Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian
Finally he pushed himself off the fence and started to walk. It had stopped spitting snow a little while ago and the skies were starting to clear. He walked for close to two hours, striding far more quickly than anyone else in the procession and passing everyone he saw. He felt pretty good and thought he might make Czersk by midday--in which case, he would have to make a decision. From there should he proceed northwest along what looked on the map like some garbage road to Brusy? Or should he stay with this crowd and push on to the southwest to Konitz? That was where much of this sorry spectacle was headed next. The road to Konitz was good, there might be food, and there were deserted houses and barns along the way where they might rest in the evening. But on the path to Brusy he would be less likely to encounter German soldiers. And since his orders were to be in Czersk, they did him no good once he was west of that town. He decided he would figure out what to do when he arrived in Czersk. It was likely the village would offer all the chaos he needed to find new orders or a new uniform.
He was within two or three kilometers of the town, noting the way the usually black telephone wires had grown white with snow in the course of the morning, when he noticed something that caused him to pause: He saw a broad-shouldered man a few years younger than him who wasn't in uniform and didn't seem to be either crippled or wounded. He was wearing wool trousers that weren't quite long enough for his legs, and what looked like an aristocrat's winter jacket that was straining desperately at the seams to contain his back and his arms. He was working with an attractive young woman with two blond braids to replace a wooden wheel on a cart, while a younger boy and, he presumed, their mother were looking on. The pair who weren't working had a dusting of snow on their hair and their shoulders--the woman was wearing a fur, the boy an excellent winter jacket--as did the bags of oats and apples the group had unloaded so they could repair the wagon. The young woman was trying to slip a new wheel onto the hub while the man held it off the ground, but it was proving difficult for even this very large fellow to lift the cart up on his own: For every sack or suitcase they had taken off the wagon, at least one remained.
Clearly this family had money: In addition to the cart with the broken wheel, they had a second one parked off to the side. And they had horses. Four magnificent horses. The animals were big, well-muscled stallions, their winter coats lustrous and long.
Curious, he stopped and knelt beside the couple trying to replace the wheel. He motioned at the cart. "You need some help?" he asked.
Beneath that cap the fellow had a thick mane of nearly carrot- colored hair. He barely looked up at Uri from the front axle. Averted his eyes, didn't say a word. Nobody did. A deserter, Uri decided, which meant that he was probably scaring the shit out of him--out of this whole family--and he had to restrain a small smile.
Finally the younger woman with the braids said, "No. But thank you. We expect to be back on the road in a few minutes." He eyed her carefully now. She had a lovely, delicate nose and the sort of full, rich lips that seem always to be slightly parted on very beautiful women. And her hair was exactly that flaxen blond so coveted by Nazi propagandists in search of models. She looked a bit like the boy and a bit, he guessed, like their mother. But those three-- the girl and the boy and their mother--looked absolutely nothing like this hulk replacing the wheel. Which meant that he probably wasn't related to them. He was probably this younger woman's fiance or husband.
"You speak?" Uri asked the fellow.
Now he turned to Uri and nodded.
"With more than your chin?" Uri continued. There was a part of him that couldn't imagine him challenging a man this physically imposing as recently as two years ago. In the first months of his masquerade, he had been more likely either to flatter everyone he met or try to be largely invisible--a nonentity; but he had learned quickly that he was much better off among these people if he was brazen. They were far less likely to question a bully. And now, after nearly two years of fighting, it seemed impossible to Uri not to view every encounter as a confrontation.
The fellow mumbled that he did speak, but he didn't look up from the strut and he spoke in a tone that was striving for annoyance but had just a hint of unease. And there was something in the few syllables that sounded foreign to Uri. American, maybe. Or British. But certainly not Prussian. And certainly not the German Uri had heard growing up in Bavaria. And so another, more interesting possibility occurred to Uri: POW. Not a deserter, a prisoner. He knew that the Germans had been sending British and American POWs to the farms to work the fields the previous summer and fall. Not the Russians, of course. After all, the field work was downright cushy. Instead, the Russian POWs were expected to detonate or remove the unexploded bombs from the urban rubble of places like Hamburg and Berlin. Most of them hadn't the slightest idea what they were doing, and it was just a game of, well, Russian roulette. But they did know that if they were still alive by the time their own army arrived, they'd be killed anyway for surrendering. Or, if they were lucky, sent to some work camp in Siberia.
Uri gazed from this redhead--this Yankee or Brit--to the two siblings and their mother. Like those women he had come across in the castle the other day, one of them might very well have a handgun concealed in a cape or a fur. The pretty blond might have a pistol trained on him right now. Still, he didn't guess they would be crazy enough to shoot a Wehrmacht soldier in broad daylight while harboring a POW.
He wondered what it meant that they were bringing their POW with them. Was he just brawn, like their horses? A pet? Or was he something more? He had heard about romances between Allied POWs and the farm girls. The German men all gone, the girls bored to tears on their estates. Was this one right here before his very eyes?
