Skeletons at the Feast (26 page)

Rolf was somewhere to the east. She tried not even to speculate where, or in what condition.

Now she called out to whoever was knocking that she was awake.

"Lovely," the voice answered, and she realized it was Klara.

"Thank you. I'll be down presently," she told her friend. Then, as she did every morning--in barns or in beds--she prayed that her husband and her two older sons were safe. That, somehow, they would escape harm. She prayed that she would have the strength and the wisdom to protect her youngest boy and her daughter; that soon they would all be together again as a family; and that someday their only concerns would be the price they were paid for their sugar beets and whether a mare would deliver a foal safely.

at breakfast, Callum listened as Mutti tried again to convince Klara that she and the two girls simply had to accompany them west to her cousin's in Stettin. He hated to admit it, but he really didn't give a damn if they came with them or not. Already he and the Emmerichs were playing with fire. Their motley group consisted of two females, a boy, a POW--who, he had to admit, was spending way too little time hidden beneath the feed--and an army deserter. Did they really need three half-insane women to slow them down? But then, when he was bringing Anna a cup of hot tea in the living room before joining Manfred to load up the wagons, he decided that none of them, not even that reprehensible Gabi, deserved to be left behind. It wasn't these women, after all, who had been machine-gunning Ukrainian civilians or working Jews till they died in labor camps somewhere. Choosing a village and hanging a hundred Poles--filling their mouths first with plaster of Paris so they couldn't cry out or shout patriotic slogans as they died--because an SS officer had been killed by the underground.

And yet when the Russians arrived here in a couple of days, these women would have to atone for the sins of their kin.

"Your mother thinks she can convince Klara to come with us," he told Anna, dipping the tea ball for her one last time in the cup and then laying it on a separate plate that Mutti had given him.

Anna was dressed in heavy wool trousers that had belonged to one of Gabi's brothers and a sweater so bulky that she seemed to be swimming in it. She had been alone in that large, dark room till he joined her, but she looked refreshed from a night in a bed. Now she sat forward on the ottoman and leaned in toward the fire. She brushed a lock of hair away from her eyes.

"She must," she said simply. "They're insane if they stay here."

"Well, they're insane if they come with us. They might be safer with us. But I think they're mad as hatters wherever they are. Here or on the road or in Berlin. Doesn't matter. They'll always be nuts."

"I hate to admit this, but I don't especially like them."

"How could you? How could anyone? They're lunatics. One of them, Sonje? She practically raped Manfred in the bloody larder. I nearly walked in on her as she was going on and on about being his . . . never mind."

"Tell me."

"Oh, no. All I meant is she's desperate. Knows she has to get out of here."

"Well, that's actually an indication that she's perfectly sane."

"It's Gabi who is particularly reprehensible," he said. "Despicable in every imaginable way."

"I agree."

He watched her gaze down into her tea, nodding. He could see her eyelashes, long and lovely and so fair that they almost disappeared against her skin. Then he looked up into the mirror on the wall behind her, a piece of glass the size of a door that was framed in ornate gold-painted wood, and there in the reflection he saw them. Gabi and Klara--the daughter with her mother. He didn't know how long they had been standing there--well into the room, no more than eight or nine feet behind them--but it was clear from the sour expressions on both of their faces that they had gotten the gist of the conversation. When their eyes met his in the mirror, Klara retreated from the room, disappeared, but Gabi exploded toward them, stomping across the thin expanse of carpet that separated them. He stood to greet her--to, he thought in the brief second before she had reached him, shield Anna from her. Before he had said a single word, however, Gabi slapped him violently across the cheek, so hard that he felt his head snapping to the right at the moment that the sting had begun to register.

"How dare you?" she hissed, the chalk of her eyes now white-hot, their anger fueled by a blast furnace raging behind a pair of ever-widening black pupils. "We took you in, we fed you, we gave you beds! And now . . . now this betrayal!"

Anna stood beside him and tried to reach out to her. But Gabi sliced at her elbow, using her own arm as a scythe. "We will turn you in. We will turn you all in," she said, and she stared at Anna as she spoke.

"I'm sorry, Gabi," Anna said, her voice a quivering, guilt-ridden echo of its usual self. "I don't know what to say."

"You can get out--just get out. We won't be joining you. We would never join you," she said. Then she turned to Callum and added, "I am quite sure that Sonje would never have given herself to your Jew-loving friend. That was all just . . . just talk."

