Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

Likewise, had he become so unhinged that he thought Anna might be a worthy substitute for his courageous sister, Rebekah? Perhaps. He would see in his mind once again Anna's lovely yellow hair and the elegant curve of her cheekbones. Her face when it was flushed from another day in the cold. The way the smallest things could make her eyes sparkle. He knew the guilt that he felt for jumping from the train that his sister might have been on was never going to leave him.

Interesting that he felt remorse for that, but not for the innumerable Germans and Russians he had killed over the last two years. He had lost no sleep over their deaths-and had, in fact, felt only satisfaction each time he had assassinated some Brownshirt or SS thug. They deserved it. The whole German people, it seemed, deserved it. But then he would find the personal and the anecdotal in the cauldron. People like the Emmerichs. A child like Theo. A young woman like Anna. The other night he had gunned down two older German soldiers standing guard outside a jail in the village. But what if one of them had been Mutti's husband, Rolf?

He really had no idea who he was anymore. He had been so many people lately that he simply hadn't a clue. Which, he guessed, was a part of the reason why he was here at the edge of the woods, looking up into a hill in which there were still small piles of snow in the shade beneath some of the trees. Perhaps here was his destiny. Not Stettin, not the Emmerichs.

Still, how in the world was he going to find these partisan Jews if the Nazis back in that village hadn't even known they were out here somewhere? Perhaps that young Russian rifleman-rifle boy, if he was going to be precise-had been mistaken, and someone else had blown up the bridge and torn up those railroad tracks. They were right on the border that had separated Germany and Poland five and a half years ago, and in the area there might be Polish as well as Jewish resistance. There were also all of those Russian units eager to be among the first to reach Berlin. Perhaps the boy hadn't realized that his own artillery had taken out the bridge or the railroad.

He had his German uniform in his knapsack and wasn't sure now if he should dispose of it here. If he did find the Jews-or, perhaps, the Poles-it wouldn't look good if he was traveling around with a Wehrmacht corporal's outfit in his backpack. On the other hand, with the front this fluid it might not be advisable to be Rifleman Barsukov either. At least not for very long. If some fanatic Nazi didn't shoot him, the Russians would as soon as he opened his mouth. How could he possibly explain his bizarre picaresque these past two years to Stalin's NKVD without incriminating himself? He'd killed a lot of Nazis, but he'd killed a good number of Russians, too.

Besides, did he really want to wind up a Soviet citizen? His plan certainly wasn't to survive this nightmare only to wind up in a labor camp or a farm collective somewhere. Somehow, he had to get west. Which brought him right back to the Emmerichs and to Callum Finella. He would remind himself that the paratrooper might ease his entry into the British or the American lines. And then his internal compass once again would long for the north. For Stettin, where the Emmerichs might still be. If they had any sense, of course, they would have left by now and continued their own journey west. He hadn't heard if the Russians had reached that city yet, but if they hadn't already he guessed they would within days-unless they simply decided to bypass the town in their rush to Berlin.

Still, would he have lost anything if he ventured north to Stettin and discovered that the Emmerichs were gone?

Well, yes. Time.

In the distance he heard airplanes, and initially he presumed they were Russian. But they were coming from the west and so he changed his mind. Probably RAF or American. It wasn't likely they were German. These days the Luftwaffe still had planes, but their airfields were cratered, fuel was almost nonexistent, and it was nearly impossible to find any pilots left who had the slightest idea what they were doing. And so he lit a cigarette and leaned against a tree, waiting, wondering what the RAF's or the Americans' target would be. He thought it was possible it was that factory in the village he had just left. Of course, it was slave labor working inside there. Girls, he had heard, just like his sister. At this stage in the war, were those nozzles or pistons or whatever they made there so important that it was worth torching the Jewish prisoners assembling them? Of course not. He hoped those girls had left. Been moved somewhere else. He hoped the target was that officers' training school further up the tracks.

He couldn't see the planes because of the angle of the hill and the trees, but he guessed there were probably a half-dozen. Not a massive bombing onslaught, but not a single fighter or two planning to strafe a couple of horse-drawn Wehrmacht wagons, either.

After a moment, he decided the target most likely was the town. The engines were growing louder. And just as the bizarre idea was starting to form in his mind that he was the target, a lone man with a cigarette standing beside a birch, behind him he heard an explosion, then another, and the sounds of branches being shattered and trees upended, and he felt himself being lifted off the ground-his rifle, which had been slung over his shoulder, was suddenly twirling ahead of him like a baton and he was aware that he was no longer holding his cigarette-and he was flying as he never had before. Then he landed and the feeling was reminiscent of the experience of diving headlong from that train two years earlier; he might even have hit the ground on the same part of his hip. But he didn't have time to consider this more carefully, because the shells were continuing to churn up the ground and the forest, and tree limbs and clods of earth were raining down upon him like hail, and he could smell the fires that were igniting in the woods.

He scampered, rolling and crabwalking as much as he actually rose up on his legs and ran, but then he remembered his rifle and scuttled back for it. His knapsack, too. Somehow that had been blown off his back. Meanwhile, the planes were coming back, diving in at the height, it seemed, of his apartment house back in Schweinfurt. He grabbed his pack and felt around in the debris for his rifle, found it, and dashed as far from the woods as he could, into an open field and then down into a deep gulley beside it, aware that his hip was hurting and his hands were bleeding and there was a long red stain forming on his pants.

Ankle-deep in cold water, runoff from the snow on the nearby hills, he looked back now and saw that the mountain was completely ablaze and the planes were departing as quickly as they had arrived. But against the blue sky he saw the swastika on the tail of one plane and iron crosses on the wings of the others. The aircraft were German. Luftwaffe. He wiped at the blood on his leg and looked at it. Wondered if he was badly hurt. He didn't think so. Mostly, however, he wondered at the lunacy of this Nazi regime, its colossal hate. Here its air force couldn't find the wherewithal to protect Berlin or Hamburg or Dresden. But tell them there were Jewish resisters in the woods near some pathetic town on the border of what used to be Poland, and they could find the runways and the resources to bomb a small forest into ash.

He watched the creosote plumes rise into the air and obscure a wide ribbon of sky, but he knew the ground was still so moist that the fires would burn themselves out within hours. Still, he wasn't going to wait. Did he need a more convincing or obvious sign? No. He didn't. He was getting the hell out of Germany; he wanted nothing more to do with this country. Ever. And that meant he would limp north now to Stettin. With any luck, the Emmerichs and their Scottish POW would still be there.