Skeletons at the Feast

by Chris Bohjalian

  indeed, there was sun, a great lemon-colored haze brightening the eastern edge of the horizon in the first moments of the morning, and outside the village of Sliwice Cecile closed her eyes and looked up at the sky. She felt the warmth on the very cheekbones that stood out now like a razor ridge on a cliff. Their guards were stopping to rest for a moment, which meant they were allowed to rest, too. They weren't allowed to sit, but at least she and Jeanne could lean against each other, and not have to endure the pain of their shoes grating against the open sores and festering blisters on their feet. They knew they were among the fortunate ones, because Cecile still had her fiance's old boots and Jeanne still had Cecile's crocodile dress flats--comfortable, though not warm. Some of the other women had actually chosen to march with rags wrapped around their feet instead of the clogs they had been given at the camp, because the snow got into the clogs anyway, and the rags didn't aggravate the cuts on their insteps the way the clogs did. Others decided to forgo shoes and rags completely, believing-- mistakenly, Cecile thought--that their frostbite would not become gangrenous if the limbs remained iced. Then, of course, there were those women who already had gangrene, and there were many; many of them went barefoot, too, both because they found the numbness less uncomfortable than the spikes of cold pain they had been suffering and because they hoped they might die more quickly if they trudged ahead barefoot.

  Everyone was envious of Cecile's boots and Jeanne's shoes, and some prisoners would express their jealousy with disarmingly angry glances.

  Cecile sighed now, her shoulders and back rolling against Jeanne's. "While we can, we should eat some snow," she said, though she wasn't honestly sure she would be able to stand upright again if she bent over. She thought she might simply fall over if she stooped, and then she risked being shot. Yesterday the guards had executed four women because they had been marching too slowly, lagging behind, or--in one case--because the prisoner had accepted the bread that had been offered by a teen girl as they had marched through a village. The guards had told them they were to speak to no one as they passed through the town, and this prisoner had simultaneously fallen out of line when she had reached for the rye and said something to the girl. The guard who shot her was Pusch, an older man who was known for his thick, white hair, his walruslike mustache, and for the way he refused to beat the prisoners the way most of the guards--especially the female ones--did. He said it was too much work to raise your rod to a Jew: It was much easier to simply shoot them instead.

  Cecile guessed there were about three hundred prisoners in their feeble parade and perhaps two dozen guards. Half the guards were women, and sometimes Cecile tried to imagine who was sleeping with whom. Because, clearly, there were romances among the guards. The men tended to be fifteen to twenty years older than the women, and they were the only ones who had rifles. The women had truncheons and clubs. When a male guard wanted to beat you, either he would borrow one of the female guard's rods or he would use the butt of his rifle.

  Finally Cecile could bear it no longer, and when none of the nearby guards seemed to be looking--and Pusch was nowhere in sight--she bent over and grabbed a handful of snow in her hand. She licked it slowly, because she had learned yesterday that if she bit into it quickly the cold would send daggerlike barbs of pain against her rotting gums and the holes where her teeth had recently fallen out. Then she passed the snowball back to Jeanne. Instead Jeanne swatted it out of her hand.

  "Oh, please," she said simply. "Spare me more snow."

  "It helps."

  "Not me. It only makes my stomachache worse."

  It was approaching noon, and Cecile was hoping that when they finally entered Sliwice they would be given some soup. That was when they had been fed yesterday: around lunchtime. There had been nothing at breakfast and nothing at dinner, but in the middle of the day they had been given a lukewarm cup of a watery soup made from turnips. Since they hadn't been fed yet today, Cecile was telling herself that they were falling into a routine and in a few moments they would be marched into the town and given their lunch. A tepid and largely flavorless soup. But food nonetheless.

  Cecile looked ahead of her and saw the prisoner named Vera was saying something. Speaking to her. Vera was taller than most of the women, and so she tended to stoop so she wouldn't stand out. That had been a key to surviving the camp: be invisible. She didn't say much, but Cecile knew she was from Hungary and that prior to the war she had been a schoolteacher. For two years she had avoided deportation because she had had a Wallenberg passport, one of the documents issued by the Swedish diplomat in Budapest that said the bearer was a Swedish subject awaiting repatriation. Eventually the Nazis and the Arrow Cross fascists simply ignored the passports and deported the Jews anyway.

  Now Cecile asked Vera to repeat herself. Sometimes she wondered if her hearing was falling apart along with the rest of her body--as if eardrums, too, could succumb to malnutrition.

  "Have you heard where we're going?" Vera was asking.

  "I haven't," she answered.

  "I hear it's Germany. They're going to put us to work in a munitions factory there. And we're going to be sleeping indoors again in a barracks right beside it."

  Jeanne turned to her. Her eyes were running in the cold. "You taught very small children, didn't you?"

  The woman nodded.

  "I thought so. Only a person who told fairy tales for a living could believe that sort of nonsense."

