Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone: A Novel by Stefan Kiesbye

he’d fallen often or crawled about. He wore a slipper on his left foot and the right was bare. His thin hair was short and cut in the style popular in our village: a pot had been put over his head and all the hair sticking out sheared off.
    After he was gone from my sight, I hesitated to continue, but my curiosity won out over my apprehension, and soon I was following the turns of the maze, spying around corners. At an intersection I was debating whether to take a left or right, when my eyes went blind.
    “You’re not so good, are you?” the stranger said into my ear. “I could die of an empty tummy before you found me.”
    I jerked my head free and stared directly into his brown eyes. “You’re not allowed to move,” I protested. “You have to stay in one place.”
    “Says who?”
    “That’s the rule.”
    “It is?” he asked, making a sad face. “I had no idea.”
    “How else could I find you?”
    “You didn’t.”
    “Because you kept moving.”
    “Is that so?” He seemed to really think about it. “All right,” he finally concluded. “It’s your turn.”
    I did as he said, following the stupid hide-and-seek routine without further questions. Had I paused, I would have tried to scale a hedge and run away, but the stranger’s urgent voice, which sounded like dishes clattering in the sink, left me no time for such thoughts. I hid.
    Within two seconds, he stood next to me.
    “You followed me,” I complained.
    “So?” he asked.
    “That’s against the rules.”
    “Says who?”
    “The rules,” I said, suddenly growing annoyed. “What are you doing here anyway? Do you live in the Big House?”
    “Not now,” the stranger said. “I live here.”
    “Who are you?” I said. I had never much spoken to any of the von Kamphoffs, and when I’d done so, never without a curtsy. Yet this man was different, I understood, and politeness not required.
    “I am a professor,” he said.
    “Of what?” I asked. I knew little of professors, had never set foot in a university, and knew no one who had. Still I knew these creatures had specialties.
    “Of what?” he echoed. “Of this maze, of course. Of mathematics, religion, and world history.”
    “How can you be a professor of this maze?” I asked.
    “I’m also a king and chop off many heads. If there’s a man or woman who insults me, I chop off their head.” He made a cutting motion with his hand, as if slicing an onion.
    His reply made me afraid again. I realized that this old man might be a lunatic, and that he had probably escaped from the asylum near Groß Ostensen. “I should go,” I said.
    He bowed. “Don’t say a word. Or else.” He made the chopping motion.
    Yet I had been walking for only a few minutes before I was back where I had left him.
    “Hello?” he said.
    “I need to get out,” I said.
    He shrugged his shoulders. Oddly, he seemed to have forgotten that we’d just met, because he didn’t rise from the grass or look a second time at me.
    “Can you help me?” I asked.
    “Do you need a horse?” he asked.
    I ran off again, and this time I made it out of the maze. My breath was rattling, my heart pounding in my ears. Every second longer that I had spent in the maze had aggravated me, and I felt like crying for help. Yet as soon as I stepped onto the lawn, the manor house only a few hundred yards to my left, I felt only the deepest disappointment. The danger was over; the day had lost its luster.
    I longed to tell my father about my strange adventure but honored the promise I had given. The man had seemed harmless enough that I did not feel it necessary to betray his whereabouts. However, at night in my room—I had told Johann, my only suitor, no that evening in front of Frick’s and was already regretting it—my thoughts wandered off to the Big House and into the maze. Was the stranger asleep among the hedges or awake like me, frightened by the night’s dampness and countless small noises? Was he hungry? Then my mind