Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

CALLUM SAW THE shooter instantly: It was one of those older men who had been guarding the women, and so Callum shot him. He picked the man off as he was pulling his rifle down and starting to retreat into a thicket of pine. His first bullet only wounded him, and so Callum shot him a second time. Then he scanned the field for any other Germans, saw none, and stood there, panting, for a long moment over Anna and Mutti as they crouched above Uri's body. Two of the prisoners were with them, including one whose name he had overheard was Cecile. Uri's eyes were open, but it seemed that he was already dead. His first thought? It had all happened so quickly. One minute Uri was with them, and the next he was gone. Anna was crying gently, shaking her head and shuddering. He knelt beside her, and when she realized he was there she leaned into his arms, as Mutti, once again, used her forefingers to gently shut the eyes of a body emptied abruptly of its soul.

“I know,” Callum murmured, his chin against the top of Anna's head, his chest against her almost violently trembling body, “I know.” He wasn't sure what he meant-if, in fact, he meant anything. What it was that he knew, he couldn't say. I know it's hard? I know it's tragic? I know you'll miss him? “I know,” he whispered softly. “I know.” Surrounded by a small sea of starving, tortured women, he thought to himself-and he heard the words in his head in Uri's frequently mordant voice- Please. I know nothing at all.

HELMUT EMMERICH PRESSED HIS KNEES AGAINST HIS chest and wrapped his arms tightly around his shins: He was an egg. He couldn't have made his body any smaller. Still, however, he feared that the toes of his boots could be seen from the road if any of the Soviet soldiers happened to glance to their right at the remnants of the stone wall. And the column was endless, absolutely endless. First there had been the trucks and the half-tracks, and then there had been the assault guns and the tanks. And, dear God, in the whole history of the war had there ever before been so many tanks in one place? It just didn't seem possible. It had been an interminable parade of them, a procession so long that for a while it had seemed to Helmut that the ground was never, ever going to stop vibrating beneath him. And now there was the infantry and the horse-drawn wagons. Every living man from Belarus had to be marching past him right now-or, for all he knew, every living man from the Ukraine. And Georgia. He had heard a variety of languages and dialects as the troops walked along. He guessed it was an entire tank corps and a rifle division marching west.

It was not simply terrifying-though that was the principal sensation-it was frustrating. After all, he had been sure that he had, finally, gotten ahead of the Russian army. He wasn't merely far, far to the west of Kaminheim: He was west of the Oder. He was west of Dresden. After nearly four weeks of hiding, of skulking, of lurking… of stealing carrots from root cellars and eating nothing but snow for days at a time… of using his last bullet a week ago now when he had shot at a hare and missed…

Evidently the war was over, or it would be within days, because clearly there was no Reich remaining. There was no Germany left. He knew how far west these soldiers were, and he had heard just enough rumors and stories to know that the western armies were well beyond the Rhine and the Russians were fighting in Berlin. Moreover, these Soviet riflemen were a joyful bunch, and that meant something, too. They were singing and laughing and whooping up a storm as they marched.

He considered, as he had often that winter and spring, simply surrendering. Just giving up. And if he was ever going to surrender, now was as good a time as any. There were plenty of officers marching past and plenty of witnesses: It seemed unlikely that they would shoot him right here by the road. At least he thought it was unlikely. They would, after all, have to do something with him if they didn't shoot him. And so while they might not execute him out here in the open right beside this stone wall, he guessed in the end some lieutenant and a pair of riflemen might escort him seventy or eighty meters into the woods and shoot him there.

He decided he would remain where he was. He stared down at the tears in his pants and the way the skin he could see on his knees had grown as coarse as sandpaper. He reminded himself that eventually the sun would set once again and this army would be gone. He would be able to uncoil his body, to rise up and go…

That, of course, was the problem. This morning, just when he thought he had finally gotten west of Ivan, here he was. Again. And so Helmut was beginning to fear there was no place left in the west that could become his eventual destination. Yes, the war was all but over, but he could only dimly imagine what sort of world was going to remain when there was nothing left of the Reich to bomb into rubble. The one thing he was certain of was that there would no longer be the Germany he had known his whole life. He still had vivid memories of Kaminheim when it had been a part of Poland, since he had been a Polish citizen for the first twelve years of his life. But even as a little boy he had viewed himself as a German. And the world that was dawning wanted no part of the Germany he knew. What would remain of the empire that once stretched from the westernmost tip of France to the oil fields in the Caucasus? From the ice of the Arctic Circle in Finland and Norway to the desert heat of North Africa? It would become a compact little vassal state. The victorious armies would divide up the nation the way the Germans and the Russians had carved up Poland into halves.

Well, such was the fate of conquered nations since the beginning of time.

Still, he didn't want to die. He had seen more than his share of death, including his father's in that ludicrous counterattack on the Kulm bridgehead hours after the two of them had said good-bye to Mutti and Theo and Anna, and he wanted to postpone his own as long as he possibly could. Somehow he had survived ill-advised counterattacks on Russian positions for almost two months, until he alone in his battle group was alive, and he couldn't imagine he had any luck left. It wasn't that he was afraid of death-though he could readily admit to himself that he was. It was the fact that his father was dead and he had to presume that Werner was dead, and so it seemed to Helmut that he alone was left to look after the Emmerichs who remained. Consequently, he vowed to stay where he was until this latest procession was past and then-as he had for weeks now-try to work his way west.

IT WAS THE BRITISH who reached the female prisoners in the field first, a long column of Churchill tanks that had pressed to the south and the east of Lübeck. When they saw the women-by no means the first camp survivors they had encountered-they radioed back for medics and set up a hospital inside what was rumored to have been an estate Martin Bormann had commandeered for a mistress. An opera singer. Some of the women had scattered by then, fearful that the Germans would return, but most had been incapable of fleeing. Anna and Callum had already filled the wagon with whatever food they could find in the village, which hadn't been much. They made two trips that first afternoon-on their second excursion, they returned with all the blankets and quilts they could steal-and a third one the next morning. Waldau never faltered. Mostly they brought back moldering root vegetables they discovered in sand barrels in empty basements and loaves of bread that were so hard they were like clubs. Still, they softened the bread in hot water they warmed over a fire and boiled the vegetables into a hot soup. No one was able to eat much, but everyone was able to eat something. They'd been there a little more than a day when the British tanks arrived, a loud, rumbling procession that caused the earth to tremble and caused Anna and Mutti and Callum to hold their breath until they knew for sure that the approaching army wasn't Russian.