Skeletons at the Feast (2008)

by Chris Bohjalian

  He wouldn't have blown up the tracks here, even if he'd had any explosives--which, other than a pair of potato-masher grenades, he didn't. That sound, far louder than three quick shots from his Luger, would have alerted any troops that happened to be nearby. Besides, he didn't have to tear up the tracks to sow a little chaos. Not here. He could stall the trains for hours while the engineers tried to figure out which tracks their cars were supposed to be on; with any luck, one might derail. Now that would gum up the works.

  Outside he heard voices and the sound of heavy boots on the cobblestones on the street. Already soldiers were coming. And so quickly he ducked out the back door and disappeared into the dark behind the station. Then he started toward the gymnasium, moving--as he did often in the night--with a speed and a silence that once he wouldn't have thought possible.

  at dawn, Anna traded one of her gold earrings to an elderly woman in the village who rumor had it had potatoes and sausage and bread for sale. They still had apples and sugar, but they had boiled the last of their beets the night before and finished off their remaining tins of canned meat: Their small party had eaten some and given the rest to a young mother and her children who said they hadn't eaten all day. Mutti had been surprised by how quickly their food was disappearing, but they had been generous both with strangers and with themselves. Now Anna bartered with this crone as she stood on the stone steps before the woman's front door. She still had a necklace and bracelets, and she knew that her mother had jewelry as well. Nevertheless, this gold earring was half of a pair that had belonged to her grandmother, and it was the last piece she owned that once had been worn by Kaminheim's original matriarch. The earring was the shape of an oak leaf.

  "You have horses?" the woman asked, her voice affectless and cold, when she handed over a half-dozen potatoes that were sprouting eyes the color of dried paste and starting to soften and shrivel with age. Her face was hard-bitten and lined, and her silver hair was hanging lank and unwashed. Anna had heard that she had a husband who couldn't walk, but supervised the transactions from a room near the entrance to the house with a loaded gun in his lap. She had told Mutti none of this.

  "We do."

  "I have apples."

  "We have apples, too. A few anyway. We have apples and oats," she said, smiling in a way that she hoped appeared friendly. "We used to have an orchard."

  "I'll save my apples for someone else then."

  "What about the sausages and the bread?"

  "Sausages?"

  "I gave you the earring. You were supposed to give me some sausages and a little bread. Isn't that what we agreed?"

  The woman seemed to think about this. Then: "Very well," she said, and she shut the front door and disappeared back into the house. Anna waited a moment and then knocked. No one answered and so she rapped her fingers against the door once again. This time when no one came back she felt a swell of umbrage and offense rise up inside her: She realized that she had parted with her grandmother's earring, and all she had to show for it were a half-dozen mealy potatoes. A part of her comprehended perfectly well that adding a few sausages to the transaction would have made it no less demeaning and exploitive in the long run, but her resentment was tangible: As real as the ice and the snow, as concrete as the soreness in her back from sleeping last night on a gymnasium floor. As painful as the blisters on the sides of her feet. And so she banged her fist hard on the door twice and swore. Used words she had never before spoken aloud. She might have made a scene right there on the street, staying and swearing at the couple through the heavy wooden door that separated them from her, but her family was waiting. They were supposed to keep moving. And so she turned and started back, not completely sure why this small injustice was so affecting, but unable to stop shaking as she walked.

  n theo took one of their last apples and was feeding it now in slices to Waldau, his favorite, as Anna and Callum started harnessing the other two animals to the wagons. Waldau would be next. Theo liked the feel of the horse's coarse tongue on his open palm as the stallion pulled the fruit into his mouth.

  In the last few months, even soap had become scarce and they had had to bathe with a putrescent-smelling cleaner that was made from animal bones and lye, and its stench reminded Theo of the swamp. He knew if one of their horses ever got ill and died, the family would have eaten its meat and made soap from its bones. The whole idea had made him a little queasy. Making soap out of Waldau? Eating meat that had once been Bogdana? He would sooner starve. He would live without soap.

  One day in school, Fraulein Grolsch had demanded that all of the students try on a gas mask, because there were rumors that the Allies were going to start gassing them: either the Russians with long-range artillery shells or the Yankees and Brits with bombs they would drop from their airplanes. There were only two masks for the entire class, however, and so the children had taken turns pulling the devices over their faces and hoisting the thick rubber bands behind their heads. Invariably, the bands had pulled at their hair and some of the girls had shrieked for attention, and no one had found it easy at first to breathe through the filter. Theo recalled now how he had asked--yet another stupid, unthinking thing he had said that had further diminished him in the eyes of his classmates--if the government would be giving them masks for their animals. The students had all gotten a real belly laugh out of that one. He hadn't honestly expected that anyone had bothered with such a thing, and he was really just thinking aloud. Imagining. But it hadn't struck him as a completely nonsensical idea, because this was farm country and the horses were critical to the farms. And he knew that in the First World War they had made gas masks for horses. After all, if you could convince a horse to wear a bridle and a bit, was it really such a stretch to expect the animal to don a mask, too? Apparently not. And if there were going to be masks for animals, Theo would have been sure to tell his parents so that they could get ones for all of their horses.

