Skeletons at the Feast (2008)

by Chris Bohjalian

  Jeanne turned to her. Her eyes were running in the cold. "You taught very small children, didn't you?"

  The woman nodded.

  "I thought so. Only a person who told fairy tales for a living could believe that sort of nonsense."

  Cecile felt Jeanne's shivering body against her back; if she hadn't, she feared, she might have slapped her. How many times had she saved Jeanne's life? How many times had she kept the woman going when Jeanne had all but given up? And still Jeanne hurled these malicious, cutting barbs at the other prisoners. At her. It was one thing for the guards to be cruel to them. But it was unconscionable for them to be cruel to one another. If indeed their husbands and their children and their parents were gone, then they were all that they had. When this war was over--and it did seem to be ending, didn't it?--they would all help one another to rebuild their lives. Wouldn't they? Isn't that what families did? What survivors did?

  And didn't family members also discipline one another? Keep them in line? She felt like a mother now whose adolescent daughter had grown snappish, and she was about to snap back. To reprimand Jeanne. Before she had opened her mouth, however, the woman on the far side of Vera, another Hungarian whom Cecile barely knew, told Jeanne, "You think you're so clever. Well, you're just mean. How do you know the Germans aren't so desperate for workers they'll use us?"

  "Because then they'd feed us!" Jeanne hissed. "If they wanted us to work, they'd give us something to eat!"

  "Then you tell me," the Hungarian said, wrapping her bony arm around Vera's shoulders. "Where are we going?"

  "To our graves," Jeanne said, narrowing her runny eyes. And then she collapsed, sobbing, into the snow.

  once more cecile got Jeanne to her feet, and once more she joined the other women as they started to walk. They lumbered along, some stumbling, all concentrating on the normally prosaic task of placing one foot in front of the other while trying not to think about the pain that came with each step, or the hunger that made their stomachs throb, or the way their work pants or shifts invariably were stained with urine and striped with frozen swaths of liquid feces, because most of them had long since lost the slightest ability to control their bowels.

  As they exited the far side of Sliwice, Cecile pushed from her mind her disappointment that the guards hadn't fed them. She tried to think instead about the sunshine and the blue sky, about the way the days were growing longer now. She tried to listen to the bird- song from the beech trees, and she considered reminding Jeanne that, yes, there still were birds in the world. She considered pointing out to her the reasonableness of Vera's supposition that they were going to be put to work in a munitions factory and thus soon would be fed. And she wondered about the carts. There were two of them, long, empty wagons, each one being pulled by a powerful draft horse. The guards had commandeered the animals and the carts from the sugar refinery in the town, and Cecile told herself it was because they were going to fill the wagons somewhere up ahead with provisions. With food and water for the prisoners. With bread and potatoes and milk.

  She was considering all of these things, imagining the way cool milk would feel on her throat and her tongue, trying to remain hopeful, when ahead of her she saw an Austrian woman named Dorothea stagger and fall face-first into the road. One of the female guards, a woman perhaps her age with eyes the green of the Mediterranean at sunset and hair the color of freshly cut wheat, yelled at her to stand up. When the Austrian didn't, the guard began kicking at her, driving her boot so hard into Dorothea that the guard was spinning the body with her foot, rolling the woman off the road and into the dirty snow just beside it. Dorothea whimpered, but she made no effort to rise, and Cecile prepared herself for the poor woman's execution. Any moment now, Pusch or one of the other male guards would fall back in the column, turn the Austrian onto her stomach, and shoot her in the back of the head. And, sure enough, here came Pusch, as well as the guard named Trammler, annoyed, it seemed, because yet again one of the prisoners had faltered and slowed down the march.

  Then, however, they surprised Cecile. Rather than shooting Dorothea, they actually lifted her up off the ground and brought her to one of the two carts they had taken in Sliwice. Pusch himself carried Dorothea in his arms as if she were his daughter and he were bringing her up to her room at the end of a long day, and then laid the emaciated woman gently in the cart.

