Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

No one in the group was precisely sure anymore where they were going. At one point Anna suggested they consider Schweinfurt, since it was far to the west and Uri might know people there. But it was also far to the south-so far that the distance, even after the hundreds of kilometers they had trekked, seemed prohibitive. Moreover, Uri wanted nothing to do with the city: He was quite certain that all of his family and friends were dead, and anyone still there had been all too happy to see the city's Jewish population degraded, deported, and, in the end, exterminated.

Consequently, their plan was simply to continue west, trying to avoid the major cities with their desperate, inevitable congestion-and, at night, the air raids that continued to pulverize the metropolitan areas even now. They would steer clear of Berlin at all costs, given the desperate battle that loomed there. When they heard cannonade to the east, they walked briskly; when they heard only bird-song, they allowed themselves the opportunity to shamble.

IT WAS URI who spotted the woeful column first. Their road was almost converging upon the one the column was on, separated from it at the moment by an expanse of triangular field cratered by shell fire and filled with the remnants of charred and blackened Wehrmacht vehicles-wagons, motorcycles, half-tracks, and what Uri alone recognized as the remains of two or three small, turretless Bushwhacker tanks. The soldiers had probably been encamped there when they had been spotted by an enemy pilot and attacked from the air. It must have been at least a day or two earlier, however, because there were no signs of soldiers either wounded or deceased, and the dead horses had started to smell.

Still, it was what was across the field that caused Uri's heart to race: There, no more than two hundred meters distant, was a plodding line of the most pathetic, despairing old men he had ever seen. At least he thought they were old men. Most of them were clad in shirts and trousers that even from this distance he could see were little more than threadbare rags, but some seemed to be wearing sacklike shifts and skirts and kerchiefs on their heads. There were also a few in striped prison uniforms. He guessed there were a hundred of them, perhaps more, and without exception the group was haggard and stooped and lumbering along at a crawl. He counted nine guards, three of whom seemed to be female.

“What do you make of that?” Callum was asking.

“The old men?”

“Old men? Are you blind?” the paratrooper admonished him, his voice indignant. “They're girls! They're young women!”

Uri squinted and studied the column of prisoners. He decided that if Callum was right, then those guards deserved to be shot. Hell, they deserved to be shot regardless of the age or the gender of the walking skeletons they were prodding along.

“Women,” he murmured, when he realized that Callum was correct.

“Young women!” Callum said again, more loudly this time. “Girls! Some are probably the same age as Anna here! Some could be as young as your sister!”

Anna and Mutti had come up beside them, standing so close that he could feel the warmth of Anna's breath and smell the damp wool of her sweater. Her parka was in the back of the wagon at the moment.

“Are they…” Mutti began.

“They're Jews,” Callum said to her. “No doubt, they're Jews.” He was at once incredulous and disgusted, and it sounded to Uri as if he were chastising the woman. This, he was saying in essence, is what your people are doing. Have done. Here it is in full view: No more hiding it behind barbed wire fences and cement crematoriums, no more burying the corpses in ditches. Here's a whole bloody parade of the walking dead.

Mutti held her hands before her mouth and a small moan-a cry, almost-escaped. “They're girls, you say?” she murmured finally.

“Yes!” Callum said. “They're Jewish girls! Here's what your ten-thousand-year Reich was really all about!”

Uri watched as the column seemed to drift: It looked to him as if the individuals were bobbing in a river. It made absolutely no sound.

“Those guards: the most abominable bastards on the planet. What kind of person would do that?” Callum was muttering. Uri had never seen him so angry. Didn't know the Scot had it in him.

“Well, then,” Uri said, aware of precisely what he wanted to do-what he was going to do-and wholly unconcerned with the ramifications. “Let's take care of them.” He pulled his rifle off his shoulder and released the safety. “I'd suggest you get one of the Russian rifles out of the wagon.”

“What are you doing?” This was Anna, and he heard a little tremor in her voice.

“I am going to kill that fellow”-and he paused as he squinted through the sight, moving his rifle like a pointer-“right there. The one with that ridiculous white mustache.”

“But there are too many of them,” Mutti said.

“And, I'd bet, they're all cowards. They're pathetic bullies and cowards.”

His angle now was such that he was going to have to shoot the man in the back. So be it. He aimed heart level, just to the left of the guard's spine and below the man's scapula. And then he squeezed the trigger, experienced the recoil in his shoulder as he heard the blast in his ear, and watched as the guard with his pre-posterous resemblance to a walrus fell like a straw man whose braces have been removed, the fellow's knees buckling, his chin rolling into his neck, his arms flapping once like a dancer's. The idea somehow crossed Uri's mind that he might have been eating something as he walked: He thought he saw a large chunk of bread fly from the man's fingers as he died.

CECILE HEARD THE gunshot and saw the black bread Pusch was gnawing-she knew that his teeth were as bad as most of the prisoners', though in his case it had everything to do with slovenly personal hygiene and not malnutrition-fall to the mud near her feet, and for the briefest of seconds she thought one of the prisoners around her had somehow acquired a gun and shot the guard for the bread. And so she didn't dare pick it up. Consequently, a woman named Luiza darted around her with the speed of a rabbit and scooped it off the ground, in one fluid motion brushing a clod of dirt from the crust and tearing off a piece the size of a ball of milkweed.

Then, however, Cecile watched as the armed male guards fell to their knees and aimed their rifles in the direction of the field they were passing. She was confused: The pasture was filled with dead horses-their carcasses being nibbled by crows-and wagons and destroyed Nazi vehicles. Were there Russians-or, better still, Americans-hiding among all those burned-out tanks and trucks? The idea crossed her mind that this was it, their moment of liberation was at hand, and any second now Allied soldiers were going to rise up from behind the wrecks and demand that their guards surrender. In her mind they were all wearing French army uniforms, because she realized that was the only Allied uniform she knew, and she felt an unfamiliar pang of giddiness. But she was pulled from her brief reverie when that female guard named Inga bellowed furiously, “Down, now! Down, down, down!” and then, suddenly, swatted her so hard on the back of her head that she fell forward onto her knees on the road beside Pusch. The dead guard was on his stomach and there was a hole in the back of his tunic around which a red stain was already starting to spread.

Across the field, beyond the blackened metal hulks and twisted lattices of steel, she saw a wooden farm wagon and a pair of horses. She thought-but she wasn't completely sure-that she had seen people near them from the corner of her eye, falling abruptly almost flat onto the ground. One moment they had been there, and in the next they had been gone. Clearly, however, the guards thought the gunfire had come from there. Their suspicions were confirmed almost instantly: There was a second crack-a female guard near Cecile shouted once, as much in surprise as in pain-and this shot had very definitely come from somewhere near that wagon. Perhaps a dozen and a half meters to her right, the Hungarian guard-a woman who was about the age of her prisoners and seemed to have the same disdain for the Germans as she did for the Jewish women she was herding west-had been shot. Apparently the guard had been up on her knees. Now, when Cecile turned, she saw the woman flapping on the ground as if she were a live fish on a dock, shrieking in a dialect that was unfamiliar to Cecile, and trying, it seemed, to pull something out of her side-as if she had been shot with an arrow, not a gun. The other guards were flat on their stomachs, eyeing the wagon, trying to see where the shooter was, and ignoring the woman who was writhing and screaming for, Cecile presumed, help.