Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

For the first time Mutti turned back toward the men, and they halted the horses and came to a stop where they were. “You don't really believe the Russians will reach Stettin, do you?” she asked Manfred.

“I don't believe it. I know it. It's only a matter of time.”

Theo saw his mother was working hard to remain in control. “Obviously I've been hearing people talk like that for days,” she said. “Weeks even. But not you.”

He sighed. “Only because you haven't asked.”

“Then what will happen? Where will it end, tell me? The Oder? Berlin?”

“Well, my sense is-”

But before he could finish, Mutti was cutting him off. “And why? Why are they doing this to us? Will you tell me that?”

“They?”

“The Russians!” She turned to Callum, her hands upraised to the sky in bewilderment. “And where are your armies? Why aren't they joining us? Don't they understand what's at stake? Where are they? Tell me, in the name of God, where are they?” She was raising her voice in a manner that Theo almost didn't recognize.

“Mutti.” The voice was weak but firm, and everyone looked toward it. It was Anna, sitting up in the back of the wagon. “Mutti,” she said again.

Their mother shook her head and looked away in disgust. A woman perhaps Mutti's age wrapped in quilts and clutching a silver cage with a dead frozen parakeet inside it passed them; next came a pair of girls in their BDM uniforms with a lady who, Theo guessed, was their grandmother.

“That's enough,” Anna went on. “None of this is Callum's fault and none of it is Manfred's. Things will look better in Stettin, I'm sure.”

Behind them they heard a man's voice yelling for them to either get moving or pull their wagons off the road. They were stalling the whole column, he barked. And so almost without thinking Theo took Mutti's hand as if his mother were a toddler, and started walking her forward. Moving her and the wagons down the road. Her mother allowed herself to be led and Sonje obediently followed, and once more they were proceeding toward Stettin. He was relieved, though he hoped Mutti couldn't detect the way he was favoring one foot. Perhaps if his toes didn't look better by Stettin; perhaps if Anna continued to mend; perhaps if his mother regained her usually calm demeanor, he might tell her that something was wrong with his foot. But then again he might not. Everyone had so much to worry about, he wasn't sure he should add anything more.

THAT AFTERNOON, Anna and Mutti and Sonje returned from what was supposed to be a brief foray into the woods to relieve themselves. They had been gone so long that Callum had grown worried and was about to start in after them. But then he saw them, and he noticed that Anna and Sonje were stomping through the snow with sacks dangling from each of their perfectly straight arms. The bags were so stuffed that they were the shape of giant pears, and when the women reached them Callum saw they were filled with carrots and turnips and beets. One even had a loaf of black bread. Apparently there was a farmhouse just beyond this copse of pine-they would all see it soon from the road-and Mutti had traded the last of her jewelry for the provisions. A gold necklace that Rolf had given her on their honeymoon, and her wedding band. It seemed like an awfully steep price to Callum, but they were all very hungry and ate ravenously before continuing on to the west.

URI SAW THE SS troops at the crossroads, a four-way intersection with a cemetery stretching toward them from the southeast corner, before either Callum or the Emmerichs did, and he knew instantly that he was going to be leaving this family. At least for the foreseeable future. He would have to disappear, and then rejoin them at the home of this Emmerich woman's cousin in a few days or weeks-depending upon the speed with which the front continued to disintegrate. There were four soldiers, Waffen SS in their camou-flage uniforms, and two of them were brandishing Bergman sub-machine guns, smoking cigarettes, and watching the procession. The other two were talking to a middle-aged couple, reviewing their identification papers. The man, whose hair was graying and thin, was at least fifty, and yet he was nonetheless about to be drafted. There was an open truck behind the soldiers with a dozen pathetic-looking fellows-feeble and frail and some quite old-sitting or standing nervously behind the rails in the rear.

Without saying a word Uri put his hand up and signaled for Callum and Mutti to halt the horses. Instantly the Emmerichs saw the soldiers, too.

“Get in the cart, Callum,” he murmured. “Trade places with Anna.” Anna, as far as they knew, had fallen back to sleep among the bags of oats, a snug warren beneath the quilts. They still had a sizable amount of feed left for the horses, because whenever they could they had fed the animals with the hay they found in the abandoned barns where they slept.

“You don't think they'll search the wagon?” he asked.

“No. Mutti, Theo, and two young women traveling west? Seems pretty natural to me. They'll be fine.”

“What will happen to them if I'm discovered?”

“After they shoot you? They'll shoot them.”

“That's comforting,” Callum said, nodding, and he climbed over the side of the wagon and gently woke Anna. Her hair once more was wild with sleep, and for a moment she didn't seem to realize where she was. There was a trace of the cross-hatching from the burlap on her cheek. She stretched her arms over her head, and Uri imagined her waking in her warm bed, the sun bursting through curtains in the window, on a peaceful spring morning on that estate of hers. The image-the entitlement-briefly rankled him. Made him wonder where his own sister was. How she had died. All she had endured before she had finally been killed or succumbed to starvation or disease. He had the sense that Anna had come to like him more than she should given her supposed affection for this paratrooper, though he thought it was also possible this was mere arrogance on his part. Still, there was a part of him that wanted to put his arm around Callum's shoulders and tell him, So, my young friend. Anna's people? They're trying to exterminate mine. Trust me: There's no danger I am going to fall for her. He wouldn't say such a thing, of course. But the idea crossed his mind.

“She looks better, doesn't she?” her mother was saying to him. He feared he'd been staring and quickly glanced back toward the cemetery. There he noticed that the angel on one of the nearest tombstones had lost a wing and the marble at the break was almost albino white. The rest of the statue was ash-colored with age. He looked more closely now at the gravestones and saw other angels-as well as granite women and men, their robes and sandals seemingly inadequate even for stone in winters this brutal-that had lost their arms and their heads as well as their wings. There were decapitated rock cherubs and sheep. He presumed at some point there had been shell fire here, and under the rolling mantle of snow the ground had been chewed up by the explosions, the caskets splintered, and whatever was left of the bodies scattered like dust along the earth. There probably were other tombstones that had been obliterated completely, the remnants-pebbles and slabs and chunks-buried as well beneath the fresh snow.

“How long was I sleeping?” Anna was saying. Suddenly she was beside him, wrapping her head in a shawl as she spoke.

“Two hours. Maybe three,” Callum said from the wagon. “We didn't realize you were in such a deep slumber.”

“I was dreaming.”

“What of?” This was Theo.

She sniffed at the air, wrinkling her nose in a way that made Uri think of a rabbit. “Werner and Helmut,” she told her brother. “But you were in the dream, too.”