"Please, Gabi, I'm sorry," Anna was saying. "We're tired and we were saying things we didn't really mean. We were just being catty. We--"

"We don't need you," Gabi said. "We don't need anybody. Unlike you, I still have faith in our fuhrer and in our armies. The Russians? Little more than apes. We will stop them well before they get anywhere near this house."

"They are pretty near here right now," he reminded her.

It looked to him as if she were about to respond, to say something more. Perhaps accuse him of cowardice. Perhaps accuse Anna of defeatism. But she did neither. She glowered for a brief moment and then turned on her heels and stalked off.

in the end, only Sonje accompanied them when they left. Mutti had pleaded with Klara to join them, but Gabi wouldn't leave and Klara wouldn't leave without her daughter. The angry young woman refused to even emerge from her bedroom. And so it was only Sonje who threw a few items into a suitcase and joined the group as they started back down the path Mutti had shown them the day before. Anna had the distinct sense that Gabi was gazing down at them scornfully from her window and she felt a deep twinge of guilt. Arguably, it was her and Callum's fault that Gabi, and thus Klara, were remaining behind. But she had apologized, she had apologized profusely; she had all but begged Gabi to forgive her and come with them. But the woman was obstinate beyond all reason. Her mother was, too. Prattled on about her faith in the once-vaunted army. Still, Anna couldn't help but imagine the two of them slashing their wrists in an upstairs bathroom or the parlor, as the Bolsheviks arrived at the gates of their estate.

Once the horses and wagons were back on the road, Manfred and Callum shoveled snow on their tracks and flattened it down as best they could. They threw tree limbs onto the ground where the path to the estate would have been visible to passersby. Then they were back amid the long line of refugees, and although they heard no cannon fire to the east, one young mother reported that Russian tanks had been seen as close as Butow, and by all means they had to keep moving.

FOR A WEEK NOW THEY HAD WALKED WITH sONJE as part of their group, the woman a largely silent, stoic, and sepulchral presence. But she kept up and her crying in the night was soundless. That seemed to be about all that mattered to anyone.

Little by little they learned more of her history: Her father was a chemist who worked with the Luftwaffe, and when she had seen him last--months and months earlier, just days after Paris had been liberated--he had said he had been working on nonflammable aviation paints. She said she had believed him, but the mere fact that she felt the need to footnote her recollection this way led Manfred and Callum and the Emmerichs to conclude that she hadn't. Was the Luftwaffe actually producing shells that were filled with poisons or chemical gases? Certainly Manfred and Callum thought it was possible, especially when they learned that Sonje's father's project had been moved around so frequently to avoid Allied air attacks that she no longer had any idea where he was. And her mother? She had died when Sonje had been fifteen, in the very first days of the war. Consequently, Sonje and her younger brother had spent much of the conflict being shuttled between well-meaning family and friends. As far as Sonje knew, her brother was still alive. He had been a soldier since June and missing in action since October, but that, in her opinion, did not definitively mean he was dead. Didn't missing soldiers turn up alive and well every day? No one saw any reason to correct her.

theo overheard the grownups saying that they would reach Mutti's cousin's home within days, and certainly by the end of the week. He hoped so. The days were noticeably longer now than when they had left Kaminheim, but that only meant they were spending more time exposed in the cold and the snow, and he wasn't sure which he hated more. The other day he had heard another refugee, a gaunt and glum-looking old man in a fedora who was traveling alone and trudging along with a cardboard suitcase, sarcastically muttering aloud a part of the Fifty-first Psalm. "Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow," he kept mumbling, and when the man saw Theo was watching him and listening, he went on, "Ridiculous, isn't it? I am tired of all this whiteness. Really, what's so pure about snow? Would somebody tell me? Besides, that writer lived in the desert. He knew nothing about snow. Nothing!"

