Skeletons at the Feast (17 page)

"I do, yes."

"Still: I'm scared."

"Because of the Russians . . ."

"And because it's all over! Everything!" she said, raising her voice more than she'd meant to. "I've never lived anyplace but Kaminheim. Now I don't even know where I'll be sleeping tonight!"

Though her father or mother or Helmut might appear at any moment, he put his arms around her and pulled her against him. She was wearing only a sweater and so she was shivering. He stroked her hair, careful not to disturb the long braid that ran down her back. She murmured something into his chest, but he couldn't make it out and so he gently lifted her chin with his thumb.

"They . . ." she began again. Her eyes were moist, but she wasn't crying and it might have been the cold alone that was causing them to water.

"Your uncle's family?" he asked.

"The Russians," she said, her voice almost bewildered. "They must have been very mad."

A gust of wind whipped the snow on the walkway into a series of small, tornado-like swirls, and the noise momentarily drowned out the cannonade.

"Apparently. But that sort of behavior is always inexcusable," he said, wishing he had found a word that suggested the gravity of the Russians' atrocities. He was parroting, he suspected, something his own priggish uncle once must have said. "Even in the worst moments of a war, it's intolerable. No British soldier would have done such a thing. You know that, don't you?"

"I know you believe that."

"It's a fact," he said, instantly regretting how curt he had sounded.

"I wouldn't have thought German soldiers would, either. But from what you've told me--from what your radio people claim--they did, and that's probably why the Bolsheviks are so barbaric now."

He considered this and wondered, as he did often, what sort of soldier he would have been if he hadn't fallen from the sky into a bog and been taken prisoner so quickly. He didn't fear he would ever have done anything cowardly: He was twenty and still had the remorseless confidence of late adolescence. And he knew that he had handled himself well enough when he was helping his fellow paratroopers survive their first moments in the marsh after that disastrous drop. Rather, what made him curious was how capricious his captors had been before he was sent here to Kaminheim to help with the harvest. The guards, he had observed, might dispense a completely unwarranted kindness upon one POW because there was something they liked about the particular Brit's or American's attitude. He was quiet, perhaps. Or he would smile once in a while. Meanwhile, they would beat another prisoner senseless with their rifle butts because they were annoyed with the fellow's sluggishness or the way he wore his overcoat, or they simply didn't like the shape of his jaw or the color of his eyes.

And, Callum presumed, it was a thousand times worse on the battlefield. Those Germans who captured him: Sure, they wanted prisoners they could interrogate. But had they had a less seasoned commander, they probably would have just opened fire and machine-gunned the paratroopers as they struggled from the swamp. And that would have been absolutely fair and reasonable. Hell, if he'd seen a group of German paratroopers in some bog near Elgin in the midst of an invasion, he wouldn't have asked a whole lot of questions before opening fire.

Still, he would never have killed a civilian. Never. Nor would he have raped some poor girl because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was certain that none of his mates would have, either.

Likewise, he couldn't see Helmut doing such things.

Yet Helmut's peers very well might. And Werner's probably had. For all he knew, they had done far worse, if that was possible. And if they hadn't actually raped the girls they had come across in Russia, it was only because they didn't rape dogs and pigs, either. It was beneath them.

What the Russians were doing wasn't forgivable. But it was, he feared, understandable. In their minds, they were just taking an eye for an eye.

And so he had to admit that he was a little relieved, too, that he was going west with the Emmerichs and not staying behind to greet the Russian army. It wasn't just that he wanted to protect Anna. It wasn't just that he wanted to be with her. It was, he thought, his best shot at surviving this nightmare.

they left well before lunchtime, just as Father had insisted. They left on foot, six more people and four more horses, joining the river of refugees planning, if necessary, to walk the width of Germany in the winter. They left as the snow flurries once more began to coat the road and the roof of the manor house, as behind them the chimneys grew cold. They were a solemn, largely silent procession, their thoughts punctuated always by the sound of the cannons, because by this point there was nothing to say. Anna glanced once at Theo and saw the poor boy had a face that was resolute: He was striving to be as grownup as his older brothers, soldiers both, as sure and as steadfast as Callum. He was also, she imagined, simply too scared to cry now. Didn't dare. She guessed they all felt that way on some level.

