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

That night Frick, against his custom, served a second round of free beer, and more bloodshed was avoided, even though many swore that next year it would be Heidrun’s turn. Even when Jens Jensen claimed that Frick poured water into the beer, people answered with nothing but laughter.

The only person in Hemmersmoor who was not satisfied with Thanksgiving was my mother. No winner had been declared in the Butterkuchen contest, and the jurors, after acknowledging that their black tongues were in no shape to come to a sound judgment, refused to award first prize.

My dad welcomed the outcome. He was fond of pastries and did not want any misgivings between him and the baker. My mother, though, was not to be consoled.

When Anke and Linde asked me the following afternoon if I would come home with them to play, I answered in a loud voice, so Alex and the other boys could hear me, “I don’t play with girls. I’m not stupid.”

In the fall of Helga Vierksen’s death, I was seven years old. She and her five children were clubbed to death in our village square, and their remains—what was left of them—were buried in a small lot in the cemetery outside the village. The cemetery was a windy affair, square and barren, and sometimes a few of us would approach it cautiously at night and watch little flames scurry over the graves.

That fall I should have been in school, but my parents had pleaded with the authorities, and it was agreed that I was to be given a year’s reprieve. I wasn’t allowed to be present during the talks, and I can’t imagine what they hoped might change me during that one year. I had a lot of time on my hands, since Alex and Martin, my two loyal friends, were now learning math and reading and geography.

Just outside of Hemmersmoor stood Brümmer’s tool factory. For reasons unknown, a huge window, not unlike a shop window, had been set into the wall just left of the office entrance. The factory had nothing to offer the villagers, nor did the villagers come to the factory to shop. About twenty men worked inside the cream-colored building, and none of them could say why the window had been inserted or who’d come up with the idea in the first place.

Even stranger was the setup of the window. It was impossible to peer into the office because on the inside a kind of alcove had been built, and a set of doors shut out our gazes from what lay beyond that alcove.

The sides, top, and bottom of the alcove were angled, lending a false perspective to the display, as though you were looking through a short tunnel or doorway. The most astonishing thing, however, lived inside the window. Otto Nubis, the foreman at Brümmer’s, displayed his marionettes there, three or four at a time. This was not a gaudy display. The wooden people on the other side of the glass were not beautiful, their clothes shabby and discolored, their faces rough, serious, and more intimidating than the pictures of tortured saints in our church. They had a strange effect on my young mind: I feared them and yet couldn’t keep myself from returning time and again.

The monotony of my days was interrupted during only two months. In March and October, in a sandy lot next to Frick’s Inn, a small carnival set up its tents. We dreamt of Astro Blasters, the Galactic Loop, and the House of Primal Fear, but we were treated to shabby carousels and shooting stands where the BB guns were rusty and the barrels bent. Nobody ever won one of the five giant bears that dangled above those willing to pay.

While Alex and Martin were at school, I watched the carnies set up their tents. I knew the candy vendors and the mirrored maze, and I strolled past the groups of men and women who had fewer teeth and fingers than even the poorest peat cutters in Hemmersmoor.

One attraction I didn’t recognize. The red-and-white tent stood in back of the ship swings, and I saw a lanky man who looked old, but not in the way my parents did, standing in front, attaching a sign. “Ricos Reise Durch Die Hölle,” it read: “Rico’s Journey Through Hell.” I stood and gaped.

“What’s that?” I finally asked.

The man turned to face me. He wore a suit made from rough brown material, and his white shirt stood open at the neck. His skin was tough and wrinkled. He had a strong nose, a high forehead, and a chin with a deep cleft. Most impressive, though, were his eyes. They were watery and of such a light gray they seemed white. What could such eyes see? I wondered, and took two steps back.

“Who’s asking?” the man said.

“I am,” I said stubbornly.

The man, who I thought had to be Rico, laughed. “Do you have a name?”

“Christian Bobinski. Is that you?” I pointed to his sign. “What can I see in hell?”

“You can’t wait, can you?” Rico said. “But hell isn’t interested in you. You have to be eighteen to see my marvels.”

“Rubbish,” I said. “I’m old enough.”

Rico laughed again. “Come tonight after midnight. If you do, and if you do me a favor, I will take you through hell.”

Even at seven I knew that hell wasn’t supposed to travel in a tent, and yet I couldn’t find any rest throughout the day. I tied a tin can to my cat Melchior’s tail and watched him take off in terror into the woods behind our garden. When my sister Ingrid, who was ten and in fourth grade, came home in the afternoon, I slipped a frog into her dress, and my parents promptly sent me to my room and locked the door. My eldest sister, Nicole, slid a note under my door. It read, “I hope they’ve thrown away the key.”

Hell. What did Rico have to show me? I climbed through my window, jumped into the lime tree, and dropped to the ground. I had to find Alex and Martin.

They were at Alex’s house. The teacher had told them to collect colorful leaves and dry them between sheets of blotting paper inserted into the pages of large and heavy books. Now they were trying the method on lizards and blindworms.

“Hell?” Martin asked. He was wiry and the tallest of us. His cropped hair and eyebrows were very red, his face full of freckles. He was the son of the Gendarm. “And he’ll let you in?”

“If I do him a favor,” I said.

Alex’s lizard was still squirming, the tail twitching inside the Brockhaus Encyclopedia , volume A–D. Alex was Mr. Frick’s son, and he was sturdily built and his eyebrows were bushy and growing together above his nose. His older brother, Olaf, should have inherited the inn, but he had no mind for working behind the bar and entertaining customers, and had moved out with his young wife. He was now working in Brümmer’s tool factory.

Alex didn’t concern himself with the family feud. He immediately moved into his brother’s room. “What a fool,” he said, whenever the grown-ups mentioned Olaf, and each and every time he did his father slapped his face. But the inn was his small kingdom. He knew how to get us food whenever we felt hungry. He’d stolen liquor from his father too.

“Is he the devil?” Alex asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. It didn’t seem likely, yet his eyes had fascinated me. I had to get a pair of them.

At midnight I met my friends behind Frick’s Inn. It was a Friday night, and the noise inside the pub would continue until the last drunk had been thrown out. There wasn’t any rumor, any gossip that escaped Alex. Whatever secret the people of Hemmersmoor thought safe, alcohol finally dug it up and shouted it out, and in time Alex told Martin and me.

“It’s the most amazing thing he’s ever seen,” he told us, about Jens Jensen, the peat cutter, who loved his Bommerlunder and who’d confessed many times to having sex with witches on the moor. “He saw the damned and their tortured souls, he says, and he says it could scare the devil himself.”