Theo wasn't sure he could walk much farther, or--when he was allowed to ride on one of the wagons--even endure many more days outside in the chill February air. That was the thing: If you walked you grew tired, but at least the exertion helped keep you warm; if you rested atop one of the wagons, you slowly froze. It was unpleasant either way. Still, he decided he preferred riding because something was happening to the toes on his left foot. There was a hole in the bottom of the boot and snow had begun to seep in. Three days ago the toes had started to itch and tingle; two days ago they had started to burn; now the skin was swelling and turning yellow, and the toes were as solid as miniature icicles--especially his two smallest ones. Even when he would bundle them up at night they didn't seem to improve. Of course, he wasn't exactly getting to warm them indoors around a fireplace most evenings. Many of the nights since they had left Kaminheim he had slept inside barns-- barns for horses and carriages and livestock--or burrowed beneath quilts and sacks of grain in the wagons with only the winter stars for a roof. And one of the few nights they had slept in beds had been their bizarre stay at Klara's. Another of their shelters was a crowded schoolroom with mattresses packed onto the floor like tiles, which by the time they had arrived had been colonized by red insects that swarmed upon them the moment the Volkssturm guards extinguished the lights. The creatures seemed to rise up from the filthy mattresses and burrow under their clothes and nip at their skin. He wanted to sleep with a sack tied around his head so they wouldn't attack his eyes, but Mutti was afraid he would choke and wouldn't let him.

He decided the best night had occurred four days ago now. That evening an elderly farmer just outside a village had taken them in and he had slept alone in a twin bed while Mutti and Anna had slept in the second bed beside him. Sonje had another room to herself and Manfred and Callum had slept in the living room by the fire. The farmer's wife had fed them all a hot soup, and they had eaten sausages and warm bread slathered with butter. That night--and all that food--had done wonders for his sister.

Still, Theo guessed that the reason the farmer had been so kind to them had had much more to do with Manfred than with Anna. Sick and dying refugees were everywhere. But Manfred? He was a soldier who had defended the Reich up and down the eastern front, and there was nothing this farmer and his wife wouldn't have done to thank him. They had practically cleaned out their cupboards when he had introduced himself.

He hadn't told his mother about his toes, because Mutti already had so much to fret about. His sister had improved, but she was still too weak to walk for more than an hour or two at a time, and she was spending most of the trek convalescing in whichever wagon two of their remaining three horses were pulling. And then there were the rumors of military disasters everywhere. The worst story? A ship had left Gotenhafen, a port beside Danzig, at the end of January and been sunk in the night by a Russian submarine. Nearly ten thousand refugees had been on it, and almost all of them, he had heard, had drowned in the half-frozen waters of the Baltic. The vessel was a cruise ship named the Wilhelm Gustloff, and his parents had once spent a romantic holiday on the boat in 1938, when he had been little more than a toddler. He remembered--or conjured images from stories and photographs--that he and Anna and their brothers had stayed with Uncle Karl and Aunt Uschi while their parents had been away.

He was pleased that Manfred and Callum seemed to be abiding by the rules of some unwritten truce. When Manfred had first joined them, he had simply been grateful that they weren't killing each other. After all, Callum was the enemy. Well, had once been the enemy. He wasn't quite sure what Callum was these days.

"Where will you go once we reach Stettin?" the fellow was asking the German corporal now. The two men were walking behind him and Mutti and Sonje, each of them leading one of the wagons. The sun had been up for almost three hours, but it was overcast again, and the air felt as cold now as it had when Mutti had gently woken him. It had been one of those nights in which he had slept in the wagon beside Mutti because the nearest barn already was overflowing with refugees when they arrived, and when he opened his eyes and emerged from under the blankets and quilts, he saw around him a field filled virtually to the horizon with people. Hundreds of them, and dozens and dozens of wagons. There were also the remnants of the fires that had been built in the night, all started by the men and women only after they had shoveled out holes in the snow and managed somehow to ignite the green--sometimes sodden--wood they had found in the nearby forest. Callum had built such a fire for them. What Theo found most interesting was how many families had arrived while he had been sleeping. Evidently, he had been in a much deeper slumber than he had realized.

Manfred didn't answer Callum's question, and so he turned around, curious. The corporal smiled at him and winked good-naturedly.

"You can't keep this up forever, you know," Callum continued. "Don't you have to be someplace? Isn't your company missing you?"

"I would think you'd be happy I'm here," Manfred said, clearly avoiding a more revealing response.

"I would think you'd be worried about being shot as a deserter."

"Deserter? POW? Maybe they should just hang us both. You watch: When we get to Stettin, there will be a scaffold in the center of town. For all we know, there will already be bodies swinging in the wind."

"You're frightening Theo."

He turned away, but only briefly, a little annoyed that Callum would presume he was so easily scared. "I've seen worse," he said petulantly, and in his mind once more he saw the refugees on the Vistula being thrown into the roiling, frigid river, and the bodies of the Russian soldiers after Manfred and Callum had ambushed them.

Manfred nodded approvingly at him. "See?" he said to Callum. "It takes more than a few hanging corpses to scare Theo."

