Skeletons at the Feast (2008)

by Chris Bohjalian

  He couldn't see the planes because of the angle of the hill and the trees, but he guessed there were probably a half-dozen. Not a massive bombing onslaught, but not a single fighter or two planning to strafe a couple of horse-drawn Wehrmacht wagons, either.

  After a moment, he decided the target most likely was the town. The engines were growing louder. And just as the bizarre idea was starting to form in his mind that he was the target, a lone man with a cigarette standing beside a birch, behind him he heard an explosion, then another, and the sounds of branches being shattered and trees upended, and he felt himself being lifted off the ground--his rifle, which had been slung over his shoulder, was suddenly twirling ahead of him like a baton and he was aware that he was no longer holding his cigarette--and he was flying as he never had before. Then he landed and the feeling was reminiscent of the experience of diving headlong from that train two years earlier; he might even have hit the ground on the same part of his hip. But he didn't have time to consider this more carefully, because the shells were continuing to churn up the ground and the forest, and tree limbs and clods of earth were raining down upon him like hail, and he could smell the fires that were igniting in the woods.

  He scampered, rolling and crabwalking as much as he actually rose up on his legs and ran, but then he remembered his rifle and scuttled back for it. His knapsack, too. Somehow that had been blown off his back. Meanwhile, the planes were coming back, diving in at the height, it seemed, of his apartment house back in Schwein- furt. He grabbed his pack and felt around in the debris for his rifle, found it, and dashed as far from the woods as he could, into an open field and then down into a deep gulley beside it, aware that his hip was hurting and his hands were bleeding and there was a long red stain forming on his pants.

  Ankle-deep in cold water, runoff from the snow on the nearby hills, he looked back now and saw that the mountain was completely ablaze and the planes were departing as quickly as they had arrived. But against the blue sky he saw the swastika on the tail of one plane and iron crosses on the wings of the others. The aircraft were German. Luftwaffe. He wiped at the blood on his leg and looked at it. Wondered if he was badly hurt. He didn't think so. Mostly, however, he wondered at the lunacy of this Nazi regime, its colossal hate. Here its air force couldn't find the wherewithal to protect Berlin or Hamburg or Dresden. But tell them there were Jewish resisters in the woods near some pathetic town on the border of what used to be Poland, and they could find the runways and the resources to bomb a small forest into ash.

  He watched the creosote plumes rise into the air and obscure a wide ribbon of sky, but he knew the ground was still so moist that the fires would burn themselves out within hours. Still, he wasn't going to wait. Did he need a more convincing or obvious sign? No. He didn't. He was getting the hell out of Germany; he wanted nothing more to do with this country. Ever. And that meant he would limp north now to Stettin. With any luck, the Emmerichs and their Scottish POW would still be there.

  Chapter 17

  THEO OPENED His EYEs AND FELT THE sUN ON His face. Looked up at an ivory ceiling, at unfamiliar walls that were papered with columns of violets. A painting of the seashore, the water- color lighthouse on the cliff looking strangely like a sea serpent to him. It took him a moment to orient himself in this room, to place the bed and the bureau--both the brilliance of fresh chalk--and the window. Windows, actually, because there were two of them, and they were wide and tall. They faced east and north, and one was open just a crack. He thought he heard a ship, and so he understood instantly that he wasn't home in Kaminheim. And then, slowly, it all started coming back to him. The trip through the winter cold with the wagons, the nights in the frigid barns. Being warmed by the animals. The stay at Klara's, the dead Russians. The loss of the horses, the attacks from the air. The shelling. The rubble. And now, he believed, he was in Stettin. Finally. At the home of Mutti's cousin. At Elfi's. He tried to sit up in this bed on his elbows--the mattress was soft and it was almost as if he were sinking deep into it--but he couldn't. He couldn't. It was strange and then it was scary. For a moment he felt a panic at his immobility rising up from inside him, a desperate fear that suddenly he was paralyzed. But this wasn't paralysis; this was something else. It was as if either he were pinioned to the bed or a massive, invisible weight were atop him. And the panic began to recede as quickly as it had begun to appear. He couldn't say why, except that he was warm and he was aware of the smell--and, after a moment, the sound--of the surf, and he sensed it was spring. And so he began to relax. Or, rather, he felt something relaxing him. Eliminating both that sense of weight on his chest and the desire to fight. He heard himself singing somewhere inside him, his very own voice, and it was that folk song he liked about horses and clouds. He wasn't opening his mouth-- he couldn't--but there was clearly the sound of music, and it made him content. Suddenly he had the sense that he was riding atop someone's shoulders as if he were a very little boy, and for a moment he couldn't say whose shoulders they were. But then, though he couldn't see the face, somehow he knew they belonged to Werner. The two of them were on a beach. And there in the morning fog before them was their father, smiling and waving at them as they made their way toward him across a wide expanse of sand.

