Skeletons at the Feast

by Chris Bohjalian

  He pulled away and reached behind him to take her hand off the back of his head, but the fingers on her other hand were grasping his shirt with such tenacity--such ferocity--that he allowed them to retain their leechlike hold.

  "Take me with you," she begged, speaking so quickly that at first he didn't quite understand what she was saying. "I will be your whore. I will be your army whore and do whatever you want. Anything, anything at all. Better to be an army whore for a German hero than to be left behind here for Ivan."

  "Oh, I agree," he told her.

  "Gabi's mother has lost her mind. It's gone, completely gone. She's insisting we stay. But we can't; you know we can't. You know we'll be raped and killed if we do."

  He rested a hand upon her fingers. He could feel her nails against his chest through the layers of fabric from his shirt and his undershirt.

  "Of course you can come with us," he said. "And my sense is, if you put your foot down and say you're coming with us--that's all there is to it--Gabi and her mother will come, too. At least they might. Either way, please, let's have no more talk about army whores. Okay?"

  She lowered her gawking eyes in a manner that she must have thought was flirtatious and nodded. But then she took her free hand and--though Gabi's mother and the guests were nearby, either through one door that led to the kitchen or through another that led to the dining room--surprised him by grabbing at his crotch. He presumed she had meant this as a bit of erotic foreplay, a taste of the carnal delights that awaited him, but her fingers and her palm, if they reminded him of anything, struck him as only the mouth of a snake.

  callum offered to help Klara set the table in the formal dining room, but she insisted that he rest with the others. And so he went exploring, wandering aimlessly through the conservatory and the living room and the two small rooms that served as maids' quarters. The house was darker than Kaminheim--and not simply because the electricity was out and it was illuminated entirely by candles and whatever oil lamps they were carrying with them--but he guessed it was at least as big. In the library he ran into Manfred. He was sitting on the arm of a leather easy chair, with a book open on a round table beside him, three candles surrounding it. He was hunched over the text and so his face was in shadow.

  "What have you got there?" Callum asked.

  "A biography of Richard Wagner."

  "Ah, a favorite of your fuhrer."

  "Apparently." The corporal flipped it shut. Beside it was a second, thinner volume. "How much German do you read?"

  "A little," he said. "Not enough to make much sense of your Wagner biography. But it wouldn't be my choice in bedtime reading, anyway. I don't mind biographies, but he didn't write much for the accordion."

  Manfred smiled. "How come you didn't bring the instrument? You brought whole wagonloads of stuff. But not the accordion."

  "Wasn't mine to bring. Belonged to Anna's uncle."

  "Think it was an oversight?"

  "Probably."

  He smiled: "Sure they weren't just sick of your playing?"

  "No one gets sick of my playing."

  He shook his head. "I guess I'm just not a fan of the accordion."

  "Well, that's because you've never heard me play."

  "You're that good?"

  "I am."

  "In that case, maybe it's just a problem of association. I always associate the accordion with bullies and beer."

  "Oh, it's much more elegant than that. It has its earliest roots in Berlin, but it evolved in Vienna and London, too. A hundred years ago, folks were fiddling with bellows and reeds all across Europe. You play an instrument?"

  "No."

  "Go on!"

  "Really, I don't."

  "I'm shocked. A cultured German like you?"

  "I worked in a ball-bearing factory, remember?"

  "Nevertheless," Callum murmured. He was honestly surprised.

  "Here. This will show you how cultured Germans really are," Manfred said, and he opened the second book on the table to a specific page and handed it to him. "Even you should be able to get the gist of this. Small words. Big pictures."

  He put his oil lamp down on the desk. "A children's book?"

  "Believe it or not, yes."

  "Oh, good. Now we're motoring along at my speed," he said happily, but instantly the sense of mirth that had been welling up inside him evaporated. He saw that the illustrations were water- color paintings of noses. The noses were grotesquely large and wart-covered, and said to typify those of the Jew. There were five of them on the two pages. And then there was a separate nose that was elegant and small and presented as typical of the Aryan countenance.

  "Clearly you don't believe this rubbish," he said, unable to hide the indignation in his voice.

  "Clearly."

  "A few minutes ago, Gabi was trying to analyze my head. God . . ."

  Down one of the long corridors they heard a bell ringing: It was the sound that Klara had said would signal that dinner was being served. When Callum turned back to Manfred, he saw the other soldier had blown out the candles on the table and his face was lost to the darkness.

  mutti recalled what had happened to her brother and his family when the Russians had reached his estate and decided she would tell Klara what she knew--what Helmut had seen. It might convince the woman to bring Gabi and Sonje and join her group as they trekked west. Yet there was a part of her that wondered if even with that knowledge Klara would reconsider. The woman seemed a little daft now. Certainly Klara had always been eccentric--an artistic temperament without any artistic talent--but this evening her behavior was verging on the peculiar. The girls' behavior, too.

