Skeletons at the Feast Read online

  "I don't know if there's enough material here for another dress," she told Mutti, running her fingertips lightly over the frock.

  "I agree. Perhaps we can turn it into a skirt for you--minus, of course, those ridiculous sequins," she said. After a brief moment she added, "I have very fond memories of this dress. Your grandmother thought it looked like a slip, but your father certainly liked it. Those were fun days."

  "And nights, apparently."

  "Anna!" her mother said, feigning embarrassment, but Anna could tell that she was far more delighted by the memories than she was scandalized by her daughter's innuendo.

  "I only meant those years must have been a lovely period. Better days than now."

  "Yes, they were."

  "Were you ever jealous of those city girls?"

  "Sometimes. They all seemed so glamorous if you came from a community such as ours."

  "If I ever said I wanted to go to Berlin to be, I don't know, a secretary, what would you say?"

  "I would say no," Mutti said, but she sat down beside Anna on the bed and turned her attention squarely from the dresses to her daughter. "No sane parent these days would send her child to Berlin--or to any city. Parents who live in the cities are trying to send their children away. Get them as far away from the bombs as they can."

  "But after the war? Would you mind if I went to work in a city after the war?"

  Mutti seemed to think about this. "I would. Your father would. We would miss you. But whether we would or we could prevent you? That would be something else. Now, you tell me: Why would you want to? This is the first I've heard of such a thing."

  "Well, it's the first time I've contemplated such an idea. I'm not sure if, in the end, I ever would want to."

  "Is there something particular behind this notion?"

  She sighed. "Maybe it was the naval officers. And the POWs. And Callum. They have all seen so much of the world, they have all been to so many places. They all seem so sophisticated compared to me. And it's not merely that I feel sheltered. It's that I feel frivolous."

  "Do you think I have led a frivolous life?"

  "Not at all. It just seems . . ."

  "Go on."

  "It just seems there is a very big world beyond Kaminheim."

  Mutti looked at her with uncharacteristic intensity, and Anna couldn't decide whether her mother's eyes had grown wide because she was anxious or defensive. "There is, my dear. There is. But let us hope you don't have to see it any sooner than necessary."

  "i don't feel disloyal precisely," Callum was saying to Anna another afternoon, when Mutti and Theo had gone to Uncle Karl's estate twenty-five kilometers to the east and once again left them alone at Kaminheim. They had just thrown another log into the fireplace, and the ice that was pelting the windowpanes seemed very far away. "I feel guilty. Horribly guilty. I am eating as well as you and your family and--"

  "You think we are eating well?" she asked him, incredulous. They were on the floor before the fire, and she was leaning against his chest, her body between his legs. She knew they would have to get dressed soon, but she couldn't bear the idea that their time alone was just about over. She felt a little giddy. Mature, too. But still blissfully dizzy. Her hands rested upon his bent, oddly hairless knees, and she imagined for a brief second they were the oarlocks on the small rowboat the family owned for their pond.

  "Well, perhaps you don't eat like you did before the war--"

  "We don't eat like we did even a year ago."

  "But you still eat considerably better than a POW. And so I am eating dramatically better than I would have if your father hadn't finagled a way for me to remain here. Plus, I am sleeping in a bunkhouse, not the barracks of a prison camp--"

  "And that will change. Any day now it will get much, much colder, and that bunkhouse was never meant to be used in the winter. Besides, it's absurd for you to sleep out there alone when we have nothing but bedrooms here in the house. I'll talk to Mutti tonight."

  "That's not exactly my point. My accommodations are fine."

  "But you will move into the house. I'll see to that."

  "My point," he said, wrapping her more tightly in his arms, "is that your family may need me, but nothing I've done here has been especially onerous. A little heavy lifting. Cleaning some farm machinery. A bit of carpentry. And so a part of me feels as if I've deserted my mates--that I should be enduring their trials with them."

