Skeletons at the Feast (12 page)

URI HAD sEEN IT BEFORE AND HE IMAGINED HE WOULD see it again. The woods were starting to move.

The first time he had witnessed such a thing he had squinted, rubbed his eyes, and then stared. He'd worried that something he had eaten in the forest was poisoning him. Weren't there mushrooms out there that could kill you? Give you hallucinations? After all, he was not witnessing boughs and branches swaying in a breeze or being whipped about in great swirling gusts: Here before him were shrubs and trees--small trees, but trees nonetheless--rolling forward, as if they had been uprooted from the earth and were lumbering toward him in a wide, slow wave.

Which, in fact, they were. Because they had been attached to the front and the sides of tanks and assault guns and armored personnel carriers. There were at least a dozen mechanized vehicles altogether that first time, emerging at once from the woods.

This time the foliage was camouflaging a mere pair of battered Tiger tanks, a jeep so crowded that it looked like a clown car from a circus, and a single assault gun. Such was the fate of the once-vaunted Wehrmacht. He heard the Germans were trying to counterattack the Russians at Thorn, but at this point the whole front was collapsing and this small assault group might be off to fight anywhere. If these warriors had seen him a year and a half ago, they would have ignored him completely. After all, he wasn't a part of their brigade. Now, however, they would be likely to recruit him. Manpower was so short and the divisions so maimed that assault groups were being cobbled together from whatever remnants could be found wandering aimlessly (often shell-shocked) in the woods. Signalmen. Medics. Cooks. It no longer mattered. And so Uri fell back into the copse of trees, retreating so quickly that he banged into a branch and a river of snow cascaded behind his collar and inside the back of his uniform coat.

When the group was across the field and beyond him, he continued walking west toward the Vistula. He had a little cheese left in some butcher's paper, moldy but certainly edible, and he decided to finish it off.

he had heard there was a recently abandoned concentration camp a few kilometers south of the village, and he considered detouring there. Talking to the residents who lived closest to it. Asking whether any Jews from Schweinfurt or Bavaria had once been imprisoned in the place--and, if so, where they might be now. It was one of the smaller camps, all women, and they worked in a nearby clothing factory. He had been told by another soldier with whom he'd walked briefly that the camp didn't have a crematorium. That was a big distinction he had discovered: If there was no towering smokestack, it probably wasn't one of the death camps. This wasn't an absolute rule, of course, because even now they sometimes just marched the inmates into a field, had them dig ditches, and machine-gunned them en masse.

Unfortunately, the Russians were so close by the time he reached the town that a hobbled old man told him the buildings there already had been dynamited. There were no soldiers to ask about the camp, not even a few local Volkssturm recruits hoping to stall the Soviets with a brief rearguard action. And other than this old man, there didn't seem to be any locals who had stuck around. Not that the locals ever said much. Often they acted like they knew nothing. Still, if he was persistent he could usually learn whether the inmates were marched into the town to work, where most of the prisoners were from, and whether there were women who might be his sister's age. If you asked enough questions, someone always knew something.

In the end, he didn't bother to visit the remains of the camp or the farmhouses near its perimeter. He'd stood outside the barbed wire at other camps and gazed at their decrepit wooden barracks. And this time there wouldn't even be barracks to see. There would be only blackened debris and piles of earth. Likewise, he'd followed stories and rumors before: A train of Jews here. A train of Jews there. A group of women from Bavaria, some of whom might-- might--have been from Schweinfurt. But it had never led anywhere concrete. His sister had to be dead, and there was no reason to remain this far east. At this point, he should do all that he could to get west.

exhausted, he stopped at dusk in the ruins of a long-abandoned castle. He wasn't completely sure in the twilight, but he had the sense that the fortress had fallen into disrepair centuries before Nazi or Soviet bombs had demolished it. He didn't detect the acrid stench of gunpowder, and despite the ice and the snow that covered the ramparts like frosting and filled the crenels in the sole remaining turret like mascarpone cream in a parfait glass (a dessert his mother would make him as a child), he could see the dormant tendrils of ivy and the leafless branches of the thin trees that had grown up between the stones.

