Skeletons at the Feast (2008)

by Chris Bohjalian

  Finally Uri motioned for the man to move over so he could help him lift the wagon, and the woman would be able to slip the wheel into place. He considered introducing himself, but he didn't want to put the POW in the awkward position of having to speak once again. "Here," he said simply, "let me help. You can't sit here all day with a broken wheel." Then he and the prisoner hoisted the axle just far enough off the ground that the woman was able to place the spare wheel onto the bar and secure it to the wagon. It took about half a minute.

  Up ahead, coming from the west, Uri heard the metallic rattle that he instantly recognized as tanks. At least two, and maybe more. Given that the line was moving sluggishly to one side of the road--rather than fleeing like frightened kittens into the brush-- he presumed the tanks were German. And, within seconds, he saw them: three Panthers motoring toward them, half on and half off the road so they didn't mow down the refugees. They each had infantry soldiers riding atop them, and they were moving with such purpose that he didn't fear anyone was going to try to recruit him into the assault group.

  As they passed he saluted, the sort of lackadaisical wave he offered in lieu of a full-fledged Heil Hitler. He watched to see what the redhead would do, and he did, essentially, the same thing. Unlike Uri, however, he was actually sweating, despite the cold.

  When the tanks' earth-flattening clanking was beyond them, he glanced at the piles of oats and provisions they had to load back into the wagon. Without asking, he went to one and lifted it onto the cart.

  "Oh, we can do that," the young woman said.

  "I figured. But you can do it faster if you let me help. And fast is good now that the Russians have broken out of Kulm."

  The woman's mother gasped. "Kulm has fallen? Completely fallen?" she asked. She made it sound like Berlin had surrendered.

  "Yes, of course," said Uri. He couldn't imagine at first why she might care that such an irrelevant little place had been overrun. As far as he could tell, it was an obscure hamlet that served the aristocratic beet farmers who lived just outside it. But then he glanced at the horses and the quality of the clothes these people were wearing. No doubt they were part of that Kulm gentry. Had probably been on the road only a few days. "Are you from Kulm?" he asked, trying to soften his tone.

  "We live there," the young woman said. "My father and my brother were counterattacking the Russians there just the other day!"

  Well, they're not anymore, Uri thought, but he kept that response to himself. In all likelihood, the pair was lying dead in a snowbank somewhere. The counterattack had been launched by old men and young boys, and--like everything the Wehrmacht did these days-- it had been absolutely fearless and completely ill-advised, and virtually all those old men and young boys had been slaughtered.

  The younger brother looked up at the sky now, and he gazed with such curious intensity that the adults around him all stopped what they were doing.

  "What is it, Theo?" his mother asked.

  "I hear buzzing," he said simply.

  Uri had been around enough artillery that he knew his hearing had gone to hell. He couldn't hear yet what this boy--and then, clearly, his older sister--could hear. But he knew what it meant when you heard a buzzing in the sky. The odds were good they were hearing planes. Lots of planes. Far more planes than the Luftwaffe could put into the air at one time these days. And then, before he could warn them, tell them his suspicions, they all heard the sound. In seconds it was transmogrified from insects to engines, dozens and dozens of them, and they saw the great, growling formation, one side actually luminescent as the long swaths of metal fuselage reflected the sun as they emerged from the clouds. The aircraft were British, and suddenly three of the planes were diving toward the column--he wondered if they had seen the German tanks that had just passed--and they all needed to get off the road.

  Reflexively he grabbed the mother by her arm and pulled her with him into the fields, sprinting with her past those large, circular piles of ash and toward the barn beyond them. The POW and the two siblings were beside him, racing too, and he was aware that the formerly long and straight caravan had spread like spilled milk into the snow and the fields along both sides of the road. They were nearing the barn when the boy abruptly shrieked, "Waldau! I won't lose Waldau, too!" He let go of his older sister's hand and ran back toward the road, apparently worried about one of those horses.

  "Theo!" the prisoner yelled, and then both he and the POW were dashing after the boy.

