Skeletons at the Feast Read online

  "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 son 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.

  He thought it interesting that his mother had responded to the reality that her second son was now a man by baking him a cake and decorating it with lingonberries and candles--as if he were still a boy. Of course, those lingonberries had been delicious. Nevertheless, he felt as if the seriousness of what loomed before him had been diminished. It was as if Mutti didn't want to accept the fact that he, too, was about to become a soldier.

  Alone now, he leaned over the table with the family's maps in the parlor. For over three years he had tracked the progress of the armies in the east, as they had neared Moscow and Leningrad and almost (but not quite) conquered Stalingrad. With toothpicks and colored paper he had made small flags denoting the divisions whose victories he would hear about on the radio, and whose defeats he would glean from rumor and innuendo and the simple fact that (suddenly) they seemed to be fifty or seventy-five kilometers west of where he had understood them to be. Occasionally, the German broadcasters would explain casually that the army was straightening its line or consolidating its front, but Helmut understood that was just a euphemism for withdrawal or outright retreat. It was clear that the Germans were not simply losing--Lord, that had been apparent for at least a year and a half--but that the end was near. The Russians were just east of Warsaw, and that summer there had been some sort of uprising inside the city itself. The Polish Home Army and Communists attempting to retake it block by block, he gathered. And while the rebellion was being successfully quashed--for all he knew, it was over now--the fact remained that the Germans there had their backs to the very same river that he had grown up with: the Vistula. Warsaw was a mere 180 kilometers to the southeast.

  Only last year, nineteen months ago, the fighting had been as much as two thousand kilometers to the east. Of course, nineteen months ago they had also been fighting in North Africa. And France was a part of the Reich. As was Italy--the whole boot. Now Paris and Rome were gone, and eventually Warsaw would be, too.

  He thought of his brother near Budapest--another of the great cities that would, he imagine, fall into the Allies' hands soon enough. Werner would have great scars on both of his legs for the rest of his life, a result of the burns he had endured when the tank on which he had been riding had been shelled and caught fire. Helmut didn't like the idea of Werner in a prison camp somewhere, but it crossed his mind that it wouldn't be the worst thing to happen to his brother at this point in the war if he was captured. Look at the way his own family was treating the Englishmen the stalag had sent them: They were more like houseguests than POWs. Surely the British or the Americans would treat his brother that kindly. Unfortunately, unless Werner's division was transferred to the Siegfried Line or Holland or Italy, that wasn't likely. If Werner was captured, it would be by the Russians, and that meant a prison camp in Siberia--if he didn't die first on the way there. Besides, it was almost inconceivable that his brother would ever wind up a POW: Werner would die fighting.

  Helmut hoped he would die that way, too.

  If, of course, he had to die.

  In a perfect world, they would somehow find a way to repel the Russians and, just maybe, he himself would do something heroic in a great, final battle. Even though the Russians were on the verge of capturing Warsaw, it still didn't seem quite possible to him that these barbarians eventually would brutalize all of Europe.

  From the ballroom on the other side of the house he heard the sound of music: Mutti was playing the piano and the Scotsman was playing the accordion. His uncle's accordion. If the naval officers hadn't left, there would be dancing, and he would have had to polka and waltz with one of Anna's friends: Frieda or Gudrun. Here, at least, was one small consolation to their departure: He thought Anna's friends were juvenile and frivolous--insufficiently committed to the war effort--and he didn't much like them (though lately, he had to admit, he did see the appeal of having a girl as pretty as Gudrun in your arms when you danced, and feeling her beautiful, small hands in yours).

  He found it interesting that his father was allowing this Callum so much latitude. The other POWs had gone back to the bunkhouse for the night, where they belonged. Even their captain, that schoolteacher, didn't seem to want Callum spending so much time in the house. It was, in the schoolteacher's opinion, fraternizing with the enemy.

  Well, yes.

  Perhaps that was precisely why his father was not simply allowing it, but was actually condoning it. Encouraging it. Maybe he was, in some way, trying to drive a wedge between Callum and his fellow POWs. Create a rift. Give them something to talk about other than, Helmut guessed, escaping.

  Or, he wondered, did his parents actually like Callum? Clearly Anna did.

