Skeletons at the Feast

by Chris Bohjalian

  "Oh, great: The POWs are eating better than the soldiers. Very nice."

  "There is an irony there."

  "I haven't eaten like tonight in years. Since I was a little boy."

  "Really? Not even before the war?"

  He thought of the privations he and the other Jews had endured in Schweinfurt. The possessions they had bartered for food. "Not even," he said simply. Then: "So, how long have you and Anna been lovers?"

  "Pardon me?"

  "Don't be coy."

  "Is it that obvious?"

  "Only if you're breathing and have eyes. The dead? They wouldn't notice," he said.

  "Well, it didn't stop you from dancing with her."

  "Certainly not. So, tell me: How did you convince an Aryan princess to fall for you?" he asked. "I'm interested."

  "Why?"

  "I just am," he said. His arms were folded across his chest and he imagined himself as a mummy. Somewhere oddly far away he heard Callum starting to answer. Telling him something about an apple orchard at Kaminheim. The extensive harvest. But he felt another yawn rising up inside him. Gave in to it. And was asleep.

  anna awoke, shivering, from a dream and pulled the quilt and the sheet up and over her head. Curled her knees into her chest. She couldn't quite recall what she had dreamed; it hovered like a coil of mist just outside of her reach. But she thought she had been a child in the dream, and as she trembled a blurred image came to her of herself as a little girl in a pinafore and blue dirndl dress. The pinafore, she thought, had been decorated with cherry red hearts. Perhaps she was carrying a basket of flowers she had picked. Perhaps not. What was clear was that the sun was high and she was warm: She could still feel the heat on her face.

  The wind was rattling the windows here--it was still dark outside--and she thought if she had been home at Kaminheim and there hadn't been a war that the sound would actually have reassured her. After all, she would have been safe in her bed in a house that, once, had seemed indestructible to her. Now? Anything-- people, horses, whole buildings--could disappear in a moment. For all she knew, Kaminheim was gone. Shelled. Ransacked. Or, perhaps, merely occupied. She saw in her mind Russian officers in her father's office. In the parlor. Russian soldiers pillaging the kitchen and the pantry. She fretted about the horses, but she told herself that the Russians would need them--and, thus, feed them. They wouldn't suffer too terribly. But she did worry about Theo's pony. Would the Russians have any use for such a good-natured little creature? Unlikely. The animal might be nothing more to them than a hot stew, and the image caused her to grimace.

  And yet even now, despite all they were enduring and all they had lost, life's smallest, most irrelevant dramas went on. She wasn't sure whether this was an indication of how resilient people were, or how pathetic. But she had danced that night with Manfred, and Callum had briefly grown a little jealous. It was unfounded, of course: The corporal had been charming and gallant once they had started to dance, but it was clear that he didn't have a particular interest in her. And now, her pride slightly wounded, she wondered why. Perhaps, she told herself, it was because he was older: eight years. Not a huge difference. But it was possible this was too much in his eyes. Maybe--and this idea actually caused her a small ripple of annoyance--he thought eighteen was too young to be interesting. Well, she had only danced with him to calm him. To settle the room.

  She ran the edge of the sheet over her forehead and cheeks, which were damp and hot. She decided she was flattered by the idea that Callum was jealous of Manfred. There was no cause, of course: Her heart belonged entirely to the Scottish paratrooper. A man like Manfred? He was too much like Werner and Helmut. A Teutonic warrior. A killer.

  Still, there was clearly a deep streak of rebellion in him that her brothers almost completely lacked. He was with them now, wasn't he, rather than with his unit? And even if he had no special fondness for her and she wasn't attracted to him--at least, she reassured herself, in a meaningful way--she was nonetheless glad he was with them. Oh, she had been angry with him when he and Callum had shot those Russian soldiers. She had been incensed at both men. At the time, it had seemed senseless. Now, however, in the dark of the night, it struck her as a somewhat more reasonable course of action. Those men were going to steal their provisions. They were a part of the army from which her family was fleeing.

