Read Online Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone: A Novel by Stefan Kiesbye - Free Book Online Page A

looked outside the next morning, everything was buried under a fresh blanket of snow. Our truck refused to start, and when my father finally managed to bring the engine to life, the snow fell so heavily that we had to turn around after only a kilometer or two and head back home. As if the winter wanted to make up for lost time, it snowed without interruption for four days. The blossoms on the hedges froze and broke, the tree branches burst, and finally the canals froze over and Hemmersmoor ground to a halt.
    That first morning Jens Jensen, the old peat cutter, was lying drunk in a ditch, only his face and chest protruding from the snow. The children, who found him half-naked and half-frozen, threw snowballs at the slowly awakening man. “Where are my pants?” he asked in a rusty voice. “What have you done with them?”
    My mother sighed in relief—for her the snow was a godsend. My father had to stay home and couldn’t see Inge Madelunganymore. And every morning she waited for the mailman, stood by the window, and couldn’t quiet her hands. When, on the third day, he finally fought his way through the snowdrifts and told her that he’d been to the manor house and delivered a thick envelope from the authorities to the widow, she hugged him. “Has to be her pension,” he said and winked at her. “They must have declared her husband dead.” After he left us, my mother stood by the window and cried for a long time.
    That winter I understood very little of what was going on around me. I understood my mother’s sorrow and the fears and suspicions she harbored, but the visits from the neighbors’ wives and the mailman’s curious behavior I couldn’t explain. Something monstrous was happening under our roof, but I couldn’t make the various parts fit. Instead I wished I could have gone with Anke to Groß Ostensen. I wished we could have owned a larger house, one that looked more like the Hoffmanns’. I wished I could have seen the ghost of Friedrich’s father with my own eyes.
    When, two days before Epiphany, the roads were accessible once again, I drove with my father to the manor house one final time. To my surprise Inge didn’t greet us, and when I knocked on the Madelungs’ door, everything stayed quiet. Inge had not waited for the snow to melt. The old owner came to deliver the news. “She left us,” he said. Inge had packed the same suitcase with which she had arrived in Hemmersmoor. She had wrapped Friedrich in his thick coat and left for Hamburg. “I promised her a better room, but she didn’t want to listen. God knows what got into her.”
    When I told my mother, she hugged me fiercely, kissed my cheeks and forehead, and made my father’s favorite dish—porkroast with salt potatoes, carrots, and peas. Her steps were as light as a ballerina’s. And even if my father remained silent during the following days, slowly peace was restored in our house.
    Only in February did the weather break, and at the beginning of March the peat cutters were once again out on the canals. My mother had feared that Inge might return, but with every new day she gained more confidence. And even my dad, who for weeks had rarely said a word at the dinner table, smiled again when I showed him my homework or what I had painted in class. Inge Madelung had found a better home. She was able to start a new life. The women in our village didn’t miss her.
    It was a mild afternoon in April when we learned that Inge had never arrived in Hamburg. Peat cutters found her on their trek across the moor. The widow must have lost her way during the snowstorm, they said. Inge and Friedrich had died two kilometers from the road to Groß Ostensen. Klaus Schürholz found a letter from the Groß Ostensen authorities in Inge’s pocket. It was exactly as the mailman had said. The good news about receiving her pension, the
Gendarm
reported, had caused the widow’s death.
    “A tragedy,” the women in Meier’s bakery called it when my mother