Skeletons at the Feast

by Chris Bohjalian

  "When did they start hating us?" a woman named Eve asked her aimlessly.

  "They've always hated us," said Leah, a seamstress from Budapest who had only arrived at their original camp the previous autumn. "Even when I was a little girl, my friends all called me the Dirty Jew. My friends! Hitler simply made it acceptable to kill us."

  Behind them they heard the sound of a hard, vicious slap and re- flexively turned. There they saw the old man who had tried to give them the pork chop on his hands and knees in the mud by the side of the road. Standing over him, shaking his head in disgust, was the one-eyed guard named Blumer.

  it was an almost idyllic existence compared to the other camp, and so most of the women knew it couldn't last--even Cecile. They had spent not quite six weeks here. Now the Soviets once again were approaching, and when the wind was right they could hear the periodic cannonade. As they walked to and from the factory, they saw the locals in the village either packing up wagons and carts to leave themselves or lining up in a park with a gazebo to drill with a group of Waffen SS. There the new recruits seemed to be learning to fire small arms and throw grenades, and sometimes Cecile guessed the explosions the women heard when they were inside the factory were merely a part of the training.

  Still, they knew they were going to leave here soon, and they did. Usually they were awakened by a piercing, trainlike whistle at five thirty, but one morning the whistle went off closer to four thirty and they were roused from their beds and informed they were leaving that very moment for a different factory. They might stop for breakfast in a few hours, but only if they made sufficient progress.

  And so once again they were walking, marching that morning in a direction that she thought was actually more northern than western. She was grateful she had her hiking boots and she presumed Jeanne was appreciative of the dress shoes she had given her. Yes, their shoes were falling apart--both pairs--but they were still better than those wooden clogs so many of the other prisoners were forced to wear. And while the sun hadn't risen and the air was brisk, it was infinitely more endurable than the march on which the group had been taken in late January and early February. No one knew for sure, but Cecile guessed at least a third of the group had died in those weeks, expiring in the cold by the sides of train tracks or roads, shot by the guards, or immolated one particularly awful night in great bonfires on wagons.

  uri looked up into the woods, the first buds on the branches creating a small but perceptible green haze around the silver birch trees. The morning sun felt good on his face, and the last of the mist had almost burned off. Today he was wearing the uniform of a Russian rifleman named Barsukov, minus his cap, because the fellow had been shot through the head. Uri hadn't killed him, but he guessed he might have if he had come across the soldier first. He needed a Russian uniform badly.

  The problem, of course, was that he spoke far too little Russian to pass for more than a few minutes if he tried to join the Bolsheviks. Moreover, their army was not nearly the shambles that the Wehrmacht had become; they would expect him to be with the right company at the right time. Unfortunately, yesterday the Germans-- desperate old men and teen boys, and a few SS with mortars and antitank guns--had counterattacked and successfully retaken the nearby village. There was a factory there that made important airplane parts, and the Nazis wanted it back. When he had left an hour ago, there was still a pair of destroyed Russian tanks smoldering in a small park with an idyllic white gazebo, which, inexplicably, was completely undamaged.

  Somewhere in these woods, however, he had heard a rumor that there was a group of armed Jewish resisters. Or there had been. They were living in a couple of caves and an underground bunker, and there were men and women among the group. Supposedly, the Russians had originally taken that village with their help. Somehow Ivan had contacted them ahead of time, and the Jews had blown up the bridge north of the town over which the Wehrmacht initially planned to send in reinforcements, and then cut the railroad tracks that linked the village with an officers' training school to the west. The town's mayor was a maniac, however, and there were just enough Nazi diehards in the area--and, unknown to the Russians, the remnants of a company of Waffen SS--to launch an assault on the Soviets before they could solidify their position.

  In the chaos of the battle, he had melted from one side to the other.

  Now, supposedly, the Jews had disappeared once more into the woods, into their hidden grottoes and fissures and dugouts. At least that's what he thought he had been told by another rifleman--a boy, really, from some icy village near Murmansk, who didn't seem to care that he spoke about seventeen words of Russian. Seemed to assume he was simply an Armenian or Azerbaijani from the Caucasus.