  Still, it had been more death, and Manfred's reaction to what they had done had been so very different from Callum's.

  A powerful gust shook the window glass in the bedroom and she opened her eyes. Tomorrow they would be out in that cold once again. And so what did any of this matter--Manfred's indifference, Callum's attraction--when it was possible that none of them would even survive the month, much less make it through the winter?

  No, it wasn't likely they'd perish. They couldn't. She told herself she was being melodramatic because she was sick and scared and it was the middle of the night. The truth was, there was no reason to believe that any of them would die. She had the sense, suddenly, that Manfred would see to that.

  in the morning, Mutti awoke to the sound of someone knocking on the door to her bedroom and cooing that coffee--real coffee--was brewing, and for one brief, lovely moment she thought Rolf was beside her in bed. She could feel his warmth; she could hear his low, steady breathing. The pillows once more were those on which she rested her head in Kaminheim, great soft nests of goose feathers, and the bed was the one in which she had slept with Rolf since the day they were married. It was only when she reached out her fingers to brush his cheek and feel the comforting stubble there that she realized she was alone. She was at Klara's and Rolf was . . .

  Rolf was somewhere to the east. She tried not even to speculate where, or in what condition.

  Now she called out to whoever was knocking that she was awake.

  "Lovely," the voice answered, and she realized it was Klara.

  "Thank you. I'll be down presently," she told her friend. Then, as she did every morning--in barns or in beds--she prayed that her husband and her two older sons were safe. That, somehow, they would escape harm. She prayed that she would have the strength and the wisdom to protect her youngest boy and her daughter; that soon they would all be together again as a family; and that someday their only concerns would be the price they were paid for their sugar beets and whether a mare would deliver a foal safely.

  at breakfast, Callum listened as Mutti tried again to convince Klara that she and the two girls simply had to accompany them west to her cousin's in Stettin. He hated to admit it, but he really didn't give a damn if they came with them or not. Already he and the Emmerichs were playing with fire. Their motley group consisted of two females, a boy, a POW--who, he had to admit, was spending way too little time hidden beneath the feed--and an army deserter. Did they really need three half-insane women to slow them down? But then, when he was bringing Anna a cup of hot tea in the living room before joining Manfred to load up the wagons, he decided that none of them, not even that reprehensible Gabi, deserved to be left behind. It wasn't these women, after all, who had been machine-gunning Ukrainian civilians or working Jews till they died in labor camps somewhere. Choosing a village and hanging a hundred Poles--filling their mouths first with plaster of Paris so they couldn't cry out or shout patriotic slogans as they died--be- cause an SS officer had been killed by the underground.

  And yet when the Russians arrived here in a couple of days, these women would have to atone for the sins of their kin.

  "Your mother thinks she can convince Klara to come with us," he told Anna, dipping the tea ball for her one last time in the cup and then laying it on a separate plate that Mutti had given him.

  Anna was dressed in heavy wool trousers that had belonged to one of Gabi's brothers and a sweater so bulky that she seemed to be swimming in it. She had been alone in that large, dark room till he joined her, but she looked refreshed from a night in a bed. Now she sat forward on the ottoman and leaned in toward the fire. She brushed a lock of hair away from he
r eyes.

  "She must," she said simply. "They're insane if they stay here."

  "Well, they're insane if they come with us. They might be safer with us. But I think they're mad as hatters wherever they are. Here or on the road or in Berlin. Doesn't matter. They'll always be nuts."

  "I hate to admit this, but I don't especially like them."

  "How could you? How could anyone? They're lunatics. One of them, Sonje? She practically raped Manfred in the bloody larder. I nearly walked in on her as she was going on and on about being his . . . never mind."

  "Tell me."

  "Oh, no. All I meant is she's desperate. Knows she has to get out of here."

