Skeletons at the Feast (21 page)

One day in school, Fraulein Grolsch had demanded that all of the students try on a gas mask, because there were rumors that the Allies were going to start gassing them: either the Russians with long-range artillery shells or the Yankees and Brits with bombs they would drop from their airplanes. There were only two masks for the entire class, however, and so the children had taken turns pulling the devices over their faces and hoisting the thick rubber bands behind their heads. Invariably, the bands had pulled at their hair and some of the girls had shrieked for attention, and no one had found it easy at first to breathe through the filter. Theo recalled now how he had asked--yet another stupid, unthinking thing he had said that had further diminished him in the eyes of his classmates--if the government would be giving them masks for their animals. The students had all gotten a real belly laugh out of that one. He hadn't honestly expected that anyone had bothered with such a thing, and he was really just thinking aloud. Imagining. But it hadn't struck him as a completely nonsensical idea, because this was farm country and the horses were critical to the farms. And he knew that in the First World War they had made gas masks for horses. After all, if you could convince a horse to wear a bridle and a bit, was it really such a stretch to expect the animal to don a mask, too? Apparently not. And if there were going to be masks for animals, Theo would have been sure to tell his parents so that they could get ones for all of their horses.

"Theo?"

He looked up; it was Anna.

"We should hurry."

He nodded and led Waldau to the second wagon. No one had told him why they must hurry, but he had overheard Anna and Mutti talking and so he knew. It wasn't just the Russians. Last night someone had assassinated two Wehrmacht soldiers near the train station and then murdered the stationmaster. As a result, two trains that had been traveling in the night had taken the wrong tracks and collided. They had all heard the noise and presumed at the time it was an Allied bomb. One of the trains, the one moving northwest, was filled with refugees; the other, traveling southeast, had been filled with soldiers. The trains had been approaching the station so neither had been moving quickly. Nonetheless, there were injuries, a few as serious as concussions and broken bones. And for the time being the saboteurs had succeeded in clogging this stretch of track.

As he stood high on his feet to lift the bridle over Waldau's head he felt an unexpected twinge in a toe and grimaced. Still, he whispered into the great horse's ear, "You will never be eaten and you will never be gassed. I promise."

"so, you've always been here on the eastern front," Callum asked Manfred as they walked along a quiet stretch of road. There were other refugees, but for the moment they seemed to be bobbing almost leisurely between the waves and once more Callum was grateful to be on his feet.

"I have."

"Is it as frightful as everyone says?"

"I think so. But this is my first war, so I don't have a lot to compare it to," Manfred answered, and he smiled.

"Everyone presumes the eastern front is much more horrific than either France or Italy. I take that implication as a compliment."

"Because it suggests you and your American allies are so civilized?"

"Precisely," he replied. It was true, they were civilized. He was sure of that. He and his mates had a much higher regard for human life than either the Russians or the Germans. The western Allies were, he imagined, every bit as brave as these other people. But they were also less likely to kill--or be killed--senselessly.

"Well, we're all nastier on this side of Europe," Manfred told him. "Trust me: If your parachute had landed over here, we wouldn't have taken you prisoner."

Callum thought about this and listened to the sound of the horses' hooves behind them. Their metronomic clopping made him think of a clock, and he tried to place in his mind precisely where he was a year ago now. Then two. Then three. He saw himself once again as a student and recalled the face of Camellia. "You married?" he asked the corporal.

"I am not."

"Girlfriend? Fiancee?"

"Neither."

Anna was on the driver's box on the wagon behind them. She must have heard what they were saying, because she called out to them now, "Manfred is just a warrior." She was teasing him, a small swell of sarcasm in her voice. "He is one of those German men who have too much knight in their blood. I know the type well."

The corporal turned back to her and said, "Now for all you know, I was a mild-mannered young lawyer before joining the army. Or a docile schoolteacher. For all you know, I am actually an extremely peaceful person."

"All right then," Callum said, and he clapped the man on the shoulder good-naturedly. "What did you do before the war? We're all ears."

"Do you know what you remind me of?" Manfred asked him instead of answering the question.

"Absolutely no idea. Haven't a clue."

"A Saint Bernard. That's what you are. A very big dog. The sort of creature that hasn't figured out yet that he has ham hocks for paws. Wants to jump on the couch, even though he's the size of a pony."

"Quite through?"

"All done."

"Well, I was expecting much worse," he said. And he was. "I rather like big dogs with favorable dispositions."

"You didn't tell us what you were doing before the war," Anna pressed the soldier.

"I say he was a lawyer," Callum told her. "It was the first profession that popped into his head a moment ago." He turned to Manfred: "Am I right?"

"No."

"A schoolteacher then? Really? I wouldn't have guessed it."

"You will be disappointed."

