Skeletons at the Feast (2008)

by Chris Bohjalian

  "You don't have to do that," Theo told her.

  "I do, sweetie. I do," she said to her brother. Then, with a sickening flutter in her chest, she noticed the boots. Callum's boots. Both of them. Clearly this was what her mother and Sonje had seen a moment ago, this was what had caused their eyes to widen in fear. She could see the thick rubber soles, and as high on one leg as his ankle. His feet were actually sticking out. The SS soldiers were so focused on the horses, however, that they hadn't looked back yet. But, eventually, they would. They would. How could they not? Eventually their eyes would roam casually in that direction, and there would be the two shoes. They stood out against the canvas bags like lit candles on a Christmas tree.

  "Here, let me do that," she offered quickly, struggling to make the words sound normal when she felt as if she were trying to speak with a giant popover in her mouth. She realized that she needed an excuse to stand between the soldier and the incriminating side of the wagon. Once there, perhaps she might be able to drape something atop Callum's feet. Her cape, maybe. But why? Why in this cold would she do such a thing? Still, as she began to work the complicated series of straps and buckles that linked the animal with the wagon she wondered if it would seem suspicious to either of these SS troopers if she were to go and rearrange the bags of feed behind her. She decided, however, that she hadn't a choice, and she was just starting in that direction when the soldier without the eyeglasses, the one in charge, suddenly ordered her to halt, to stop whatever it was she was doing. He snapped at the old men in the truck behind him to be silent. To shut their mouths. He commanded his partner to cease work on the harness. His face grew into an elongated mask with a rictus of rage in the middle, but otherwise he, too, stood perfectly still. She didn't dare venture a glimpse back at the boots, those awful, incriminating boots that were about to get them all-- even her poor, young, innocent little brother--killed, and instead kept her eyes fixed upon this suddenly furious soldier. And then she understood that his anger had nothing to do with the boots, nothing at all. It had nothing to do with anything he had seen. It was what he had heard. Was hearing. Abruptly he jumped up onto the hood of the truck and reached with both hands for the Volks- empfanger radio on the cab. She had been so focused on his questions about her brother and Manfred's pistol and where they were going that she hadn't been listening to the broadcast. She had been aware that some particularly somber music had been playing, nothing more. Now she realized that the music had been replaced by an announcer, and in tones even more solemn than whatever song had been on the radio he was describing an air raid on Dresden. For a brief moment she felt only relief: This wasn't about the paratrooper in their wagon. It was only about an air raid. And air raids were, unfortunately, common these days. But then she understood this was a raid of a very different sort, a very different magnitude. Apparently Dresden was gone, all but burned off the map in the night, the once lovely city bombed in mere hours into ruins. The British, the announcer was saying, may have used a new, more deadly sort of explosive: The firestorm that engulfed the city seemed to have melted even the stone buildings that were two and three hundred years old, and there were reports that the Elbe itself was ablaze. He said the casualties were well into the tens--perhaps even hundreds--of thousands, and this attack represented an escalation in the RAF's medieval brutality: After all, Dresden was known for porcelain, not munitions. It was almost completely undefended. Even the Art Academy and the Belvedere, with all of their paintings and pottery and sculpture, had been bombed, an indication that the western Allies were as shameless and savage as the Russians. Still, he vowed that the fuhrer's new wonder rockets would exact revenge on the United Kingdom from London to Glasgow, and this sort of vicious- ness would only stiffen the German resistance. It would never, he insisted, encourage capitulation. Then, after a drumroll, the grave music resumed.

  The SS soldier was still holding the radio before his face, and Anna wondered if he might raise it aloft and hurl it from the roof of the truck like a boulder. But he didn't. He had merely been trying to hear every detail the announcer was offering. Now that no more news was forthcoming, he put the Volksempfanger down on the cab and jumped to the ground from his perch atop the vehicle. "Wonder rockets. That's horseshit," he said, a little calmer now, his rage having been subsumed by disgust.

  His partner murmured a pair of female names to him, and Anna presumed the fellow was referring to the soldier's two sisters--the ones who were home somewhere painting plates. She watched him place his hands on the man's shoulders, squeezing them firmly and saying something more that she couldn't hear. But she understood: Those poor girls lived in Dresden. That's where the family was from. The two men were both envisioning those sisters in the firestorm.