He climbed the stairs to the tower where he planned to try to sleep for a few hours. He was just starting to kick away the snow there with his boot when below him he saw the children. Three of them. They were bundled up so tightly in blankets and furs that he couldn't tell if they were boys or girls, but he guessed by their height that they were all between the ages of nine and twelve. They were strolling almost leisurely through the arch where once there might have existed a great wooden door with a wrought-iron grate and wrought-iron spikes. Then, behind them, came two adults, both women. The small group had entered the castle from the side opposite him, and thus hadn't yet discovered his footprints. He crouched behind one of the crumbling stones along the wall and watched them, unsure whether he should reveal he was here. There was a good chance one of those women was armed, and in the dusk she might think he was a Russian and shoot him on the spot. That, of course, would be a fitting irony: For almost two years now he had shot Nazis, knifed Nazis, garroted Nazis, and--that very first time--bludgeoned and impaled Nazis with a fireplace poker. Conversely, he had fought Russians with rifles, panzerfausts, machine guns, and potato-masher grenades. If there was a God, and at this point he had no reason to believe that there was, Uri thought he would have a lot of explaining to do when he died. A lot of death to account for.

Most of it, however, had been in self-defense. Even when he was part of various attacks and counterattacks on Soviet positions, it had been self-preservation.

And so just imagine, he speculated, if it all turned out to have been for naught because one refugee mother or sister or aunt, protecting her cubs, took a potshot at him in the dusk of some crumbling castle with her late husband's (or brother's) Luger because she thought he was Russian. Or, perhaps, because she recognized his uniform and presumed (not unreasonably, given how he was dressed) that he was a Nazi himself. It was possible. Maybe the men absent now from this family were a part of the Polish resistance-- or had been before some SS sadist had executed them--and these women would shoot anything in German attire.

They were clearly going to camp here for the night, and that meant that any moment one of them might cross the inner bailey and ascend the very same steps he had to this tower to see precisely where they were or to stand guard. And the last thing he wanted was to shoot some poor woman simply because he had surprised her and she was about to shoot him, and so he decided he would call down to them. First in German, but then in his pigeon Polish. Before he had opened his mouth, however, just as the three children were trying to cocoon inside one of the casemates that was still standing--trees seemed to be bookending the castle slabs now--he heard the sound of a vehicle and then, after the engine had stopped, laughter. Deep, guttural, back-of-the-throat laughter. There, just outside the castle wall below him, was a Russian jeep with two soldiers.

Had the front disintegrated so totally that the Russians had gotten behind him? Now that would be a disaster, as well: To have survived nearly two years by masquerading as a German soldier-- German soldiers, actually--only to be overrun by the rampaging Soviets before he could either return to his original self or find a new guise.

As the soldiers emerged from the jeep, Uri realized that he could see the women and the children on one side of the castle wall, and the Russian soldiers on the other. But the Russians were oblivious of the civilians and the civilians were unaware of the Russians. One of the soldiers, a stout, walleyed sergeant with a rat's nest of red hair, was peeing into the snow, and Uri gave himself license to hope they would be here but a moment and move on. And after that he would figure out how he himself would move on. But then the second soldier, a lanky fellow with deeply pockmarked cheeks and a crooked beak for a nose, motioned toward the castle, and they started walking through the gate and inside the ruins.

Now the women saw them and, exactly as Uri had feared, one pulled a small gun from beneath her cape and fired. Her aim was comically bad and she missed both men completely. Instantly the soldiers were upon her. Both of them. The sergeant tackled her, the air reverberating with his howls of relief and mirth that the shooter was a woman and they had not stumbled upon retreating Wehrmacht or home guard. His partner ripped the gun from her fingers, chuckling when he saw the diminutive size of the pistol that almost had killed them. Together they pulled away the hood of her cloak and discovered that the woman was perhaps thirty, with golden hair and a long and gaunt but not unattractive face. She looked more angry than terrified.