Finally Uri motioned for the man to move over so he could help him lift the wagon, and the woman would be able to slip the wheel into place. He considered introducing himself, but he didn't want to put the POW in the awkward position of having to speak once again. "Here," he said simply, "let me help. You can't sit here all day with a broken wheel." Then he and the prisoner hoisted the axle just far enough off the ground that the woman was able to place the spare wheel onto the bar and secure it to the wagon. It took about half a minute.
Up ahead, coming from the west, Uri heard the metallic rattle that he instantly recognized as tanks. At least two, and maybe more. Given that the line was moving sluggishly to one side of the road--rather than fleeing like frightened kittens into the brush-- he presumed the tanks were German. And, within seconds, he saw them: three Panthers motoring toward them, half on and half off the road so they didn't mow down the refugees. They each had infantry soldiers riding atop them, and they were moving with such purpose that he didn't fear anyone was going to try to recruit him into the assault group.
As they passed he saluted, the sort of lackadaisical wave he offered in lieu of a full-fledged Heil Hitler. He watched to see what the redhead would do, and he did, essentially, the same thing. Unlike Uri, however, he was actually sweating, despite the cold.
When the tanks' earth-flattening clanking was beyond them, he glanced at the piles of oats and provisions they had to load back into the wagon. Without asking, he went to one and lifted it onto the cart.
"Oh, we can do that," the young woman said.
"I figured. But you can do it faster if you let me help. And fast is good now that the Russians have broken out of Kulm."
The woman's mother gasped. "Kulm has fallen? Completely fallen?" she asked. She made it sound like Berlin had surrendered.
"Yes, of course," said Uri. He couldn't imagine at first why she might care that such an irrelevant little place had been overrun. As far as he could tell, it was an obscure hamlet that served the aristocratic beet farmers who lived just outside it. But then he glanced at the horses and the quality of the clothes these people were wearing. No doubt they were part of that Kulm gentry. Had probably been on the road only a few days. "Are you from Kulm?" he asked, trying to soften his tone.
"We live there," the youn
Well, they're not anymore, Uri thought, but he kept that response to himself. In all likelihood, the pair was lying dead in a snowbank somewhere. The counterattack had been launched by old men and young boys, and--like everything the Wehrmacht did these days-- it had been absolutely fearless and completely ill-advised, and virtually all those old men and young boys had been slaughtered.
The younger brother looked up at the sky now, and he gazed with such curious intensity that the adults around him all stopped what they were doing.
"What is it, Theo?" his mother asked.
"I hear buzzing," he said simply.
Uri had been around enough artillery that he knew his hearing had gone to hell. He couldn't hear yet what this boy--and then, clearly, his older sister--could hear. But he knew what it meant when you heard a buzzing in the sky. The odds were good they were hearing planes. Lots of planes. Far more planes than the Luftwaffe could put into the air at one time these days. And then, before he could warn them, tell them his suspicions, they all heard the sound. In seconds it was transmogrified from insects to engines, dozens and dozens of them, and they saw the great, growling formation, one side actually luminescent as the long swaths of metal fuselage reflected the sun as they emerged from the clouds. The aircraft were British, and suddenly three of the planes were diving toward the column--he wondered if they had seen the German tanks that had just passed--and they all needed to get off the road.
Reflexively he grabbed the mother by her arm and pulled her with him into the fields, sprinting with her past those large, circular piles of ash and toward the barn beyond them. The POW and the two siblings were beside him, racing too, and he was aware that the formerly long and straight caravan had spread like spilled milk into the snow and the fields along both sides of the road. They were nearing the barn when the boy abruptly shrieked, "Waldau! I won't lose Waldau, too!" He let go of his older sister's hand and ran back toward the road, apparently worried about one of those horses.
"Theo!" the prisoner yelled, and then both he and the POW were dashing after the boy.
Up the road they all heard the sound of the screams and the missiles and the diving airplanes, a simultaneous, deafening cacophony, part machine and part animal, and watched as three Spitfires swooped down in a perfect line, one behind the other, their cannons ablaze, splintering the carts and slaughtering the stragglers who remained on the road. One wagon was flying through the air in two massive pieces, its rear wheels still spinning, as were the bodies of three old women who had been traveling together, one of whom had lost her legs in the blast. The air was alive with sheets of newspapers and the stuffing from pillows, and rags of clothing that were either drenched with blood or housing now-unattached arms and legs and feet. Beyond them they saw great plumes of black smoke swirling into the sky like tornadoes, fueled, Uri guessed, by the ammunition and petrol from those Panthers that recently had passed.
And still Theo ran hysterically for the horses.
