He hadn't told his mother about his toes, because Mutti already had so much to fret about. His sister had improved, but she was still too weak to walk for more than an hour or two at a time, and she was spending most of the trek convalescing in whichever wagon two of their remaining three horses were pulling. And then there were the rumors of military disasters everywhere. The worst story? A ship had left Gotenhafen, a port beside Danzig, at the end of January and been sunk in the night by a Russian submarine. Nearly ten thousand refugees had been on it, and almost all of them, he had heard, had drowned in the half-frozen waters of the Baltic. The vessel was a cruise ship named the Wilhelm Gustloff, and his parents had once spent a romantic holiday on the boat in 1938, when he had been little more than a toddler. He remembered--or conjured images from stories and photographs--that he and Anna and their brothers had stayed with Uncle Karl and Aunt Uschi while their parents had been away.
He was pleased that Manfred and Callum seemed to be abiding by the rules of some unwritten truce. When Manfred had first joined them, he had simply been grateful that they weren't killing each other. After all, Callum was the enemy. Well, had once been the enemy. He wasn't quite sure what Callum was these days.
"Where will you go once we reach Stettin?" the fellow was asking the German corporal now. The two men were walking behind him and Mutti and Sonje, each of them leading one of the wagons. The sun had been up for almost three hours, but it was overcast again, and the air felt as cold now as it had when Mutti had gently woken him. It had been one of those nights in which he had slept in the wagon beside Mutti because the nearest barn already was overflowing with refugees when they arrived, and when he opened his eyes and emerged from under the blankets and quilts, he saw around him a field filled virtually to the horizon with people. Hundreds of them, and dozens and dozens of wagons. There were also the remnants of the fires that had been built in the night, all started by the men and women only after they had shoveled out holes in the snow and managed somehow to ignite the green--sometimes sodden--wood they had found in the nearby forest. Callum had built such a fire for them. What Theo found most interesting was how many families had arrived while he had been sleeping. Evidently, he had been in a much deeper slumber than he had realized.
Manfred didn't answer Callum's question, and so he turned around, curious. The corporal smiled at him and winked good- naturedly.
"You can't keep this up forever, you know," Callum continued. "Don't you have to be someplace? Isn't your company missing you?"
"I would think you'd be happy I'm here," Manfred said, clearly avoiding a more revealing response.
"I would think you'd be worried about being shot as a deserter."
"Deserter? POW? Maybe they should just hang us both. You watch: When we get to Stettin, there will be a scaffold in the center of town. For all we know, there will already be bodies swinging in the wind."
"You're frightening Theo."
He turned away, but only briefly, a little annoyed that Callum would presume he was so easily scared. "I've seen worse," he said petulantly, and in his mind once more he saw the refugees on the Vistula being thrown into the roiling, frigid river, and the bodies of the Russian soldiers after Manfred and Callum had ambushed them.
Manfred nodded approvingly at him. "See?" he said to Callum. "It takes more than a few hanging corpses to scare Theo."
He had the sense that Manfred was trying to rile Callum. Needle him a bit. They were all getting a little testy. And while he had indeed seen worse than hanged corpses, he also knew this sort of talk was going to disturb Mutti. Already she was shouldering an awful lot.
"Sometimes you people are such . . ." Callum began.
"Such what?" Manfred asked.
"You're such barbarians."
"Oh, you don't know a thing about my people. Or, for that matter, about me." Suddenly, he sounded morose. The irreverence was gone from his voice.
"I know you're not with your company. That's pretty clear. I know you haven't been since you joined us."
"Well, you tell me: What are you going to do in Stettin? Hide in this strange woman's attic? Or just wait on her front lawn for the Russians?"
For the first time Mutti turned back toward the men, and they halted the horses and came to a stop where they were. "You don't really believe the Russians will reach Stettin, do you?" she asked Manfred.
"I don't believe it. I know it. It's only a matter of time."
Theo saw his mother was working hard to remain in control. "Obviously I've been hearing people talk like that for days," she said. "Weeks even. But not you."
He sighed. "Only because you haven't asked."
"Then what will happen? Where will it end, tell me? The Oder? Berlin?"
"Well, my sense is--"
But before he could finish, Mutti was cutting him off. "And why? Why are they doing this to us? Will you tell me that?"
"They?"
"The Russians!" She turned to Callum, her hands upraised to the sky in bewilderment. "And where are your armies? Why aren't they joining us? Don't they understand what's at stake? Where are they? Tell me, in the name of God, where are they?" She was raising her voice in a manner that Theo almost didn't recognize.
"Mutti." The voice was weak but firm, and everyone looked toward it. It was Anna, sitting up in the back of the wagon. "Mutti," she said again.
Their mother shook her head and looked away in disgust. A woman perhaps Mutti's age wrapped in quilts and clutching a silver cage with a dead frozen parakeet inside it passed them; next came a pair of girls in their BDM uniforms with a lady who, Theo guessed, was their grandmother.
"That's enough," Anna went on. "None of this is Callum's fault and none of it is Manfred's. Things will look better in Stettin, I'm sure."
