Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

“You're blushing.” It was Uri and he was speaking to her.

“Have you absolutely no sense of decorum at all?” Callum chastised him, but his voice was light and good-natured.

“Nope. That's what happens when you live your life on the run. You tend to care less about such niceties. Of course, it was you who just suggested that I drop my drawers for the Russians.”

He was grinning. And then, suddenly, Callum was grinning. She loved it when the two men wound up smiling together at precisely the same time.

IT WAS ALMOST as if the town house had been charmed: The structures to its immediate right and left-every house on the block on this street in the village-had been bombed or shelled recently. The buildings either had been reduced to large mounds of fallen timbers, crumbling stone, and dust or were the skeletal cutaways the Emmerichs had witnessed so often as they had trekked west. Unlike in the past, however, there were no refugees camped out in these husks or families who had chosen to remain. There were ornery, skinny dogs wandering the streets, growling at the horses; there was the occasional rat; and there were birds-mostly crows. But otherwise there was no sign of life in the town. Everyone either had died or had fled.

But then there was that one town house. The windows facing the street were broken and the wooden shutters on the second floor were askew, but the brick facade was largely undamaged and the slate roof was mostly intact. The curtains on the second floor and the drapes on the first, all a little shabby now, would occasionally billow out through the frames like a ghost.

It was nearly seven in the evening and the sun had set, and so they decided they would stop here for the night. To savor their good fortune. There wouldn't be running water or electricity, but perhaps there might be beds or couches inside on which they might sleep. In the three days since they had left Stettin, they hadn't dozed for more than a few hours at a time, and always those naps had been inside barns or-one night-on the floor of a bombed-out gymnasium.

But they had, once again, managed to put some distance between themselves and the army that they were trying to elude. It wasn't, however, that they were making such good time: They had simply veered farther away from Berlin, trekking not exactly along the coast but still well north of the capital. Uri believed that by now the Russians almost certainly would have overrun them if the Soviets hadn't been so focused on the prize to the south, and their race to plant the hammer and sickle atop the Reichstag. Moreover, by remaining so far to the north their small group had also managed to separate themselves from the hordes heading west or southwest. There were long intervals when they had had the road to themselves.

Now as they all stared with some measure of disbelief at the brick town house, Uri took his rifle off his shoulder and approached the front door. He said that he was just making sure it was empty.

“You want some help?” Callum asked, and Uri nodded.

But the house was every bit as deserted as it seemed, an odd oasis in the midst of the rubble that once had been a small hamlet. They were all asleep within the hour.

ANNA FELT SOMEONE gently rubbing her arm, long, tender strokes, and she opened her eyes. The room was dark and it took her a moment to orient herself. She recalled that she was in a town house in… in that place without a name. In the one town house that remained standing in the whole village. She was in a small bed-a child's bed-in a room by herself, while her mother was resting in the massive bed in the other bedroom on the floor. She was buried deep beneath quilts because the windows had been blown out in the bombing and there was no heat. But she had been warm enough to have fallen into a very deep sleep. Until now. Until someone-Callum-was rubbing her arm. Waking her up. The men had been asleep downstairs on the couches, but now one of them was upstairs.

She looked up at him, and even in the dark saw him bring one finger to his lips. He was wearing his gloves.

“Are the Russians here?” she whispered. She was so weary that the idea didn't fill her with dread. Terror, she realized, was an emotion that demanded energy.

“No,” he said, smiling. “Nothing like that. Nothing like that at all.”

“Then what?”

“Come with me. There's something I want to show you.”

“What time is it?”

“Not quite two thirty.”

She nodded. She'd been asleep, she thought, for just about seven hours.

“Come, come,” he said again, his tone almost boyish. “Hurry!”

Though she had gone to bed in her clothes, the moment she emerged from beneath the bedding she felt a nip of the frost in the air.

“Do I need my boots?” she asked.

He nodded. He already had them in his hands.

“Are the others awake?”

“No. This is just for you. For us.”

When she had her boots on, he helped her slide her arms through her parka and gave her her gloves. Then he led her down the stairs, past the living room in which Uri was sleeping, and outside. He took her hand in his and she looked up at him. His face was inscrutable: not anxious, not whimsical, not stoic. It was the face of a man, she thought, who was impassively reading a book. Over his shoulder he had slung a backpack.

As they started down the street, past the piles of debris, she heard a wolf howling in the distance, and the sound-so different from the rumble of artillery-caused her to smile slightly to herself. A wolf in the night. How natural.

“Can I have a clue?” she asked him.

“No. But you'll see it for yourself in a moment.”

And indeed she did. They quickly reached the edge of the village, the end of the last block. He pointed, but she would have been blind not to see it. She was surprised she was only noticing it now, and decided she must have been looking down at the street as they walked, either because she was so sleepy or because she was being careful and watching her step as they navigated their way along the churned-up cobblestones that once had been road.

“The northern lights,” she murmured, and she felt him squeeze her fingers and then wrap his long arms around her and pull her into him purposefully. They were standing at the edge of a lake, and there were three fountains rising up from the horizon, over the Baltic Sea in the distance, each of the sprays a throbbing column of gold that flickered like a gargantuan candle. They were illuminating the sky, causing the tips of the highest evergreens to stand out in relief, while reflecting off the glassy surface of the lake. It was almost as if the fountains of light were coming toward them as well as shooting up into the sky. There were two passing clouds the rough shapes of ovals, and it looked to Anna as if they were eyes in the face of the universe-a countenance that tonight was the color of saffron. “I've never seen them so beautiful,” she said.

“Me either. In Scotland, we call them the merry dancers. Sometimes I've seen them more colorful than this. Some violet, some red. But I've never seen them look quite so much like bloody torches.”

She burrowed against his shoulder. “Bloody,” she repeated.

“Yes. Bloody torches.”

“Would you do something for me?” she asked.

“Anything. You know that.”

“Never use that word again. Bloody. I know what you mean. But lately there has just been too much real blood.”

“I'm sorry, I only-”

“Shhhhh,” she said, as the lights shimmered to the north and that wolf she had heard back in the village bayed once again at the sky. “I know what you meant.” Then she turned toward him and stood on her toes to kiss him. He tasted like one of the old pepper-mints they had found in a tin by the fireplace on the first floor of the town house, and she guessed that she probably tasted like sleep. But she didn't care and she had the sense that he didn't either. When they parted she started to nestle back into his coat, pressing her elbows and her arms against her ribs, but he was already pulling his pack off his shoulder and unbuckling it.