Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

He peeked carefully through the remnant of what she had told him was her late husband's nightshirt that served now as a window curtain, and felt the hairs on his neck bristle and a wave of nausea rise up from his abdomen into the back of his throat. There approaching the front door were a pair of soldiers in the black uniforms of the SS. They were young and tall and moving with the assurance of predators in a wood in which they know they are the very top of the food chain. A chicken scuttled across their path, and one of the men kicked it so violently that the bird squawked in pain as it briefly went airborne. Uri fell away from the window, against the wall, realizing that they were about to knock, would hear nothing, and then enter the shack. There was no lock on the door, but he didn't believe it would have mattered if there had been. They would have come in anyway, because the old woman must have ventured into the village this morning while he slept, and either ratted him out on purpose or inadvertently said something to someone that sounded suspicious. An engineer with Organisation Todt? Him? After three days in a cattle car and a night in the woods? Plausible if you're seven years old, maybe.

Now one of them was rapping on the door and calling inside. His voice was crisp, businesslike, brutal. And then he heard the word: Judenschwein. They were calling inside for the… Jewish pig. Telling him they knew he was there. They called a second time. Then the door was sliding open-it couldn't swing precisely because of the way it rubbed against the coarse wooden boards that served as the floor-and there was absolutely no place where he could hide, no place where he could run. No train from which he could jump.

And so, unsure what he really was going to do with it, he grabbed the poker that was leaning against the fireplace, the only item he saw with which he might defend himself, and he swung it like an ax into the first of the two men to come through the door, not aiming, just twirling, a dervish with a baton, the wrought iron slamming into the soldier's chest, breaking bones in his rib cage and knocking the wind from him, as it sent him spiraling back into his partner. Uri saw the second man, a corporal, reaching for the handle of the Luger in his holster, but the fellow never had the time to withdraw it. The next half-minute was a blur in which Uri would recall what he had done with only the vaguest outlines: Raising the poker over his head and repeatedly clubbing each of the soldiers in the skull until he had broken through bone and begun to mash the steaming gray and white tissue beneath it into pudding. Using the pointed tip of the instrument to spear the soldier who continued to groan through the abdomen, the metal poking a hole through his uniform jacket and shirt and impaling him against one of the floor-boards in a geyser of peritoneal fluid and blood. Kicking-one final repayment for the deaths he had witnessed in the cattle car and the myriad afflictions and indignities he had endured for about as long as he could remember-both corpses so violently that they bounced on the wood.

When he was finished he stood back, shaking, on the verge of hyperventilation. He heard the noise of his rapid, labored breathing, the clucking of the chickens in the yard, and what he thought for a second was the sound of water dripping. He wondered briefly if the old woman indeed had a pump somewhere that he had missed. Then he understood: A thin rivulet the color of claret was trickling out from beneath the soldier pinned to the floor with the poker and dripping off a warped, sloping timber near the front entrance.

The magnitude of what he had done slowly set in. He had killed someone. He had killed two someones. And while he had to presume that they would have killed him first if he'd given them half a chance-or shipped him off to a camp that would have done the dirty work for them-a small part of him couldn't help but wonder about their lives when they weren't wearing those black uniforms and polished black boots. For all he knew, they had wives or girl-friends; they may have had small children waiting for them somewhere beautiful. Dresden, maybe. Or some lovely village on the Rhine. And while it was merely conceivable that he had just killed somebody's husband or lover or father, it was absolutely certain that he had just killed somebody's son. He had just killed two some-bodies' sons. In addition to snuffing out the lives of these men, he had brought sadness and despair to their mothers. He leaned over the corpses and stared at the mangled remains of their faces, at the pitch of their noses and the clefts in their chins. One had a receding hairline, evident despite the great gaping gouge marks in his skull, which seemed to make him even more human to Uri. The other, his ear dangling by a thin tendril of pinkish flesh to a flap of skin by his jawbone-a leaf, he thought, clinging to a twig in October-had eyebrows so thin they looked girlish.

Imperceptibly, his exhausted gasping had morphed into sobbing, and he fell to his knees and allowed himself to cry.

URI DIDN'T KNOW if the old woman failed to return because she didn't want to be present while he was being arrested or executed, or whether a more prosaic concern had detained her. But it didn't really matter to him. All that counted was that she was still gone and he had cleaned up the cottage as best he could, sopping up the dead soldiers' blood with his own clothing and sweeping their fragments of bone and broken teeth into the hearth. Then he started the hottest fire that he could, hoping to reduce his pants and his shirt and his shoes to ashes, while cremating the pieces of human flesh that he had swept with a broom into the blaze. Meanwhile, he buried the two soldiers in a section of earth where the woman's potato mounds merged with the dirt and feed and excrement of her chickens. One of the soldiers, the one whose uniform had holes in the coat and the shirt, was fully clothed. The other was buried naked.

And when Uri started down the road away from the village, he was wearing the uniform of an SS corporal, and in his breast pocket were the official papers of a soldier roughly his age from Cologne with the alliterative (almost whimsical in Uri's mind) name of Hartmut Hildebrand.

IN THIS QUADRANT OF THE CAMP THERE WERE ONLY women, all of them young and (once) healthy. The middle-aged women and the old women had been separated out and executed upon arrival. So had the sick. But, Cecile thought, when her mind could focus on anything other than hunger, they-the survivors-all looked like dying old men. Small, stooped, dying old men. Bony old men. Their heads had been shaved and the hair never seemed to grow back. Instead they grew sores that never quite healed. Cecile had worried when she arrived and most of her clothes were taken from her-her angora-trimmed coat, her cashmere sweaters-but it wasn't the loss of a skirt or a blouse that had caused her to panic. It was the confiscation of her purse. Inside it were the pads that she needed because she was menstruating. When she had asked an SS guard what she was supposed to do-standing there naked with two small rivulets of blood trickling down her thighs-the woman had laughed at her, pushed her over the edge of a metal table, and then shoved the handle of her riding crop deep inside her vagina. When she had removed it, she had insisted that another prisoner, a secretary from Troyes with whom Cecile would become friends, lick off the blood.

“Eat, eat,” the guard had ordered, “it's the most nutritious food you'll get here.”

Since then Cecile had stopped menstruating. Most of the prisoners had. Here she was a twenty-three-year-old woman from a wealthy family in Lyon, and she hadn't had her period in five months. And, obviously, she wasn't pregnant. She hadn't seen her fiancé since he had been taken to a forced-labor unit over a year ago, and now she was being told by the other prisoners that she should give up hope that she would ever see him again. Even if somehow he survived-she told everyone that although he was an accountant, he was strong and in impeccable physical condition-they said that she wouldn't. They said that none of them would.