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

As soon as the ice was thick enough, lovers chose the night to glide to far and hidden corners of the bog, and our parents still talked about the winter when Julian Fitschen and Anna Jensen melted through the ice because they had lost control of their feelings. The lovers were lifted from the water frozen solid, carried into the village like a pagan statue, and left to stand in back of the Fitschens’ farm until spring.

Sometimes my friends Alex, Christian, Holger, Bernhard, and I would go to where the Droste River slowed and widened into a lake, and ice fish. We’d pick holes in the ice and cast our lines. Yet we ran out of patience soon and rarely caught a fish.

On one of these trips, Broder, the Hoffmanns’ youngest son, accompanied us, carrying an axe as tall as his lithe body. It had been years since I had played with his sister, Anke, and Linde Janeke and braided their hair. We had often watched the girls with a mixture of repulsion and amusement, had pulled at their braids and pushed and teased them after school. Now, however, we looked at them with new interest. Last year Alex had fallen mortally in love with Anke and had tried to get her to unbutton her blouse, and she had declined. He’d tried the whole fall and had enlisted Broder as the messenger for his lovelorn letters. Alex had since found a new object for his pursuits, but Broder still clung to him, no matter how hard Alex tried to get rid of the boy.

“I’ll bring you luck,” Broder crowed happily. He’d been a star singer, caroling in a cardboard crown painted gold, his voice bright and high.

We laughed. Our own voices were a mess; we preferred silence. We were going to high school in Groß Ostensen, ten kilometers to the south. We were old enough to wish ourselves beyond Hemmersmoor, yet we were too young to buy mopeds and drive to Groß Ostensen’s movie theater and ice cream parlor. When the townspeople talked about us, the word “incest” cropped up frequently. We looked at their world and their girls, and they didn’t look back.

When we reached the Droste River, we put on our skates and took off toward the middle, where the ice responded with shrieks and pangs to our weight. It was around three o’clock in the afternoon, and groups of kids slid or skated over the lake. The sun had not bothered to come out, and the light was already fading. Snow fell, tickling our faces.

“What happens if the ice breaks?” Broder asked.

“We’ll drown,” I said.

“Why, Martin?” he asked. “I can swim.”

“Your skates,” I said. “They’re too heavy. Your clothes will pull you down.”

Alex took out a pack of cigarettes and offered them around. His father gave him money for the work he did around the inn; the rest of us couldn’t afford to smoke. We skated lazily, smoked, on the lookout for a good spot to fish. The snow rendered the small kids near the banks invisible and turned us invisible to them. We could have been on a vast ocean, lost in the middle of the Baltic Sea. It was a good feeling.

“Here. That’s our spot,” Alex said.

“Here. That’s the spot,” Broder echoed. We picked and hammered away.

“Look how thick it is,” Broder said.

“Look how thick it is,” Alex mocked him, but the boy laughed it off.

In time we cast our lines, sat on our haunches, smoking. We enjoyed the solitude until we were shivering. You’re supposed to have a hut or a fire, and we didn’t have either. Our bones rattled, our teeth chattered. Nobody caught a thing.

“So where’s the luck you promised?” Alex said.

“Just a little longer,” Broder replied. “You’ll see.” He closed his eyes so tightly that his small face was all wrinkles. “I can feel it.”

“You didn’t bring me any luck with your sister,” Alex said.

“She didn’t like you,” Broder said brightly. We all laughed; it was the truth. Even quiet Christian laughed. He was a pale boy, his hair and eyebrows so light he looked naked. He had lost his father two years before, and when he changed his sports clothes at school, we could see scrapes and bruises on his arms and back. But he never complained.

“No girl likes you,” Bernhard said. “Your mind’s too dirty.” Bernhard still had no beard but was the tallest and heaviest of us all. His face was as pretty as a girl’s.

“Shut up,” Alex said. “Anke hurt me.”

Holger grunted. He was heavyset and had short dark hair and a red face with even redder cheeks. His feet were already larger than those of most grown men. “Anke won’t go for you.”

“Why not?” Alex asked. His brown mustache was frozen, his small eyes framed by icy white lashes. “If my brother doesn’t return, I’ll inherit the inn and the land and will be richer than the Hoffmanns.”

Alex’s brother was a sailor, and after leaving for New York one day, he had never returned to his wife. Postcards from around the world arrived irregularly in our village.

“Why shouldn’t he come back?” I asked.

“Maybe he’s contracted leprosy or maybe he’ll drown. Who knows? If it were up to me, the ship’s kobold could carry him off.”

“But if he returns?”

“I’ll deal with him then. The inn is mine, and if Anke won’t have me, I’ll buy her family’s farm and have her brothers cut my peat.” He focused on Broder. “Right?”

“Right,” Broder said. “I’ll cut peat.”

“She won’t be able to find a better man,” Alex said, more to himself.

I nodded. I wasn’t as strong as Holger or as pretty as Bernhard. Nor was my family as well-heeded as Alex’s, which owned Frick’s Inn. Yet I had kissed Linde Janeke before Christmas break and considered myself ahead of the others. Linde wasn’t as beautiful as Anke, but she had been seen with a boy from Groß Ostensen who rode a moped and was seventeen. That counted for something.

It was around the time we lost any feeling in our feet that Alex dropped his hatchet in the water.

“What’d you do that for?” Holger said.

“You’re stupid,” Bernhard chimed in. “That hatchet is gone.”

“Maybe.” Alex pulled out a ten-mark bill. “Maybe someone is willing to dive after the hatchet for ten.”

We laughed at his offer. Christian tapped his finger to his forehead and rolled his eyes.

“Okay,” Alex said, pulling out another bill. “Twenty. I’ll give you twenty if you can get the hatchet.”

“Keep your money,” I said, stretching my legs. I was ready to head home.

“I could,” Broder said. His eyes were large; the things he could buy for twenty marks! You could see his mind at work, his head filling with possibilities. “But I won’t. I’m not stupid.”

We laughed. “Good call,” Bernhard said. “No one’s that stupid.”

“But I’ll do it for fifty.”

We shook our heads, still grinning, gathering our lines and tools.

“I’ll do it,” Broder repeated, more loudly. He took off his coat. “For fifty.”

“Man,” Bernhard said, “put your coat back on. You’ll freeze to death like that without having to dive.”

“Fifty,” Broder crowed.

“Wait,” Christian said and fished in his pockets. “I have a five, a ten, and three ones.” He lay the bills and coins on the ground, then grabbed Alex’s two tens and put them on top.

Bernhard whistled. “Guys, that’s dumb. Look, even if he doesn’t die from the cold, he’s not going to find that damn hatchet, and he’s not going to find this shitty hole again when he comes up for air.”

“I can do it.” Broder took off his skates and shoes.

Holger came up with another eight marks, and I provided the rest. Alex put Broder’s shoe on top of the pile and looked at the kid. “Fifty,” he said.

“Wait!” Bernhard raised his right hand like a teacher, begging for silence. “How are we going to dry him off? If he comes back up.”