Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

His father and Oskar emerged from the office, and Oskar greeted his associates. His father noticed him now on the floor and knelt beside him.

“I didn't hear you out here,” he said, and he rubbed the top of his head. “Have you been playing long?”

He had the sense that he would worry his father if he told him that he had. And his father had worries enough right now.

“No. I just sat down,” he answered.

This seemed to make his father happy. He motioned down at the cavalrymen. “The battle of Mars-la-Tour?” he asked.

“I hadn't decided.”

“Oskar reminded me of a book I think you're old enough to read now. It has a wonderful description of Von Bredow's Death Ride and the Prussian cavalry charge. Would you like me to see if I can find you a copy?”

“Yes, thank you.”

Over their shoulder one of the officers was boasting that he had brought honey for the schnapps from the village, and Theo heard a female voice he couldn't quite recognize start to giggle. No doubt, it was indeed one of Anna's friends: She had so many. Another night, Theo thought, he might have continued to move his lead soldiers around the board, alone on the dining room floor, but not this evening. He would join the crowd that would gather in the ball-room. Perhaps if he was unobtrusive, the grown-ups would let down their guards and he might learn whatever it was that Oskar had been about to reveal.

ANOTHER DAY, CALLUM told Anna about his uncle's library in Edinburgh. His uncle was a university professor there, and among the books on his shelves were novels by Russians that he was confident would convince her that not everyone born east of Warsaw was a barbarian.

“I don't think that,” she said. “My mother might. But I don't.”

Still, she was only dimly aware of most of the authors he mentioned. She wondered if their books had been banned in Germany, or whether they simply weren't available in their rural corner of the Reich. The same seemed to be true of movies he had seen, and specific operas and dramas he'd attended. It all made Callum seem almost impossibly erudite for someone so physically imposing and, yes, so young-it was hard to believe he was only twenty-and it caused her to rue, for the first time, all of the things she was being denied.

They also compared the beaches on the Baltic with those along the North Sea, and the castle ruins that dotted their landscapes. She expressed envy for how civilized the winters sounded in Scotland, and he, in turn, said he thought Scotch farmers would be jealous of the soil in which her family grew sugar beets and corn, and cared for their apple trees.

She found herself wishing she had a fraction of the stories and experiences he had, and worrying that soon he would come to find her boring. All she knew, she realized, were horses. Horses and housework. Her father had taught her to ride-and, in all fairness, to ski and to hike-and her mother had groomed her well to be the wife, someday, of a farmer. A gentleman farmer, certainly. A landowner. An aristocrat, even. But, like her father, a farmer nonetheless.

He was completely unlike her three brothers-even little Theo-whose posture had always been perfect at the dining room table, and who seemed to stand with their ankles together and (inevitably) their arms folded imperiously across their chests. Could Werner and Helmut ever be anything but stern? She didn't think so. Perhaps there was still hope for Theo, but already he was being trained to be a soldier in carriage if not, in the end, in profession.

And yet their father was no martinet. He laughed and drank beer and had stories of his own he could tell. He would slouch on occasion. Listen with them to the BBC. Tell jokes about the Nazis, despite the reality that both he and his wife were party members. She asked her father that night if he had ever read books by the Russians Callum had mentioned, and he said that he had. Mutti had, too.

Of course, they had grown up in a different era. A different time. The world they knew wasn't decorated solely with red flags and black swastikas, and a person could still read novels written by Russians.

JUDENJAGD. A JEW HUNT.

Not unlike a fox hunt. You searched for the Jews in the woods, and then you shot them. You shot them if they were mothers hiding alone with their children; you shot them if they were old men oblivious of the roundup in the village and were here in the woods gathering mushrooms. Or, if you didn't have the time or the inclination to view it as sport, you marched them at gunpoint-or with a whip-back to the village. You sat them in the square in the heat of the sun, and you shot the first one who happened to stand up and stretch.

Because, of course, you had ordered them to sit and rising was an act of disobedience.

Sometimes, as they were marched to the square, they would actually call out their farewells to their neighbors. You'd walk them down the street, past the houses with the windows shuttered-the local people always closed their curtains and windows-and you'd hear, Farewell, Edyta. Or, Good-bye, Roza. Or, Zofia, look after my cat-please!

Occasionally, when you were waiting for the last of the Jews to be rounded up, you'd make the ones you had perform-badly, of course-circus stunts. A human pyramid. Walking the clothesline you'd string a few feet off the ground between half-tracks. Basic gymnastics. These little stunts were most fun if you happened to have the rabbi among the lot.

And when the square was completely filled and the Jews were hot and thirsty and weak, then you herded them to a field outside of the town-often at the edge of the very woods where the Judenjagd had commenced. There the men would dig the graves. Sometimes, this talkative, stocky soldier named Joachim continued, taking another long swallow from the bottle of vodka he had commandeered-he was drunk, Uri thought, because no one would tell a person they had done such things if they were sober-you had them strip first so they were stark naked when they started to dig. Then, when the hole was roughly the size of the foundation for a modest house, you would order them to toss their shovels from the pit and lie facedown in the muck.

And they would, they would, Joachim went on, his voice incredulous. They would, they all would, even though they knew they were about to be shot.

And then any of the men who hadn't been ordered to strip and dig would be told to undress and walk into the grave, and they would, too! Occasionally, they'd be told to lie on top of the corpses below them. Facedown. And they walked just like sheep. The women were a little more resistant, especially when they had babes in their arms or toddlers squealing at their shins. They might beg for the lives of their children. But, eventually, they'd go, too.

It wasn't easy work, he said, even though the Jews were never armed. And it was never pleasant. The locals hated the clatter of the machine guns so much that the women would blast the volume on their radios-nothing but static most of the time-so their children wouldn't have to hear the sound of their neighbors being executed. One time, Joachim continued, he had to walk into the pit himself with-dear God-the Ukrainian volunteers (absolute pigs, he said) and shoot the Jews whose bodies were continuing to twitch, and he discovered that he was ankle deep in their blood. There was so much blood, the bodies were actually starting to float.

And so Uri asked him-and he phrased the sentence in a very few words-You did this yourself? They were sitting alone in the kitchen of a house on the outskirts of Auków on a beautiful autumn evening in September, because their company commander was in the village itself, meeting with their major about the withdrawal that was about to begin from this corner of Poland. Not a retreat, exactly, because they weren't turning and running as fast as they could this time. Ostensibly, they were merely pulling back to a more defensible position.