  He wondered what time it was, but then he didn't care. When it was time to rise, someone would get him. And perhaps then he would be able to move. In the meantime, he would stay here and doze, and he closed his eyes once again. Almost instantly he was asleep, his mind submerging itself in memories of the park behind Kaminheim, and the days he would ride his pony along the trails in the woods, or run back and forth between the seemingly endless beet fields and the house, or eat the delicious jam in the kitchen that Anna or Mutti always seemed to be boiling on the stove.

  mutti watched the boy sleep. For a brief moment Theo had opened his eyes and Mutti's heart had leapt in her chest. It had been days. The child's gaze had seemed to wander all around the bedroom, taking it in as if for the first time. But, in the end, Theo hadn't seemed to notice she was there. It was as if she had been invisible. Or, perhaps, the boy really hadn't woken at all. His eyes had opened, but he had remained asleep.

  Initially, the surgeon had hoped the tissue on his foot and lower leg would respond to treatment--warm water, lotions, elevation-- and he would only need to cut off the toes. But it soon became evident that the foot wasn't responding and was in fact becoming gangrenous. Moreover, it was a wet gangrene, and it was spreading quickly up into the leg. And so instead of cutting away his toes or even his foot, in the end the physician had had to saw through the bone at midshin. The surgery had been performed at Elfi's because the small hospital already had been overwhelmed by wounded German soldiers, and there had been reports of patients with typhus. Consequently, the surgeon had recommended cutting off the leg in a bedroom of the house on the cliff. He was an old man, as accustomed to operating in homes as he was in hospitals.

  And that, Mutti had presumed, was that. It was a tragic loss, but perhaps it would be the last loss the child would have to suffer. When Theo emerged briefly from the anesthesia, the boy had whispered in a hoarse, soft voice that he hoped he would be able to ride his horses by summer, and he wondered how hard it would be to run with a fake leg. He murmured that those were the things he thought he did best. Ride and run. Then he fell back into the gas- induced torpor.

  Over the next few weeks he seemed to mend, fighting his way back from the agony and the shock and the weakness; he was even hobbling around the house on a pair of crutches with so much daring and casualness that Mutti found herself scolding the boy, reminding him to be careful, to take it slow. Mutti's cousin, Elfi, was telling the child the same things, though it was also clear that she thought Theo's behavior was more impressive than alarming. Together the two mothers even chuckled, briefly, at the resiliency of youth and took some much-needed comfort in it. It suggested to them both that their nation had a future after all, and the children would rebuild what their parents had destroyed.


  By the second week in March, as the sun was warming the rooms that faced the water, it was possible to believe that the worst really was behind them. Yes, the army was losing and the Russians were nearing. But so were the British and the Americans. After five and a half years, the war was finally going to end. Hope, suddenly, didn't seem such a fanciful proposition.

