Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

Nevertheless, he had become yet one more pet in the Emmerichs' extensive menagerie. And their anticipated goodwill offering when they reached the British or American lines. And, though neither Mutti nor Rolf-her husband-nor their sons had a clue, Anna Emmerich's lover.

THE HORSES DID make it up the small knoll with the thigh-deep drifts of snow, despite the weight in the wagons, and they made it with relative ease. But Anna had never had any doubts. Helmut was right, they were more her horses than anyone's, and she knew what they were capable of. Balga especially, the animal that she rode most often. Balga was a massive, powerful stallion that wanted only to run. He had been chafing all morning at the very idea that these humans expected him to walk at their pace, even as-along with a second horse-he pulled a cart full of feed.

All of the horses were named after castles. Not just Balga. The others? Labiau, Ragnit, and Waldau. Though it had been the child Helmut who had been obsessed with the knights of East Prussia, Anna as well had appreciated the medieval romance of the stories that surrounded the citadels. And the first of the horses that she suggested be christened with the name of a castle, Balga, was regal and proud and seemed to lack completely the skittishness that marked so many of the estate's other horses. Altogether they had twelve, but only these four were coming with them on the trek west.

Now it was their turn to join the queue crossing the ice on the river. Still, Anna understood the river wouldn't keep the Russians at bay for long. Already they had a bridgehead at Kulm.

There were explosions echoing to their south and-farther away-to the north, but at the moment no shells were falling here. Gingerly she stepped onto the ice, found her footing, and then she started to lead Balga and Waldau onto the glassy plane with her. The horses were actually better off than she was because yesterday the Emmerichs' farrier had drilled ice nails into the bottom of their shoes. Helmut was behind the family on the ridge, scanning the far side of the river with his binoculars. As far as she could tell, all that was over there were the lucky refugees who had preceded them, but her father and brother feared the front was so fluid that it was possible they might cross a stretch of river where the Russians already were encamped.

Her mother and Theo had climbed off the wagon and were walking beside her, because her parents wanted everyone in the family off the carts in the event one plunged through the ice. That had happened, they knew, to other trekkers. One moment the wagons were atop the ice, and the next-after a groan and a snap-the horses and people were drowning in the frigid current of the Vistula. Only Callum was still in a cart, and Anna wasn't sure how seriously devastated anyone other than she would be if he drowned. Certainly Helmut wouldn't care, and he didn't even know how she and Callum had been spending their secret, private moments together since the winter had started to set in.

Helmut placed his field glasses back into their case and started across the ice, leading Labiau and Ragnit and the wagon they were pulling. Her father marched beside Mutti, taking her hand as they walked, occasionally whispering something into her ear, but Anna and Theo and Helmut remained silent, listening largely to the breathing of the horses and the periodic curses and whimpers from the trekkers around them who had discovered this section of river about the same time that her brother had. There were no Volkssturm or Wehrmacht soldiers here to prevent more than a family or two from starting across the river at a time, and slowly the refugees were fanning out: Instead of a single line, it was fast becoming a wave, and Anna worried that the ice would go and they would all flop into the frigid water at once.

But that didn't happen. It was all, in a way, stunningly anticlimactic. One moment they were on the eastern bank, and now, ten minutes later, they were on the west. Apparently, the road to Schwetz, the nearest village, was no more than two or three kilometers distant, and most of the trek there would be across flat meadows and fields. No more woods, at least not today, or inching forward in the midst of an endless line of equally pathetic-no, far more pathetic-refugees. She felt an almost debilitating surge of relief, an outpouring of exhaustion that made her long to sit where she was in the snow, because they were on the far shore and they were alive. And, despite the rumble of gunfire in the distance, they were safe. At least for the moment. Her father and Helmut had gotten them across the Vistula, and now they would bring them safely from this frontier of the Reich to the cocoon of its interior. She wanted, she realized, to do more than sit: She wanted to lie down, and she didn't care whether it was in her bed or the autumn-scented fields of Kaminheim or here in the cold and the ice on the western ( Western. Had there ever been a more lovely word?) bank of the Vistula and daydream. But she saw that her father and her mother were approaching her. Helmut was approaching her. Theo looked up apprehensively.

“Anna,” her father was saying, pulling her from the lovely, enervating stupor into which she was descending. He placed his hands squarely on her shoulders. “My Anna.”

“Yes, Father?”

He reached over with one arm and seemed about to pull both Theo and her against him. Into him. Then he remembered the blood, a frozen swath of burgundy-colored ice crystals that clung to his wool sleeve like honey, and instead simply rested his fingers on the scarf that swaddled her neck.

“My children,” he murmured. “Here is where you must be as strong as your mother. As strong as Helmut and Werner.”

“We have been strong, haven't we?” Theo asked. The boy wanted desperately to be as respected as his two older-in his mind, venerated-brothers. He wanted to be a soldier, too. To be needed. To not be a burden, a child who had to be watched over and managed.

Their father nodded at Theo, but he didn't smile. And instantly Anna understood. She glanced over at Helmut, the instinctive, yearning reflex of a twin for a twin. Her brother wouldn't look at her. Or he couldn't. He folded his arms against his chest and gazed at the caravan of wagons and wheelbarrows and carts that was inching its way over the ice. When she turned toward her mother, Mutti looked away. Her lips were thin and flat, and she had that stoic, gritty gaze she got whenever she did something that took enormous resolve: when she had buried the Luftwaffe pilot; when she had learned that her oldest son, Werner, had been wounded and she had had to share the news with the rest of the children; and when, only yesterday, she had been draping the chalk-white sheets on the divan and the chairs in the parlor.

And so Anna was only half-listening when her father told Theo and her that he and Helmut were leaving them here. They were returning east across the Vistula. Something about a counterattack on the Russians' bridgehead at Kulm. The need to defend Germany. Theo burrowed his face in his father's uniform jacket, oblivious of the cold and the wet and the frozen blood, his head bobbing either because he was trying hard not to cry or because he was trying to nod obediently or, perhaps, both.

And then Helmut was beside her, or-she realized after a moment-beside the wagon with Callum. Because it was to Callum he wanted to speak.

“You,” he barked at the oats. “Take care of my mother and Anna and Theo. No surrendering this time. Do you hear?”

With a grunt Callum pushed his head and his arms free, a turtlehead emerging from its shell. “You know, I can't do a whole hell of a lot in here, Helmut,” he said.

“No, but-” her brother started to snarl at the Scot, but before he could say more their father was silencing him. Reminding him that it was in no one's interest for Callum to make his presence known until they had reached the British or American lines-or until they were overtaken by the Brits or the Americans. He reassured both Helmut and Callum that the rest of the Emmerichs were more than strong enough-physically, emotionally-to get to the west on their own.