  "Well, that's actually an indication that she's perfectly sane."

  "It's Gabi who is particularly reprehensible," he said. "Despicable in every imaginable way."

  "I agree."

  He watched her gaze down into her tea, nodding. He could see her eyelashes, long and lovely and so fair that they almost disappeared against her skin. Then he looked up into the mirror on the wall behind her, a piece of glass the size of a door that was framed in ornate gold-painted wood, and there in the reflection he saw them. Gabi and Klara--the daughter with her mother. He didn't know how long they had been standing there--well into the room, no more than eight or nine feet behind them--but it was clear from the sour expressions on both of their faces that they had gotten the gist of the conversation. When their eyes met his in the mirror, Klara retreated from the room, disappeared, but Gabi exploded toward them, stomping across the thin expanse of carpet that separated them. He stood to greet her--to, he thought in the brief second before she had reached him, shield Anna from her. Before he had said a single word, however, Gabi slapped him violently across the cheek, so hard that he felt his head snapping to the right at the moment that the sting had begun to register.

  "How dare you?" she hissed, the chalk of her eyes now white- hot, their anger fueled by a blast furnace raging behind a pair of ever-widening black pupils. "We took you in, we fed you, we gave you beds! And now . . . now this betrayal!"

  Anna stood beside him and tried to reach out to her. But Gabi sliced at her elbow, using her own arm as a scythe. "We will turn you in. We will turn you all in," she said, and she stared at Anna as she spoke.

  "I'm sorry, Gabi," Anna said, her voice a quivering, guilt-ridden echo of its usual self. "I don't know what to say."

  "You can get out--just get out. We won't be joining you. We would never join you," she said. Then she turned to Callum and added, "I am quite sure that Sonje would never have given herself to your Jew-loving friend. That was all just . . . just talk."

  "Please, Gabi, I'm sorry," Anna was saying. "We're tired and we were saying things we didn't really mean. We were just being catty. We--"

  "We don't need you," Gabi said. "We don't need anybody. Unlike you, I still have faith in our fuhrer and in our armies. The Russians? Little more than apes. We will stop them well before they get anywhere near this house."

  "They are pretty near here right now," he reminded her.

  It looked to him as if she were about to respond, to say something more. Perhaps accuse him of cowardice. Perhaps accuse Anna of defeatism. But she did neither. She glowered for a brief moment and then turned on her heels and stalked off.

  in the end, only Sonje accompanied them when they left. Mutti had pleaded with Klara to join them, but Gabi wouldn't leave and Klara wouldn't leave without her daughter. The angry young woman refused to even emerge from her bedroom. And so it was only Sonje who threw a few items into a suitcase and joined the group as they started back down the path Mutti had shown them the day before. Anna had the distinct sense that Gabi was gazing down at them scornfully from her window and she felt a deep twinge of guilt. Arguably, it was her and Callum's fault that Gabi, and thus Klara, were remaining behind. But she had apologized, she had apologized profusely; she had all but begged Gabi to forgive her and come with them. But the woman was obstinate beyond all reason. Her mother was, too. Prattled on about her faith in the once- vaunted army. Still, Anna couldn't help but imagine the two of them slashing their wrists in an upstairs bathroom or the parlor, as the Bolsheviks arrived at the gates of their estate.

  Once the horses and wagons were back on the road, Manfred and Callum shoveled snow on their tracks and flattened it down as best they could. They threw tree limbs onto the ground where the path to the estate would have been visible to passersby. Then they were back amid the long line of refugees, and although they heard no cannon fire to the east, one young mother reported that Russian tanks had been seen as close as Butow, and by all means they had to keep moving.

  Chapter 15

  FOR A WEEK NOW THEY HAD WALKED WITH sONJE as part of their group, the woman a largely silent, stoic, and sepulchral presence. But she kept up and her crying in the night was soundless. That seemed to be about all that mattered to anyone.