  Still, she was astounded at their energy. At everyone's energy. The young people's in particular. Anna was continuing to rest and, hopefully, recover, but after feasting on canned asparagus and spaetzle and pot-roasted boar, the other young folks hadn't stopped dancing. They had even executed with precision an exquisite gavotte. Klara had a lovely, light touch at the piano, and Mutti was reminded of those delightful evenings in the autumn when Anna and her friends had danced with those handsome naval officers who had come to Kaminheim to design the antitank trenches. Moreover, Manfred and Callum were such gentlemen: Not only were they waltzing with Klara's sadly unattractive daughter and her friend, they were also showing Theo how to dance with the girls. Her little boy was indeed growing up. She wished that Anna felt well enough to dance, too, but it was heartening just to see her warm and content and sipping a glass of red wine on the love seat. Her cheeks, once again, had some color.

  "I wonder if you'll come back when the war is over," she heard Gabi saying to Callum, while Klara was skimming through the sheet music on the piano in search of another song. Certainly no one here seemed to care that he was Scottish. She watched him glance at Anna, who raised her eyebrows behind Gabi's back and smiled at him. Imagine: Did Anna really think that her own mother was born yesterday? That her own mother didn't know what was going on between her daughter and this foreign paratrooper? She remembered when she and Rolf had been courting; it wasn't all that many years ago that she had first flirted with the man who would eventually become her husband.

  "Oh, I think there's a pretty good chance," he said, and it was clear to Mutti that he was speaking more to Anna than to Gabi.

  "Good. I will expect you. I will hang a glass ornament in the guest bedroom window here where you will stay," she said, and Mutti wondered if the girl was getting tipsy.

  "A glass butterfly," Sonje added. "Because by then we will all be out of our cocoons. So, a butterfly for Callum and a . . ." She paused, looking deeply into Manfred's eyes. "And what would you like, Corporal? What kind of glass ornament should await your return?"

  "Oh, I will be flattered by whatever you suggest," he said. He looked away from her and briefly his eyes rested on Anna. Mutti couldn't decide what he was thinking, but when Anna looked up--perhaps sensing the corporal's attention--he quickly turned toward the portrait of Eckhard on the far wall. Her daughte
r, she thought, seemed slightly troubled by the corporal's gaze. Almost as if she were changing the subject, she reached into the tin on the table beside her for one of the florentines and took a small bite.

  "Maybe tonight my mother will allow you to sleep with one of Father's dogs," Gabi suggested to Manfred. "A man should always have a wolfhound by his bed, shouldn't he?"

  "Oh, I don't think we need to cart them around the house. But I thank you," he told her, his voice drifting, and Mutti couldn't imagine why anyone would bring one of those stuffed dogs with them to a bedroom. Even in a room this large it took the smell of the fire and the tea and the scented candles to smother their stench.

  "The fuhrer always sleeps with a wolfhound, you know. Blondi," Gabi continued. She was speaking almost directly into the corporal's ear.

  "Blondi is a German shepherd--not a wolfhound," Sonje corrected her.

  "No, she's a wolfhound."

  "You're wrong."

  "And she was a gift from Goebbels."

  "From Bormann," Sonje insisted.

  "Goebbels."

  "Bormann."

  "Oh, please, does it matter?"

  "I'm just saying--"

  "You're just being a Jew. A know-it-all Jew," Gabi snapped at her.

  "I'm just being right," Sonje said.

  "Girls," Klara said, raising her voice ever so slightly and drawing the word out. "We have guests. No need to squabble. What always is more important is what we agree upon. And we all agree that the fuhrer has a beautiful animal named Blondi and that sometimes a man wants to sleep with a dog."

  At that Gabi tittered slightly, but then Klara's usually kind face turned to a glare. "You know I do not approve of prurient thoughts," she said.

  "I'm sorry," Gabi murmured, though it was clear that she wasn't. Not at all. Then she turned to Sonje, and it was evident to Mutti that the moment--already irreparably curdled--was about to get worse. "But Sonje was acting like a Jew: a selfish, piglike, know-it-all Jew. A Jew who probably opposes our fuhrer. A Jew who lives off the sweat of others. A Jew who seduces--"

  "Enough!" This was Manfred, and everyone in the room turned. Mutti was embarrassed for Gabi. She was embarrassed for them all. Living outside of Kulm had meant that she had been spared having to hear firsthand this sort of nonsense about the Jews. Certainly in the early days of the war she had worried about her family's acquaintances who were Jewish--hadn't Rolf written letters and telegrams to everyone he could think of on behalf of some fami- lies?--but in the last two years their own situation had become so precarious that she had grown oblivious of their plight. She had Werner to worry about. And she had to learn to make do in a world where everything, it seemed, was suddenly scarce. Nevertheless, she had never believed the sort of claptrap that appeared in Der Sturmer or that Gabi was giving voice to now.

