Skeletons at the Feast (23 page)

THEO WALKED WITH His FAMILY THROUGH A LARGELY deserted village in which the road was almost impassable because of the rubble--at one point he had helped Callum and Manfred move a pile of bricks from a fallen chimney from the road so the wagons could proceed, and twice he had gotten to assist them as they had lifted great slabs of wall that had slid onto the street--and he listened as Manfred wondered why in the name of God there wasn't some otherwise useless Hitler Youth lad to direct everyone onto the road that circled outside of the town. Even the stone church had collapsed upon itself, the buttresses for the walls supporting nothing but sky, and the once-imposing pipes for the organ reshaped by heat and flame into giant copper-colored mushrooms. It was a small village, no more than six square blocks, and none of the structures were taller than three stories high. And yet it had been bombed so severely that almost without exception they were passing buildings in which whole exterior walls were gone and Theo realized that he was looking up into people's bedrooms and bathrooms and kitchens. The buildings were, in a way, like giant dollhouses, with the sides removed so you could peer inside and move the furniture wherever you liked. The fires were long extinguished by the cold and fresh snow, but he could smell the soot and even see deep patches of black where an awning or a ceiling had somehow survived and shielded the burn marks from the latest storm. In one of the dollhouses he saw an old woman sitting before a precarious, three-legged table on the second floor, picking with a fork at some food in a bowl with yellow flowers adorning the side. The stairwell had caved in, and he wondered how the woman would ever get down from her perch. In another skeletal structure he saw three girls, sisters he guessed, standing at the lip of the floor on the third story, staring down at them glumly. The oldest one was probably his age, Theo decided, and she was wearing what had to be her uncle's or her father's Luftwaffe dress uniform coat. The younger girls were wrapped in blankets. He waved at them, but they didn't wave back.

Whenever he saw a rat scuttle across the surface of the snow and into the debris, he feared there were bodies moldering there. When he expressed this concern to the grownups, Callum reassured him: The Scotsman told him he was quite positive that a town this small would have been sure to care for its own. Theo thought of that old woman and those three girls, and he wasn't convinced.

"You know, Theo," Manfred was saying to him, "I have never ridden a horse in my life."

"Really? Well, that's only because you're a city person. It's no big deal that I have," he said, because it didn't seem to him that it was. Country people often rode horses. City people didn't. Besides, he could tell that Manfred was only talking about horses now to change the subject from the bodies that might be under the rubble. "If I'd grown up in Schweinfurt, I probably wouldn't ride, either."

"Theo is a wonderful rider," Anna said, and he wasn't sure if it was pride that he heard in her voice or something else. Worry, perhaps.

"Not really," he said, feeling the need to assert the truth. "I only ride ponies."

"Outside of the ring, yes. But in the ring? I don't know any boys your age who ride half so well."

"It's true," Callum agreed. "You're an excellent horseman."

"Frankly, your animals scare me to death," said Manfred. "They're monsters."

"Are you serious?" he asked the soldier.

"Absolutely. Your Balga? A terror."

"He's a horse!"

"He's a giant. They're all giants."

"They're very sweet, actually. And very smart. Sometimes they can be stubborn--even my pony. He's always snitching grass when he's not supposed to. But terrors? They're more like"--and he paused for a brief moment as he tried to find the appropriate analogy--"big stubborn babies. Or, maybe, big stubborn toddlers. That's what they really are, sometimes."

Callum and his mother laughed aloud, and his sister nodded in recognition.

"You think you could teach me to ride?" Manfred asked him. "It might make the animals seem less like monsters to me--and more like babies."

"My sister could probably teach you better than I could."

"Perhaps you could both teach me. My sense is I wouldn't be an especially quick study. I'd need all the help I could get."

"You mean after the war?"

"Yes," he said thoughtfully. "After the war."

"I could do that," he said. He turned to Callum. "And you, too? Do you want some lessons?"

"Definitely."

The notion made Theo smile. It wasn't, he guessed, the idea that he might have some knowledge or talent that he could impart to these grown men--though he did like that idea; rather, it was the realization that he might actually get to see them again when this long journey was over.

n perhaps two hours beyond the village, when the sky was growing dark and everyone knew that soon they would have to try to find a barn or a shelter in which to spend the night, Mutti announced that she had an idea of where they should go. "Let's turn here," she said, and she directed Manfred and Anna to lead the horses off the main road and down a path that didn't seem to have been plowed in weeks. With each step Theo was sinking up to his knees, and the men were actually shoveling a path for the carriage wheels as they trudged forward. But Mutti assured them the path wasn't long and it would be worth the effort. She refused, however, to tell them what awaited them at the end, and Theo was surprised by Manfred's patience with his mother. He had expected that the soldier would demand to know what they were doing, and why. But, it seemed, he had faith in Mutti, too.

Nevertheless, it was completely dark when they saw a dim glow before them, and then, in a brief moment when the moon peered out from the clouds and illuminated the earth, they saw a house at least the size of Kaminheim. The glow was from windows along the first floor, and Theo imagined there must have been dozens of candles burning inside since there couldn't possibly be electricity left here.

"Whose house is this?" Manfred was asking Mutti.

"Friends of Rolf's and mine since, well, forever. Eckhard and Klara. We lost touch with them once the war started. But it looks like they're still here."

"Or someone is," Callum muttered.

"Well, it's a roof," Manfred said. "And beds."

