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By Root 3045 0

of the burned-down houses. Skolegade was one huge scene of devastation. The walls were still standing: the empty windows gaped darkly, and the townsfolk gaped back. January 1 was a holiday. Men wore top hats and examined the damage with expert faces, as though they were assessors accustomed to major fires—even though almost forty years had passed since the last one. The women, including those who'd lost nothing, wore black shawls over their heads and wailed loudly. It seemed that fear had claimed the women of Marstal just as the fire had claimed the houses the night before. It was the same fear that the sea instilled in them, the fear of losing everything: brothers, fathers, and sons. But the fire had shown more mercy than the sea. It hadn't taken a single life.

In the midst of all this, we heard Mrs. Isager calling out for Karo. She seemed to forget that the dog was long gone. The other women spoke to her, but she shook her head and went on calling.

Though the lives of dogs and humans had been spared, many families had lost the things that help us through life, such as furniture and clothes and memories and kitchen utensils. The Albertsen family found a cast-iron pot that could still be used, and the Svanes unearthed a frying pan. The handle had burned away, but Laves Petersen, the carpenter, said he could make a new one.

The fire had started while we were bombarding Isager's house with clay pots. We did this every year and we were all—even those who had not taken part—punished for it annually. Since we never snitched on one another, we were all regarded as equally guilty. But this year there was no punishment—because set against the scale of the inferno, our clay-pot larks seemed like small beer. They were forgotten, and so were we. Isager had been in the street when the fire broke out and simply didn't connect us with what had happened. Unable to conceive that we might be responsible for such a disaster, he'd underestimated us. Likewise he was unaware of the wickedness he had sown in us. His stupidity was our protection.

In the days that followed, we learned that his fat wife had lost her reason. She kept wandering around, calling for Karo. She thought that the flames had scared him away, and she put his bowl out every day to entice him out of hiding.

"She's improved," Josef said. "She keeps forgetting to thump us."

THE FLAMES HADN'T touched the school, and the teacher's home was rebuilt. Before long, new houses had appeared on Skolegade. But at school, nothing had changed. Isager had been bedridden and fought off death. His house had burned down. And we, his pupils, were behind it all. But he kept coming back. We'd lost. It was hopeless.

Again we counted the remaining years on our fingers. Sooner or later we would be old enough to leave the school. That was the only hope we had.

Lorentz was confirmed and became apprenticed to the baker in Tværgade. Appropriate, we thought, given his obese, unmanly body. As he grew older it had become increasingly feminine: he'd developed breasts, and the Isager boys had once taken him out to the Tail and made him strip so they could see what a girl looked like. Then Josef had held Lorentz in a viselike grip while he twisted away at his fat, quivering flesh, and Johan, who was sensitive and cried greasy, waxy tears at every opportunity, had done things to Lorentz that afterward made them both shoot us knowing glances, as if they possessed a secret that we could share if we begged them hard enough. But we didn't want to know what it was. No. We didn't.

Lorentz worked for the baker in Tværgade at night, kneading dough. But he lasted only a few months. The clouds of flour next to the hot oven got into his lungs, he said, and he couldn't breathe properly. But that was a load of rubbish. He'd always had breathing trouble because he was fat, and he and his mother were to blame for that. He was an only child and she was a widow and she fed him from morning till night like a goose she was fattening for Christmas. No: the baker didn't want Lorentz because Lorentz was useless;