Skeletons at the Feast (2008) Read online

  But, initially, he was still very glad that he had.

  It was only after he had caught his breath and begun to concentrate on the sounds of the odd and unfamiliar animals he heard all around him--owls and bats and somewhere not terribly far away, a wolf--that he began to fear that he just might have deserted his family. Rebekah. Yes, she was tall and pretty, but she was only fourteen. And perhaps because there had been a child, another girl, born between him and his sister who had died within days of her birth, he and his parents had always doted on Rebekah to the point that she was really rather helpless. And what if she was on that train, in one of the other cars? His parents, too? The thought left him a little sickened, and he wasn't sure now what he would do next. He was, he realized, worse than a stranger in a strange land. He was a Jew in the east. And so the very first thing he did was to rip his star from his shirt. He'd figure out the rest--clothes, a name, a ration card for food--after he'd gotten some sleep.

  as the emmerich family was preparing to leave the estate--Kaminheim was their name for their home, because the house had so many fireplaces, some of them the height and width of a pony--much to Anna's astonishment, Mutti was actually dusting. And, with the cook--the lone servant who remained--mopping the floor. And then beating throw rugs outside on the terrace in the icy January air. Apparently she believed that someday they might return, and then they would whisk the crisp white sheets off the couches and chairs--a magician's reveal--and their life would resume as if they had only been away on a holiday.

  Anna presumed that her mother had been disabused of this notion by now, as they trekked through the snow in the woods and away from the caravan of refugees, trying to catch up to Helmut.

  But perhaps not. This was a woman, after all, who had always maintained a completely illogic faith in her fuhrer and a naive ability to compartmentalize what she deemed his good and his bad attributes. Back in 1940, Anna recalled, the very summer when Jewish friends of her parents from Danzig would appear, homeless, on their doorstep, Mutti had insisted on hanging in the parlor the signed, framed photo she owned of Hitler. They had taken the Jewish family in without a moment's hesitation, and Mutti had seen no inconsistency in celebrating the fuhrer and offering shelter to her friends. Even now, after Soviet shells had pummeled her brother's estate a mere twenty-five kilometers farther east, she could still sound like a star- struck little girl when she talked of Hitler's blue eyes, or the entire afternoon she had spent on the Schlossplatz in 1940 because the man was staying at the Hotel Bellevue and she was hoping to steal a glance of him. She hadn't been alone. There had been very big crowds that day--including Mutti and her sister-in-law and some other women from the corner of Poland that, thanks to Hitler, recently had been returned to Germany--and they hadn't been disappointed. They had gotten to stand within yards of their leader when he had walked from the hotel to the Cafe Weber; they had, as one, thanked him for reuniting them with their country.

  This was why Mutti still seemed to expect a miracle from her fuhrer. The estate, Kaminheim, on which she had grown up as a little girl had always been a part of Germany and she had viewed herself as a German. Then, in 1919, it was on land ceded to Poland and she was supposed to become a Pole. All the Germans there were. Or they could relocate. But her family wasn't about to leave Kaminheim. There was no place else for them to go, nothing else for them to do. They grew sugar beets. It was what they did. And so, with the signing of a treaty in a palace outside of Paris, she went from being the daughter of Prussian farming gentry to a disliked little foreigner. A minority. An alien. A part of a discredited nobility. Initially, like most Prussians, Mutti's parents--Anna's grandparents--had thought this Hitler character was decidedly low- rent. There were rumors that he'd once been a paperhanger, that he'd painted bad still lifes and tried to sell them on the street. The man might not even have been completely sane. But then he got people working again and he built those highways. Gave Germans back their pride. And then, best of all, he gave them back Prussia. All of Prussia. Not just a kidney-shaped patch of earth surrounding Danzig, separated from the rest of Germany by a vast tract of Poland. Sadly, Mutti's parents died before the reunification in 1939. For most of the war, Mutti had lamented that her mother and father hadn't lived to see the return of their precious Kaminheim to Germany; now, however, Anna wondered if Mutti wasn't relieved on some level that neither had they been forced to witness their treasured land occupied by what her mother considered the savages from the east.

  Finally, between the explosions and the pathetic cries of a little boy calling out not for food but for a lost dog named after food ("I want Spaetzle, Mommy! Please, please, we can't go on without Spaetzle!"), over the sound of the birdsong--still, somehow, there were birds--she heard Helmut yelling their names and high- stepping his way toward them through the snow. It sounded as if he had found another spot on the river where the ice seemed thick enough for their horses and wagons.

  "Are there other people there?" their father asked him.

  "Yes, but not many. Not yet."

  He said the spot was no more than fifteen minutes farther. There was a steep hill just ahead and it might be difficult for the horses to pull the wagons through some drifts of thigh-deep snow, but assuming they could make the knoll, it was no more than fifty or sixty meters from there to the edge of the river.

  beneath the oats, Callum listened carefully. His right arm and leg had, once more, gone to sleep. Unfortunately, it was hard to breathe if he tried to lie on his back or his stomach. In a moment, he guessed, he would roll over and spend a few seconds gasping for air so he could allow a semblance of circulation to return to those limbs. He was a big man--powerfully built, with shoulders that flattened out like a mesa and a back that was as straight and solid as granite quarry walls--and in his opinion he was, pure and simple, too large for these quarters.

