Skeletons at the Feast (2008)

by Chris Bohjalian

  "Thank you," she said. "I know it must seem ridiculous."

  "The ground will be softer inside the barn," he said to Anna. "We'll bury them there. As your mother suggested, we'll put their IDs on the marker," he added, his tone softening slightly, his face losing its severe cast. "You're . . ."

  "Yes?"

  He clasped his hands behind his back as if, she thought, he were a boy pretending to be a man. Or, maybe, because otherwise he would have reached out to touch her when he spoke. "It is ridiculous. But you and your mother are kind to want to do this. And kindness is in short supply these days."

  Then he walked into the barn, muttering something to Callum, and she heard only the very tail end. It didn't make sense to her, at least not completely. It was something about her and her family as Germans. As those people. As something other than him, as if he weren't a German himself--or, possibly, as if he no longer wanted to define himself as one. She kept thinking about this as she wrestled the horses into their harnesses, wondering what he had meant. She made a mental note to ask him about it at some point, perhaps when they had once again put some distance between themselves and the Russians.

  Chapter 13

  THE sKY WAs As RED As HOT cOALs, AN UNDULATING river of crimson, and Cecile was confused. For a brief moment she thought it was the end of the day and the sun merely was setting. But as she staggered half-awake through the front doors of the train station she realized it was still dark to the west and it was the eastern sky that was alight. Yet clearly it wasn't morning, either. And, besides, when had she seen a sky like this at daybreak?

  "That must be Berent. The whole village must be on fire," Jeanne was murmuring, and she sounded more awed than frightened. Berent was no more than eight kilometers behind them. Around Jeanne the female prisoners were starting to form into lines.

  Cecile vaguely recalled encouraging her friend to curl against her for warmth when they had gone to sleep a few hours earlier on the cement floor of the train station. When the guard had kicked her awake just now, it had taken her a moment to realize that Jeanne already was gone. Up and about. Apparently they were not going to wait any longer for the train to arrive that--the guards had told them--was going to take them to their new destination. And so the prisoners were being assembled outside in the cold, and once more they would resume their trek west on foot.

  "I wonder if there was an ammunition dump in Berent, or an arsenal, maybe," Jeanne was continuing. "So many of the buildings there were stone. Otherwise, I don't think the town would go up like that."

  Cecile nodded and took her place in line with the other women in the road before the train station. There were two streetlights and she was surprised they were on. Usually in the night the Germans dimmed everything to protect themselves from air attacks. She saw that one of their male guards, that bastard walrus named Pusch, was speaking to a pair of young German soldiers she'd never seen before who were sitting atop motorcycles. The three of them were using a flashlight to study a map, evidently deciding which roads were safest.

  "There was an SS company back there," Jeanne said. "In Berent. I just heard. I wouldn't be surprised if they set the whole town on fire themselves. You know, leave nothing for the Russians? Or maybe they're just going to fight to the death." She spat on the ground and then rubbed her hands vigorously over her arms. "Well, good riddance to them. Good riddance to them all."

  "You're feisty tonight," Cecile told her.

  "Well . . ."

  "You can tell me."

  "When you were asleep, Vera found mess kits under one of the benches. Three of them. Soldiers must have forgotten they were there. And when the lights were out, we feasted."

  She felt a pang in her stomach, part hunger and part hurt. "And you didn't wake me?"

  "You sleep so little. We didn't think you would want to be disturbed."

  She realized she was experiencing more than hurt: This was outright betrayal. Jeanne and Vera hadn't wanted to share this unexpected bounty. And after all she had done for Jeanne. For all of them. She was absolutely positive that if it weren't for her, Jeanne would be dead now.

  "What was in them?" she asked, unsure why she was tormenting herself this way by inquiring. Did she really need to know? But in the same way one can't resist picking at a scab, she was unable to prevent herself from asking.

  Already, however, Jeanne understood her mistake. "Really, not that much," she said sheepishly.

  "Not that much?" This was Vera. Incredulous. "We gorged! There were tins of meat and tomatoes and canned milk! There was knackebrot, and the crackers were still crisp--which meant that mostly we broke them into pieces and sucked on them," she said, offering them all an ironic, toothless grin. "There was even hard candy!"

