Skeletons at the Feast (2008) Read online

  Yet she was standing again. And holding the shovel. As if the towering mountain of dirt before her were food on a plate and she were the well-fed little girl she'd been twenty years earlier, she used her shovel like a fork and pushed the earth around like a vegetable that didn't interest her.

  "i had a cat, " Cecile was murmuring in the dark of the barracks. "She had tortoiseshell fur."

  "Her name?" asked Jeanne, her voice the insubstantial wisp it became in the night. For a week now, if she tried to speak much above a whisper at the end of the day, she would be reduced to paroxysms of coughing that angered some prisoners and caused others to worry that there was nothing they could do for her. Either way, Jeanne loathed the way the coughing drew attention to herself.

  "Amelie. My fiance loved her. Carried her around in his arms like a baby."

  "Where do you think she is now?"

  "I couldn't guess. But she's a survivor. She's alive somewhere."

  "In Lyon?"

  "I presume."

  "My boyfriend used to hate cats."

  "What made him change his mind?" Cecile asked.

  "He didn't. He died. You know that."

  "You know what I mean."

  "And you know what I meant. He didn't change his mind. That's all."

  Cecile hated the way almost every topic of conversation eventually circled back to grief and death. She had begun with Amelie, her cat, and wound up . . . here. Perhaps this was why almost nobody spoke in the night. What was the point? "Maybe he's alive," she said simply. "You don't know for sure he died."

  "I do."

  "But how?"

  Jeanne sighed so loudly and clearly that for a moment Cecile thought it was the wind. Then: "Because he wasn't like your cat. He wasn't a survivor."

  "What did he do?" a new woman nearby asked. Cecile didn't realize anyone else was listening to them.

  "He was a jeweler," Jeanne said. "He was much older than me. For a while, he fixed the Nazis' watches. Their ladies' necklaces. He hoped that he could protect us both by being useful."

  "How much older was he?"

  "He would have been forty-seven this winter."

  Cecile smiled, though she knew Jeanne couldn't see her face. "He must have been a friend of your parents. He was, wasn't he?"

  "My parents hated the idea I was with him."

  "Did he fight in the last war?" this other woman asked Jeanne.

  "He did. He was wounded twice. He thought it was pathetic how quickly the boys lost this time. He always felt his generation would have fought much longer."

  Cecile thought about this. Her fiance had fought hard. His whole regiment had fought hard. But one moment the Germans had been on the other side of the river from them, and the next there had been German tanks in their rear and German planes diving upon them and German artillery shells falling among them. What choice had they but to surrender? He had spent nine months in a POW camp before he was repatriated, and allowed, briefly, to resume his accounting practice. Soon after that he had been sent to work in a tire factory, and then--within eighteen months--to the forced-labor unit somewhere in the east. Neither job had demanded his skills as an accountant.

  "That was a different war," she said finally, hoping she didn't sound defensive.

  "This isn't even a war. It's just a slaughter."

  "Soon the Russians will rescue us. They're fighting in Warsaw this very moment, you know."

  Jeanne rolled onto her side and groaned. "They're not. That's a rumor. The smoke? The Nazis are just burning the city. Last year they killed the Jews in the ghetto. Now they're killing the Poles."

  "Either way, there's fighting. And the Russians will get here."

  "Oh, God . . ."

  "What?"

  "You are always so hopeful. Maybe they'll get here, Cecile. Maybe. But this I know: Unless they get here tomorrow, or maybe the day after that, they won't get here in time for me."

  Cecile reached over and ran two fingers in circles over Jeanne's temples.

  "That feels good," the woman told her.

  "Let me tell you a story," Cecile said, resolved to find a memory she could share that no one, not even Jeanne, would associate with want and sadness and loss.

