Skeletons at the Feast

by Chris Bohjalian

  He continued to stare straight ahead, but she saw a small, ironic smile forming at the edges of his--she noticed now--painfully chapped lips. "Oh, I'm just a soldier," he said modestly. "I don't know anything. I just go where I'm told and do what I can. You probably know more about what's going on than I do."

  "I know this," she said. "I never thought I'd be running for my life from the Russians. How did this happen? Is it just that their country is so big? Do they just have so many young men they can afford to lose?"

  He seemed to contemplate this. "I've asked myself that, too: How did this happen? And it seems to me it has less to do with the Russians--the Russians or the western armies, even--and much more to do with us. I think when this is all over, the Germans will have only themselves to blame."

  She recalled how her husband and her brother had talked on occasion about the foolhardiness of attacking Russia--how the Reich had plenty of land and didn't need to take on Joe Stalin. She assumed this was what Manfred was referring to now: the difficulty of waging a war on two fronts. They, the Germans, should have been satisfied with the state of things in 1941 and made peace with Britain. After all, no one had any gripes with the British. Look at Callum. Or the other POWs they had had working for them on the farm through the autumn. Good boys, fine young men. It didn't make any sense at all to be at war with Great Britain.

  "Yes, we just don't have the manpower," she murmured, hoping she sounded both agreeable and wise.

  "Well, we don't. But that isn't what I meant. I meant we haven't exactly been a civilized empire ourselves. The answer to your question, 'How did this happen?' It's actually pretty simple. We asked for it."

  She thought of how long and thin his face was, and how much he had probably suffered. It was as if he had emerged whole from an El Greco canvas, just walked into the world from the frame.

  "I've heard that our armies behaved badly sometimes," she said simply. "But then I think of soldiers like you or Werner. Or Werner's friends. We had naval officers at our home in the fall, and they were nothing but gentlemanly. We played music together, they danced with my daughter and her friends. All completely civilized. And so I have to ask: Who? Who then are these German soldiers who have done the things people whisper about? Where are they?"

  "I've met some. And it's not just the soldiers. It's the whole German people."

  "Who have you met?" she asked. "What have you seen?" She realized that she sounded like a devastated child: a girl who has just learned there are no such things as fairies. Instantly she regretted the tone and tried to reclaim a semblance of dignity. "Tell me, please. I want to know."

  He shrugged. "The eastern front is more barbaric than the west, I'll admit that. But there have been atrocities everywhere. And the worst has had nothing to do with the front lines. It's what we have done behind the lines. Behind the barbed wire."

  "The work camps? Yes, I've heard stories about them. But I'm sure they're exaggerations, aren't you?"

  "I'm not sure of that at all."

  "Have you been inside one?"

  "No. But once . . ."

  "Please. I can bear it," she told him. "I seem to have lost my home and virtually everything I've ever owned. I'm a strong woman, I assure you."

  "Once," he said, "I was on a train." His voice had taken on an uncharacteristically somber cast. "It was filled with Jews being sent east."

  "You were a guard?"

  "No, I wasn't a guard. I was simply a courier. I was bringing some papers to a general in the east. The jeep I was in was strafed and the driver was killed. But I heard a train coming and it was going in the right direction, and so I hitched a ride. There I saw firsthand how we were treating the Jews. It was disgusting. Shameful. Old people, children--everyone--were just jammed into cattle cars. No water, no food, no bathrooms. Inside there they were dying. Literally: They were expiring."

  "No."

  "Yes."

  "Maybe they were criminals."

  "The children? The old people? You know that's not true."

  "But why would we do that? That's what I don't understand. What could possibly be gained from killing the Jews? It doesn't make sense."

  He stopped walking, halting the horse, and stared at her. His eyes seemed sympathetic and kind, and she couldn't decide if he felt guilty for sharing with her what he had seen, or whether he was baffled by how little she knew. Perhaps it was a little of both.

  Behind them, on the other side of their wagon, she heard Anna calling out, asking if she was all right.

  "We're fine," Manfred shouted back, but Mutti felt his gaze holding her in place. Then, his voice much softer, he said only to her, "No. It doesn't make sense. It makes absolutely no sense at all."

  in the middle of the night, Uri awoke and told Callum--who heard him rise--that he was going outside to have a cigarette. They were camped on the floor inside a village gymnasium with perhaps two dozen other refugees, all of whom were asleep at the moment.

  Callum had said he would join him, but Uri had insisted that he remain here with the women and Theo. You just never knew. And then he walked as quietly as he could in his boots over the sleeping women and children, offering a hearty Heil Hitler as he exited the gym to the ancient policeman with a Volkssturm armband who was nervously patrolling the streets.

  They were near a train station, and Uri had learned that one of the ways he could slow the ovens was to slow the trains. And so he lit his cigarette and strolled casually there: The village was largely deserted this far east, but he knew there were still trains passing through here going north and south. He'd heard one of those vexing whistles only an hour ago.

