Skeletons at the Feast (2008)

by Chris Bohjalian

  Still, it was what was across the field that caused Uri's heart to race: There, no more than two hundred meters distant, was a plodding line of the most pathetic, despairing old men he had ever seen. At least he thought they were old men. Most of them were clad in shirts and trousers that even from this distance he could see were little more than threadbare rags, but some seemed to be wearing sacklike shifts and skirts and kerchiefs on their heads. There were also a few in striped prison uniforms. He guessed there were a hundred of them, perhaps more, and without exception the group was haggard and stooped and lumbering along at a crawl. He counted nine guards, three of whom seemed to be female.

  "What do you make of that?" Callum was asking.

  "The old men?"

  "Old men? Are you blind?" the paratrooper admonished him, his voice indignant. "They're girls! They're young women!"

  Uri squinted and studied the column of prisoners. He decided that if Callum was right, then those guards deserved to be shot. Hell, they deserved to be shot regardless of the age or the gender of the walking skeletons they were prodding along.

  "Women," he murmured, when he realized that Callum was correct.

  "Young women!" Callum said again, more loudly this time. "Girls! Some are probably the same age as Anna here! Some could be as young as your sister!"

  Anna and Mutti had come up beside them, standing so close that he could feel the warmth of Anna's breath and smell the damp wool of her sweater. Her parka was in the back of the wagon at the moment.

  "Are they . . ." Mutti began.

  "They're Jews," Callum said to her. "No doubt, they're Jews." He was at once incredulous and disgusted, and it sounded to Uri as if he were chastising the woman. This, he was saying in essence, is what your people are doing. Have done. Here it is in full view: No more hiding it behind barbed wire fences and cement crematoriums, no more burying the corpses in ditches. Here's a whole bloody parade of the walking dead.

  Mutti held her hands before her mouth and a small moan-- a cry, almost--escaped. "They're girls, you say?" she murmured finally.

  "Yes!" Callum said. "They're Jewish girls! Here's what your ten- thousand-year Reich was really all about!"

  Uri watched as the column seemed to drift: It looked to him as if the individuals were bobbing in a river. It made absolutely no sound.

  "Those guards: the most abominable bastards on the planet. What kind of person would do that?" Callum was muttering. Uri had never seen him so angry. Didn't know the Scot had it in him.

  "Well, then," Uri said, aware of precisely what he wanted to do--what he was going to do--and wholly unconcerned with the ramifications. "Let's take care of them." He pulled his rifle off his shoulder and released the safety. "I'd suggest you get one of the Russian rifles out of the wagon."

  "What are you doing?" This was Anna, and he heard a little tremor in her voice.

  "I am going to kill that fellow"--and he paused as he squinted through the sight, moving his rifle like a pointer--"right there. The one with that ridiculous white mustache."

  "But there are too many of them," Mutti said.

  "And, I'd bet, they're all cowards. They're pathetic bullies and cowards."

  His angle now was such that he was going to have to shoot the man in the back. So be it. He aimed heart level, just to the left of the guard's spine and below the man's scapula. And then he squeezed the trigger, experienced the recoil in his shoulder as he heard the blast in his ear, and watched as the guard with his preposterous resemblance to a walrus fell like a straw man whose braces have been removed, the fellow's knees buckling, his chin rolling into his neck, his arms flapping once like a dancer's. The idea somehow crossed Uri's mind that he might have been eating something as he walked: He thought he saw a large chunk of bread fly from the man's fingers as he died.

  cecile heard the gunshot and saw the black bread Pusch was gnawing--she knew that his teeth were as bad as most of the prisoners', though in his case it had everything to do with slovenly personal hygiene and not malnutrition--fall to the mud near her feet, and for the briefest of seconds she thought one of the prisoners around her had somehow acquired a gun and shot the guard for the bread. And so she didn't dare pick it up. Consequently, a woman named Luiza darted around her with the speed of a rabbit and scooped it off the ground, in one fluid motion brushing a clod of dirt from the crust and tearing off a piece the size of a ball of milkweed.

  Then, however, Cecile watched as the armed male guards fell to their knees and aimed their rifles in the direction of the field they were passing. She was confused: The pasture was filled with dead horses--their carcasses being nibbled by crows--and wagons and destroyed Nazi vehicles. Were there Russians--or, better still, Americans--hiding among all those burned-out tanks and trucks? The idea crossed her mind that this was it, their moment of liberation was at hand, and any second now Allied soldiers were going to rise up from behind the wrecks and demand that their guards surrender. In her mind they were all wearing French army uniforms, because she realized that was the only Allied uniform she knew, and she felt an unfamiliar pang of giddiness. But she was pulled from her brief reverie when that female guard named Inga bellowed furiously, "Down, now! Down, down, down!" and then, suddenly, swatted her so hard on the back of her head that she fell forward onto her knees on the road beside Pusch. The dead guard was on his stomach and there was a hole in the back of his tunic around which a red stain was already starting to spread.