  Jeanne was gazing down at the ground, her guilt a dark halo behind the prickly hair on her head. Cecile imagined them silently unwrapping the crackers and opening the tins with one of those small can openers that came with the kits. In her mind she saw them using their fingers like spoons to extract the meat, then licking the lids from the cans to get the last drops of tomatoes and milk. And then she willed those images away. She reminded herself that all she had left was her attitude. Her mind. They could take everything else from her: In the end, they might even take her life. But they couldn't take away what she thought. They couldn't take away hope. Perhaps Jeanne and Vera simply needed that food more than she did. Fine. Perhaps the two of them wouldn't get through this without that unexpected discovery. Well, that was fine, too. She would.

  She reached over to Jeanne with her hand and tenderly lifted her face by her chin. "It's okay," she whispered. "I want you this spirited. I need you this spirited. It's how we'll survive."

  Her friend looked into her eyes and Cecile wasn't sure how she was going to respond. What she was going to say. Then, like the wind that precedes a thunderstorm, the air between them grew charged and Jeanne was shaking her head and her bony shoulders and starting to sob. She gave in to long, eaglelike ululations of despair--loud, heaving wails of remorse that merged with self- recrimination and self-loathing. Cecile and Vera together tried to embrace her, Cecile cooing softly into her ear that it was all right, to let go of the guilt, but Jeanne continued to cry, her eyes shut tight like a child's, as the tears streamed down the wrinkles in her gaunt, emaciated face. "No, I am horrible," she howled suddenly. "I am as bad as they are!"

  She was shrieking in French, but it didn't matter. Pusch had heard her--everyone at the train station had heard her, the prisoners were glancing at them from their places in line--and he was marching over to them now. The last thing he was going to endure in the middle of the night was a scene from a hysterical Jew. One of the female guards was joining him, an unattractive woman with a broad forehead and elflike eyes. The two young soldiers on their motorcycles looked at them idly, not nearly as interested at the moment as the other prisoners or the guards, and then one of them started to fold up the map.

  "Shhhh," Cecile was whispering, "you must settle down. It's all right." But already it was too late. She felt Pusch's hands on her shoulders; he was pulling her away from Jeanne. The female guard--was her name Sigi?--was trying to wrench Vera away. But Vera was holding on tightly to Jeanne, her dirty, gnarled fingers grasping the front of poor Jeanne's striped prison shirt and ragged jacket, begging Jeanne so desperately to calm down that she, too, was sounding half-crazed. Suddenly Pusch took his rifle off his shoulder and slammed the butt into Vera's back, holding the gun as if it were a battering ram. Vera let go of Jeanne's clothing and collapsed onto the road, one hand reaching instinctively back for her kidney.

  "And you," he hissed at Jeanne, his eyes half-closed in anger. "And you," he repeated. Sigi pushed Jeanne to the ground so she was on her hands and knees like a cow, still shaking her head and bawling. Pusch turned his rifle around in his arms and aimed it at the back of her head. So this, Cecile thought, is how it will end for my Jeanne--and, she realized, she really did view Jeanne as hers, a possession and a pet and a tot
em of sorts, a good-luck charm that she had to keep alive to assure herself that she, too, was still breathing--shot on a road outside a train station in the middle of the night. Now she was sniveling as well, but her cries were almost silent, certainly not loud enough to be heard over Jeanne's frenzied wailing or Vera's elongated moans.

  And yet when Pusch pulled the trigger and the blast was still reverberating in her ears, Cecile realized that he hadn't shot Jeanne. He'd killed Vera. He had meant to execute her friend, but in the second that he was aiming his rifle down at the back of Jeanne's skull, Vera had rolled into Jeanne and taken the bullet instead. In, it appeared, her neck. Now she was flat on her back, still alive but clearly dying fast, choking on the blood that was seeming to run from spigots in her mouth and the gaping hole by her larynx. Cecile wondered: Had Vera rolled into Jeanne on purpose? Or had she been spasming from the blow to her kidney and simply had the misfortune of twisting her body in that direction? The wrong direction?