  "See," Vera murmured to Jeanne. "They do want us alive. They need us and they'll feed us. Soon. You just watch."

  For another hour and a half they marched without incident, walking quietly west with the sun at their back. A little past three, however, another woman slipped on a patch of ice on the road and was unable to rise to her feet. She, too, was placed in the cart beside Dorothea. Cecile took comfort in this: Clearly something had changed. Perhaps it was exactly as Vera had said: The Germans needed them alive. Or, even if Vera was mistaken and their eventual destination was not a munitions factory and a warm barracks, perhaps the Russians were closer than they realized and the guards wanted to show their conquerors that they were treating their prisoners humanely.

  More humanely, anyway.

  In any case, it was possible, wasn't it, that the worst of the march was behind them?

  By the time the sun had set they were somewhere between Sliwice and Czersk, and both carts were filled with prisoners. Easily a dozen women had allowed themselves to slip to the ground in the course of the afternoon when they realized they wouldn't be shot but would, instead, be allowed to ride in the carts. The women were sitting or lying down, some on top of each other and some sound asleep, their wheezing and snores filling the dusk like frogs in the swamps in the spring.

  The guards stopped for the night when they saw a barn on a small hillside. It wasn't a large structure--it may have been built for horses, not cattle or livestock--and she feared that only the guards would be sleeping inside it tonight. They, the prisoners, would have to sleep outside in the snow. But perhaps there was a farmhouse just beyond the barn, and the guards--most of them, anyway--would sleep there, and the prisoners would thus get the barn. She had to hope that, because the temperature was falling quickly now that the sun had set and she wasn't sure even she could survive a night in this cold in the snow. And so she told herself that any moment now the guards would give them bowls of hot soup, and then herd them all into the barn for the night. Yes, it would be a tight fit, but all that body heat would help keep them warm.

  And, sure enough, she saw that three of the guards were pulling down the wooden fence at a corner of one of the fields and using it to construct a fire. Two fires, in fact. Perhaps these would be the flames over which they would prepare them all a warm meal. Perhaps, in the meantime, they would permit them to sit before the fires and warm their skeletal frames.

  But the blazes grew high quickly, despite the cold and the still air. They were by no means out of control, but the guards continued to toss thick wooden posts and long strips of fencing into them, until the tips of the flames were dancing high above them, the nearby snow was melting in nearly perfect, concentric circles, and the crackling fires were much too big to cook pots of soup on. Some of the prisoners rushed as close to the twin infernos as they could, rubbing their hands so near the flames that Cecile was surprised they weren't singeing the backs of their fingers. The guards didn't seem to mind. Pusch even smiled and shook his head, murmuring something she couldn't hear to Trammler and the female guard named Inga. In response Trammler smirked, but Inga looked slightly uncomfortable, and it crossed Cecile's mind that whatever Pusch had said had been filthy. A dirty joke of some sort that only men would appreciate. No doubt a joke at the expense of the prisoners.

  Then, however, she saw two teamsters leading the draft horses with their carts full of prostrate women as close to the flames as the animals would venture, and then unhitching the horses from the wagons and walking them away from the fires. If Jeanne had been nearby Cecile guessed she would have reassured her friend that the heat must have felt wonderful to those
women, and then abruptly her breath caught in her throat and she had the sense that she would have regretted every word. Because suddenly she knew what was going to happen, and she was starting to tremble. To shake in a way that she hadn't all day, despite the cold. Guards, five assigned to one wagon and six to the other, the men and the women working together, braced their gloved hands and their shoulders on the rear and sidewalls of the wagons and started pushing them forward, the wooden wheels turning slowly at first in the melting snow and softening earth, but then gaining speed so they had a momentum of their own, and then with a final push--she heard the guards exhale as one, a loud grunt that sounded uncomfortably like a cheer--they sent the two wagons into the flames, where these great infusions of fuel (flesh and fabric and wood) sent the tendrils of fire and the spirals of smoke spiking ever higher into the night sky, obliterating the stars and masking the moon. Around her the surviving women cried out and gasped, but the screams--if there were any--of the prisoners being cremated alive in the carts were smothered completely by the roar of the flames.