  Cecile felt Jeanne's shivering body against her back; if she hadn't, she feared, she might have slapped her. How many times had she saved Jeanne's life? How many times had she kept the woman going when Jeanne had all but given up? And still Jeanne hurled these malicious, cutting barbs at the other prisoners. At her. It was one thing for the guards to be cruel to them. But it was unconscionable for them to be cruel to one another. If indeed their husbands and their children and their parents were gone, then they were all that they had. When this war was over--and it did seem to be ending, didn't it?--they would all help one another to rebuild their lives. Wouldn't they? Isn't that what families did? What survivors did?

  And didn't family members also discipline one another? Keep them in line? She felt like a mother now whose adolescent daughter had grown snappish, and she was about to snap back. To reprimand Jeanne. Before she had opened her mouth, however, the woman on the far side of Vera, another Hungarian whom Cecile barely knew, told Jeanne, "You think you're so clever. Well, you're just mean. How do you know the Germans aren't so desperate for workers they'll use us?"

  "Because then they'd feed us!" Jeanne hissed. "If they wanted us to work, they'd give us something to eat!"

  "Then you tell me," the Hungarian said, wrapping her bony arm around Vera's shoulders. "Where are we going?"

  "To our graves," Jeanne said, narrowing her runny eyes. And then she collapsed, sobbing, into the snow.

  once more cecile got Jeanne to her feet, and once more she joined the other women as they started to walk. They lumbered along, some stumbling, all concentrating on the normally prosaic task of placing one foot in front of the other while trying not to think about the pain that came with each step, or the hunger that made their stomachs throb, or the way their work pants or shifts invariably were stained with urine and striped with frozen swaths of liquid feces, because most of them had long since lost the slightest ability to control their bowels.

  As they exited the far side of Sliwice, Cecile pushed from her mind her disappointment that the guards hadn't fed them. She tried to think instead about the sunshine and the blue sky, about the way the days were growing longer now. She tried to listen to the bird- song from the beech trees, and she considered reminding Jeanne that, yes, there still were birds in the world. She considered pointing out to her the reasonableness of Vera's supposition that they were going to be put to work in a munitions factory and thus soon would be fed. And she wondered about the carts. There were two of them, long, empty wagons, each one being pulled by a powerful draft horse. The guards had comm
andeered the animals and the carts from the sugar refinery in the town, and Cecile told herself it was because they were going to fill the wagons somewhere up ahead with provisions. With food and water for the prisoners. With bread and potatoes and milk.

  She was considering all of these things, imagining the way cool milk would feel on her throat and her tongue, trying to remain hopeful, when ahead of her she saw an Austrian woman named Dorothea stagger and fall face-first into the road. One of the female guards, a woman perhaps her age with eyes the green of the Mediterranean at sunset and hair the color of freshly cut wheat, yelled at her to stand up. When the Austrian didn't, the guard began kicking at her, driving her boot so hard into Dorothea that the guard was spinning the body with her foot, rolling the woman off the road and into the dirty snow just beside it. Dorothea whimpered, but she made no effort to rise, and Cecile prepared herself for the poor woman's execution. Any moment now, Pusch or one of the other male guards would fall back in the column, turn the Austrian onto her stomach, and shoot her in the back of the head. And, sure enough, here came Pusch, as well as the guard named Trammler, annoyed, it seemed, because yet again one of the prisoners had faltered and slowed down the march.

  Then, however, they surprised Cecile. Rather than shooting Dorothea, they actually lifted her up off the ground and brought her to one of the two carts they had taken in Sliwice. Pusch himself carried Dorothea in his arms as if she were his daughter and he were bringing her up to her room at the end of a long day, and then laid the emaciated woman gently in the cart.

  "See," Vera murmured to Jeanne. "They do want us alive. They need us and they'll feed us. Soon. You just watch."

  For another hour and a half they marched without incident, walking quietly west with the sun at their back. A little past three, however, another woman slipped on a patch of ice on the road and was unable to rise to her feet. She, too, was placed in the cart beside Dorothea. Cecile took comfort in this: Clearly something had changed. Perhaps it was exactly as Vera had said: The Germans needed them alive. Or, even if Vera was mistaken and their eventual destination was not a munitions factory and a warm barracks, perhaps the Russians were closer than they realized and the guards wanted to show their conquerors that they were treating their prisoners humanely.

  More humanely, anyway.

  In any case, it was possible, wasn't it, that the worst of the march was behind them?

  By the time the sun had set they were somewhere between Sliwice and Czersk, and both carts were filled with prisoners. Easily a dozen women had allowed themselves to slip to the ground in the course of the afternoon when they realized they wouldn't be shot but would, instead, be allowed to ride in the carts. The women were sitting or lying down, some on top of each other and some sound asleep, their wheezing and snores filling the dusk like frogs in the swamps in the spring.

  The guards stopped for the night when they saw a barn on a small hillside. It wasn't a large structure--it may have been built for horses, not cattle or livestock--and she feared that only the guards would be sleeping inside it tonight. They, the prisoners, would have to sleep outside in the snow. But perhaps there was a farmhouse just beyond the barn, and the guards--most of them, anyway--would sleep there, and the prisoners would thus get the barn. She had to hope that, because the temperature was falling quickly now that the sun had set and she wasn't sure even she could survive a night in this cold in the snow. And so she told herself that any moment now the guards would give them bowls of hot soup, and then herd them all into the barn for the night. Yes, it would be a tight fit, but all that body heat would help keep them warm.

