Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

In the days that followed, more and more British troops arrived. Canadians, too. And, suddenly, Callum was gone. Interrogated first-at length, apparently-then cleared, and then absorbed back into the army. Anna saw him one more time before he was returned to his division. He had hoped, he said, that she would come with him. There were displaced persons all over Germany, and did it matter whether she was a refugee here or seventy-five kilometers farther south? Probably not. But she and Mutti were assisting the nurses at the makeshift hospital, doing whatever they-or anyone-asked. They cleaned bedpans and washed dirty sheets, they fed soup to the girls. They assisted the translators to find out who the prisoners were and where they were from. They acted as intermediaries with the Germans living nearby.

And so Callum told her that he would come back for her as soon as he could. He didn't know when that would be, but he was confident he would return before long. In the meantime, he urged them to stay where they were so he could find them.

There was, however, no chance that either of them was going to leave. The camp in which they were staying with other refugees was adequate, and Mutti seemed no less discomfited by the slit trench that was their bathroom than she was by the fields and woods she had used so frequently that winter and spring. There were soldiers who hated the German refugees for what their people had done, but there were others who seemed to view them merely with boredom. They gave chewing gum to the children in the camp-often having to explain what it was-and cigarettes to the younger women. They tended to ignore the women Mutti's age, as well as the men who were there-none of whom, it seemed to Anna, could possibly have been younger than fifty-five or sixty.

Every so often, Mutti would bring up her husband or her sons, and her hopes that they would all be reunited before the end of the summer. Anna would say nothing to disabuse her of this possibility. She would carry the dinner trays for the women who were, slowly, starting to mend, and she would read to them from the books that she found in one of the massive house's bedrooms. She became friends with a woman named Cecile, and told her what she could of the man who had rescued them-had, arguably, rescued them both. And she would do whatever they or the British doctors would ask of her, though it seemed the women wanted only to sleep and sip broth and inquire whether the suddenly omnipresent Red Cross had found someone they loved: A husband. A sibling. A father, a mother, a child.

In the first days there was never any news to report. By the end of June there was, and invariably it was bad.

Sometimes, the British wondered if her silence, other than when she was reading aloud to the patients, was sedition. Some conjectured that she might actually be an unrepentant little fascist, and perhaps had secrets she was shielding. Who knew what her father or her family really had done during the war? Others, however, sensed the truth: She rarely opened her mouth unless she was speaking the words of authors long dead because she felt she had lost all moral authority to speak a word of her own. She and her family had prospered under the Nazis; now the Nazis were gone and there was a price. Besides, when she saw these women in their cots and their beds in the estate, she understood that the more she spoke the more likely she was to cry. She didn't precisely hate herself-nor did she hate her mother, though when she would look at Mutti she would experience daggers of frustration that her parents and their whole selfish generation had forgotten the most fundamental of human decencies-but the guilt was nonetheless debilitating. Sometimes, she wanted to rail at Mutti, at all the refugees her mother's age, and ask them what they had been thinking. How they could have done this to their children-to the world.

She began to pray, but it had been a long time and it seemed that praying took a concentration she lacked. Moreover, other than the health of the camp survivors around her and the safe return of her father and brothers, she wasn't quite sure what to pray for. One of the other young women among the refugees, a war widow a few years older than Anna, told her that she personally prayed for forgiveness. The war widow said she hadn't been a party member, but that didn't matter.

And so Anna tried that, too. Unfortunately, with Callum gone-Callum who had loved her despite her naïveté-she wasn't confident that self-loathing wouldn't forever be her companion and cause her to walk with a distracted, disconsolate gaze. She didn't care so much whether the world would ever forgive her people; but she did hope that someday, somehow, she would be able to forgive herself.

THE RUINS OF THE SCOTTISH CASTLE LOOKED OUT UPON the North Sea from the edge of a steep cliff, and the waves rolled against the base of the ledge like wild, excited ponies. Parts of two of the original four towers remained, the stones butterscotch in the sun, and the tower nearest the ocean looked as if a giant had taken a tremendous bite out of the top. Across the road and perhaps a hundred meters distant, sheep were grazing and the herd's dog, a brown and white border collie, was running ecstatically in circles around them. Two of the sheep had been dozing half on and half off the thin road.

There had been fog in the morning, but this time of year there was always fog in the morning, and now it had lifted and the sky was cerulean blue. There were wispy, achromatic clouds far out to sea, but they posed no threat to the picnic.

The baby, a moonfaced boy with thin, poppy-colored hair, was just starting to wake up, and Anna put down the letter she had been reading and leaned over to watch him on the blanket. When they had first arrived, she had put two pillows around him to shield him from the breeze off the water. He was making small, birdlike clucking sounds, a signal that he was emerging from his nap. Anna thought she would feed him in a moment. Beside them, on the grass on the hill near the crumbling remains of the castle's east wall-the roof was long gone-sat Callum, his long legs extended well beyond the edge of the blanket. Mutti had been back in Germany a full week now, and though Anna missed her mother's help with the baby, she was relieved that she and Callum had their apartment to themselves once again. It really wasn't big enough for three grown-ups and an infant. Still, Mutti had arrived in time for the birth of her first grandson and stayed almost three months-which was at least a month longer than she had planned to visit, but she had found the role of grandmother irresistible. She shared the position contentedly with Callum's mother, who would appear with sprightly regularity at eight thirty every morning. Mutti was living now in a rooming house in a village a little west of where their trek had ended three years earlier, in the corner of Germany that was occupied by the British. Her room, she assured Anna, was more than sufficiently cheerful: It had a window that faced south and was bright most of the day. She had no plans to try to visit Poland, and no expectation that she would ever see Kaminheim-or whatever remained of Kaminheim-again. Helmut lived near her and had found work as a custodian at one of the British air bases. He hoped eventually they would train him to become a mechanic.

Anna and Callum had named the child Uri. In the months before Uri was born they had vacillated wildly between the names Theodore and Uri, debating passionately the merits of each option, but in the end Helmut had made the decision for them: He told them that someday he would like to name a son after Theo. He said that he hoped eventually he would be able to name boys after both Theo and Werner, their brothers who forever were lost.