High above them now the fighters were starting to circle back, preparing for a second pass over the remnants of the column before rejoining their massive, glistening flock. Uri and the prisoner caught up to Theo just as the boy was reaching the two horses that were still attached to the wagon. The animals' eyes were wild and their nostrils were flaring, and they were craning their powerful necks in all directions. But at least they weren't rearing up on their hind legs and attempting to break free. As for the other two? They were nowhere in sight, and Uri hoped for this boy's sake that they had simply run off, and hadn't been blown high into the sky in small pieces like so much else that had been standing on or beside this road just a moment earlier.
With the POW he tried to unhitch one of the animals, while the boy worked on his own to free the other. This was complete madness in Uri's mind, utter lunacy. Had he really lived through so much over the last two years only to get himself killed helping some Nazi boy save his damn horse? He and this prisoner weren't nearly as proficient with the clasps and the buckles as the child, but together they were able to remove the harness and grab the leather reins, and join the boy as he scurried with his horse from the road into the fields.
Behind them they heard more cries and more blasts, and they felt the ground shaking beneath them as they ran, but Uri had the horse now, and the last thing he wanted to do was waste even a second looking back.
for a long moment after the planes were gone the five of them leaned against an outside wall of the barn. Uri and the POW stood with their hands on their knees, swallowing great gulps of cold air. The boy? He and his sister were each calming one of the horses, stroking them softly along their long, graceful noses. Their mother was standing under the eave, clearly a little numbed. She was, however, the first one to speak. In a tone that surprised Uri with its firmness and control, she said, "That was unwise, Theo. You know that, don't you?"
The child nodded, but said, "I've already lost Bogdana. I shouldn't have to lose Waldau, too." His voice had just a touch of defiance to it.
"Bogdana was his pony," the boy's older sister said, as if that explained everything. Then: "Thank you for helping us. That was completely unnecessary. But very brave."
He looked up. He saw the little boy had cut his cheek at some point, just below his eye, and the blood was trickling like raindrops on glass past his ear and along the side of his jaw. Uri motioned toward it with his finger, and the child's sister reached somewhere inside her cape and found the sort of dainty handkerchief his grandmother used to use--he saw blue flowers, edelweiss perhaps, embroidered into one of the corners--and pressed it gently against the wound. "You hurt yourself, sweetie," she murmured. The boy barely shrugged.
On the road before them the lucky refugees were already starting to restack their bags and their boxes and their suitcases onto their carts and resume their trek west. Others were sobbing over dead children, dead mothers, dead fathers. Some of the dead looked as peaceful as any Uri had seen, while others had died with their arms raised in either anger or despair at the sky. Some were lying perfectly still as their clothing continued to smolder.
Uri turned to this family around him. "What are your names? I know you're Theo. But I don't know the rest of you."
"I'm Anna. And this is our mother."
"And you?" This time Uri spoke directly to the POW.
"He's . . . Otto," said Anna, answering before the man could even begin to open his mouth.
"Like hell he is," said Uri.
"He's--"
Uri waved her off. "He's Otto. I understand." He extended his hand to the POW. "I'm Manfred." The fellow took his hand and smiled at him, his eyes as grateful as a spared fawn's.
"Thank you, Manfred," the mother was saying to him. "Thank you for helping us save the horses."
"We should find the others," Anna said, meaning, Uri assumed, their other animals. She was still pressing her handkerchief against her little brother's cheek. "We have so much loaded on each of the wagons."
"You're supposing your wagons are still in one piece. And your other horses are alive," he said.
"That is hoping for a lot, isn't it?"
"It is," he said. "But let's go see."
uri stood with this POW over the carcass of what had once been a magisterial stallion. It looked like it had probably run fifty or sixty meters after the Spitfire's cannons had punched great holes in its side and caused the animal's steaming entrails to fall from its abdomen like the contents of a pinata.
"This was Labiau," the POW said, kneeling. He took off his glove and ran his bare fingers along the horse's powerfully muscled shoulders. The fellow's German sounded vaguely Scottish to Uri. "I think they named most of their horses after castles."
"You think," said Uri. "They're not your horses, too?"
The POW realized his mistake and stood. "Yes, I think. I'm not a part of their family. So: Are you going to shoot me?"
The two men h
"No," he told the prisoner. "No more than you're going to shoot me."
"Then what?"
He shrugged. "I'm going on to Czersk to rejoin my unit." In the distance, beside an overturned wicker basket that had been blown far from someone's wagon or cart, they saw a horse browsing its contents. "Is that one of theirs, too?"
The POW nodded. "It is. Ragnit."
"And your real name?"
The POW reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out some cigarettes. He handed one to Uri and kept one for himself. "Callum," he said.
"English?"
"Scottish."
"Where were you captured?"
"France. I'm a paratrooper."
"And you wound up this far east . . . how?" Uri asked, lighting the cigarette and savoring the warmth of the smoke in his mouth and his lungs. He realized that he hadn't had a cigarette in at least three or four days.