Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

He eyed her deliberatively and once more studied the horse, his gaze resting a long moment on the coronet above each of the animal's hooves and then up and down Balga's legs. He looked at the animal's mouth and finally shrugged. “I really have no idea what I'm supposed to look for in a horse's mouth. Do you? Teeth, gums? I've just no idea at all. I've never owned horses; I grew up around streetcars in the city. All I know is I'm supposed to round some more up. This one seems as good as the others,” he mused, pushing an unruly forelock of dark hair off his forehead and instructing the other soldier to take Balga instead.

“You don't have to do that,” Theo told her.

“I do, sweetie. I do,” she said to her brother. Then, with a sickening flutter in her chest, she noticed the boots. Callum's boots. Both of them. Clearly this was what her mother and Sonje had seen a moment ago, this was what had caused their eyes to widen in fear. She could see the thick rubber soles, and as high on one leg as his ankle. His feet were actually sticking out. The SS soldiers were so focused on the horses, however, that they hadn't looked back yet. But, eventually, they would. They would. How could they not? Eventually their eyes would roam casually in that direction, and there would be the two shoes. They stood out against the canvas bags like lit candles on a Christmas tree.

“Here, let me do that,” she offered quickly, struggling to make the words sound normal when she felt as if she were trying to speak with a giant popover in her mouth. She realized that she needed an excuse to stand between the soldier and the incriminating side of the wagon. Once there, perhaps she might be able to drape something atop Callum's feet. Her cape, maybe. But why? Why in this cold would she do such a thing? Still, as she began to work the complicated series of straps and buckles that linked the animal with the wagon she wondered if it would seem suspicious to either of these SS troopers if she were to go and rearrange the bags of feed behind her. She decided, however, that she hadn't a choice, and she was just starting in that direction when the soldier without the eyeglasses, the one in charge, suddenly ordered her to halt, to stop whatever it was she was doing. He snapped at the old men in the truck behind him to be silent. To shut their mouths. He commanded his partner to cease work on the harness. His face grew into an elongated mask with a rictus of rage in the middle, but otherwise he, too, stood perfectly still. She didn't dare venture a glimpse back at the boots, those awful, incriminating boots that were about to get them all-even her poor, young, innocent little brother-killed, and instead kept her eyes fixed upon this suddenly furious soldier. And then she understood that his anger had nothing to do with the boots, nothing at all. It had nothing to do with anything he had seen. It was what he had heard. Was hearing. Abruptly he jumped up onto the hood of the truck and reached with both hands for the Volksempfänger radio on the cab. She had been so focused on his questions about her brother and Manfred's pistol and where they were going that she hadn't been listening to the broadcast. She had been aware that some particularly somber music had been playing, nothing more. Now she realized that the music had been replaced by an announcer, and in tones even more solemn than whatever song had been on the radio he was describing an air raid on Dresden. For a brief moment she felt only relief: This wasn't about the paratrooper in their wagon. It was only about an air raid. And air raids were, unfortunately, common these days. But then she understood this was a raid of a very different sort, a very different magnitude. Apparently Dresden was gone, all but burned off the map in the night, the once lovely city bombed in mere hours into ruins. The British, the announcer was saying, may have used a new, more deadly sort of explosive: The firestorm that engulfed the city seemed to have melted even the stone buildings that were two and three hundred years old, and there were reports that the Elbe itself was ablaze. He said the casualties were well into the tens-perhaps even hundreds-of thousands, and this attack represented an escalation in the RAF's medieval brutality: After all, Dresden was known for porcelain, not munitions. It was almost completely undefended. Even the Art Academy and the Belvedere, with all of their paintings and pottery and sculpture, had been bombed, an indication that the western Allies were as shameless and savage as the Russians. Still, he vowed that the führer's new wonder rockets would exact revenge on the United Kingdom from London to Glasgow, and this sort of viciousness would only stiffen the German resistance. It would never, he insisted, encourage capitulation. Then, after a drumroll, the grave music resumed.

The SS soldier was still holding the radio before his face, and Anna wondered if he might raise it aloft and hurl it from the roof of the truck like a boulder. But he didn't. He had merely been trying to hear every detail the announcer was offering. Now that no more news was forthcoming, he put the Volksempfänger down on the cab and jumped to the ground from his perch atop the vehicle. “Wonder rockets. That's horseshit,” he said, a little calmer now, his rage having been subsumed by disgust.

His partner murmured a pair of female names to him, and Anna presumed the fellow was referring to the soldier's two sisters-the ones who were home somewhere painting plates. She watched him place his hands on the man's shoulders, squeezing them firmly and saying something more that she couldn't hear. But she understood: Those poor girls lived in Dresden. That's where the family was from. The two men were both envisioning those sisters in the firestorm.

Then the soldier with the eyeglasses returned to them, but only to take Balga away. He was going to lead the stallion to the wrought-iron fence with the other horses at the edge of the cemetery. Briefly the animal looked at Anna, those big, dark eyes uncomprehending and curious. A little wary. He snorted once at the stranger, and it was clear that he was being led away under duress. But it looked to Anna as if he was going to be stubborn only, not vicious. She saw Theo already was walking Waldau to the second wagon.

“Don't bring him too close to those other animals,” Anna called out to the soldier, just in case, and Balga's ears twitched at the sound of her voice.

“He might kick them?” he asked.

“Or you.”

“And you said he was your horse?” the soldier asked.

She nodded.

“Come then,” the soldier said. “Say good-bye to him. And then you had better get on your way.” Quickly she went to the animal. For a moment she ran her hand along his mane and heavy winter coat, pressing and warming her palm against him. Then she brought her fingers to her lips, inhaling one last time his scent, and pressed them against his cheek. When she pulled them away he brought his nose almost to hers, and exhaled from those great, gaping nostrils a puff of steam that smelled perfectly sweet and struck her as the gust from a fairy-tale dragon. He didn't take his eyes off her, and she decided that what she had initially supposed was wariness in her animal's intense countenance was actually more akin to despair.

WHEN THE SS CHECKPOINT was well behind them, Sonje grew animated: She unleashed a frenzied, fist-pounding assault on the sacks of feed underneath which Callum was hiding. Mutti realized that the girl's sudden, violent anger at the paratrooper was unreasonable: It wasn't he, after all, who had bombed Dresden. He wasn't a pilot. He'd never even fired a bullet at a German before surrendering. Besides, it was growing increasingly evident to Mutti that her people had asked for this. She, with her blind eye, had asked for this. Hitler, that man whom she had once viewed as the führer-as her führer-had tried to bomb most of Europe into submission. He and that pompous fop Göring. She recalled Manfred's story of that train full of Jews, and she shuddered. What else had they done? What else?