Skeletons at the Feast Page 11

  exhausted, he stopped at dusk in the ruins of a long- abandoned castle. He wasn't completely sure in the twilight, but he had the sense that the fortress had fallen into disrepair centuries before Nazi or Soviet bombs had demolished it. He didn't detect the acrid stench of gunpowder, and despite the ice and the snow that covered the ramparts like frosting and filled the crenels in the sole remaining turret like mascarpone cream in a parfait glass (a dessert his mother would make him as a child), he could see the dormant tendrils of ivy and the leafless branches of the thin trees that had grown up between the stones.

  He climbed the stairs to the tower where he planned to try to sleep for a few hours. He was just starting to kick away the snow there with his boot when below him he saw the children. Three of them. They were bundled up so tightly in blankets and furs that he couldn't tell if they were boys or girls, but he guessed by their height that they were all between the ages of nine and twelve. They were strolling almost leisurely through the arch where once there might have existed a great wooden door with a wrought-iron grate and wrought-iron spikes. Then, behind them, came two adults, both women. The small group had entered the castle from the side opposite him, and thus hadn't yet discovered his footprints. He crouched behind one of the crumbling stones along the wall and watched them, unsure whether he should reveal he was here. There was a good chance one of those women was armed, and in the dusk she might think he was a Russian and shoot him on the spot. That, of course, would be a fitting irony: For almost two years now he had shot Nazis, knifed Nazis, garroted Nazis, and--that very first time--bludgeoned and impaled Nazis with a fireplace poker. Conversely, he had fought Russians with rifles, panzerfausts, machine guns, and potato-masher grenades. If there was a God, and at this point he had no reason to believe that there was, Uri thought he would have a lot of explaining to do when he died. A lot of death to account for.

  Most of it, however, had been in self-defense. Even when he was part of various attacks and counterattacks on Soviet positions, it had been self-preservation.

  And so just imagine, he speculated, if it all turned out to have been for naught because one refugee mother or sister or aunt, protecting her cubs, took a potshot at him in the dusk of some crumbling castle with her late husband's (or brother's) Luger because she thought he was Russian. Or, perhaps, because she recognized his uniform and presumed (not unreasonably, given how he was dressed) that he was a Nazi himself. It was possible. Maybe the men absent now from this family were a part of the Polish resistance-- or had been before some SS sadist had executed them--and these women would shoot anything in German attire.

  They were clearly going to camp here for the night, and that meant that any moment one of them might cross the inner bailey and ascend the very same steps he had to this tower to see precisely where they were or to stand guard. And the last thing he wanted was to shoot some poor woman simply because he had surprised her and she was about to shoot him, and so he decided he would call down to them. First in German, but then in his pigeon Polish. Before he had opened his mouth, however, just as the three children were trying to cocoon inside one of the casemates that was still standing--trees seemed to be bookending the castle slabs now--he heard the sound of a vehicle and then, after the engine had stopped, laughter. Deep, guttural, back-of-the-throat laughter. There, just outside the castle wall below him, was a Russian jeep with two soldiers.

  Had the front disintegrated so totally that the Russians had gotten behind him? Now that would be a disaster, as well: To have survived nearly two years by masquerading as a German soldier-- German soldiers, actually--only to be overrun by the rampaging Soviets before he could either return to his original self or find a new guise.

  As the soldiers emerged from the jeep, Uri realized that he could see the women and the children on one side of the castle wall, and the Russian soldiers on the other. But the Russians were oblivious of the civilians and the civilians were unaware of the Russians. One of the soldiers, a stout, walleyed sergeant with a rat's nest of red hair, was peeing into the snow, and Uri gave himself license to hope they would be here but a moment and move on. And after that he would figure out how he himself would move on. But then the second soldier, a lanky fellow with deeply pockmarked cheeks and a crooked beak for a nose, motioned toward the castle, and they started walking through the gate and inside the ruins.

  Now the women saw them and, exactly as Uri had feared, one pulled a small gun from beneath her cape and fired. Her aim was comically bad and she missed both men completely. Instantly the soldiers were upon her. Both of them. The sergeant tackled her, the air reverberating with his howls of relief and mirth that the shooter was a woman and they had not stumbled upon retreating Wehr- macht or home guard. His partner ripped the gun from her fingers, chuckling when he saw the diminutive size of the pistol that almost had killed them. Together they pulled away the hood of her cloak and discovered that the woman was perhaps thirty, with golden hair and a long and gaunt but not unattractive face. She looked more angry than terrified.

  Then the soldiers stood and motioned for the woman to remain there on the ground, while they rounded up her sister or friend and their three . . . girls. Yes, Uri could see now that they were girls. The four other females were lined up against the wall, a grown-up and three youngsters, and when the woman on the ground tried to roll in the snow to see what was happening, the Russian sergeant stepped on her. Barely bothering to look down at her, as if he were popping a rolling balloon at a birthday party with his foot, he smashed his boot flat into her stomach, causing what might have been a shriek of pain to be reduced to an airless gasp.

