Skeletons at the Feast (16 page)

He didn't expect he would actually see any Russians, and that gave him confidence; at the same time, it diminished in his opinion the scope of the task before him. How heroic was he really if the most difficult parts of his endeavor were battling a river of refugees moving in the opposite direction, and then cajoling his fat, stubborn uncle to come with him?

Then, however, he remembered the shells that were already falling on his uncle's estate, and he stood a little straighter. Yes, the Reich needed heroes, even if they were only eighteen and their mission was to rescue their families.

uri drove the two women and the three children as far as the Vistula, and then he gave them the Russian jeep. They'd spoken little as they had driven through the night, partly because the women were so shaken and partly because the children actually slept in the back of the vehicle. But he learned the women were sisters, and the three children all belonged to the older of the siblings. The younger sister hadn't married yet. They both insisted they had never joined the party, though these days, Uri knew, anyone who bragged about being a party member was either an idiot or a fanatic. Still, he found it revealing how many people were so quick to tell strangers they'd never been Nazis.

"I wasn't in the party either," he informed them, appreciating the irony. "I don't think they would have had a lot of use for a person like me."

The pair implored him to stay with them when they reached the frozen river, to continue to protect them as they went west. But he told them that wasn't possible. He said that he needed to return to his unit. The truth was, of course, that he didn't have a unit, and among the critical lessons he had learned in his different guises in the Wehrmacht was that no one was going to question him so long as he was near the front. It was only when he was in the theoretic safety of the rear that he was in danger of being found out or-- and this would have been a bizarre turn of events--shot as a deserter. Yes, he would get west: He had to. But he would have to move judiciously.

In the headlights from another vehicle parked now along the bank of the river, he saw a couple of green Volkssturm teens and a captain with one arm attempting to manage the horde trying to cross this stretch of ice. He climbed from the jeep and started toward them. As he walked a little closer, he recognized that the fellow was, much to his surprise, Captain Hanke--his commanding officer as recently as October. Then the man had gone home to Dortmund on leave and there, Uri had heard, been wounded in an air raid. Apparently he had lost an arm.

Uri had liked Hanke, and Hanke had seemed to like him. The Hanke men had been soldiers for generations--long before there had been a Nazi regime and a world war to compel them into the service.

Already Uri saw that an old couple with a wheelbarrow were descending upon the Russian jeep, begging to put their bags of clothing in the back with the children. Begging to somehow squeeze onto the vehicle themselves. One of the young women looked back at Uri, pleading with him with her eyes to try to solve this problem, too. Rescue them as he had at the castle. He raised his eyebrows and shook his head, shrugging his shoulders. There wasn't anything he could do. There wasn't anything anyone could do. There really wasn't room for the old couple and the meager remnants of their lives, but you really couldn't leave them behind either. Still, this man was persistent and loud, and he beseeched them that if nothing else the family had to find room in the vehicle for his wife. They had to. He said she had a bad heart and she desperately needed to sit. And so, finally, Uri strolled back to them, rested his hand on the warm hood of the jeep, and suggested to the woman in the front passenger seat that she climb into the back and allow the old lady into the vehicle. He reminded her that this was where she had been when he had been driving.

Then he turned away and called out to Captain Hanke, jogging over to the man. Suddenly he had to be away from these refugees. From all refugees. From this whole whining and scared and despairingly sad parade. The officer recognized him instantly, and Uri was pleased. Hanke even had a small smile for him.

"You need some help here?" he asked the captain. "It looks like it's going to get ugly."

"Oh, it's actually been very civilized so far," he told Uri. "It won't get ugly till later."

"When the sun comes up and the real crowds arrive?"

He craned his neck and looked to the south. "When the engineers get here. Then we're going to blow up this ice bridge to slow the Russians. That's when things will get nasty--and that's when I will indeed need your help."

n the moon was mostly obscured by clouds and there were absolutely no stars. Yet the snow was oddly luminescent, as if it had its own source of light--like, Helmut thought, those fish that supposedly lived in the sunless depths of the ocean--and the birch trees were eerily skeletal. Helmut found the cold air more bracing than uncomfortable. There were few families on the road, but he did pass some. And they all told him the same thing: He was going the wrong way. A fellow soldier, his head bandaged beneath a wool cap, warned him that the Russians had pierced their lines everywhere-- that, in fact, there was no line left. An old couple pulling two small, sleeping grandchildren on a sled said they had seen a Russian tank on the outskirts of the village.

When he reached the final stretch of road before his uncle's, the sky was lightening to the east, though it was clear there was going to be no sun again today. He was almost out of petrol, but he was so close it really wouldn't have mattered if the car had come to a dead stop right here. He knew from his visit yesterday with his father that he would be unable to drive all the way to the manor house anyway. Still, he coasted whenever he could.

He was just stepping down from the BMW when he heard the metallic rumble approaching. He climbed back on to the vehicle's running board to see, hoping to God it was German tanks or, perhaps, some long antitank guns on trailers. It wasn't. There, no more than half a kilometer distant, were three massive Russian tanks lumbering across one of the fields where his uncle grew rutabagas and carrots. They were moving parallel to the road and clearly didn't give a damn about him or his family's BMW. Because clearly they saw him. If the commander inside any one of the tanks wanted, he needed only to spin his tank's turret and obliterate the car with a single shell.

