Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

THEO OVERHEAD THE grown-ups saying that they would reach Mutti's cousin's home within days, and certainly by the end of the week. He hoped so. The days were noticeably longer now than when they had left Kaminheim, but that only meant they were spending more time exposed in the cold and the snow, and he wasn't sure which he hated more. The other day he had heard another refugee, a gaunt and glum-looking old man in a fedora who was traveling alone and trudging along with a cardboard suitcase, sarcastically muttering aloud a part of the Fifty-first Psalm. “Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow,” he kept mumbling, and when the man saw Theo was watching him and listening, he went on, “Ridiculous, isn't it? I am tired of all this whiteness. Really, what's so pure about snow? Would somebody tell me? Besides, that writer lived in the desert. He knew nothing about snow. Nothing!”

Theo wasn't sure he could walk much farther, or-when he was allowed to ride on one of the wagons-even endure many more days outside in the chill February air. That was the thing: If you walked you grew tired, but at least the exertion helped keep you warm; if you rested atop one of the wagons, you slowly froze. It was unpleasant either way. Still, he decided he preferred riding because something was happening to the toes on his left foot. There was a hole in the bottom of the boot and snow had begun to seep in. Three days ago the toes had started to itch and tingle; two days ago they had started to burn; now the skin was swelling and turning yellow, and the toes were as solid as miniature icicles-especially his two smallest ones. Even when he would bundle them up at night they didn't seem to improve. Of course, he wasn't exactly getting to warm them indoors around a fireplace most evenings. Many of the nights since they had left Kaminheim he had slept inside barns-barns for horses and carriages and livestock-or burrowed beneath quilts and sacks of grain in the wagons with only the winter stars for a roof. And one of the few nights they had slept in beds had been their bizarre stay at Klara's. Another of their shelters was a crowded schoolroom with mattresses packed onto the floor like tiles, which by the time they had arrived had been colonized by red insects that swarmed upon them the moment the Volkssturm guards extinguished the lights. The creatures seemed to rise up from the filthy mattresses and burrow under their clothes and nip at their skin. He wanted to sleep with a sack tied around his head so they wouldn't attack his eyes, but Mutti was afraid he would choke and wouldn't let him.

He decided the best night had occurred four days ago now. That evening an elderly farmer just outside a village had taken them in and he had slept alone in a twin bed while Mutti and Anna had slept in the second bed beside him. Sonje had another room to herself and Manfred and Callum had slept in the living room by the fire. The farmer's wife had fed them all a hot soup, and they had eaten sausages and warm bread slathered with butter. That night-and all that food-had done wonders for his sister.

Still, Theo guessed that the reason the farmer had been so kind to them had had much more to do with Manfred than with Anna. Sick and dying refugees were everywhere. But Manfred? He was a soldier who had defended the Reich up and down the eastern front, and there was nothing this farmer and his wife wouldn't have done to thank him. They had practically cleaned out their cupboards when he had introduced himself.

He hadn't told his mother about his toes, because Mutti already had so much to fret about. His sister had improved, but she was still too weak to walk for more than an hour or two at a time, and she was spending most of the trek convalescing in whichever wagon two of their remaining three horses were pulling. And then there were the rumors of military disasters everywhere. The worst story? A ship had left Gotenhafen, a port beside Danzig, at the end of January and been sunk in the night by a Russian submarine. Nearly ten thousand refugees had been on it, and almost all of them, he had heard, had drowned in the half-frozen waters of the Baltic. The vessel was a cruise ship named the Wilhelm Gustloff, and his parents had once spent a romantic holiday on the boat in 1938, when he had been little more than a toddler. He remembered-or conjured images from stories and photographs-that he and Anna and their brothers had stayed with Uncle Karl and Aunt Uschi while their parents had been away.

He was pleased that Manfred and Callum seemed to be abiding by the rules of some unwritten truce. When Manfred had first joined them, he had simply been grateful that they weren't killing each other. After all, Callum was the enemy. Well, had once been the enemy. He wasn't quite sure what Callum was these days.

“Where will you go once we reach Stettin?” the fellow was asking the German corporal now. The two men were walking behind him and Mutti and Sonje, each of them leading one of the wagons. The sun had been up for almost three hours, but it was overcast again, and the air felt as cold now as it had when Mutti had gently woken him. It had been one of those nights in which he had slept in the wagon beside Mutti because the nearest barn already was over-flowing with refugees when they arrived, and when he opened his eyes and emerged from under the blankets and quilts, he saw around him a field filled virtually to the horizon with people. Hundreds of them, and dozens and dozens of wagons. There were also the remnants of the fires that had been built in the night, all started by the men and women only after they had shoveled out holes in the snow and managed somehow to ignite the green-sometimes sodden-wood they had found in the nearby forest. Callum had built such a fire for them. What Theo found most interesting was how many families had arrived while he had been sleeping. Evidently, he had been in a much deeper slumber than he had realized.

Manfred didn't answer Callum's question, and so he turned around, curious. The corporal smiled at him and winked goodnaturedly.

“You can't keep this up forever, you know,” Callum continued. “Don't you have to be someplace? Isn't your company missing you?”

“I would think you'd be happy I'm here,” Manfred said, clearly avoiding a more revealing response.

“I would think you'd be worried about being shot as a deserter.”

“Deserter? POW? Maybe they should just hang us both. You watch: When we get to Stettin, there will be a scaffold in the center of town. For all we know, there will already be bodies swinging in the wind.”

“You're frightening Theo.”

He turned away, but only briefly, a little annoyed that Callum would presume he was so easily scared. “I've seen worse,” he said petulantly, and in his mind once more he saw the refugees on the Vistula being thrown into the roiling, frigid river, and the bodies of the Russian soldiers after Manfred and Callum had ambushed them.

Manfred nodded approvingly at him. “See?” he said to Callum. “It takes more than a few hanging corpses to scare Theo.”

He had the sense that Manfred was trying to rile Callum. Needle him a bit. They were all getting a little testy. And while he had indeed seen worse than hanged corpses, he also knew this sort of talk was going to disturb Mutti. Already she was shouldering an awful lot.

“Sometimes you people are such…” Callum began.

“Such what?” Manfred asked.

“You're such barbarians.”

“Oh, you don't know a thing about my people. Or, for that matter, about me.” Suddenly, he sounded morose. The irreverence was gone from his voice.

“I know you're not with your company. That's pretty clear. I know you haven't been since you joined us.”

“Well, you tell me: What are you going to do in Stettin? Hide in this strange woman's attic? Or just wait on her front lawn for the Russians?”