Skeletons at the Feast (2008) Read online

  "I've heard rumors. We've all heard rumors. I've listened to your propaganda on the radio."

  "You listen to the BBC? That's illegal, Anna, you know that," he told her, his voice mocking her good-naturedly.

  "Everyone listens. And you know that."

  Wally dumped his apples in one of the shipping crates in the back of a wagon and started to say something, his mouth opening into an anxiety-ridden O, but then stopped himself and returned to the trees where he was working, shaking his head in bewilderment.

  "Besides," she said, angry now, "what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to go have tea with the fuhrer and advise him on policy?" He paused, seeming to think about this, unsure what to say. She decided to press her advantage. "You would be in serious trouble, you know, if I told anyone what you were saying."

  "Indeed I would. I am putting my trust completely at your discretion."

  "Why?"

  "Because you are very pretty and very smart, and until I was sent here I hadn't spoken to a girl who was either in a very, very long time."

  "Spare me," she said, but she couldn't help being flattered. "I've gone just as long without the company of boys. They're all off fighting somewhere."

  "Ah, but then your navy men arrived," he said, and she realized he was actually a little jealous of them. He seemed about to say more when Wally returned, this time accompanied by the Yorkshire schoolteacher named Arthur Frost. "Come along, Callum," Arthur said firmly, "those apples won't pick themselves. No more dillydallying."

  Callum nodded agreeably and left, turning back to Anna once to bring his index and middle finger to the tip of his lips. At the time, she thought he was shushing her; later, she would conclude he had in fact blown her a kiss.

  theo moved two of his toy cavalrymen to the front of his column, and then had them ride to the river that Anna had helped him paint a year ago now on a piece of barn board. The board was at least a meter and a half square and he could carry it by himself--but just barely. Helmut had found it and his father had sanded it flat. In addition to the river, he and Anna had also painted trees and wooden fences on it, and a long trench winding its way down one of the sides, all as if seen from a low-flying airplane. He had wanted to add barbed wire near the trench, but Anna had convinced him that it would reduce the number of conflicts he could reenact by limiting his scenarios to the Great War. The trench, she had suggested, could be a streambed that had dried up in the summer if he wanted to stage a battle from the nineteenth century.

  "Or," he had suggested helpfully at the time, "one of the fire- fights Werner has been in."

  "That's right," she had said, but he had been able to tell by the pause and the way her voice had quivered just the tiniest bit that for some reason she was troubled by the idea of him using his lead soldiers to reenact battles along the eastern front. He hadn't really expected at the time that he would, because he had only a pair of toy tanks, and battles these days demanded lots and lots of armor. Moreover, his two tanks were of a different scale than his lead soldiers. They were from another collection and they were barely the height of his fighting men, which meant that he rarely used them.

  He did know boys who owned model tanks that would have worked quite well with his men. But they wouldn't have shared their tanks with him and he never played with them. He wanted to, and he would have been happy to join them if they had ever asked-- he would have been happy and flattered and more than a little grateful--but they never did. Moreover, he knew they never would. Once he made the mistake of telling some of the boys in school about the scene he and Anna had painted for his soldiers, hinting that they should come to Kaminheim and bring their own model cannons and tanks, but they had laughed at him and suggested that they would sooner have gone and played in Moscow. It wasn't, of course, Kaminheim that kept them away; it was him.

  He had set up his playing board this evening after dinner in a corner of the dining room underneath one of the sconces, and these two cavalry officers were reconnoitering the terrain. It was the summer of 1870, and they were deciding whether this might be a good spot to try and force a battle with the French Army of the Rhine.

  He heard his father and the naval officer named Oskar in the hallway walking toward Father's office, and he went very still. Oskar had small eyes, a high forehead, and almost no lips, but he was calm and intelligent and Theo knew that his parents respected him. He heard his father pushing the door shut, but it didn't close all the way and he could hear some of what they were saying if he didn't move. They were discussing, as the grown-ups did all the time these days, the Russian front, but it seemed that Oskar was talking as well about the attempt that summer on the life of the fuhrer. A few months earlier, in July, a group of officers had set off a bomb in the fuhrer's headquarters in Prussia. Hitler had survived, but it seemed the conspiracy was extensive. Even now, months later, the SS was still rounding up individuals who were involved. At school and among the Jungvolk, people referred to those officers as traitors and discussed with undisguised glee how cowardly they had been when they were executed for their crime, but Theo had the sense when the subject came up at dinner that his parents believed the plotters had only had Germany's best interests in mind.

  It seemed, from what Theo could hear, that Oskar did, too.

  "The problem," the officer was telling his father now, "is that we can't win the war. But we can't negotiate a peace now because of what some of Hitler's lackeys have done."

  "A negotiated peace was never an option. Churchill and Roosevelt said years ago they would only accept a complete surrender," his father said.

  "We are speaking in confidence, true?"

  "Of course."

  "Have you heard about the camps?"

  "I've heard whispers."

  "When the Russians find them? Or the Americans and the Brits? There will be hell to pay."

  "Tell me: What do you know?"