  "You didn't desert them. That would mean you had a choice. You didn't. Father wanted someone here and you were picked." "Still . . ."

  She turned and craned her neck to face him. "I think I should be angry that you're not more grateful," she said playfully. "I doubt most POWs had an afternoon like you just had."

  He moved out from behind her. Gazed at her. Pushed her bangs off her forehead, still a little slick with perspiration. "Oh, I doubt any did."

  "And so?"

  He was, much to her surprise, blushing. When he didn't say anything, she added, "Maybe you'll protect us from the Russians. Maybe that's why you're here."

  "The Russians are British allies, my dear. It's one thing for me to replace the spark plugs on a tractor; it would be quite another for me to take up arms against my comrades. There's a word for that, you know: treason. And armies, mine included, frown upon it."

  "The Russians are not your comrades."

  "You know they are."

  "The Russians are the comrades of no civilized person. And you are very civilized--even if you do take advantage of German farm girls while their mothers are away for the day." She tried to add a cosmopolitan pout to her voice when she spoke; she hoped she sounded like a flirtatious adult. But then she saw the look of trepidation on Callum's face, and she realized that inadvertently she had hit a nerve: He honestly did feel guilty. He really did have misgivings.

  "The Russians are doing horrible things," she continued simply.

  "Everyone has been doing horrible things," he corrected her. "We both know your army was not especially charitable toward the women and children in Warsaw when they finished quashing the uprising there this past autumn," he added. Nevertheless, he brought her hands to his lips and kissed them. Then he stood up and, much to her disappointment, looked around for his clothes.

  "You're not leaving, are you?" she asked.

  "I am. But only with great frustration--and only because I would hate to see your reputation in tatters."

  She stood reluctantly and handed him his shirt. She admired his back, the way the muscles swelled near his shoulder blades as he pushed his arm into a sleeve, and how hairless this whole side of his body seemed to be--at least compared to his front. The sheer size of his back and his shoulders reminded her suddenly of Balga, and she tried and failed to suppress a small giggle.

  "What? My nakedness makes you chuckle?" he asked, pretending to sound insulted.

  "You're not naked anymore. You're wearing a shirt."

  She, however, was still completely nude, and was interested in--and intrigued by--how powerful this made her feel. She felt in command and surprised herself by scooting across the floor to him and taking his cock in her hand. He smiled down at her as she started to stroke it, and seemed about to shake his head no, no, they should stop. He should resume getting dressed. She should start getting dressed. But she could feel the blood engorging his penis and the organ growing once more against the palm of her hand, and he breathed in deeply and closed his eyes, his head rearing back like--again--her horse.

  "Aren't you worried about your mother?" he murmured, the words drifting aimlessly up toward the ceiling.

  She leaned her forehead against his thigh and looked at what she was doing, at the way the tip of his penis would appear and disappear, a magic hat in the midst of her fingers. "No," she said, "not at all. At the moment, I'm not worried about a thing."

  Chapter 6

  BY THE END OF JANUARY, THE FIGHTING WAs sO close they could hear it, the distant cannonade reminiscent of the soft and airy gurgle the prison
ers sometimes heard from the women in the barracks before they died in the night. Almost without exception, those survivors who could still stand found themselves less likely to avert their eyes when they saw the guards. It wasn't that they had suddenly grown bold; it was that watching the transformation of each of the guards was irresistible. No two guards (or officers) seemed to change in precisely the same fashion, but when Cecile thought about it--and she thought about it almost as often as she thought about hunger and what she would do when, finally, she was home and saw her precious Lyon again--she concluded that any day now the Germans were either going to up and flee or they were going to start feeding them. Really feeding them. Caring for them. They would fatten them up so the Russians wouldn't see how severely they had been mistreated. How could they not? Whenever there was no falling snow to muffle the sound, everyone--prisoners and guards alike--could hear the explosions rolling slowly in the direction of the camp. The guards had to save their own hides. There were even rumors that the Red Cross was going to visit, and somewhere nearby there was a train car filled with cans and cans of tomatoes--one for each prisoner--that were going to be given to them any day now.

