Skeletons at the Feast (34 page)

"Now, stop!" the woman screamed again, but it was clear Leah knew she didn't dare. They'd shoot her anyway. Besides, the woods were no more than thirty meters distant. She'd be there in seconds. And so Leah kept running along the wet ground, and even when she heard the gunshot she didn't break stride. She didn't turn around to see that the male guard named Kogel had come up beside the woman who had ordered her to stop. There he was, his arm extended parallel to the ground, his pistol aimed at Leah as she fled. He was about to fire a second time, and Cecile knew he wouldn't miss twice. The idea entered her mind that she would be responsible for her friend's death--directly, clearly, unequivocally responsible--and she experienced a dagger of guilt so pronounced that it caused her to emit a small, choking cry. But then there was Jeanne. Beside the two guards. Or, rather, between them. Her friend wasn't in the woods, she was still back with the other prisoners. And she was pushing Kogel's arm upward toward the sky as he discharged the weapon once more, sending the bullet uselessly into the overcast mist as Leah disappeared into the woods.

Meanwhile, from inside the barn, almost like an echo, came Blumer's second shot as he executed the other prisoner who had failed to rise from her patch of straw. The birds that had returned to the peak flew off. And then, when they were still circling above the fields and the trees in search of a quiet place to land, Kogel shoved Jeanne to the ground, where she had neither the time nor the inclination to beg for mercy, and at point-blank range he discharged his pistol once again, this time into the back of poor Jeanne's skull.

Cecile couldn't hear what the female guard said to Kogel, but it was clear by her countenance and the way she was using one of her gloves like a rag to wipe Jeanne's blood and the gray-white tissue from the prisoner's brain off her skirt that she was annoyed. He had shot the woman at such an angle that the two of them had been sprayed with the gelatinous ooze from the inside of her head.

she walked between women whose faces she knew but whose names were a mystery, and while one of them wanted to talk, Cecile was now all but incapable of speech. It wasn't that she couldn't stop crying--though that was a factor. It was that she no longer gave a damn and there was absolutely nothing she wanted to say. Her oldest friend from the camp was dead and it was her fault and only her fault. Moreover, Jeanne--grumbling, whining, meandering Jeanne--had actually died so that Leah might live. The woman had given herself up. Halfheartedly Kogel had looked for the seamstress in the woods, but he had spent no more than four or five minutes wandering through the soggy underbrush. They needed to get the column moving. And so Leah was on her own now somewhere in this foreign countryside, hopefully speaking her elegant, perfect German to someone who would shield her until the world had come to its senses or the Russians had arrived and it was safe for her to emerge from the shadows. Meanwhile, Cecile was left alone with her incapacitating guilt. She neither deserved to live nor saw any possible future. For the moment she would keep marching, struggling on with the other prisoners, but one of these times when the bastards allowed them to lie down or sit, she simply wouldn't bother to rise. Jeanne had died fast and it couldn't have been very painful. One bullet, she decided, and there would be no more hunger or pain or cold. That's all it would take. A little bit of courage and then forever she could let go of this enervating charade she called hope.

THERE WERE LARGE ANTITANK GUNs AIMED AT TWO of the bridges, and the white paint on their barrels had started to peel. Anna guessed that once she would have found the weapons frightening--or, at the very least, disturbing. The same with the shell fire that seemed, their first morning back on the road, to be falling only blocks behind them. Or the skeletal remains of the brick buildings, their whole front and rear walls sheared off. Or, certainly, the corpses of the hanged men, their bodies still dangling from makeshift scaffolds with the handwritten signs tied to their jackets that said, simply, "Coward." But she didn't. The litany of the absent in her life had grown so long and the future was so relentlessly bleak that she had grown numb to it all. She could see that her mother had, too. It was odd: Anna was continuing on this path now only for the sake of her mother, and she had the sense that her mother was doing the same only for her. Mutti, Anna had decided, couldn't possibly believe that she would ever see her husband or her two older sons again. They were as dead and gone as poor Theo. And they all knew they would never return to Kaminheim-- assuming Kaminheim even was standing.

So what was propelling this woman forward, Anna would ask herself, what was giving her mother the resolve to put one foot in front of the other and, sometimes, take the lead lines of one of the horses? In the end she decided that she herself was the answer: Mutti would not give up completely so long as she had even a single child remaining.