  "Theo?"

  He looked up; it was Anna.

  "We should hurry."

  He nodded and led Waldau to the second wagon. No one had told him why they must hurry, but he had overheard Anna and Mutti talking and so he knew. It wasn't just the Russians. Last night someone had assassinated two Wehrmacht soldiers near the train station and then murdered the stationmaster. As a result, two trains that had been traveling in the night had taken the wrong tracks and collided. They had all heard the noise and presumed at the time it was an Allied bomb. One of the trains, the one moving northwest, was filled with refugees; the other, traveling southeast, had been filled with soldiers. The trains had been approaching the station so neither had been moving quickly. Nonetheless, there were injuries, a few as serious as concussions and broken bones. And for the time being the saboteurs had succeeded in clogging this stretch of track.

  As he stood high on his feet to lift the bridle over Waldau's head he felt an unexpected twinge in a toe and grimaced. Still, he whispered into the great horse's ear, "You will never be eaten and you will never be gassed. I promise."

  "so, you've always been here on the eastern front," Callum asked Manfred as they walked along a quiet stretch of road. There were other refugees, but for the moment they seemed to be bobbing almost leisurely between the waves and once more Callum was grateful to be on his feet.

  "I have."

  "Is it as frightful as everyone says?"

  "I think so. But this is my first war, so I don't have a lot to compare it to," Manfred answered, and he smiled.

  "Everyone presumes the eastern front is much more horrific than either France or Italy. I take that implication as a compliment."

  "Because it suggests you and your American allies are so civilized?"

  "Precisely," he replied. It was true, they were civilized. He was sure of that. He and his mates had a much higher regard for human life than either the Russians or the Germans. The western Allies were, he imagined, every bit as brave as these other people. But they were also less likely to kill--or be killed--senselessly.
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br />   "Well, we're all nastier on this side of Europe," Manfred told him. "Trust me: If your parachute had landed over here, we wouldn't have taken you prisoner."

  Callum thought about this and listened to the sound of the horses' hooves behind them. Their metronomic clopping made him think of a clock, and he tried to place in his mind precisely where he was a year ago now. Then two. Then three. He saw himself once again as a student and recalled the face of Camellia. "You married?" he asked the corporal.

  "I am not."

  "Girlfriend? Fiancee?"

  "Neither."

  Anna was on the driver's box on the wagon behind them. She must have heard what they were saying, because she called out to them now, "Manfred is just a warrior." She was teasing him, a small swell of sarcasm in her voice. "He is one of those German men who have too much knight in their blood. I know the type well."

  The corporal turned back to her and said, "Now for all you know, I was a mild-mannered young lawyer before joining the army. Or a docile schoolteacher. For all you know, I am actually an extremely peaceful person."

  "All right then," Callum said, and he clapped the man on the shoulder good-naturedly. "What did you do before the war? We're all ears."

  "Do you know what you remind me of?" Manfred asked him instead of answering the question.

  "Absolutely no idea. Haven't a clue."

  "A Saint Bernard. That's what you are. A very big dog. The sort of creature that hasn't figured out yet that he has ham hocks for paws. Wants to jump on the couch, even though he's the size of a pony."

  "Quite through?"

  "All done."

  "Well, I was expecting much worse," he said. And he was. "I rather like big dogs with favorable dispositions."

  "You didn't tell us what you were doing before the war," Anna pressed the soldier.

  "I say he was a lawyer," Callum told her. "It was the first profession that popped into his head a moment ago." He turned to Manfred: "Am I right?"

  "No."

  "A schoolteacher then? Really? I wouldn't have guessed it."

  "You will be disappointed."

  "Dear God, you weren't a student were you?" he continued. "Have you been in the army that bloody long?"

  "I worked in a ball-bearing factory."

  "Well, that's honest work. Why would I be disappointed?"

  He seemed to Callum to be pondering this for a moment. Then: "Perhaps because I was. It wasn't quite what I expected I would be doing with my life when I was fifteen or sixteen years old."

  Overhead the clouds parted just enough that they all felt great shafts of sun on their faces, and as one they reflexively stared up into the sky. "I don't think any of us wound up doing quite what we expected," Callum said. His stomach growled loudly and he thought of how hungry he was. For a moment he envisioned himself as a Saint Bernard, and he wished they hadn't finished off all of their meat and their bread and their beets.

  that day they passed through a village and had lunch by a warm stove in the kitchen of a carpenter and his wife who seemed oddly prosperous. They were having meat for lunch, some sort of stew made with pork and root vegetables, and they offered the trekkers real coffee. The couple was packing to leave, too, when the Emmerichs passed by and they noticed Manfred. Because Manfred was in uniform, they insisted on inviting them indoors to eat and rest. They wanted to finish off the food they had left that they couldn't bring with them, so the Russians wouldn't get it.

  As they ate, the carpenter shared with Manfred and Callum-- who said not a word--the secret behind his success: He always got wood because he had joined the party. And, since 1942, he made nothing but coffins. "These days, I can't make too many coffins," he said, his voice at once oddly satisfied and rueful. The pair had two sons, both of whom were missing in action. Their daughters, both married, had gone to Prague where, supposedly, they would be safe from Allied air attacks.

