Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

Cecile wasn't sure Jeanne really could, at least all that much, but she nodded. They each took one of Vera's arms at the shoulder and together were able to drag her off into the snow on the side of the road.

“We can't bury her,” Cecile said, kneeling beside the body. “I wish we could. But we can't.”

Jeanne looked at her, wide-eyed, and Cecile was afraid that Jeanne, despite her despair, was going to snap at her for saying something so obvious and dull. But mostly she had just been talking to herself. She did wish they could bury Vera. But they hadn't the time, the ground was rock solid, and even if Pusch had given them shovels she doubted they had the strength left to dig.

She was wrong about Jeanne, however; the woman's eyes, she understood, had grown wide because she was about to be sick. Her friend turned away from Vera's body and, suddenly, she was spewing into the grimy snow the meat and tomatoes and the knäckebrot she had consumed, the vomit tinged with white from the canned milk. When she was done, when all that was left was a long tendril of spit linking her lips to the icy ground, she murmured, “I had forgotten what it was like to be full. I had completely forgotten.”

Behind them Pusch was screaming, “Move, move!” And so Cecile bent over and pulled down Vera's eyelids and kissed the woman good-bye on her sore-ridden scalp. Then she and Jeanne stood, and with the little energy they could muster they rejoined the other prisoners as they trudged their way west in the night.

THEO WALKED WITH HIS FAMILY THROUGH A LARGELY deserted village in which the road was almost impassable because of the rubble-at one point he had helped Callum and Manfred move a pile of bricks from a fallen chimney from the road so the wagons could proceed, and twice he had gotten to assist them as they had lifted great slabs of wall that had slid onto the street-and he listened as Manfred wondered why in the name of God there wasn't some otherwise useless Hitler Youth lad to direct everyone onto the road that circled outside of the town. Even the stone church had collapsed upon itself, the buttresses for the walls supporting nothing but sky, and the once-imposing pipes for the organ reshaped by heat and flame into giant copper-colored mushrooms. It was a small village, no more than six square blocks, and none of the structures were taller than three stories high. And yet it had been bombed so severely that almost without exception they were passing buildings in which whole exterior walls were gone and Theo realized that he was looking up into people's bedrooms and bathrooms and kitchens. The buildings were, in a way, like giant dollhouses, with the sides removed so you could peer inside and move the furniture wherever you liked. The fires were long extinguished by the cold and fresh snow, but he could smell the soot and even see deep patches of black where an awning or a ceiling had somehow survived and shielded the burn marks from the latest storm. In one of the dollhouses he saw an old woman sitting before a precarious, three-legged table on the second floor, picking with a fork at some food in a bowl with yellow flowers adorning the side. The stairwell had caved in, and he wondered how the woman would ever get down from her perch. In another skeletal structure he saw three girls, sisters he guessed, standing at the lip of the floor on the third story, staring down at them glumly. The oldest one was probably his age, Theo decided, and she was wearing what had to be her uncle's or her father's Luftwaffe dress uniform coat. The younger girls were wrapped in blankets. He waved at them, but they didn't wave back.

Whenever he saw a rat scuttle across the surface of the snow and into the debris, he feared there were bodies moldering there. When he expressed this concern to the grown-ups, Callum reassured him: The Scotsman told him he was quite positive that a town this small would have been sure to care for its own. Theo thought of that old woman and those three girls, and he wasn't convinced.

“You know, Theo,” Manfred was saying to him, “I have never ridden a horse in my life.”

“Really? Well, that's only because you're a city person. It's no big deal that I have,” he said, because it didn't seem to him that it was. Country people often rode horses. City people didn't. Besides, he could tell that Manfred was only talking about horses now to change the subject from the bodies that might be under the rubble. “If I'd grown up in Schweinfurt, I probably wouldn't ride, either.”

“Theo is a wonderful rider,” Anna said, and he wasn't sure if it was pride that he heard in her voice or something else. Worry, perhaps.

“Not really,” he said, feeling the need to assert the truth. “I only ride ponies.”

“Outside of the ring, yes. But in the ring? I don't know any boys your age who ride half so well.”

“It's true,” Callum agreed. “You're an excellent horseman.”

“Frankly, your animals scare me to death,” said Manfred. “They're monsters.”

“Are you serious?” he asked the soldier.

“Absolutely. Your Balga? A terror.”

“He's a horse!”

“He's a giant. They're all giants.”

“They're very sweet, actually. And very smart. Sometimes they can be stubborn-even my pony. He's always snitching grass when he's not supposed to. But terrors? They're more like”-and he paused for a brief moment as he tried to find the appropriate analogy-“big stubborn babies. Or, maybe, big stubborn toddlers. That's what they really are, sometimes.”

Callum and his mother laughed aloud, and his sister nodded in recognition.

“You think you could teach me to ride?” Manfred asked him. “It might make the animals seem less like monsters to me-and more like babies.”

“My sister could probably teach you better than I could.”

“Perhaps you could both teach me. My sense is I wouldn't be an especially quick study. I'd need all the help I could get.”

“You mean after the war?”

“Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “After the war.”

“I could do that,” he said. He turned to Callum. “And you, too? Do you want some lessons?”

“Definitely.”

The notion made Theo smile. It wasn't, he guessed, the idea that he might have some knowledge or talent that he could impart to these grown men-though he did like that idea; rather, it was the realization that he might actually get to see them again when this long journey was over.

PERHAPS TWO HOURS beyond the village, when the sky was growing dark and everyone knew that soon they would have to try to find a barn or a shelter in which to spend the night, Mutti announced that she had an idea of where they should go. “Let's turn here,” she said, and she directed Manfred and Anna to lead the horses off the main road and down a path that didn't seem to have been plowed in weeks. With each step Theo was sinking up to his knees, and the men were actually shoveling a path for the carriage wheels as they trudged forward. But Mutti assured them the path wasn't long and it would be worth the effort. She refused, however, to tell them what awaited them at the end, and Theo was surprised by Manfred's patience with his mother. He had expected that the soldier would demand to know what they were doing, and why. But, it seemed, he had faith in Mutti, too.

Nevertheless, it was completely dark when they saw a dim glow before them, and then, in a brief moment when the moon peered out from the clouds and illuminated the earth, they saw a house at least the size of Kaminheim. The glow was from windows along the first floor, and Theo imagined there must have been dozens of candles burning inside since there couldn't possibly be electricity left here.