Skeletons at the Feast

by Chris Bohjalian

  And that, Mutti had presumed, was that. It was a tragic loss, but perhaps it would be the last loss the child would have to suffer. When Theo emerged briefly from the anesthesia, the boy had whispered in a hoarse, soft voice that he hoped he would be able to ride his horses by summer, and he wondered how hard it would be to run with a fake leg. He murmured that those were the things he thought he did best. Ride and run. Then he fell back into the gas- induced torpor.

  Over the next few weeks he seemed to mend, fighting his way back from the agony and the shock and the weakness; he was even hobbling around the house on a pair of crutches with so much daring and casualness that Mutti found herself scolding the boy, reminding him to be careful, to take it slow. Mutti's cousin, Elfi, was telling the child the same things, though it was also clear that she thought Theo's behavior was more impressive than alarming. Together the two mothers even chuckled, briefly, at the resiliency of youth and took some much-needed comfort in it. It suggested to them both that their nation had a future after all, and the children would rebuild what their parents had destroyed.

  By the second week in March, as the sun was warming the rooms that faced the water, it was possible to believe that the worst really was behind them. Yes, the army was losing and the Russians were nearing. But so were the British and the Americans. After five and a half years, the war was finally going to end. Hope, suddenly, didn't seem such a fanciful proposition.

  Then, however, the infection set in. It set in weeks after the amputation, long after they had ceased to worry about Theo's recovery. Oh, they had still worried about his rehabilitation. About finding a good prosthetic limb in a country that could no longer even find coal. Yet even when his temperature started to spike, they didn't begin to fret. It was only when they couldn't bring the temperature back down that they began to grow anxious. When, for three days, they couldn't even get a doctor to come to the house. Finally, they bundled him up and Callum risked everything, carrying the boy inside the hospital from the wagon. But there were no beds available and the staff could do nothing for him. And so Callum carried him back outside and placed him in the wagon beside Anna, and together with Mutti they brought him home.

  Over the last week and a half now he had gone from eating an occasional slice of toasted bread to sipping a little broth to, almost all of the time, sleeping. Three times in the last four days they had thought he was dying or had fallen into a coma. Once, for a brief and horrible moment, Mutti was sure that her youngest child was dead. But then the boy had inhaled and, a few hours later, opened his eyes. He hadn't spoken in half a week, however, and the weight had just melted away. They would moisten his lips with water and soup, keep cool compresses upon his forehead, and gently wipe the sweat off his neck. Everyone was a little dazed by his endurance.

  When he had opened his eyes once more this morning, Mutti had sat up expectantly, convinced that this was it, this was the moment when her altogether astonishing little boy would turn that corner and begin to recover in earnest. But then the child's lids had sagged shut and his breathing had slowed.

  Now Elfi put her head in the door, saw how quiet and still the mother and son were, and then gingerly entered the room. Mutti was sitting in the rocking chair that Elfi usually kept in the sun- room, and so she took the armchair by the window and dragged it next to the bed.

  "You look like you're ready to leave," Mutti said.

  Elfi nodded. She was wearing her gray flannel traveling skirt, her most comfortable walking shoes, and a heavy cardigan sweater she had knit that winter with the very last of their wool. It was thick enough to keep her warm in the early morning and dusk this time of the year, but she could tie it around her waist during the heat of the day. She was also bringing with her a winter coat, because she knew well how cold it could still get once the sun had gone down. She fully expected more snow, and Mutti and Anna had described for her the ordeal they had survived before they had arrived here in February.

  "But, if you want, I will stay. You know that, don't you?" she asked. "Sonje will, too."

  Mutti considered her cousin, her square face with the lines furrowing deep along her eyes and around her lips. Her hair was in that odd translucent phase, no longer blond but not yet gray or white, and it was pulled back tightly now into a bun. She had grown only a little wide with age, in part--like Mutti--because of the deprivations they had been enduring for a little more than two years.

  "I do," she told Elfi. "I know you'd both stay. But you have the chance to go now, and so you should." People had been leaving Stettin ever since Kolberg had been surrounded, and now that Kolberg had surrendered, they were fleeing in massive, less orderly numbers. This was especially true since the German troops had begun to withdraw from Altdamm, just east of the Oder. Elfi and Sonje were planning to leave on what people were suggesting might be the very last train to depart Stettin. It was supposed to arrive around five o'clock, and so Elfi had said that she wanted to be on the platform no later than noon: Although much of the city had started west days ago, there were still plenty of people left, and it was very likely that a crowd was already forming at the station.

  "What will you do?" Elfi asked her.

  She had been thinking about this for much of the past couple of days, as Theo's condition had worsened and she had realized that the boy couldn't possibly travel. What, precisely, would she do? And the answer was simple. She would stay here. Elfi and Sonje would head west, catching a train that would take the two women to the comparable safety of central or northern Germany. What, in any event, was left of central or northern Germany. But they would go and she would stay. She wished Callum and Anna would leave, too, but--for the moment, anyway--they were refusing. They wouldn't leave her and Theo. She thought this was a decision more foolish than noble. It was far more probable that the Russians would hurt the two of them than her and her son. A middle-aged woman and an ailing little boy.

