Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

He looked now at the books and the shirts and sweaters and underpants he had folded on his bed. At the long pants. No short pants, not on this trip. That, he guessed, was the one consolation to leaving home in the winter. He hated short pants. When he was wearing them, it reminded everyone that he was a boy and his legs were thin. Pathetically thin. So thin that the other children invariably made fun of them-as if they needed one more reason to tease him or hurt his feelings. Still, even without the short pants he had no idea how he could possibly bring everything with him that Mutti had said he must pack. Just no idea at all.

WHEN ANNA HAD FINISHED packing and she knew that her parents and her brothers were in their rooms for the night, she crept silently to the maid's room where Callum slept. The house's front door had been open so often during the day and evening as they had traipsed back and forth to the wagons that the downstairs was frigid, far colder than the bedrooms upstairs-especially her room, which had had a small blaze burning in the fireplace for the last couple of hours. The air was far from arctic, but she found herself pulling her robe tightly around her.

“Is my family trying to freeze you to death?” she asked him, kicking off her slippers and crawling beside him beneath the quilt on the slim bed as quickly as she could. He was still awake, too, since he was expecting her. Normally the room was warmed slightly by the stove in the kitchen, but they had been so busy organizing and packing that evening that Mutti had instructed Basha simply to create a buffet from whatever was left in the icebox. Apparently, there had been nothing worth heating up, and Basha had never lit the stove.

“Don't tell me a little ice on the windows is too much for a Daughter of the Reich,” he murmured, teasing her and pulling her against him. He was wearing Werner's woolen long underwear, and even in the dark she could tell that it was far too small for him. She ran her toe along his leg and realized that the ankle of the underwear was stretched tightly around his shin. Reflexively she ran her fingers down his sleeve and discovered that the wrist of the long underwear was at least two inches up his forearm.

“How can you breathe in this outfit?” she asked him.

“Oh, I'm fine. I was actually wearing considerably more layers until a few moments ago.”

“Well, if you think you have any chance of convincing me to remove one single article of clothing, you are mistaken.”

“You've already taken off your slippers.”

“And that's going to be all, I assure you.” She curled her hands into small balls and pressed them between their chests. She heard a mouse racing along inside the exterior wall, and couldn't imagine how a creature that tiny could survive in cold this severe.

“Ah, but you're here,” he whispered, and she thought about this-how her entire world was starting to collapse, and that she had chosen here, this thin mattress, on which to take solace. They didn't even know where they would be sleeping tomorrow night. After a moment she nodded. “Are you warm enough?” she asked him. “I was kidding a minute ago when I mentioned my family. But maybe you should be sleeping upstairs.”

“I'm all right. Really, my sweet, I am. But you don't need to stay here. I'm flattered you've come to the icebox to join me, but I think you should savor a few hours of sleep in your bed. Tomorrow will be here before you know it.”

She hadn't considered how long she was going to stay. There was no question that she would be in her own room when Mutti would come for her at dawn. But she hadn't decided whether she had come downstairs to hold him briefly and kiss him good night, or whether she might stay longer. Before her father and Helmut had returned, she had come here with some frequency. Now? It was a considerably more risky endeavor.

“Of course, I never slept the night before a jump,” he went on. “Even the practice jumps.”

“It must be terrifying to jump from a plane. I've never even flown.”

“It wasn't the fear of getting killed that kept me awake. After all, on the practice runs there was no one shooting at you. It was the fear of botching the jump in some fashion-in some fashion that would be embarrassing or might complicate the whole affair for your mates. And I worried about how I would respond during the actual fight.”

“From what you've told me, you responded just fine,” she said, though the truth was that he had told her almost nothing. Like Werner, he shared with her only the most basic, unembellished details-and not particularly many of them, at that. It wasn't that she was the enemy and he had secrets to protect; it was merely that he was a soldier and soldiers, even young ones such as Werner and Callum, didn't seem to want to discuss what they had seen and done. And so all she really knew was that he hadn't shot anyone-at least that's what he had said. And that he had spent most of his time on the ground the night of the jump in a swamp, while the woods around him were on fire because another plane had crashed there. Whenever she envisioned that Allied plane, she thought of the Luftwaffe fighter that had been shot down over Kaminheim, and the dead pilot in the wreckage in the hunting park. Nevertheless, she hoped that someday she would get to see the world from an airplane, and she told him that now.

“It's overrated,” he said.

“Really?”

“Well, it is if you're a paratrooper. No windows. Bad seating. Most blokes spend a good part of the ride either vomiting or trying not to vomit. Airsickness and terror: a mighty bad combination.”

“Maybe if you had a comfortable seat and a window.”

He rose up on his elbow now and looked down at her. She could see his face in the light from the candle on the windowsill, and he was smiling at her. “Maybe,” he said, the two syllables oddly wistful. Except that he was smiling.

“Your face doesn't match your words,” she said.

“What?”

“You sound sad. But you look happy.”

He seemed to think about this, but only briefly. And then, instead of answering her, he bent toward her and kissed her, his lips soft and his tongue tasting slightly of candy cane-probably from one of the very last treats they had remaining from Christmas. His fingers started to inch under her robe and against her nightgown, and then they were grazing her collarbone and her neck. They were oddly, surprisingly warm, and suddenly the layers of flannel separating their bodies seemed a barrier that was at once considerable and frustrating: She loved him and who could say when they would ever get to lie together like this again. She wanted to feel his skin against her skin, the cold be damned, and she wanted to feel him running his fingers over her nipples and holding her breasts in the palms of his hands. She wanted to feel him inside her. And so she sat up and pulled her nightgown over her head, and he followed her lead and climbed from her brother's long underwear. She had planned on leading his fingers to her breasts, but already his hands were there, and she felt a shiver as they started to brush in circles over her nipples. She allowed herself a soft purr, aware that outside the wind was blowing the fallen snow against the windows and somewhere nearby there was a mouse, but that didn't matter, that didn't matter at all. His erection was pressing against her, she could feel it against her hips, and she grasped it in the dark beneath their quilt. Stroked it gently, felt the moistness at the tip.

“I'm beside you,” he whispered, a slight pant in his voice because, she could tell, of the way she was massaging his penis. “How could I be anything but happy?” And then he kissed her again, this time on her forehead, her eyes, her nose. But he surprised her by scooting over her mouth. An image crossed her mind: Her hand was replicating her vagina, and it made her want to lick her palm for him. But he raised himself up once again and pulled away so she could no longer fondle his cock. Already he was retreating under the tent of their quilt, slipping down toward her waist and her knees so that she could no longer see him. She knew what he was going to do because they had done this before, and at first she had been shocked. She had been shocked that he would even have such an idea. But then she realized this was just one more way that he had experiences far beyond her ken, and she had given herself over to him and to what he was doing and, yes, to the sensations. He had used his tongue on her in much the same way that she would touch herself when she was alone, only this felt so much better: the orgasms so intense, especially that first time when the feelings had coiled inside her, building until she had come so powerfully that she had feared she was going to pee on the rug at the edge of the ballroom.