Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

In the morning, Callum dug a grave in a patch of softening earth in the backyard that looked out upon the water. Again Mutti noticed the seagulls. As Callum worked, she recalled once more the grave she had dug by herself in September 1939 for the Luftwaffe pilot who had been shot down near Kaminheim and crashed in their park. The sky had been blue that day, too. Midmorning she had happened to notice two planes in the sky, darting around each other as if they were a part of an aerial barnstorming show, but then abruptly she saw a wide, frothy rope of black smoke trailing behind one. It dipped its wing and then, as the other plane continued to the north, started to plummet like an arrow into the park between the marshes and the beet fields. She'd never witnessed anything like this: A plane was about to crash. She half-expected she would see a parachute emerge and the pilot floating safely through the air, but she didn't, and then she realized that she wasn't merely watching a plane auger into the ground: She was watching a person-a pilot-die. She didn't actually see the aircraft when it smashed into the earth, but she was standing on the terrace and she felt the stones shudder beneath her feet at the impact.

The small dogfight had occurred in the very first days of the war, soon after their Polish field hands had fled, the workers unsure whose side they were supposed to be on. At least that was what Mutti had told herself at the time. When they returned after the Polish surrender, however, it was clear by the combination of contrition and resentment that marked their attitudes that they had been hoping for a Polish victory. They had known very well whose side they were supposed to take, and it wasn't hers.

Earlier in the month, almost immediately after German tanks had crossed the Polish border, the Poles had rounded up Rolf and Werner-along with most of the other German men and male teenagers in the district-and were detaining them in the school-house and one of the churches in Kulm. Helmut was not quite thirteen, just young enough that they hadn't bothered with him. And so after leaving Anna and Helmut and little Theo back at the house, she alone had ventured to the wreckage. There, much to her surprise, she discovered that the fires already were burning themselves out. Right away she spied the German's body, even though the cockpit had collapsed violently around his chest and his legs. He was dead and his head was twisted almost completely around so that the back of his skull was pressed against the glass canopy, but he didn't appear especially disfigured. No scorch marks, no burns. She pulled off his helmet and was surprised by how young he looked. Not much older than Werner. His eyes were closed, as if he merely were sleeping.

Like her Theo now.

His hair was jet black and his bangs had fallen over his forehead.

She couldn't bear to leave him where he was. There wasn't anything she could do about the blackened and twisted metal, but she could, she decided, bury this poor young man. In addition, she could alert his family. Let them know what had happened. And so she dragged him from the remains of the plane, aware by the way his legs sagged like great bags of cornmeal that the bones there had probably been ground to a fine powder and that even most of the bones in his arms and his rib cage had been shattered. She could feel long splinters that once had been scapulae underneath his flight jacket.

Initially she couldn't find his papers, but as she rooted around the pockets inside his vest she discovered them. His name was Hans-Gunther Sprenger, and he was from Leipzig. He was twenty-three. She carefully put the papers aside so she could return them, along with the watch he had in his pocket and the gold ring he was wearing, to his family. Then she prepared the young man for burial. She washed the body with alcohol there in the field and decorated his forehead with oak leaves. She placed a bouquet of wildflowers from the field inside his hands. And all by herself, because she didn't want to frighten poor Helmut who was already alarmed by the sudden way the older boys and men had been taken away, she dug a grave. The soil was dry and rocky here, and it took most of the day. But with only a shovel and her gardening gloves, she dug a rectangle big enough and deep enough for a casket-though, of course, there would be no casket. There would be only a corpse wrapped tightly in sheets. And then in a German flag. She had one hidden among the hay bales in the barn.

When she had laid Sprenger in the dirt, she said the Lord's Prayer and thanked him for his service. She placed beside the body some of the dials and pieces of the cockpit that had been thrown clear of the fuselage. The combination of the corpse swaddled in sheets and the items she had placed beside it gave the burial an unexpectedly Egyptian feel, she decided. Then she covered the body with dirt, flattened the ground with the back of the shovel, and used a honeycomb-shaped piece of debris from the wing as a tombstone.

Days later, when the men were back home and the Germans had taken control of their corner of the country, they dug the pilot back up. Rolf and Werner and the wheelwright crafted for him a decent casket, but then a Luftwaffe administrator appeared and returned Sprenger to Leipzig, where he was buried with full military honors. Mutti remained in touch with the airman's family until 1943, but Sprenger's mother stopped writing after the pilot's father died fighting in Italy. Mutti never heard from her again.

Now, here in Stettin, she placed another makeshift marker atop another makeshift grave. They had discovered in Theo's bag that the child had brought with him the wire currycomb with the wooden handle on which Helmut had meticulously engraved the name Theo and his birth date and the words Kaminheim's von Seydlitz, a reference to a great Prussian cavalry commander under Friedrich the Second. It had been Helmut's birthday present for his younger brother two years earlier. While Callum was digging the grave, Anna hammered the comb into a piece of timber that was leaning uselessly against the stone foundation in the basement of Elfi's house, and then painted below the comb a line from a Wagner opera the family had particularly liked. The line was sung by a young woman named Senta, but the character sings it before she throws herself into the sea and so it was fitting here on the cliff, and Anna thought Theo would have liked the sentiment more than he would have been troubled by the idea it was a line that belonged to a girl: “Here I stand, faithful to you until death.”

Then the three of them buried the boy, standing for a moment in the morning sun beside the flattened earth with the tombstone made of timber, aware of the sound of the surf and the gulls and-somewhere to the east and the south-artillery fire.

When they were done, Anna and Callum went to harness the two horses to one of the wagons. It didn't seem to make sense anymore to bring both wagons. They only had the two horses, Ragnit and Waldau, which meant they didn't need all that feed. Besides, it was Balga who had been the insatiable eater, the warhorse with an appetite that matched his charisma. Moreover, the snow was largely melted now and the pair that remained could graze on the spring grass that was slowly transforming the world from gray to green. And Theo and Sonje were no longer traveling with them: They were down to a party of three. Fewer people, fewer horses. Everything was dwindling. If they ever did reach the British or the Americans, Anna wondered who would be left.

It was as they were finishing the task, as Mutti was draping a sheet over the divan in the bay window that looked out upon the street, that the three of them saw Manfred. A motorcycle roared down the almost preternaturally silent road and skidded to a stop perhaps a dozen meters from the horses, kicking up gravel and dust. At first neither the lone woman inside the house nor the young people with the animals outside recognized him. Instead of the gray and green uniform of a Wehrmacht corporal, he was wearing a rubberized motorcycle coat, with an officer's shoulder boards attached to loops there.