  When he arrived, he saluted the two guards. They chatted briefly about the state of the war--the pair were noncommittal, unsure who he was and whether he might be the sort who would turn them in if they said something defeatist--and how, at the very least, the trains were still running. Yes, they were slowed by air strikes, but they were still on the tracks and that was testimony to how much fight the nation still had left. He agreed and offered each of them one of the precious cigarettes he had gotten from Callum. They accepted. And then, as they were lighting them, he shot them both. Two quick shots, into the base of the skull of the first and into the face of the second, because that second soldier had turned, stunned, at the sound of the blast. Then Uri had gone inside and shot the fellow who was, apparently, in charge of marshaling the trains onto the proper tracks: It was possible, he saw, to switch and cross the cars onto parallel tracks at this particular station.

  He wouldn't have blown up the tracks here, even if he'd had any explosives--which, other than a pair of potato-masher grenades, he didn't. That sound, far louder than three quick shots from his Luger, would have alerted any troops that happened to be nearby. Besides, he didn't have to tear up the tracks to sow a little chaos. Not here. He could stall the trains for hours while the engineers tried to figure out which tracks their cars were supposed to be on; with any luck, one might derail. Now that would gum up the works.

  Outside he heard voices and the sound of heavy boots on the cobblestones on the street. Already soldiers were coming. And so quickly he ducked out the back door and disappeared into the dark behind the station. Then he started toward the gymnasium, moving--as he did often in the night--with a speed and a silence that once he wouldn't have thought possible.

  at dawn, Anna traded one of her gold earrings to an elderly woman in the village who rumor had it had potatoes and sausage and bread for sale. They still had apples and sugar, but they had boiled the last of their beets the night before and finished off their remaining tins of canned meat: Their small party had eaten some and given the rest to a young mother and her children who said they hadn't eaten all day. Mutti had been surprised by how quickly their food was disappearing, but they had been generous both with strangers and with themselves. Now Anna bartered with this crone as she stood on the stone steps before the woman's front door. She still had a necklace and bracelets, and she knew that her mother
had jewelry as well. Nevertheless, this gold earring was half of a pair that had belonged to her grandmother, and it was the last piece she owned that once had been worn by Kaminheim's original matriarch. The earring was the shape of an oak leaf.

  "You have horses?" the woman asked, her voice affectless and cold, when she handed over a half-dozen potatoes that were sprouting eyes the color of dried paste and starting to soften and shrivel with age. Her face was hard-bitten and lined, and her silver hair was hanging lank and unwashed. Anna had heard that she had a husband who couldn't walk, but supervised the transactions from a room near the entrance to the house with a loaded gun in his lap. She had told Mutti none of this.

  "We do."

  "I have apples."

  "We have apples, too. A few anyway. We have apples and oats," she said, smiling in a way that she hoped appeared friendly. "We used to have an orchard."

  "I'll save my apples for someone else then."

  "What about the sausages and the bread?"

  "Sausages?"

  "I gave you the earring. You were supposed to give me some sausages and a little bread. Isn't that what we agreed?"

  The woman seemed to think about this. Then: "Very well," she said, and she shut the front door and disappeared back into the house. Anna waited a moment and then knocked. No one answered and so she rapped her fingers against the door once again. This time when no one came back she felt a swell of umbrage and offense rise up inside her: She realized that she had parted with her grandmother's earring, and all she had to show for it were a half-dozen mealy potatoes. A part of her comprehended perfectly well that adding a few sausages to the transaction would have made it no less demeaning and exploitive in the long run, but her resentment was tangible: As real as the ice and the snow, as concrete as the soreness in her back from sleeping last night on a gymnasium floor. As painful as the blisters on the sides of her feet. And so she banged her fist hard on the door twice and swore. Used words she had never before spoken aloud. She might have made a scene right there on the street, staying and swearing at the couple through the heavy wooden door that separated them from her, but her family was waiting. They were supposed to keep moving. And so she turned and started back, not completely sure why this small injustice was so affecting, but unable to stop shaking as she walked.

  n theo took one of their last apples and was feeding it now in slices to Waldau, his favorite, as Anna and Callum started harnessing the other two animals to the wagons. Waldau would be next. Theo liked the feel of the horse's coarse tongue on his open palm as the stallion pulled the fruit into his mouth.

  In the last few months, even soap had become scarce and they had had to bathe with a putrescent-smelling cleaner that was made from animal bones and lye, and its stench reminded Theo of the swamp. He knew if one of their horses ever got ill and died, the family would have eaten its meat and made soap from its bones. The whole idea had made him a little queasy. Making soap out of Waldau? Eating meat that had once been Bogdana? He would sooner starve. He would live without soap.

