Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

“I do.”

“But how?”

Jeanne sighed so loudly and clearly that for a moment Cecile thought it was the wind. Then: “Because he wasn't like your cat. He wasn't a survivor.”

“What did he do?” a new woman nearby asked. Cecile didn't realize anyone else was listening to them.

“He was a jeweler,” Jeanne said. “He was much older than me. For a while, he fixed the Nazis' watches. Their ladies' necklaces. He hoped that he could protect us both by being useful.”

“How much older was he?”

“He would have been forty-seven this winter.”

Cecile smiled, though she knew Jeanne couldn't see her face. “He must have been a friend of your parents. He was, wasn't he?”

“My parents hated the idea I was with him.”

“Did he fight in the last war?” this other woman asked Jeanne.

“He did. He was wounded twice. He thought it was pathetic how quickly the boys lost this time. He always felt his generation would have fought much longer.”

Cecile thought about this. Her fiancé had fought hard. His whole regiment had fought hard. But one moment the Germans had been on the other side of the river from them, and the next there had been German tanks in their rear and German planes diving upon them and German artillery shells falling among them. What choice had they but to surrender? He had spent nine months in a POW camp before he was repatriated, and allowed, briefly, to resume his accounting practice. Soon after that he had been sent to work in a tire factory, and then-within eighteen months-to the forced-labor unit somewhere in the east. Neither job had demanded his skills as an accountant.

“That was a different war,” she said finally, hoping she didn't sound defensive.

“This isn't even a war. It's just a slaughter.”

“Soon the Russians will rescue us. They're fighting in Warsaw this very moment, you know.”

Jeanne rolled onto her side and groaned. “They're not. That's a rumor. The smoke? The Nazis are just burning the city. Last year they killed the Jews in the ghetto. Now they're killing the Poles.”

“Either way, there's fighting. And the Russians will get here.”

“Oh, God…”

“What?”

“You are always so hopeful. Maybe they'll get here, Cecile. Maybe. But this I know: Unless they get here tomorrow, or maybe the day after that, they won't get here in time for me.”

Cecile reached over and ran two fingers in circles over Jeanne's temples.

“That feels good,” the woman told her.

“Let me tell you a story,” Cecile said, resolved to find a memory she could share that no one, not even Jeanne, would associate with want and sadness and loss.

MUTTI-IRMGARD WAS HER REAL NAME, BUT EVEN her husband now called her Mutti-was decorating a cake for Helmut with lingonberries while the Polish cook was baking bread. The kitchen was warm from the oven, a great iron box as black as the coal that fueled it. The cook was a woman from the village named Basha who Mutti guessed had been pretty once in a common sort of way but hadn't taken care of herself-she probably didn't get enough exercise or spend enough time outdoors-and thus had grown round and flabby with age. Her eyebrows were as thick and bushy as an old man's, and whiter than daisies. She had been with the Emmerichs almost a year now, arriving each day in the morning and staying until dinner was served.

Helmut, along with all the boys his age in his school, had been drafted into the Volkssturm and would be leaving in two days for training in Bromberg. The students had been told that their group would only be defending their district, but Mutti wasn't sure she believed this. And Helmut himself hoped this wasn't the case: In two months he would be joining the Wehrmacht anyway, hoping for the chance to fight in the sorts of faraway places his older brother, the visiting naval officers, and those English POWs all had seen.

“You know Mr. Emmerich will be next,” Basha was saying. “The Volkssturm will want him, too.”

“I know,” Mutti agreed. The cook wasn't precisely trying to start a fight, she decided, but she was endeavoring to poke at those spots that were the most tender. The Emmerichs already had one son in the army and a second now conscripted into the home guard. The idea that the country would take her husband as well was profoundly dispiriting. Mutti feared that she couldn't run Kaminheim on her own, especially once those workers-hundreds of them, perhaps!-arrived to dig the antitank trench. She had just returned from a shopping trip to Kulm, and even with her ration card it had been impossible to get half the items she needed. She felt that the natural order of things-a husband cares for his wife, and a mother cares for her children-was being upended.

“He fought the Russians twenty-five years ago, right?” Basha was saying.

“Twenty-seven. He rose to captain.”

“Then maybe he won't be needed in the Volkssturm.”

“No?” she asked, her voice in that single syllable betraying the small kernel of optimism the cook had given her. Perhaps he would be rewarded for his past service by being allowed to remain home. It didn't seem likely: Everyone was supposed to sacrifice for the Fatherland and the war effort, especially now.

“No. They'll give him some men of his own and put him right into the army instead. They'll send him off to face Ivan,” Basha continued, referring to the deeply feared Russian army with the oddly pejorative nickname some of the soldiers themselves used.

Mutti looked down at the bowl of frosting on the counter before her so the cook wouldn't see the way she had been taken in by this cruel joke. Dangling such a wondrous hope before her, and then whisking it away. Basha should be ashamed of herself. If Mutti had thought it was even remotely possible to find another cook, she would have fired the woman on the spot.

No, she wouldn't have done that. Mutti knew she was much fiercer in her mind than she was in reality. Besides, more days than not she actually enjoyed Basha's company, and the woman's relentlessly bleak sense of humor. Lately they had all been feeling the stress as the Russians had driven the army farther toward the borders of the Reich, and maybe they had all grown a little more snappish than usual.

She found three of the candles they used on the Christmas tree every year and placed them among the berries on the top of the cake. The twins' birthday was still months away, but the candles seemed like a cheerful idea to her. And Mutti desperately wanted something to seem cheerful-festive-right now.

“Well, if the army needs Rolf, that's where he'll go,” she told Basha, but the idea of her forty-nine-year-old husband being expected to fight the Soviet barbarians terrified her. He could still handle a rifle, but he hadn't shot more than foxes and hares on hunting parties in their park in a quarter century. And the weapons they seemed to use now? So different from that earlier war. So much more effective. So much more lethal. “We are all making sacrifices, aren't we?”

Both women looked up when they saw young Theo listening in the doorway. She thought the boy had taken his flat box with his wooden letters into the den to practice his spelling. This afternoon he was supposed to be working on his words and then, when he was through, with his penmanship. Clearly not. He had overheard what they had been discussing, and Mutti could see in Basha's eyes that the woman felt a small pang of guilt: It was one thing for her to torment a person she viewed as an entitled German aristocrat with the notion that her husband was about to be commandeered to fight the Bolsheviks; it was quite another to needlessly frighten a ten-year-old boy.

“Would you like a spoonful of icing?” Mutti asked her son the moment she saw him.