Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone

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Time is of no importance. I have returned to Hemmersmoor to live in the same house in which I grew up, the same cramped house in which my father and my sister Ingrid died when I was a schoolboy. I pour water from silver ewers onto their graves and pull weeds and put sweet williams into the soil. From time to time, one of the old villagers asks about them and remembers the incidents from forty years ago. Then their noses start to twitch, as if they smell a fire. Their lips tremble, but the words won’t come and they drop the topic immediately. Nobody has ever bothered me about their deaths. I never had anything to hide.

Our village has grown—rich people from Bremen have built vacation homes here, and their immaculately polished cars park every morning in front of Meier’s bakery. The noise seems foreign, life seems to have quickened. When I was a boy in Hemmersmoor, our village consisted of the main street and a few alleys and dirt roads. The houses were old and stooped—the doors and windows narrow and low, the beams twisted by rheumatism. The cobblestone was full of humps and holes, and nobody drove through our village just for pleasure. Even the sunlight seemed different, darker, never without suspicion.

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