  "Irmgard?"

  She looked up. Since Rolf had been gone, she was called that so infrequently that it always gave her a small start. Sometimes she forgot that she was not simply Mutti. Mother. That she had other guises and roles and personalities.

  "When will you follow us?" Elfi was asking.

  "As soon as we're able," she answered, and the idea crossed her mind that they were just playacting. Going through the motions. They were both pretending to believe that they honestly thought they would be reunited within days. That she and her children and Callum would harness the horses to the wagons and set out any day now, too. Or, perhaps, leave the horses to the Russians and find a train yet. Perhaps there would be another one tomorrow. Or the day after. Then she asked, "Has Sonje packed?"

  Elfi nodded. "We won't wait for lunch to leave. We shouldn't."

  "No, of course you shouldn't," Mutti agreed, and she reached for her son's hand, and when she did she felt a pang dart across her chest. The skin was cold. The very flesh was cold. She tried to control her breathing, to reassure herself that it might just be that the fever finally had broken and Theo's temperature was starting to fall. But she was the boy's mother, and she knew this was different. This was the cold you felt in the extremities when people were dying. When the heart was growing selfish and cocooning for the chest and the head whatever warmth it could offer, and allowing the fingers and toes, the hands and the feet, to fend for themselves. Quickly she tucked Theo's hand beneath the quilt and rubbed it between both of her palms.

  In the hallway she heard Callum and Anna starting down the stairs, chatting about something. A part of her wanted to cry out to them that Theo was dying and to be still. To be silent. To mourn. But another part of her wanted to rise to her feet and order them out of the house. To insist they go west right now with Elfi and Sonje. Because Rolf and Werner and Helmut were gone--she had hoped for weeks that a letter might arrive, but none ever had, not from her husband or either of her sons--and now, before her eyes in this bed by the lake, Theo was leaving, too.

  Instead, however, she sat quietly with Th
eo's cold hand between hers and felt Elfi's dry kiss on her suddenly moist cheek.

  "You're crying," Elfi said.

  "I know."

  "Why don't we bundle Theo up and just bring him with us? We'll wrap him in quilts."

  Mutti realized her cousin hadn't any idea why she was tearing, and she hadn't the energy to tell her. Besides, then Elfi would stay behind with her. She would remain here because Theo's death was imminent, and then she would expect her cousin to accompany her and Sonje. After all, there would no longer be any reason for her to stay.

  But the opposite was true, too, wasn't it? Once Theo was gone, what reason would there be for her to go? She'd have no reasons left to live but selfish ones. It would mean that everyone else but Anna was, it seemed, dead. And Anna had her paratrooper to care for her now; she no longer needed her mutti. No one would. Hers had been a life of service, and now there would be no one left to serve. Soon enough they would all run out of places to run, anyway; there would be no west remaining. Already the Reich was an hourglass, and the enemies were pressing hard against the upper and lower globes.

  "You know we can't do that," she murmured simply to Elfi. "But we'll catch up with you as soon as we can. I promise." At breakfast they had created an elaborate list of all the people they knew and all the places they might go in Berlin, Neubrandenburg, and Rostock. All the places where they might seek refuge and where they might find one another.

  "All right then," Elfi agreed, and awkwardly--because Mutti would not stand up and risk releasing Theo's cold, cold hand--Elfi embraced her. A moment later Sonje came in to say good-bye, too, and to thank her for letting her come with her from Klara's. Again, Mutti didn't rise from the chair or release Theo's fingers. Then she heard Callum and Anna saying their farewells to the two women downstairs, their voices largely, but not completely, muffled by the stairway and the corridor that separated them.

  She presumed that Anna would join her in a moment. Either sit with her, as she did for a large part of each day, or spell her, which she did, too, when Mutti needed to stretch her legs.

  Outside the window she watched a pair of seagulls shooting down from the sky toward the rocky shore at the base of the cliff.

  Then she closed her eyes and rested her head on the pillow beside Theo, praying in her mind that this one child be spared, though she realized that--for the first time in her life--she didn't believe there was anybody there who might listen.

  when theo died, the train with Elfi and Sonje--six cars, each one overflowing with women and children and men who were either wounded or very, very old--was three hours to the west of the city. It was so crowded that many of the passengers had to either hold their suitcases over their heads or balance them on their shoulders because there wasn't room on the floor. It had arrived a little past seven at night and didn't stay long.

