Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

“The Russians are doing horrible things,” she continued simply.

“Everyone has been doing horrible things,” he corrected her. “We both know your army was not especially charitable toward the women and children in Warsaw when they finished quashing the uprising there this past autumn,” he added. Nevertheless, he brought her hands to his lips and kissed them. Then he stood up and, much to her disappointment, looked around for his clothes.

“You're not leaving, are you?” she asked.

“I am. But only with great frustration-and only because I would hate to see your reputation in tatters.”

She stood reluctantly and handed him his shirt. She admired his back, the way the muscles swelled near his shoulder blades as he pushed his arm into a sleeve, and how hairless this whole side of his body seemed to be-at least compared to his front. The sheer size of his back and his shoulders reminded her suddenly of Balga, and she tried and failed to suppress a small giggle.

“What? My nakedness makes you chuckle?” he asked, pretending to sound insulted.

“You're not naked anymore. You're wearing a shirt.”

She, however, was still completely nude, and was interested in-and intrigued by-how powerful this made her feel. She felt in command and surprised herself by scooting across the floor to him and taking his cock in her hand. He smiled down at her as she started to stroke it, and seemed about to shake his head no, no, they should stop. He should resume getting dressed. She should start getting dressed. But she could feel the blood engorging his penis and the organ growing once more against the palm of her hand, and he breathed in deeply and closed his eyes, his head rearing back like-again-her horse.

“Aren't you worried about your mother?” he murmured, the words drifting aimlessly up toward the ceiling.

She leaned her forehead against his thigh and looked at what she was doing, at the way the tip of his penis would appear and disappear, a magic hat in the midst of her fingers. “No,” she said, “not at all. At the moment, I'm not worried about a thing.”

BY THE END OF JANUARY, THE FIGHTING WAS SO CLOSE they could hear it, the distant cannonade reminiscent of the soft and airy gurgle the prisoners sometimes heard from the women in the barracks before they died in the night. Almost without exception, those survivors who could still stand found themselves less likely to avert their eyes when they saw the guards. It wasn't that they had suddenly grown bold; it was that watching the transformation of each of the guards was irresistible. No two guards (or officers) seemed to change in precisely the same fashion, but when Cecile thought about it-and she thought about it almost as often as she thought about hunger and what she would do when, finally, she was home and saw her precious Lyon again-she concluded that any day now the Germans were either going to up and flee or they were going to start feeding them. Really feeding them. Caring for them. They would fatten them up so the Russians wouldn't see how severely they had been mistreated. How could they not? Whenever there was no falling snow to muffle the sound, everyone-prisoners and guards alike-could hear the explosions rolling slowly in the direction of the camp. The guards had to save their own hides. There were even rumors that the Red Cross was going to visit, and somewhere nearby there was a train car filled with cans and cans of tomatoes-one for each prisoner-that were going to be given to them any day now.

Meanwhile, most of the guards seemed less likely to fire a shot into the back of anyone's skull because the prisoner no longer could stand, or pour buckets of cold water on someone's head so they could watch her eyelashes freeze solid. Three days passed without a single woman being hanged by the camp gate because her sewing at the clothing works had been deemed subpar. There was one guard named Hedda who made a special effort to ask Cecile where she was from, and then told her how much she liked the French-how she had even visited Paris in 1937. Another guard had seen Jeanne swaying in line one morning, her strength flagging, and secretly given her the sausage that she had planned on tossing into the pile of scraps they gave to the camp dogs.

Clearly, the pace of death was slowing. It wasn't just the absence of dangling corpses at the entrance to the camp. A whole week went by when they were marched back to their barracks after a day stitching SS uniforms at the factory and saw that the guards had felt no need to build a bonfire at the edge of the camp for the corpses. (“At least, they're getting out,” a woman named Rosa had once mumbled to Cecile and Jeanne while they were standing in line, watching the thick, black smoke from the bonfire, to which Cecile had quietly replied, “I'd rather not leave here via the wind, thank you very much.”)

There was a different spirit in the camp. Not optimism precisely: Everyone was too tired or too hungry or too sick to feel optimism. But the sense of dread was starting to lift. The other prisoners stopped ignoring Cecile when she would prattle on about the future, or envying her formidable resiliency. They realized they all were alive-hundreds of them, still able to stand and walk and stitch-and soon the Russians would be here. And the Germans would be gone. And before they knew it, they would be home.

Not all the guards, of course, were discovering suddenly that they were still capable of feigning kindness, or that it might be time to treat their prisoners like human beings. Trammler and Pusch may not have shot anyone that week, but the two men had allowed the dogs to maul one woman badly; the black joke among the prisoners was that the animals would have killed the girl if there had been any meat left on her bones they could eat. And a female guard named Inga had whipped a prisoner because she had tried to be the last in line for their soup at lunchtime. There was occasionally something solid at the bottom of the great metal pots, something of substance, and so there was always some jockeying to be toward the end of the queue. This time Inga had seen the girl trying to lag behind and disciplined her severely. And so Cecile and the other prisoners did what they could to avoid those guards, wondering if at some point their instinct for self-preservation would kick in and they would come around, too.

Consequently, the prisoners were caught completely off guard when they were lined up in the snow one morning and informed they were going to be relocated. Moved west to another camp, one closer to the heart of the Reich. There their work would continue. The war would continue. Some of the prisoners, including Jeanne, had to stifle small sobs. But almost instantly they started to march-no cattle cars this time, they were going to walk west-most of the prisoners in coarse wooden clogs, few with socks, many with feet that were a moonscape of open lesions and raging abscesses. The fortunate had either a cape or a coat or a blanket. A coarse or ratty old sweater. Some had only their prison shirts. They were going to march, they were told, as long as there was daylight.

As they walked for the last time past the barbed wire and the guard towers, staggering in the direction opposite the clothing works, two jeeps filled with soldiers and wooden crates drove past them into the camp. A rumor was whispered along the line that the crates were filled with explosives, and the satchels with detonators and wires. Hours later they heard explosions that were louder than the distant rumbling they'd been aware of for days, and Cecile told everyone that she wouldn't be surprised if their rickety wooden barracks now were gone, if the piles of smoldering ashes-as well as the blackened but not obliterated bones that lay among the cinders at the perimeter of the camp-were buried beneath the churned-up dirt from the center commons. The idea gave her pause, and she wasn't precisely sure how she felt about this: Though she didn't want such unambiguous testimony to cruelty and barbarism to remain on the planet, she wondered if people would ever believe what she'd seen if there wasn't concrete proof.