  Not far from her was a heavyset female guard with mannish legs and shoulders as broad as a wardrobe. She shook her head and waggled her finger at Cecile and the women beside her. "Let that be a lesson to you," she said. "Shirkers and stragglers will be punished."

  Chapter 10

  URI LEANED AGAINsT A WOODEN FENcE, EATING A piece of rye bread slathered with lard, and watched the parade of German refugees pass by. It was endless. Absolutely endless. Old people, young people, families. Crippled soldiers. Many had sleds or carts that they were pulling themselves. The most pathetic were the children, especially in those first kilometers west of the villages. Invariably, the road heading west from every town was littered with dolls and stuffed animals and toy soldiers. With picture books. As the families had packed, the parents had weakened and allowed their little ones to take some toys or books. Then, however, as they began their trek west, they had discovered just how difficult it was to pull a heavy sled or push an overloaded cart, and one by one their children's precious objects had been tossed aside and left to molder in the ratty snow. He actually found himself feeling sorry for these people.

  Though not that sorry. Just last night he had shot a pair of Waffen SS troopers on motorcycles as they had sped past him. Two quick shots. He had no compunction whatsoever when it came to executing anyone he could in an SS or an SA uniform. Wehrmacht?

  Sometimes he spared them, even when the opportunities presented themselves for a clean shot.

  He noticed that long strips of the fencing around him had recently been pulled down and used for bonfires in the field perhaps seventy-five meters distant. The snow was melted in two nearly perfect circles, and there were still impressive piles of smoldering black ash. He wondered if the Wehrmacht had had a field kitchen here yesterday or last night. Perhaps some of these refugees had actually been given a hot meal.

  Many of the people who passed him were absolutely terrified. When there was sun they expected Russian planes would strafe or bomb them; when there were clouds, they wondered aloud if Ivan would start showering them with artillery shells filled with poison gas. Still, in their minds, being strafed or poisoned was an infinitely preferable fate to being overrun by the Russian army and captured alive: Even some of the children talked with great animation of their families' suicide plans in the event the Russians suddenly appeared before them. Some had stories of schoolmasters and party members who already had done themselves in.

  Now Uri was just about to rejoin the procession himself. If anyone asked, he had orders in his pockets to join an assault group forming in Czersk. The army was going to try, yet again, to open a corridor into Danzig. That attack would fail within hours. Uri had absolutely no doubts. But he also didn't seriously plan to be anywhere near it. Czersk was west, however, and these orders--taken off the body of a corporal whose skull had been crushed just west of the Vistula when an artillery shell had sent a sizable chunk of the road into the back of his head--would get him there if anyone asked.

  Finally he pushed himself off the fence and started to walk. It had stopped spitting snow a little while ago and the skies were starting to clear. He walked for close to two hours, striding far more quickly than anyone else in the procession and passing everyone he saw. He felt pretty good and thought he might make Czersk by midday--in which case, he would have to make a decision. From there should he proceed northwest along what looked on the map like some garbage road to Brusy? Or should he stay with this crowd and push on to the southwest to Konitz? That was where much of this sorry spectacle was headed next. The road to Konitz was good, there might be food, and there were deserted houses and barns along the way where they might rest in the evening. But on the path to Brusy he would be less likely to encounter German soldiers. And since his orders were to be in Czersk, they did him no good once he was west of that town. He decided he would figure out what to do when he arrived in Czersk. It was likely the village would offer all the chaos he needed to find new orders or a new uniform.