  Then the soldier with the eyeglasses returned to them, but only to take Balga away. He was going to lead the stallion to the wrought- iron fence with the other horses at the edge of the cemetery. Briefly the animal looked at Anna, those big, dark eyes uncomprehending and curious. A little wary. He snorted once at the stranger, and it was clear that he was being led away under duress. But it looked to Anna as if he was going to be stubborn only, not vicious. She saw Theo already was walking Waldau to the second wagon.

  "Don't bring him too close to those other animals," Anna called out to the soldier, just in case, and Balga's ears twitched at the sound of her voice.

  "He might kick them?" he asked.

  "Or you."

  "And you said he was your horse?" the soldier asked.

  She nodded.

  "Come then," the soldier said. "Say good-bye to him. And then you had better get on your way." Quickly she went to the animal. For a moment she ran her hand along his mane and heavy winter coat, pressing and warming her palm against him. Then she brought her fingers to her lips, inhaling one last time his scent, and pressed them against his cheek. When she pulled them away he brought his nose almost to hers, and exhaled from those great, gaping nostrils a puff of steam that smelled perfectly sweet and struck her as the gust from a fairy-tale dragon. He didn't take his eyes off her, and she decided that what she had initially supposed was wariness in her animal's intense countenance was actually more akin to despair.

  when the ss checkpoint was well behind them, Sonje grew animated: She unleashed a frenzied, fist-pounding assault on the sacks of feed underneath which Callum was hiding. Mutti realized that the girl's sudden, violent anger at the paratrooper was unreasonable: It wasn't he, after all, who had bombed Dresden. He wasn't a pilot. He'd never even fired a bullet at a German before surrendering. Besides, it was growing increasingly evident to Mutti that her people had asked for this. She, with her blind eye, had asked for this. Hitler, that man whom she had once viewed as the fuhrer-- as her fuhrer--had tried to bomb most of Europe into submission. He and that pompous fop Goring. She recalled Manfred's story of that train full of Jews, and she shuddered. What else had they done? What else?

  Nevertheless, she was so worried about Sonje's precarious mental health that she didn't defend Callum as the girl lashed into him. When the young man climbed from the wagon, it only got worse. Sonje's grim face grew red as she ranted, and it looked as if she might physically attack him. But Mutti concluded that Sonje needed to vent--they all did, she guessed, for different reasons--and she would give her that opportunity, as unfair as that might be for poor Callum. Even Anna seemed to have realized that everyone would be better off if they allowed Sonje her say.

  "I can't even bear to walk beside you right now!" she was telling the paratrooper when he climbed from the wagon, her voice strident and shrill. Callum seemed largely unperturbed, as if it were easier to allow this wave of anger to wash over him than it was to rise up and risk it cutting his columnar legs out from under him. Occasionally he would glance at Anna, and he seemed more bemused than defensive, but he was listening and nodding, as if he were receiving nothing more from Sonje than a shopping list for the village. "Are you really the people we are supposed to surrender to? You are no better than the Russ
ians! No better at all! You are a horrible, violent people and you are brutes! When will you have had enough? When? When you've killed every last woman and child in Germany? Destroyed every single home and museum?"

  Mutti presumed that part of Sonje's anger stemmed from fear: from the reality that Manfred had left them. She knew that she herself felt a little bereft, a little more anxious, and so why wouldn't Sonje--or, for that matter, her own daughter? Why shouldn't all their tempers be a little short? It was a small miracle they weren't constantly snapping at one another now that their Wehrmacht corporal was gone. It wasn't that Manfred was braver than Callum-- though Mutti had to admit to herself, he probably was. Unlike their young Scot, Manfred would not have allowed himself to be captured without firing a shot. Rather, it was that he was resourceful and focused and just a little bit fierce. Moreover, he was a man in a uniform: His presence gave them a clout the other refugees lacked. The result? When they'd had this handsome Wehrmacht corporal as a part of their group, they couldn't help but feel a little bit safer, a little more secure.

  "Barbarians!" Sonje was insisting, shaking her head. "Barbarians!" she repeated.

