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

One photo of my dad was of special interest to me in those days. It showed him as a young man wearing a leather jacket over his white uniform. Next to him stood the baker, whose right hand rested on my father’s shoulder, and who also laughed at the camera. Both men wore hats with stiff black bills, almost like the police, and they stood in front of their delivery vans, which were parked next to each other. In the background several men unloaded milk and large crates full of bread. They wore uniforms and wore their hair as short as soldiers.

My mother hadn’t removed a single picture of my late father, but it was this one I looked at almost daily. I was in love with Sylvia Meier, the baker’s daughter, and this picture seemed to connect our families. It was a source of pleasure and a certain discomfort to see the two men smiling at me together. It seemed as though my father had meddled with my life and love even before I was born. At times when I looked at Sylvia’s face and ran my fingers over her nose and cheeks, it was as though my dad were leading my hand and Sylvia were looking not at me but him.

When my mother caught me one morning with that photo in my hands, she hit my face repeatedly. My nose started to bleed, and one of her rings cut my forehead. The teacher often admonished me not to brawl—I looked all raw, he said. My white, almost translucent skin was a map of my mother’s wrath.

At night I left the house to meet Sylvia at our usual spot on the banks of the Droste. Sylvia had kissed many boys, and she had already done it with several of them. She was experienced. I was barely her height, but she said I was special and had not once missed an appointed meeting. She felt the small hills of my scars, kissed my burns, my bruises, and licked them. In the dark she ran her tongue over every bump of my skin, and since spring was near, we were half-naked and panting. Sylvia unbuttoned my pants and pulled down my underwear. She showed me how to unclasp her bra, asked if I weren’t curious to see how she looked without her pantyhose.

Often our encounters lasted several hours, but that night Sylvia soon told me to put my clothes back on, and then walked away from the river.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

She laughed, her legs naked and stockings stuffed into one of her coat pockets. We strode past the last houses of Hemmersmoor, across barren fields. The night was damp, thousands of fine drops clung to our bodies. But we were warm.

“Are we meeting someone?” I asked.

Sylvia kissed me, pulling my hand down to touch her. “Be quiet, Christian,” she whispered.

I trusted her, and yet I grew concerned as we made our way farther and farther out onto the moor. After a while the rows of drying peat bricks grew scarce, and only hard grasses covered the soil. Clouds as large as continents blew over our heads. Hemmersmoor had long since disappeared behind us.

After half an hour she finally slowed. In front of us scraggly trees rose and waved their branches, and after a few more steps, we came to a gate, rusty barbed wire curling at our feet.

“You’re not scared, are you?” Sylvia scaled the iron gate, her legs shining even in the dark.

I followed her. “What is this?” I asked. “Do they have dogs?”

Sylvia shushed me. “Don’t be afraid. No one’s here.”

We were walking along a narrow paved road, and soon we reached a low barrack. Its door was locked, but Sylvia opened a window on the far side of the building, and we climbed inside. She flicked a switch, and we stood among thirty bunk beds, their mattresses bare, some stained. The room smelled of dust, yet the overall effect was one of cleanliness.

Sylvia’s blond hair was glittering with moisture under the single bare bulb that dangled from the ceiling. Her cheeks were red.

“Who lives here?”

“No one,” she said, and kicked off her shoes.

Three weeks later she said she’d fallen in love with someone else, a twenty-year-old soccer player, and that we couldn’t see each other anymore.

I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t tell anyone. My mother was not allowed to know; my sister Nicole had no time for “that monster.” She had a little baby to take care of and couldn’t be bothered. Whatever I confessed to her would go straight to my mother.

Images of Sylvia doing what we had done with a new boy, an older boy, kept me sobbing at night. But even worse was when, after two days of mourning, I plunged into such hopelessness that I didn’t even have the strength to conjure up any haunting images. My world turned black.

After a week I decided to go to the place Sylvia had shown me. Just the thought of returning to that barrack revived my pain, and I felt grateful for it. I would spy on her, I decided. I would watch Sylvia with her new lover. I’d be so close to her, so close.

My task turned out to be more difficult than I had imagined. A walk after school one May afternoon proved futile. The daylight barricaded my way; after an hour of crisscrossing the moor, I stood in ankle-deep mud, with nothing in sight. My memory was useless.

During supper, I tried to steer my family’s conversation toward the subject of a gated area, an empty barrack somewhere north of our village. Maybe my mother or sister knew of that place.

“A barrack?” Nicole asked. Her son had fed and was sleeping in her lap; she never let me come close to him.

“Thomas said, in school, that he’d seen one outside the village. He said there was a gate.” I stared at my salami sandwich, unable to meet her eyes.

“Maybe he’s seen one of the vacation homes around here,” Mother said. My dad’s chair at the table was not to be touched or moved, and every evening she put out a plate for him.

“Probably just a barn,” my sister replied. “Thomas isn’t all that bright. Neither are his parents.”

I tried again to reach that gate after nightfall. How strange that once it had grown dark, my feet knew just where to go and my eyes followed my memories. Sylvia, of course, was not with me, but I hoped to see her at the barrack.

I scaled the fence once more, found the barrack dark and locked. I listened for sounds from inside but heard nothing. Instead of climbing through a window, I headed down the paved road.

After only fifty yards, another barrack appeared to my right, then another. A fourth one, and the road was still leading ahead. To my left a large barnlike structure shot up, and through an unlocked gate, which I slid open, I entered. It was darker than night inside, but after a few moments, I made out large machines, squatting like reptiles. Tiny feet scurried over the floor, glass crunched under my shoes. My whistling came echoing back at me, and I hurried outside.

I was still following the road when I came to a railroad crossing. Hemmersmoor’s only track ended at Brümmer’s factory—did this track extend to Brümmer’s? Or was it unconnected to the appearance of the small steam engine we boys had admired for so long?

Walking from one end of Hemmersmoor to the other took me twenty minutes. I had walked twenty minutes on the winding road when I came to a barrack whose front door was busted. On entering I found that, just like in the first building, the light was still working. In the back, I stepped into an enormous kitchen with several stationary frying pans, gas burners as big as the stove surface at my own home, and pots into which I still would have fit entirely. Enormous cooking spoons and whisks lay strewn on the floor, like the toys of some ancient race of giants.

A large hall with wooden floors and long wooden tables lay adjacent to this kitchen, and while some of the chairs had been broken, this hall still seemed to wait for hundreds of hungry eaters. Who had been living here? I didn’t dare switch off the light.