He had the sense that Manfred was trying to rile Callum. Needle him a bit. They were all getting a little testy. And while he had indeed seen worse than hanged corpses, he also knew this sort of talk was going to disturb Mutti. Already she was shouldering an awful lot.

"Sometimes you people are such . . ." Callum began.

"Such what?" Manfred asked.

"You're such barbarians."

"Oh, you don't know a thing about my people. Or, for that matter, about me." Suddenly, he sounded morose. The irreverence was gone from his voice.

"I know you're not with your company. That's pretty clear. I know you haven't been since you joined us."

"Well, you tell me: What are you going to do in Stettin? Hide in this strange woman's attic? Or just wait on her front lawn for the Russians?"

For the first time Mutti turned back toward the men, and they halted the horses and came to a stop where they were. "You don't really believe the Russians will reach Stettin, do you?" she asked Manfred.

"I don't believe it. I know it. It's only a matter of time."

Theo saw his mother was working hard to remain in control. "Obviously I've been hearing people talk like that for days," she said. "Weeks even. But not you."

He sighed. "Only because you haven't asked."

"Then what will happen? Where will it end, tell me? The Oder? Berlin?"

"Well, my sense is--"

But before he could finish, Mutti was cutting him off. "And why? Why are they doing this to us? Will you tell me that?"

"They?"

"The Russians!" She turned to Callum, her hands upraised to the sky in bewilderment. "And where are your armies? Why aren't they joining us? Don't they understand what's at stake? Where are they? Tell me, in the name of God, where are they?" She was raising her voice in a manner that Theo almost didn't recognize.

"Mutti." The voice was weak but firm, and everyone looked toward it. It was Anna, sitting up in the back of the wagon. "Mutti," she said again.

Their mother shook her head and looked away in disgust. A woman perhaps Mutti's age wrapped in quilts and clutching a silver cage with a dead frozen parakeet inside it passed them; next came a pair of girls in their BDM uniforms with a lady who, Theo guessed, was their grandmother.

"That's enough," Anna went on. "None of this is Callum's fault and none of it is Manfred's. Things will look better in Stettin, I'm sure."

Behind them they heard a man's voice yelling for them to either get moving or pull their wagons off the road. They were stalling the whole column, he barked. And so almost without thinking Theo took Mutti's hand as if his mother were a toddler, and started walking her forward. Moving her and the wagons down the road. Her mother allowed herself to be led and Sonje obediently followed, and once more they were proceeding toward Stettin. He was relieved, though he hoped Mutti couldn't detect the way he was favoring one foot. Perhaps if his toes didn't look better by Stettin; perhaps if Anna continued to mend; perhaps if his mother regained her usually calm demeanor, he might tell her that something was wrong with his foot. But then again he might not. Everyone had so much to worry about, he wasn't sure he should add anything more.

that afternoon, Anna and Mutti and Sonje returned from what was supposed to be a brief foray into the woods to relieve themselves. They had been gone so long that Callum had grown worried and was about to start in after them. But then he saw them, and he noticed that Anna and Sonje were stomping through the snow with sacks dangling from each of their perfectly straight arms. The bags were so stuffed that they were the shape of giant pears, and when the women reached them Callum saw they were filled with carrots and turnips and beets. One even had a loaf of black bread. Apparently there was a farmhouse just beyond this copse of pine--they would all see it soon from the road--and Mutti had traded the last of her jewelry for the provisions. A gold necklace that Rolf had given her on their honeymoon, and her wedding band. It seemed like an awfully steep price to Callum, but they were all very hungry and ate ravenously before continuing on to the west.

uri saw the SS troops at the crossroads, a four-way intersection with a cemetery stretching toward them from the southeast corner, before either Callum or the Emmerichs did, and he knew instantly that he was going to be leaving this family. At least for the foreseeable future. He would have to disappear, and then rejoin them at the home of this Emmerich woman's cousin in a few days or weeks--depending upon the speed with which the front continued to disintegrate. There were four soldiers, Waffen SS in their camouflage uniforms, and two of them were brandishing Bergman submachine guns, smoking cigarettes, and watching the procession. The other two were talking to a middle-aged couple, reviewing their identification papers. The man, whose hair was graying and thin, was at least fifty, and yet he was nonetheless about to be drafted. There was an open truck behind the soldiers with a dozen pathetic-looking fellows--feeble and frail and some quite old-- sitting or standing nervously behind the rails in the rear.