Skeletons at the Feast (38 page)

"Don't be. It would have been a miracle if you had," he told her. Then he added quickly, "Well, we have to get you some food," and he motioned his arm at the prisoners in the fields and the prisoners still pummeling the Hungarian guard and the prisoners staring wide-eyed into the sun. "We have a little in the wagon, but not nearly enough for all of you. But we'll find some."

"How?"

"There's a village up ahead. We may be able to wait there for the Americans. At the very least, we'll be able to rest for a bit and scare up something to eat."

"Is . . ."

"Go on."

"Is the war over?"

"Not yet," he told her. "But soon. Very soon. And I believe, at the very least, it's over for you."

the village was no more than three kilometers distant, but even that seemed too far to expect some of the women to walk. Still, Uri didn't think they could possibly bring back enough food and water--assuming they could even scare up provisions there--for the whole group with a single horse and a single wagon. Waldau was strong, but he was weary. He guessed that the women who felt up to it could come with him to the village, and those who didn't could stay where they were. Callum and Anna and Mutti could wait with them.

When he told Anna his idea, she looked up at him and said, "Bring back a doctor, too. They need a doctor badly. All of them." Her voice sounded very small. She was sitting on the grass, rubbing the blackened and mangled feet of a woman who seemed unconscious.

"I imagine the village will be mostly deserted," he said. "If there's a doctor anywhere near here, I'm sure whatever's left of the army has pressed him into service. But I'll try to find out how close we are to the Americans and the British."

"They must be near," said Mutti.

"One would think so," he agreed. He didn't want to get their hopes up, including his own, but when he looked at the map he guessed the western Allies might be as close as fifteen or twenty kilometers. It could be more. They'd heard that the British and Americans had paused, as if they had reached an agreement with the Soviets to be sure that each side received an equitable share of the remains of the Reich. Nevertheless, their armies were within reach--though, of course, so were the Soviets. It was possible that by remaining with the prisoners, the four of them would be overrun by the Russians. But these women were viewing the Russians as their liberators. And for the prisoners they would be. But for the four of them--especially for Anna and Mutti? The Soviets might be merciless.

And so a different idea began to formulate in Uri's head: He would tell the Emmerichs that they should leave the horse and the wagon behind and proceed ahead without them. The two of them should just walk west as quickly as they could. For all he knew, they might reach the Americans or the British by tomorrow. Meanwhile, he and Callum and the women who could walk would bring back whatever food and water and medicine they could find. But Anna and Mutti should leave now--make one last dash for the west.

He decided he liked this plan; he liked it a lot. He would strip off his German uniform, climb into some of Werner's ragged old clothes they had in the wagon, and allow his circumcised penis to vouch for his identity. And Callum? For God's sake, he was a POW. The two of them would be fine. He didn't completely believe this, but he reiterated the idea in his mind. They'd be fine. He shared his plan with Callum, and then he squatted beside Anna and told her what he thought they should do. And then he climbed atop the charred metal husk of a tank and clapped his hands together and shouted to get the attention of the women around him. He was just starting to speak--just beginning to open his mouth in earnest-- when he heard the rifle shot and then, before he could even turn in its general direction, felt himself being punched ferociously hard in the chest. He fell backward off the tank, the wind, it seemed, knocked completely out of him. He was aware that Anna was shrieking--he thought she might have been saying no, but already her voice sounded to him as if he were underwater--and he felt the back of his head hitting the ground. Then he was staring up into the bluest sky he had ever seen. For a split second he felt crushing pain and experienced a pang of frustration at the realization that he had come so far only to die now. He wondered who had shot him, and he wondered at the way the myth he had concocted of his indestructibility was so easily shattered. One bullet: That was all it took. Apparently, his soul was negligible, after all. But this recognition lasted just the briefest of moments, because then he was, much to his surprise, in the dining room of his childhood home in Schweinfurt, once again a teenage boy, and he and little Rebekah were using long, slender spoons to scoop the mascarpone cream from the tops of parfait glasses, and their mother and father were chatting casually about nothing. At least nothing of consequence. Then they were laughing. And the sky was blue there, too, more blue than even this Anna girl's eyes, and the sun was streaming in through the gauzy curtains. He was warm and content and his stomach was comfortably full. And then: Nothing.