  Across the field, beyond the blackened metal hulks and twisted lattices of steel, she saw a wooden farm wagon and a pair of horses. She thought--but she wasn't completely sure--that she had seen people near them from the corner of her eye, falling abruptly almost flat onto the ground. One moment they had been there, and in the next they had been gone. Clearly, however, the guards thought the gunfire had come from there. Their suspicions were confirmed almost instantly: There was a second crack--a female guard near Cecile shouted once, as much in surprise as in pain--and this shot had very definitely come from somewhere near that wagon. Perhaps a dozen and a half meters to her right, the Hungarian guard--a woman who was about the age of her prisoners and seemed to have the same disdain for the Germans as she did for the Jewish women she was herding west--had been shot. Apparently the guard had been up on her knees. Now, when Cecile turned, she saw the woman flapping on the ground as if she were a live fish on a dock, shrieking in a dialect that was unfamiliar to Cecile, and trying, it seemed, to pull something out of her side--as if she had been shot with an arrow, not a gun. The other guards were flat on their stomachs, eyeing the wagon, trying to see where the shooter was, and ignoring the woman who was writhing and screaming for, Cecile presumed, help.

  Then, however, she saw Blumer rising up and darting into the field, diving quickly behind the remains of a half-track before a shot whizzed harmlessly past him. The guard had a potato-masher grenade on his belt and he reached for it, signaling to someone-- another guard, she assumed, probably Kogel--to cover him as he scuttled closer still to the horses and the wagon and the faceless shooter.

  Beside her there was a prisoner on her hands and knees whose name Cecile thought was Vivienne, but that was little more than a guess based on something she may or may not have overheard, and the fact the girl usually spoke French. Vivienne was younger than she was and had arrived at the factory in February from another camp. "Cecile, I'm leaving!" she whispered urgently. "Come with me--now!"

  "Just run away?"

  "Yes! Into the woods! Come with me, you've nothing to lose!"

  She saw in her mind that awful moment when Kogel had executed Jeanne--there he was again, his arm straight with his pistol at the end, an extension of his hand--shooting her friend in the back of the head as Leah fled into the dark of the forest. She was just starting to wonder where Leah was--an image formed in her mind of the girl in a farmhouse somewhere, perhaps sitting before a fire in a wide brick hearth, a bowl of soup and an actual spoon in her fingers--when there was another gunshot in the field. She tu
rned toward it, reflexively putting one of her hands over her eyes like a visor. There was Blumer, within a stone's throw of the wagon and the horses, shielded from it by the charred remains of a tank.

  "Cecile, this is it," Vivienne was saying, "I'm going." And then the girl was gone, crabwalking carefully toward the woods, scuttling on her fingers and feet, her eyes darting back but one time.

  Kogel spotted her almost instantly. "You, stop!" he shouted, but instead Vivienne stood up and started to run in her clogs, her legs stretching out one last time, the wind just starting, perhaps, to whistle in her ears, before the guard shot her with his rifle and she collapsed in the brush at the edge of the trees. Then he turned and aimed a second shot at one of the horses across the meadow, firing, apparently, for no other reason than anger and frustration and spite. The animal whinnied, reared up on its rear legs, and then sunk into the ground in its harness. Briefly it tried to reach the hole in its side with its nose, to nuzzle it, examine what had occurred there and would cause it to die, but then the horse's long, great head rolled around as if it were dangling on the head of a stick, and the animal expired. Kogel pulled his rifle down and surveyed the field. He seemed oddly satisfied.

  She glanced back and forth between the body of the prisoner at the edge of the forest--a young woman whose forehead may once have been stroked by parents as they softly cooed her name--and the Hungarian guard, who was continuing to wriggle and moan and was now slapping at her side with the open palm of one of her hands. At least Vivienne had been granted a quick death, Cecile thought, and decided that she might as well try to scurry into the woods, too. Probably she would be shot, and that would be fine. There were no liberators here, no army about to rescue them. There was one idiot somewhere across that field with a gun. That was all.

  And so she was about to stand when she noticed that Blumer was rising up from his crouch behind the tank to hurl the grenade at the wagon, blow it up and kill anyone behind or beside it--those lumps of clothing she had seen briefly falling to the ground-- including the one horse that remained alive. She watched, hypnotized, sad for the horse that was about to die in a way that she wasn't for whatever people were near the wagon. He had pulled the pin and his arm was rearing back, when there were shots--two, maybe three, she wasn't sure, because it happened so fast--and Blumer with his one eye and mutilated ear was doubling over, the grenade beside him, kicking out his leg to try to push it away. But it was too late, far too late, and the grenade was exploding, the flash sending a cloud of dirt and fabric and flesh and metal from the tank high into the air, the plume darkening one vertical swath of sky and instantly making the world smell like sulfur and smoke. She wasn't quite sure what happened next because she had ducked into a ball, her arms across her face and her head, her eyes closed. When she opened them, she saw there was a gaping hole in the ground where a moment earlier Blumer had been kneeling. Kogel was on his back, dead--shot, she assumed, because the grenade couldn't possibly have done him in--and there was a large man with red hair and a smaller one in, of all things, a German uniform running across the meadow toward them and then disappearing behind the metal carcass of a half-track. She looked around and realized that the pair hadn't needed to dive behind the vehicle for cover. Pusch and Blumer and Kogel were dead. The Hungarian was dying. The other guards--three other men and two other women--had seen this skirmish as a reason to flee. To escape themselves before they were held accountable for all they had done. Around her the prisoners were starting to rise, to mill about, and so she did, too. She stumbled over to Vivienne, and much to her surprise she found that the girl was still breathing. Her eyes were small slits in the hollows of her skull and the front of her worn shift was soaked with her blood, but she looked up at Cecile and murmured, "In my pocket, there's a photo. Take it."