  "Mommy!" the smallest of the three girls cried, and it looked as if she were going to say more but one of the older girls silenced her. Still, it was too late. She had drawn attention to herself and the tall soldier was scrutinizing her carefully. Then he pulled off his glove with his teeth and slid his hand under her coat, reaching down, it seemed, deep into her underwear. He said something to his comrade in a language that was largely foreign to Uri, but he got the gist of it: He'd take this girl first. They were going to begin by raping the girls in front of the women rather than starting with the two adults. The sergeant chuckled at this idea, removed his pistol from his holster, and aimed it down at the woman beneath his boot. She pleaded with him, begged him to take her instead, and he smirked and nodded. Said, Uri thought, that everyone would have a chance.

  Quietly Uri pulled his rifle off his shoulder and unclipped the safety. He could take out the Russian standing with his foot atop this mother easily, but the other soldier would be a tougher shot. He was no more than fifty or sixty meters away, and at that distance there was no reason to believe the bullet wouldn't travel right through the fellow and lodge itself deep inside the child: The angle was such that if he aimed for his head, he might shoot the poor girl in the chest. If he aimed for his heart, he might shoot the child in the stomach. Certainly there was a chance that the moment he fired at the first Bolshevik--that one who was now seeming to grind his boot into the woman on the ground--the second would reflexively move away or take cover, and in that instant Uri could blast him, too. But it was equally likely that he might use the child as a shield and fire back at him from behind her.

  Already, however, with almost preternatural speed, the Bolshevik had ripped off the poor girl's coat and was tearing open her dress, turning her nearly upside down as he pulled her underpants off her spindly legs so, suddenly, she was stark naked in the cold and the snow. She was screaming, a hairless wild animal with a hillockless chest--all rib cage and pancake-flat areolae, with a pencil dot for a navel--screaming so loudly that the soldier smacked her hard with the back of his hand and her whole body corkscrewed into the ground.

  And so Uri gazed at the sergeant through the sight on his Mauser, aimed at a spot on his tunic just about where the fellow's heart would be, and fired. As if the gunshot were the dial that turned down the volume on a radio, the world instantly went quiet except for the echo from the
blast. The child stopped howling and the woman stopped pleading, and even the wind seemed abruptly to cease. The sergeant never even turned to see the source of the shot, he simply collapsed into the snow beside the woman. Already, however, Uri was spinning the barrel of his rifle toward the second Russian, who he saw in his sight had his pants at his knees and was fumbling for something--his holster, his penis, Uri couldn't say-- and gazing like a frightened animal directly at him. Instinctively Uri calculated the girl would be safer if he fired at the Russian's head, even if it meant a smaller target. This shot wasn't as clean: He took off the soldier's ear and a thin sliver of skull, sending a sizable chunk of hair and scalp splattering against the naked abdomen of the child. Still, he hadn't killed him. It looked like there was a lot of blood, but he barely had slowed him. Fortunately, as the soldier reached for his own gun, he put just enough distance between himself and the girl that this time Uri was able to fire into his stomach. And then, as he fell to his knees, into his chest. And, because Uri was absolutely furious that this bastard had been about to rape a child, into his face one more time.

  Only then did Uri stand from his firing position in the tower and work his way down the stone steps to the family. He figured they should get that child dressed and take advantage of the fact they now had a jeep, and drive as far west as they could.

  Chapter 8

  in his crisp, freshly tailored uniform as a Wehrmacht private, Helmut accompanied his father east to Uncle Karl's estate. The drive usually took less than an hour, but today they had to battle against the crush of evacuees who were clogging the roads, and the trip took most of the morning. They weren't completely sure what they would find when they arrived at the home of Mutti's garrulous, indefatigably good-natured older brother, because the day before the phone service that far east had been cut. But when Mutti had called Karl two days earlier, the last time the siblings had spoken, shells had been falling sporadically in the corners of his property and the outbuilding where he stored the tractors in the winter had been damaged. Nonetheless, Karl had been adamant about staying.

  As far back as Christmas Day he had told the Emmerichs, "I will greet the Russian commander as one civilized man to another. Maybe their soldiers are peasants, but I've heard their leaders are well educated. Some grew up before the revolution with the sort of reasonable privilege one expects from officers. On occasion, you know, class means more than country. Really, that's often the case. And so I wouldn't be surprised if we have more in common than any of us realizes. Of course, that presumes it ever comes to that and they actually reach this part of the Vistula. But who's to say they will? War is all about tides, and the tide should be with us again soon."

  Helmut knew that his father thought Uncle Karl's optimism was completely unwarranted--that the man was dangerously sanguine about the prospects for his house and his farm and his family. His wife had succumbed to cancer two years earlier and his children were grown: His younger son had died in Stalingrad (and still, still, Karl harbored the delusion that the Russians and Germans would get along if they came from a certain class) and his older son was a staff officer with a Volksgrenadier division in the west. But his older son's wife lived with him now. Karl's one daughter did, too, returning home after her husband was captured in France, and bringing with her Karl's first grandson, a robust toddler with blond spit curls who was built like a beer keg. Neither Helmut nor his father liked the idea of two young women being left to the mercy of the Russians, but throughout the whole month of January Karl had rebuffed his brother-in-law's entreaties to join the Emmerichs if they went west.

