“You never had a soul.” She says it without anger; she doesn’t care about me. “You were always a ghost.”
I nod once more. I say, “A spirit.”
“You’ll see. Alex will bite the dust before me.”
“Sure,” I say, but my answer isn’t good enough for her and she turns away and leaves. She’s a good friend. In her own way she’s still loyal to Anke Hoffmann, as though the two were still wearing the same rolled-up braids. She’s never forgiven Anke; that she owed to her friend. Her hatred bound them together, and now that Anke has died, Linde only keeps on living in her hatred for Alex. What use does she have for a new house in a new town?
What about myself? I don’t have anything to forget or forgive. Nobody has ever loved me enough to hate me beyond my grave. My wife is dead, and she never knew me, couldn’t see the boy from Hemmersmoor. She did away with my past like discarding a worn coat.
The chest of drawers stands in the same spot it did when I was young, and I’ve gathered all the old photographs. The baker Meier and my dad smile at me. They have faded, turned gray; they almost look harmless. Two young men who have just started their lives. But the dead are restless spirits—they meddle with everything. I’m a light sleeper, and they sense that and invade my dreams. This is very easy for them. I can swat at them as though they were fleas or cockroaches, but I can’t get rid of them. My mother and sister keep me company and lament their fate, my housekeeping, and the state of my wardrobe. The Gendarm visits me, and the von Kamphoffs stop by as well. With Alex’s help, their house will rise again on the hill Hüklüt the Giant left behind. All visitors gather in my living room, make themselves comfortable on the sofa and the carpet in front of the fireplace. I despise them, but if they should ever turn their backs on me, what will I have left? I was raised in this village. I can’t replace them.
If I should leave Hemmersmoor once again, I won’t need to burn down my house. Alex has offered to buy it, and he’ll get rid of my belongings faster than any fire could. He plans to open a small boutique, maybe an antiques store. With his help, I will take all my memories with me; I will be less than a ghost. Should anybody ask about my whereabouts, Martin, Linde, and Alex will shrug helplessly and shake their heads. I can count on my old friends. Christian Bobinski, the pale boy? Never heard of him.
Acclaim for Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone
“Full of dark folk magic and frightful, lurid wonder. It casts a spell, winking all the way through every grim detail and shadowy secret.”
“Creepy in a way that actually made me quite nervous.”
“A brilliant amalgam of Faulkner, the Brothers Grimm, and Günter Grass as if condensed for intensity.”
“The characters are all doomed. ‘Doomed to what?’ is the only question, and you won’t put the book down until you find out.”
“[A novel] with a chilling twist here and there, a sly, stark wit, and a fascinating cast of lost boys and girls.”
“Stefan Kiesbye would be a writer to watch out for if he had not so clearly already arrived.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STEFAN KIESBYE has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. Born on the German coast of the Baltic Sea, he moved to Berlin in the early 1980s. He studied drama and worked in radio before starting a degree in American studies, English, and comparative literature at Berlin’s Freie Universität. A scholarship brought him to Buffalo, New York, in 1996. Kiesbye now lives in Portales, New Mexico, where he teaches creative writing at Eastern New Mexico University. He is also the arts editor of Absinthe: New European Writing. His stories and poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and his first book, Next Door Lived a Girl, won the Low Fidelity Press Novella Award and was praised by Peter Ho Davies as “utterly gripping,” by Charles Baxter as “both laconic and feverish,” and by Robert Olmstead as “maddeningly powerful.”
Copyright
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in Penguin Books 2012
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © Stefan Kiesbye, 2012
All rights reserved
Pages 21–30 appeared in different form under the title “Rico’s Journey Through Hell” in Hobart in 2007.
Pages 93–103 appeared in different form under the title “The Mill” in Fickle Muses in 2007.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Kiesbye, Stefan.
Your house is on fire, your children all gone : a novel / Stefan Kiesbye.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-60363-5
1. Older people—Fiction. 2. Early memories—Fiction. 3. Villages—Fiction. 4. Germany—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3611.I4464Y68 2012
813’.6—dc22 2012023841
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Adobe Garamond
Designed by Elke Sigal
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