Skeletons at the Feast (2008)

by Chris Bohjalian

  "Maybe tonight my mother will allow you to sleep with one of Father's dogs," Gabi suggested to Manfred. "A man should always have a wolfhound by his bed, shouldn't he?"

  "Oh, I don't think we need to cart them around the house. But I thank you," he told her, his voice drifting, and Mutti couldn't imagine why anyone would bring one of those stuffed dogs with them to a bedroom. Even in a room this large it took the smell of the fire and the tea and the scented candles to smother their stench.

  "The fuhrer always sleeps with a wolfhound, you know. Blondi," Gabi continued. She was speaking almost directly into the corporal's ear.

  "Blondi is a German shepherd--not a wolfhound," Sonje corrected her.

  "No, she's a wolfhound."

  "You're wrong."

  "And she was a gift from Goebbels."

  "From Bormann," Sonje insisted.

  "Goebbels."

  "Bormann."

  "Oh, please, does it matter?"

  "I'm just saying--"

  "You're just being a Jew. A know-it-all Jew," Gabi snapped at her.

  "I'm just being right," Sonje said.

  "Girls," Klara said, raising her voice ever so slightly and drawing the word out. "We have guests. No need to squabble. What always is more important is what we agree upon. And we all agree that the fuhrer has a beautiful animal named Blondi and that sometimes a man wants to sleep with a dog."

  At that Gabi tittered slightly, but then Klara's usually kind face turned to a glare. "You know I do not approve of prurient thoughts," she said.

  "I'm sorry," Gabi murmured, though it was clear that she wasn't. Not at all. Then she turned to Sonje, and it was evident to Mutti that the moment--already irreparably curdled--was about to get worse. "But Sonje was acting like a Jew: a selfish, piglike, know-it-all Jew. A Jew who probably opposes our fuhrer. A Jew who lives off the sweat of others. A Jew who seduces--"

  "Enough!" This was Manfred, and everyone in the room turned. Mutti was embarrassed for Gabi. She was embarrassed for them all. Living outside of Kulm had meant that she had been spared having to hear firsthand this sort of nonsense about the Jews. Certainly in the early days of the war she had worried about her family's acquaintances who were Jewish--hadn't Rolf written letters and telegrams to everyone he could think of on behalf of some fami- lies?--but in the last two years their own situation had become so precarious that she had grown oblivious of their plight. She had Werner to worry about. And she had to learn to make do in a world where everything, it seemed, was suddenly scarce. Nevertheless, she had never believed the sort of claptrap that appeared in Der Sturmer or that Gabi was giving voice to now.

  "Enough," Manfred continued, a mere echo of the word this time, but his anger clearly unabated. "No Jews are living off the sweat of others. No Jews are seducing your precious Aryan children. No Jews--"

  "That's right," Sonje said, oddly adamant, and she was, much to Mutti's discomfort, pressing her body against Manfred's and burrowing her cheek against his chest. "That's absolutely right." "Tell me, Corporal, are you a Jew lover?" Gabi asked him. He pushed Sonje down into the love seat almost atop poor Anna and then took Gabi's fleshy upper arms in his hands, clenching his fingers so firmly around them that Mutti could see the fabric of her dress sleeve crinkling and she feared for a moment that he was hurting her.

  "I don't care that I am a guest in your family's house. I will not abide your monumental ignorance," he told her, lowering his face into hers, his eyes unblinking.

  "I was only--"

  "He's right, you know," Callum interrupted. "Say one more word like that and I'll walk out that door and put a bloody arrow at the end of the driveway pointing up here for the Russians. I'll even paint them a sign: Nazis and food, right this way."

  Gabi looked nervously toward Klara, but her mother was leaning over the piano, crying soundlessly and running the fingers of one hand abstractedly over the woodwork just above the keys. When she saw her mother was going to offer neither assistance nor comfort, she stiffened her back and stood up a little straighter. "That man is a prisoner. Your enemy. Are all of you going to allow him to talk to me like this?"