callum saw the shooter instantly: It was one of those older men who had been guarding the women, and so Callum shot him. He picked the man off as he was pulling his rifle down and starting to retreat into a thicket of pine. His first bullet only wounded him, and so Callum shot him a second time. Then he scanned the field for any other Germans, saw none, and stood there, panting, for a long moment over Anna and Mutti as they crouched above Uri's body. Two of the prisoners were with them, including one whose name he had overheard was Cecile. Uri's eyes were open, but it seemed that he was already dead. His first thought? It had all happened so quickly. One minute Uri was with them, and the next he was gone. Anna was crying gently, shaking her head and shuddering. He knelt beside her, and when she realized he was there she leaned into his arms, as Mutti, once again, used her forefingers to gently shut the eyes of a body emptied abruptly of its soul.

"I know," Callum murmured, his chin against the top of Anna's head, his chest against her almost violently trembling body, "I know." He wasn't sure what he meant--if, in fact, he meant anything. What it was that he knew, he couldn't say. I know it's hard? I know it's tragic? I know you'll miss him? "I know," he whispered softly. "I know." Surrounded by a small sea of starving, tortured women, he thought to himself--and he heard the words in his head in Uri's frequently mordant voice--Please. I know nothing at all,.

helmut emmerich pressed His knees against His chest and wrapped his arms tightly around his shins: He was an egg. He couldn't have made his body any smaller. Still, however, he feared that the toes of his boots could be seen from the road if any of the Soviet soldiers happened to glance to their right at the remnants of the stone wall. And the column was endless, absolutely endless. First there had been the trucks and the half-tracks, and then there had been the assault guns and the tanks. And, dear God, in the whole history of the war had there ever before been so many tanks in one place? It just didn't seem possible. It had been an interminable parade of them, a procession so long that for a while it had seemed to Helmut that the ground was never, ever going to stop vibrating beneath him. And now there was the infantry and the horse-drawn wagons. Every living man from Belarus had to be marching past him right now--or, for all he knew, every living man from the Ukraine. And Georgia. He had heard a variety of languages and dialects as the troops walked along. He guessed it was an entire tank corps and a rifle division marching west.

It was not simply terrifying--though that was the principal sensation--it was frustrating. After all, he had been sure that he had, finally, gotten ahead of the Russian army. He wasn't merely far, far to the west of Kaminheim: He was west of the Oder. He was west of Dresden. After nearly four weeks of hiding, of skulking, of lurking . . . of stealing carrots from root cellars and eating nothing but snow for days at a time . . . of using his last bullet a week ago now when he had shot at a hare and missed . . .

Evidently the war was over, or it would be within days, because clearly there was no Reich remaining. There was no Germany left. He knew how far west these soldiers were, and he had heard just enough rumors and stories to know that the western armies were well beyond the Rhine and the Russians were fighting in Berlin. Moreover, these Soviet riflemen were a joyful bunch, and that meant something, too. They were singing and laughing and whooping up a storm as they marched.

He considered, as he had often that winter and spring, simply surrendering. Just giving up. And if he was ever going to surrender, now was as good a time as any. There were plenty of officers marching past and plenty of witnesses: It seemed unlikely that they would shoot him right here by the road. At least he thought it was unlikely. They would, after all, have to do something with him if they didn't shoot him. And so while they might not execute him out here in the open right beside this stone wall, he guessed in the end some lieutenant and a pair of riflemen might escort him seventy or eighty meters into the woods and shoot him there.

He decided he would remain where he was. He stared down at the tears in his pants and the way the skin he could see on his knees had grown as coarse as sandpaper. He reminded himself that eventually the sun would set once again and this army would be gone. He would be able to uncoil his body, to rise up and go . . .

