Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

“What were we doing?”

She smiled at the boy. “We were all at the sea. At that beach you love east of Danzig, and we were all on a holiday. There was a boat in the distance. A big one. Helmut and Werner were dunking you in the waves.”

“I'm too old for that,” Theo said, clearly disappointed that even in Anna's dreams he was deemed a small child. Meanwhile, Uri was left wondering at the way his big sister had taken the night-marish story they had all heard about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff and somehow in her sleep generated images that left her content.

“You are indeed, my little love. You are indeed.”

“Where were you? It doesn't sound like you were in the water with us.”

She paused. “I was sitting on a blanket on the beach. Watching. And the sun? Glorious. Hotter than it ever is in reality, I think. Scorching. The sand was almost too hot for my toes. But I was very happy.”

“You weren't alone, were you?”

Anna rolled her eyes at her brother, but Uri could tell that the boy had hit a nerve. “Tell me who!” the child insisted. “Who was on the blanket with you!”

“No one. I was alone.”

“You're lying, I can tell.”

Uri saw her glance at him briefly, almost against her will. Then she squeezed her brother's shoulders through his coat, pulling him against her. “Big sisters are allowed their secrets,” she said into Theo's ear, and-though Uri knew it was exactly the wrong thing to do-he glanced up at Callum in the wagon. The paratrooper's gaze was darting back and forth between Anna and him, and the fact that Anna had looked fleetingly in his direction-rather than in Callum's-hadn't been lost on the Scot. Uri could see the hurt in his eyes. And now, he realized, by glimpsing up at Callum he had made it clear to this other soldier that he, too, was aware of who had been on the blanket beside Anna in her dream.

The moment was broken abruptly when somewhere in the woods in the distance, somewhere behind the SS soldiers, they heard a single shot. “Russians?” Mutti asked him.

“No,” he told her. “Most likely a deserter. The SS simply taking care of someone without the proper papers.” He sensed Callum was continuing to stare at him as he said this, and when he turned, he saw he was correct. Only when they heard the SS soldiers signaling for the line to move along did the paratrooper finally disappear beneath the feed. Uri decided that when he rejoined this crowd in Stettin, he would have to be careful not to antagonize this Scotsman. He would have to watch what he said, and he would have to stay the hell out of this Anna girl's dreams. Besides, he liked Callum. But he couldn't focus on any of that right now. He handed Anna his pistol and told her that she should not be afraid to use it. Then he asked Mutti for the address of her cousin in Stettin and, once he had it, started to march with authority back down the road. Against the current, against this boundless stream of refugees. Their good-byes had been brief and, in his mind, completely unsatisfactory. But he had to move fast and he had to move as if he had a purpose, at least until he was far, far from those SS goons.

Then, when he had some distance on the checkpoint, he would figure out how, once again, to reinvent himself.

DESPITE THE COLD, the ground was spongy and soft at the checkpoint, a mix of mud and motor oil and horse manure. Off to one side of the road, opposite the SS soldiers' truck, Anna saw four strong horses tied to the wrought-iron fence that surrounded this edge of the cemetery. Two had their mouths and noses hidden by army feed bags, and two were looking on testily. On the other side of the intersection there was a large mound of debris, clothes and toys and suitcases that families were discarding here. She guessed the suitcases belonged to the men in the truck. But that hairless doll in the torn smock? Or the chipped wooden sword and its matching scabbard? There were certainly no coats or capes, but she saw linens and spring bonnets and picture frames-large ones for paintings and small ones for photographs-with the images removed. Someone had left behind a box that must once have held fine silver, and while the utensils were long gone, the container was still here, the felt lining filling now with snow and clods of mud churned up by people's boots as they passed.

Anna thought the SS soldiers actually looked more tired than menacing, perhaps even a little bored. Still, two of them were coldly pulling almost every male they found from the line and herding them into the back of the vehicle, where the recruits were listening to the music and propaganda-offered at the moment in equal parts-on the Volksempfänger radio that was resting on the truck's cab. The other soldiers, the pair who had been smoking cigarettes, had taken a half-dozen of the men with them to the edge of the forest, and briefly Anna feared they were going to execute the group right here and now. Much to her relief, however, she understood after a moment that instead the soldiers were about to give them an impromptu lesson on how to fire a panzerfaust. One of the soldiers was leaning a ratty piece of barn board with a hand-drawn Russian star against a dead chestnut tree at the edge of the cemetery, while the other was showing them how to rest the small cannon on their shoulders. He was warning them to avoid the flame that would exit the rear of the weapon and spurt easily two meters behind them.

Some of those men, she thought, didn't look fit to work on her family's farm, much less try to stop Russian tanks. They were more likely to kill themselves than slow Ivan's advance. She wondered: Weeks ago had one of those men been her father? An aging veteran of the First World War expected now to do what men half his age-with better weapons and better training-had been incapable of accomplishing? It was pathetic, just pathetic, and she was at once mortified and embarrassed and angry.

One of the soldiers who was reviewing her family's papers looked up at her. “Something bothering you?” he asked.

She focused on him, at the shadowy stubble and the deep bags under his disturbingly boyish green eyes, at the pencil-point-thin scar that ran along his jaw from his earlobe to his chin, and tried to erase the frown from her face. Still, the absurdity of his question astonished her. Was something bothering her? She was a refugee. She had been sleeping in the homes of strangers or in barns or outside in the snow for weeks. She was hungry; she was cold. Of course something was bothering her. But she held her tongue and said-trying to sound pleasant-“I've been sick.”

“With what?”

“I don't know. Not typhus. I'm getting better.”

He nodded. “I'm glad,” he said, and his relief sounded oddly genuine. “It seems you have two brothers in the army, yes?”

For a moment she was curious why he was asking her this and not Mutti-the head of their household. But then she got it. He simply wanted to talk to her. A young woman.

“Yes. My older brother is fighting outside of Budapest. That's Werner. I'm not sure where Helmut is. He's my twin. But he's east of here, with our father. The last we heard, they were part of the counterattack on the Kulm bridgehead.”

“That was weeks ago,” he said.

“I know.”

“No word since then?”

She shook her head and quickly he looked down from her to the papers in his gloved hands. “And your father is Rolf,” he said, trying to fill in the silence before it grew awkward. “My father is named Rolf, too. I haven't seen him in months, either.”

“I'm sorry,” she murmured, assuming she had to say something.

“He's fine. He trains teenagers to fire antiaircraft guns in the west. They're boys practically-not much older than this young fellow,” the soldier continued, motioning toward Theo. “He travels between the factories and sets up the batteries. I'm sure your father is fine, too.”