Read Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone: A Novel for Free Online Page A

last war, the administration in Groß Ostensen had insisted that the von Kamphoff family take in war refugees. This was how Inge Madelung and her young son, Friedrich, came to live in a tiny room at the Big House. She was a small woman, with white, curly hair that, it was said, on the evening before her escape from East Prussia had still been flaxen. Inge Madelung wasn’t yet forty years old, and even though her face looked tired and drawn, she was met with suspicion by the women in Hemmersmoor whenever she came to buy a few things for herself and her son. She didn’t have a husband, she held herself straight, and she had kept her youthful figure.
    Hermann Madelung, who had worked as a waiter before thewar, had never come home from the Lithuanian front, Mrs. Meier told her patrons. As long as his death wasn’t established, the small woman would not receive a pension. What a cruel fate, sighed Mrs. Meier, and the women in the bakery sighed with her a bit too heartily.
    In the summer Inge Madelung worked in the fields around the Big House, and in the fall and winter she did the laundry and helped in the kitchen. She was a good worker, diligent, conscientious, and quiet.
    Friedrich grew and started going to school in the village. He was needled because of his mended shirts and socks. He always wore the same pair of pants—clean, mended at the knees, and a bit shabbier every month—until he was finally too tall for them.
    Friedrich often bragged about his father, told stories of his daring adventures in the last war. One day his father flew in an attack on Moscow, on another he saved his men by jumping out of a trench and storming toward the enemy all by himself. He’d been a high-ranking officer, Friedrich told us, and had received many medals. Friedrich was the only one in our class whose father wasn’t around, and his stories grew ever more fantastic. But Alex and Bernhard called him a bastard, and he often went home from school crying after fighting with Martin and the others. Rumors were flying that neither Friedrich nor his mother knew who the boy’s father was. She had been too friendly with soldiers or maybe something much worse had happened, something the women in Hemmersmoor never named. They said Inge should be happy that her son didn’t look like a Mongol or a Moor.
    Inge Madelung, however, ignored these rumors and mended her son’s pants after every fight. When she came into the village, she held her head high, even though the other women’s hostilitywas palpable and can’t have escaped her. They worried about their men, called her the Crow behind her back, but loudly enough so she could hear it. She never came to our Thanksgiving celebrations.
    No matter how much Inge wished for a friendlier reception in Hemmersmoor, she understood the women’s hostility all too well. She felt the men’s stares like needles on her skin, and was treated without any respect by them, as though she had personally caused her husband’s death.
    All that would probably have escaped me—Anke and I had better things to do than to worry about the adults’ affairs—if my father had stayed home like every other winter, if his hedges and flower beds had been buried under a thick layer of snow. But the old owner insisted that my dad work long hours in the gardens of the Big House, and the strangest thing was that it didn’t seem to bother my father. Quite the opposite. Each morning he seemed to get up a little bit earlier than the previous one, and my mother started to complain about his early rising, his good spirits, and loud voice. When my father returned home in the evenings, she was in such a foul mood that I left the house to make Christmas decorations from colored paper and straw with Anke.
    What I didn’t know, but what my mom told me all too soon in a low whisper, was that Inge Madelung was helping my dad with his work. In the fall Inge had helped in the fields, just like the previous year, but one day the overseer had