  Meanwhile, most of the guards seemed less likely to fire a shot into the back of anyone's skull because the prisoner no longer could stand, or pour buckets of cold water on someone's head so they could watch her eyelashes freeze solid. Three days passed without a single woman being hanged by the camp gate because her sewing at the clothing works had been deemed subpar. There was one guard named Hedda who made a special effort to ask Cecile where she was from, and then told her how much she liked the French--how she had even visited Paris in 1937. Another guard had seen Jeanne swaying in line one morning, her strength flagging, and secretly given her the sausage that she had planned on tossing into the pile of scraps they gave to the camp dogs.

  Clearly, the pace of death was slowing. It wasn't just the absence of dangling corpses at the entrance to the camp. A whole week went by when they were marched back to their barracks after a day stitching SS uniforms at the factory and saw that the guards had felt no need to build a bonfire at the edge of the camp for the corpses. ("At least, they're getting out," a woman named Rosa had once mumbled to Cecile and Jeanne while they were standing in line, watching the thick, black smoke from the bonfire, to which Cecile had quietly replied, "I'd rather not leave here via the wind, thank you very much.")

  There was a different spirit in the camp. Not optimism precisely: Everyone was too tired or too hungry or too sick to feel optimism. But the sense of dread was starting to lift. The other prisoners stopped ignoring Cecile when she would prattle on about the future, or envying her formidable resiliency. They realized they all were alive--hundreds of them, still able to stand and walk and stitch--and soon the Russians would be here. And the Germans would be gone. And before they knew it, they would be home.

  Not all the guards, of course, were discovering suddenly that they were still capable of feigning kindness, or that it might be time to treat their prisoners like human beings. Trammler and Pusch may not have shot anyone that week, but the two men had allowed the dogs to maul one woman badly; the black joke among the prisoners was that the animals would have killed the girl if there had been any meat left on her bones they could eat. And a female guard named Inga had whipped a prisoner because she had tried to be the last in line for their soup at lunchtime. There was occasionally something solid at the bottom of the great metal pots, something of substance, and so there was always some jockeying to be toward the end of the queue. This time Inga had seen the girl trying to lag behind and disciplined her severely. And so Cecile and the other prisoners did what they could to avoid those guards, wondering if at some point their instinct for self-preservation would kick in and they would come around, too.

  Consequently, the prisoners were caught completely off guard when they were lined up in the snow one morning and informed they were going to be relocated. Moved west to another camp, one closer to the heart of the Reich. There their work would continue. The war would continue. Some of the prisoners, including Jeanne, had to stifle small sobs. But almost instantly they started to march--no cattle cars this time, they were going to walk west-- most of the prisoners in coarse wooden clogs, few with socks, many with feet that were a moonscape of open lesions and raging abscesses. The fortunate had either a cape or a coat or a blanket. A coarse or ratty old sweater. Some had only their prison shirts. They were going to march, they were told, as long as there was daylight.

  As they walked for the last time past the barbed wire and the guard towers, staggering in the direction opposite the clothing works, two jeeps filled with soldiers and wooden crates drove past them into the camp. A rumor was whispered along the line that the crates were filled with explosives, and the satchels with detonators and wires. Hours later they heard explosions that were louder than the distant rumbling they'd been aware of for days, and Cecile told everyone that she wouldn't be surprised if their rickety wooden barracks now were gone, if the piles of smoldering ashes--as well as the blackened but not obliterated bones that lay among the cinders at the perimeter of the camp--were buried beneath the churned-up dirt from the center commons. The idea gave her pause, and she wasn't precisely sure how she felt about this: Though she didn't want such unambiguous testimony to cruelty and barbarism to remain on the planet, she wondered if people would ever believe what she'd seen if there wasn't concrete proof.

  Chapter 7

  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 de- touring 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 was
n'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.