Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

Callum thought about this and listened to the sound of the horses' hooves behind them. Their metronomic clopping made him think of a clock, and he tried to place in his mind precisely where he was a year ago now. Then two. Then three. He saw himself once again as a student and recalled the face of Camellia. “You married?” he asked the corporal.

“I am not.”

“Girlfriend? Fiancée?”

“Neither.”

Anna was on the driver's box on the wagon behind them. She must have heard what they were saying, because she called out to them now, “Manfred is just a warrior.” She was teasing him, a small swell of sarcasm in her voice. “He is one of those German men who have too much knight in their blood. I know the type well.”

The corporal turned back to her and said, “Now for all you know, I was a mild-mannered young lawyer before joining the army. Or a docile schoolteacher. For all you know, I am actually an extremely peaceful person.”

“All right then,” Callum said, and he clapped the man on the shoulder good-naturedly. “What did you do before the war? We're all ears.”

“Do you know what you remind me of?” Manfred asked him instead of answering the question.

“Absolutely no idea. Haven't a clue.”

“A Saint Bernard. That's what you are. A very big dog. The sort of creature that hasn't figured out yet that he has ham hocks for paws. Wants to jump on the couch, even though he's the size of a pony.”

“Quite through?”

“All done.”

“Well, I was expecting much worse,” he said. And he was. “I rather like big dogs with favorable dispositions.”

“You didn't tell us what you were doing before the war,” Anna pressed the soldier.

“I say he was a lawyer,” Callum told her. “It was the first profession that popped into his head a moment ago.” He turned to Manfred: “Am I right?”

“No.”

“A schoolteacher then? Really? I wouldn't have guessed it.”

“You will be disappointed.”

“Dear God, you weren't a student were you?” he continued. “Have you been in the army that bloody long?”

“I worked in a ball-bearing factory.”

“Well, that's honest work. Why would I be disappointed?”

He seemed to Callum to be pondering this for a moment. Then: “Perhaps because I was. It wasn't quite what I expected I would be doing with my life when I was fifteen or sixteen years old.”

Overhead the clouds parted just enough that they all felt great shafts of sun on their faces, and as one they reflexively stared up into the sky. “I don't think any of us wound up doing quite what we expected,” Callum said. His stomach growled loudly and he thought of how hungry he was. For a moment he envisioned himself as a Saint Bernard, and he wished they hadn't finished off all of their meat and their bread and their beets.

THAT DAY THEY passed through a village and had lunch by a warm stove in the kitchen of a carpenter and his wife who seemed oddly prosperous. They were having meat for lunch, some sort of stew made with pork and root vegetables, and they offered the trekkers real coffee. The couple was packing to leave, too, when the Emmerichs passed by and they noticed Manfred. Because Manfred was in uniform, they insisted on inviting them indoors to eat and rest. They wanted to finish off the food they had left that they couldn't bring with them, so the Russians wouldn't get it.

As they ate, the carpenter shared with Manfred and Callum-who said not a word-the secret behind his success: He always got wood because he had joined the party. And, since 1942, he made nothing but coffins. “These days, I can't make too many coffins,” he said, his voice at once oddly satisfied and rueful. The pair had two sons, both of whom were missing in action. Their daughters, both married, had gone to Prague where, supposedly, they would be safe from Allied air attacks.

Theo thought Manfred seemed to pay the man special attention when the carpenter told him how recently there had been columns of prisoners passing by, and one of the groups had been nothing but women. Rows and rows of them, he had said.

“And they were marching west?” Manfred asked.

“They were. Starving things. Jews. Belinda here managed to give some of them food. Bread and the last of our sausages. She snuck it to them as they passed. Some of them didn't even have shoes. Can you imagine? I mean, they're just Jews. But still. I'd heard about such things, but never seen them with my own eyes.”

“Where were they from?”

“Well, the east.”

“No,” Manfred continued, his voice a little testy now. “I meant what countries were they from?”

“I heard some of the girls speaking French. I heard others speaking Polish. Even, I think, a little Russian.”

“Any German?”

“A few, maybe.”

“How old were they?”

“At first I thought they were older than me, and I am sixty-two. It was only when Belinda got close to them that we could tell. They were in their twenties and thirties. They'd have to be. Any older and they would have perished by now in this weather.”

Theo watched Manfred seem to take this in. He thought the soldier was seething inside and working hard to maintain an even facade. And his sister? He could see anger on her face as well, but something else, too, and when he understood what it was he grew scared: It was guilt. Shame, as if she were responsible. He felt a small chill in the room, despite the heat from the stove, and for the first time he began to wonder: Was this- those prisoners -why the whole world seemed so mad at his country? Was this what those British POWs and Callum on occasion had whispered about? He had a sense that was just beyond perfect articulation in his mind but nonetheless absolutely apparent to him: When this war was over, he and his family-all Germans-were going to have to live with the black mark of this (whatever this was) for a long, long time.

ANNA WAS VAGUELY AWARE THAT SHE WAS FAR FROM the comforts of her own bed in Kaminheim. She was wrapped tightly inside a pair of quilts, half-buried in the hay in a barn. Another barn. Not even a gymnasium, albeit an unheated one, such as the one where they had spent the night before last. This barn was far from the main road, perhaps a kilometer distant. They had come here for privacy and quiet. To escape the throngs. She wasn't freezing, but her feet-despite the reality that she had slept yet again in her boots-and her fingers were chilled. Her nose was running from the cold, and when she removed her hands from beneath the quilts she was stunned to discover how warm her face was. Was it possible she had a fever? Was this why she was shivering? Slowly she began to focus, but still she kept trying to push full wakefulness away, as if it were a suitor at a dance she was trying to avoid. She recalled how they had stopped here last night. Her family and Callum and Manfred and the three horses had all taken refuge in one corner, while another family had taken the side nearest the entrance, and the humans had all been grateful to have the heat generated by the Emmerichs' animals. For dinner, Manfred had shown them how to bake the potatoes in the wild: He had buried them in a shallow hole, and then built a fire on the patch of ground directly above them.

Now Anna could tell by the hazy light that was coming in through the cupola and a pair of eastern-facing dormers that day had broken. She heard the low rumble of voices, men's voices, but she couldn't make out what they were saying. It didn't sound like Manfred and Callum, and so she guessed it was that other family. But then, when she visualized those other refugees-their name, she thought, was Sanders-she could see in her somnambulant fog only one male. A grandfather. There were the grandparents, a married daughter and a daughter-in-law, and two small girls. And neither of the voices, as she tried to concentrate, sounded much like the girls' elderly grandfather.