"When I realized where we were this afternoon, I thought instantly of my old friends. Then, when I recognized the road, I decided to bring us in the back entrance," she continued, her voice almost gleeful--a little girl who has pulled off a great surprise. "I didn't want to bring a thousand people with us."

They found that a path had been carved between the horse barn and the manor house, and Theo saw that Balga was sniffing the air with interest, tensing and then rolling his massive head nervously.

"Balga must smell the barn," Mutti told them, and tenderly she stroked the animal along his forehead and cheek. "They used to have as many animals as we had."

Callum handed the reins to Anna and turned toward Mutti. "I'll see who's there. What do these people look like? How big is the family?"

"They have a daughter and two sons. But I wouldn't expect the boys to be here. Surely they're in the army. Probably only Gabi will be there."

"And how old is Gabi?"

"Twenty or twenty-one. Just a little older than Anna."

"Okay. I'll go peer in one of those windows. See who's inside."

"What, you don't think it will just be my friends? Looters, maybe?"

He shrugged. "Or Russians."

"I'll go with you," Manfred said, and Theo watched as the two men shuffled through the snow up to the windows with the softly flickering lights.

there weren't looters and there weren't Russians. There weren't even other refugees. When Anna had heard Manfred and Callum conjecturing that the house might have been commandeered by criminals or Bolsheviks, her heart had sunk. Now, however, as her mother's friend Klara was heating tea for her in a kettle over the fireplace in the living room and their wet cloaks and capes and quilts were drying on wooden racks before the hearth, she was almost giddy. She was exhausted and she knew she was ill. But she was clean. She had soaked in an elegant porcelain tub for nearly an hour, savoring the hot water and rose-scented bubble bath, allowing herself to doze in solitude amid the steam and the aroma of the flowers. After her, Mutti and Theo--her brother normally no fan of baths--had bathed, too, and their spirits had risen accordingly as well.

They rejoined Anna downstairs now. She smiled at them and then burrowed even deeper into a thickly cushioned love seat, warm and content, while her eyes wandered aimlessly over the heads of the dead animals with antlers that adorned some of the walls, resting occasionally on the tapestries of unicorns and crusaders from the Middle Ages that hung on the others. There was also a line of stuffed wolfhounds--six of them in various poses, their mouths and marble eyes always open, in one case a tongue thrust out like a snake--serving as an honor guard into the room. At first Anna had found them a little disturbing. They also smelled of something unrecognizable but distasteful, and she feared that the taxidermist had been sloppy. But they were on the other side of the love seat from her and she had, for now, put them out of her mind. She was putting almost everything out of her mind. She was only half-listening as Mutti shared the story of their ordeal with Klara, while her old acquaintance's daughter, Gabi, and a friend of hers seemed to be hanging on every word. Gabi's friend was named Sonje, and like Gabi she was pathetically homely. They were fairy-tale stepsisters, Anna imagined, and she felt bad for them. Sonje was tall and gangly with a skeletal stalk linking her collarbone with a chin as sharp as a goatee and eyes that bulged out like a bug's. Gabi, the privations they had endured notwithstanding, was plump beyond the help of a corset and had a nose that looked a bit like an acorn with nostrils. Moreover, despite the reality that the Russians might be here in days if the army didn't find a way to stop them, they were insisting that they were going to remain in this house. The servants were long gone, as were the men and the horses, but before setting off to join a Volkssturm unit Eckhard had used his party connections to fill the larder and make sure they had plenty of wood and oil for the lamps. He had taught Klara and Gabi and Sonje how to shoot, and left them each a pistol--which, in Sonje's case, she kept with her in a holster she had decorated with red and black ribbons and wore around her dress like a sash. And, if the very worst occurred and the Russians appeared suddenly down their long driveway, he had shown them how they should slash their wrists, assuring them that this was a largely painless way to go--and infinitely preferable to their fate if they didn't.

Still, they were viewing their home as if it were an island sanctuary. They weren't maintaining the driveways, and Klara, at least, actually believed that no one--neither Russians nor refugees-- would even know they were here.

"But I found you," Mutti was saying. "You simply have to come with us. You simply can't stay here."

"But would you have turned down that path if you hadn't known this house was here?" Klara asked. "Of course not. You knew to take it because you're an old friend and you've been here before. And the main entrance is even more deeply buried in snow, and-- you might remember--all uphill from there to the house. No one would even think there's anything worth looking for at the other end. You're the first people we've seen in over a week."

"It's a cocoon," said Sonje.

"And in the spring we'll be butterflies," said Gabi.

"Butterflies with guns," Sonje added pleasantly.

Behind them the door opened, and Manfred and Callum returned from bedding down the horses for the night in the barn.

"Or," Klara said, "you girls can be butterflies right now! Why wait till the spring! Come, gentlemen, I'll play the piano and you two can dance with my daughter and Sonje!"

"now, i am no expert," Gabi was telling Callum a little later, though it was evident from the tone in her voice that she was quite confident that she was, "but we had a wonderful professor come to one of our BDM meetings, and he taught us all about physiognomy. It was fascinating." She was running the tips of her fingers along the top and the sides of Callum's head as he sat in the massive easy chair that was upholstered with a scene from a forest that looked positively primeval. The treatment didn't look precisely like a scalp massage, but Anna thought Callum might have enjoyed the physical sensations if Gabi weren't running her hands along his head for the purpose of a lesson in Aryan physical superiority. As it was, he was fidgeting uncomfortably and looked like a cat that wanted to bolt from a stranger's arms.