On the day of the Sacrificial Festival, I was uncertain which Most Beloved Possession I should single out — my one-year-old pillow (which stank just as powerfully of onions as the one from the year before) or a box of matches — when they called me into the parlor.
“Have you decided?” asked Josfer.
“Leave me alone,” I said.
Jasfe brought me to the door. Anni was waiting outside, absentmindedly rocking Frau Puppe, the first doll she’d sewn together herself.
Jasfe pressed a torch into my hand. “You know what you have to do.” She stepped back into the house and locked the door behind her.
“We know who burned all of our things!” called Josfer through the door.
“Leave me alone!” I shouted back.
“Today is the Sacrificial Festival. Today you’re allowed to burn whatever you want. So go ahead! Burn the house!”
“But … but you’re still inside.”
“Someone remembers how to speak!”
“Leave me alone,” I said.
“Don’t you love us, Julius?”
“That’s our house!”
“I’ll burn it, I love you!” cried Anni, to whom no one was listening.
“Julius, those were our things that you threw in the fire.”
“But that was different!”
“Aren’t you brave enough?”
“I don’t want to do it!”
“I love you. I’ll do it,” said Anni softly, as I screamed, “I’m not going to do it! I hate you!”
My vision was so blurry with crying that I couldn’t tell Jasfe from Josfer when they stood beside me again, lifted me up and embraced me, kissed me.
“We love you,” they whispered. “We love you.”
“Me, too,” said Anni. “Me, too.”
After the Sacrificial Festival everyone went to bed early. I couldn’t sleep, I thought about how I should have answered my parents, how I wished I’d answered them, and how good it would have felt to say those words. I slipped from the house, walked to the Moorbach, and hung my feet in the water. I plucked marsh marigolds, threw them into the current, and asked myself where their journey would take them. I cleared my throat, and said, “I love you.”
Maybe that didn’t sound perfect — but then, what did sound perfect? On the way home I imagined how my parents’ faces would look when they heard me speak — first sleepy, then befuddled, and a moment later, happy — and had to smile. As I looked up at the night sky above the village, it seemed to me that this year the sacrificial bonfire was sending up a brighter glow than usual. But it wasn’t the festival. A house was burning. Our house was burning. Josfer and Jasfe’s house, and Anni’s, and mine. I ran toward it. The heat struck me in the face, and I flinched back. The fire had reached the second floor. There were no screams, I listened closely, I knew that in Segendorf people screamed at the slightest opportunity, but in my ears there was only a rumbling like that of a gigantic cooking pot on the boil, the fire whispering and hissing in a particularly hateful language. And I saw and I saw and I saw the flames dance through the rooms.
Somebody tugged at my sleeve. Anni. She looked at me anxiously, clutching a torch in both hands.
“I love them,” she said.
PART III. You Are My Mother
Good at These Things
They set out right after lunch. Albert had trouble keeping up with Fred, who settled immediately into a brisk stride. As always when he left the house, Fred was wrapped in his royal blue poncho, which fluttered behind him like a cape as he walked and intensified his already imposing appearance. His tufted Tyrolean hat sat askew on his head. His bulky, sagging backpack, which suggested a cargo of junk, the encyclopedia doubtless among it, didn’t appear to be hindering him. Albert, on the other hand, had allowed himself to be persuaded into wearing a plastic raincoat, and was now sweating freely beneath a flawless blue sky.
In a decidedly unsporty tote bag Albert was carrying a few slices of buttered bread, a Tupperware container filled with bananas, a few peeled carrots, a bottle of apple spritzer, Fred’s medication, and a pack of cigarettes. And in his hip pocket, the makeup compact.
After they’d followed the main street a ways, they curved to the right down Ludwigstrasse, a narrow side street littered with dried cow patties, where at the age of eight Albert had taught Fred to ride his bicycle without training wheels. Albert had run back and forth beside him, pushing him along, encouraging him, nursing his skinned knees after each tumble, and wiping away his tears, until finally, during the May school holidays, Fred had rolled his first few feet sans training wheels, the wind blowing into his proud, radiant face.
Fred paused beside a garden fence, stretched his arm over the wire, and waited. A white-and-brown-mottled foal broke from the shadow of an arborvitae hedge, trotted closer, and lifted its head so that Fred could stroke it between the ears. Albert watched as Fred tickled it, said hello, and asked how its day was going. He got the impression it enjoyed Fred’s company — it whinnied, as if at any moment it might break out into unceremonious chatter.
Fred waved him closer. “Gertrude? This is Albert.”
“Gertrude?” Albert took a step toward them, and the horse flinched.
“It’s okay,” Fred said to the foal, which was holding itself just out of reach. Albert wasn’t surprised; he tended to have this sort of effect on animals. Presumably they were able to sense that he still couldn’t grasp why most people had more pity for a stray cat than for a vagrant on the subway.
Albert cleared his throat. “Let’s get going.”
“Can’t we stay for a minute?”
“No.”
“But Gertrude—”
“No!” said Albert, louder than he’d intended. He really wasn’t in the mood for a petting zoo.
Fred pulled him aside. “When I’m dead, you have to come see Gertrude every day,” he whispered.
Albert hadn’t expected that; wiping the sweat from his forehead, he said, “I’m not good at these things.”
Fred clapped him on the shoulder. “It won’t take you long to learn.”
Then he said his good-byes to the foal. Fred had never mentioned Gertrude after returning from his rambles through Königsdorf, thought Albert; and if Fred didn’t mention something, it usually meant he’d been up to no good.
Fred interrupted Albert’s train of thought when he came to a halt in the middle of the street. “We’re there.”
Albert glanced around. Farm plots stretched away on either side. The sun stung them. Flies traced rectangles above dried cow dung.
Fred drew a crowbar from his backpack, kneeled, and began struggling to slip its end under the manhole cover.
“What are you doing? Stop it!” shouted Albert.
Fred turned to look at him, and with an aggrieved bass note the cover slid back into its recess. “We have to go down there.”
“What if someone sees us? What if a car comes along?”
Fred glanced at both ends of the street. “There’s no car coming.”