  He and Anna were hoping that once they were west of the Vistula, periodically he would be allowed to walk beside the wagons. Her father had said he thought this was extremely unlikely. Though he was dressed in her older brother's winter clothes instead of his ragged British paratrooper's uniform--Werner wasn't nearly as muscular as Callum, but he was almost as tall, and Mutti had been able to doctor some pants and a jacket--if he was seen by anyone in authority he might be hanged on the spot as a German deserter.

  Unless, of course, he opened his mouth first.

  Then he would simply be shot on the spot as an escaped POW.

  Still, he couldn't spend forever curled like a hermit crab beneath their food and the horses' feed in this wagon. And while Anna's father had surmised that he would have to remain in the cart until they reached either Mutti's cousin in Stettin or, eventually, the British and American lines somewhere far to the west, her mother was firmly convinced that he would be up and about within days. Why? Any day now, she said, certainly inside of two or three weeks, they would all be allies together: the Brits and the Yanks and the Germans. The civilized nations of the world would band together to repel the Russians. Prevent them from barbarizing all of Europe. It was, she had said, inevitable.

  Callum wasn't quite so sure. In point of fact, he thought Mutti was absolutely loopy. A sweet lady with fortitude and courage. But also, alas, bloody bonkers.

  Nevertheless, ever since he had jumped from an airplane seven months ago now--almost eight, if he was going to be precise--his entire life had been bonkers. The whole world, it seemed, had gone mad. And, of course, jumping from an airplane--and jumping in the dark while people below you were firing machine guns into the night sky--was hardly an indication that the world was especially sane to begin with.

  The drop, at least his portion, had been a disaster almost from the moment he had first hurled himself from the plane. First there had been all that gunfire from the hedgerows and the woods. He hadn't been hit, but he had heard the agonized screams of the men drifting--sometimes minus an arm or a leg or towing their entrails like kite tails--to the earth all around him. And then, instead of landing
in a meadow just east of the Orne, he had landed in quicksand. At least it had struck him as quicksand in the dark. In reality it was a mere swamp, but clutching a rifle and weighed down by his harness, the risers, and the pack with his reserve chute, it might just as well have been quicksand. And, again, the cries, though this time they were punctuated by the choking hacks of men who were drowning as they pleaded for help. Yes, indeed, they were drowning in a few feet of water and a little Norman muck. He was on his side, disoriented in the bog, but he found if he arched his back and his neck he could keep his nose above the water and slime. Finally he was able to right himself and half-crawl, half-dog-paddle his way out of the marsh.

  When he was free, when he was actually emerging onto turf that was solid, the world around him was abruptly lit as if it were noon: A troop plane had exploded, hit by a shell as it approached his corner of the drop zone. It slammed like a comet--blue and yellow flames streaming behind it, its descent marked by a screech far louder than any noise he had ever heard in his life--into the ground within a stone's throw of where he was standing, dumbstruck. Instantly it set fire to the understory and the brush all around him. Inside his pack were ammunition and a land mine, and so he actually ran back into the swamp, the only ground he could see now that wasn't ablaze.

  There he helped a trooper named Bingham and a radioman named Lane save themselves from drowning, literally grabbing Bingham by his harness as if he were a big dog he had by the collar and raising him up and out of the slime. There they watched the flames in the plane and the woods burn themselves out. And the fires really didn't last all that long, despite whatever fuel the aircraft had left in its tanks, because the air was moist and the ground was a bog. When they staggered from the marsh onto dry land, a half- dozen wet and scared and lost paratroopers, it was still dark. But not for long. Almost the moment their boots touched ground that didn't squash beneath their feet for the first time in hours, the world once more went bright as midday, and the men squinted as one and shielded their eyes against searchlights. The Germans took them prisoner rather than machine-gunning them dead on the spot because they didn't know if this was the actual invasion or a mere feint, and they wanted to interrogate the Brits.

  Callum was thus taken into custody without ever firing a single shot at a German. This would only endear him further to Mutti and her lone daughter, though it also led Helmut and even Theo to think a little less of him than they already did.

  Nevertheless, he had become yet one more pet in the Emmerichs' extensive menagerie. And their anticipated goodwill offering when they reached the British or American lines. And, though neither Mutti nor Rolf--her husband--nor their sons had a clue, Anna Emmerich's lover.

  the horses did make it up the small knoll with the thigh- deep drifts of snow, despite the weight in the wagons, and they made it with relative ease. But Anna had never had any doubts. Helmut was right, they were more her horses than anyone's, and she knew what they were capable of. Balga especially, the animal that she rode most often. Balga was a massive, powerful stallion that wanted only to run. He had been chafing all morning at the very idea that these humans expected him to walk at their pace, even as--along with a second horse--he pulled a cart full of feed.