  And, sure enough, she saw that three of the guards were pulling down the wooden fence at a corner of one of the fields and using it to construct a fire. Two fires, in fact. Perhaps these would be the flames over which they would prepare them all a warm meal. Perhaps, in the meantime, they would permit them to sit before the fires and warm their skeletal frames.

  But the blazes grew high quickly, despite the cold and the still air. They were by no means out of control, but the guards continued to toss thick wooden posts and long strips of fencing into them, until the tips of the flames were dancing high above them, the nearby snow was melting in nearly perfect, concentric circles, and the crackling fires were much too big to cook pots of soup on. Some of the prisoners rushed as close to the twin infernos as they could, rubbing their hands so near the flames that Cecile was surprised they weren't singeing the backs of their fingers. The guards didn't seem to mind. Pusch even smiled and shook his head, murmuring something she couldn't hear to Trammler and the female guard named Inga. In response Trammler smirked, but Inga looked slightly uncomfortable, and it crossed Cecile's mind that whatever Pusch had said had been filthy. A dirty joke of some sort that only men would appreciate. No doubt a joke at the expense of the prisoners.

  Then, however, she saw two teamsters leading the draft horses with their carts full of prostrate women as close to the flames as the animals would venture, and then unhitching the horses from the wagons and walking them away from the fires. If Jeanne had been nearby Cecile guessed she would have reassured her friend that the heat must have felt wonderful to those women, and then abruptly her breath caught in her throat and she had the sense that she would have regretted every word. Because suddenly she knew what was going to happen, and she was starting to tremble. To shake in a way that she hadn't all day, despite the cold. Guards, five assigned to one wagon and six to the other, the men and the women working together, braced their gloved hands and their shoulders on the rear and sidewalls of the wagons and started pushing them forward, the wooden wheels turning slowly at first in the melting snow and softening earth, but then gaining speed so they had a momentum of their own, and then with a final push--she heard the guards exhale as one, a loud grunt that sounded uncomfortably like a cheer--they sent the two wagons into the flames, where these great infusions of fuel (flesh and fabric and wood) sent the tendrils of fire and the spirals of smoke spiking ever higher into the night sky, obliterating the stars and masking the moon. Around her the surviving women cried out and gasped, but the screams--if there were any--of the prisoners being cremated alive in the carts were smothered completely by the roar of the flames.

  Not far from her was a heavyset female guard with mannish legs and shoulders as broad as a wardrobe. She shook her head and waggled her finger at Cecile and the women beside her. "Let that be a lesson to you," she said. "Shirkers and stragglers will be punished."

  Chapter 10

  URI LEANED AGAINsT A WOODEN FENcE, EATING A piece of rye bread slathered with lard, and watched the parade of German refugees pass by. It was endless. Absolutely endless. Old people, young people, families. Crippled soldiers. Many had sleds or carts that they were pulling themselves. The most pathetic were the children, especially in those first kilometers west of the villages. Invariably, the road heading west from every town was littered with dolls and stuffed animals and toy soldiers. With picture books. As the families had packed, the parents had weakened and allowed their little ones to take some toys or books. Then, however, as they began their trek west, they had discovered just how difficult it was to pull a heavy sled or push an overloaded cart, and one by one their children's precious objects had been tossed aside and left to molder in the ratty snow. He actually found himself feeling sorry for these people.

  Though not that sorry. Just last night he had shot a pair of Waffen SS troopers on motorcycles as they had sped past him. Two quick shots. He had no compunction whatsoever when it came to executing anyone he could in an SS or an SA uniform. Wehrmacht?

  Sometimes he spared them, even when the opportunities presented themselves for a clean shot.

  He noticed that long strips of the fencing around him had recently been pulled down and used for bonfires in the field perhaps seventy-five meters distant. The snow was melted in two nearly perfect circles, and there were still impressive piles of smoldering black ash. He wondered if the Wehrmacht had had a field kitche
n here yesterday or last night. Perhaps some of these refugees had actually been given a hot meal.

  Many of the people who passed him were absolutely terrified. When there was sun they expected Russian planes would strafe or bomb them; when there were clouds, they wondered aloud if Ivan would start showering them with artillery shells filled with poison gas. Still, in their minds, being strafed or poisoned was an infinitely preferable fate to being overrun by the Russian army and captured alive: Even some of the children talked with great animation of their families' suicide plans in the event the Russians suddenly appeared before them. Some had stories of schoolmasters and party members who already had done themselves in.

  Now Uri was just about to rejoin the procession himself. If anyone asked, he had orders in his pockets to join an assault group forming in Czersk. The army was going to try, yet again, to open a corridor into Danzig. That attack would fail within hours. Uri had absolutely no doubts. But he also didn't seriously plan to be anywhere near it. Czersk was west, however, and these orders--taken off the body of a corporal whose skull had been crushed just west of the Vistula when an artillery shell had sent a sizable chunk of the road into the back of his head--would get him there if anyone asked.