As they passed between the imposing stone columns that marked the entrance to Kaminheim, she noticed that neither of her parents ever looked back.

*

the refugees in the columns moved at Different speeds once they were west of the Vistula, not unlike the runners in the middle stages of a marathon. The Emmerichs on occasion were passed and on occasion passed others. During their first afternoon without Helmut or Rolf, they spoke to almost no one, and when they bedded down for the night at the estate of a family they knew in Klinger--abandoned, too, they found when they arrived, and already occupied by a half-dozen other families trekking west-- they were so exhausted that they barely opened their mouths. Even Callum was largely silent as he and Anna fed the horses and watched the animals sniff at the strange stalls. Mutti opened some of the canned meats they had brought, and selflessly shared the food--as well as some apples and beets--with the families there, since all of them were traveling on foot and hadn't been able to bring anywhere near the provisions that the Emmerichs had. She had, by her own rough calculations, given away about a day and a half's worth of their food. But it would have been indecent not to share what they had.

Anna had presumed that they would all sleep in bedrooms, on clean, crisp sheets that her parents' friends or servants would place on the guest beds, but other groups who, it was clear, hadn't even known the people who had once lived at this house had already commandeered those quarters. There were elderly married couples who seemed far too frail to be out on their own in the cold, and women (like Mutti) with children, and three female auxiliaries from the navy who were perhaps a year or two older than Anna. The auxiliaries claimed to have been on their way to Konitz on official business when their jeep was destroyed in an air attack, but there was an air of vagueness about their story and a decided restiveness in their eyes. Both Mutti and Anna had the sense they were lying, and hoped for the girls' sake that they would not be spotted by some doctrinaire Nazi who thought the war could be saved if he turned in these possible deserters. The girls had seized the couches and the divan in the den, but insisted on turning them over to the Emmerichs and slept instead on the thick carpet on the floor. Meanwhile, Callum slept beneath their comforters in the barn with the horses, because Mutti decided that there were too many refugees in the house to risk bringing him indoors. The next morning, he said the barn hadn't been too bad because of the amount of heat that was given off by the horses.

On the second night, the Emmerichs were forced to join Callum in a barn, because there was absolutely no more room in either of the two farmhouses where they stopped. At the first home, Anna peered through the windows while Mutti tried to negotiate their way inside, and she saw people packed so tightly in the living room that it looked like the young mothers were sleeping on their feet with their infants in their arms, while old women were asleep both on the dining room table and beneath it. The second house, four kilometers farther, was just as crowded, and Theo--despite his best efforts to transcend his age--was starting to grow a little hysterical with fatigue. And so Mutti had them camp that evening in the barn with, by the time the moon had risen, two other families of trekkers. They were still weeks from Stettin, and as they spread out their blankets and quilts on the hay, Anna guessed that if this trend continued they would be sleeping in the snow by the time they arrived there.

Nevertheless, she didn't complain. Even Theo didn't complain once he was off his feet and buffered by barn board from the chill winds, and they had all eaten apples and beets and the last of the bread they had brought. As they had the day before, they shared their bounty with the families with whom, suddenly, they were sleeping in unexpectedly close quarters.