  Chapter 4

  MUTTIIRMGARD WA s HER REAL NAME, BUT EVEN her husband now called her Mutti--was decorating a cake for Helmut with lingonberries while the Polish cook was baking bread. The kitchen was warm from the oven, a great iron box as black as the coal that fueled it. The cook was a woman from the village named Basha who Mutti guessed had been pretty once in a common sort of way but hadn't taken care of herself-she probably didn't get enough exercise or spend enough time outdoors--and thus had grown round and flabby with age. Her eyebrows were as thick and bushy as an old man's, and whiter than daisies. She had been with the Emmerichs almost a year now, arriving each day in the morning and staying until dinner was served.

  Helmut, along with all the boys his age in his school, had been drafted into the Volkssturm and would be leaving in two days for training in Bromberg. The students had been told that their group would only be defending their district, but Mutti wasn't sure she believed this. And Helmut himself hoped this wasn't the case: In two months he would be joining the Wehrmacht anyway, hoping for the chance to fight in the sorts of faraway places his older brother, the visiting naval officers, and those English POWs all had seen.

  "You know Mr. Emmerich will be next," Basha was saying. "The Volkssturm will want him, too."

  "I know," Mutti agreed. The cook wasn't precisely trying to start a fight, she decided, but she was endeavoring to poke at those spots that were the most tender. The Emmerichs already had one son in the army and a second now conscripted into the home guard. The idea that the country would take her husband as well was profoundly dispiriting. Mutti feared that she couldn't run Kaminheim on her own, especially once those workers--hundreds of them, perhaps!--arrived to dig the antitank trench. She had just returned from a shopping trip to Kulm, and even with her ration card it had been impossible to get half the items she needed. She felt that the natural order of things--a husband cares for his wife, and a mother cares for her children--was being upended.

  "He fought the Russians twenty-five years ago, right?" Basha was saying.

  "Twenty-seven. He rose to captain."

  "Then maybe he won't be needed in the Volkssturm."

  "No?" she asked, her voice in that single syllable betraying the small kernel of optimism the cook had given her. Perhaps he would be rewarded for his past service by being allowed to remain home. It didn't seem likely: Everyone was supposed to sacrifice for the Fatherland and the war effort, especially now.

  "No. They'll give him some men of his own and put him right into the army instead. They'll send him off to face Ivan," Basha continued, referring to the deeply feared Russian army with the oddly pejorative nickname some of the soldiers themselves used.

  Mutti looked down at the bowl of frosting on the counter before her so the cook wouldn't see the way she had been taken in by this cruel joke. Dangling such a wondrous hope before her, and then whisking it away. Basha should be ashamed of herself. If Mutti had thought it was even remotely possible to find another cook, she would have fired the woman on the spot.

  No, she wouldn't have done that. Mutti knew she was much fiercer in her mind than she was in reality. Besides, more days than not she actually enjoyed Basha's company, and the woman's relentlessly bleak sense of humor. Lately they had all been feeling the stress as the Russians had driven the army farther toward the borders of the Reich, and maybe they had all grown a little more snappish than usual.

  She found three of the candles they used on the Christmas tree every year and placed them among the berries on the top of the cake. The twins' birthday was still months away, but the candles seemed like a cheerful idea to her. And Mutti desperately wanted something to seem cheerful--festive--right now.

  "Well, if the army needs Rolf, that's where he'll go," she told Basha, but the idea of her
forty-nine-year-old husband being expected to fight the Soviet barbarians terrified her. He could still handle a rifle, but he hadn't shot more than foxes and hares on hunting parties in their park in a quarter century. And the weapons they seemed to use now? So different from that earlier war. So much more effective. So much more lethal. "We are all making sacrifices, aren't we?"

  Both women looked up when they saw young Theo listening in the doorway. She thought the boy had taken his flat box with his wooden letters into the den to practice his spelling. This afternoon he was supposed to be working on his words and then, when he was through, with his penmanship. Clearly not. He had overheard what they had been discussing, and Mutti could see in Basha's eyes that the woman felt a small pang of guilt: It was one thing for her to torment a person she viewed as an entitled German aristocrat with the notion that her husband was about to be commandeered to fight the Bolsheviks; it was quite another to needlessly frighten a ten-year- old boy.

