Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

She thought about this. For a while. He hadn't emphasized those words, but they had seemed a meaningful coda.

“Where do you think we'll stop the Russians?” she asked, longing for the sort of reassurance she had once gotten from her husband and her oldest son.

He continued to stare straight ahead, but she saw a small, ironic smile forming at the edges of his-she noticed now-painfully chapped lips. “Oh, I'm just a soldier,” he said modestly. “I don't know anything. I just go where I'm told and do what I can. You probably know more about what's going on than I do.”

“I know this,” she said. “I never thought I'd be running for my life from the Russians. How did this happen? Is it just that their country is so big? Do they just have so many young men they can afford to lose?”

He seemed to contemplate this. “I've asked myself that, too: How did this happen? And it seems to me it has less to do with the Russians-the Russians or the western armies, even-and much more to do with us. I think when this is all over, the Germans will have only themselves to blame.”

She recalled how her husband and her brother had talked on occasion about the foolhardiness of attacking Russia-how the Reich had plenty of land and didn't need to take on Joe Stalin. She assumed this was what Manfred was referring to now: the difficulty of waging a war on two fronts. They, the Germans, should have been satisfied with the state of things in 1941 and made peace with Britain. After all, no one had any gripes with the British. Look at Callum. Or the other POWs they had had working for them on the farm through the autumn. Good boys, fine young men. It didn't make any sense at all to be at war with Great Britain.

“Yes, we just don't have the manpower,” she murmured, hoping she sounded both agreeable and wise.

“Well, we don't. But that isn't what I meant. I meant we haven't exactly been a civilized empire ourselves. The answer to your question, ‘How did this happen?’ It's actually pretty simple. We asked for it.”

She thought of how long and thin his face was, and how much he had probably suffered. It was as if he had emerged whole from an El Greco canvas, just walked into the world from the frame.

“I've heard that our armies behaved badly sometimes,” she said simply. “But then I think of soldiers like you or Werner. Or Werner's friends. We had naval officers at our home in the fall, and they were nothing but gentlemanly. We played music together, they danced with my daughter and her friends. All completely civilized. And so I have to ask: Who? Who then are these German soldiers who have done the things people whisper about? Where are they?”

“I've met some. And it's not just the soldiers. It's the whole German people.”

“Who have you met?” she asked. “What have you seen?” She realized that she sounded like a devastated child: a girl who has just learned there are no such things as fairies. Instantly she regretted the tone and tried to reclaim a semblance of dignity. “Tell me, please. I want to know.”

He shrugged. “The eastern front is more barbaric than the west, I'll admit that. But there have been atrocities everywhere. And the worst has had nothing to do with the front lines. It's what we have done behind the lines. Behind the barbed wire.”

“The work camps? Yes, I've heard stories about them. But I'm sure they're exaggerations, aren't you?”

“I'm not sure of that at all.”

“Have you been inside one?”

“No. But once…”

“Please. I can bear it,” she told him. “I seem to have lost my home and virtually everything I've ever owned. I'm a strong woman, I assure you.”

“Once,” he said, “I was on a train.” His voice had taken on an uncharacteristically somber cast. “It was filled with Jews being sent east.”

“You were a guard?”

“No, I wasn't a guard. I was simply a courier. I was bringing some papers to a general in the east. The jeep I was in was strafed and the driver was killed. But I heard a train coming and it was going in the right direction, and so I hitched a ride. There I saw firsthand how we were treating the Jews. It was disgusting. Shameful. Old people, children-everyone-were just jammed into cattle cars. No water, no food, no bathrooms. Inside there they were dying. Literally: They were expiring.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe they were criminals.”

“The children? The old people? You know that's not true.”

“But why would we do that? That's what I don't understand. What could possibly be gained from killing the Jews? It doesn't make sense.”

He stopped walking, halting the horse, and stared at her. His eyes seemed sympathetic and kind, and she couldn't decide if he felt guilty for sharing with her what he had seen, or whether he was baffled by how little she knew. Perhaps it was a little of both.

Behind them, on the other side of their wagon, she heard Anna calling out, asking if she was all right.

“We're fine,” Manfred shouted back, but Mutti felt his gaze holding her in place. Then, his voice much softer, he said only to her, “No. It doesn't make sense. It makes absolutely no sense at all.”

IN THE MIDDLE of the night, Uri awoke and told Callum-who heard him rise-that he was going outside to have a cigarette. They were camped on the floor inside a village gymnasium with perhaps two dozen other refugees, all of whom were asleep at the moment. Callum had said he would join him, but Uri had insisted that he remain here with the women and Theo. You just never knew. And then he walked as quietly as he could in his boots over the sleeping women and children, offering a hearty Heil Hitler as he exited the gym to the ancient policeman with a Volkssturm armband who was nervously patrolling the streets.

They were near a train station, and Uri had learned that one of the ways he could slow the ovens was to slow the trains. And so he lit his cigarette and strolled casually there: The village was largely deserted this far east, but he knew there were still trains passing through here going north and south. He'd heard one of those vexing whistles only an hour ago.

When he arrived, he saluted the two guards. They chatted briefly about the state of the war-the pair were noncommittal, unsure who he was and whether he might be the sort who would turn them in if they said something defeatist-and how, at the very least, the trains were still running. Yes, they were slowed by air strikes, but they were still on the tracks and that was testimony to how much fight the nation still had left. He agreed and offered each of them one of the precious cigarettes he had gotten from Callum. They accepted. And then, as they were lighting them, he shot them both. Two quick shots, into the base of the skull of the first and into the face of the second, because that second soldier had turned, stunned, at the sound of the blast. Then Uri had gone inside and shot the fellow who was, apparently, in charge of marshaling the trains onto the proper tracks: It was possible, he saw, to switch and cross the cars onto parallel tracks at this particular station.

He wouldn't have blown up the tracks here, even if he'd had any explosives-which, other than a pair of potato-masher grenades, he didn't. That sound, far louder than three quick shots from his Luger, would have alerted any troops that happened to be nearby. Besides, he didn't have to tear up the tracks to sow a little chaos. Not here. He could stall the trains for hours while the engineers tried to figure out which tracks their cars were supposed to be on; with any luck, one might derail. Now that would gum up the works.

Outside he heard voices and the sound of heavy boots on the cobblestones on the street. Already soldiers were coming. And so quickly he ducked out the back door and disappeared into the dark behind the station. Then he started toward the gymnasium, moving-as he did often in the night-with a speed and a silence that once he wouldn't have thought possible.