Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

Meanwhile, from inside the barn, almost like an echo, came Blumer's second shot as he executed the other prisoner who had failed to rise from her patch of straw. The birds that had returned to the peak flew off. And then, when they were still circling above the fields and the trees in search of a quiet place to land, Kogel shoved Jeanne to the ground, where she had neither the time nor the inclination to beg for mercy, and at point-blank range he discharged his pistol once again, this time into the back of poor Jeanne's skull.

Cecile couldn't hear what the female guard said to Kogel, but it was clear by her countenance and the way she was using one of her gloves like a rag to wipe Jeanne's blood and the gray-white tissue from the prisoner's brain off her skirt that she was annoyed. He had shot the woman at such an angle that the two of them had been sprayed with the gelatinous ooze from the inside of her head.

SHE WALKED BETWEEN women whose faces she knew but whose names were a mystery, and while one of them wanted to talk, Cecile was now all but incapable of speech. It wasn't that she couldn't stop crying-though that was a factor. It was that she no longer gave a damn and there was absolutely nothing she wanted to say. Her oldest friend from the camp was dead and it was her fault and only her fault. Moreover, Jeanne-grumbling, whining, meandering Jeanne-had actually died so that Leah might live. The woman had given herself up. Halfheartedly Kogel had looked for the seamstress in the woods, but he had spent no more than four or five minutes wandering through the soggy underbrush. They needed to get the column moving. And so Leah was on her own now somewhere in this foreign countryside, hopefully speaking her elegant, perfect German to someone who would shield her until the world had come to its senses or the Russians had arrived and it was safe for her to emerge from the shadows. Meanwhile, Cecile was left alone with her incapacitating guilt. She neither deserved to live nor saw any possible future. For the moment she would keep marching, struggling on with the other prisoners, but one of these times when the bastards allowed them to lie down or sit, she simply wouldn't bother to rise. Jeanne had died fast and it couldn't have been very painful. One bullet, she decided, and there would be no more hunger or pain or cold. That's all it would take. A little bit of courage and then forever she could let go of this enervating charade she called hope.

THERE WERE LARGE ANTITANK GUNS AIMED AT TWO of the bridges, and the white paint on their barrels had started to peel. Anna guessed that once she would have found the weapons frightening-or, at the very least, disturbing. The same with the shell fire that seemed, their first morning back on the road, to be falling only blocks behind them. Or the skeletal remains of the brick buildings, their whole front and rear walls sheared off. Or, certainly, the corpses of the hanged men, their bodies still dangling from makeshift scaffolds with the handwritten signs tied to their jackets that said, simply, “Coward.” But she didn't. The litany of the absent in her life had grown so long and the future was so relentlessly bleak that she had grown numb to it all. She could see that her mother had, too. It was odd: Anna was continuing on this path now only for the sake of her mother, and she had the sense that her mother was doing the same only for her. Mutti, Anna had decided, couldn't possibly believe that she would ever see her husband or her two older sons again. They were as dead and gone as poor Theo. And they all knew they would never return to Kaminheim-assuming Kaminheim even was standing.

So what was propelling this woman forward, Anna would ask herself, what was giving her mother the resolve to put one foot in front of the other and, sometimes, take the lead lines of one of the horses? In the end she decided that she herself was the answer: Mutti would not give up completely so long as she had even a single child remaining.

At one point they stopped to rest the horses and allow them to graze on the early spring grass, and a pair of women older than Mutti came up behind them and exhorted them to keep moving. Their skin was whiter than milk, and they were each carrying a single elegant valise. Their skirts-though streaked with mud and fraying along the hems-were stylish. They were both wearing leather riding boots.

“Ivan's back there,” one of the women said to Mutti. She had a kerchief around her head that looked as if it had once been a part of a window curtain. “You can't stop.”

“We'll just be here a minute,” her mother told them.

“Suit yourself,” said the woman. She then remarked, so casually that Anna found herself studying the storyteller to see if she was lying, that she had been raped multiple times only two days before and was here now only because the Russians had passed out drunk after assaulting her. A third woman, a friend of theirs, was dead because she had resisted: She had been shot, her corpse violated, and the body was left impaled on the ends of two captured German bayonets. The woman claimed that both she and her traveling partner had been attacked in broad daylight by a half-dozen Soviet riflemen. Then, after the soldiers either had fallen asleep or left them to find other, younger victims, the women had continued on their way west.

And so Anna helped Callum harness the horses so they, too, could resume their trek. Overhead there were seagulls circling the field where the horses had been grazing. She thought how lately when she had looked into the sky, it had usually been because she had heard airplanes approaching. It was surprising-and reassuring-to notice something as mundane as seagulls looking for food in the fresh grass and loosened soil.

“Would you like to ride for a bit? You've been walking all morning,” Callum asked Mutti, but her mother shook her head. She would continue on foot.

“I just don't understand why the Russians are so brutal,” her mother said after a moment. “Was war always this horrid? Is this a secret you men always have known, and you just never told the women?”

Uri had been sharing his story with Callum off and on for hours now, and when he heard Mutti's remark he turned to her and asked, “Do you really wonder?”

“I do.”

“After all you've heard about what your armies did these past years in Russia-or just last autumn in Warsaw-can it possibly be a mystery? My God, after what some of your people did to my people, do you even have to ask?”

Behind them they heard motorcycles, and then four Wehrmacht engineers sped past them on the vehicles. Anna saw they barely paid any notice to either Uri or Callum. “I can see why you don't want to remain with those boys,” Callum said, motioning toward the German soldiers, already disappearing into the distance. “But tell me: Why aren't you just waiting here now for the Russians? Why is it so important to you to get to the west?”

“I didn't go through hell the last two years only to wind up a Communist on some collective farm in the Ukraine,” he answered. “Besides, somehow I don't think the NKVD would take kindly to my having impersonated a German soldier since 1943. They probably wouldn't even believe that it was an impersonation.”

“You could always drop your drawers,” Callum said lightly, and Anna couldn't resist turning to watch her mother's reaction. Mutti was staring straight ahead, pretending not to have heard.

“I could, yes. But I have also spent the last two years peeing only in the dark or when I'm alone. I hate to think of the damage I've done to my bladder.”

The idea crossed Anna's mind that she had only the vaguest idea what a circumcised penis might look like. She had seen her twin brother's genitals when they had been children, as well as Theo's. And she had seen Callum's. It seemed, she decided now, an awful lot of work to care about such things. Too much work for an issue that didn't seem that important.