Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

“I wonder if you'll come back when the war is over,” she heard Gabi saying to Callum, while Klara was skimming through the sheet music on the piano in search of another song. Certainly no one here seemed to care that he was Scottish. She watched him glance at Anna, who raised her eyebrows behind Gabi's back and smiled at him. Imagine: Did Anna really think that her own mother was born yesterday? That her own mother didn't know what was going on between her daughter and this foreign paratrooper? She remembered when she and Rolf had been courting; it wasn't all that many years ago that she had first flirted with the man who would eventually become her husband.

“Oh, I think there's a pretty good chance,” he said, and it was clear to Mutti that he was speaking more to Anna than to Gabi.

“Good. I will expect you. I will hang a glass ornament in the guest bedroom window here where you will stay,” she said, and Mutti wondered if the girl was getting tipsy.

“A glass butterfly,” Sonje added. “Because by then we will all be out of our cocoons. So, a butterfly for Callum and a…” She paused, looking deeply into Manfred's eyes. “And what would you like, Corporal? What kind of glass ornament should await your return?”

“Oh, I will be flattered by whatever you suggest,” he said. He looked away from her and briefly his eyes rested on Anna. Mutti couldn't decide what he was thinking, but when Anna looked up-perhaps sensing the corporal's attention-he quickly turned toward the portrait of Eckhard on the far wall. Her daughter, she thought, seemed slightly troubled by the corporal's gaze. Almost as if she were changing the subject, she reached into the tin on the table beside her for one of the florentines and took a small bite.

“Maybe tonight my mother will allow you to sleep with one of Father's dogs,” Gabi suggested to Manfred. “A man should always have a wolfhound by his bed, shouldn't he?”

“Oh, I don't think we need to cart them around the house. But I thank you,” he told her, his voice drifting, and Mutti couldn't imagine why anyone would bring one of those stuffed dogs with them to a bedroom. Even in a room this large it took the smell of the fire and the tea and the scented candles to smother their stench.

“The führer always sleeps with a wolfhound, you know. Blondi,” Gabi continued. She was speaking almost directly into the corporal's ear.

“Blondi is a German shepherd-not a wolfhound,” Sonje corrected her.

“No, she's a wolfhound.”

“You're wrong.”

“And she was a gift from Goebbels.”

“From Bormann,” Sonje insisted.

“Goebbels.”

“Bormann.”

“Oh, please, does it matter?”

“I'm just saying-”

“You're just being a Jew. A know-it-all Jew,” Gabi snapped at her.

“I'm just being right,” Sonje said.

“Girls,” Klara said, raising her voice ever so slightly and drawing the word out. “We have guests. No need to squabble. What always is more important is what we agree upon. And we all agree that the führer has a beautiful animal named Blondi and that sometimes a man wants to sleep with a dog.”

At that Gabi tittered slightly, but then Klara's usually kind face turned to a glare. “You know I do not approve of prurient thoughts,” she said.

“I'm sorry,” Gabi murmured, though it was clear that she wasn't. Not at all. Then she turned to Sonje, and it was evident to Mutti that the moment-already irreparably curdled-was about to get worse. “But Sonje was acting like a Jew: a selfish, piglike, know-it-all Jew. A Jew who probably opposes our führer. A Jew who lives off the sweat of others. A Jew who seduces-”

“Enough!” This was Manfred, and everyone in the room turned. Mutti was embarrassed for Gabi. She was embarrassed for them all. Living outside of Kulm had meant that she had been spared having to hear firsthand this sort of nonsense about the Jews. Certainly in the early days of the war she had worried about her family's acquaintances who were Jewish-hadn't Rolf written letters and telegrams to everyone he could think of on behalf of some families?-but in the last two years their own situation had become so precarious that she had grown oblivious of their plight. She had Werner to worry about. And she had to learn to make do in a world where everything, it seemed, was suddenly scarce. Nevertheless, she had never believed the sort of claptrap that appeared in Der Stürmer or that Gabi was giving voice to now.

“Enough,” Manfred continued, a mere echo of the word this time, but his anger clearly unabated. “No Jews are living off the sweat of others. No Jews are seducing your precious Aryan children. No Jews-”

“That's right,” Sonje said, oddly adamant, and she was, much to Mutti's discomfort, pressing her body against Manfred's and burrowing her cheek against his chest. “That's absolutely right.”

“Tell me, Corporal, are you a Jew lover?” Gabi asked him.

He pushed Sonje down into the love seat almost atop poor Anna and then took Gabi's fleshy upper arms in his hands, clenching his fingers so firmly around them that Mutti could see the fabric of her dress sleeve crinkling and she feared for a moment that he was hurting her.

“I don't care that I am a guest in your family's house. I will not abide your monumental ignorance,” he told her, lowering his face into hers, his eyes unblinking.

“I was only-”

“He's right, you know,” Callum interrupted. “Say one more word like that and I'll walk out that door and put a bloody arrow at the end of the driveway pointing up here for the Russians. I'll even paint them a sign: Nazis and food, right this way.”

Gabi looked nervously toward Klara, but her mother was leaning over the piano, crying soundlessly and running the fingers of one hand abstractedly over the woodwork just above the keys. When she saw her mother was going to offer neither assistance nor comfort, she stiffened her back and stood up a little straighter. “That man is a prisoner. Your enemy. Are all of you going to allow him to talk to me like this?”

Mutti felt she should do something-say something-to deescalate the tension. Comfort Klara, maybe. Chastise Gabi. Calm Manfred. But she realized that she was tired, so very, very tired. Wasn't it only a moment ago that these young people were waltzing together contentedly? Still, she wished she could find the words to calm Manfred and silence this strange, half-insane Gabi.

“Manfred, would you have one more dance in you for a sickly girl from the country?” It was Anna speaking, and she had risen to her feet. Her lips were parted just the tiniest bit in a modest, demure smile, though it was clear from the slight quiver there that she was nervous-or, to be precise, unnerved by both Gabi's erratic behavior and Manfred's anger. She rested her fingers gently atop the corporal's shoulder, a leaf coming to rest on a low branch in the autumn, and Mutti worried that what looked to the rest of the room merely like a bit of practiced, coquettish charm was driven actually by the need for help with her balance. Her daughter, she knew, wasn't tipsy-but she was weak.

Without turning to Anna, Manfred released the other woman and allowed his strong arms to drop to his sides. He exhaled loudly, and Mutti hoped his anger might diminish now to something like a more harmless exasperation. She knew the effect a beautiful young girl like Anna could have on a young man. She had been such a girl herself, once.

“Ah, a little sympathy for a soldier home from the front. I won't say no,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, dipping her head slightly, and Mutti thought the storm was going to pass. Had, in fact, passed. But not yet. Sonje was glaring at Anna as if she, a friend of Klara's family, had some proprietary hold on the soldier. Meanwhile, Callum was muttering something in English that she didn't hear well enough to translate in her mind, but she thought was an aspersion upon Manfred's character. It sounded as if he were implying that Manfred actually was hiding from the front. Or running from the front. But he was most certainly not a soldier home from the front. She was surprised by this odd spike of jealousy from him and wondered if she had missed signs of it earlier.