But it was clear there was no alternative to spending the night with strangers. Besides, Anna reminded herself, how could she even consider whining when her father and Helmut were off fighting at the Kulm bridgehead and Werner was God alone knew where? At least, she reminded herself, they all had their winter boots and their parkas and their furs, and for the moment it had stopped snowing. And the presence of the moon high above had given everyone in the line trekking west the hope that tomorrow there might even be sun.

indeed, there was sun, a great lemon-colored haze brightening the eastern edge of the horizon in the first moments of the morning, and outside the village of Sliwice Cecile closed her eyes and looked up at the sky. She felt the warmth on the very cheekbones that stood out now like a razor ridge on a cliff. Their guards were stopping to rest for a moment, which meant they were allowed to rest, too. They weren't allowed to sit, but at least she and Jeanne could lean against each other, and not have to endure the pain of their shoes grating against the open sores and festering blisters on their feet. They knew they were among the fortunate ones, because Cecile still had her fiance's old boots and Jeanne still had Cecile's crocodile dress flats--comfortable, though not warm. Some of the other women had actually chosen to march with rags wrapped around their feet instead of the clogs they had been given at the camp, because the snow got into the clogs anyway, and the rags didn't aggravate the cuts on their insteps the way the clogs did. Others decided to forgo shoes and rags completely, believing-- mistakenly, Cecile thought--that their frostbite would not become gangrenous if the limbs remained iced. Then, of course, there were those women who already had gangrene, and there were many; many of them went barefoot, too, both because they found the numbness less uncomfortable than the spikes of cold pain they had been suffering and because they hoped they might die more quickly if they trudged ahead barefoot.

Everyone was envious of Cecile's boots and Jeanne's shoes, and some prisoners would express their jealousy with disarmingly angry glances.

Cecile sighed now, her shoulders and back rolling against Jeanne's. "While we can, we should eat some snow," she said, though she wasn't honestly sure she would be able to stand upright again if she bent over. She thought she might simply fall over if she stooped, and then she risked being shot. Yesterday the guards had executed four women because they had been marching too slowly, lagging behind, or--in one case--because the prisoner had accepted the bread that had been offered by a teen girl as they had marched through a village. The guards had told them they were to speak to no one as they passed through the town, and this prisoner had simultaneously fallen out of line when she had reached for the rye and said something to the girl. The guard who shot her was Pusch, an older man who was known for his thick, white hair, his walruslike mustache, and for the way he refused to beat the prisoners the way most of the guards--especially the female ones--did. He said it was too much work to raise your rod to a Jew: It was much easier to simply shoot them instead.

Cecile guessed there were about three hundred prisoners in their feeble parade and perhaps two dozen guards. Half the guards were women, and sometimes Cecile tried to imagine who was sleeping with whom. Because, clearly, there were romances among the guards. The men tended to be fifteen to twenty years older than the women, and they were the only ones who had rifles. The women had truncheons and clubs. When a male guard wanted to beat you, either he would borrow one of the female guard's rods or he would use the butt of his rifle.

Finally Cecile could bear it no longer, and when none of the nearby guards seemed to be looking--and Pusch was nowhere in sight--she bent over and grabbed a handful of snow in her hand. She licked it slowly, because she had learned yesterday that if she bit into it quickly the cold would send daggerlike barbs of pain against her rotting gums and the holes where her teeth had recently fallen out. Then she passed the snowball back to Jeanne. Instead Jeanne swatted it out of her hand.

"Oh, please," she said simply. "Spare me more snow."

"It helps."

"Not me. It only makes my stomachache worse."

It was approaching noon, and Cecile was hoping that when they finally entered Sliwice they would be given some soup. That was when they had been fed yesterday: around lunchtime. There had been nothing at breakfast and nothing at dinner, but in the middle of the day they had been given a lukewarm cup of a watery soup made from turnips. Since they hadn't been fed yet today, Cecile was telling herself that they were falling into a routine and in a few moments they would be marched into the town and given their lunch. A tepid and largely flavorless soup. But food nonetheless.

Cecile looked ahead of her and saw the prisoner named Vera was saying something. Speaking to her. Vera was taller than most of the women, and so she tended to stoop so she wouldn't stand out. That had been a key to surviving the camp: be invisible. She didn't say much, but Cecile knew she was from Hungary and that prior to the war she had been a schoolteacher. For two years she had avoided deportation because she had had a Wallenberg passport, one of the documents issued by the Swedish diplomat in Budapest that said the bearer was a Swedish subject awaiting repatriation. Eventually the Nazis and the Arrow Cross fascists simply ignored the passports and deported the Jews anyway.