  All of the horses were named after castles. Not just Balga. The others? Labiau, Ragnit, and Waldau. Though it had been the child Helmut who had been obsessed with the knights of East Prussia, Anna as well had appreciated the medieval romance of the stories that surrounded the citadels. And the first of the horses that she suggested be christened with the name of a castle, Balga, was regal and proud and seemed to lack completely the skittishness that marked so many of the estate's other horses. Altogether they had twelve, but only these four were coming with them on the trek west.

  Now it was their turn to join the queue crossing the ice on the river. Still, Anna understood the river wouldn't keep the Russians at bay for long. Already they had a bridgehead at Kulm.

  There were explosions echoing to their south and--farther away--to the north, but at the moment no shells were falling here. Gingerly she stepped onto the ice, found her footing, and then she started to lead Balga and Waldau onto the glassy plane with her. The horses were actually better off than she was because yesterday the Emmerichs' farrier had drilled ice nails into the bottom of their shoes. Helmut was behind the family on the ridge, scanning the far side of the river with his binoculars. As far as she could tell, all that was over there were the lucky refugees who had preceded them, but her father and brother feared the front was so fluid that it was possible they might cross a stretch of river where the Russians already were encamped.

  Her mother and Theo had climbed off the wagon and were walking beside her, because her parents wanted everyone in the family off the carts in the event one plunged through the ice. That had happened, they knew, to other trekkers. One moment the wagons were atop the ice, and the next--after a groan and a snap--the horses and people were drowning in the frigid current of the Vistula. Only Callum was still in a cart, and Anna wasn't sure how seriously devastated anyone other than she would be if he drowned. Certainly Helmut wouldn't care, and he didn't even know how she and Callum had been spending their secret, private moments together since the winter had started to set in.

  Helmut placed his field glasses back into their case and started across the ice, leading Labiau and Ragnit and the wagon they were pulling. Her father marched beside Mutti, taking her hand as they walked, occasionally whispering something into her ear, but Anna and Theo and Helmut remained silent, listening largely to the breathing of the horses and the periodic curses and whimpers from the trekkers around them who had discovered this section of river about the same time that her brother had. There were no Volkssturm or Wehrmacht soldiers here to prevent more than a family or two from starting across the river at a time, and slowly the refugees were fanning out: Instead of a single line, it was fast becoming a wave, and Anna worried that the ice would go and they would all flop into the frigid water at once.

  But that didn't happen. It was all, in a way, stunningly anti- climactic. One moment they were on the eastern bank, and now, ten minutes later, they were on the west. Apparently, the road to Schwetz, the nearest village, was no more than two or three kilometers distant, and most of the trek there would be across flat meadows and fields. No more woods, at least not today, or inching forward in the midst of an endless line of equally pathetic--no, far more pathetic--refugees. She felt an almost debilitating surge of relief, an outpouring of exhaustion that made her long to sit where she was in the snow, because they were on the far shore and they were alive. And, despite the rumble of gunfire in the distance, they were safe. At least for the moment. Her father and Helmut had gotten them across the Vistula, and now they would bring them safely from this frontier of the Reich to the cocoon of its interior. She wanted, she realized, to do more than sit: She wanted to lie down, and she didn't care whether it was in her bed or the autumn- scented fields of Kaminheim or here in the cold and the ice on the western (Western. Had there ever been a more lovely word?) bank of the Vistula and daydream. But she saw that her father and her mother were approaching her. Helmut was approaching her. Theo looked up apprehensively.

  "Anna," her father was saying, pulling her from the lovely, enervating stupor into which she was descending. He placed his hands squarely on her shoulders. "My Anna."

  "Yes, Father?"

  He reached over with one arm and seemed about to pull both Theo and her against him. Into him. Then he remembered the blood, a frozen swath of burgundy-colored ice crystals that clung to his wool sleeve like honey, and instead simply rested his fingers on the scarf that swaddled her neck.

  "My children," he murmured. "Here is where you must be as strong as your mother. As strong as Helmut and Werner."

  "We have been strong, haven't we?" Theo asked. The boy wanted desperately to be as respected as his two older--in his mind, venerated--brothers. He wanted to be a soldier, too. To be needed. To not be a burden, a chil
d who had to be watched over and managed.

  Their father nodded at Theo, but he didn't smile. And instantly Anna understood. She glanced over at Helmut, the instinctive, yearning reflex of a twin for a twin. Her brother wouldn't look at her. Or he couldn't. He folded his arms against his chest and gazed at the caravan of wagons and wheelbarrows and carts that was inching its way over the ice. When she turned toward her mother, Mutti looked away. Her lips were thin and flat, and she had that stoic, gritty gaze she got whenever she did something that took enormous resolve: when she had buried the Luftwaffe pilot; when she had learned that her oldest son, Werner, had been wounded and she had had to share the news with the rest of the children; and when, only yesterday, she had been draping the chalk-white sheets on the divan and the chairs in the parlor.

  And so Anna was only half-listening when her father told Theo and her that he and Helmut were leaving them here. They were returning east across the Vistula. Something about a counterattack on the Russians' bridgehead at Kulm. The need to defend Germany. Theo burrowed his face in his father's uniform jacket, oblivious of the cold and the wet and the frozen blood, his head bobbing either because he was trying hard not to cry or because he was trying to nod obediently or, perhaps, both.