Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

Now Cecile asked Vera to repeat herself. Sometimes she wondered if her hearing was falling apart along with the rest of her body-as if eardrums, too, could succumb to malnutrition.

“Have you heard where we're going?” Vera was asking.

“I haven't,” she answered.

“I hear it's Germany. They're going to put us to work in a munitions factory there. And we're going to be sleeping indoors again in a barracks right beside it.”

Jeanne turned to her. Her eyes were running in the cold. “You taught very small children, didn't you?”

The woman nodded.

“I thought so. Only a person who told fairy tales for a living could believe that sort of nonsense.”

Cecile felt Jeanne's shivering body against her back; if she hadn't, she feared, she might have slapped her. How many times had she saved Jeanne's life? How many times had she kept the woman going when Jeanne had all but given up? And still Jeanne hurled these malicious, cutting barbs at the other prisoners. At her. It was one thing for the guards to be cruel to them. But it was unconscionable for them to be cruel to one another. If indeed their husbands and their children and their parents were gone, then they were all that they had. When this war was over-and it did seem to be ending, didn't it?-they would all help one another to rebuild their lives. Wouldn't they? Isn't that what families did? What survivors did?

And didn't family members also discipline one another? Keep them in line? She felt like a mother now whose adolescent daughter had grown snappish, and she was about to snap back. To reprimand Jeanne. Before she had opened her mouth, however, the woman on the far side of Vera, another Hungarian whom Cecile barely knew, told Jeanne, “You think you're so clever. Well, you're just mean. How do you know the Germans aren't so desperate for workers they'll use us?”

“Because then they'd feed us!” Jeanne hissed. “If they wanted us to work, they'd give us something to eat!”

“Then you tell me,” the Hungarian said, wrapping her bony arm around Vera's shoulders. “Where are we going?”

“To our graves,” Jeanne said, narrowing her runny eyes. And then she collapsed, sobbing, into the snow.

ONCE MORE CECILE got Jeanne to her feet, and once more she joined the other women as they started to walk. They lumbered along, some stumbling, all concentrating on the normally prosaic task of placing one foot in front of the other while trying not to think about the pain that came with each step, or the hunger that made their stomachs throb, or the way their work pants or shifts invariably were stained with urine and striped with frozen swaths of liquid feces, because most of them had long since lost the slightest ability to control their bowels.

As they exited the far side of Sliwice, Cecile pushed from her mind her disappointment that the guards hadn't fed them. She tried to think instead about the sunshine and the blue sky, about the way the days were growing longer now. She tried to listen to the bird-song from the beech trees, and she considered reminding Jeanne that, yes, there still were birds in the world. She considered pointing out to her the reasonableness of Vera's supposition that they were going to be put to work in a munitions factory and thus soon would be fed. And she wondered about the carts. There were two of them, long, empty wagons, each one being pulled by a powerful draft horse. The guards had commandeered the animals and the carts from the sugar refinery in the town, and Cecile told herself it was because they were going to fill the wagons somewhere up ahead with provisions. With food and water for the prisoners. With bread and potatoes and milk.

She was considering all of these things, imagining the way cool milk would feel on her throat and her tongue, trying to remain hopeful, when ahead of her she saw an Austrian woman named Dorothea stagger and fall face-first into the road. One of the female guards, a woman perhaps her age with eyes the green of the Mediterranean at sunset and hair the color of freshly cut wheat, yelled at her to stand up. When the Austrian didn't, the guard began kicking at her, driving her boot so hard into Dorothea that the guard was spinning the body with her foot, rolling the woman off the road and into the dirty snow just beside it. Dorothea whimpered, but she made no effort to rise, and Cecile prepared herself for the poor woman's execution. Any moment now, Pusch or one of the other male guards would fall back in the column, turn the Austrian onto her stomach, and shoot her in the back of the head. And, sure enough, here came Pusch, as well as the guard named Trammler, annoyed, it seemed, because yet again one of the prisoners had faltered and slowed down the march.

Then, however, they surprised Cecile. Rather than shooting Dorothea, they actually lifted her up off the ground and brought her to one of the two carts they had taken in Sliwice. Pusch himself carried Dorothea in his arms as if she were his daughter and he were bringing her up to her room at the end of a long day, and then laid the emaciated woman gently in the cart.

“See,” Vera murmured to Jeanne. “They do want us alive. They need us and they'll feed us. Soon. You just watch.”

For another hour and a half they marched without incident, walking quietly west with the sun at their back. A little past three, however, another woman slipped on a patch of ice on the road and was unable to rise to her feet. She, too, was placed in the cart beside Dorothea. Cecile took comfort in this: Clearly something had changed. Perhaps it was exactly as Vera had said: The Germans needed them alive. Or, even if Vera was mistaken and their eventual destination was not a munitions factory and a warm barracks, perhaps the Russians were closer than they realized and the guards wanted to show their conquerors that they were treating their prisoners humanely.

More humanely, anyway.

In any case, it was possible, wasn't it, that the worst of the march was behind them?

By the time the sun had set they were somewhere between Sliwice and Czersk, and both carts were filled with prisoners. Easily a dozen women had allowed themselves to slip to the ground in the course of the afternoon when they realized they wouldn't be shot but would, instead, be allowed to ride in the carts. The women were sitting or lying down, some on top of each other and some sound asleep, their wheezing and snores filling the dusk like frogs in the swamps in the spring.

The guards stopped for the night when they saw a barn on a small hillside. It wasn't a large structure-it may have been built for horses, not cattle or livestock-and she feared that only the guards would be sleeping inside it tonight. They, the prisoners, would have to sleep outside in the snow. But perhaps there was a farmhouse just beyond the barn, and the guards-most of them, anyway-would sleep there, and the prisoners would thus get the barn. She had to hope that, because the temperature was falling quickly now that the sun had set and she wasn't sure even she could survive a night in this cold in the snow. And so she told herself that any moment now the guards would give them bowls of hot soup, and then herd them all into the barn for the night. Yes, it would be a tight fit, but all that body heat would help keep them warm.

And, sure enough, she saw that three of the guards were pulling down the wooden fence at a corner of one of the fields and using it to construct a fire. Two fires, in fact. Perhaps these would be the flames over which they would prepare them all a warm meal. Perhaps, in the meantime, they would permit them to sit before the fires and warm their skeletal frames.

But the blazes grew high quickly, despite the cold and the still air. They were by no means out of control, but the guards continued to toss thick wooden posts and long strips of fencing into them, until the tips of the flames were dancing high above them, the nearby snow was melting in nearly perfect, concentric circles, and the crackling fires were much too big to cook pots of soup on. Some of the prisoners rushed as close to the twin infernos as they could, rubbing their hands so near the flames that Cecile was surprised they weren't singeing the backs of their fingers. The guards didn't seem to mind. Pusch even smiled and shook his head, murmuring something she couldn't hear to Trammler and the female guard named Inga. In response Trammler smirked, but Inga looked slightly uncomfortable, and it crossed Cecile's mind that whatever Pusch had said had been filthy. A dirty joke of some sort that only men would appreciate. No doubt a joke at the expense of the prisoners.