  To their right she heard the two soldiers starting up their motorcycles. One seemed to be shaking his head in annoyance, exasperated either by the wailing Jew or by the way Pusch had shot one of the prisoners. She couldn't decide. And then they sped off, their motorcycles leaving behind trails of blue smoke in the frigid night air.

  "You," Sigi was saying, "you Jew pig," and Cecile choked back her tears and stood at attention because she realized that Sigi was speaking to her. "Get that body out of here. I don't want to soil my gloves with Jew blood."

  She averted her eyes and bowed her head, a slight, obedient nod. Jeanne was only whimpering now; her cries had grown soft.

  Pusch murmured something to Sigi that she couldn't quite hear and then he was shouting to the women behind them, commanding them to get back in line, telling them there was nothing that interesting to see. They were going to set off once again within minutes. He and Sigi glanced over at the spot where the two regular soldiers on motorcycles had been; they seemed surprised the two men were gone.

  "Pigs, too," Pusch mumbled, spitting on the road and narrowly missing Vera.

  "Do you know which roads are still open?" Sigi asked him. There was just a trace of nervousness in her voice. "Did they tell you?"

  "They did," Pusch said. "The commandant and I know which way to go. We'll be fine." Then he looked down at Vera, whose desperate, labored breathing was starting to slow. "At least we'll be fine if we hurry up and get out of here. You heard us," he barked at Cecile. "Get this pig shit off the road!"

  Instantly she bent over Vera, whispering into her ear--lying into her ear--that she would be fine, and lifting her shoulders off the ground and cradling the back of her injured neck in her hands. The bullet, she realized, must have passed right through, because she felt her palm growing moist with the woman's blood. She wasn't sure how to move her without causing her yet more pain, but she didn't have to worry long. Vera's eyes rolled up toward her forehead, there was one last convulsion somewhere deep inside her chest, and then she was gone. Jeanne crawled over to them, still sniffing back tears, and said, "I can help."

  Cecile wasn't sure Jeanne really could, at least all that much, but she nodded. They each took one of Vera's arms at the shoulder and together were able to drag her off into the snow on the side of the road.

  "We can't bury her," Cecile said, kneeling beside the body. "I wish we could. But we can't."

  Jeanne looked at her, wide-eyed, and Cecile was afraid that Jeanne, despite her despair, was going to snap at her for saying something so obvious and dull. But mostly she had just been talking to herself. She did wish they could bury Vera. But they hadn't the time, the ground was rock solid, and even if Pusch had given them shovels she doubted they had the strength left to dig.

  She was wrong about Jeanne, however; the woman's eyes, she understood, had grown wide because she was about to be sick. Her friend turned away from Vera's body and, suddenly, she was spewing into the grimy snow the meat and tomatoes and the knackebrot she had consumed, the vomit tinged with white from the canned milk. When she was done, when all that was left was a long tendril of spit linking her lips to the icy ground, she murmured, "I had forgotten what it was like to be full. I had completely forgotten."

  Behind them Pusch was screaming, "Move, move!" And so Cecile bent over and pulled down Vera's eyelids and kissed the woman good-bye on her sore-ridden scalp. Then she and Jeanne stood, and with the little energy they could muster they rejoined the other prisoners as they trudged their way west in the night.

