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

and I went shopping after school had let out. “She wouldn’t have had to pinch every penny anymore,” Mrs. Meier said. “How foolish to walk across the moor during all that snow. A shame,” Mrs. Schürholz cried. “That old von Kamphoff should have driven her to Groß Ostensen, the old cheapskate.” My mother didn’t know what to say to all this and completely forgot what it was she had come to buy. She stammered, stuttered, looked stunned at Mrs. Meier, and swayed lightly until her friend said, “Pull yourself together.”
    It was an accident. A foolish mistake. That’s what everyone in the village said. And yet, wasn’t it peculiar that my mother, who had wished nothing more than to see Inge Madelung driven from the manor, took the news of her death so badly? Wasn’t it strange that she walked home from the bakery with her face all pale and drawn and that she buried her head in her hands all afternoon and cried bitterly?

Christian
    O ur father was a slight man, working as a foreman for the small dairy in Hemmersmoor.
    In his youth, he had dreamt of leaving his village for Australia or Canada. He’d bought illustrated books about those countries and studied the photographs with his characteristic seriousness, as though it took a straight face and an inquiring mind to leaf through their pages. He would never have relaxed that face to smile or joke about the strange uniforms the police were wearing in the pictures, not for anything in the world. It might have shattered him to hear his own laughter in Canada’s wild mountains.
    Before getting married, he’d been driving a motorcycle, and he and my mother had been going to dances in the surrounding villages. A photo of them sat on a chest of drawers in the living room, and next to it was one in which my father stood in a leather jacket next to his milk-delivery van. Mr. Meier, the baker, had his right hand on my father’s shoulder, and behind them several men who looked like soldiers were unloading bread and milk. The picture was taken during the war, but my dad and the baker had stayed in Hemmersmoor. They smiled at the camera.
    My father was well liked in the village and among my friends. He was charming, friendly, and the year I turned eleven and my sister’s belly swelled up was a good one for him.
    By November, Nicole’s belly stuck out like a watermelon, and she wasn’t allowed to leave the house. “Who was it?” I asked her, like my mother had countless times before. Yet I didn’t shower her face with punches, I didn’t bang her head against the bedpost. My sister Ingrid had died four years ago in the fall. “And now we’re losing this one too,” my mother lamented.
    I stroked Nicole’s belly, which I could barely stand to look at but had to touch nonetheless. I couldn’t keep my fingers off it. What was inside knocked against my hand, and my sister’s face grew terrified; another person possessed her like a demon. She was fifteen.
    “Who was it?” I wanted to know. She had to have done it—I knew how people were made. I had watched Alex’s sister do it with an apprentice from Brümmer’s factory. It was an ugly business, brutal, and yet Alex and I had used every opportunity we’d gotten to watch through his floorboards how the young guy shook and groaned and how Anna’s flesh quivered like pudding.
    My sister smiled at my questions and kept silent. My mother announced to Hemmersmoor that Nicole was sick, and kept a close eye on me. “If you don’t watch your mouth,” she promised, “you will forever regret it.” Since my sister Ingrid’s death, she had nothing but harsh words for me. My toes bled whenever she trimmed my nails, and one day in the fall she had poured boiling water onto my lap and later said the saucepan had slipped out of her grip. Whenever she caught me in Nicole’s room, she cursed at me and called my sister a whore.
    My dad was more forgiving and devoted himself to my sister’s care. They’d always been