  Then, however, the infection set in. It set in weeks after the amputation, long after they had ceased to worry about Theo's recovery. Oh, they had still worried about his rehabilitation. About finding a good prosthetic limb in a country that could no longer even find coal. Yet even when his temperature started to spike, they didn't begin to fret. It was only when they couldn't bring the temperature back down that they began to grow anxious. When, for three days, they couldn't even get a doctor to come to the house. Finally, they bundled him up and Callum risked everything, carrying the boy inside the hospital from the wagon. But there were no beds available and the staff could do nothing for him. And so Callum carried him back outside and placed him in the wagon beside Anna, and together with Mutti they brought him home.

  Over the last week and a half now he had gone from eating an occasional slice of toasted bread to sipping a little broth to, almost all of the time, sleeping. Three times in the last four days they had thought he was dying or had fallen into a coma. Once, for a brief and horrible moment, Mutti was sure that her youngest child was dead. But then the boy had inhaled and, a few hours later, opened his eyes. He hadn't spoken in half a week, however, and the weight had just melted away. They would moisten his lips with water and soup, keep cool compresses upon his forehead, and gently wipe the sweat off his neck. Everyone was a little dazed by his endurance.

  When he had opened his eyes once more this morning, Mutti had sat up expectantly, convinced that this was it, this was the moment when her altogether astonishing little boy would turn that corner and begin to recover in earnest. But then the child's lids had sagged shut and his breathing had slowed.

  Now Elfi put her head in the door, saw how quiet and still the mother and son were, and then gingerly entered the room. Mutti was sitting in the rocking chair that Elfi usually kept in the sun- room, and so she took the armchair by the window and dragged it next to the bed.

  "You look like you're ready to leave," Mutti said.

  Elfi nodded. She was wearing her gray flannel traveling skirt, her most comfortable walking shoes, and a heavy cardigan sweater she had knit that winter with the very last of their wool. It was thick enough to keep her warm in the early morning and dusk this time of the year, but she could tie it around her waist during the heat of the day. She was also bringing with her a winter coat, because she knew well how cold it could still get once the sun had gone down. She fully expected more snow, and Mutti and Anna had described for her the ordeal they had survived before they had arrived here in February.

  "But, if you want, I will stay. You know that, don't you?" she asked. "Sonje will, too."

  Mutti considered her cousin, her square face with the lines furrowing deep along her eyes and around her lips. Her hair was in that odd translucent phase, no longer blond but not yet gray or white, and it was pulled back tightly now into a bun. She had grown only a little wide with age, in part--like Mutti--because of the deprivations they had been enduring for a little more than two years.

  "I do," she told Elfi. "I know you'd both stay. But you have the chance to go now, and so you should." People had been leaving Stettin ever since Kolberg had been surrounded, and now that Kolberg had surrendered, they were fleeing in massive, less orderly numbers. This was especially true since the German troops had begun to withdraw from Altdamm, just east of the Oder. Elfi and Sonje were planning to leave on what people were suggesting might be the very last train to depart Stettin. It was supposed to arrive around five o'clock, and so Elfi had said that she wanted to be on the platform no later than noon: Although much of the city had started west days ago, there were still plenty of people left, and it was very likely that a crowd was already forming at the station.

  "What will you do?" Elfi asked her.

  She had been thinking about this for much of the past couple of days, as Theo's condition had worsened and she had realized that the boy couldn't possibly travel. What, precisely, would she do? And the answer was simple. She would stay here. Elfi and Sonje would head west, catching a train that would take the two women to the comparable safety of central or northern Germany. What, in any event, was left of central or northern Germany. But they would go and she would stay. She wished Callum and Anna would leave, too, but--for the moment, anyway--they were refusing. They wouldn't leave her and Theo. She thought this was a decision more foolish than noble. It was far more probable that the Russians would hurt the two of them than her and her son. A middle-aged woman and an ailing little boy.

  "Irmgard?"

  She looked up. Since Rolf had been gone, she was called that so infrequently that it always gave her a small start. Sometimes she forgot that she was not simply Mutti. Mother. That she had other guises and roles and personalities.

