Skeletons at the Feast (2008) Read online

  After the potatoes were in the pot, she looked over at him and motioned for him to help himself to one of the limp, rotting stalks of what he thought may once have been celery in a chipped bowl on the table. A film the color of a robin's egg coated the woman's eyes completely, but she insisted she was not totally blind. Still, she was blind enough that she hadn't questioned him, despite his tattered clothing and limp, when he had told her that he was with Organisation Todt and he was researching the area for a railroad spur they were contemplating. She lived alone with a half-dozen chickens in this ramshackle cottage on the outskirts of the village--no electricity or telephone or running water--and he guessed he would be safe here until she ventured into the small hamlet and told someone there was a stranger passing through. He felt a bit, in this regard, like Frankenstein in that moment in the story when the monster is befriended by the blind old man in his house in the woods.

  He thought about how he had always liked that part of the book, and how his sister had, too. His family's copy of the novel was tattered and old, because it was one of the stories the Nazi regime had considered decadent. They had banned it, and so Uri's edition had been his father's when he had been a teenaged boy.

  He wondered where his family was now. How he could go about finding them. Whether he could go about finding them. Probably not. He realized he had never been so alone in his life, and the sensation was so upsetting--disturbing both because his family was gone and because he felt, on some level, that he had deserted them--that he imagined if he were a child he would just curl up in a ball and wail. He knew he would never have jumped from the train if his parents or Rebekah had been in that cattle car with him.

  The woman insisted that she was, like most of her neighbors in the town, a German who had never fully accepted Polish rule for the two decades between the wars. Whether this was true or she was lying to him because she believed he was a Nazi was irrelevant in his mind. No doubt, she was a staunch anti-Semite. But he wouldn't have given a damn if she were the devil himself, because for the first time in four nights he was going to sleep in neither a cattle car nor the woods. Granted, his bed was a rag-filled comforter in a corner of a kitchen that, he speculated, hadn't been mopped in his lifetime. But he was exhausted and, thus, deeply relieved by the prospect of sharing a nook in this cottage with the rats and the spiders and the balls of living dust the size of his fists. He was grateful to this old woman, and if it wouldn't have revealed too much about his life and put himself at risk, he would have thrown himself at her feet and kissed those gnarled toes with mustard-colored talons for nails.

  uri awoke the next morning with the sun, and for a moment was unsure where he was. He thought he must have slept oddly for his hip and his knees to be so sore. Then, when he heard the chickens outside the back door, he recalled the woman, the cottage, and the train. Gingerly he stood and looked around for her, wondering if she was outside feeding the birds. She wasn't. Nor did she seem to be planting potatoes in the rows of mounds that marked most of her yard. For dinner last night they had eaten potatoes from last autumn's harvest, eggs, and still more moldering celery. He wasn't sure if this old woman ever ate anything but potatoes and eggs and moldering celery. Still, he had eaten ravenously. He was glad the woman was blind: His own mother would never have forgiven the ill-mannered barbarity with which he had devoured the meal.

  She had an outhouse, primitive he guessed, even by the standards of outhouses, beside the chicken coop, and he was just about to pick his way there through the birds when he heard the voices. Neither, he realized with alarm, was the impenetrable blend of Polish and German and who knew what else that marked the woman's conversation. They were speaking German--his German. Bavarian German. And, worse, they were male.

  He peeked carefully through the remnant of what she had told him was her late husband's nightshirt that served now as a window curtain, and felt the hairs on his neck bristle and a wave of nausea rise up from his abdomen into the back of his throat. There approaching the front door were a pair of soldiers in the black uniforms of the SS. They were young and tall and moving with the assurance of predators in a wood in which they know they are the very top of the food chain. A chicken scuttled across their path, and one of the men kicked it so violently that the bird squawked in pain as it briefly went airborne. Uri fell away from the window, against the wall, realizing that they were about to knock, would hear nothing, and then enter the shack. There was no lock on the door, but he didn't believe it would have mattered if there had been. They would have come in anyway, because the old woman must have ventured into the village this morning while he slept, and either ratted him out on purpose or inadvertently said something to someone that sounded suspicious. An engineer with Organisation Todt? Him? After three days in a cattle car and a night in the woods? Plausible if you're seven years old, maybe.

  Now one of them was rapping on the door and calling inside. His voice was crisp, businesslike, brutal. And then he heard the word: Judenschwein. They were calling inside for the . . . Jewish pig. Telling him they knew he was there. They called a second time. Then the door was sliding open--it couldn't swing precisely because of the way it rubbed against the coarse wooden boards that served as the floor--and there was absolutely no place where he could hide, no place where he could run. No train from which he could jump.