That, of course, was the problem. This morning, just when he thought he had finally gotten west of Ivan, here he was. Again. And so Helmut was beginning to fear there was no place left in the west that could become his eventual destination. Yes, the war was all but over, but he could only dimly imagine what sort of world was going to remain when there was nothing left of the Reich to bomb into rubble. The one thing he was certain of was that there would no longer be the Germany he had known his whole life. He still had vivid memories of Kaminheim when it had been a part of Poland, since he had been a Polish citizen for the first twelve years of his life. But even as a little boy he had viewed himself as a German. And the world that was dawning wanted no part of the Germany he knew. What would remain of the empire that once stretched from the westernmost tip of France to the oil fields in the Caucasus? From the ice of the Arctic Circle in Finland and Norway to the desert heat of North Africa? It would become a compact little vassal state. The victorious armies would divide up the nation the way the Germans and the Russians had carved up Poland into halves.

Well, such was the fate of conquered nations since the beginning of time.

Still, he didn't want to die. He had seen more than his share of death, including his father's in that ludicrous counterattack on the Kulm bridgehead hours after the two of them had said good-bye to Mutti and Theo and Anna, and he wanted to postpone his own as long as he possibly could. Somehow he had survived ill-advised counterattacks on Russian positions for almost two months, until he alone in his battle group was alive, and he couldn't imagine he had any luck left. It wasn't that he was afraid of death--though he could readily admit to himself that he was. It was the fact that his father was dead and he had to presume that Werner was dead, and so it seemed to Helmut that he alone was left to look after the Emmerichs who remained. Consequently, he vowed to stay where he was until this latest procession was past and then--as he had for weeks now--try to work his way west.

n it was the british who reached the female prisoners in the field first, a long column of Churchill tanks that had pressed to the south and the east of Lubeck. When they saw the women--by no means the first camp survivors they had encountered--they radioed back for medics and set up a hospital inside what was rumored to have been an estate Martin Bormann had commandeered for a mistress. An opera singer. Some of the women had scattered by then, fearful that the Germans would return, but most had been incapable of fleeing. Anna and Callum had already filled the wagon with whatever food they could find in the village, which hadn't been much. They made two trips that first afternoon--on their second excursion, they returned with all the blankets and quilts they could steal--and a third one the next morning. Waldau never faltered. Mostly they brought back moldering root vegetables they discovered in sand barrels in empty basements and loaves of bread that were so hard they were like clubs. Still, they softened the bread in hot water they warmed over a fire and boiled the vegetables into a hot soup. No one was able to eat much, but everyone was able to eat something. They'd been there a little more than a day when the British tanks arrived, a loud, rumbling procession that caused the earth to tremble and caused Anna and Mutti and Callum to hold their breath until they knew for sure that the approaching army wasn't Russian.

In the days that followed, more and more British troops arrived. Canadians, too. And, suddenly, Callum was gone. Interrogated first--at length, apparently--then cleared, and then absorbed back into the army. Anna saw him one more time before he was returned to his division. He had hoped, he said, that she would come with him. There were displaced persons all over Germany, and did it matter whether she was a refugee here or seventy-five kilometers farther south? Probably not. But she and Mutti were assisting the nurses at the makeshift hospital, doing whatever they--or anyone--asked. They cleaned bedpans and washed dirty sheets, they fed soup to the girls. They assisted the translators to find out who the prisoners were and where they were from. They acted as intermediaries with the Germans living nearby.

And so Callum told her that he would come back for her as soon as he could. He didn't know when that would be, but he was confident he would return before long. In the meantime, he urged them to stay where they were so he could find them.

There was, however, no chance that either of them was going to leave. The camp in which they were staying with other refugees was adequate, and Mutti seemed no less discomfited by the slit trench that was their bathroom than she was by the fields and woods she had used so frequently that winter and spring. There were soldiers who hated the German refugees for what their people had done, but there were others who seemed to view them merely with boredom. They gave chewing gum to the children in the camp--often having to explain what it was--and cigarettes to the younger women. They tended to ignore the women Mutti's age, as well as the men who were there--none of whom, it seemed to Anna, could possibly have been younger than fifty-five or sixty.

Every so often, Mutti would bring up her husband or her sons, and her hopes that they would all be reunited before the end of the summer. Anna would say nothing to disabuse her of this possibility. She would carry the dinner trays for the women who were, slowly, starting to mend, and she would read to them from the books that she found in one of the massive house's bedrooms. She became friends with a woman named Cecile, and told her what she could of the man who had rescued them--had, arguably, rescued them both. And she would do whatever they or the British doctors would ask of her, though it seemed the women wanted only to sleep and sip broth and inquire whether the suddenly omnipresent Red Cross had found someone they loved: A husband. A sibling. A father, a mother, a child.