  Helmut understood that his family didn't know the party leader well in their district, and had only met the governor once. This was farm country and the area was vast. But he knew that his father had never been impressed with either the party leader or the governor in their few face-to-face encounters. Nor did he approve of the way the district was being managed. Both officials had been brought in from Bavaria, the party leader actually taking control of a farm that previously had been owned by an officer in the Polish army, and running it about as poorly as humanly possible. His father had once called the two of them "real Nazis," and he had meant this as an insult: In his opinion, they were uneducated and vulgar and coarse, and they didn't know how to handle an agrarian landscape at all. They didn't understand farmers at all. It was an insult to the region.

  And they certainly wouldn't approve of the way a Scot POW was ingratiating himself into t
he Emmerich family.

  One time, Helmut recalled, almost a year ago now, his teacher had pulled him aside and asked him all sorts of questions about his father. The teacher was an older man who took his party membership very seriously, and thought Rolf Emmerich did not treat his own with sufficient gravity. The teacher couldn't fight anymore, but he sure could march--and demand that his students march. Apparently, he felt that Rolf Emmerich had greeted him on the street with an insincere Heil Hitler. Had felt the salute was halfhearted at best, and downright condescending at worst. As if his father thought the very greeting had become a joke. This was what he had told Helmut, anyway. But it was also painfully clear to Helmut that the fellow had heard or overheard a lot more about his father's attitudes toward the party. Toward some of Hitler's lieutenants. Father was usually careful about what he said in public, and the truth was that he was of two minds about National Socialism. Certainly things had gotten better for most Germans. At least at the beginning. And while he wished that Poland and Germany had been able to negotiate a peaceful return of the German lands to the Fatherland instead of having to resort to war, he was as grateful as Mutti that Kaminheim was back where it belonged. But there was also an awful lot about National Socialism that he considered either ripe for ridicule or deeply troubling. The replacement of the old Christmas carols with those ridiculous songs about the solstice and motherhood? Absurd. The fixation on the Jews? Inexplicable at first. Then alarming. It was evident by the teacher's line of questioning that at some point his father had been indiscreet--perhaps made fun of those new song lyrics or the way one of the district's little Hitlers had been screaming at some rally--and the word had gotten back to this teacher. The salute, Helmut guessed, was only the last straw.

  For a moment Helmut had paused in thought with the teacher, as they had sat alone in the classroom. It wasn't that he was contemplating actually validating the teacher's concerns or turning his own father in--even though there were moments when he considered his father's ambivalence about their government and their fuhrer disloyal. It seemed to Helmut that the world had always been against Germany: jealous of its people and its culture, and determined to crush both. The country was fighting now for its very survival, and the last thing the fuhrer needed was Rolf Emmerich badmouthing the party or party officials. Still, the primary reason that Helmut had sat there silently for seconds was the sheer unreality of the moment, the idea that here before him was an honest-to- God informant. Someone who ratted people out to the Gestapo. Perhaps there were those who needed ratting out. Shirkers and spies and people who really did want to undermine the regime. But not his father. And so Helmut had taken a breath and composed himself and, with as simple and unrevealing a face as he could assume, told his teacher that his father must have been distracted that day on the street when he saluted, and that his father cared deeply about the government and about the fuhrer. Fearful that he hadn't said enough, he added quickly that they even had their signed photograph of the fuhrer matted with red silk and framed, and it hung on the wall of their parlor. This was the truth. What he would have said if he were going to be scrupulously honest was that it hung there because his father was rarely in the parlor: He was more likely to be in the den or the dining room or the ballroom. Greeting a guest or a business associate in his office. It was Mutti who had cherished that image of Adolf Hitler--his mother had once had the sort of crush on the fuhrer that was not uncommon among her middle-aged female friends--and it was Mutti who savored the light in the parlor. Still, he had said enough. The teacher let him go, and suggested they could speak again if Helmut had anything new to report: If he had heard or seen anything--heard or seen anything about anyone, not merely his father--that the teacher should know about.