He jumped back into the driver's seat and raced as far up the driveway as he could, stopping only when he reached the fallen oak where he and his father had parked yesterday. Then he ran to the house, aware even as he churned his legs in the snow that something was different. Something had changed. He couldn't have said precisely how he knew this, and he told himself that his foreboding had been triggered, naturally enough, by the sight of three Russian tanks cavalierly driving westward behind him. Soon, however, he understood his premonition was well founded: He saw that the estate's high and wide front doors had been shattered, the wood slivered and the hinges bent like old playing cards. He stepped over what now were little more than sharp pieces of kindling and called for his uncle. He called for Jutta. A crow flew past him, swooping toward him down the stairs and then darting outside through the hole where the front doors once had stood. The heavy tapestries of hunters and herds of elk that usually adorned the eastern wall of the entrance hall had been slashed with bayonets, and each bulb on the great chandelier--all of them encased in globes with the faces of wood nymphs--had been exploded.

He tried to convince himself that Karl had come to his senses and left with his family, but he didn't believe this. He walked gingerly across the broken glass from the light fixture, saw that the kitchen and the pantry had been ransacked--the doors ripped from the cupboards, the jars of pickles and cabbage and jam smashed onto the floor--and then across the shattered remnants of the mahogany dining room table into his uncle's study. Which was where he saw them. All four of them. The boy with the beautiful, cherubic smile had been hung as if he were a small pig by his ankles from one of the acorn finials atop the high cherry bookcases, his throat slashed so deeply that his head was dangling by twinelike shreds of muscle and skin. The women, including poor, frightened Jutta, had been tied facedown to Uncle Karl's broad desk, their legs naked, their dresses pulled up over their hips. There was dried blood caked like icing along the insides of their legs, and--almost hypnotized--he stared for a moment at the eggplant-colored bruises that marked their buttocks. After they had been violated (or before, for all Helmut knew), each woman had been shot once in the back of the head.

And on the floor nearby, still in his dressing gown, was Uncle Karl. Even in death the man's eyes were wide. The body was on its side, almost curled into a fetal position, and there was something causing the back of the dressing gown to tent. He knelt, pulled the silk aside, and saw that someone had taken the man's crystal decanter full of schnapps and thrust the bottleneck as far into the man's anus as it would fit.

helmut wandered stunned, almost somnambulant, to his uncle's garage, where he found a can of petrol that the Russians must not have noticed. There he filled the BMW. Then he left and joined the throng traveling west. Although he was moving in the same direction as the stream, the trip home still took him nearly two and a half hours. When he passed a woman with five children and all of their suitcases and cartons trudging along on foot, he packed them into the car with him and brought them as far as the entrance to Kaminheim. The only traffic he encountered moving east was two trucks pulling antitank guns, the weapons' long barrels painted white for the winter.

His parents were furious when he got home. His mother, he saw, had actually cleaned the kitchen with the cook in his absence and was draping the furniture in the ballroom with white sheets when he arrived. Their anger dissipated quickly, however, when he told them what he had seen at Uncle Karl's. He didn't share with them all the details, especially after Mutti lowered her head and grew silent. He could tell that it was the death of the boy that first had shocked and then dispirited her. For a long moment she simply allowed herself to be rocked in her husband's arms, her face buried in his chest. She said nothing, though occasionally her body shuddered as she tried to suppress her sobs. She was struggling to maintain a semblance of composure, to prevent her grief and her panic from overwhelming her, but he knew her well enough to know that she would succeed. Then she would resume packing with her usual efficiency and organizing his sister and brother for their departure.

Finally he heard his father murmuring--his voice soft but firm--that it was important they were on the road well before lunchtime. And, sure enough, Mutti stood up a little straighter, pulled away from her husband, and wiped at her eyes.

"Helmut," she said, just the smallest quaver in her voice. "Please check on your brother. See if he needs any help."

anna went outside into the chill morning air when she heard what had happened to Uncle Karl and Jutta and the others, and listened to the firing to the east. She had known people who had died--mostly men, of course, including her cousin at Stalingrad, but some women, too--and she had even known people who had died in their apartments or town houses when RAF and American bombers had incinerated whole city blocks. A girl from a BDM camp in one case, friends of her parents in another. But this was a first: the deaths of people she was related to who had been violated--tortured--before they had been slaughtered. She wasn't completely sure why Helmut had insisted on telling her so much more than he had told their parents, but she sensed by the way his forehead was furrowed and his eyes were glassy that he felt a powerful need to unburden himself to someone.

Callum appeared beside her now and dropped at his feet the trunk he was carrying. She recognized it as Theo's, though she knew that most of what had been wedged into it was either provisions for the trek or valuables that her parents thought they might barter as they made their way west. She and her mother had sewn small, secret pockets into some of their dresses and skirts in which they would hide jewelry, since it was possible that diamonds and gold might be the only currency with any value someday soon. Like her, Theo was taking a single suitcase.

"I'm sorry," Callum said to her simply. "The people who did that to your family . . . well, they weren't soldiers, you know. They were just criminals."

She thought about this, but the idea offered little comfort. What difference did it make? "I'm scared," she said simply. She realized that she really hadn't been before. She had been agitated and apprehensive, she had felt a deep and nagging unease. But until now she hadn't been frightened.

"I can't say I blame you."

"I tell myself it was all my uncle's fault. You know, he did this to himself. To his family. Because he wouldn't listen, he wouldn't leave. If he had, they'd all be alive today. All of them. You realize that, don't you?"