  When Helmut and his father reached the gates of the estate, the shelling had momentarily subsided. But there were great potholes in the driveway and the splinters from one of Karl's favorite oaks-- as well as pieces of trunk the size of railroad ties--littered the road to the manor house. They finally gave up and parked in the snow a hundred meters from the front entrance.

  Karl's daughter, Jutta, greeted them, her son swaying uncertainly beside her, despite the fleshy Doric columns that passed for his legs. Her lips were the pink of cooked fish, and thin as paper. But her eyes were wide and darting around her--out into the yard, up into the sky--and though she was standing still there was a frenzied quality about her that reminded Helmut of the way boars twitched when they were cornered at the end of a long hunt. Jutta was a decade older than Helmut, and once--before she had become a mother, before her husband had been captured, before the Russians had retaken most of Poland--he had thought she was among the most glamorous women he had ever seen outside of Danzig or Berlin. No longer.

  She brought them into the den, where Karl was having a glass of schnapps and staring out the mullioned windows toward the east. It was a flat white vista, the snow having long smothered even the foot-high remnants of the corn, with the edge of a silvery birch forest in the distance. Karl was wearing a paisley dressing gown made of silk, his bulbous cheeks were covered with white stubble, and Helmut found himself growing embarrassed for the man. Helmut had never viewed his uncle as especially slothful (though he did feel that Uncle Karl indeed lacked Rolf Emmerich's tireless discipline), but he had never before seen the man in a dressing gown at lunchtime. He had never before seen him drinking at lunchtime. Then he grew more than embarrassed: He grew angry. The idea that he and his father were in their uniforms--that they had risked their lives to come here, that they were using precious hours of leave when they should have been packing their own estate-- started to rankle him.

  The man pulled the drapes, instantly darkening the room. All of the furniture--the desk, the sofa, the cherry bookshelves that climbed along two of the walls from the floor to the ceiling--was cumbersome and heavy. He offered them both a drink, cavalierly waving the crystal decanter in their direction. Helmut listened as his father politely declined, then watched as Rolf sat down on the arm of the sofa, hooking his thumbs inside his wide black officer's belt. Helmut took this as an indication that he could sit, too. His cousin and her son watched from the doorway, standing. Then the child clicked the heels of his feet together, imitating other soldiers he had seen. Quickly Helmut stood and clicked his heels together in response, and the chubby boy grinned. For a moment he wondered how he could have missed how beautiful this tiny boy's smile was. Then he recognized it: It was the lively smile he remembered from his cousin before her life had started to come apart.

  "I'm not going, Rolf," his uncle was saying. "I grew up here and I plan to die here--though not, I assure you, anytime soon. But I stayed back in thirty-nine when our troops crossed the border and everyone said the Poles were going to kill us. You did, too. And it was all a great disturbance, great chaos. And for what? The Poles were fine--"

  "The Poles are not the Russians. And things were different in 1939."

  Karl poured yet more schnapps into his glass, and finally put the decanter down on the blotter on a corner of his desk. Helmut saw there were three stacked cardboard boxes beside it, and for a moment thought that while his uncle was insisting he was going to stay, he was nonetheless gathering up those items he would take with him in the event he did decide to evacuate. Then, however, he saw the note his uncle had scribbled on the top of the highest of the cartons: Karl was instructing one of the servants who remained to burn it. To burn them all. To, it seems, burn these three boxes along with the other papers that already had been gathered and left in the shed.

  "Yes," his uncle said, "things were different. We were younger. But otherwise, war is war and--"

  "Things happened in Russia. You know that. For them, this is revenge. Retribution."

  "Oh, please, don't talk to me about revenge and retribution. My son died in Stalingrad. If anyone should feel there are scores to be settled, it's me. It's us. It's the Germans, who at the moment are getting hammered on all sides."

  "You've talked to Felix," Rolf said, referring to his own brother who had served in Russia before being transferred to the western front. "And I know you've talked to my son. I know w
hat Werner has told you."

  "So? This was war. War is never pretty."

  "This was beyond war."

  "SS brutes and thugs," he said, shaking his head dismissively. "Neither of my boys--and neither of yours--was responsible. My sons were soldiers, nothing more. No axes to grind. Same with Werner, and young Helmut here. I'm a farmer, Rolf, and so are you--despite that fancy uniform you've put on. The fact is, we grow food, and whether you're a National Socialist or a Bolshevik, you have to eat."

  "The Russians are not going to distinguish between the SS and the rest of us. We're all just Germans to them. Don't forget Nem- mersdorf."

  Karl seemed to contemplate this for a moment, and then motioned for his daughter and grandson to leave the doorway where they'd been listening, waving his hand without the glass as if he were brushing a fly away from his nose. Almost instantly Jutta retreated, taking her son by his fingertips. Briefly the boy resisted her, but Helmut smiled, again clicked the heels of his boots, and the child went, too.