Skeletons at the Feast (2008)
Page 34
She began to pray, but it had been a long time and it seemed that praying took a concentration she lacked. Moreover, other than the health of the camp survivors around her and the safe return of her father and brothers, she wasn't quite sure what to pray for. One of the other young women among the refugees, a war widow a few years older than Anna, told her that she personally prayed for forgiveness. The war widow said she hadn't been a party member, but that didn't matter.
And so Anna tried that, too. Unfortunately, with Callum gone-- Callum who had loved her despite her naivete--she wasn't confident that self-loathing wouldn't forever be her companion and cause her to walk with a distracted, disconsolate gaze. She didn't care so much whether the world would ever forgive her people; but she did hope that someday, somehow, she would be able to forgive herself.
EPILOGUE:
1948
THE RUINs OF THE scOTTisH cAsTLE LOOKED OUT UPON the North Sea from the edge of a steep cliff, and the waves rolled against the base of the ledge like wild, excited ponies. Parts of two of the original four towers remained, the stones butterscotch in the sun, and the tower nearest the ocean looked as if a giant had taken a tremendous bite out of the top. Across the road and perhaps a hundred meters distant, sheep were grazing and the herd's dog, a brown and white border collie, was running ecstatically in circles around them. Two of the sheep had been dozing half on and half off the thin road.
There had been fog in the morning, but this time of year there was always fog in the morning, and now it had lifted and the sky was cerulean blue. There were wispy, achromatic clouds far out to sea, but they posed no threat to the picnic.
The baby, a moonfaced boy with thin, poppy-colored hair, was just starting to wake up, and Anna put down the letter she had been reading and leaned over to watch him on the blanket. When they had first arrived, she had put two pillows around him to shield him from the breeze off the water. He was making small, birdlike clucking sounds, a signal that he was emerging from his nap. Anna thought she would feed him in a moment. Beside them, on the grass on the hill near the crumbling remains of the castle's east wall--the roof was long gone--sat Callum, his long legs extended well beyond the edge of the blanket. Mutti had been back in Germany a full week now, and though Anna missed her mother's help with the baby, she was relieved that she and Callum had their apartment to themselves once again. It really wasn't big enough for three grownups and an infant. Still, Mutti had arrived in time for the birth of her first grandson and stayed almost three months--which was at least a month longer than she had planned to visit, but she had found the role of grandmother irresistible. She shared the position contentedly with Callum's mother, who would appear with sprightly regularity at eight thirty every morning. Mutti was living now in a rooming house in a village a little west of where their trek had ended three years earlier, in the corner of Germany that was occupied by the British. Her room, she assured Anna, was more than sufficiently cheerful: It had a window that faced south and was bright most of the day. She had no plans to try to visit Poland, and no expectation that she would ever see Kaminheim--or whatever remained of Kaminheim--again. Helmut lived near her and had found work as a custodian at one of the British air bases. He hoped eventually they would train him to become a mechanic.
Anna and Callum had named the child Uri. In the months before Uri was born they had vacillated wildly between the names Theodore and Uri, debating passionately the merits of each option, but in the end Helmut had made the decision for them: He told them that someday he would like to name a son after Theo. He said that he hoped eventually he would be able to name boys after both Theo and Werner, their brothers who forever were lost.
And so Anna and Callum had a son with a name that was uncommon in Scotland, but sometimes made Anna smile when she said the full name aloud. On occasion those smiles were wistful because she was contemplating all that was gone from the world, or she was recalling in her mind's eye Uri's grave, well-chiseled face; but other times, especially as days passed and small hints of her baby's own personality began to emerge, those smiles would verge on the ecstatic because she was pondering all that nevertheless remained.
Nearby the dog barked and Uri opened his eyes. Blinked. Rolled his small head slightly toward the sound. Then he closed them again, as he slowly began to reacclimate himself to the waking world. She decided if she was going to finish the letter from Cecile, she had better return to it right now. And so she picked up the paper and started to read, catching up with the Frenchwoman with whom she had been friends since their paths had crossed at the very end of the war. Once Cecile had left the displaced-persons camp outside of Lubeck, she had returned to Lyon. Her fiance had indeed perished, as had her mother and father, but she remained surprised by the number of friends who had somehow survived. She worked now as a secretary in a small publishing house and had a cat and a boyfriend. Cecile made the future, as always, sound promising.
Anna had almost finished the letter when Uri once again opened his eyes and looked up at her. He shaped his impossibly small mouth into an oval. A greeting, she thought, though she presumed he might simply have been hungry and in a moment would use that mouth to cry out for food. She loved the glimmer of recognition she saw in his eyes when his lids first rolled back after a nap and he recognized her.
Now she lifted the boy up and into her arms, brought his face to hers, and thought of nothing and no one--not Cecile or parents or siblings or in-laws or even her husband--but her baby, and how remarkably warm this small person's skin was against hers.
a girl stood beside one of the pomegranate trees on a narrow street in Beersheba, savoring the shade she had found and watching the long parade of captured Egyptian trucks passing by. The trucks were filled with victorious Israeli soldiers now, whooping and hollering and singing. The driver of every second or third truck would press exuberantly on the vehicle's horn. She herself had been on one of those trucks until a few moments ago, when she had hopped off.
She wiped the sweat from her brow with the sleeve of her shirt, made sure that her machine gun's safety was on, and then wandered down the street to the gray-green awning of the restaurant. The ground was so hot that she could feel it through the soles of her boots--a sensation that she knew well, and one that always reminded her of how profoundly different the Middle East was from Europe. She couldn't imagine ever living in Germany again. She knew she was young, but she was confident that she would never again want anything to do with that country--or, for that matter, with the whole European continent.
The cafe was a joyous mob scene in which every table was taken and the bar was filled with young and old soldiers who were toasting to victory and the Negev and the future of Israel, and everybody was at least as happy as the soldiers who had just ridden by on the trucks. She found a table with three soldiers, including the lanky fellow whom she had agreed to meet here today, God willing. She saw him before he saw her, and so she snuck up behind him and kissed him on the cheek, pressing her lips against the coarse stubble there. He hadn't shaved in two days.
"Ah, my Rebekah," he said, standing and smiling. He took her in his long arms and embraced her. "I knew you would make it."
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