Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

Still, this fellow soldier named Joachim had grabbed the vodka because he knew-they all knew-that eventually they would run out of more defensible positions and that maniac with the mustache in Berlin would tell them to stand and fight where they were. When Uri had first approached him, he had hoped to discover something more about the Jews shipped east from Schweinfurt because of the man's history with the Einsatzgruppen and the police battalions, and because he, too, was a Bavarian from the neighboring city of Würzburg. Uri had already learned that many of the group had indeed gone to Auschwitz, but some veterans from the First World War and their families had been diverted elsewhere. Some to Theresienstadt in the west, and some to CheBmno in the east. Ostensibly, these other destinations were survivable. At least that was what people said. If his family had gone to Auschwitz, then almost certainly his mother and father were dead. Given the way their health had been deteriorating in their last few months in Schweinfurt, they were probably dead wherever they had gone. But Rebekah? She looked like a fit young woman, and thus was likely to have survived the initial selection at any of these camps. Joachim hadn't known much, but he told Uri that-as far as he knew-at least some of the Jews from Schweinfurt had been sent to work in clothing and munitions factories.

Now Uri repeated his question to this other soldier, unsure whether Joachim hadn't answered him because he was contemplating a response or because he was just so drunk that he hadn't been listening. And so Uri asked again: You did this yourself?

This time Joachim looked him squarely in the eye, and after a beat nodded. And so Uri shot him. He reached for his pistol and blew a hole the size of an orange into the part of Joachim's face where there once had sat a jowly cheek and a champagne cork of a nose, sending the body tilting backward in the chair and onto the floor.

Uri stood, contemplating for a moment whether to bury the body, but then decided there wasn't a reason to bother. The front was unstable and the Polish partisans were taking greater liberties all the time. Other than in Warsaw, where the uprising was being smothered with barbarous ease, the Germans were too busy trying to consolidate their lines and keep the Russians at bay to waste any manpower on the partisans here near the front. And so whenever somebody found this Joachim's body, they were as likely as not to assume it was the work of the partisans. Or the Russians.

Or, perhaps, some reservist named Henrik Schreiner.

Once more Uri would flee, leave this role of Henrik Schreiner behind, and take the name and uniform of some soldier who had just died or whom Uri himself would murder.

Joachim wasn't the first Nazi Uri had killed. Far from it. He wasn't, Uri realized, even the first he had killed in a kitchen.

That distinction belonged to the pair of SS troopers he had met almost a year and a half ago now, within days of the night he had jumped off the train on the way to a death camp.

ANOTHER KITCHEN, another shack. A spring evening, 1943.

Uri was watching the old woman, her back almost parallel to the floorboards in her kitchen, drop the potatoes in the kettle that hung on a rod over the flames in the fireplace. Her mouth was a lip-less, toothless maw, and she spoke a dialect that he was relatively sure would have been largely incomprehensible to him even if the woman had done more than mumble or had had any teeth. She reeked of garlic and sweat and what he had come to believe was chicken shit. He presumed that he didn't smell a whole lot better, though he had tried to clean himself up in the small stream he had come across a few kilometers from the railroad tracks. Unfortunately, the water was fetid with oil and gasoline and he had been forced to use one of his socks as a washcloth.

After the potatoes were in the pot, she looked over at him and motioned for him to help himself to one of the limp, rotting stalks of what he thought may once have been celery in a chipped bowl on the table. A film the color of a robin's egg coated the woman's eyes completely, but she insisted she was not totally blind. Still, she was blind enough that she hadn't questioned him, despite his tattered clothing and limp, when he had told her that he was with Organisation Todt and he was researching the area for a railroad spur they were contemplating. She lived alone with a half-dozen chickens in this ramshackle cottage on the outskirts of the village-no electricity or telephone or running water-and he guessed he would be safe here until she ventured into the small hamlet and told someone there was a stranger passing through. He felt a bit, in this regard, like Frankenstein in that moment in the story when the monster is befriended by the blind old man in his house in the woods.

He thought about how he had always liked that part of the book, and how his sister had, too. His family's copy of the novel was tattered and old, because it was one of the stories the Nazi regime had considered decadent. They had banned it, and so Uri's edition had been his father's when he had been a teenaged boy.

He wondered where his family was now. How he could go about finding them. Whether he could go about finding them. Probably not. He realized he had never been so alone in his life, and the sensation was so upsetting-disturbing both because his family was gone and because he felt, on some level, that he had deserted them-that he imagined if he were a child he would just curl up in a ball and wail. He knew he would never have jumped from the train if his parents or Rebekah had been in that cattle car with him.

The woman insisted that she was, like most of her neighbors in the town, a German who had never fully accepted Polish rule for the two decades between the wars. Whether this was true or she was lying to him because she believed he was a Nazi was irrelevant in his mind. No doubt, she was a staunch anti-Semite. But he wouldn't have given a damn if she were the devil himself, because for the first time in four nights he was going to sleep in neither a cattle car nor the woods. Granted, his bed was a rag-filled comforter in a corner of a kitchen that, he speculated, hadn't been mopped in his lifetime. But he was exhausted and, thus, deeply relieved by the prospect of sharing a nook in this cottage with the rats and the spiders and the balls of living dust the size of his fists. He was grateful to this old woman, and if it wouldn't have revealed too much about his life and put himself at risk, he would have thrown himself at her feet and kissed those gnarled toes with mustard-colored talons for nails.

URI AWOKE THE next morning with the sun, and for a moment was unsure where he was. He thought he must have slept oddly for his hip and his knees to be so sore. Then, when he heard the chickens outside the back door, he recalled the woman, the cottage, and the train. Gingerly he stood and looked around for her, wondering if she was outside feeding the birds. She wasn't. Nor did she seem to be planting potatoes in the rows of mounds that marked most of her yard. For dinner last night they had eaten potatoes from last autumn's harvest, eggs, and still more moldering celery. He wasn't sure if this old woman ever ate anything but potatoes and eggs and moldering celery. Still, he had eaten ravenously. He was glad the woman was blind: His own mother would never have forgiven the ill-mannered barbarity with which he had devoured the meal.

She had an outhouse, primitive he guessed, even by the standards of outhouses, beside the chicken coop, and he was just about to pick his way there through the birds when he heard the voices. Neither, he realized with alarm, was the impenetrable blend of Polish and German and who knew what else that marked the woman's conversation. They were speaking German-his German. Bavarian German. And, worse, they were male.