  Suddenly Theo's heart was beating fast in his chest, in part because his father and this officer were discussing the possibility that Germany might actually lose the war, and in part because of whatever it was that Oskar was about to reveal. Before the officer had continued, however, there were great whoops of laughter and the sound of the front door swinging open. He felt a rush of cool air. Two of the other naval officers, Oskar's friends, had come inside, and then he heard Anna and Mutti greeting them and helping them off with their coats. Any moment now they would bring that giant Scotsman in from the bunkhouse and hand him the accordion, and everyone would start dancing. No doubt, one of Anna's friends had arrived with the officers. The two men had probably been off somewhere picking her up.

  His father and Oskar emerged from the office, and Oskar greeted his associates. His father noticed him now on the floor and knelt beside him.

  "I didn't hear you out here," he said, and he rubbed the top of his head. "Have you been playing long?"

  He had the sense that he would worry his father if he told him that he had. And his father had worries enough right now.

  "No. I just sat down," he answered.

  This seemed to make his father happy. He motioned down at the cavalrymen. "The battle of Mars-la-Tour?" he asked.

  "I hadn't decided."

  "Oskar reminded me of a book I think you're old enough to read now. It has a wonderful description of Von Bredow's Death Ride and the Prussian cavalry charge. Would you like me to see if I can find you a copy?"

  "Yes, thank you."

  Over their shoulder one of the officers was boasting that he had brought honey for the schnapps from the village, and Theo heard a female voice he couldn't quite recognize start to giggle. No doubt, it was indeed one of Anna's friends: She had so many. Another night, Theo thought, he might have continued to move his lead soldiers around the board, alone on the dining room floor, but not this evening. He would join the crowd that would gather in the ballroom. Perhaps if he was unobtrusive, the grown-ups would let down their guards and he might learn whatever it was that Oskar had been about to reve
al.

  n another day, callum told Anna about his uncle's library in Edinburgh. His uncle was a university professor there, and among the books on his shelves were novels by Russians that he was confident would convince her that not everyone born east of Warsaw was a barbarian.

  "I don't think that," she said. "My mother might. But I don't."

  Still, she was only dimly aware of most of the authors he mentioned. She wondered if their books had been banned in Germany, or whether they simply weren't available in their rural corner of the Reich. The same seemed to be true of movies he had seen, and specific operas and dramas he'd attended. It all made Callum seem almost impossibly erudite for someone so physically imposing and, yes, so young--it was hard to believe he was only twenty--and it caused her to rue, for the first time, all of the things she was being denied.

  They also compared the beaches on the Baltic with those along the North Sea, and the castle ruins that dotted their landscapes. She expressed envy for how civilized the winters sounded in Scotland, and he, in turn, said he thought Scotch farmers would be jealous of the soil in which her family grew sugar beets and corn, and cared for their apple trees.

  She found herself wishing she had a fraction of the stories and experiences he had, and worrying that soon he would come to find her boring. All she knew, she realized, were horses. Horses and housework. Her father had taught her to ride--and, in all fairness, to ski and to hike--and her mother had groomed her well to be the wife, someday, of a farmer. A gentleman farmer, certainly. A landowner. An aristocrat, even. But, like her father, a farmer nonetheless.

  He was completely unlike her three brothers--even little Theo--whose posture had always been perfect at the dining room table, and who seemed to stand with their ankles together and (inevitably) their arms folded imperiously across their chests. Could Werner and Helmut ever be anything but stern? She didn't think so. Perhaps there was still hope for Theo, but already he was being trained to be a soldier in carriage if not, in the end, in profession.

  And yet their father was no martinet. He laughed and drank beer and had stories of his own he could tell. He would slouch on occasion. Listen with them to the BBC. Tell jokes about the Nazis, despite the reality that both he and his wife were party members. She asked her father that night if he had ever read books by the Russians Callum had mentioned, and he said that he had. Mutti had, too.

  Of course, they had grown up in a different era. A different time. The world they knew wasn't decorated solely with red flags and black swastikas, and a person could still read novels written by Russians.

  Chapter 2

  judenjagd. a jew hunt.

  Not unlike a fox hunt. You searched for the Jews in the woods, and then you shot them. You shot them if they were mothers hiding alone with their children; you shot them if they were old men oblivious of the roundup in the village and were here in the woods gathering mushrooms. Or, if you didn't have the time or the inclination to view it as sport, you marched them at gunpoint--or with a whip--back to the village. You sat them in the square in the heat of the sun, and you shot the first one who happened to stand up and stretch.

  Because, of course, you had ordered them to sit and rising was an act of disobedience.

  Sometimes, as they were marched to the square, they would actually call out their farewells to their neighbors. You'd walk them down the street, past the houses with the windows shuttered--the local people always closed their curtains and windows--and you'd hear, Farewell, Edyta. Or, Good-bye, Roza. Or, Zofia, look after my cat--please!

  Occasionally, when you were waiting for the last of the Jews to be rounded up, you'd make the ones you had perform--badly, of course--circus stunts. A human pyramid. Walking the clothesline you'd string a few feet off the ground between half-tracks. Basic gymnastics. These little stunts were most fun if you happened to have the rabbi among the lot.