  "When will you follow us?" Elfi was asking.

  "As soon as we're able," she answered, and the idea crossed her mind that they were just playacting. Going through the motions. They were both pretending to believe that they honestly thought they would be reunited within days. That she and her children and Callum would harness the horses to the wagons and set out any day now, too. Or, perhaps, leave the horses to the Russians and find a train yet. Perhaps there would be another one tomorrow. Or the day after. Then she asked, "Has Sonje packed?"

  Elfi nodded. "We won't wait for lunch to leave. We shouldn't."

  "No, of course you shouldn't," Mutti agreed, and she reached for her son's hand, and when she did she felt a pang dart across her chest. The skin was cold. The very flesh was cold. She tried to control her breathing, to reassure herself that it might just be that the fever finally had broken and Theo's temperature was starting to fall. But she was the boy's mother, and she knew this was different. This was the cold you felt in the extremities when people were dying. When the heart was growing selfish and cocooning for the chest and the head whatever warmth it could offer, and allowing the fingers and toes, the hands and the feet, to fend for themselves. Quickly she tucked Theo's hand beneath the quilt and rubbed it between both of her palms.

  In the hallway she heard Callum and Anna starting down the stairs, chatting about something. A part of her wanted to cry out to them that Theo was dying and to be still. To be silent. To mourn. But another part of her wanted to rise to her feet and order them out of the house. To insist they go west right now with Elfi and Sonje. Because Rolf and Werner and Helmut were gone--she had hoped for weeks that a letter might arrive, but none ever had, not from her husband or either of her sons--and now, before her eyes in this bed by the lake, Theo was leaving, too.

  Instead, however, she sat quietly with Theo's cold hand between hers and felt Elfi's dry kiss on her suddenly moist cheek.

  "You're crying," Elfi said.

  "I know."

  "Why don't we bundle Theo up and just bring him with us? We'll wrap him in quilts."

  Mutti realized her cousin hadn't any idea why she was tearing, and she hadn't the energy to tell her. Besides, then Elfi would stay behind with her. She would remain here because Theo's death was imminent, and then she would expect her cousin to accompany her and Sonje. After all, there would no longer be any reason for her to stay.

  But the opposite was true, too, wasn't it? Once Theo was gone, what reason would there be for her to go? She'd have no reasons left to live but selfish ones. It would mean that everyone else but Anna was, it seemed, dead. And Anna had her paratrooper to care for her now; she no longer needed her mutti. No one would. Hers had been a life of service, and now there would be no one left to serve. Soon enough they would all run out of places to run, anyway; there would be no west remaining. Already the Reich was an hourglass, and the enemies were pressing hard against the upper an
d lower globes.

  "You know we can't do that," she murmured simply to Elfi. "But we'll catch up with you as soon as we can. I promise." At breakfast they had created an elaborate list of all the people they knew and all the places they might go in Berlin, Neubrandenburg, and Rostock. All the places where they might seek refuge and where they might find one another.

  "All right then," Elfi agreed, and awkwardly--because Mutti would not stand up and risk releasing Theo's cold, cold hand--Elfi embraced her. A moment later Sonje came in to say good-bye, too, and to thank her for letting her come with her from Klara's. Again, Mutti didn't rise from the chair or release Theo's fingers. Then she heard Callum and Anna saying their farewells to the two women downstairs, their voices largely, but not completely, muffled by the stairway and the corridor that separated them.

  She presumed that Anna would join her in a moment. Either sit with her, as she did for a large part of each day, or spell her, which she did, too, when Mutti needed to stretch her legs.

  Outside the window she watched a pair of seagulls shooting down from the sky toward the rocky shore at the base of the cliff.

  Then she closed her eyes and rested her head on the pillow beside Theo, praying in her mind that this one child be spared, though she realized that--for the first time in her life--she didn't believe there was anybody there who might listen.