  Yes, it was clear that Manfred had spent more time away from his unit than he probably should have; but she couldn't begrudge the man that, not after all he had endured in his years in the army and all, undoubtedly, he had seen. Besides, he might have saved Anna's life in that barn. Who knew what those Russians might have done to her in the end?

  "And now Dresden!" Sonje hissed, her voice eerily reminiscent of Klara's when she said the name of the city, but Mutti had the sense that the girl's tirade might finally be winding down. "Why would you bomb Dresden? What could possibly be gained from bombing Dresden?"

  She shook her head and wiped at her eyes and her cheeks with her gloved fingers, and Mutti reached out and rubbed her back in long, slow circles. Russians, British, Americans, she thought. Perhaps Sonje was right. Perhaps it didn't make a difference in which direction they walked. It really did seem as if the whole world was against them.

  "What, Mutti?"

  She looked over at Anna. She hadn't realized that she had spoken aloud just now.

  "What were you saying?" her daughter was asking her, the girl's eyes shining and a little wide with concern. Callum, too, was watching her.

  "Oh," she said to them both, noting an especially forlorn- looking birch by the side of the road. "I was just being an old woman. Talking to myself, I guess."

  "You are hardly an old woman," said Anna.

  "I wasn't three or four months ago. I think I am now. I seem to be easily distracted." She heard the despair in her voice and felt ashamed. Had she ever before sounded so gloomy?

  "Well," her daughter was saying kindly, "the mind's bound to roam when all we do is walk out here in the cold. Half the time, I find myself nodding off on my feet. Just listen to the horses' hooves: It's like a metronome. Of course we get distracted!"

  We. Anna was kind enough to say we, Mutti noticed, and so she stood up a little straighter. Stopped rubbing Sonje's back. She forced herself to take strides that were longer, more vigorous, and reminded herself that she still had a part of her family with her. Her lovely daughter. Her brave little boy. This was a great blessing. And it meant, as their mother, that she had to remain steadfast and resolute, and do all that she could to protect them. Under no circumstances could she allow herself to break down and become an additional burden.

  "Come," she said to no one in particular, "we should keep moving. It won't be dark for another few hours."

  anna understood on a level that was more intellectual than visceral that aging represented a steady winnowing of life's possibilities. She grasped death from bullets and bombs and bayonets far better than she did death from old age and cancer. But she was not uncomprehending of the reality that the infinite steadily contracted, the options narrowed, and eventually one's future would be as shallow as a spoon. As predictable--and enervating-- as the mud that followed the first thaws in March. And so as they walked on toward Stettin, three more days beneath a dreary, ever- lowering sky, in her mind she recited a litany of names. Yes, they did get distracted. All of them. They were distracted as much by their memories of what--of whom--they had lost as they were by what loomed before them. Gone, she thought, at least for the moment, was Werner. And disappeared behind him into that great fog of battle were her father and Helmut. Her twin. Then there was her mother's brother, dead, as well as the obdurate man's daughter and daughter-in-law and grandson. There were Klara and Gabi, not certainly dead but most likely dead. Russians, two killed in a barn in the midst of an act of inexplicable kindness. No, that wasn't right: It wasn't an act of kindness at all. They were stealing everything her family had: They had simply chosen not to rape and murder her in the process. Funny how a war altered one's definition of mercy.

  And then, of course, there were the animals, some profoundly beloved. There were the animals they had left behind at Kaminheim and the ones they had lost since starting west: Labiau, senselessly butchered, and Balga--her favorite--commandeered. Already she could see the physical strain on the two horses that remained. Cal- lum was walking beside the wagons most of the time, but at least once or twice each day he had been forced to crawl beneath the remaining bags of oats and one of the horses had had to struggle extra hard to proceed. She had sacrificed her suitcase soon after they had left that first SS checkpoint, telling no one when she did it, though in hindsight it hadn't been very heavy and she had regretted her sacrifice as soon as they had stopped at the end of that day. Still, when she had looked into the eyes of Waldau and Ragnit, when she had watched the white foam ooze from their mouths, she had been almost unable to bear it.