  And when the square was completely filled and the Jews were hot and thirsty and weak, then you herded them to a field outside of the town--often at the edge of the very woods where the Judenjagd had commenced. There the men would dig the graves. Sometimes, this talkative, stocky soldier named Joachim continued, taking another long swallow from the bottle of vodka he had comman- deered--he was drunk, Uri thought, because no one would tell a person they had done such things if they were sober--you had them strip first so they were stark naked when they started to dig. Then, when the hole was roughly the size of the foundation for a modest house, you would order them to toss their shovels from the pit and lie facedown in the muck.

  And they would, they would, Joachim went on, his voice incredulous. They would, they all would, even though they knew they were about to be shot.

  And then any of the men who hadn't been ordered to strip and dig would be told to undress and walk into the grave, and they would, too! Occasionally, they'd be told to lie on top of the corpses below them. Facedown. And they walked just like sheep. The women were a little more resistant, especially when they had babes in their arms or toddlers squealing at their shins. They might beg for the lives of their children. But, eventually, they'd go, too.

  It wasn't easy work, he said, even though the Jews were never armed. And it was never pleasant. The locals hated the clatter of the machine guns so much that the women would blast the volume on their radios--nothing but static most of the time--so their children wouldn't have to hear the sound of their neighbors being executed. One time, Joachim continued, he had to walk into the pit himself with--dear God--the Ukrainian volunteers (absolute pigs, he said) and shoot the Jews whose bodies were continuing to twitch, and he discovered that he was ankle deep in their blood. There was so much blood, the bodies were actually starting to float.

  And so Uri asked him--and he phrased the sentence in a very few words--You did this yourself? They were sitting alone in the kitchen of a house on the outskirts of Lukow on a beautiful autumn evening in September, because their company commander was in the village itself, meeting with their major about the withdrawal that was about to begin from this corner of Poland. Not a retreat, exactly, because they weren't turning and running as fast as they could this time. Ostensibly, they were merely pulling back to a more defensible position.

  Still, this fellow soldier named Joachim had grabbed the vodka because he knew--they all knew--that eventually they would run out of more defensible positions and that maniac with the mustache in Berlin would tell them to stand and fight where they were. When Uri had first approached him, he had hoped to discover something more about the Jews shipped east from Schweinfurt because of the man's history with the Einsatzgruppen and the police battalions, and because he, too, was a Bavarian from the neighboring city of Wurzburg. Uri had already learned that many of the group had indeed gone to Auschwitz, but some veterans from the First World War and their families had been diverted elsewhere. Some to Theresienstadt in the west, and some to Cheimno in the east. Ostensibly, these other destinations were survivable. At least that was what people said. If his family had gone to Auschwitz, then almost certainly his mother and father were dead. Given the way their health had been deteriorating in their last few months in Schweinfurt, they were probably dead wherever they had gone. But Rebekah? She looked like a fit young woman, and thus was likely to have survived the initial selection at any of these camps. Joachim hadn't known much, but he told Uri that--as far as he knew--at least some of the Jews from Schweinfurt had been sent to work in clothing and munitions factories.

  Now Uri repeated his question to this other soldier, unsure whether Joachim hadn't answered him because he was contemplating a response or because he was just so drunk that he hadn't been listening. And so Uri asked again: You did this yourself?

  This time Joachim looked him squarely in the eye, and after a beat nodded. And so Uri shot him. He reached for his pistol and blew a hole the size of an orange into the part of Joachim's face where there once had sat a jowly cheek and a champagne cork of a nose, sending the body tilting backward in the chair and onto the floor.


  Uri stood, contemplating for a moment whether to bury the body, but then decided there wasn't a reason to bother. The front was unstable and the Polish partisans were taking greater liberties all the time. Other than in Warsaw, where the uprising was being smothered with barbarous ease, the Germans were too busy trying to consolidate their lines and keep the Russians at bay to waste any manpower on the partisans here near the front. And so whenever somebody found this Joachim's body, they were as likely as not to assume it was the work of the partisans. Or the Russians.

  Or, perhaps, some reservist named Henrik Schreiner.

  Once more Uri would flee, leave this role of Henrik Schreiner behind, and take the name and uniform of some soldier who had just died or whom Uri himself would murder.

  Joachim wasn't the first Nazi Uri had killed. Far from it. He wasn't, Uri realized, even the first he had killed in a kitchen.

  That distinction belonged to the pair of SS troopers he had met almost a year and a half ago now, within days of the night he had jumped off the train on the way to a death camp.

  n another kitchen, another shack. A spring evening, 1943.

  Uri was watching the old woman, her back almost parallel to the floorboards in her kitchen, drop the potatoes in the kettle that hung on a rod over the flames in the fireplace. Her mouth was a lip- less, toothless maw, and she spoke a dialect that he was relatively sure would have been largely incomprehensible to him even if the woman had done more than mumble or had had any teeth. She reeked of garlic and sweat and what he had come to believe was chicken shit. He presumed that he didn't smell a whole lot better, though he had tried to clean himself up in the small stream he had come across a few kilometers from the railroad tracks. Unfortunately, the water was fetid with oil and gasoline and he had been forced to use one of his socks as a washcloth.