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

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 hadbeen 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