  "Would you like a spoonful of icing?" Mutti asked her son the moment she saw him.

  The child stared back at her, but said nothing. He was as shy as his two older brothers and Anna were extroverted, the sort of boy who was picked to play the enemy--the Russian or the American, usually--when the children played their loud, exuberant war games in the school yard. One night, in a moment of weakness before bed, he had let down his guard and confessed to her how most of the time he was just cast aside by the other boys and sent to the corner of the gymnasium or the field they had cordoned off as the POW camp. He would sit there, all alone, while the other children--even the girls as the army nurses with their pretend bandages made from white paper--ran and screamed and played.

  "Icing?" she asked again when he remained silent.

  Finally he shook his head no, and abruptly turned and dashed from the house. A moment later, through the kitchen window, Mutti saw him racing like a colt on his deceptively long legs--thin and sticklike, even in his wool trousers--along the manicured grass in the yard and then off into the apple orchard where the real POWs were at work.

  theo no longer pretended to be one of Anna's horses when he ran--even when he was very little, he had never imagined he was his own pony, Bogdana, because that animal was too sweet and good-natured to fly across Kaminheim the way the stallions who had been named after castles would--but he did see the stallion Balga in his mind now as he raced away from the house and the kitchen and that witch of a cook. He ran past the elderly guard who more times than not seemed to have his ancient eyes closed, past the English schoolteacher and mason, and past the young men who he guessed hadn't done anything at all before they'd become soldiers. He was vaguely aware they were watching him, their hands full of apples, but he didn't care. He was just running, he was running fast. It was, in his opinion--and in the opinion of his schoolteachers and the women and old men who ran the youth camps where he spent so much of each summer--what he did best. He wanted to be as far as he could from the idea that his father might be about to be stolen from him, too. His father seemed to Theo to be the only grown man in the world who didn't seem to be lecturing him all the time about German honor and German bravery and German posture (what posture and bravery had to do with one another was inexplicable to Theo, but apparently they were related), or didn't find reasons to rap his knuckles with birch rods. Some days at school he would be so lost in a daydream that he wouldn't even be aware that his teacher, Fraulein Grolsch, was standing beside his desk until he would hear the whoosh of the rod and feel its sting on the bones of his knuckles. Of all the children in the school, there was no one whom Fraulein Grolsch--the niece of the district's gauleiter and someone who clearly cared passionately about all that Nazi marching and singing and flag-waving--seemed to dislike more than him. One day she made him march around the courtyard for two hours with a Nazi flag on a shaft so tall and heavy that he could barely lift it. If it fell, she warned him, she would beat him worse than she had beaten any child ever. His sin this time? He'd forgotten his pencil box at home.

  Only when he had reached the edge of the orchard did he stop running and place his hands on his knees, catching his breath. As he gulped down great puffs of air, he looked up. There he saw two of the wicker baskets that were used to harvest the apples, and on the ground beside one was his big sister's navy cardigan sweater.

  anna leaned against one of the trees in the arbored apple orchard and felt the bark scratch her back through her blouse. She wondered how angry her parents or Helmut or Werner would be if they knew that just this moment she had kissed a Scotsman. She tried to envision the faces of the girls from her school or her summer camps if she were to tell them. Imagine: Her first kiss--soft, serious, mouths open and probing--and it had come from a prisoner of war. One moment they had been harmlessly flirting, as they did often, and the next they were kissing.

  "Of all the places you've lived, which is your favorite?" she asked him now. It was not a subject that actually interested her this very second, but she felt she had to say something to fill the quiet that suddenly was enveloping them like a tent.

  "Elgin," he said simply.

  "And that's in Scotland?"

