Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

“Whose house is this?” Manfred was asking Mutti.

“Friends of Rolf's and mine since, well, forever. Eckhard and Klara. We lost touch with them once the war started. But it looks like they're still here.”

“Or someone is,” Callum muttered.

“Well, it's a roof,” Manfred said. “And beds.”

“When I realized where we were this afternoon, I thought instantly of my old friends. Then, when I recognized the road, I decided to bring us in the back entrance,” she continued, her voice almost gleeful-a little girl who has pulled off a great surprise. “I didn't want to bring a thousand people with us.”

They found that a path had been carved between the horse barn and the manor house, and Theo saw that Balga was sniffing the air with interest, tensing and then rolling his massive head nervously.

“Balga must smell the barn,” Mutti told them, and tenderly she stroked the animal along his forehead and cheek. “They used to have as many animals as we had.”

Callum handed the reins to Anna and turned toward Mutti. “I'll see who's there. What do these people look like? How big is the family?”

“They have a daughter and two sons. But I wouldn't expect the boys to be here. Surely they're in the army. Probably only Gabi will be there.”

“And how old is Gabi?”

“Twenty or twenty-one. Just a little older than Anna.”

“Okay. I'll go peer in one of those windows. See who's inside.”

“What, you don't think it will just be my friends? Looters, maybe?”

He shrugged. “Or Russians.”

“I'll go with you,” Manfred said, and Theo watched as the two men shuffled through the snow up to the windows with the softly flickering lights.

THERE WEREN'T LOOTERS and there weren't Russians. There weren't even other refugees. When Anna had heard Manfred and Callum conjecturing that the house might have been commandeered by criminals or Bolsheviks, her heart had sunk. Now, however, as her mother's friend Klara was heating tea for her in a kettle over the fireplace in the living room and their wet cloaks and capes and quilts were drying on wooden racks before the hearth, she was almost giddy. She was exhausted and she knew she was ill. But she was clean. She had soaked in an elegant porcelain tub for nearly an hour, savoring the hot water and rose-scented bubble bath, allowing herself to doze in solitude amid the steam and the aroma of the flowers. After her, Mutti and Theo-her brother normally no fan of baths-had bathed, too, and their spirits had risen accordingly as well.

They rejoined Anna downstairs now. She smiled at them and then burrowed even deeper into a thickly cushioned love seat, warm and content, while her eyes wandered aimlessly over the heads of the dead animals with antlers that adorned some of the walls, resting occasionally on the tapestries of unicorns and crusaders from the Middle Ages that hung on the others. There was also a line of stuffed wolfhounds-six of them in various poses, their mouths and marble eyes always open, in one case a tongue thrust out like a snake-serving as an honor guard into the room. At first Anna had found them a little disturbing. They also smelled of something unrecognizable but distasteful, and she feared that the taxidermist had been sloppy. But they were on the other side of the love seat from her and she had, for now, put them out of her mind. She was putting almost everything out of her mind. She was only half-listening as Mutti shared the story of their ordeal with Klara, while her old acquaintance's daughter, Gabi, and a friend of hers seemed to be hanging on every word. Gabi's friend was named Sonje, and like Gabi she was pathetically homely. They were fairy-tale stepsisters, Anna imagined, and she felt bad for them. Sonje was tall and gangly with a skeletal stalk linking her collarbone with a chin as sharp as a goatee and eyes that bulged out like a bug's. Gabi, the privations they had endured notwithstanding, was plump beyond the help of a corset and had a nose that looked a bit like an acorn with nostrils. Moreover, despite the reality that the Russians might be here in days if the army didn't find a way to stop them, they were insisting that they were going to remain in this house. The servants were long gone, as were the men and the horses, but before setting off to join a Volkssturm unit Eckhard had used his party connections to fill the larder and make sure they had plenty of wood and oil for the lamps. He had taught Klara and Gabi and Sonje how to shoot, and left them each a pistol-which, in Sonje's case, she kept with her in a holster she had decorated with red and black ribbons and wore around her dress like a sash. And, if the very worst occurred and the Russians appeared suddenly down their long driveway, he had shown them how they should slash their wrists, assuring them that this was a largely painless way to go-and infinitely preferable to their fate if they didn't.

Still, they were viewing their home as if it were an island sanctuary. They weren't maintaining the driveways, and Klara, at least, actually believed that no one-neither Russians nor refugees-would even know they were here.

“But I found you,” Mutti was saying. “You simply have to come with us. You simply can't stay here.”

“But would you have turned down that path if you hadn't known this house was here?” Klara asked. “Of course not. You knew to take it because you're an old friend and you've been here before. And the main entrance is even more deeply buried in snow, and-you might remember-all uphill from there to the house. No one would even think there's anything worth looking for at the other end. You're the first people we've seen in over a week.”

“It's a cocoon,” said Sonje.

“And in the spring we'll be butterflies,” said Gabi.

“Butterflies with guns,” Sonje added pleasantly.

Behind them the door opened, and Manfred and Callum returned from bedding down the horses for the night in the barn.

“Or,” Klara said, “you girls can be butterflies right now! Why wait till the spring! Come, gentlemen, I'll play the piano and you two can dance with my daughter and Sonje!”

“NOW, I AM NO expert,” Gabi was telling Callum a little later, though it was evident from the tone in her voice that she was quite confident that she was, “but we had a wonderful professor come to one of our BDM meetings, and he taught us all about physiognomy. It was fascinating.” She was running the tips of her fingers along the top and the sides of Callum's head as he sat in the massive easy chair that was upholstered with a scene from a forest that looked positively primeval. The treatment didn't look precisely like a scalp massage, but Anna thought Callum might have enjoyed the physical sensations if Gabi weren't running her hands along his head for the purpose of a lesson in Aryan physical superiority. As it was, he was fidgeting uncomfortably and looked like a cat that wanted to bolt from a stranger's arms.

“Now, it seems to me that people from England have far more in common with Germans than-for example-the Slavs. Your skull is much more like mine than those of many of my neighbors,” she went on.

“That's only because my skull is still here. Most of your neighbors' skulls had the common sense to get out of here and head west.”

“I am serious. This is science. You map the brain by the bumps on the skull. It's a known fact, for instance, that the Aryan cranium differs from the Slavic cranium or the Jewish cranium. It is far more regal, and it has fewer bulges and ugly swellings. And compare the line of your jaw to the line of mine,” she continued. “Though I will say this: For a large man and a Celtic, your jaw is not especially apelike.”

“And the jaws of most Celts are?”

“Don't be insulted. It's simply that the jawlines of all races are more apelike than ours.”