  As he stood now at the edge of the woods, he considered his options. He could try to find those Jews, shed his uniform, and finally become Uri Singer from Schweinfurt once again. Or he could make one last attempt to reach Stettin and rejoin the Emmerichs. Just head straight north. That had certainly been his intention in the weeks since he had left the family, but it seemed there had always been a checkpoint, an artillery barrage, or a couple of extremist (and, at this stage, completely delusional) Nazis in the way. Like the mayor of this village and his entourage who had pressed him into service for their counterattack.

  It surprised him how frequently he had thought of the Emmerichs this spring. Originally, of course, they had been nothing more to him than his ticket to the west. Or, to be precise, Callum had been his ticket to the west. But then something had changed, and he was left wondering: Was he so hungry for kinship and camaraderie that he had grown to like them? Was he that lonely and desperate to replace his own forever lost family? Apparently. Now, here was an irony: The people he felt closest to were the remnants of some clan of Nazi beet farmers from Prussia. A boy, his older sister, their mother. A paratrooper from Scotland who was captured almost the moment he hit the ground. He didn't honestly believe he had any sort of future with this family, but he also found himself thinking about them often. About where they were, whether they were safe. He would recall the impressive way that Anna and her mother and young Theo had managed those massive horses. The way they had endured no small litany of indignities and privations. He would hear in his head Mutti's determination to protect her children--a determination, he knew, that resembled his own mother's. Even that hulking paratrooper seemed more interesting to him now that he had some distance from the fellow, and he recalled instead their long conversations as they walked and the unexpected moments when they would laugh. Certainly Anna saw something in him. Cared for him. Besides, for all of the fellow's size, he was barely more than a boy. How old was he? Twenty? He shouldn't be so hard on the young man.

  Likewise, had he become so unhinged that he thought Anna might be a worthy substitute for his courageous sister, Rebekah? Perhaps. He would see in his mind once again Anna's lovely yellow hair and the elegant curve of her cheekbones. Her face when it was flushed from another day in the cold. The way the smallest things could make her eyes sparkle. He knew the guilt that he felt for jumping from the train that his sister might have been on was never going to leave him.

  Interesting that he felt remorse for that, but not for the innumerable Germans and Russians he had killed over the last two years. He had lost no sleep over their deaths--and had, in fact, felt only satisfaction each time he had assassinated some Brownshirt or SS thug. They deserved it. The whole German people, it seemed, deserved it. But then he would find the personal and the anecdotal in the cauldron. People like the Emmerichs. A child like Theo. A young woman like Anna. The other night he had gunned down two older German soldiers standing guard outside a jail in the village. But what if one of them had been Mutti's husband, Rolf?

  He really had no idea who he was anymore. He had been so many people lately that he simply hadn't a clue. Which, he guessed, was a part of the reason why he was here at the edge of the woods, looking up into a hill in which there were still small piles of snow in the shade beneath some of the trees.
Perhaps here was his destiny. Not Stettin, not the Emmerichs.

  Still, how in the world was he going to find these partisan Jews if the Nazis back in that village hadn't even known they were out here somewhere? Perhaps that young Russian rifleman--rifle boy, if he was going to be precise--had been mistaken, and someone else had blown up the bridge and torn up those railroad tracks. They were right on the border that had separated Germany and Poland five and a half years ago, and in the area there might be Polish as well as Jewish resistance. There were also all of those Russian units eager to be among the first to reach Berlin. Perhaps the boy hadn't realized that his own artillery had taken out the bridge or the railroad.

  He had his German uniform in his knapsack and wasn't sure now if he should dispose of it here. If he did find the Jews--or, perhaps, the Poles--it wouldn't look good if he was traveling around with a Wehrmacht corporal's outfit in his backpack. On the other hand, with the front this fluid it might not be advisable to be Rifleman Barsukov either. At least not for very long. If some fanatic Nazi didn't shoot him, the Russians would as soon as he opened his mouth. How could he possibly explain his bizarre picaresque these past two years to Stalin's NKVD without incriminating himself? He'd killed a lot of Nazis, but he'd killed a good number of Russians, too.