"Dear God, you weren't a student were you?" he continued. "Have you been in the army that bloody long?"

"I worked in a ball-bearing factory."

"Well, that's honest work. Why would I be disappointed?"

He seemed to Callum to be pondering this for a moment. Then: "Perhaps because I was. It wasn't quite what I expected I would be doing with my life when I was fifteen or sixteen years old."

Overhead the clouds parted just enough that they all felt great shafts of sun on their faces, and as one they reflexively stared up into the sky. "I don't think any of us wound up doing quite what we expected," Callum said. His stomach growled loudly and he thought of how hungry he was. For a moment he envisioned himself as a Saint Bernard, and he wished they hadn't finished off all of their meat and their bread and their beets.

that day they passed through a village and had lunch by a warm stove in the kitchen of a carpenter and his wife who seemed oddly prosperous. They were having meat for lunch, some sort of stew made with pork and root vegetables, and they offered the trekkers real coffee. The couple was packing to leave, too, when the Emmerichs passed by and they noticed Manfred. Because Manfred was in uniform, they insisted on inviting them indoors to eat and rest. They wanted to finish off the food they had left that they couldn't bring with them, so the Russians wouldn't get it.

As they ate, the carpenter shared with Manfred and Callum-- who said not a word--the secret behind his success: He always got wood because he had joined the party. And, since 1942, he made nothing but coffins. "These days, I can't make too many coffins," he said, his voice at once oddly satisfied and rueful. The pair had two sons, both of whom were missing in action. Their daughters, both married, had gone to Prague where, supposedly, they would be safe from Allied air attacks.

Theo thought Manfred seemed to pay the man special attention when the carpenter told him how recently there had been columns of prisoners passing by, and one of the groups had been nothing but women. Rows and rows of them, he had said.

"And they were marching west?" Manfred asked.

"They were. Starving things. Jews. Belinda here managed to give some of them food. Bread and the last of our sausages. She snuck it to them as they passed. Some of them didn't even have shoes. Can you imagine? I mean, they're just Jews. But still. I'd heard about such things, but never seen them with my own eyes."

"Where were they from?"

"Well, the east."

"No," Manfred continued, his voice a little testy now. "I meant what countries were they from?"

"I heard some of the girls speaking French. I heard others speaking Polish. Even, I think, a little Russian."

"Any German?"

"A few, maybe."

"How old were they?"

"At first I thought they were older than me, and I am sixty-two. It was only when Belinda got close to them that we could tell. They were in their twenties and thirties. They'd have to be. Any older and they would have perished by now in this weather."

Theo watched Manfred seem to take this in. He thought the soldier was seething inside and working hard to maintain an even facade. And his sister? He could see anger on her face as well, but something else, too, and when he understood what it was he grew scared: It was guilt. Shame, as if she were responsible. He felt a small chill in the room, despite the heat from the stove, and for the first time he began to wonder: Was this--those prisoners--why the whole world seemed so mad at his country? Was this what those British POWs and Callum on occasion had whispered about? He had a sense that was just beyond perfect articulation in his mind but nonetheless absolutely apparent to him: When this war was over, he and his family--all Germans--were going to have to live with the black mark of this (whatever this was) for a long, long time.

ANNA WAs VAGUELY AWARE THAT sHE WAs FAR FROM the comforts of her own bed in Kaminheim. She was wrapped tightly inside a pair of quilts, half-buried in the hay in a barn. Another barn. Not even a gymnasium, albeit an unheated one, such as the one where they had spent the night before last. This barn was far from the main road, perhaps a kilometer distant. They had come here for privacy and quiet. To escape the throngs. She wasn't freezing, but her feet--despite the reality that she had slept yet again in her boots--and her fingers were chilled. Her nose was running from the cold, and when she removed her hands from beneath the quilts she was stunned to discover how warm her face was. Was it possible she had a fever? Was this why she was shivering? Slowly she began to focus, but still she kept trying to push full wakefulness away, as if it were a suitor at a dance she was trying to avoid. She recalled how they had stopped here last night. Her family and Callum and Manfred and the three horses had all taken refuge in one corner, while another family had taken the side nearest the entrance, and the humans had all been grateful to have the heat generated by the Emmerichs' animals. For dinner, Manfred had shown them how to bake the potatoes in the wild: He had buried them in a shallow hole, and then built a fire on the patch of ground directly above them.

Now Anna could tell by the hazy light that was coming in through the cupola and a pair of eastern-facing dormers that day had broken. She heard the low rumble of voices, men's voices, but she couldn't make out what they were saying. It didn't sound like Manfred and Callum, and so she guessed it was that other family. But then, when she visualized those other refugees--their name, she thought, was Sanders--she could see in her somnambulant fog only one male. A grandfather. There were the grandparents, a married daughter and a daughter-in-law, and two small girls. And neither of the voices, as she tried to concentrate, sounded much like the girls' elderly grandfather.