Behind them they heard a man's voice yelling for them to either get moving or pull their wagons off the road. They were stalling the whole column, he barked. And so almost without thinking Theo took Mutti's hand as if his mother were a toddler, and started walking her forward. Moving her and the wagons down the road. Her mother allowed herself to be led and Sonje obediently followed, and once more they were proceeding toward Stettin. He was relieved, though he hoped Mutti couldn't detect the way he was favoring one foot. Perhaps if his toes didn't look better by Stettin; perhaps if Anna continued to mend; perhaps if his mother regained her usually calm demeanor, he might tell her that something was wrong with his foot. But then again he might not. Everyone had so much to worry about, he wasn't sure he should add anything more.
that afternoon, Anna and Mutti and Sonje returned from what was supposed to be a brief foray into the woods to relieve themselves. They had been gone so long that Callum had grown worried and was about to start in after them. But then he saw them, and he noticed that Anna and Sonje were stomping through the snow with sacks dangling from each of their perfectly straight arms. The bags were so stuffed that they were the shape of giant pears, and when the women reached them Callum saw they were filled with carrots and turnips and beets. One even had a loaf of black bread. Apparently there was a farmhouse just beyond this copse of pine--they would all see it soon from the road--and Mutti had traded the last of her jewelry for the provisions. A gold necklace that Rolf had given her on their honeymoon, and her wedding band. It seemed like an awfully steep price to Callum, but they were all very hungry and ate ravenously before continuing on to the west.
uri saw the SS troops at the crossroads, a four-way intersection with a cemetery stretching toward them from the southeast corner, before either Callum or the Emmerichs did, and he knew instantly that he was going to be leaving this family. At least for the foreseeable future. He would have to disappear, and then rejoin them at the home of this Emmerich woman's cousin in a few days or weeks--depending upon the speed with which the front continued to disintegrate. There were four soldiers, Waffen SS in their camouflage uniforms, and two of them were brandishing Bergman submachine guns, smoking cigarettes, and watching the procession. The other two wer
e talking to a middle-aged couple, reviewing their identification papers. The man, whose hair was graying and thin, was at least fifty, and yet he was nonetheless about to be drafted. There was an open truck behind the soldiers with a dozen pathetic-looking fellows--feeble and frail and some quite old-- sitting or standing nervously behind the rails in the rear.
Without saying a word Uri put his hand up and signaled for Callum and Mutti to halt the horses. Instantly the Emmerichs saw the soldiers, too.
"Get in the cart, Callum," he murmured. "Trade places with Anna." Anna, as far as they knew, had fallen back to sleep among the bags of oats, a snug warren beneath the quilts. They still had a sizable amount of feed left for the horses, because whenever they could they had fed the animals with the hay they found in the abandoned barns where they slept.
"You don't think they'll search the wagon?" he asked.
"No. Mutti, Theo, and two young women traveling west? Seems pretty natural to me. They'll be fine."
"What will happen to them if I'm discovered?"
"After they shoot you? They'll shoot them."
"That's comforting," Callum said, nodding, and he climbed over the side of the wagon and gently woke Anna. Her hair once more was wild with sleep, and for a moment she didn't seem to realize where she was. There was a trace of the cross-hatching from the burlap on her cheek. She stretched her arms over her head, and Uri imagined her waking in her warm bed, the sun bursting through curtains in the window, on a peaceful spring morning on that estate of hers. The image--the entitlement--briefly rankled him. Made him wonder where his own sister was. How she had died. All she had endured before she had finally been killed or succumbed to starvation or disease. He had the sense that Anna had come to like him more than she should given her supposed affection for this paratrooper, though he thought it was also possible this was mere arrogance on his part. Still, there was a part of him that wanted to put his arm around Callum's shoulders and tell him, So, my young friend. Anna's people? They're trying to exterminate mine. Trust me: There's no danger I am going to fall for her. He wouldn't say such a thing, of course. But the idea crossed his mind.
"She looks better, doesn't she?" her mother was saying to him. He feared he'd been staring and quickly glanced back toward the cemetery. There he noticed that the angel on one of the nearest tombstones had lost a wing and the marble at the break was almost albino white. The rest of the statue was ash-colored with age. He looked more closely now at the gravestones and saw other angels-- as well as granite women and men, their robes and sandals seemingly inadequate even for stone in winters this brutal--that had lost their arms and their heads as well as their wings. There were decapitated rock cherubs and sheep. He presumed at some point there had been shell fire here, and under the rolling mantle of snow the ground had been chewed up by the explosions, the caskets splintered, and whatever was left of the bodies scattered like dust along the earth. There probably were other tombstones that had been obliterated completely, the remnants--pebbles and slabs and chunks--buried as well beneath the fresh snow.
"How long was I sleeping?" Anna was saying. Suddenly she was beside him, wrapping her head in a shawl as she spoke.
"Two hours. Maybe three," Callum said from the wagon. "We didn't realize you were in such a deep slumber."
"I was dreaming."
"What of?" This was Theo.