  Up the road they all heard the sound of the screams and the missiles and the diving airplanes, a simultaneous, deafening cacophony, part machine and part animal, and watched as three Spitfires swooped down in a perfect line, one behind the other, their cannons ablaze, splintering the carts and slaughtering the stragglers who remained on the road. One wagon was flying through the air in two massive pieces, its rear wheels still spinning, as were the bodies of three old women who had been traveling together, one of whom had lost her legs in the blast. The air was alive with sheets of newspapers and the stuffing from pillows, and rags of clothing that were either drenched with blood or housing now-unattached arms and legs and feet. Beyond them they saw great plumes of black smoke swirling into the sky like tornadoes, fueled, Uri guessed, by the ammunition and petrol from those Panthers that recently had passed.

  And still Theo ran hysterically for the horses.

  High above them now the fighters were starting to circle back, preparing for a second pass over the remnants of the column before rejoining their massive, glistening flock. Uri and the prisoner caught up to Theo just as the boy was reaching the two horses that were still attached to the wagon. The animals' eyes were wild and their nostrils were flaring, and they were craning their powerful necks in all directions. But at least they weren't rearing up on their hind legs and attempting to break free. As for the other two? They were nowhere in sight, and Uri hoped for this boy's sake that they had simply run off, and hadn't been blown high into the sky in small pieces like so much else that had been standing on or beside this road just a moment earlier.

  With the POW he tried to unhitch one of the animals, while the boy worked on his own to free the other. This was complete madness in Uri's mind, utter lunacy. Had he really lived through so much over the last two years only to get himself killed helping some Nazi boy save his damn horse? He and this prisoner weren't nearly as proficient with the clasps and the buckles as the child, but together they were able to remove the harness and grab the leather reins, and join the boy as he scurried with his horse from the road into the fields.

  Behind them they heard more cries and more blasts, and they felt the ground shaking beneath them as they ran, but Uri had the horse now, and the last thing he wanted to do was waste even a second looking back.

  for a long moment after the planes were gone the five of them leaned against an outside wall of the barn. Uri and the POW stood with their hands on their knees, swallowing great gulps of cold air. The boy? He and his sister were each calming one of the horses, stroking them softly along their long, graceful noses. Their mother was standing under the eave, clearly a little numbed. She was, however, the first one to speak. In a tone that surprised Uri with its firmness and control, she said, "That was unwise, Theo. You know that, don't you?"

  The child nodded, but said, "I've already lost Bogdana. I shouldn't have to lose Waldau, too." His voice had just a touch of defiance to it.

  "Bogdana was his pony," the boy's older sister said, as if that explained everything. Then: "Thank you for helping us. That was completely unnecessary. But very brave."

  He looked up. He saw the little boy had cut his cheek at some point, just below his eye, and the blood was trickling like raindrops on glass past his ear and along the side of his jaw. Uri motioned toward it with his finger, and the child's sister reached somewhere inside her cape and found the sort of dainty handkerchief his grandmother used to use--he saw blue flowers, edelweiss perhaps, embroidered into one of the corners--and pressed it gently against the wound.
"You hurt yourself, sweetie," she murmured. The boy barely shrugged.

  On the road before them the lucky refugees were already starting to restack their bags and their boxes and their suitcases onto their carts and resume their trek west. Others were sobbing over dead children, dead mothers, dead fathers. Some of the dead looked as peaceful as any Uri had seen, while others had died with their arms raised in either anger or despair at the sky. Some were lying perfectly still as their clothing continued to smolder.

  Uri turned to this family around him. "What are your names? I know you're Theo. But I don't know the rest of you."

  "I'm Anna. And this is our mother."

  "And you?" This time Uri spoke directly to the POW.

  "He's . . . Otto," said Anna, answering before the man could even begin to open his mouth.

  "Like hell he is," said Uri.

  "He's--"

  Uri waved her off. "He's Otto. I understand." He extended his hand to the POW. "I'm Manfred." The fellow took his hand and smiled at him, his eyes as grateful as a spared fawn's.

  "Thank you, Manfred," the mother was saying to him. "Thank you for helping us save the horses."