  In the morning, Callum dug a grave in a patch of softening earth in the backyard that looked out upon the water. Again Mutti noticed the seagulls. As Callum worked, she recalled once more the grave she had dug by herself in September 1939 for the Luftwaffe pilot who had been shot down near Kaminheim and crashed in their park. The sky had been blue that day, too. Midmorning she had happened to notice two planes in the sky, darting around each other as if they were a part of an aerial barnstorming show, but then abruptly she saw a wide, frothy rope of black smoke trailing behind one. It dipped its wing and then, as the other plane continued to the north, started to plummet like an arrow into the park between the marshes and the beet fields. She'd never witnessed anything like this: A plane was about to crash. She half-expected she would see a parachute emerge and the pilot floating safely through the air, but she didn't, and then she realized that she wasn't merely watching a plane auger into the ground: She was watching a person--a pilot--die. She didn't actually see the aircraft when it smashed into the earth, but she was standing on the terrace and she felt the stones shudder beneath her feet at the impact.

  The small dogfight had occurred in the very first days of the war, soon after their Polish field hands had fled, the workers unsure whose side they were supposed to be on. At least that was what Mutti had told herself at the time. When they returned after the Polish surrender, however, it was clear by the combination of contrition and resentment that marked their attitudes that they had been hoping for a Polish victory. They had known very well whose side they were supposed to take, and it wasn't hers.

  Earlier in the month, almost immediately after German tanks had crossed the Polish border, the Poles had rounded up Rolf and Werner--along with most of the other German men and male teenagers in the district--and were detaining them in the school- house and one of the churches in Kulm. Helmut was not quite thirteen, just young enough that they hadn't bothered with him. And so after leaving Anna and Helmut and little Theo back at the house, she alone had ventured to the wreckage. There, much to her surprise, she discovered that the fires already were burning themselves out. Right away she spied the German's body, even though the cockpit had collapsed violently around his chest and his legs. He was dead and his head was twisted almost completely around so that the back of his skull was pressed against the glass canopy, but he didn't appear especially disfigured. No scorch marks, no burns. She pulled off his helmet and was surprised by how young he looked. Not much older than Werner. His eyes were closed, as if he merely were sleeping.

  Like her Theo now.

  His hair was jet black and his bangs had fallen over his forehead.

  She couldn't bear to leave him where he was. There wasn't anything she could do about the blackened and twisted metal, but she could, she decided, bury this poor young man. In addition, she could alert his family. Let them know what had happened. And so she dragged him from the remains of the plane, aware by the way his legs sagged like great bags of cornmeal that the bones there had probably been ground to a fine powder and that even most of the bones in his arms and his rib cage had been shattered. She could feel long splinters that once had been scapulae underneath his flight jacket.

  Initially she couldn't find his papers, but as she rooted around the pockets inside his vest she discovered them. His name was Hans-Gunther Sprenger, and he was from Leipzig. He was twenty- three. She carefully put the papers aside so she could return them, along with the watch he had in his pocket and the gold ring he was wearing, to his family. Then she prepared the young man for burial. She washed the body with alcohol there in the field and decorated his forehead with oak leaves. She placed a bouquet of wildflowers from the field inside his hands. And all by herself, because she didn't want to frighten poor Helmut who was already alarmed by the sudden way the older boys and men had been taken away, she dug a grave. The soil was dry and rocky here, and it took most of the day. But with only a shovel and her gardening gloves, she dug a rectangle big enough and deep enough for a casket--though, of course, there would be no casket. There would be only a corpse wrapped tightly in sheets. And then in a German flag. She had one hidden among the hay bales in the barn.

  When she had laid Sprenger in the dirt, she said the Lord's Prayer and thanked him for his service. She placed beside the body some of the dials and pieces of the cockpit that had been thrown clear of the fuselage. The combination of the corpse swaddled in sheets and the items she had placed beside it gave the burial an unexpectedly Egyptian feel, she decided. Then she covered the body with dirt, flattened the ground with the back of the shovel, and used a honeycomb-shaped piece of debris from the wing as a tombstone.

  Days later, when the men were back home and the Germans had taken control of their corner of the country, they dug the pilot back up. Rolf and Werner and the wheelwright crafted for him a decent casket, but then a Luftwaffe administrator appeared and returned Sprenger to Leipzig, where he was buried with full military honors. Mutti remained in touch with the airman's family until 1943, but Sprenger's mother stopped writing after the pilot's father died fighting in Italy. Mutti never heard from her again.

  Now, here in Stettin, she placed another
makeshift marker atop another makeshift grave. They had discovered in Theo's bag that the child had brought with him the wire currycomb with the wooden handle on which Helmut had meticulously engraved the name Theo and his birth date and the words Kaminheim's von Seydlitz, a reference to a great Prussian cavalry commander under Friedrich the Second. It had been Helmut's birthday present for his younger brother two years earlier. While Callum was digging the grave, Anna hammered the comb into a piece of timber that was leaning uselessly against the stone foundation in the basement of Elfi's house, and then painted below the comb a line from a Wagner opera the family had particularly liked. The line was sung by a young woman named Senta, but the character sings it before she throws herself into the sea and so it was fitting here on the cliff, and Anna thought Theo would have liked the sentiment more than he would have been troubled by the idea it was a line that belonged to a girl: "Here I stand, faithful to you until death."