  One day in school, Fraulein Grolsch had demanded that all of the students try on a gas mask, because there were rumors that the Allies were going to start gassing them: either the Russians with long-range artillery shells or the Yankees and Brits with bombs they would drop from their airplanes. There were only two masks for the entire class, however, and so the children had taken turns pulling the devices over their faces and hoisting the thick rubber bands behind their heads. Invariably, the bands had pulled at their hair and some of the girls had shrieked for attention, and no one had found it easy at first to breathe through the filter. Theo recalled now how he had asked--yet another stupid, unthinking thing he had said that had further diminished him in the eyes of his classmates--if the government would be giving them masks for their animals. The students had all gotten a real belly laugh out of that one. He hadn't honestly expected that anyone had bothered with such a thing, and he was really just thinking aloud. Imagining. But it hadn't struck him as a completely nonsensical idea, because this was farm country and the horses were critical to the farms. And he knew that in the First World War they had made gas masks for horses. After all, if you could convince a horse to wear a bridle and a bit, was it really such a stretch to expect the animal to don a mask, too? Apparently not. And if there were going to be masks for animals, Theo would have been sure to tell his parents so that they could get ones for all of their horses.

  "Theo?"

  He looked up; it was Anna.

  "We should hurry."

  He nodded and led Waldau to the second wagon. No one had told him why they must hurry, but he had overheard Anna and Mutti talking and so he knew. It wasn't just the Russians. Last night someone had assassinated two Wehrmacht soldiers near the train station and then murdered the stationmaster. As a result, two trains that had been traveling in the night had taken the wrong tracks and collided. They had all heard the noise and presumed at the time it was an Allied bomb. One of the trains, the one moving northwest, was filled with refugees; the other, traveling southeast, had been filled with soldiers. The trains had been approaching the station so neither had been moving quickly. Nonetheless, there were injuries, a few as serious as concussions and broken bones. And for the time being the saboteurs had succeeded in clogging this stretch of track.

  As he stood high on his feet to lift the bridle over Waldau's head he felt an unexpected twinge in a toe and grimaced. Still, he whispered into the great horse's ear, "You will never be eaten and you will never be gassed. I promise."

  "so, you've always been here on the eastern front," Callum asked Manfred as they walked along a quiet stretch of road. There were other refugees, but for the moment they seemed to be bobbing almost leisurely between the waves and once more Callum was grateful to be on his feet.

  "I have."

  "Is it as frightful as everyone says?"

  "I think so. But this is my first war, so I don't have a lot to compare it to," Manfred answered, and he smiled.

  "Everyone presumes the eastern front is much more horrific than either France or Italy. I take that implication as a compliment."

  "Because it suggests you and your American allies are so civilized?"

  "Precisely," he replied. It was true, they were civilized. He was sure of that. He and his mates had a much higher regard for human life than either the Russians or the Germans. The western Allies were, he imagined, every bit as brave as these other people. But they were also less likely to kill--or be killed--senselessly.

  "Well, we're all nastier on this side of Europe," Manfred told him. "Trust me: If your parachute had landed over here, we wouldn't have taken you prisoner."

  Callum thought about this and listened to the sound of the horses' hooves behind them. Their metronomic clopping made him think of a clock, and he tried to place in his mind precisely where he was a year ago now. Then two. Then three. He saw himself once again as a student and recalled the face of Camellia. "You married?" he asked the corporal.

  "I am not."

  "Girlfriend? Fiancee?"

  "Neither."

  Anna was on the driver's box on the wagon behind them. She must have heard what they were saying, because she called out to them now, "Manfred is just a warrior." She was teasing him, a small swell of sarcasm in her voice. "He is one of those German men who have too much knight in their blood. I know the type well."

  The corporal turned back to her and said, "Now for all you know, I was a mild-mannered young lawyer before joining the army. Or a docile schoolteacher. For all you know, I am actually an extremely peaceful person."

  "All right then," Callum said, and he clapped the man on the shoulder good-naturedly. "What did you do before the war? We're all ears."

  "Do you know what you remind me of?" Manfred asked him instead of answering the question.

  "Absolutely no idea. Haven't a clue."

  "A Saint Bernard. That's what you are. A very big dog. The sort of creature that hasn't figured out yet that he
has ham hocks for paws. Wants to jump on the couch, even though he's the size of a pony."

  "Quite through?"

  "All done."

  "Well, I was expecting much worse," he said. And he was. "I rather like big dogs with favorable dispositions."

  "You didn't tell us what you were doing before the war," Anna pressed the soldier.

  "I say he was a lawyer," Callum told her. "It was the first profession that popped into his head a moment ago." He turned to Manfred: "Am I right?"

  "No."

  "A schoolteacher then? Really? I wouldn't have guessed it."

  "You will be disappointed."

  "Dear God, you weren't a student were you?" he continued. "Have you been in the army that bloody long?"

  "I worked in a ball-bearing factory."

  "Well, that's honest work. Why would I be disappointed?"