  "We should find the others," Anna said, meaning, Uri assumed, their other animals. She was still pressing her handkerchief against her little brother's cheek. "We have so much loaded on each of the wagons."

  "You're supposing your wagons are still in one piece. And your other horses are alive," he said.

  "That is hoping for a lot, isn't it?"

  "It is," he said. "But let's go see."

  uri stood with this POW over the carcass of what had once been a magisterial stallion. It looked like it had probably run fifty or sixty meters after the Spitfire's cannons had punched great holes in its side and caused the animal's steaming entrails to fall from its abdomen like the contents of a pinata.

  "This was Labiau," the POW said, kneeling. He took off his glove and ran his bare fingers along the horse's powerfully muscled shoulders. The fellow's German sounded vaguely Scottish to Uri. "I think they named most of their horses after castles."

  "You think," said Uri. "They're not your horses, too?"

  The POW realized his mistake and stood. "Yes, I think. I'm not a part of their family. So: Are you going to shoot me?"

  The two men hadn't planned on separating from Anna and Theo and their mother, and Uri had the sense that wherever Anna was at the moment, she wasn't happy about the fact that the family's POW was alone with him.

  "No," he told the prisoner. "No more than you're going to shoot me."

  "Then what?"

  He shrugged. "I'm going on to Czersk to rejoin my unit." In the distance, beside an overturned wicker basket that had been blown far from someone's wagon or cart, they saw a horse browsing its contents. "Is that one of theirs, too?"

  The POW nodded. "It is. Ragnit."

  "And your real name?"

  The POW reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out some cigarettes. He handed one to Uri and kept one for himself. "Callum," he said.

  "English?"

  "Scottish."

  "Where were you captured?"

  "France. I'm a paratrooper."

  "And you wound up this far east . . . how?" Uri asked, lighting the cigarette and savoring the warmth of the smoke in his mouth and his lungs. He realized that he hadn't had a cigarette in at least three or four days.

  "I was sent from the stalag to their farm to help with the harvest."

  "Alone?"

  "No. Originally there were seven of us."

  "What happened to the others?"

  "They were returned to the stalag."

  "But not you."

  "No. Their father knew someone. Pulled some strings. He realized he was going to be recruited into the army, and he wanted a man to help manage the estate when he was gone. Do the heavy lifting."

  "You know how much trouble you're in now, don't you?"

  "How so?"

  "Well, I'm not going to kill you. But many other soldiers would. And if the Russians catch you, well, that wouldn't be pretty, either. In their eyes, you'd be either a collaborator or a spy."

  "The plan--" Abruptly the POW stopped talking, alarmed that he was saying too much. But it was apparent now to Uri that there was a plan, or at least a vague hope, and it became clear in an instant to Uri what it was: This family, like so many others in this endless and tawdry procession, was going to cross the whole bloody Reich, if necessary, to reach the British or the American lines. And, when they made it, this Scottish paratrooper was going to be their goodwill ambassador. Their currency. Their proof that they weren't your run-of-the-mill Nazis. There was little doubt in Uri's mind that this Callum and Anna were lovers, and the reason the girl's parents were tolerating their relationship was because this paratrooper was going to be their daughter and son's ticket into whatever post-Hitler world awaited them. For all he knew, the girl's mother was actually hoping the two would marry someday, and they'd all live happily ever after on some Scottish moor. Or, perhaps, she was living under some delusion that in a few weeks' time this man's army would be joining hers to beat back the barbarians from the east. He'd heard people saying such things for a while now. Believing such things. It was, along with their pathetic faith in some wonder weapon that Nazi scientists were supposedly cooking up in underground tunnels somewhere, what kept them going.

  Still, this girl's parents might be on to something. Not about the Brits and the Yankees ever aligning themselves with the Germans. And not about the wonder weapons. But he realized if he was still stuck in this German uniform when the end finally came, it would benefit him, too, to have a friend like Callum. He didn't honestly believe that would happen. That it could happen. But he had been a chameleon for so long, what if people didn't believe him when he insisted he was actually Uri Singer from Schweinfurt? What if he awoke one morning and the war was over, and he learned that all the Jews but him had been killed? What if he was actually unable to convince anyone who he was?