Then the soldiers stood and motioned for the woman to remain there on the ground, while they rounded up her sister or friend and their three . . . girls. Yes, Uri could see now that they were girls. The four other females were lined up against the wall, a grownup and three youngsters, and when the woman on the ground tried to roll in the snow to see what was happening, the Russian sergeant stepped on her. Barely bothering to look down at her, as if he were popping a rolling balloon at a birthday party with his foot, he smashed his boot flat into her stomach, causing what might have been a shriek of pain to be reduced to an airless gasp.

"Mommy!" the smallest of the three girls cried, and it looked as if she were going to say more but one of the older girls silenced her. Still, it was too late. She had drawn attention to herself and the tall soldier was scrutinizing her carefully. Then he pulled off his glove with his teeth and slid his hand under her coat, reaching down, it seemed, deep into her underwear. He said something to his comrade in a language that was largely foreign to Uri, but he got the gist of it: He'd take this girl first. They were going to begin by raping the girls in front of the women rather than starting with the two adults. The sergeant chuckled at this idea, removed his pistol from his holster, and aimed it down at the woman beneath his boot. She pleaded with him, begged him to take her instead, and he smirked and nodded. Said, Uri thought, that everyone would have a chance.

Quietly Uri pulled his rifle off his shoulder and unclipped the safety. He could take out the Russian standing with his foot atop this mother easily, but the other soldier would be a tougher shot. He was no more than fifty or sixty meters away, and at that distance there was no reason to believe the bullet wouldn't travel right through the fellow and lodge itself deep inside the child: The angle was such that if he aimed for his head, he might shoot the poor girl in the chest. If he aimed for his heart, he might shoot the child in the stomach. Certainly there was a chance that the moment he fired at the first Bolshevik--that one who was now seeming to grind his boot into the woman on the ground--the second would reflexively move away or take cover, and in that instant Uri could blast him, too. But it was equally likely that he might use the child as a shield and fire back at him from behind her.

Already, however, with almost preternatural speed, the Bolshevik had ripped off the poor girl's coat and was tearing open her dress, turning her nearly upside down as he pulled her underpants off her spindly legs so, suddenly, she was stark naked in the cold and the snow. She was screaming, a hairless wild animal with a hillockless chest--all rib cage and pancake-flat areolae, with a pencil dot for a navel--screaming so loudly that the soldier smacked her hard with the back of his hand and her whole body corkscrewed into the ground.

And so Uri gazed at the sergeant through the sight on his Mauser, aimed at a spot on his tunic just about where the fellow's heart would be, and fired. As if the gunshot were the dial that turned down the volume on a radio, the world instantly went quiet except for the echo from the blast. The child stopped howling and the woman stopped pleading, and even the wind seemed abruptly to cease. The sergeant never even turned to see the source of the shot, he simply collapsed into the snow beside the woman. Already, however, Uri was spinning the barrel of his rifle toward the second Russian, who he saw in his sight had his pants at his knees and was fumbling for something--his holster, his penis, Uri couldn't say-- and gazing like a frightened animal directly at him. Instinctively Uri calculated the girl would be safer if he fired at the Russian's head, even if it meant a smaller target. This shot wasn't as clean: He took off the soldier's ear and a thin sliver of skull, sending a sizable chunk of hair and scalp splattering against the naked abdomen of the child. Still, he hadn't killed him. It looked like there was a lot of blood, but he barely had slowed him. Fortunately, as the soldier reached for his own gun, he put just enough distance between himself and the girl that this time Uri was able to fire into his stomach. And then, as he fell to his knees, into his chest. And, because Uri was absolutely furious that this bastard had been about to rape a child, into his face one more time.