  He was within two or three kilometers of the town, noting the way the usually black telephone wires had grown white with snow in the course of the morning, when he noticed something that caused him to pause: He saw a broad-shouldered man a few years younger than him who wasn't in uniform and didn't seem to be either crippled or wounded. He was wearing wool trousers that weren't quite long enough for his legs, and what looked like an aristocrat's winter jacket that was straining desperately at the seams to contain his back and his arms. He was working with an attractive young woman with two blond braids to replace a wooden wheel on a cart, while a younger boy and, he presumed, their mother were looking on. The pair who weren't working had a dusting of snow on their hair and their shoulders--the woman was wearing a fur, the boy an excellent winter jacket--as did the bags of oats and apples the group had unloaded so they could repair the wagon. The young woman was trying to slip a new wheel onto the hub while the man held it off the ground, but it was proving difficult for even this very large fellow to lift the cart up on his own: For every sack or suitcase they had taken off the wagon, at least one remained.

  Clearly this family had money: In addition to the cart with the broken wheel, they had a second one parked off to the side. And they had horses. Four magnificent horses. The animals were big, well-muscled stallions, their winter coats lustrous and long.

  Curious, he stopped and knelt beside the couple trying to replace the wheel. He motioned at the cart. "You need some help?" he asked.

  Beneath that cap the fellow had a thick mane of nearly carrot- colored hair. He barely looked up at Uri from the front axle. Averted his eyes, didn't say a word. Nobody did. A deserter, Uri decided, which meant that he was probably scaring the shit out of him--out of this whole family--and he had to restrain a small smile.

  Finally the younger woman with the braids said, "No. But thank you. We expect to be back on the road in a few minutes." He eyed her carefully now. She had a lovely, delicate nose and the sort of full, rich lips that seem always to be slightly parted on very beautiful women. And her hair was exactly that flaxen blond so coveted by Nazi propagandists in search of models. She looked a bit like the boy and a bit, he guessed, like their mother. But those three-- the girl and the boy and their mother--looked absolutely nothing like this hulk replacing the wheel. Which meant that he probably wasn't related to them. He was probably this younger woman's fiance or husband.

  "You speak?" Uri asked the fellow.

  Now he turned to Uri and nodded.

  "With more than your chin?" Uri continued. There was a part of him that couldn't imagine him challenging a man this physically imposing as recently as two years ago. In the first months of his masquerade, he had been more likely either to flatter everyone he met or try to be largely invisible--a nonentity; but he had learned quickly that he was much better off among these people if he was brazen. They were far less likely to question a bully. And now, after nearly two years of fighting, it seemed imposs
ible to Uri not to view every encounter as a confrontation.

  The fellow mumbled that he did speak, but he didn't look up from the strut and he spoke in a tone that was striving for annoyance but had just a hint of unease. And there was something in the few syllables that sounded foreign to Uri. American, maybe. Or British. But certainly not Prussian. And certainly not the German Uri had heard growing up in Bavaria. And so another, more interesting possibility occurred to Uri: POW. Not a deserter, a prisoner. He knew that the Germans had been sending British and American POWs to the farms to work the fields the previous summer and fall. Not the Russians, of course. After all, the field work was downright cushy. Instead, the Russian POWs were expected to detonate or remove the unexploded bombs from the urban rubble of places like Hamburg and Berlin. Most of them hadn't the slightest idea what they were doing, and it was just a game of, well, Russian roulette. But they did know that if they were still alive by the time their own army arrived, they'd be killed anyway for surrendering. Or, if they were lucky, sent to some work camp in Siberia.

  Uri gazed from this redhead--this Yankee or Brit--to the two siblings and their mother. Like those women he had come across in the castle the other day, one of them might very well have a handgun concealed in a cape or a fur. The pretty blond might have a pistol trained on him right now. Still, he didn't guess they would be crazy enough to shoot a Wehrmacht soldier in broad daylight while harboring a POW.

  He wondered what it meant that they were bringing their POW with them. Was he just brawn, like their horses? A pet? Or was he something more? He had heard about romances between Allied POWs and the farm girls. The German men all gone, the girls bored to tears on their estates. Was this one right here before his very eyes?