Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

“You're feisty tonight,” Cecile told her.

“Well…”

“You can tell me.”

“When you were asleep, Vera found mess kits under one of the benches. Three of them. Soldiers must have forgotten they were there. And when the lights were out, we feasted.”

She felt a pang in her stomach, part hunger and part hurt. “And you didn't wake me?”

“You sleep so little. We didn't think you would want to be disturbed.”

She realized she was experiencing more than hurt: This was outright betrayal. Jeanne and Vera hadn't wanted to share this unexpected bounty. And after all she had done for Jeanne. For all of them. She was absolutely positive that if it weren't for her, Jeanne would be dead now.

“What was in them?” she asked, unsure why she was tormenting herself this way by inquiring. Did she really need to know? But in the same way one can't resist picking at a scab, she was unable to prevent herself from asking.

Already, however, Jeanne understood her mistake. “Really, not that much,” she said sheepishly.

“Not that much?” This was Vera. Incredulous. “We gorged! There were tins of meat and tomatoes and canned milk! There was knäckebrot, and the crackers were still crisp-which meant that mostly we broke them into pieces and sucked on them,” she said, offering them all an ironic, toothless grin. “There was even hard candy!”

Jeanne was gazing down at the ground, her guilt a dark halo behind the prickly hair on her head. Cecile imagined them silently unwrapping the crackers and opening the tins with one of those small can openers that came with the kits. In her mind she saw them using their fingers like spoons to extract the meat, then licking the lids from the cans to get the last drops of tomatoes and milk. And then she willed those images away. She reminded herself that all she had left was her attitude. Her mind. They could take everything else from her: In the end, they might even take her life. But they couldn't take away what she thought. They couldn't take away hope. Perhaps Jeanne and Vera simply needed that food more than she did. Fine. Perhaps the two of them wouldn't get through this without that unexpected discovery. Well, that was fine, too. She would.

She reached over to Jeanne with her hand and tenderly lifted her face by her chin. “It's okay,” she whispered. “I want you this spirited. I need you this spirited. It's how we'll survive.”

Her friend looked into her eyes and Cecile wasn't sure how she was going to respond. What she was going to say. Then, like the wind that precedes a thunderstorm, the air between them grew charged and Jeanne was shaking her head and her bony shoulders and starting to sob. She gave in to long, eaglelike ululations of despair-loud, heaving wails of remorse that merged with self-recrimination and self-loathing. Cecile and Vera together tried to embrace her, Cecile cooing softly into her ear that it was all right, to let go of the guilt, but Jeanne continued to cry, her eyes shut tight like a child's, as the tears streamed down the wrinkles in her gaunt, emaciated face. “No, I am horrible,” she howled suddenly. “I am as bad as they are!”

She was shrieking in French, but it didn't matter. Pusch had heard her-everyone at the train station had heard her, the prisoners were glancing at them from their places in line-and he was marching over to them now. The last thing he was going to endure in the middle of the night was a scene from a hysterical Jew. One of the female guards was joining him, an unattractive woman with a broad forehead and elflike eyes. The two young soldiers on their motorcycles looked at them idly, not nearly as interested at the moment as the other prisoners or the guards, and then one of them started to fold up the map.

“Shhhh,” Cecile was whispering, “you must settle down. It's all right.” But already it was too late. She felt Pusch's hands on her shoulders; he was pulling her away from Jeanne. The female guard-was her name Sigi?-was trying to wrench Vera away. But Vera was holding on tightly to Jeanne, her dirty, gnarled fingers grasping the front of poor Jeanne's striped prison shirt and ragged jacket, begging Jeanne so desperately to calm down that she, too, was sounding half-crazed. Suddenly Pusch took his rifle off his shoulder and slammed the butt into Vera's back, holding the gun as if it were a battering ram. Vera let go of Jeanne's clothing and collapsed onto the road, one hand reaching instinctively back for her kidney.

“And you,” he hissed at Jeanne, his eyes half-closed in anger. “And you,” he repeated. Sigi pushed Jeanne to the ground so she was on her hands and knees like a cow, still shaking her head and bawling. Pusch turned his rifle around in his arms and aimed it at the back of her head. So this, Cecile thought, is how it will end for my Jeanne-and, she realized, she really did view Jeanne as hers, a possession and a pet and a totem of sorts, a good-luck charm that she had to keep alive to assure herself that she, too, was still breathing-shot on a road outside a train station in the middle of the night. Now she was sniveling as well, but her cries were almost silent, certainly not loud enough to be heard over Jeanne's frenzied wailing or Vera's elongated moans.

And yet when Pusch pulled the trigger and the blast was still reverberating in her ears, Cecile realized that he hadn't shot Jeanne. He'd killed Vera. He had meant to execute her friend, but in the second that he was aiming his rifle down at the back of Jeanne's skull, Vera had rolled into Jeanne and taken the bullet instead. In, it appeared, her neck. Now she was flat on her back, still alive but clearly dying fast, choking on the blood that was seeming to run from spigots in her mouth and the gaping hole by her larynx. Cecile wondered: Had Vera rolled into Jeanne on purpose? Or had she been spasming from the blow to her kidney and simply had the misfortune of twisting her body in that direction? The wrong direction?

To their right she heard the two soldiers starting up their motorcycles. One seemed to be shaking his head in annoyance, exasperated either by the wailing Jew or by the way Pusch had shot one of the prisoners. She couldn't decide. And then they sped off, their motorcycles leaving behind trails of blue smoke in the frigid night air.

“You,” Sigi was saying, “you Jew pig,” and Cecile choked back her tears and stood at attention because she realized that Sigi was speaking to her. “Get that body out of here. I don't want to soil my gloves with Jew blood.”

She averted her eyes and bowed her head, a slight, obedient nod. Jeanne was only whimpering now; her cries had grown soft.

Pusch murmured something to Sigi that she couldn't quite hear and then he was shouting to the women behind them, commanding them to get back in line, telling them there was nothing that interesting to see. They were going to set off once again within minutes. He and Sigi glanced over at the spot where the two regular soldiers on motorcycles had been; they seemed surprised the two men were gone.

“Pigs, too,” Pusch mumbled, spitting on the road and narrowly missing Vera.

“Do you know which roads are still open?” Sigi asked him. There was just a trace of nervousness in her voice. “Did they tell you?”

“They did,” Pusch said. “The commandant and I know which way to go. We'll be fine.” Then he looked down at Vera, whose desperate, labored breathing was starting to slow. “At least we'll be fine if we hurry up and get out of here. You heard us,” he barked at Cecile. “Get this pig shit off the road!”

Instantly she bent over Vera, whispering into her ear-lying into her ear-that she would be fine, and lifting her shoulders off the ground and cradling the back of her injured neck in her hands. The bullet, she realized, must have passed right through, because she felt her palm growing moist with the woman's blood. She wasn't sure how to move her without causing her yet more pain, but she didn't have to worry long. Vera's eyes rolled up toward her forehead, there was one last convulsion somewhere deep inside her chest, and then she was gone. Jeanne crawled over to them, still sniffing back tears, and said, “I can help.”