Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

Nevertheless, she was so worried about Sonje's precarious mental health that she didn't defend Callum as the girl lashed into him. When the young man climbed from the wagon, it only got worse. Sonje's grim face grew red as she ranted, and it looked as if she might physically attack him. But Mutti concluded that Sonje needed to vent-they all did, she guessed, for different reasons-and she would give her that opportunity, as unfair as that might be for poor Callum. Even Anna seemed to have realized that everyone would be better off if they allowed Sonje her say.

“I can't even bear to walk beside you right now!” she was telling the paratrooper when he climbed from the wagon, her voice strident and shrill. Callum seemed largely unperturbed, as if it were easier to allow this wave of anger to wash over him than it was to rise up and risk it cutting his columnar legs out from under him. Occasionally he would glance at Anna, and he seemed more bemused than defensive, but he was listening and nodding, as if he were receiving nothing more from Sonje than a shopping list for the village. “Are you really the people we are supposed to surrender to? You are no better than the Russians! No better at all! You are a horrible, violent people and you are brutes! When will you have had enough? When? When you've killed every last woman and child in Germany? Destroyed every single home and museum?”

Mutti presumed that part of Sonje's anger stemmed from fear: from the reality that Manfred had left them. She knew that she herself felt a little bereft, a little more anxious, and so why wouldn't Sonje-or, for that matter, her own daughter? Why shouldn't all their tempers be a little short? It was a small miracle they weren't constantly snapping at one another now that their Wehrmacht corporal was gone. It wasn't that Manfred was braver than Callum-though Mutti had to admit to herself, he probably was. Unlike their young Scot, Manfred would not have allowed himself to be captured without firing a shot. Rather, it was that he was resourceful and focused and just a little bit fierce. Moreover, he was a man in a uniform: His presence gave them a clout the other refugees lacked. The result? When they'd had this handsome Wehrmacht corporal as a part of their group, they couldn't help but feel a little bit safer, a little more secure.

“Barbarians!” Sonje was insisting, shaking her head. “Barbarians!” she repeated.

Yes, it was clear that Manfred had spent more time away from his unit than he probably should have; but she couldn't begrudge the man that, not after all he had endured in his years in the army and all, undoubtedly, he had seen. Besides, he might have saved Anna's life in that barn. Who knew what those Russians might have done to her in the end?

“And now Dresden!” Sonje hissed, her voice eerily reminiscent of Klara's when she said the name of the city, but Mutti had the sense that the girl's tirade might finally be winding down. “Why would you bomb Dresden? What could possibly be gained from bombing Dresden?”

She shook her head and wiped at her eyes and her cheeks with her gloved fingers, and Mutti reached out and rubbed her back in long, slow circles. Russians, British, Americans, she thought. Perhaps Sonje was right. Perhaps it didn't make a difference in which direction they walked. It really did seem as if the whole world was against them.

“What, Mutti?”

She looked over at Anna. She hadn't realized that she had spoken aloud just now.

“What were you saying?” her daughter was asking her, the girl's eyes shining and a little wide with concern. Callum, too, was watching her.

“Oh,” she said to them both, noting an especially forlorn-looking birch by the side of the road. “I was just being an old woman. Talking to myself, I guess.”

“You are hardly an old woman,” said Anna.

“I wasn't three or four months ago. I think I am now. I seem to be easily distracted.” She heard the despair in her voice and felt ashamed. Had she ever before sounded so gloomy?

“Well,” her daughter was saying kindly, “the mind's bound to roam when all we do is walk out here in the cold. Half the time, I find myself nodding off on my feet. Just listen to the horses' hooves: It's like a metronome. Of course we get distracted!”

We. Anna was kind enough to say we, Mutti noticed, and so she stood up a little straighter. Stopped rubbing Sonje's back. She forced herself to take strides that were longer, more vigorous, and reminded herself that she still had a part of her family with her. Her lovely daughter. Her brave little boy. This was a great blessing. And it meant, as their mother, that she had to remain steadfast and resolute, and do all that she could to protect them. Under no circumstances could she allow herself to break down and become an additional burden.

“Come,” she said to no one in particular, “we should keep moving. It won't be dark for another few hours.”

ANNA UNDERSTOOD ON a level that was more intellectual than visceral that aging represented a steady winnowing of life's possibilities. She grasped death from bullets and bombs and bayonets far better than she did death from old age and cancer. But she was not uncomprehending of the reality that the infinite steadily contracted, the options narrowed, and eventually one's future would be as shallow as a spoon. As predictable-and enervating-as the mud that followed the first thaws in March. And so as they walked on toward Stettin, three more days beneath a dreary, ever-lowering sky, in her mind she recited a litany of names. Yes, they did get distracted. All of them. They were distracted as much by their memories of what-of whom-they had lost as they were by what loomed before them. Gone, she thought, at least for the moment, was Werner. And disappeared behind him into that great fog of battle were her father and Helmut. Her twin. Then there was her mother's brother, dead, as well as the obdurate man's daughter and daughter-in-law and grandson. There were Klara and Gabi, not certainly dead but most likely dead. Russians, two killed in a barn in the midst of an act of inexplicable kindness. No, that wasn't right: It wasn't an act of kindness at all. They were stealing everything her family had: They had simply chosen not to rape and murder her in the process. Funny how a war altered one's definition of mercy.

And then, of course, there were the animals, some profoundly beloved. There were the animals they had left behind at Kaminheim and the ones they had lost since starting west: Labiau, senselessly butchered, and Balga-her favorite-commandeered. Already she could see the physical strain on the two horses that remained. Callum was walking beside the wagons most of the time, but at least once or twice each day he had been forced to crawl beneath the remaining bags of oats and one of the horses had had to struggle extra hard to proceed. She had sacrificed her suitcase soon after they had left that first SS checkpoint, telling no one when she did it, though in hindsight it hadn't been very heavy and she had regretted her sacrifice as soon as they had stopped at the end of that day. Still, when she had looked into the eyes of Waldau and Ragnit, when she had watched the white foam ooze from their mouths, she had been almost unable to bear it.

Yet as they trudged west, the loss she found herself ruing with a frequency and a depth that surprised her was neither her father nor her brothers nor even her precious horse. It was Manfred. It wasn't that she cared for him more than anyone else. She was quite sure of that. (She was, wasn't she?) But she nonetheless found herself thinking of him even when she tried not to. She thought of him when Callum was trying to cheer her up with his stories of the Scottish coast and what a life might be like for them in Elgin. His accent pained her now, because while his German vocabulary was extensive-he was, more or less, fluent-his pronunciation was still slightly off, and every conversation reminded her of how different they were. She thought of him when Theo was asking her if she thought there was a chance they might come across new boots for him soon, because his, he said, were getting a little tight. Manfred was capable and ingenious: He would have found her brother some boots. And she thought of him when she traded two bags of feed for a small sack of muesli and a little milk, and when Mutti would talk reverentially about her husband and her two distant sons. Mutti was, essentially, whistling in the dark, talking aloud about how resilient the Emmerich men were, and how they would get through this. They would, she was certain. They'd find a way.