Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

Her first thought was to tell him, You don't believe that. Once more, however, she restrained herself and said simply, “I hope so. We all do.”

“Where are you going?”

“Stettin.”

“Do you have family there? Or friends who are expecting you?”

“My mother's cousin lives there.”

“It's just the four of you?”

“Yes,” she said, wondering why he would even ask such a thing. She thought instantly of Callum, buried beneath the feed, and Manfred, behind them now somewhere amid the long columns of refugees.

“It's awfully dangerous for women and children to travel alone,” he said.

She felt a small eddy of resentment: If they actually had a man with them right now, he would be taken away from them and asked to stop a tank with a slingshot. She considered telling him the story of the pair of Russian scouts in the barn, perhaps omitting the small detail that they really did have two males traveling with them at the time and each of those men had shot one of the enemy soldiers. She was awed at the rage that was festering inside her and wondered if it stemmed from the fact that Manfred was gone. Did she actually feel more vulnerable now that he had left them? “I know,” she said evenly.

“Do you have anything you can use to defend yourself?”

She reached under her cape and revealed the pistol Manfred had given her. She wanted to give him no reason to search her or the wagons. In addition to Callum, she recalled that the rifles they had taken from the Russian soldiers were in the cart, too.

He looked at it, and despite the fact she had shared the gun with him willingly, his tone changed from one of vague solicitude to suspicion. “Where did you get this?”

“It was Werner's,” she said quickly, reflexively.

“Werner is your brother in Budapest?”

“That's right.”

“And why doesn't Werner-your-brother-in-Budapest have it?”

She shrugged, hoping her breathing sounded normal, her voice natural. “When he was home on leave, he gave it to me. He knew we were going to have to evacuate soon.”

“Rather defeatist of him, don't you think?”

“No.”

“When did your brother return to his company?”

“I don't recall the exact date. But it was early January,” she lied.

He turned his attention toward Mutti for the first time.

“Do you love your son? This Werner in Budapest?” he asked.

Sonje was huddling against Mutti, and Theo was standing beside them. The boy, for reasons Anna couldn't fathom, was standing on a single foot like a stork, and she wanted to ask her brother what in heaven's name he was doing, if only to divert this SS soldier's attention away from their mother. Already, however, her mother was releasing Sonje and rising up to her full height. “Yes, of course I do,” she replied.

“Do you worry about him in Budapest?”

“I don't know what you're implying, young man, and I don't believe I want to know. But, obviously, I worry about my son in Budapest. I'm a mother and I'm a wife. That means I also worry about my son and my husband who are fighting somewhere to the east. And, if you are desirous of a complete litany, I will also tell you that I worry about my brother-in-law who is defending our country on the western front,” she continued, as if she were speaking with an inattentive and slightly annoying schoolboy. “And while my older son wanted his sister to have a way to protect herself and her family, his attitude is anything but defeatist. If you had a sister, wouldn't you want her to have a way to protect herself? For goodness' sake, you just said yourself that it's dangerous out here.”

The soldier actually smiled at her and seemed slightly and appropriately abashed. For goodness' sake. Anna chastised herself inwardly for fretting for even a moment about what her mother might say.

“As a matter of fact, I do have sisters. Two,” he said. “And, yes, if they weren't safely at home right now painting plates, I expect I would want them to carry handguns, too.”

Nearby there was a small explosion, and almost as one she and Theo winced and turned toward the sound, her brother finally dropping that other foot for balance. One of the older men had just fired the panzerfaust. The red star was completely untouched, but she thought one of the tombstones-easily twenty meters to the right of the target-had been obliterated. When she looked back at the SS soldier before her, he was rolling his eyes in disgust.

“And that's what's going to save the Fatherland. Please. Heaven protect us all,” he said, and he placed Manfred's pistol back in her palm and returned to her both the Emmerichs' and Sonje's papers. Then he looked at their wagons, his hands on his hips, and paused.

“May we continue?” she asked him.

He ignored her as if he had a sudden, more pressing thought, and marched over to Waldau. Waldau and Ragnit were leading one cart-the one in which Callum was hidden-and Balga the other. He ran his fingers along the animal's velvetine cannon of a shoulder. “I see you have two wagons and three horses. I hate to do this to you, but I don't have a choice: I'm going to have to confiscate one of your animals. But they look like good, strong pullers: You'll still have a horse for each wagon,” he said, and then he motioned for the soldier beside him-a studious-looking fellow with round eye-glasses who was no older than Werner, Anna guessed, but with an oddly weathered face for a man so young-to remove the harness linking the horse nearest him from the wagon. Instantly her mother and Sonje glanced at her, and she could see the alarm in their faces. It wasn't, she sensed, merely the reality that they were about to lose a second horse that was troubling them. Certainly Mutti had to know that Ragnit was capable of pulling the wagon away from this checkpoint on his own, even with the added weight of the parastrooper buried beneath the bags of oats. She looked back at them, trying to understand what, suddenly, had them so unnerved.

“That's Waldau,” Theo was saying to the men. “He's named for a castle.” Her brother's voice had a quiver to it that Anna recognized. This was his favorite horse, other than that pony of his they had left behind at Kaminheim, and he was trying hard to keep from crying.

“I know the castle,” the soldier with the spectacles was saying patiently, and something about the tenderness in his tone made her wonder if it was possible that he was old enough to have children of his own. He pulled off his gloves so he could more easily manage the buckles on the bridle and the reins and the leather suspenders that fell across the animal's neck and chest. “I know precisely where it is in Prussia.”

“We've already lost Labiau,” Theo continued, as he watched the soldier begin to unhitch the horse.

“Ah, another castle,” he remarked.

“He was killed by a plane that strafed our column,” the boy added, and Anna found herself mesmerized by her brother's resilience, by the way he was holding back his tears even now. And so before she knew quite what she was going to say or do, she was pointing at Balga and suggesting to the soldier, “Would you please take this animal instead?”

The soldier paused and shrugged. His partner, the one who had examined their papers, went over to Balga and eyed him more closely. “You realize, don't you, that I could take all three of your horses,” he said, a statement, not a question.

“I do know, yes.”

“Well, then: Why this one?” he asked. “Is there a problem with him I'm missing? If he's dragging this wagon on his own, he must be quite some animal.”

“He's my horse,” she said simply. “That's why. The first one you picked is a favorite of my little brother. He's already had to leave his pony behind. If possible, I'd like him to keep this animal in his life. He's lost so much else.”