Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

“Even your boyfriend, Callum! I'm telling you, they're all going to be taken away!”

If she hadn't needed both hands on the leather reins, she thought she might have slapped him for that remark about the Scotsman. She'd never hit her brother before, but there was always a first time. “He's not my boyfriend,” she said simply, allowing a little sharpness into her tone.

Theo looked away. He didn't believe her, but clearly he had no plans to argue about this. Whether Callum was her boyfriend was the least of his concerns. “They're almost done with the harvest,” he went on, an apparently helpful clarification on his part.

“Who was Father talking to?” she asked.

“I don't know.”

“The agriculture minister? The commandant of the prison camp?”

“I said, I don't know.”

“Well, just because the harvest is finished doesn't mean Father can run Kaminheim with only you and me and Mutti to help him. He certainly can't. And-”

“And Father will be gone, too!” Theo snapped, turning back toward her. “It will just be the three of us! That's what I mean: I'm going to have to be the man of the house!”

She felt herself growing a little exasperated, and offered a litany of the different men from the village-the farrier, the veterinarian, the logger, the mechanic, the handyman, the chimney sweep-who would appear periodically at the estate.

“Have you seen Mr. Schenck lately? Or Mr. Lutz?” Theo asked, referring to the veterinarian and the mechanic.

“No, of course I haven't. We haven't needed them.”

“They're gone!”

“What do you mean they're gone?”

“I heard Father! Mr. Schenck is in the army now and Mr. Lutz has been taken to some factory in Germany. They're taking everybody!”

The contentment-the outright happiness-she had been experiencing at the horse barn had evaporated completely, along with the final vestiges of the morning fog, and she spurred Balga forward. Behind her she heard Theo urging on Bogdana. She realized she would have to slow her own horse when they reached the apple orchard so Theo could catch up to her before they returned to the grounds, and this only annoyed her further.

THE WORKERS FROM ORGANISATION TODT NEVER CAME. The long, meticulous lines the naval officers had scratched into the eastern edges of Kaminheim slowly disappeared beneath wind and sleet and the winter grasses that sprung up even as the days grew despairingly short and the temperature in the evenings fell below freezing. There would be no deep crevasses gouged from the clay, no strategically placed gun emplacements, no firing pits from which anyone-boys closer in age to Theo than Helmut-might discharge their panzerfausts in desperation at stalled Russian armor.

No one from Todt called or wrote to tell the Emmerichs why, but as October faded along with the sunlight into November, they all presumed there simply weren't enough men. Apparently, there weren't even enough prisoners. The dike that was the Greater Reich was collapsing in so many spots, there were so many breaches on so many fronts, that the need to construct an antitank trench in their corner of the district was all but forgotten. Anna told Theo that the reason the trench wasn't being built was that it was no longer necessary: Their armies were stemming the Russian advance far to the east, and he needn't be afraid. It wasn't true, of course, but it made them both happy when she verbalized the notion, especially now that news of the slaughter in the recaptured village of Nemmersdorf had reached them.

And that news had reached them in every conceivable way the Ministry of Propaganda could imagine. Though Mutti had tried to shield her children from the stories, the tales of rape and mutilation were on the radio, in the newsreels, and in the press. There were leaflets about the slaughter distributed along with ration cards; there were posters on the walls of the villages and nailed to the trees along the roads. The underlying message always was clear: This- this unspeakable brutality, this unparalleled violence -is what awaits our women and children if we don't fight to the death to preserve our precious Fatherland. For weeks, Nemmersdorf was all anyone could talk about.

Meanwhile, the men from the village continued to leave as the weather grew cold. When Father needed the logger to help clear land for firewood because coal was growing more rare than gold, he was told that the fellow was gone, taken away at gunpoint in a truck along with his brothers and son. There was no sweep to prepare the manor house's many chimneys for the winter, and so Werner, home from Budapest in October for three days of leave, found the chains and brushes and spent his few days at Kaminheim climbing over the slate on the peaks and the eaves to clean the chimneys himself. No one in the town had any idea where the chimney sweep had been taken.

Soon after the naval officers left, most of the prisoners and their aged guard were taken away, too, returned to the stalag where they had spent the summer. The one exception? Callum Finella. Certainly there were martinets in the district, such as Helmut's school-teacher, who questioned Rolf Emmerich's patriotism or wondered if he was a party member only because it made it easier to run the business that was Kaminheim; but his farm also produced a great deal of food and he was part of a distinguished Aryan family. He had just enough clout that the authorities heard his plea for slave labor-just as, before that, Rolf had heard the pleas of his only daughter for Callum. She insisted that the two of them were friends and nothing more, and he acted as if he believed her. Mutti did, too. And since the needs of his estate matched the wants of his daughter-since, in his experience, there had to be another man on the farm capable of the heavy lifting that was demanded daily on an estate the size of Kaminheim, even in winter-he had argued convincingly that one of the prisoners should remain in his possession. The presence of the individual was going to be especially critical, Rolf realized, once he was pressed into service.

And that date came in the middle of November. Precisely as Basha, their cook, had speculated, Rolf Emmerich, though forty-nine years old, returned to the Wehrmacht. Not the Volkssturm. The army. Initially, his uniform had made his younger son Helmut envious, since Helmut would have to be satisfied with a mere Volkssturm armband until he turned eighteen in December and would graduate into the army, as well.

No one seemed to care that this meant a POW was left alone with two women, a boy, and a part-time cook on the estate outside of Kulm. No one worried for the two women because, after all, this Callum Finella was British-not Russian. And the Emmerichs (and their friends and relatives on the neighboring estates) had no idea why they were even at war with the British.

Might he try to leave the grounds of Kaminheim and escape? It was possible. But why would he? they asked themselves. If he went west he would only be going deeper into Germany and the likelihood that he would be shot as an escaped POW. And if he went east? Dear God, no one went east. All that was east were the Russians.

CALLUM HAD JUST wedged the hay bale against the barn wall and was starting down the stairs from the loft when he heard the boy singing. Theo's voice hadn't begun to change yet, and so it was still a lovely soprano. He was singing a folk song, something about a horse and some clouds, as he was mucking the stalls. For a long moment Callum stood perfectly still on the wooden stairs, listening to the child. He had studied French and German in school and had learned a fair amount more since he'd been taken prisoner-most in the last few months under Anna's tutelage-but he was still not completely sure what the song was about. When he finally moved, the step groaned loudly and Theo heard him and went quiet.