  And so, unsure what he really was going to do with it, he grabbed the poker that was leaning against the fireplace, the only item he saw with which he might defend himself, and he swung it like an ax into the first of the two men to come through the door, not aiming, just twirling, a dervish with a baton, the wrought iron slamming into the soldier's chest, breaking bones in his rib cage and knocking the wind from him, as it sent him spiraling back into his partner. Uri saw the second man, a corporal, reaching for the handle of the Luger in his holster, but the fellow never had the time to withdraw it. The next half-minute was a blur in which Uri would recall what he had done with only the vaguest outlines: Raising the poker over his head and repeatedly clubbing each of the soldiers in the skull until he had broken through bone and begun to mash the steaming gray and white tissue beneath it into pudding. Using the pointed tip of the instrument to spear the soldier who continued to groan through the abdomen, the metal poking a hole through his uniform jacket and shirt and impaling him against one of the floorboards in a geyser of peritoneal fluid and blood. Kicking--one final repayment for the deaths he had witnessed in the cattle car and the myriad afflictions and indignities he had endured for about as long as he could remember--both corpses so violently that they bounced on the wood.

  When he was finished he stood back, shaking, on the verge of hyperventilation. He heard the noise of his rapid, labored breathing, the clucking of the chickens in the yard, and what he thought for a second was the sound of water dripping. He wondered briefly if the old woman indeed had a pump somewhere that he had missed. Then he understood: A thin rivulet the color of claret was trickling out from beneath the soldier pinned to the floor with the poker and dripping off a warped, sloping timber near the front entrance.

  The magnitude of what he had done slowly set in. He had killed someone. He had killed two someones. And while he had to presume that they would have killed him first if he'd given them half a chance--or shipped him off to a camp that would have done the dirty work for them--a small part of him couldn't help but wonder about their lives when they weren't wearing those black uniforms and polished black boots. For all he knew, they had wives or girlfriends; they may have had small children waiting for them somewhere beautiful. Dresden, maybe. Or some lovely village on the Rhine. And while it was merely conceivable that he had just killed somebody's husband or lover or father, it was absolutely certain that he had just killed somebody's son. He had just killed two somebodies' sons. In addition to snuffing out the lives of these men, he had brought sadness and despair to their mothers. He leaned over the corpses and stared at the mangled remains of their faces, at the pitch of their noses and the clefts in
their chins. One had a receding hairline, evident despite the great gaping gouge marks in his skull, which seemed to make him even more human to Uri. The other, his ear dangling by a thin tendril of pinkish flesh to a flap of skin by his jawbone--a leaf, he thought, clinging to a twig in October--had eyebrows so thin they looked girlish.

  Imperceptibly, his exhausted gasping had morphed into sobbing, and he fell to his knees and allowed himself to cry.

  uri didn't know if the old woman failed to return because she didn't want to be present while he was being arrested or executed, or whether a more prosaic concern had detained her. But it didn't really matter to him. All that counted was that she was still gone and he had cleaned up the cottage as best he could, sopping up the dead soldiers' blood with his own clothing and sweeping their fragments of bone and broken teeth into the hearth. Then he started the hottest fire that he could, hoping to reduce his pants and his shirt and his shoes to ashes, while cremating the pieces of human flesh that he had swept with a broom into the blaze. Meanwhile, he buried the two soldiers in a section of earth where the woman's potato mounds merged with the dirt and feed and excrement of her chickens. One of the soldiers, the one whose uniform had holes in the coat and the shirt, was fully clothed. The other was buried naked.

  And when Uri started down the road away from the village, he was wearing the uniform of an SS corporal, and in his breast pocket were the official papers of a soldier roughly his age from Cologne with the alliterative (almost whimsical in Uri's mind) name of Hartmut Hildebrand.

  Chapter 3

  IN THIS QUADRANT OF THE CAMP THERE wERE ONLY women, all of them young and (once) healthy. The middle-aged women and the old women had been separated out and executed upon arrival. So had the sick. But, Cecile thought, when her mind could focus on anything other than hunger, they--the survivors-- all looked like dying old men. Small, stooped, dying old men. Bony old men. Their heads had been shaved and the hair never seemed to grow back. Instead they grew sores that never quite healed. Cecile had worried when she arrived and most of her clothes were taken from her--her angora-trimmed coat, her cashmere sweaters--but it wasn't the loss of a skirt or a blouse that had caused her to panic. It was the confiscation of her purse. Inside it were the pads that she needed because she was menstruating. When she had asked an SS guard what she was supposed to do--standing there naked with two small rivulets of blood trickling down her thighs--the woman had laughed at her, pushed her over the edge of a metal table, and then shoved the handle of her riding crop deep inside her vagina. When she had removed it, she had insisted that another prisoner, a secretary from Troyes with whom Cecile would become friends, lick off the blood.

  "Eat, eat," the guard had ordered, "it's the most nutritious food you'll get here."

  Since then Cecile had stopped menstruating. Most of the prisoners had. Here she was a twenty-three-year-old woman from a wealthy family in Lyon, and she hadn't had her period in five months. And, obviously, she wasn't pregnant. She hadn't seen her fiance since he had been taken to a forced-labor unit over a year ago, and now she was being told by the other prisoners that she should give up hope that she would ever see him again. Even if somehow he survived--she told everyone that although he was an accountant, he was strong and in impeccable physical condition--they said that she wouldn't. They said that none of them would.

