Chris Bohjalian - Skeletons at the Feast

And then Callum was back beneath the feed and Helmut was checking his pistol and her father was saying something more to her. “I know it is an awful responsibility I am giving you, Anna. Awful. But you know the horses. And I know you can do this. Just keep moving. You are never to look back or turn back until we are all together again as a family. Do you understand?”

She had the sense that Helmut was too young and brash to understand for certain that he was going to die if he left them now to join in the fight against the Russians. But he probably suspected how badly the odds were stacked against him. He wasn't stupid. And, clearly, their father knew. She could tell by the way he was gently saying good-bye to Mutti, and the way he was lying-her father, lying!-about their return to Kaminheim. Joking now about the scavenger hunt they would have when they started to dig up the silver and crystal and china they had buried in their hunting park. Anna knew the truth: After a month in the deep freeze of January, the soil had become solid as granite. They had buried nothing. She and her father had simply thrown up their arms and left the serving trays and decanters and whole place settings upright in the snow like tombstones in a cemetery. If servants from the neighboring estates hadn't stolen the pieces by now, the Russians had. Or would any moment.

His message when he told her not to look back until they were together again as a family? Never look back, period. She wanted to throw herself against him just the way Theo had, beg him to come with them. Tell him how little sense it made to get killed by the Russians at this point in the war. But, clearly, he understood there wasn't a point. Everyone except Mutti seemed to realize it was over. Even Helmut: He had talked with the British POWs in the autumn. With Callum when he was home in the winter. Until yesterday, he had been the one who was putting the markers in the map in the parlor that showed the locations, as far as they could tell, of the different armies and the boundaries of the Reich.

Yet despite what they knew, now her father was going to join a bunch of other old men and boys and counterattack the Russian bridgehead at Kulm.

He took off one of his gloves and stroked the side of her cheek, his fingers coarse, but still gentle and warm. His eyes were milky in the cold and he-a man who she knew loved her but was never going to verbalize such a notion-actually pulled her into him, and so he had both her and Theo wrapped in his arms. They stayed that way for a long, quiet moment, and then he pushed them away. He embraced Mutti once more, as Helmut awkwardly, almost tentatively, hugged their brother and her. Then, without another word, he took Helmut and the two of them started back across the Vistula, this time moving against the long procession of sleighs and wagons traveling west.

She told her mother that they should probably continue if they wanted to reach Klinger by nightfall, but Mutti said that she wanted to be sure that her husband and her son made it safely across the ice. And so they waited and watched. Thus they saw the men, one in so many ways still a boy, reach the east bank and start back into the woods. And then, seconds later, they heard the screech of shells-not a single one this time, this was no solo diving raptor-approaching and instinctively they curled themselves against the carts, but they continued to stare to the east. Instantly, in a series of blasts that reduced the ice on the river to slivers and sent shards and spray raining down upon them like hail-shards and spray, the grips and leather sides of valises, wood splinters from crates, wheels from wagons and the runners from sleighs, the flesh of horses and people, hooves and feet (bare somehow, as if their boots had been blown off them by the blasts)-the natural bridge was gone. Where seconds before there had been perhaps a dozen families working their way gingerly across the ice, now there was only the once more violently churning waters of the Vistula, the brief, choking screams of the living as they disappeared beneath the current, and the more prolonged wails of the German families on the eastern shore, still alive. Anna couldn't tell if they were despairing over what they had just witnessed, or because they knew what awaited them now that they had failed to escape the Russians.

Beside her, without saying a single word, her mother and Theo started leading Labiau and Ragnit west across the snowy meadow. And so Anna looped the reins of the other two animals around her wrists, stroked Balga once along his forehead and poll, and followed.

USUALLY, IT WAS ONLY WHEN ONE OF THE LOCAL SOLDIERS was home on leave that Anna and her girlfriends ever saw the sorts of young men with whom, in different times, they might have danced. And, as the war had dragged on, the pool of marriage prospects-in Anna's mind, often enough that meant merely her older brother Werner's acquaintances-dried up completely. The soldiers were either missing or disfigured or dead.

But then came the POWs. Seven of them, sent from the prison camp to help with the harvest.

And a week after the POWs arrived at Kaminheim, when the corn was almost completely harvested and everyone was about to begin to gather the sugar beets and the apples, there came four naval officers in search of a plow. They were planning to mark a groove through the estate that would be the start of an antitank trench. When it was complete, the trench would span the length of the district, bisecting some farms, skirting the edges of others. Meanwhile, different officers were visiting neighboring estates as well, and the Emmerichs were told that at some point in the coming month hundreds of foreigners and old men would follow them, and descend on the estate to actually construct the trench.

And while the very idea of an antitank trench was alarming, the presence of all those handsome young men-the Germans, the Brits, and that one very young Scot-made it a burden Anna was willing to shoulder. This was true, at least in part, because she didn't honestly believe the fighting would ever come this far west. It couldn't. Even the naval officers said this was a mere precaution. And so she would flirt with the Brits during the day in the fields, where she would work, too, and dance with the naval officers in the evenings in the manor house's small but elegant ballroom. Mutti would play the piano, joined after that first night by Callum Finella on Uncle Felix's accordion, while her father-though distracted by the news from the east-would look on benignly. Sometimes Theo would put his toy cavalrymen away and watch as well, appalled in the manner of any ten-year-old boy that these brave and accomplished soldiers wanted to waste their time with the likes of his sister and her friends. He followed the men around like a puppy.

Helmut did, too. But Helmut actually would work with the officers as long as their father allowed him away from the harvest, helping them to find their way around the endless acres of Kaminheim, and thus mark out the optimum design and placement of the trench. Then, after dinner, he would dance with Anna's friends-girls who, previously, he had insisted were too puerile to be interesting. Seeing them now through the eyes of the navy men, however, he was suddenly discovering their charms.

Certainly Anna worried about her older brother, Werner, who had already been wounded once in this war and was fighting somewhere to the south. But she had rarely spent any time with men as interesting as this eclectic group who had descended upon their farm that autumn. She and Helmut had learned to speak English in school, though she had taken her studies far more seriously than her brother, which meant that she alone in the assemblage could speak easily to everybody-the POWs during the day and the naval officers at night-and appreciate how erudite and experienced everyone was. At least, she thought, in comparison to her. She was, on occasion, left almost dizzy as she swiveled among conversations and translated asides and remarks. And the longer stories? She felt like a star-struck child. When she was in grade school she had met English families the winter her family had gone skiing in Switzerland, but by 1944 she remembered little more than a very large man in a very poor bear costume, and the way she and the English children together had endured his clownish shenanigans because all of the parents had thought the fellow was wildly entertaining. But since the war had begun, she hadn't been west of Berlin. In the early years, they had still taken summer holidays on the beaches of the Baltic or ventured to Danzig for concerts, but lately even those trips had ceased completely. Two of their POWs, however, had seen the pyramids; another had been to America; and Callum-the youngest of the group, the tallest of the group, and the only one from Scotland-had been born in India, where his father had been a colonial official, and had traveled extensively throughout Bengali and Burma and Madras as a little boy.