At one point they stopped to rest the horses and allow them to graze on the early spring grass, and a pair of women older than Mutti came up behind them and exhorted them to keep moving. Their skin was whiter than milk, and they were each carrying a single elegant valise. Their skirts--though streaked with mud and fraying along the hems--were stylish. They were both wearing leather riding boots.

"Ivan's back there," one of the women said to Mutti. She had a kerchief around her head that looked as if it had once been a part of a window curtain. "You can't stop."

"We'll just be here a minute," her mother told them.

"Suit yourself," said the woman. She then remarked, so casually that Anna found herself studying the storyteller to see if she was lying, that she had been raped multiple times only two days before and was here now only because the Russians had passed out drunk after assaulting her. A third woman, a friend of theirs, was dead because she had resisted: She had been shot, her corpse violated, and the body was left impaled on the ends of two captured German bayonets. The woman claimed that both she and her traveling partner had been attacked in broad daylight by a half-dozen Soviet riflemen. Then, after the soldiers either had fallen asleep or left them to find other, younger victims, the women had continued on their way west.

And so Anna helped Callum harness the horses so they, too, could resume their trek. Overhead there were seagulls circling the field where the horses had been grazing. She thought how lately when she had looked into the sky, it had usually been because she had heard airplanes approaching. It was surprising--and reassuring--to notice something as mundane as seagulls looking for food in the fresh grass and loosened soil.

"Would you like to ride for a bit? You've been walking all morning," Callum asked Mutti, but her mother shook her head. She would continue on foot.

"I just don't understand why the Russians are so brutal," her mother said after a moment. "Was war always this horrid? Is this a secret you men always have known, and you just never told the women?"

Uri had been sharing his story with Callum off and on for hours now, and when he heard Mutti's remark he turned to her and asked, "Do you really wonder?"

"I do."

"After all you've heard about what your armies did these past years in Russia--or just last autumn in Warsaw--can it possibly be a mystery? My God, after what some of your people did to my people, do you even have to ask?"

Behind them they heard motorcycles, and then four Wehrmacht engineers sped past them on the vehicles. Anna saw they barely paid any notice to either Uri or Callum. "I can see why you don't want to remain with those boys," Callum said, motioning toward the German soldiers, already disappearing into the distance. "But tell me: Why aren't you just waiting here now for the Russians? Why is it so important to you to get to the west?"

"I didn't go through hell the last two years only to wind up a Communist on some collective farm in the Ukraine," he answered. "Besides, somehow I don't think the NKVD would take kindly to my having impersonated a German soldier since 1943. They probably wouldn't even believe that it was an impersonation."

"You could always drop your drawers," Callum said lightly, and Anna couldn't resist turning to watch her mother's reaction. Mutti was staring straight ahead, pretending not to have heard.

"I could, yes. But I have also spent the last two years peeing only in the dark or when I'm alone. I hate to think of the damage I've done to my bladder."

The idea crossed Anna's mind that she had only the vaguest idea what a circumcised penis might look like. She had seen her twin brother's genitals when they had been children, as well as Theo's. And she had seen Callum's. It seemed, she decided now, an awful lot of work to care about such things. Too much work for an issue that didn't seem that important.

"You're blushing." It was Uri and he was speaking to her.

"Have you absolutely no sense of decorum at all?" Callum chastised him, but his voice was light and good-natured.

"Nope. That's what happens when you live your life on the run. You tend to care less about such niceties. Of course, it was you who just suggested that I drop my drawers for the Russians."

He was grinning. And then, suddenly, Callum was grinning. She loved it when the two men wound up smiling together at precisely the same time.

it was almost as if the town house had been charmed: The structures to its immediate right and left--every house on the block on this street in the village--had been bombed or shelled recently. The buildings either had been reduced to large mounds of fallen timbers, crumbling stone, and dust or were the skeletal cutaways the Emmerichs had witnessed so often as they had trekked west. Unlike in the past, however, there were no refugees camped out in these husks or families who had chosen to remain. There were ornery, skinny dogs wandering the streets, growling at the horses; there was the occasional rat; and there were birds--mostly crows. But otherwise there was no sign of life in the town. Everyone either had died or had fled.

But then there was that one town house. The windows facing the street were broken and the wooden shutters on the second floor were askew, but the brick facade was largely undamaged and the slate roof was mostly intact. The curtains on the second floor and the drapes on the first, all a little shabby now, would occasionally billow out through the frames like a ghost.