In the first days there was never any news to report. By the end of June there was, and invariably it was bad.

Sometimes, the British wondered if her silence, other than when she was reading aloud to the patients, was sedition. Some conjectured that she might actually be an unrepentant little fascist, and perhaps had secrets she was shielding. Who knew what her father or her family really had done during the war? Others, however, sensed the truth: She rarely opened her mouth unless she was speaking the words of authors long dead because she felt she had lost all moral authority to speak a word of her own. She and her family had prospered under the Nazis; now the Nazis were gone and there was a price. Besides, when she saw these women in their cots and their beds in the estate, she understood that the more she spoke the more likely she was to cry. She didn't precisely hate herself-- nor did she hate her mother, though when she would look at Mutti she would experience daggers of frustration that her parents and their whole selfish generation had forgotten the most fundamental of human decencies--but the guilt was nonetheless debilitating. Sometimes, she wanted to rail at Mutti, at all the refugees her mother's age, and ask them what they had been thinking. How they could have done this to their children--to the world.

She began to pray, but it had been a long time and it seemed that praying took a concentration she lacked. Moreover, other than the health of the camp survivors around her and the safe return of her father and brothers, she wasn't quite sure what to pray for. One of the other young women among the refugees, a war widow a few years older than Anna, told her that she personally prayed for forgiveness. The war widow said she hadn't been a party member, but that didn't matter.

And so Anna tried that, too. Unfortunately, with Callum gone-- Callum who had loved her despite her naivete--she wasn't confident that self-loathing wouldn't forever be her companion and cause her to walk with a distracted, disconsolate gaze. She didn't care so much whether the world would ever forgive her people; but she did hope that someday, somehow, she would be able to forgive herself.

EPILOGUE:

1948

THE RUINs OF THE scOTTisH cAsTLE LOOKED OUT UPON the North Sea from the edge of a steep cliff, and the waves rolled against the base of the ledge like wild, excited ponies. Parts of two of the original four towers remained, the stones butterscotch in the sun, and the tower nearest the ocean looked as if a giant had taken a tremendous bite out of the top. Across the road and perhaps a hundred meters distant, sheep were grazing and the herd's dog, a brown and white border collie, was running ecstatically in circles around them. Two of the sheep had been dozing half on and half off the thin road.

There had been fog in the morning, but this time of year there was always fog in the morning, and now it had lifted and the sky was cerulean blue. There were wispy, achromatic clouds far out to sea, but they posed no threat to the picnic.

The baby, a moonfaced boy with thin, poppy-colored hair, was just starting to wake up, and Anna put down the letter she had been reading and leaned over to watch him on the blanket. When they had first arrived, she had put two pillows around him to shield him from the breeze off the water. He was making small, birdlike clucking sounds, a signal that he was emerging from his nap. Anna thought she would feed him in a moment. Beside them, on the grass on the hill near the crumbling remains of the castle's east wall--the roof was long gone--sat Callum, his long legs extended well beyond the edge of the blanket. Mutti had been back in Germany a full week now, and though Anna missed her mother's help with the baby, she was relieved that she and Callum had their apartment to themselves once again. It really wasn't big enough for three grownups and an infant. Still, Mutti had arrived in time for the birth of her first grandson and stayed almost three months--which was at least a month longer than she had planned to visit, but she had found the role of grandmother irresistible. She shared the position contentedly with Callum's mother, who would appear with sprightly regularity at eight thirty every morning. Mutti was living now in a rooming house in a village a little west of where their trek had ended three years earlier, in the corner of Germany that was occupied by the British. Her room, she assured Anna, was more than sufficiently cheerful: It had a window that faced south and was bright most of the day. She had no plans to try to visit Poland, and no expectation that she would ever see Kaminheim--or whatever remained of Kaminheim--again. Helmut lived near her and had found work as a custodian at one of the British air bases. He hoped eventually they would train him to become a mechanic.