Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

Rolf was somewhere to the east. She tried not even to speculate where, or in what condition.

Now she called out to whoever was knocking that she was awake.

“Lovely,” the voice answered, and she realized it was Klara.

“Thank you. I'll be down presently,” she told her friend. Then, as she did every morning-in barns or in beds-she prayed that her husband and her two older sons were safe. That, somehow, they would escape harm. She prayed that she would have the strength and the wisdom to protect her youngest boy and her daughter; that soon they would all be together again as a family; and that someday their only concerns would be the price they were paid for their sugar beets and whether a mare would deliver a foal safely.

AT BREAKFAST, Callum listened as Mutti tried again to convince Klara that she and the two girls simply had to accompany them west to her cousin's in Stettin. He hated to admit it, but he really didn't give a damn if they came with them or not. Already he and the Emmerichs were playing with fire. Their motley group consisted of two females, a boy, a POW-who, he had to admit, was spending way too little time hidden beneath the feed-and an army deserter. Did they really need three half-insane women to slow them down? But then, when he was bringing Anna a cup of hot tea in the living room before joining Manfred to load up the wagons, he decided that none of them, not even that reprehensible Gabi, deserved to be left behind. It wasn't these women, after all, who had been machine-gunning Ukrainian civilians or working Jews till they died in labor camps somewhere. Choosing a village and hanging a hundred Poles-filling their mouths first with plaster of Paris so they couldn't cry out or shout patriotic slogans as they died-because an SS officer had been killed by the underground.

And yet when the Russians arrived here in a couple of days, these women would have to atone for the sins of their kin.

“Your mother thinks she can convince Klara to come with us,” he told Anna, dipping the tea ball for her one last time in the cup and then laying it on a separate plate that Mutti had given him.

Anna was dressed in heavy wool trousers that had belonged to one of Gabi's brothers and a sweater so bulky that she seemed to be swimming in it. She had been alone in that large, dark room till he joined her, but she looked refreshed from a night in a bed. Now she sat forward on the ottoman and leaned in toward the fire. She brushed a lock of hair away from her eyes.

“She must,” she said simply. “They're insane if they stay here.”

“Well, they're insane if they come with us. They might be safer with us. But I think they're mad as hatters wherever they are. Here or on the road or in Berlin. Doesn't matter. They'll always be nuts.”

“I hate to admit this, but I don't especially like them.”

“How could you? How could anyone? They're lunatics. One of them, Sonje? She practically raped Manfred in the bloody larder. I nearly walked in on her as she was going on and on about being his… never mind.”

“Tell me.”

“Oh, no. All I meant is she's desperate. Knows she has to get out of here.”

“Well, that's actually an indication that she's perfectly sane.”

“It's Gabi who is particularly reprehensible,” he said. “Despicable in every imaginable way.”

“I agree.”

He watched her gaze down into her tea, nodding. He could see her eyelashes, long and lovely and so fair that they almost disappeared against her skin. Then he looked up into the mirror on the wall behind her, a piece of glass the size of a door that was framed in ornate gold-painted wood, and there in the reflection he saw them. Gabi and Klara-the daughter with her mother. He didn't know how long they had been standing there-well into the room, no more than eight or nine feet behind them-but it was clear from the sour expressions on both of their faces that they had gotten the gist of the conversation. When their eyes met his in the mirror, Klara retreated from the room, disappeared, but Gabi exploded toward them, stomping across the thin expanse of carpet that separated them. He stood to greet her-to, he thought in the brief second before she had reached him, shield Anna from her. Before he had said a single word, however, Gabi slapped him violently across the cheek, so hard that he felt his head snapping to the right at the moment that the sting had begun to register.

“How dare you?” she hissed, the chalk of her eyes now white-hot, their anger fueled by a blast furnace raging behind a pair of ever-widening black pupils. “We took you in, we fed you, we gave you beds! And now… now this betrayal!”

Anna stood beside him and tried to reach out to her. But Gabi sliced at her elbow, using her own arm as a scythe. “We will turn you in. We will turn you all in,” she said, and she stared at Anna as she spoke.

“I'm sorry, Gabi,” Anna said, her voice a quivering, guilt-ridden echo of its usual self. “I don't know what to say.”

“You can get out-just get out. We won't be joining you. We would never join you,” she said. Then she turned to Callum and added, “I am quite sure that Sonje would never have given herself to your Jew-loving friend. That was all just… just talk.”

“Please, Gabi, I'm sorry,” Anna was saying. “We're tired and we were saying things we didn't really mean. We were just being catty. We-”

“We don't need you,” Gabi said. “We don't need anybody. Unlike you, I still have faith in our führer and in our armies. The Russians? Little more than apes. We will stop them well before they get anywhere near this house.”

“They are pretty near here right now,” he reminded her.

It looked to him as if she were about to respond, to say something more. Perhaps accuse him of cowardice. Perhaps accuse Anna of defeatism. But she did neither. She glowered for a brief moment and then turned on her heels and stalked off.

IN THE END, only Sonje accompanied them when they left. Mutti had pleaded with Klara to join them, but Gabi wouldn't leave and Klara wouldn't leave without her daughter. The angry young woman refused to even emerge from her bedroom. And so it was only Sonje who threw a few items into a suitcase and joined the group as they started back down the path Mutti had shown them the day before. Anna had the distinct sense that Gabi was gazing down at them scornfully from her window and she felt a deep twinge of guilt. Arguably, it was her and Callum's fault that Gabi, and thus Klara, were remaining behind. But she had apologized, she had apologized profusely; she had all but begged Gabi to forgive her and come with them. But the woman was obstinate beyond all reason. Her mother was, too. Prattled on about her faith in the once-vaunted army. Still, Anna couldn't help but imagine the two of them slashing their wrists in an upstairs bathroom or the parlor, as the Bolsheviks arrived at the gates of their estate.

Once the horses and wagons were back on the road, Manfred and Callum shoveled snow on their tracks and flattened it down as best they could. They threw tree limbs onto the ground where the path to the estate would have been visible to passersby. Then they were back amid the long line of refugees, and although they heard no cannon fire to the east, one young mother reported that Russian tanks had been seen as close as Bütow, and by all means they had to keep moving.

FOR A WEEK NOW THEY HAD WALKED WITH SONJE as part of their group, the woman a largely silent, stoic, and sepulchral presence. But she kept up and her crying in the night was soundless. That seemed to be about all that mattered to anyone.

Little by little they learned more of her history: Her father was a chemist who worked with the Luftwaffe, and when she had seen him last-months and months earlier, just days after Paris had been liberated-he had said he had been working on nonflammable aviation paints. She said she had believed him, but the mere fact that she felt the need to footnote her recollection this way led Manfred and Callum and the Emmerichs to conclude that she hadn't. Was the Luftwaffe actually producing shells that were filled with poisons or chemical gases? Certainly Manfred and Callum thought it was possible, especially when they learned that Sonje's father's project had been moved around so frequently to avoid Allied air attacks that she no longer had any idea where he was. And her mother? She had died when Sonje had been fifteen, in the very first days of the war. Consequently, Sonje and her younger brother had spent much of the conflict being shuttled between well-meaning family and friends. As far as Sonje knew, her brother was still alive. He had been a soldier since June and missing in action since October, but that, in her opinion, did not definitively mean he was dead. Didn't missing soldiers turn up alive and well every day? No one saw any reason to correct her.