows you’re lying to me.”

When the two brothers returned home, Hilde stood in the living room and behind her appeared Bernd Frick. The lines in the old man’s face appeared even deeper than usual. “I heard the ruckus outside,” Hilde said. “I was worried. What did you want from Liese?”

“The girl is your daughter,” Olaf said, his words barely slipping past his tongue. “Who is the father?”