Now Cecile asked Vera to repeat herself. Sometimes she wondered if her hearing was falling apart along with the rest of her body--as if eardrums, too, could succumb to malnutrition.

"Have you heard where we're going?" Vera was asking.

"I haven't," she answered.

"I hear it's Germany. They're going to put us to work in a munitions factory there. And we're going to be sleeping indoors again in a barracks right beside it."

Jeanne turned to her. Her eyes were running in the cold. "You taught very small children, didn't you?"

The woman nodded.

"I thought so. Only a person who told fairy tales for a living could believe that sort of nonsense."

Cecile felt Jeanne's shivering body against her back; if she hadn't, she feared, she might have slapped her. How many times had she saved Jeanne's life? How many times had she kept the woman going when Jeanne had all but given up? And still Jeanne hurled these malicious, cutting barbs at the other prisoners. At her. It was one thing for the guards to be cruel to them. But it was unconscionable for them to be cruel to one another. If indeed their husbands and their children and their parents were gone, then they were all that they had. When this war was over--and it did seem to be ending, didn't it?--they would all help one another to rebuild their lives. Wouldn't they? Isn't that what families did? What survivors did?

And didn't family members also discipline one another? Keep them in line? She felt like a mother now whose adolescent daughter had grown snappish, and she was about to snap back. To reprimand Jeanne. Before she had opened her mouth, however, the woman on the far side of Vera, another Hungarian whom Cecile barely knew, told Jeanne, "You think you're so clever. Well, you're just mean. How do you know the Germans aren't so desperate for workers they'll use us?"

"Because then they'd feed us!" Jeanne hissed. "If they wanted us to work, they'd give us something to eat!"

"Then you tell me," the Hungarian said, wrapping her bony arm around Vera's shoulders. "Where are we going?"

"To our graves," Jeanne said, narrowing her runny eyes. And then she collapsed, sobbing, into the snow.

once more cecile got Jeanne to her feet, and once more she joined the other women as they started to walk. They lumbered along, some stumbling, all concentrating on the normally prosaic task of placing one foot in front of the other while trying not to think about the pain that came with each step, or the hunger that made their stomachs throb, or the way their work pants or shifts invariably were stained with urine and striped with frozen swaths of liquid feces, because most of them had long since lost the slightest ability to control their bowels.

As they exited the far side of Sliwice, Cecile pushed from her mind her disappointment that the guards hadn't fed them. She tried to think instead about the sunshine and the blue sky, about the way the days were growing longer now. She tried to listen to the birdsong from the beech trees, and she considered reminding Jeanne that, yes, there still were birds in the world. She considered pointing out to her the reasonableness of Vera's supposition that they were going to be put to work in a munitions factory and thus soon would be fed. And she wondered about the carts. There were two of them, long, empty wagons, each one being pulled by a powerful draft horse. The guards had commandeered the animals and the carts from the sugar refinery in the town, and Cecile told herself it was because they were going to fill the wagons somewhere up ahead with provisions. With food and water for the prisoners. With bread and potatoes and milk.

She was considering all of these things, imagining the way cool milk would feel on her throat and her tongue, trying to remain hopeful, when ahead of her she saw an Austrian woman named Dorothea stagger and fall face-first into the road. One of the female guards, a woman perhaps her age with eyes the green of the Mediterranean at sunset and hair the color of freshly cut wheat, yelled at her to stand up. When the Austrian didn't, the guard began kicking at her, driving her boot so hard into Dorothea that the guard was spinning the body with her foot, rolling the woman off the road and into the dirty snow just beside it. Dorothea whimpered, but she made no effort to rise, and Cecile prepared herself for the poor woman's execution. Any moment now, Pusch or one of the other male guards would fall back in the column, turn the Austrian onto her stomach, and shoot her in the back of the head. And, sure enough, here came Pusch, as well as the guard named Trammler, annoyed, it seemed, because yet again one of the prisoners had faltered and slowed down the march.