Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

But she disagreed. After all, she still had good shoes. Very good shoes. It was a small thing, but when life was reduced to conditions this primitive and painful and demeaning, the small things were magnified greatly. Moreover, those shoes were her fiancé's hiking boots, a trace of the man that she loved. Certainly the boots were too big for her, but everyone had warned her to have warm, comfortable shoes at her disposal when they came to take her away. And so she did. She had also brought with her a pair of her crocodile dress flats, largely because she couldn't bear to leave them behind. But, thank God, she had. Thank God, she had brought the boots and the shoes with her. The camp had been running low on the clogs they were distributing to the new prisoners, and so the guards who were processing the trainload from France had told Cecile to keep her boots and then given her crocodile shoes to the prisoner nearest her, that secretary from Troyes.

And so while she was astonished some moments that she had survived this long in these conditions-while she was surprised that anyone had-there were other times when she simply didn't believe that she was going to die here. Death was no abstraction to her: She saw it daily. But her own death? She was young and (once) beautiful, and she had lived a life of such perfect entitlement that her own death was almost completely inconceivable.

A CART WITH DESSERTS. A tart. A torte. A small pot with crème brûlée.

The cart was draped in white linen, and the desserts were surrounding a purple vase overflowing with lilies and edelweiss. The secretary from Troyes was beside it in her mind, reveling in the warmth of a dining room in a restaurant in Paris with her mother and father and sisters, until the wind lashed a piece of broken twig against her eye and she blinked. Instantly the vision was gone, all of it.

Still, she stood where she was as the cold rain continued to soak through her uniform and tattered sweater and fill those bizarre crocodile flats as if they were buckets. Her toes were beyond cold; they had fallen numb. When they were inside, she cherished these shoes, and she understood how much better off she was with them than with those coarse wooden clogs many of the prisoners wore. But not today. Today she was as badly off as everyone else.

Normally they toiled in a clothing factory near the camp, but this afternoon they were working outdoors. The pile of dirt before her was not yet frozen, but it had grown hard, and she decided now that she was too weak to jam the shovel into the mound one more time. She simply couldn't lift it, she could no longer bear to place her foot-so frigid that she felt spikes of pain through the sole of her shoe whenever she pressed it against the rolled shoulder of the spade-on the shovel and force it once more into the earth. Her name was Jeanne, and she feared the only person left in the world whom she trusted, Cecile, was at least fifty or sixty meters farther down the track. Too far to help her. Had she been next to her, Jeanne imagined that Cecile would say something-find the right words or the right tone-to give her the strength to help dig out these buried railroad ties for another half hour. Or, if there were no words left (at least ones that could possibly matter), to be with her when she expired.

Because, Jeanne concluded, she was going to expire. Right here, right now. With her back to this damaged railway station, a low building with gray stucco walls and a roof-largely collapsed-of blue slate that looked almost like ocean water. She was going to die right beside this angry, quiet, determined prisoner whose name she didn't know and whose teeth were dropping from her mouth as if they were acorns in autumn. It was a certainty. Every moment she wasn't digging was a moment the guards might see her not working. And then they would prod her to dig more, and-when she couldn't-they would shoot her. They shot girls in the fields all the time in the summer and on the way back from the clothing works in the early days of autumn; she'd witnessed at least a dozen and a half die this way. Why not shoot one more here by the station, where last night Allied bombs had buried the track beneath small mountains of earth? Other prisoners would then dig her grave, which couldn't be any more difficult than trying to do the work of a bulldozer to excavate a patch of railway. And Jeanne didn't want to make work any harder for anyone. And so, she thought, let it all end here. Right here. Fine. It had been too much to shoulder for too long.

She was about to open her cold, gnarled fingers-fingers that once were straight and manicured and, in her opinion, one of her best features-and let the shovel slip to the ground, when she felt an arm on her shoulder. She turned and saw Cecile. Somehow her friend had worked her way over to her.

“Dig. They'll bring us back to the camp soon,” Cecile murmured, jabbing her own shovel into a looser section of soil. “A few more minutes, that's all. It's almost dark. Just dig. Or look like you're digging.”

“I can't,” she said, and she began to cry. She dropped the shovel and fell to her knees. Behind her she was aware that Cecile was trying to lift her up, to hoist her off the ground as if she were already a cadaver. The woman's arms were sliding beneath her armpits, the bones in Cecile's fingers blunt rods against her ribs and the bones beneath her shoulders.

“Leave me alone,” she sobbed. “Go away! Just leave me here!” But she was, somehow, once more on her feet. Cecile reached down and handed her the shovel.

“Lean on it. Really, just lean on it for a moment. Catch your breath. Then shovel a little bit more. That's all. Then we'll be done. You'll see. Just another few minutes.”

Just another few minutes. This was what her life had come down to: A series of small increments to be suffered, brief moments of torture to be endured. A walk across the camp without an SS officer talking to you. Singling you out for… something. A day, one more, when the infections in your feet hadn't spread up into your legs. Another morning when you were able to avoid the certain death that marked anyone sick enough or stupid enough to ask to go to the camp hospital. Another few minutes of shoveling.

Yet she was standing again. And holding the shovel. As if the towering mountain of dirt before her were food on a plate and she were the well-fed little girl she'd been twenty years earlier, she used her shovel like a fork and pushed the earth around like a vegetable that didn't interest her.

“I HAD A CAT,” Cecile was murmuring in the dark of the barracks. “She had tortoiseshell fur.”

“Her name?” asked Jeanne, her voice the insubstantial wisp it became in the night. For a week now, if she tried to speak much above a whisper at the end of the day, she would be reduced to paroxysms of coughing that angered some prisoners and caused others to worry that there was nothing they could do for her. Either way, Jeanne loathed the way the coughing drew attention to herself.

“Amelie. My fiancé loved her. Carried her around in his arms like a baby.”

“Where do you think she is now?”

“I couldn't guess. But she's a survivor. She's alive somewhere.”

“In Lyon?”

“I presume.”

“My boyfriend used to hate cats.”

“What made him change his mind?” Cecile asked.

“He didn't. He died. You know that.”

“You know what I mean.”

“And you know what I meant. He didn't change his mind. That's all.”

Cecile hated the way almost every topic of conversation eventually circled back to grief and death. She had begun with Amelie, her cat, and wound up… here. Perhaps this was why almost nobody spoke in the night. What was the point? “Maybe he's alive,” she said simply. “You don't know for sure he died.”