  Besides, did he really want to wind up a Soviet citizen? His plan certainly wasn't to survive this nightmare only to wind up in a labor camp or a farm collective somewhere. Somehow, he had to get west. Which brought him right back to the Emmerichs and to Callum Finella. He would remind himself that the paratrooper might ease his entry into the British or the American lines. And then his internal compass once again would long for the north. For Stettin, where the Emmerichs might still be. If they had any sense, of course, they would have left by now and continued their own journey west. He hadn't heard if the Russians had reached that city yet, but if they hadn't already he guessed they would within days--unless they simply decided to bypass the town in their rush to Berlin.

  Still, would he have lost anything if he ventured north to Stettin and discovered that the Emmerichs were gone?

  Well, yes. Time.

  In the distance he heard airplanes, and initially he presumed they were Russian. But they were coming from the west and so he changed his mind. Probably RAF or American. It wasn't likely they were German. These days the Luftwaffe still had planes, but their airfields were cratered, fuel was almost nonexistent, and it was nearly impossible to find any pilots left who had the slightest idea what they were doing. And so he lit a cigarette and leaned against a tree, waiting, wondering what the RAF 's or the Americans' target would be. He thought it was possible it was that factory in the village he had just left. Of course, it was slave labor working inside there. Girls, he had heard, just like his sister. At this stage in the war, were those nozzles or pistons or whatever they made there so important that it was worth torching the Jewish prisoners assembling them? Of course not. He hoped those girls had left. Been moved somewhere else. He hoped the target was that officers' training school further up the tracks.

  He couldn't see the planes because of the angle of the hill and the trees, but he guessed there were probably a half-dozen. Not a massive bombing onslaught, but not a single fighter or two planning to strafe a couple of horse-drawn Wehrmacht wagons, either.

  After a moment, he decided the target most likely was the town. The engines were growing louder. And just as the bizarre idea was starting to form in his mind that he was the target, a lone man with a cigarette standing beside a birch, behind him he heard an explosion, then another, and the sounds of branches being shattered and trees upended, and he felt himself being lifted off the ground--his rifle, which had been slung over his shoulder, was suddenly twirling ahead of him like a baton and he was aware that he was no longer holding his cigarette--and he was flying as he never had before. Then he landed and the feeling was reminiscent of the experience of diving headlong from that train two years earlier; he might even have hit the ground on the same part of his hip. But he didn't have time to consider this more carefully, because the shells were continuing to churn up the ground and the forest, and tree limbs and clods of earth were raining down upon him like hail, and he could smell the fires that were igniting in the woods.

  He scampered, rolling and crabwalking as much as he actually rose up on his legs and ran, but then he remembered his rifle and scuttled back for it. His knapsack, too. Somehow that had been blown off his back. Meanwhile, the planes were coming back, diving in at the height, it seemed, of his apartment house back in Schwein- furt. He grabbed his pack and felt around in the debris for his rifle, found it, and dashed as far from the woods as he could, into an open field and then down into a deep gulley beside it, aware that his hip was hurting and his hands were bleeding and there was a long red stain forming on his pants.

  Ankle-deep in cold water, runoff from the snow on the nearby hills, he looked back now and saw that the mountain was completely ablaze and the planes were departing as quickly as they had arrived. But against the blue sky he saw the swastika on the tail of one plane and iron crosses on the wings of the others. The aircraft were German. Luftwaffe. He wiped at the blood on his leg and looked at it. Wondered if he was badly hurt. He didn't think so. Mostly, however, he wondered at the lunacy of this Nazi regime, its colossal hate. Here its air force couldn't find the wherewithal to protect Berlin or Hamburg or Dresden. But tell them there were Jewish resisters in the woods near some pathetic town on the border of what used to be Poland, and they could find the runways and the resources to bomb a small forest into ash.