She sniffed at the air, wrinkling her nose in a way that made Uri think of a rabbit. "Werner and Helmut," she told her brother. "But you were in the dream, too."
"What were we doing?"
She smiled at the boy. "We were all at the sea. At that beach you love east of Danzig, and we were all on a holiday. There was a boat in the distance. A big one. Helmut and Werner were dunking you in the waves."
"I'm too old for that," Theo said, clearly disappointed that even in Anna's dreams he was deemed a small child. Meanwhile, Uri was left wondering at the way his big sister had taken the nightmarish story they had all heard about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff and somehow in her sleep generated images that left her content.
"You are indeed, my little love. You are indeed."
"Where were you? It doesn't sound like you were in the water with us."
She paused. "I was sitting on a blanket on the beach. Watching. And the sun? Glorious. Hotter than it ever is in reality, I think. Scorching. The sand was almost too hot for my toes. But I was very happy."
"You weren't alone, were you?"
Anna rolled her eyes at her brother, but Uri could tell that the boy had hit a nerve. "Tell me who!" the child insisted. "Who was on the blanket with you!"
"No one. I was alone."
"You're lying, I can tell."
Uri saw her glance at him briefly, almost against her will. Then she squeezed her brother's shoulders through his coat, pulling him against her. "Big sisters are allowed their secrets," she said into Theo's ear, and--though Uri knew it was exactly the wrong thing to do--he glanced up at Callum in the wagon. The paratrooper's gaze was darting back and forth between Anna and him, and the fact that Anna had looked fleetingly in his direction--rather than in Callum's--hadn't been lost on the Scot. Uri could see the hurt in his eyes. And now, he realized, by glimpsing up at Callum he had made it clear to this other soldier that he, too, was aware of who had been on the blanket beside Anna in her dream.
The moment was broken abruptly when somewhere in the woods in the distance, somewhere behind the SS soldiers, they heard a single shot. "Russians?" Mutti asked him.
"No," he told her. "Most likely a deserter. The SS simply taking care of someone without the proper papers." He sensed Callum was continuing to stare at him as he said this, and when he turned, he saw he was correct. Only when they heard the SS soldiers signaling for the line to move along did the paratrooper finally disappear beneath the feed. Uri decided that when he rejoined this crowd in Stettin, he would have to be careful not to antagonize this Scotsman. He would have to watch what he said, and he would have to stay the hell out of this Anna girl's dreams. Besides, he liked Callum. But he couldn't focus on any of that right now. He handed Anna his pistol and told her that she should not be afraid to use it. Then he asked Mutti for the address of her cousin in Stettin and, once he had it, started to march with authority back down the road. Against the current, against this boundless stream of refugees. Their good-byes had been brief and, in his mind, completely unsatisfactory. But he had to move fast and he had to move as if he had a purpose, at least until he was far, far from those SS goons.
Then, when he had some distance on the checkpoint, he would figure out how, once again, to reinvent himself.
despite the cold, the ground was spongy and soft at the checkpoint, a mix of mud and motor oil and horse manure. Off to one side of the road, opposite the SS soldiers' truck, Anna saw four strong horses tied to the wrought-iron fence that surrounded this edge of the cemetery. Two had their mouths and noses hidden by army feed bags, and two were looking on testily. On the other side of the intersection there was a large mound of debris, clothes and toys and suitcases that families were discarding here. She guessed the suitcases belonged to the men in the truck. But that hairless doll in the torn smock? Or the chipped wooden sword and its matching scabbard? There were certainly no coats or capes, but she saw linens and spring bonnets and picture frames--large ones for paintings and small ones for photographs--with the images removed. Someone had left behind a box that must once have held fine silver, and while the utensils were long gone, the container was still here, the felt lining filling now with snow and clods of mud churned up by people's boots as they passed.
Anna thought the SS soldiers actually looked more tired than menacing, perhaps even a little bored. Still, two of them were coldly pulling almost every male they found from the line and herding them into the back of the vehicle, where the recruits were listening to the music and propaganda--offered at the moment in equal parts--on the Volksempfanger radio that was resting on the truck's cab. The other soldiers, the pair who ha
d been smoking cigarettes, had taken a half-dozen of the men with them to the edge of the forest, and briefly Anna feared they were going to execute the group right here and now. Much to her relief, however, she understood after a moment that instead the soldiers were about to give them an impromptu lesson on how to fire a panzerfaust. One of the soldiers was leaning a ratty piece of barn board with a hand-drawn Russian star against a dead chestnut tree at the edge of the cemetery, while the other was showing them how to rest the small cannon on their shoulders. He was warning them to avoid the flame that would exit the rear of the weapon and spurt easily two meters behind them.
Some of those men, she thought, didn't look fit to work on her family's farm, much less try to stop Russian tanks. They were more likely to kill themselves than slow Ivan's advance. She wondered: Weeks ago had one of those men been her father? An aging veteran of the First World War expected now to do what men half his age--with better weapons and better training--had been incapable of accomplishing? It was pathetic, just pathetic, and she was at once mortified and embarrassed and angry.
Skeletons at the Feast Page 24
