Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone: A Novel by Stefan Kiesbye

dad chuckle. “You had a glass already.”
    “Please?”
    Soon we reheated the wine. While I was careful only to raise my glass without drinking, my father emptied his while chewing on the leftover sausages. We ate like two starving beggars, as if we’d never before eaten goose and stuffing and potatoes and greens and pudding. We ate and he drank.
    By one o’clock I lay in bed wide awake. I didn’t feel guilt over what I had done, but my plan seemed too enormous to think through. Just like the sausages and bread and goose, mythoughts kept me awake all night, until gray light scurried over the floor like mice.
    My father never made it to breakfast. He refused to eat, stayed in bed all day. Yet he drank. My mother had to go down to the cellar and carry bottles of wine upstairs. She was concerned, bewildered, yet after refusing at first and earning harsh words, she relented.
    For the two days of Christmas, my father drank. He ate little, and what little he ate, he emptied into the toilet bowl shortly. On the twenty-seventh he went to work but was sent home early after fainting. The doctor came and prescribed medicine, and my father took the powders and tablets and drank. He drank and drank, and after he’d gone through the modest reserves of our cellar, he made my mother buy more. He drank until his sweat turned pink and the bedroom reeked like Frick’s Inn. Still he didn’t stop. He didn’t seem to get drunk. He didn’t grow loud. He drank only to sleep feverishly, wake up, and drink more.
    On the last day of Christmas, January 6, he died. A shadow lifted from our house; his revenge, which I’d felt would destroy me should he recover, died with him. He was buried in our cemetery, and half of Hemmersmoor came out to pay him their last respects.
    Despite the dark, stuffy clothes I was wearing, I felt unburdened. I watched the burial with a sense of success, and I slept soundly that night.
    I still visited my sister, who’d not been allowed to attend the funeral, and who looked scared and miserable. I should have kept quiet, but the ease with which I had accomplished our liberation went to my head. One day in late February, a day beforeI turned twelve, my sister was crying in fear of her giant belly, and I told her what I had risked for her sake. She didn’t have to be afraid anymore, I said. He was gone, and I would take care of her once I was old enough to earn money.
    “I saved you,” I told Nicole, and explained how I had done it.
    She slapped me, took the teapot from her nightstand, and broke it on my head. She beat me with her fists and wouldn’t have stopped had the child not started to move inside her.
    After that night I was only reluctantly tolerated in our house, and soon my back was scarred, my arms burned, my body full of bruises. Whenever someone commented on my cuts and scabs, I shrugged and said, “A real boy needs scars.”
    My mother and sister raised the child, a boy, together. A refugee from that other Germany had taken advantage of my sister, they said when they wheeled the baby through the village. They told me to keep my dirty mouth shut. And so I repeated what they had taught me: a kid from the East had done it.

Martin
    A fter the New Year, the canals crisscrossing the peat bog froze, and as soon as school was out we chased each other across the ice. I had inherited my father’s red hair and hid it underneath black woolen hats, which I pulled down over my forehead. But I couldn’t do anything about the freckles, which spread on my face even in the dead of winter. I was thirteen and felt alternately ugly and invisible.
    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