Stefan Kiesbye - Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone

My dad was more forgiving and devoted himself to my sister’s care. They’d always been close; he’d taken naps with her in the afternoon until she was eight, and he called her Mieze . Now he brought her dinner when she felt too weak to come down from her room.

I could have put it together myself if I had known how to connect my thoughts, moods, and observations. Yet it was Alex who, one day after school, asked, “What are you going to do with the bastard?”

I stared at him; I hadn’t told him about the baby. “Nicole is sick,” I said dutifully.

Alex’s bushy eyebrows met above his nose—he stared that hard at me. He was one class ahead of me in school and knew everything a year in advance. “My mom says she knows that kind of sickness. She also says it’s strange that your parents haven’t tried to pin it on someone. She says that if she were your mom, she’d be all over town defending her daughter’s honor.”

“Nicole won’t tell me who it was,” I said.

“Mom says there’s no one your folks can blame. It’s either God’s baby, or the devil’s, and the former hasn’t happened in two thousand years, so it’s the devil’s.”

“The devil’s?” I asked.

“Your dad’s,” Alex said. “I think that’s what she means.”

The suggestion was so utterly impossible that I immediately knew it was true. That night at dinner, all the glances, silences, and quiet words suddenly made sense to me, as if I had learned a new language and for the first time was able to follow the conversation.

I realized that my mother administered her beatings, not to find out the truth, but solely to punish, and that my dad’s smiles were not fueled by forgiveness but expectations. He was looking forward to seeing his child.

I sneaked into my sister’s room after my parents had gone to bed. I pushed up her nightshirt and put my ear to her belly. My father was in there, small and unborn.

“What is going to happen to him?” I asked.

Nicole shook her head. She was beautiful in a quiet way. You wouldn’t have noticed her in a crowd, and yet once you’d spied her, you realized she could beat out any girl in Hemmersmoor. I was convinced we had to act quickly. The baby was due in March, and who knew what Mom and Dad had planned? There was only one way to make sure neither Nicole nor her child would be harmed.

I did not tell Nicole of my plans; I did not want to burden her. No, I had to do it all by myself. Yet what could I possibly do without arousing suspicion? I tried to remember spells I’d heard mentioned in the village. I asked my friends to recount what they knew about ghouls, witches, and wizards. Time passed uneasily, and still I hadn’t come up with a solution. Soon it would be Christmas.

On the first day of Advent, I ran over to Frick’s Inn to visit Alex. His mother had died the year before, and he helped in the pub in the afternoons and on weekends. His brother had long since left the village and sailed to New York. Nobody knew if and when he would return, and Hilde, his young wife, had moved into the apartment above the inn. “I had to move back to my old room,” Alex complained.

While I was waiting for my friend, I overheard a conversation at the bar. A candle had been lit in the pine wreath hanging from the ceiling. Jens Jensen, who’d come right after church as always, sat at the bar with a fresh glass of beer in front of him.

“You’ve got to be careful that night. It’s the darnedest thing,” said the old man, while drinking his beer and scratching his gray stubble. “If you drink wine that night, you’ll be dead by Epiphany.”

“What night would that be?” I asked. Alex was getting gloves and a hat from upstairs, and I couldn’t let this chance go by.

“Who wants to know?” Jens Jensen turned away from the farmer’s wife he’d been talking to, a woman with broken veins webbing her face. Her husband slept peacefully by the fireplace.

“It’s me, Christian.”

“The Bobinski boy,” he said, looking me over. “Christmas Eve, of course.”

“What happens on Christmas Eve?” I said.

Jens Jensen took a long drink from his beer, foam gathering on his lip. “Why, when you get up during the night before Christmas,” he said with importance, “you’ll notice an enormous thirst.”

“You always have an enormous thirst,” the farmer’s wife said and laughed boomingly at her own joke.

“Right you are,” Jensen said, and slapped her knee affectionately. “Go to hell, sweetheart.” Then he turned once more to me. “On Christmas Eve you can drink nothing but water.”

Alex arrived with his hat and gloves and started pulling me away, but I shook him off.

“So what if you don’t drink water?” I said.

“If you drink wine that night,” the old peat cutter said, lowering his voice for effect, “you won’t stop drinking. You’ll drink yourself to death before the star singers are home.” He grinned, exposing more gaps than teeth. “When I was your age—”

“You were born old,” the farmer’s wife boomed, slapping her hand on the counter.

“When I was your age,” Jensen said again, “we knew these things.” He extended a hand, maybe to touch my face, but I pulled back. He laughed. “We all knew these things, and they’re still true, but no one remembers.” He looked at me with eyes that didn’t even seem to recognize me anymore. “We’ve forgotten the traps.”

“Let’s go,” Alex said impatiently, and this time I followed him outside.

The weeks before Christmas were as serene and light filled as they had ever been, but that year I hardly noticed the smell of gingerbread cookies, of cinnamon, vanilla, and oranges. The people of Hemmersmoor seemed to live in a story of good cheer and happy preparations, a story of warmth and expectations I couldn’t squeeze into. I still went to school, still helped my dad cut a tree near the ruins of the Black Mill, still helped Mom with baking cookies, but I didn’t understand what I was doing. It didn’t register. Because Advent was just as it always had been, it didn’t make any sense to me anymore.

Mom’s attacks on Nicole receded like a tide. I tended to my sister and her belly every evening, and should Nicole fall asleep before I had left, I would talk to the baby. I let my hand rest above the navel and murmured words to the infant, who was growing bigger, making a room for itself inside Nicole. “You’re safe,” I’d say. “Don’t worry. I’ll make it right once you get out.”

I made a point of being obedient to my parents, especially my dad. When we cut down the pine tree, I let him tell me the story of the Black Miller again, as though I’d never heard it before. The mill had been empty for centuries but still withstood wind and rain and snow; the miller’s ghost kept everything in working order and was still out for revenge. Halfway through the tale of how Swedish soldiers had raped the miller’s daughters, my father stopped to look at me sideways, from under his fur-lined hat.

“Have you any interest in girls yet?” he said.

I stared at him, clutching my axe. He was still taller and stronger than me, but in that moment my thoughts focused on how to split his skull in half. It was a possibility. I shook my head.

“Never too early,” he chuckled. “It’ll come soon. Just make sure to marry a girl that’s not all used up. You can have fun with many, but those you can’t marry.”

I nodded.

“The best way to start is with an experienced woman,” he said, cleaning off the lower branches of our tree. “A married woman.” And then he told me how he’d been initiated as a fifteen-year-old boy by an older cousin in Groß Ostensen and how he was still thankful to that woman. “She made me a man,” he said. I gritted my teeth.