  As Helmut studied the placement of the flags of the German and Soviet armies on the map and the way the Reich was narrowing in its old age, he took some comfort from the reality that the party leader and the governor--his own teachers, even--clearly had far more pressing issues before them right now than the way the Allied prisoners were being treated at Kaminheim, or whether his father saluted people on the street with ample enthusiasm.

  before breakfast, when the sun had barely risen and the fog was only beginning to burn off the fields, Anna took Theo with her to the horse barn and together they saddled Balga and Theo's small pony, Bogdana. Anna honestly wasn't sure she had been as happy in years as she was in those final days of that harvest, and she felt almost flighty that morning. The two siblings rode past the fields where any moment the men would begin pulling the last of the sugar beets from the soil, past the orchards where Anna would join them in the afternoon, and past the pond where in August she had swum with her friends and her brothers those hot, steaming days when they hadn't been hiking or away at their summer camps. Anna was wearing a white linen shirt that she had ironed before going to bed last night, and the jodhpurs in which she thought she looked prettiest from behind. Never before had she worried about what she was wearing when she and her little brother had gone riding, but never before had there been a man at Kaminheim who had interested her in quite the way Callum had. She hoped she might see him--and, yes, he would see her--when they returned to the barn.

  As they were riding through the marsh on the far side of the pond, Theo pulled his pony to a stop and called out to her.

  "Yes, Theo?" she said, reining in Balga. The horse was dying to run--she could feel his muscles tensing beneath his satin coat-- and Anna had the sense that when they had cleared the marsh she was going to have to let the animal air it out. Theo would be fine for a few minutes on his own.

  "What will happen if the Russians get here?"

  "The Russians won't get here," she said reflexively. She wasn't sure she believed this, but she could hear the fear in her little brother's voice and felt the need to reassure him.

  "But how do you know? How can you be so sure?"

  Anna watched the pony, more plump than was probably healthy, snitch at a clump of high grass.

  "I guess I don't know. Not for certain. But . . ."

  "Tell me."

  "Well, it's one thing for them to take back the land we had conquered. It's quite another to take our land from us. Just imagine how fiercely Werner would be fighting if he were defending this country right here."

  Theo nodded and seemed to be taking this in. Then: "They might take Father, you know."

  For a moment Anna wasn't sure who they were. Did Theo mean the Russians? She must have looked puzzled, because Theo continued, "The army. Maybe the Volkssturm, but maybe the Wehrmacht."

  "Father? He's already done his duty--and that was a very long time ago. He's . . . old," she said, and as that last word formed on her lips she couldn't help but smile in bemusement. Their father? In the army? He was strong and disciplined and smart, but these days he was a businessman and farmer. He ran the estate. She couldn't see him enduring the sorts of misery that had seemed to dog Werner. She didn't see why he should have to. "Why would you ever think such a thing?" she added.

  "Yesterday I heard Mutti and Basha talking."

  "About Father leaving for the army?"

  "Yes!"

  She felt Balga once more straining beneath her and motioned to Theo that they needed to keep moving. When they reached the drier land on the far side of the marsh they began to trot, and over the sound of the horses' hooves she called back to her brother, "I'm sure if they did take him, it would just be for desk work. Right here, maybe. Or in Kulm. But he wouldn't be fighting like Werner."

  "Or Helmut soon," Theo muttered.

  "Yes."

  "But if Father does leave, there will hardly be any grown-up men left here at all. And that means I . . ."

  "Go on."

  "It means I would have to be the man of the house. And I'm not ready for that. I know I'm not."

  "Oh, Theo, sweetie, you don't have to worry about such things!" she told him, working hard to suppress a small smile so he wouldn't think she was laughing at his expense when all she
was feeling was affection for him. To her relief, he was still young enough to allow his vulnerabilities and his fears a small voice. All the other males-- even the boys Theo's age--were already growing into blustering strongmen. Powerful Aryans who didn't dare admit to anyone that they just might be scared. "Everyone loves you as you are," she went on. "No one expects you suddenly to be older than ten."

  "But I could be if I had to be. Don't you think so?"

  "Of course I think so."

  "I just don't want to if I don't have to."

  "No, I agree. Who would? Besides, there will always be the prisoners," she said, only half-serious, hoping to get a small laugh out of Theo.

  Instead, however, her brother told her in a voice that was completely earnest, "No, they're leaving the day after tomorrow. I heard Father on the phone yesterday!"

  Instantly she pulled her horse to a stop and turned to face the boy. "What?"

  "They're being sent back to their prison camp."

  "No, that's not possible--"

  "Yes, it is possible," he said, his tone growing defensive because she hadn't believed him. "Even . . ."