  "Enough," Manfred continued, a mere echo of the word this time, but his anger clearly unabated. "No Jews are living off the sweat of others. No Jews are seducing your precious Aryan children. No Jews--"

  "That's right," Sonje said, oddly adamant, and she was, much to Mutti's discomfort, pressing her body against Manfred's and burrowing her cheek against his chest. "That's absolutely right." "Tell me, Corporal, are you a Jew lover?" Gabi asked him. He pushed Sonje down into the love seat almost atop poor Anna and then took Gabi's fleshy upper arms in his hands, clenching his fingers so firmly around them that Mutti could see the fabric of her dress sleeve crinkling and she feared for a moment that he was hurting her.

  "I don't care that I am a guest in your family's house. I will not abide your monumental ignorance," he told her, lowering his face into hers, his eyes unblinking.

  "I was only--"

  "He's right, you know," Callum interrupted. "Say one more word like that and I'll walk out that door and put a bloody arrow at the end of the driveway pointing up here for the Russians. I'll even paint them a sign: Nazis and food, right this way."

  Gabi looked nervously toward Klara, but her mother was leaning over the piano, crying soundlessly and running the fingers of one hand abstractedly over the woodwork just above the keys. When she saw her mother was going to offer neither assistance nor comfort, she stiffened her back and stood up a little straighter. "That man is a prisoner. Your enemy. Are all of you going to allow him to talk to me like this?"

  Mutti felt she should do something--say something--to de- escalate the tension. Comfort Klara, maybe. Chastise Gabi. Calm Manfred. But she realized that she was tired, so very, very tired. Wasn't it only a moment ago that these young people were waltzing together contentedly? Still, she wished she could find the words to calm Manfred and silence this strange, half-insane Gabi.

  "Manfred, would you have one more dance in you for a sickly girl from the country?" It was Anna speaking, and she had risen to her feet. Her lips were parted just the tiniest bit in a modest, demure smile, though it was clear from the slight quiver there that she was nervous--or, to be precise, unnerved by both Gabi's erratic behavior and Manfred's anger. She rested her fingers gently atop the corporal's shoulder, a leaf coming to rest on a low branch in the autumn, and Mutti worried that what looked to the rest of the room merely like a bit of practiced, coquettish charm was driven actually by the need for help with her balance. Her daughter, she knew, wasn't tipsy--but she was weak.

  Without turning to Anna, Manfred released the other woman and allowed his strong arms to drop to his sides. He exhaled loudly, and Mutti hoped his anger might diminish now to something like a more harmless exasperation. She knew the effect a beautiful young girl like Anna could have on a young man. She had been such a girl herself, once.

  "Ah, a little sympathy for a soldier home from the front. I won't say no," he said.

  "Thank you," she said, dipping her head slightly, and Mutti thought the storm was going to pass. Had, in fact, passed. But not yet. Sonje was glaring at Anna as if she, a friend of Klara's family, had some proprietary hold on the soldier. Meanwhile, Callum was muttering something in English that she didn't hear well enough to translate in her mind, but she thought was an aspersion upon Manfred's character. It sounded as if he were implying that Manfred actually was hiding from the front. Or running from the front. But he was most certainly not a soldier home from the front. She was surprised by this odd spike of jealousy from him and wondered if she had missed signs of it earlier.

  "Do you really feel up to that?" she asked her daughter, but it was only out of obligation--because she thought as the girl's mother she should ask. The truth was, the sight of her daughter dancing with this handsome Wehrmacht corporal gave her a pleasant, maternal pride. It allowed her to fantasize what might have been if the war hadn't taken such a nasty turn and sent them all scurrying like scared animals from Kaminheim.

  "Yes, Mutti, I think I can dance once," she replied and then, when she saw Callum, she continued, "twice even. I don't think my evening would be complete if I didn't have the honor of dancing with every handsome soldier we have in our presence."

  Klara sniffled and looked up from her piano, and abruptly her mouth and eyes opened wide like a fish's. There were long stretches of tears running over the swell of her cheekbones and linking her eyes with the cut of her jaw. "Wonderful!" she exclaimed. "I know just what to play!"

  Gabi was biting the insides of her mouth so angrily and obviously that she was sucking in the flesh on the sides of her face. Then, almost as if her head were on a spindle, she turned suddenly to Sonje and ordered her to dance with her. "Come, butterfly. Join me so neither of us has to dance with the enemy."

  Callum, Mutti thought, looked relieved.

  uri threw another log on the fireplace, pushed the massive screen with the finials of eagles in front of it, and collapsed on his back onto the couch. Suddenly, he was almost too tired to retire to the maid's room in which he was supposed to sleep. Their hostess had placed him in one and Callum in the other. It wasn't that there was a shortage of bedrooms upstairs; rather, it was Klara's sense of propriety: She wanted her daughter and Sonje
and Anna to be on one floor, and these two men on another. The only male allowed upstairs? Young Theo. Now Uri closed his eyes, vaguely aware that Callum was extinguishing the oil lamps and blowing out the candles. Everyone else was in bed for the night.

  "So," he said, not even trying to suppress a yawn. "When was the last time you ate like we did tonight?"

  "Actually, the food was pretty impressive at the Emmerichs' right up to the end. Things were rationed and some things were much harder to come by than others. But, remember: The place was a working farm."