  Chapter 14

  THEO WALKED WITH His FAMILY THROUGH A LARGELY deserted village in which the road was almost impassable because of the rubble--at one point he had helped Callum and Manfred move a pile of bricks from a fallen chimney from the road so the wagons could proceed, and twice he had gotten to assist them as they had lifted great slabs of wall that had slid onto the street--and he listened as Manfred wondered why in the name of God there wasn't some otherwise useless Hitler Youth lad to direct everyone onto the road that circled outside of the town. Even the stone church had collapsed upon itself, the buttresses for the walls supporting nothing but sky, and the once-imposing pipes for the organ reshaped by heat and flame into giant copper-colored mushrooms. It was a small village, no more than six square blocks, and none of the structures were taller than three stories high. And yet it had been bombed so severely that almost without exception they were passing buildings in which whole exterior walls were gone and Theo realized that he was looking up into people's bedrooms and bathrooms and kitchens. The buildings were, in a way, like giant dollhouses, with the sides removed so you could peer inside and move the furniture wherever you liked. The fires were long extinguished by the cold and fresh snow, but he could smell the soot and even see deep patches of black where an awning or a ceiling had somehow survived and shielded the burn marks from the latest storm. In one of the dollhouses he saw an old woman sitting before a precarious, three-legged table on the second floor, picking with a fork at some food in a bowl with yellow flowers adorning the side. The stairwell had caved in, and he wondered how the woman would ever get down from her perch. In another skeletal structure he saw three girls, sisters he guessed, standing at the lip of the floor on the third story, staring down at them glumly. The oldest one was probably his age, Theo decided, and she was wearing what had to be her uncle's or her father's Luftwaffe dress uniform coat. The younger girls were wrapped in blankets. He waved at them, but they didn't wave back.

  Whenever he saw a rat scuttle across the surface of the snow and into the debris, he feared there were bodies moldering there. When he expressed this concern to the grown-ups, Callum reassured him: The Scotsman told him he was quite positive that a town this small would have been sure to care for its own. Theo thought of that old woman and those three girls, and he wasn't convinced.

  "You know, Theo," Manfred was saying to him, "I have never ridden a horse in my life."

  "Really? Well, that's only because you're a city person. It's no big deal that I have," he said, because it didn't seem to him that it was. Country people often rode horses. City people didn't. Besides, he could tell that Manfred was only talking about horses now to change the subject from the bodies that might be under the rubble. "If I'd grown up in Schweinfurt, I probably wouldn't ride, either."

  "Theo is a wonderful rider," Anna said, and he wasn't sure if it was pride that he heard in her voice or something else. Worry, perhaps.

  "Not really," he said, feeling the need to assert the truth. "I only ride ponies."

  "Outside of the ring, yes. But in the ring? I don't know any boys your age who ride half so well."

  "It's true," Callum agreed. "You're an excellent horseman."

  "Frankly, your animals scare me to death," said Manfred. "They're monsters."

  "Are you serious?" he asked the soldier.

  "Absolutely. Your Balga? A terror."

  "He's a horse!"

  "He's a giant. They're all giants."

  "They're very sweet, actually. And very
smart. Sometimes they can be stubborn--even my pony. He's always snitching grass when he's not supposed to. But terrors? They're more like"--and he paused for a brief moment as he tried to find the appropriate analogy--"big stubborn babies. Or, maybe, big stubborn toddlers. That's what they really are, sometimes."

  Callum and his mother laughed aloud, and his sister nodded in recognition.

  "You think you could teach me to ride?" Manfred asked him. "It might make the animals seem less like monsters to me--and more like babies."

  "My sister could probably teach you better than I could."

  "Perhaps you could both teach me. My sense is I wouldn't be an especially quick study. I'd need all the help I could get."

  "You mean after the war?"

  "Yes," he said thoughtfully. "After the war."

  "I could do that," he said. He turned to Callum. "And you, too? Do you want some lessons?"

  "Definitely."

  The notion made Theo smile. It wasn't, he guessed, the idea that he might have some knowledge or talent that he could impart to these grown men--though he did like that idea; rather, it was the realization that he might actually get to see them again when this long journey was over.

  n perhaps two hours beyond the village, when the sky was growing dark and everyone knew that soon they would have to try to find a barn or a shelter in which to spend the night, Mutti announced that she had an idea of where they should go. "Let's turn here," she said, and she directed Manfred and Anna to lead the horses off the main road and down a path that didn't seem to have been plowed in weeks. With each step Theo was sinking up to his knees, and the men were actually shoveling a path for the carriage wheels as they trudged forward. But Mutti assured them the path wasn't long and it would be worth the effort. She refused, however, to tell them what awaited them at the end, and Theo was surprised by Manfred's patience with his mother. He had expected that the soldier would demand to know what they were doing, and why. But, it seemed, he had faith in Mutti, too.