  Mutti felt she should do something--say something--to de- escalate the tension. Comfort Klara, maybe. Chastise Gabi. Calm Manfred. But she realized that she was tired, so very, very tired. Wasn't it only a moment ago that these young people were waltzing together contentedly? Still, she wished she could find the words to calm Manfred and silence this strange, half-insane Gabi.

  "Manfred, would you have one more dance in you for a sickly girl from the country?" It was Anna speaking, and she had risen to her feet. Her lips were parted just the tiniest bit in a modest, demure smile, though it was clear from the slight quiver there that she was nervous--or, to be precise, unnerved by both Gabi's erratic behavior and Manfred's anger. She rested her fingers gently atop the corporal's shoulder, a leaf coming to rest on a low branch in the autumn, and Mutti worried that what looked to the rest of the room merely like a bit of practiced, coquettish charm was driven actually by the need for help with her balance. Her daughter, she knew, wasn't tipsy--but she was weak.

  Without turning to Anna, Manfred released the other woman and allowed his strong arms to drop to his sides. He exhaled loudly, and Mutti hoped his anger might diminish now to something like a more harmless exasperation. She knew the effect a beautiful young girl like Anna could have on a young man. She had been such a girl herself, once.

  "Ah, a little sympathy for a soldier home from the front. I won't say no," he said.

  "Thank you," she said, dipping her head slightly, and Mutti thought the storm was going to pass. Had, in fact, passed. But not yet. Sonje was glaring at Anna as if she, a friend of Klara's family, had some proprietary hold on the soldier. Meanwhile, Callum was muttering something in English that she didn't hear well enough to translate in her mind, but she thought was an aspersion upon Manfred's character. It sounded as if he were implying that Manfred actually was hiding from the front. Or running from the front. But he was most certainly not a soldier home from the front. She was surprised by this odd spike of jealousy from him and wondered if she had missed signs of it earlier.

  "Do you really feel up to that?" she asked her daughter, but it was only out of obligation--because she thought as the girl's mother she should ask. The truth was, the sight of her daughter dancing with this handsome Wehrmacht corporal gave her a pleasant, maternal pride. It allowed her to fantasize what might have been if the war hadn't taken such a nasty turn and sent them all scurrying like scared animals from Kaminheim.

  "Yes, Mutti, I think I can dance once," she replied and then, when she saw Callum, she continued, "twice even. I don't think my evening would be complete if I didn't have the honor of dancing with every handsome soldier we have in our presence."

  Klara sniffled and looked up from her piano, and abruptly her mouth and eyes opened wide like a fish's. There were long stretches of tears running over the swell of her cheekbones and linking her eyes with the cut of her jaw. "Wonderful!" she exclaimed. "I know just what to play!"

  Gabi was biting the insides of her mouth so angrily and obviously that she was sucking in the flesh on the sides of her face. Then, almost as if her head were on a spindle, she turned suddenly to Sonje and ordered her to dance with her. "Come, butterfly. Join me so neither of us has to dance with the enemy."

  Callum, Mutti thought, looked relieved.

  uri threw another log on the fireplace, pushed the massive screen with the finials of eagles in front of it, and collapsed on his back onto the couch. Suddenly, he was almost too tired to retire to the maid's room in which he was supposed to sleep. Their hostess had placed him in one and Callum in the other. It wasn't that there was a shortage of bedrooms upstairs; rather, it was Klara's sense of propriety: She wanted her daughter and Sonje and Anna to be on one floor, and these two men on another. The only male allowed upstairs? Young Theo. Now Uri closed his eyes, vaguely aware that Callum was extinguishing the oil lamps and blowing out the
candles. Everyone else was in bed for the night.

  "So," he said, not even trying to suppress a yawn. "When was the last time you ate like we did tonight?"

  "Actually, the food was pretty impressive at the Emmerichs' right up to the end. Things were rationed and some things were much harder to come by than others. But, remember: The place was a working farm."

  "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 her 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.