  But she disagreed. After all, she still had good shoes. Very good shoes. It was a small thing, but when life was reduced to conditions this primitive and painful and demeaning, the small things were magnified greatly. Moreover, those shoes were her fiance's hiking boots, a trace of the man that she loved. Certainly the boots were too big for her, but everyone had warned her to have warm, comfortable shoes at her disposal when they came to take her away. And so she did. She had also brought with her a pair of her crocodile dress flats, largely because she couldn't bear to leave them behind. But, thank God, she had. Thank God, she had brought the boots and the shoes with her. The camp had been running low on the clogs they were distributing to the new prisoners, and so the guards who were processing the trainload from France had told Cecile to keep her boots and then given her crocodile shoes to the prisoner nearest her, that secretary from Troyes.

  And so while she was astonished some moments that she had survived this long in these conditions--while she was surprised that anyone had--there were other times when she simply didn't believe that she was going to die here. Death was no abstraction to her: She saw it daily. But her own death? She was young and (once) beautiful, and she had lived a life of such perfect entitlement that her own death was almost completely inconceivable.

  a cart with desserts. A tart. A torte. A small pot with creme brulee.

  The cart was draped in white linen, and the desserts were surrounding a purple vase overflowing with lilies and edelweiss. The secretary from Troyes was beside it in her mind, reveling in the warmth of a dining room in a restaurant in Paris with her mother and father and sisters, until the wind lashed a piece of broken twig against her eye and she blinked. Instantly the vision was gone, all of it.

  Still, she stood where she was as the cold rain continued to soak through her uniform and tattered sweater and fill those bizarre crocodile flats as if they were buckets. Her toes were beyond cold; they had fallen numb. When they were inside, she cherished these shoes, and she understood how much better off she was with them than with those coarse wooden clogs many of the prisoners wore. But not today. Today she was as badly off as everyone else.

  Normally they toiled in a clothing factory near the camp, but this afternoon they were working outdoors. The pile of dirt before her was not yet frozen, but it had grown hard, and she decided now that she was too weak to jam the shovel into the mound one more time. She simply couldn't lift it, she could no longer bear to place her foot--so frigid that she felt spikes of pain through the sole of her shoe whenever she pressed it against the rolled shoulder of the spade--on the shovel and force it once more into the earth. Her name was Jeanne, and she feared the only person left in the world whom she trusted, Cecile, was at least fifty or sixty meters farther down the track. Too far to help her. Had she been next to her, Jeanne imagined that Cecile would say something--find the right words or the right tone--to give her the strength to help dig out these buried railroad ties for another half hour. Or, if there were no words left (at least ones that could possibly matter), to be with her when she expired.

  Because, Jeanne concluded, she was going to expire. Right here, right now. With her back to this damaged railway station, a low building with gray stucco walls and a roof--largely collapsed--of blue slate that looked almost like ocean water. She was going to die right beside this angry, quiet, determined prisoner whose name she didn't know and whose teeth were dropping from her mouth as if they were acorns in autumn. It was a certainty. Every moment she wasn't digging was a moment the guards might see her not working. And then they would prod her to dig more, and--when she couldn't--they would shoot her. They shot girls in the fields all the time in the summer and on the way back from the clothing works in the early days of autumn; she'd witnessed at least a dozen and a half die this way. Why not shoot one more here by the station, where last night Allied bombs had buried the track beneath small mountains of earth? Other prisoners would then dig her grave, which couldn't be any more difficult than trying to do the work of a bulldozer to excavate a patch of railway. And Jeanne didn't want to make work any harder for anyone. And so, she thought, let it all end here. Right here. Fine. It had been too much to shoulder for too long.

  She was about to open her cold, gnarled fingers--fingers that once were straight and manicured and, in her opinion, one of her best features--and let the shovel slip to the ground, when she felt an arm on her shoulder. She turned and saw Cecile. Somehow her friend had worked her way over to her.

  "Dig. They'll bring us back to the camp soon," Cecile murmured, jabbing her own shovel into a looser section of soil. "A few more minutes, that's all. It's almost dark. Just dig. Or look lik
e you're digging."

  "I can't," she said, and she began to cry. She dropped the shovel and fell to her knees. Behind her she was aware that Cecile was trying to lift her up, to hoist her off the ground as if she were already a cadaver. The woman's arms were sliding beneath her armpits, the bones in Cecile's fingers blunt rods against her ribs and the bones beneath her shoulders.

  "Leave me alone," she sobbed. "Go away! Just leave me here!" But she was, somehow, once more on her feet. Cecile reached down and handed her the shovel.

  "Lean on it. Really, just lean on it for a moment. Catch your breath. Then shovel a little bit more. That's all. Then we'll be done. You'll see. Just another few minutes."

  Just another few minutes. This was what her life had come down to: A series of small increments to be suffered, brief moments of torture to be endured. A walk across the camp without an SS officer talking to you. Singling you out for . . . something. A day, one more, when the infections in your feet hadn't spread up into your legs. Another morning when you were able to avoid the certain death that marked anyone sick enough or stupid enough to ask to go to the camp hospital. Another few minutes of shoveling.