  "Are you going to Czersk now, too?" he asked the paratrooper.

  "Only because it's the next stop on the road."

  "And then?"

  "Stettin, eventually."

  "I've never been to Stettin."

  "Me neither."

  "Well, why don't I go round up that Ragnit," he said. Gently he touched the toe of his boot to the dead horse at his feet. "And you can tell the family what happened to this one."

  The Scot snuffed out his cigarette in the snow and nodded. He put back on his gloves and lumbered off, his shoulders slightly stooped by the weight of the news he was toting.

  Chapter 11

  callum walked beside anna along the path that linked a farmer's field to the road. There was hardpacked snow in the middle, but the innumerable wagon wheels that had preceded them had carved the two ruts on which they were leading the horses. They were down to three animals now, and so they had left behind a few bags of feed and one of the trunks. They had consolidated three trunks into two, with Mutti sacrificing most of her spare clothes. When they reached Stettin, she had said, her cousin would have plenty of coats and dresses to lend her.

  It fascinated Callum. It fascinated them all. They were leaving a trunk by the side of the road packed with silks and linens and nightgowns, and no one was bothering to ransack it. No one cared. People could barely struggle forward with the few things they had: They couldn't have cared less about adding more. And so the trunk was just one more suitcase or bag or chest that would sit moldering in the snow until, perhaps, a Russian soldier finally got around to looting it.

  On the surface, the Emmerichs seemed fine to Callum, even young Theo. But he knew they weren't. They were stunned by what they had seen and saddened by the loss of Labiau. Still, they were soldiering on, just as they had after Rolf and Helmut had left them at the Vistula. They were continuing now with neither hysteria nor histrionics, because, after all, they hadn't a choice. Nevertheless, he wanted to reach out and embrace them. Especially Anna. Si
nce they had left the estate, it had been difficult to find moments when the two of them could be alone. They had found them, but the kisses and the embraces had been furtive. They certainly hadn't had either the opportunity or the inclination to make love. As a result, it had been the smallest of contacts that had mattered: One time Anna had removed her glove and taken his hand when he had still been riding inside the cart, smothered by all those bags of oats, and the connection--the rediscovery of her skin--had been electric. Another time, one of those nights in one of those barns, when it seemed as if everyone in the world was asleep but them, she had sat beside him and then curled against him, burrowing deep inside his jacket. For close to three hours they had whispered and dozed in their corner of the barn and imagined what their lives would be like when the war was behind them. And they had usually found brief moments to kiss: chaste kisses good night when no one was looking, as well as kisses that were wanton and moist and in other circumstances--simply being warm, perhaps, or being alone-- would have left them aroused and desirous of more.

  He considered the other girls he had known. He had had girlfriends before, but neither he nor they had ever thought that their relationships might have longevity, and he had made love with only one woman before Anna. The closest thing he had had to a serious relationship had been with the widow nearly twice his age with whom he'd been sleeping--clandestinely--until she had found a more suitable partner and remarried. Her name was Camellia, and her husband had been a friend of his uncle's. That was how they had met. She was tiny: small breasts and boyish hips and dark hair she kept bobbed in a manner that he understood was no longer fashionable. But she was ravenous in bed in a way that, until he was with her, he hadn't realized women could be. She had taught him an awful lot. But he had also understood that their relationship-- perhaps even that was too strong a word, perhaps even in his mind he should use the term that she always had, which was dalliance-- had never had any sort of future. Which, given the fact he was eighteen and nineteen years old at the time and he was being trained to hurl himself from an airplane above blokes who wanted to shoot him like quail, had seemed to make sense. She had actually remarried three weeks before he jumped over France, and he and his mother and his uncle had of course been at the wedding. Her new husband was a few years her senior and worked for the chancellor of the exchequer. The last time he saw her was as he was leaving the reception, and he had kissed her once on each cheek before returning to his barracks. It hadn't felt all that odd. She didn't even wink slyly at him, and he had murmured nothing to her about their past. Already she was back to being a friend of his uncle's. A woman from a different generation.