It was nearly seven in the evening and the sun had set, and so they decided they would stop here for the night. To savor their good fortune. There wouldn't be running water or electricity, but perhaps there might be beds or couches inside on which they might sleep. In the three days since they had left Stettin, they hadn't dozed for more than a few hours at a time, and always those naps had been inside barns or--one night--on the floor of a bombed-out gymnasium.

But they had, once again, managed to put some distance between themselves and the army that they were trying to elude. It wasn't, however, that they were making such good time: They had simply veered farther away from Berlin, trekking not exactly along the coast but still well north of the capital. Uri believed that by now the Russians almost certainly would have overrun them if the Soviets hadn't been so focused on the prize to the south, and their race to plant the hammer and sickle atop the Reichstag. Moreover, by remaining so far to the north their small group had also managed to separate themselves from the hordes heading west or southwest. There were long intervals when they had had the road to themselves.

Now as they all stared with some measure of disbelief at the brick town house, Uri took his rifle off his shoulder and approached the front door. He said that he was just making sure it was empty.

"You want some help?" Callum asked, and Uri nodded.

But the house was every bit as deserted as it seemed, an odd oasis in the midst of the rubble that once had been a small hamlet. They were all asleep within the hour.

n anna felt someone gently rubbing her arm, long, tender strokes, and she opened her eyes. The room was dark and it took her a moment to orient herself. She recalled that she was in a town house in . . . in that place without a name. In the one town house that remained standing in the whole village. She was in a small bed--a child's bed--in a room by herself, while her mother was resting in the massive bed in the other bedroom on the floor. She was buried deep beneath quilts because the windows had been blown out in the bombing and there was no heat. But she had been warm enough to have fallen into a very deep sleep. Until now. Until someone--Callum--was rubbing her arm. Waking her up. The men had been asleep downstairs on the couches, but now one of them was upstairs.

She looked up at him, and even in the dark saw him bring one finger to his lips. He was wearing his gloves.

"Are the Russians here?" she whispered. She was so weary that the idea didn't fill her with dread. Terror, she realized, was an emotion that demanded energy.

"No," he said, smiling. "Nothing like that. Nothing like that at all."

"Then what?"

"Come with me. There's something I want to show you."

"What time is it?"

"Not quite two thirty."

She nodded. She'd been asleep, she thought, for just about seven hours.

"Come, come," he said again, his tone almost boyish. "Hurry!"

Though she had gone to bed in her clothes, the moment she emerged from beneath the bedding she felt a nip of the frost in the air.

"Do I need my boots?" she asked.

He nodded. He already had them in his hands.

"Are the others awake?"

"No. This is just for you. For us."

When she had her boots on, he helped her slide her arms through her parka and gave her her gloves. Then he led her down the stairs, past the living room in which Uri was sleeping, and outside. He took her hand in his and she looked up at him. His face was inscrutable: not anxious, not whimsical, not stoic. It was the face of a man, she thought, who was impassively reading a book. Over his shoulder he had slung a backpack.

As they started down the street, past the piles of debris, she heard a wolf howling in the distance, and the sound--so different from the rumble of artillery--caused her to smile slightly to herself. A wolf in the night. How natural.

"Can I have a clue?" she asked him.

"No. But you'll see it for yourself in a moment."

And indeed she did. They quickly reached the edge of the village, the end of the last block. He pointed, but she would have been blind not to see it. She was surprised she was only noticing it now, and decided she must have been looking down at the street as they walked, either because she was so sleepy or because she was being careful and watching her step as they navigated their way along the churned-up cobblestones that once had been road.

"The northern lights," she murmured, and she felt him squeeze her fingers and then wrap his long arms around her and pull her into him purposefully. They were standing at the edge of a lake, and there were three fountains rising up from the horizon, over the Baltic Sea in the distance, each of the sprays a throbbing column of gold that flickered like a gargantuan candle. They were illuminating the sky, causing the tips of the highest evergreens to stand out in relief, while reflecting off the glassy surface of the lake. It was almost as if the fountains of light were coming toward them as well as shooting up into the sky. There were two passing clouds the rough shapes of ovals, and it looked to Anna as if they were eyes in the face of the universe--a countenance that tonight was the color of saffron. "I've never seen them so beautiful," she said.

"Me either. In Scotland, we call them the merry dancers. Sometimes I've seen them more colorful than this. Some violet, some red. But I've never seen them look quite so much like bloody torches."