  Yet as they trudged west, the loss she found herself ruing with a frequency and a depth that surprised her was neither her father nor her brothers nor even her precious horse. It was Manfred. It wasn't that she cared for him more than anyone else. She was quite sure of that. (She was, wasn't she?) But she nonetheless found herself thinking of him even when she tried not to. She thought of him when Callum was trying to cheer her up with his stories of the Scottish coast and what a life might be like for them in Elgin. His accent pained her now, because while his German vocabulary was extensive--he was, more or less, fluent--his pronunciation was still slightly off, and every conversation reminded her of how different they were. She thought of him when Theo was asking her if she thought there was a chance they might come across new boots for him soon, because his, he said, were getting a little tight. Manfred was capable and ingenious: He would have found her brother some boots. And she thought of him when she traded two bags of feed for a small sack of muesli and a little milk, and when Mutti would talk reverentially about her husband and her two distant sons. Mutti was, essentially, whistling in the dark, talking aloud about how resilient the Emmerich men were, and how they would get through this. They would, she was certain. They'd find a way.

  Anna was considerably less confident, but she wasn't going to disagree with her mother. You believed whatever was necessary to keep putting one foot in front of the other in this cold and gray and ice.

  Almost imperceptibly, however, over those three days the fields and the forests were slowly transformed into lawns and garden plots, still white with snow or silvery pearl with ice, but the houses were growing closer together and eventually they grew even into rows. Behind them, to the east, the front had apparently stabilized. The Russians were no longer licking at the rear wheels of their wagons.

  And then, as if Mutti were discussing a common bird she had seen at a feeder at Kaminheim, one morning her mother casually remarked that they were on the Altdamm road and Altdamm was an eastern suburb of Stettin. Any moment, she said, they might hear the sound of ships in the great harbor. She reminded them that her cousin lived at the edge of the city--on a cliff overlooking the lake--and she guessed they would be there by midafternoon.

  Anna turned to her brother, who at the moment was riding on the driver's box of
the wagon Waldau was pulling.

  "We did it," she said, and she found herself smiling more broadly than she had in a very long while. "We made it."

  Theo tried to smile back, but she was surprised to see there were tears running down his cheeks and his eyes were red. Theo, crying? The child struggled so hard to be brave that she wasn't sure if he had cried once since they had left Kaminheim.

  "Sweetie, don't cry," she said to the boy. "Don't you see? We're here. Tonight you'll have warm food and a warm bed."

  The boy sniffed back a small sob and said in a voice that was barely above a whisper--it was hushed and scared, as if he didn't want Mutti to hear him--"Anna? I think . . ." "Tell me, sweetie."

  "I think something bad has happened to my foot."

  *

  PART III

  The First Days of Spring

  1945

  Chapter 16

  cecile hadn't really believed they were destined for work, even though she had said such things to Jeanne and to Vera and to anyone else who would listen. As often as not as they had walked west in the winter, she had begun to conclude that either there was no purpose to their marching other than to march them to death or they were being marched to a camp that was beyond the reach of the Soviets. Perhaps one with a gas chamber to asphyxiate the prisoners and a crematorium. She'd heard stories about such camps. And yet here they were, working by day at a factory that made a small part for airplane engines and sleeping by night in a barracks. During the last part of their trip, and the part that had covered the most ground by far, they had been locked inside windowless vans--not gas vans, as they had all briefly presumed, some grateful that their misery was finally going to be ended. Actual transportation vans. Eleven of them. They were driven inside the vans for two days and then deposited at barracks that smelled of alcohol. Each of the prisoners had a thin bunk to herself, a pillow filled with straw, and a blanket. Russian women had worked here before them and the blankets still were infested with body lice, but they were no longer sleeping outside or in barns, and they were given the clothing the Russians had left behind before they had--the Jewish women supposed--been executed themselves. And so while some of the prisoners concluded that eventually they would be machine-gunned or gassed as well, for the moment they had warmer clothes and their rations of soup and bread were more substantial. Not generous, not even remotely satisfying, but larger. Moreover, they were grateful for that soup, even on those days when it was watery and thin, because if nothing else it had been boiled and that meant they could drink it and slake their thirst without fear of typhus. And though the barracks weren't heated, the walls kept out the worst of the wind. Besides, it was March now and the sun was higher during the day and the most brutal weather was behind them.