  He watched the creosote plumes rise into the air and obscure a wide ribbon of sky, but he knew the ground was still so moist that the fires would burn themselves out within hours. Still, he wasn't going to wait. Did he need a more convincing or obvious sign? No. He didn't. He was getting the hell out of Germany; he wanted nothing more to do with this country. Ever. And that meant he would limp north now to Stettin. With any luck, the Emmerichs and their Scottish POW would still be there.

  Chapter 17

  THEO OPENED His EYEs AND FELT THE sUN ON His face. Looked up at an ivory ceiling, at unfamiliar walls that were papered with columns of violets. A painting of the seashore, the water- color lighthouse on the cliff looking strangely like a sea serpent to him. It took him a moment to orient himself in this room, to place the bed and the bureau--both the brilliance of fresh chalk--and the window. Windows, actually, because there were two of them, and they were wide and tall. They faced east and north, and one was open just a crack. He thought he heard a ship, and so he understood instantly that he wasn't home in Kaminheim. And then, slowly, it all started coming back to him. The trip through the winter cold with the wagons, the nights in the frigid barns. Being warmed by the animals. The stay at Klara's, the dead Russians. The loss of the horses, the attacks from the air. The shelling. The rubble. And now, he believed, he was in Stettin. Finally. At the home of Mutti's cousin. At Elfi's. He tried to sit up in this bed on his elbows--the mattress was soft and it was almost as if he were sinking deep into it--but he couldn't. He couldn't. It was strange and then it was scary. For a moment he felt a panic at his immobility rising up from inside him, a desperate fear that suddenly he was paralyzed. But this wasn't paralysis; this was something else. It was as if either he were pinioned to the bed or a massive, invisible weight were atop him. And the panic began to recede as quickly as it had begun to appear. He couldn't say why, except that he was warm and he was aware of the smell--and, after a moment, the sound--of the surf, and he sensed it was spring. And so he began to relax. Or, rather, he felt something relaxing him. Eliminating both that sense of weight on his chest and the desire to fight. He heard himself singing somewhere inside him, his very own voice, and it was that folk song he liked about horses and clouds. He wasn't opening his mouth-- he couldn't--but there was clearly the sound of music, and it made him content. Suddenly he had the sense that he was riding atop someone's shoulders as if he were a very littl
e boy, and for a moment he couldn't say whose shoulders they were. But then, though he couldn't see the face, somehow he knew they belonged to Werner. The two of them were on a beach. And there in the morning fog before them was their father, smiling and waving at them as they made their way toward him across a wide expanse of sand.

  He wondered what time it was, but then he didn't care. When it was time to rise, someone would get him. And perhaps then he would be able to move. In the meantime, he would stay here and doze, and he closed his eyes once again. Almost instantly he was asleep, his mind submerging itself in memories of the park behind Kaminheim, and the days he would ride his pony along the trails in the woods, or run back and forth between the seemingly endless beet fields and the house, or eat the delicious jam in the kitchen that Anna or Mutti always seemed to be boiling on the stove.

  mutti watched the boy sleep. For a brief moment Theo had opened his eyes and Mutti's heart had leapt in her chest. It had been days. The child's gaze had seemed to wander all around the bedroom, taking it in as if for the first time. But, in the end, Theo hadn't seemed to notice she was there. It was as if she had been invisible. Or, perhaps, the boy really hadn't woken at all. His eyes had opened, but he had remained asleep.

  Initially, the surgeon had hoped the tissue on his foot and lower leg would respond to treatment--warm water, lotions, elevation-- and he would only need to cut off the toes. But it soon became evident that the foot wasn't responding and was in fact becoming gangrenous. Moreover, it was a wet gangrene, and it was spreading quickly up into the leg. And so instead of cutting away his toes or even his foot, in the end the physician had had to saw through the bone at midshin. The surgery had been performed at Elfi's because the small hospital already had been overwhelmed by wounded German soldiers, and there had been reports of patients with typhus. Consequently, the surgeon had recommended cutting off the leg in a bedroom of the house on the cliff. He was an old man, as accustomed to operating in homes as he was in hospitals.