Nevertheless, for another moment she allowed herself to drowse and to wonder, almost as if she were witnessing this happen to somebody else, at the idea that she was sleeping in a barn and she might be coming down with a fever. Might? No, not might. It all came back to her now. Yesterday she had started to grow ill and had nearly passed out. They had stopped here because she simply had to rest. And now it was just so much easier to remain curled in a ball under these quilts, to allow her fever--if, indeed, she had one--to run its course, than to rise from the hay and begin the hard work of continuing west. Melting the snow so she could wash. Feeding the horses. Rummaging for a piece of bread they had scavenged or a small handful of the muesli they had bought with a bracelet. When she'd been younger, there had actually been a servant girl who had laid out her clothes for her in the morning and then had her breakfast waiting. A Polish girl. Jadwiga. She guessed the servant had been with them through 1941. Then? Deported somewhere. The girl's parents were taken, too. Mutti had been devastated. Her father had made phone calls. Sent telegrams. But there had been nothing that either of her parents had been able to do. It seemed that Jadwiga's father had been involved with the Communists. Perhaps even the resistance.

Anna was just beginning to wonder where the rest of her family was--Mutti and Theo--when she was pulled abruptly from her torpor by the distinctive, full-throated whinny of her horse. Balga was, it sounded, just outside the barn. And he sounded furious. She sat up now, imagining that Manfred or Callum was mishandling the animal in some fashion, antagonizing him inadvertently. Instead, however, she saw Balga silhouetted in the massive barn doors, rearing up on his hind legs while two men she didn't recognize were trying (and failing) to convince the horse to remain still so they could place a saddle upon him. These, she realized, had been the voices she had heard.

She rose, pushing her quilts off her, and stormed toward the pair. The cold struck her like a slap, but she didn't care, because these fellows were trying to steal her horse--and she wasn't going to stand for that. Her family had already lost Labiau; they couldn't afford to lose Balga, too. They simply couldn't. She didn't know where the rest of her family was, but she didn't hesitate. She would simply insist that these other refugees leave her horse alone. Steal someone else's. When she was halfway across the barn, however, she stopped, realizing in an instant how ill-advised it was for her to have even considered confronting these men. Because they weren't mere horse thieves; they weren't pathetic refugees like her and her family. They were Russian soldiers--perhaps even Cossacks-- working in fur hats and long uniform coats, with bandoliers of bullets draped over their shoulders like scarves. She started to crouch, but it was too late: They had seen her. And they started to laugh, despite the reality that one was straining desperately to hold Balga in place by the reins, and the other was holding on to a heavy-looking saddle with both hands.

The soldier nearer to her dropped the saddle into the snow, said something to the other soldier, and started toward her. He had a long, drooping mustache and perhaps two days' growth of beard, and he had an exasperated smile on his face as he sauntered across the barn: First the horse, she imagined him thinking, now this. Meanwhile his partner let go of Balga's reins and then fell against an exterior wall of the barn so he wouldn't be kicked by the animal's wildly flailing front hooves as the creature scurried a dozen meters away before stopping. From there the horse eyed them warily, snorting, and raised his nose high into the air. She started to call for him, but the words caught in her throat. She realized the only place she could run was further into the barn, and that would do her as little good as standing her ground. Perhaps she could try to dash past the Russians and jump atop Balga, but the horse was probably far too riled to allow her to climb upon him with neither a saddle nor stirrups. Besides, it seemed unlikely that she would get past the two soldiers. They'd simply grab her like a small chicken. And so she remained where she was, in a half-crouch beside head-high bales of hay, telling herself that she was unmoving now because she was feverish and there was nothing she could do. Suddenly she felt so sick and fatigued that she almost didn't care if they raped and killed her right here. In this barn outside of some village she'd never heard of. Fine. Let it all end this morning. And then, in little more than a heartbeat, the soldiers were surrounding her. She realized that neither was especially tall, and she could look them both in the eye.

"Do you speak Polish?" the one with the mustache asked her, his own Polish marked by an eastern-sounding accent she didn't recognize.

She nodded. She smelled, she thought, chocolate--delicious, real chocolate--on his breath. She wondered if she was a little delirious, or whether they really had eaten chocolate for breakfast.

"She speaks Polish," he said to his comrade, as if this were a great revelation. Then to her he continued, "Your horse--and I'm presuming that is your horse--is a demon." He looked back over his shoulder toward the open barn doors. Balga had inched a few meters closer and was peering inside.

She glanced down at her boots, wrapped her arms around her chest. She wasn't sure what she should say--if she should even say anything. She realized her teeth were chattering.