  Little by little they learned more of her history: Her father was a chemist who worked with the Luftwaffe, and when she had seen him last--months and months earlier, just days after Paris had been liberated--he had said he had been working on nonflammable aviation paints. She said she had believed him, but the mere fact that she felt the need to footnote her recollection this way led Manfred and Callum and the Emmerichs to conclude that she hadn't. Was the Luftwaffe actually producing shells that were filled with poisons or chemical gases? Certainly Manfred and Callum thought it was possible, especially when they learned that Sonje's father's project had been moved around so frequently to avoid Allied air attacks that she no longer had any idea where he was. And her mother? She had died when Sonje had been fifteen, in the very first days of the war. Consequently, Sonje and her younger brother had spent much of the conflict being shuttled between well-meaning family and friends. As far as Sonje knew, her brother was still alive. He had been a soldier since June and missing in action since October, but that, in her opinion, did not definitively mean he was dead. Didn't missing soldiers turn up alive and well every day? No one saw any reason to correct her.

  theo overheard the grown-ups saying that they would reach Mutti's cousin's home within days, and certainly by the end of the week. He hoped so. The days were noticeably longer now than when they had left Kaminheim, but that only meant they were spending more time exposed in the cold and the snow, and he wasn't sure which he hated more. The other day he had heard another refugee, a gaunt and glum-looking old man in a fedora who was traveling alone and trudging along with a cardboard suitcase, sarcastically muttering aloud a part of the Fifty-first Psalm. "Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow," he kept mumbling, and when the man saw Theo was watching him and listening, he went on, "Ridiculous, isn't it? I am tired of all this whiteness. Really, what's so pure about snow? Would somebody tell me? Besides, that writer lived in the desert. He knew nothing about snow. Nothing!"

  Theo wasn't sure he could walk much farther, or--when he was allowed to ride on one of the wagons--even endure many more days outside in the chill February air. That was the thing: If you walked you grew tired, but at least the exertion helped keep you warm; if you rested atop one of the wagons, you slowly froze. It was unpleasant either way. Still, he decided he preferred riding because something was happening to the toes on his left foot. There was a hole in the bottom of the boot and snow had begun to seep in. Three days ago the toes had started to itch and tingle; two days ago they had started to burn; now the skin was swelling and turning yellow, and the toes were as solid as miniature icicles--especially his two smallest ones. Even when he would bundle them up at night they didn't seem to improve. Of course, he wasn't exactly getting to warm them indoors around a fireplace most evenings. Many of the nights since they had left Kaminheim he had slept inside barns-- barns for horses and carriages and livestock--or burrowed beneath quilts and sacks of grain in the wagons with only the winter stars for a roof. And one of the few nights they had slept in beds had been their bizarre stay at Klara's. Another of their shelters was a crowded scho
olroom with mattresses packed onto the floor like tiles, which by the time they had arrived had been colonized by red insects that swarmed upon them the moment the Volkssturm guards extinguished the lights. The creatures seemed to rise up from the filthy mattresses and burrow under their clothes and nip at their skin. He wanted to sleep with a sack tied around his head so they wouldn't attack his eyes, but Mutti was afraid he would choke and wouldn't let him.

  He decided the best night had occurred four days ago now. That evening an elderly farmer just outside a village had taken them in and he had slept alone in a twin bed while Mutti and Anna had slept in the second bed beside him. Sonje had another room to herself and Manfred and Callum had slept in the living room by the fire. The farmer's wife had fed them all a hot soup, and they had eaten sausages and warm bread slathered with butter. That night--and all that food--had done wonders for his sister.

  Still, Theo guessed that the reason the farmer had been so kind to them had had much more to do with Manfred than with Anna. Sick and dying refugees were everywhere. But Manfred? He was a soldier who had defended the Reich up and down the eastern front, and there was nothing this farmer and his wife wouldn't have done to thank him. They had practically cleaned out their cupboards when he had introduced himself.