Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

This was why Mutti still seemed to expect a miracle from her führer. The estate, Kaminheim, on which she had grown up as a little girl had always been a part of Germany and she had viewed herself as a German. Then, in 1919, it was on land ceded to Poland and she was supposed to become a Pole. All the Germans there were. Or they could relocate. But her family wasn't about to leave Kaminheim. There was no place else for them to go, nothing else for them to do. They grew sugar beets. It was what they did. And so, with the signing of a treaty in a palace outside of Paris, she went from being the daughter of Prussian farming gentry to a disliked little foreigner. A minority. An alien. A part of a discredited nobility. Initially, like most Prussians, Mutti's parents-Anna's grandparents-had thought this Hitler character was decidedly low-rent. There were rumors that he'd once been a paperhanger, that he'd painted bad still lifes and tried to sell them on the street. The man might not even have been completely sane. But then he got people working again and he built those highways. Gave Germans back their pride. And then, best of all, he gave them back Prussia. All of Prussia. Not just a kidney-shaped patch of earth surrounding Danzig, separated from the rest of Germany by a vast tract of Poland. Sadly, Mutti's parents died before the reunification in 1939. For most of the war, Mutti had lamented that her mother and father hadn't lived to see the return of their precious Kaminheim to Germany; now, however, Anna wondered if Mutti wasn't relieved on some level that neither had they been forced to witness their treasured land occupied by what her mother considered the savages from the east.

Finally, between the explosions and the pathetic cries of a little boy calling out not for food but for a lost dog named after food (“I want Spaetzle, Mommy! Please, please, we can't go on without Spaetzle!”), over the sound of the birdsong-still, somehow, there were birds-she heard Helmut yelling their names and high-stepping his way toward them through the snow. It sounded as if he had found another spot on the river where the ice seemed thick enough for their horses and wagons.

“Are there other people there?” their father asked him.

“Yes, but not many. Not yet.”

He said the spot was no more than fifteen minutes farther. There was a steep hill just ahead and it might be difficult for the horses to pull the wagons through some drifts of thigh-deep snow, but assuming they could make the knoll, it was no more than fifty or sixty meters from there to the edge of the river.

BENEATH THE OATS, Callum listened carefully. His right arm and leg had, once more, gone to sleep. Unfortunately, it was hard to breathe if he tried to lie on his back or his stomach. In a moment, he guessed, he would roll over and spend a few seconds gasping for air so he could allow a semblance of circulation to return to those limbs. He was a big man-powerfully built, with shoulders that flattened out like a mesa and a back that was as straight and solid as granite quarry walls-and in his opinion he was, pure and simple, too large for these quarters.

He and Anna were hoping that once they were west of the Vistula, periodically he would be allowed to walk beside the wagons. Her father had said he thought this was extremely unlikely. Though he was dressed in her older brother's winter clothes instead of his ragged British paratrooper's uniform-Werner wasn't nearly as muscular as Callum, but he was almost as tall, and Mutti had been able to doctor some pants and a jacket-if he was seen by anyone in authority he might be hanged on the spot as a German deserter.

Unless, of course, he opened his mouth first.

Then he would simply be shot on the spot as an escaped POW.

Still, he couldn't spend forever curled like a hermit crab beneath their food and the horses' feed in this wagon. And while Anna's father had surmised that he would have to remain in the cart until they reached either Mutti's cousin in Stettin or, eventually, the British and American lines somewhere far to the west, her mother was firmly convinced that he would be up and about within days. Why? Any day now, she said, certainly inside of two or three weeks, they would all be allies together: the Brits and the Yanks and the Germans. The civilized nations of the world would band together to repel the Russians. Prevent them from barbarizing all of Europe. It was, she had said, inevitable.

Callum wasn't quite so sure. In point of fact, he thought Mutti was absolutely loopy. A sweet lady with fortitude and courage. But also, alas, bloody bonkers.

Nevertheless, ever since he had jumped from an airplane seven months ago now-almost eight, if he was going to be precise-his entire life had been bonkers. The whole world, it seemed, had gone mad. And, of course, jumping from an airplane-and jumping in the dark while people below you were firing machine guns into the night sky-was hardly an indication that the world was especially sane to begin with.

The drop, at least his portion, had been a disaster almost from the moment he had first hurled himself from the plane. First there had been all that gunfire from the hedgerows and the woods. He hadn't been hit, but he had heard the agonized screams of the men drifting-sometimes minus an arm or a leg or towing their entrails like kite tails-to the earth all around him. And then, instead of landing in a meadow just east of the Orne, he had landed in quick-sand. At least it had struck him as quicksand in the dark. In reality it was a mere swamp, but clutching a rifle and weighed down by his harness, the risers, and the pack with his reserve chute, it might just as well have been quicksand. And, again, the cries, though this time they were punctuated by the choking hacks of men who were drowning as they pleaded for help. Yes, indeed, they were drowning in a few feet of water and a little Norman muck. He was on his side, disoriented in the bog, but he found if he arched his back and his neck he could keep his nose above the water and slime. Finally he was able to right himself and half-crawl, half-dog-paddle his way out of the marsh.

When he was free, when he was actually emerging onto turf that was solid, the world around him was abruptly lit as if it were noon: A troop plane had exploded, hit by a shell as it approached his corner of the drop zone. It slammed like a comet-blue and yellow flames streaming behind it, its descent marked by a screech far louder than any noise he had ever heard in his life-into the ground within a stone's throw of where he was standing, dumbstruck. Instantly it set fire to the understory and the brush all around him. Inside his pack were ammunition and a land mine, and so he actually ran back into the swamp, the only ground he could see now that wasn't ablaze.

There he helped a trooper named Bingham and a radioman named Lane save themselves from drowning, literally grabbing Bingham by his harness as if he were a big dog he had by the collar and raising him up and out of the slime. There they watched the flames in the plane and the woods burn themselves out. And the fires really didn't last all that long, despite whatever fuel the aircraft had left in its tanks, because the air was moist and the ground was a bog. When they staggered from the marsh onto dry land, a half-dozen wet and scared and lost paratroopers, it was still dark. But not for long. Almost the moment their boots touched ground that didn't squash beneath their feet for the first time in hours, the world once more went bright as midday, and the men squinted as one and shielded their eyes against searchlights. The Germans took them prisoner rather than machine-gunning them dead on the spot because they didn't know if this was the actual invasion or a mere feint, and they wanted to interrogate the Brits.

Callum was thus taken into custody without ever firing a single shot at a German. This would only endear him further to Mutti and her lone daughter, though it also led Helmut and even Theo to think a little less of him than they already did.