"I am Lieutenant Vassily Kuptchenko. This is Corporal Ros-tropovich. And you are?"

"Anna," she said, the word elongated by the clacking of her teeth.

They both bowed slightly, gallantly, as if they were noblemen. The lieutenant pointed at the piles of quilts and her cape in the mound of straw behind her. "Go get your coat. Or at least one of those quilts. You're trembling." She took a fleeting peek behind her, but she couldn't bring herself to turn her back on the men. When she remained riveted in place, the lieutenant said something to the corporal in a language she didn't understand, and the soldier went and brought her cape to her. Gently he draped it over her shoulders.

"Where . . . where . . . is my family?" she said, the short sentence again punctuated by her shivers.

"We saw the wagons and the horses. But no one else."

"They're gone?"

"They didn't leave you, I'm sure. Your army set up a field kitchen a few kilometers from here, back toward the road. They're probably getting breakfast," he told her.

The corporal rolled his eyes and murmured something under his breath that caused the lieutenant to smile.

"Forgive me: There was a field kitchen. Now there's just a field. Your army left rather quickly."

"We've been overrun?"

He brushed the idea away. "Not yet. But you will be. It's all chaos right now. But you should go. Not everyone is as tolerant of nice German girls as I am. I assume that demon of a horse will let you climb upon him?"

"But my family? What about my family?"

"Child--"

"I'm not a child!" she said, blurting the words out. She feared the moment she had spoken that she had made an egregious mistake. She should have just gotten on Balga and ridden off to find Mutti and Theo. Tracked down Callum and Manfred. Given the two of them--the two of them and her mother and brother--a piece of her mind for leaving her here all alone. What in the name of God were they thinking? But the Russian lieutenant didn't seem to have been angered by her remark.

"Fine, you're not a child. More the reason to run," he said, and he held up his hands as if he were balancing a plate on each palm. The corporal was nodding his head earnestly. "Maybe if you're with us, that monster will let us get a saddle on him for you."

"That doesn't look like his saddle."

"It isn't."

"There's a saddle he knows in one of the wagons."

"The one with all that feed?"

"The other one."

"Fine. You take the saddle, if that's the only one he'll allow on his back. But we'll keep the rest. You really are getting a bargain, you know."

She was still shaking, and she wasn't even sure she was capable of riding Balga right now. But she guessed she hadn't a choice. These two soldiers were gentlemen. Or, at least, decent human beings. It was unlikely the next Russians would be as well. And so she started past them toward the entrance to the barn, walking with her head held high--but she hoped, not haughtily--experiencing at once fury over the way she had been abandoned by her family and gratitude toward these two Bolsheviks for sparing her life.

As she passed through the open doors, squinting slightly against the daylight, she saw poised on either side were Callum and Manfred, their backs flat against the barn board. Callum was to her right and Manfred was to her left, and they were both holding guns: The paratrooper was grasping the antique pistol her mother usually concealed under her cape--it had been her husband's during the First World War--and the Wehrmacht corporal had his rifle in his hands. She realized they knew the Russians were a couple of steps behind her and were going to ambush them, and the thought was just beginning to formulate in her head that she should tell Callum and Manfred that these soldiers were kind--that they hadn't harmed her, that they were actually sending her on her way. But the notion was still germinating, finding a warm spot in her mind to put down roots, when the two men spun and were firing. She spun with them, heard a voice--was it her own?--actually screaming No! Don't shoot!, the words running together, but she was an instant too late. As she turned, she saw from the corners of her eyes that one of the Russians was being lifted up and off the ground by the force of the bullet--was this the one named Vassily?--and the other, the corporal, was simply buckling at the knees and collapsing silently into the straw as if he were one of the elk that were shot each year in the park behind Kaminheim.

For a long moment her ears were ringing the way they had on that first day of their trek, when the Russian shell had exploded beside them as they had approached the Vistula, and so she was only dimly aware of the echoes from the two gunshots. Or of the cries of the birds that had disappeared abruptly from the nearby trees. Initially, she didn't even realize that with careful, tentative steps, Balga had inched closer to her. Mutti, too. And Theo. All she was cognizant of was the smell from the gunshots and the way these Russian soldiers had been only steps behind her just a few seconds ago, and now they were dead in the straw at her feet. They each looked as if their last thought had been only surprise. Not terror, not fear. Not even anger. They had both been shot in the chest, though the almost point-blank wound inflicted by the rifle had created a black, bowl-like chasm in Vassily's coat, and long wisps of steam were rising up from it into the barn. The hole in the corporal's coat was smaller, but no less fatal.

She felt Callum beside her, and she could tell that he wanted to hold her. To comfort her. But she didn't care. She was angry at him. She was angry at Manfred, too. Furious.