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

approached her and asked if she would like to help the gardener with his work. Inge had agreed and had been happy to escape the sun beating down on her without respite. My father had shaken his head when the overseer introduced him to Inge, had complained to my mother that she couldn’t lift and carry like a man.
    But after the first week, he had been surprisingly satisfied with her work, and after another week, they could often be seen working side by side until my father drove home at night in his beat-up truck.
    My mother’s face was dark, her eyes shimmered, and something that appeared to be a smile, but was so much more dangerous, played on her lips while she told me all this two days before our Christmas recess. “The worst,” she said, “is that he won’t talk about her at all anymore. He’s keeping her a secret. He can’t wait to be alone with that hussy. Your father is not himself anymore. He’s long forgotten about the two of us.”
    I didn’t answer my mother. No word could have consoled her or changed the plan she had come up with. As soon as school let out for Christmas, I was to accompany my dad to the Big House again. “You have to keep your eyes open and tell me everything you see,” she said.
    “Can Anke come with me?” I asked.
    My mom nodded. “Just don’t let on.”
    On December 21, at five o’clock in the morning, my dad and I left the house and picked up Anke, who was already waiting outside her house, freshly washed and groomed. Together we trundled through the darkness toward the Big House.
    Anke carried a small leather bag that her mother had packed for her, and she stared intently through the side window. She wore a dress, which was, unlike my own, much too nice to wear for work or play, and she looked all pretty and smelled as if her mom had rubbed her whole body with cologne. “Can we go into the maze?” she asked.
    “As long as you don’t get caught,” mumbled my father. Last summer my presence had still cheered him up, but this wintermorning he was moody. “Don’t do anything foolish and, above all, be courteous to old man von Kamphoff. Curtsy when you see him.”
    Three generations of the von Kamphoff family lived in the manor house. The old owner had served as an officer in two wars. He was missing an arm and had a pronounced limp. It was he who had first hired my dad, when my father was a young man with a pregnant bride, and he treated Dad with the same benevolence one might show to a favorite dog. His legs were white and crisscrossed by varicose veins and scars, and one shirtsleeve was rolled up and fastened to the shoulder with safety pins.
    Some days he stood next to my dad, who was digging up weed trees or planting rhododendrons, and rambled on good-humoredly about the battles he’d fought in. He explained why we should have won the wars and which mistakes and coincidences had prevented us from claiming what was destined to be ours.
    My father agreed. He might have been a good, gentle man, but if his bad eyes had not kept him out of the service, he would readily have fought for the
Vaterland
. He was poor, Hemmersmoor was poor, someone had to be responsible for the misery in the world, and it couldn’t be us. Not us.
    Only a few people in the village had ever visited the manor, and even fewer had set foot inside. Yet this fact added spice to the rumors that swirled around the von Kamphoff family. It was said that the old Johann von Kamphoff had murdered his father in his sleep to become lord of the manor, and that a black woman he had captured during the last war was imprisoned in the basement. The patrons of Frick’s Inn again and again talked about the true heir. They claimed that Johann had had ayounger brother, and that this brother, against all customs, should have inherited the manor. But after the death of his father, Johann hadn’t wanted to cede what he thought was his and had killed his brother. In a different version of the story, Johann had imprisoned