Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

“You speak?” Uri asked the fellow.

Now he turned to Uri and nodded.

“With more than your chin?” Uri continued. There was a part of him that couldn't imagine him challenging a man this physically imposing as recently as two years ago. In the first months of his masquerade, he had been more likely either to flatter everyone he met or try to be largely invisible-a nonentity; but he had learned quickly that he was much better off among these people if he was brazen. They were far less likely to question a bully. And now, after nearly two years of fighting, it seemed impossible to Uri not to view every encounter as a confrontation.

The fellow mumbled that he did speak, but he didn't look up from the strut and he spoke in a tone that was striving for annoyance but had just a hint of unease. And there was something in the few syllables that sounded foreign to Uri. American, maybe. Or British. But certainly not Prussian. And certainly not the German Uri had heard growing up in Bavaria. And so another, more interesting possibility occurred to Uri: POW. Not a deserter, a prisoner. He knew that the Germans had been sending British and American POWs to the farms to work the fields the previous summer and fall. Not the Russians, of course. After all, the field work was downright cushy. Instead, the Russian POWs were expected to detonate or remove the unexploded bombs from the urban rubble of places like Hamburg and Berlin. Most of them hadn't the slightest idea what they were doing, and it was just a game of, well, Russian roulette. But they did know that if they were still alive by the time their own army arrived, they'd be killed anyway for surrendering. Or, if they were lucky, sent to some work camp in Siberia.

Uri gazed from this redhead-this Yankee or Brit-to the two siblings and their mother. Like those women he had come across in the castle the other day, one of them might very well have a hand-gun concealed in a cape or a fur. The pretty blond might have a pistol trained on him right now. Still, he didn't guess they would be crazy enough to shoot a Wehrmacht soldier in broad daylight while harboring a POW.

He wondered what it meant that they were bringing their POW with them. Was he just brawn, like their horses? A pet? Or was he something more? He had heard about romances between Allied POWs and the farm girls. The German men all gone, the girls bored to tears on their estates. Was this one right here before his very eyes?

Finally Uri motioned for the man to move over so he could help him lift the wagon, and the woman would be able to slip the wheel into place. He considered introducing himself, but he didn't want to put the POW in the awkward position of having to speak once again. “Here,” he said simply, “let me help. You can't sit here all day with a broken wheel.” Then he and the prisoner hoisted the axle just far enough off the ground that the woman was able to place the spare wheel onto the bar and secure it to the wagon. It took about half a minute.

Up ahead, coming from the west, Uri heard the metallic rattle that he instantly recognized as tanks. At least two, and maybe more. Given that the line was moving sluggishly to one side of the road-rather than fleeing like frightened kittens into the brush-he presumed the tanks were German. And, within seconds, he saw them: three Panthers motoring toward them, half on and half off the road so they didn't mow down the refugees. They each had infantry soldiers riding atop them, and they were moving with such purpose that he didn't fear anyone was going to try to recruit him into the assault group.

As they passed he saluted, the sort of lackadaisical wave he offered in lieu of a full-fledged Heil Hitler. He watched to see what the redhead would do, and he did, essentially, the same thing. Unlike Uri, however, he was actually sweating, despite the cold.

When the tanks' earth-flattening clanking was beyond them, he glanced at the piles of oats and provisions they had to load back into the wagon. Without asking, he went to one and lifted it onto the cart.

“Oh, we can do that,” the young woman said.

“I figured. But you can do it faster if you let me help. And fast is good now that the Russians have broken out of Kulm.”

The woman's mother gasped. “Kulm has fallen? Completely fallen?” she asked. She made it sound like Berlin had surrendered.

“Yes, of course,” said Uri. He couldn't imagine at first why she might care that such an irrelevant little place had been overrun. As far as he could tell, it was an obscure hamlet that served the aristocratic beet farmers who lived just outside it. But then he glanced at the horses and the quality of the clothes these people were wearing. No doubt they were part of that Kulm gentry. Had probably been on the road only a few days. “Are you from Kulm?” he asked, trying to soften his tone.

“We live there,” the young woman said. “My father and my brother were counterattacking the Russians there just the other day!”

Well, they're not anymore, Uri thought, but he kept that response to himself. In all likelihood, the pair was lying dead in a snowbank somewhere. The counterattack had been launched by old men and young boys, and-like everything the Wehrmacht did these days-it had been absolutely fearless and completely ill-advised, and virtually all those old men and young boys had been slaughtered.

The younger brother looked up at the sky now, and he gazed with such curious intensity that the adults around him all stopped what they were doing.

“What is it, Theo?” his mother asked.

“I hear buzzing,” he said simply.

Uri had been around enough artillery that he knew his hearing had gone to hell. He couldn't hear yet what this boy-and then, clearly, his older sister-could hear. But he knew what it meant when you heard a buzzing in the sky. The odds were good they were hearing planes. Lots of planes. Far more planes than the Luft-waffe could put into the air at one time these days. And then, before he could warn them, tell them his suspicions, they all heard the sound. In seconds it was transmogrified from insects to engines, dozens and dozens of them, and they saw the great, growling formation, one side actually luminescent as the long swaths of metal fuselage reflected the sun as they emerged from the clouds. The aircraft were British, and suddenly three of the planes were diving toward the column-he wondered if they had seen the German tanks that had just passed-and they all needed to get off the road.

Reflexively he grabbed the mother by her arm and pulled her with him into the fields, sprinting with her past those large, circular piles of ash and toward the barn beyond them. The POW and the two siblings were beside him, racing too, and he was aware that the formerly long and straight caravan had spread like spilled milk into the snow and the fields along both sides of the road. They were nearing the barn when the boy abruptly shrieked, “Waldau! I won't lose Waldau, too!” He let go of his older sister's hand and ran back toward the road, apparently worried about one of those horses.

“Theo!” the prisoner yelled, and then both he and the POW were dashing after the boy.

Up the road they all heard the sound of the screams and the missiles and the diving airplanes, a simultaneous, deafening cacophony, part machine and part animal, and watched as three Spitfires swooped down in a perfect line, one behind the other, their cannons ablaze, splintering the carts and slaughtering the stragglers who remained on the road. One wagon was flying through the air in two massive pieces, its rear wheels still spinning, as were the bodies of three old women who had been traveling together, one of whom had lost her legs in the blast. The air was alive with sheets of newspapers and the stuffing from pillows, and rags of clothing that were either drenched with blood or housing now-unattached arms and legs and feet. Beyond them they saw great plumes of black smoke swirling into the sky like tornadoes, fueled, Uri guessed, by the ammunition and petrol from those Panthers that recently had passed.