  Theo thought Manfred seemed to pay the man special attention when the carpenter told him how recently there had been columns of prisoners passing by, and one of the groups had been nothing but women. Rows and rows of them, he had said.

  "And they were marching west?" Manfred asked.

  "They were. Starving things. Jews. Belinda here managed to give some of them food. Bread and the last of our sausages. She snuck it to them as they passed. Some of them didn't even have shoes. Can you imagine? I mean, they're just Jews. But still. I'd heard about such things, but never seen them with my own eyes."

  "Where were they from?"

  "Well, the east."

  "No," Manfred continued, his voice a little testy now. "I meant what countries were they from?"

  "I heard some of the girls speaking French. I heard others speaking Polish. Even, I think, a little Russian."

  "Any German?"

  "A few, maybe."

  "How old were they?"

  "At first I thought they were older than me, and I am sixty-two. It was only when Belinda got close to them that we could tell. They were in their twenties and thirties. They'd have to be. Any older and they would have perished by now in this weather."

  Theo watched Manfred seem to take this in. He thought the soldier was seething inside and working hard to maintain an even facade. And his sister? He could see anger on her face as well, but something else, too, and when he understood what it was he grew scared: It was guilt. Shame, as if she were responsible. He felt a small chill in the room, despite the heat from the stove, and for the first time he began to wonder: Was this--those prisoners--why the whole world seemed so mad at his country? Was this what those British POWs and Callum on occasion had whispered about? He had a sense that was just beyond perfect articulation in his mind but nonetheless absolutely apparent to him: When this war was over, he and his family--all Germans--were going to have to live with the black mark of this (whatever this was) for a long, long time.

  Chapter 12

  ANNA WAs VAGUELY AWARE THAT sHE WAs FAR FROM the comforts of her own bed in Kaminheim. She was wrapped tightly inside a pair of quilts, half-buried in the hay in a barn. Another barn. Not even a gymnasium, albeit an unheated one, such as the one where they had spent the night before last. This barn was far from the main road, perhaps a kilometer distant. They had come here for privacy and quiet. To escape the throngs. She wasn't freezing, but her feet--despite the reality that she had slept yet again in her boots--and her fingers were chilled. Her nose was running from the cold, and when she removed her hands from beneath the quilts she was stunned to discover how warm her face was. Was it possible she had a fever? Was this why she was shivering? Slowly she began to focus, but still she kept trying to push full wakefulness away, as if it were a suitor at a dance she was trying to avoid. She recalled how they had stopped here last night. Her family and Callum and Manfred and the three horses had all taken refuge in one corner, while another family had taken the side nearest the entrance, and the humans had all been grateful to have the heat generated by the Emmerichs' animals. For dinner, Manfred had shown them how to bake the potatoes in the wild: He had buried them in a shallow hole, and then built a fire on the patch of ground directly above them.

  Now Anna could tell by the hazy light that was coming in through the cupola and a pair of eastern-facing dormers that day had broken. She heard the low rumble of voices, men's voices, but she couldn't make out what they were saying. It didn't sound like Manfred and Callum, and so she guessed it was that other family. But then, when she visualized those other refugees--their name, she thought, was Sanders--she could see in her somnambulant fog only one male. A grandfather. There were the grandparents, a married daughter and a daughter-in-law, and two small girls. And neither of the voices, as she tried to concentrate, sounded much like the girls' elderly grandfather.

  Nevertheless, for another moment she allowed herself to drowse and to wonder, almost as if she were witnessing this happen to somebody else, at the idea that she was sleeping in a barn and she might be coming down with a fever. Might? No, not might. It all came back t
o her now. Yesterday she had started to grow ill and had nearly passed out. They had stopped here because she simply had to rest. And now it was just so much easier to remain curled in a ball under these quilts, to allow her fever--if, indeed, she had one--to run its course, than to rise from the hay and begin the hard work of continuing west. Melting the snow so she could wash. Feeding the horses. Rummaging for a piece of bread they had scavenged or a small handful of the muesli they had bought with a bracelet. When she'd been younger, there had actually been a servant girl who had laid out her clothes for her in the morning and then had her breakfast waiting. A Polish girl. Jadwiga. She guessed the servant had been with them through 1941. Then? Deported somewhere. The girl's parents were taken, too. Mutti had been devastated. Her father had made phone calls. Sent telegrams. But there had been nothing that either of her parents had been able to do. It seemed that Jadwiga's father had been involved with the Communists. Perhaps even the resistance.

  Anna was just beginning to wonder where the rest of her family was--Mutti and Theo--when she was pulled abruptly from her torpor by the distinctive, full-throated whinny of her horse. Balga was, it sounded, just outside the barn. And he sounded furious. She sat up now, imagining that Manfred or Callum was mishandling the animal in some fashion, antagonizing him inadvertently. Instead, however, she saw Balga silhouetted in the massive barn doors, rearing up on his hind legs while two men she didn't recognize were trying (and failing) to convince the horse to remain still so they could place a saddle upon him. These, she realized, had been the voices she had heard.