  "It is. Moray Scotland. North. On the ocean. But a very hospitable climate. That's where we lived when we returned from India."

  "Are your parents still there?"

  He bowed toward her and she thought he was going to kiss her once more, and so she closed her eyes as a lock of his unruly hair fell away from his forehead and she parted her lips. But he didn't kiss her, and--embarrassed and angry--she opened her eyes. He was smiling, his face close to her, one arm straight against the tree behind her.

  "You know," he murmured, "I am sure someone could shoot me for kissing you. They wouldn't shoot you, of course. At least I hope they wouldn't. But me? It wouldn't be pretty, Anna."

  "Then why did you do it? Has it been that long since you kissed a girl?"

  "Well, let's see. There were all those girls while I was being interrogated in France. And then there were the ones the guards brought into the prison camp for us. And, of course, there are just girls everywhere here on your estate. So, not all that long, really."

  She ducked beneath his elbow and gave herself some distance from him. She wished he had simply kissed her.

  "You didn't tell me: Do your parents still live in . . ."

  "Elgin."

  "Yes. That place. On the ocean."

  "My mother does. My father died."

  "How?"

  "He drowned."

  The violence of his death jolted her, and she wasn't sure what to say. Then, after a moment, she told him honestly, "I'm sorry. I don't know what I'd do if something happened to my father--or to Mutti. Was he near the beach?"

  "No. Nowhere near it, actually. Middle of the ocean."

  She saw behind him a dark red apple at the end of a spindly branch. It was enfolded by leaves and swaying ever so slightly in the wind. She understood she should leave this line of questioning alone, but she couldn't. And then, perhaps because it was better for her to speak aloud her conjecture than allow it to wallow inside her, she said, "It was a U-boat, wasn't it?"

  "It was."

  "You must hate us."

  "I just kissed you."

  "Still. You must . . ."

  "I try not to generalize with my hate. Certainly my father never did."

  "Your mother?"

  "She's another story, a very interesting woman. Very complicated. She is quite capable of generalizing hate. As the wife of a colonial administrator, I gather, she started out rather well. But she managed to see slights everywhere. Especially when we were in India. I was just a boy, but even I could tell that she wasn't happy there. Didn't like being an outsider. Couldn't abide the heat. Still, she's resourceful--a bit like your Mutti. These days, she's a very tough war widow. Bitter. But, in all fairness, she is also extremely capable."

  "I presume she hates us."

  "Well, in her opinion you killed her husband and now you've taken her only s
on prisoner. So, yes, I'd say she doesn't have particularly generous feelings toward the Germans these days. But if she knew you, Anna, I think she might be slightly more forgiving. Not a lot, mind you. But you, I think, would at least give her pause."

  He leaned toward her again, but this time she kept her eyes open until she saw Callum close his and she felt his lips pressing gently against hers.

  the naval officers left the Emmerichs' once they had finished gouging the long, painful-looking slices from the skin of the earth at Kaminheim, and Helmut went to the parlor in the manor house that night a little unmoored. Everyone felt that way: Suddenly, the very soil in which the family had grown sugar beets and apples and corn had been upended. And for what purpose? An antitank trench. And as deep as those great, sluicing grooves were, they were mere runnels compared to the chasms the naval officers said would replace them. Imagine, the captain had explained, the difference between a toddler's little dig at the seashore and an actual moat. After all, he'd added ruefully, these would have to stop tanks.

  Helmut knew that he wasn't alone in his unease. Everyone felt a little anxious. But he also surmised that he was, justifiably, more anxious than the rest of his family--with the exception, no doubt, of poor Mutti--because he was the one who was leaving the next morning to join a Volkssturm unit in Bromberg. The reality was starting to sink in: He would no longer be a boy in short pants with a Hitler Youth dagger. He was about to become a soldier. And then, assuming he survived the next few months, he would graduate from the Volkssturm to the Wehrmacht. From a mere armband to a full uniform. To real training.