  She carefully lifted the girl's head and rested it on her own bony thighs. Then she saw the slit in the tattered dress and reached in. She found the picture instantly, an image of five children and two parents. The father was wearing a white V-necked sweater, and his eyes and his cheekbones were striking. He could have been a movie star. The mother was lovely, too, though there was something vacant about her eyes--as if, perhaps, she were blind. The children looked as young as three or four and as old as fifteen or sixteen. The family was on the deck of a cruise ship, and Cecile had the sense that the small, rocky islands in the background were Greece. The children were in tidy shorts or sleeveless summer dresses, their mother in an elegant skirt and a blouse. She was wearing pearls. All of their faces were windblown and their hair in vacation-like disarray.

  "On the back," Vivienne sputtered.

  She turned it over and saw five names, including, yes, Vivienne, and the words father and mother in French.

  "Where are you from?" Cecile asked.

  "Limoges."

  She nodded, recalled a visit there once with her parents when she'd been a little girl, and stroked Vivienne's forehead with her fingers. Then gently she dabbed at the spittle that was forming on the prisoner's lips.

  "Cecile?"

  "I'm here," she murmured.

  "Tell them what happened. Please."

  "Your family . . ."

  "Yes."

  "I will."

  "I never gave up. That's what I want them to know. My parents. My brothers and sisters. I know they can't all have died."

  "No," she answered, "of course not," but she didn't see any reason why it wasn't possible that this whole family had been machine- gunned or gassed or simply worked till they collapsed in a quarry or a brick factory somewhere. Certainly the woman's younger siblings were dead. "Someday," she added, "you'll tell them yourself."

  "No." The word was barely the tiniest puff of air, a syllable spoken without even moving her lips.

  "What is your name?"

  "Viv . . ." she answered, too weak now to link together more than a syllable at a time.

  "I know that, silly," she said. "Your whole name. Your surname."

  The girl started to nod, to answer. But this time when she tried to breathe she discovered that she couldn't, and she grimaced with the pain of the effort, her eyes and mouth becoming parallel lines below a series of deep creases upon her forehead. Her eyes opened one last time, the panic and fear and desperation apparent, and Cecile willed herself to smile down at this scared dying girl, to keep her own tears from her eyes. And then Vivienne--like the litany of others who had died near Cecile, beside Cecile, or in her very arms--died, too.

  She looked up and saw a woman with a mane of yellow hair protruding from beneath her dirty kerchief wandering through the field toward the prisoners. She had worn but elegant leather riding boots on her feet, and Cecile thought she appeared to be a few years younger than she was. Near her an older woman in a coat with a tired-looking fur collar was already starting to kneel before two other prisoners and hand them . . . something. Bread, perhaps. And there was that German soldier offering his canteen to a prisoner, and that tall fellow with terra-cotta red hair literally lifting another prisoner off the road and carrying her to a patch of earth in the field where there was sun and the ground was warm. She noticed that the crows had flown back and resumed their lunch on the entrails of the dead horses.

  Some of the other girls started to follow the redheaded man onto the grass. Others looked around nervously, wondering whether even this--this apparent rescue--was a mere trap of some kind. An ambush. A trick. They glanced down the road to the east and to the west; they peered apprehensively at the woods. Some even scanned the sky.

  Then one of the girls walked over to Pusch, leaned over his body, and spat. She glanced around to see if anyone had noticed, her eyes mischievous and childlike. And then, with the suddenness of lightning, she kicked the dead guard in the ribs, using her clog like a bludgeon. She kicked him in the face, too, slamming the front of her clog into his nose and mouth with such force that the head seemed almost to lift away from its neck.

  Other prisoners watched for a moment--but only for a mome
nt. Within seconds the girls were kicking and stomping on the corpses of all the dead guards, battering them with their feet, and when that wasn't sufficiently satisfying, using the butts of the guards' rifles to smash the bones in their faces and pummel their skulls into the earth. They cheered as they worked and, like that first girl, spat on the bodies. Then they turned on the Hungarian guard--the woman still hadn't died--and they drilled their clogs into her wherever they could and walloped her with the rifles, swinging them like axes in some cases and in others like plungers, until she grew completely silent and her body moved only in response to the way it was kicked or beaten or shoved.

  Cecile wasn't sure how long she had been watching when the German soldier came over and squatted on his haunches beside her. She knew enough not to be scared of him, despite the uniform. Hadn't he just killed or driven off their guards? He asked her if she spoke German and she said that she did, though she was French. He asked her if the girl in her arms was a friend.