Read Online Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian - Free Book Online Page A

almost certainly his mother and father were dead. Given the way their health had been deteriorating in their last few months in Schweinfurt, they were probably dead wherever they had gone. But Rebekah? She looked like a fit young woman, and thus was likely to have survived the initial selection at any of these camps. Joachim hadn't known much, but he told Uri that--as far as he knew--at least some of the Jews from Schweinfurt had been sent to work in clothing and munitions factories.
    Now Uri repeated his question to this other soldier, unsure whether Joachim hadn't answered him because he was contemplating a response or because he was just so drunk that he hadn't been listening. And so Uri asked again: You did this yourself?
    This time Joachim looked him squarely in the eye, and after a beat nodded. And so Uri shot him. He reached for his pistol and blew a hole the size of an orange into the part of Joachim's face where there once had sat a jowly cheek and a champagne cork of a nose, sending the body tilting backward in the chair and onto the floor.
    Uri stood, contemplating for a moment whether to bury the body, but then decided there wasn't a reason to bother. The front was unstable and the Polish partisans were taking greater liberties all the time. Other than in Warsaw, where the uprising was being smothered with barbarous ease, the Germans were too busy trying to consolidate their lines and keep the Russians at bay to waste any manpower on the partisans here near the front. And so whenever somebody found this Joachim's body, they were as likely as not to assume it was the work of the partisans. Or the Russians.
    Or, perhaps, some reservist named Henrik Schreiner.
    Once more Uri would flee, leave this role of Henrik Schreiner behind, and take the name and uniform of some soldier who had just died or whom Uri himself would murder.
    Joachim wasn't the first Nazi Uri had killed. Far from it. He wasn't, Uri realized, even the first he had killed in a kitchen.
    That distinction belonged to the pair of SS troopers he had met almost a year and a half ago now, within days of the night he had jumped off the train on the way to a death camp.
    n another kitchen, another shack. A spring evening, 1943.
    Uri was watching the old woman, her back almost parallel to the floorboards in her kitchen, drop the potatoes in the kettle that hung on a rod over the flames in the fireplace. Her mouth was a lip-less, toothless maw, and she spoke a dialect that he was relatively sure would have been largely incomprehensible to him even if the woman had done more than mumble or had had any teeth. She reeked of garlic and sweat and what he had come to believe was chicken shit. He presumed that he didn't smell a whole lot better, though he had tried to clean himself up in the small stream he had come across a few kilometers from the railroad tracks. Unfortunately, the water was fetid with oil and gasoline and he had been forced to use one of his socks as a washcloth.
    After the potatoes were in the pot, she looked over at him and motioned for him to help himself to one of the limp, rotting stalks of what he thought may once have been celery in a chipped bowl on the table. A film the color of a robin's egg coated the woman's eyes completely, but she insisted she was not totally blind. Still, she was blind enough that she hadn't questioned him, despite his tattered clothing and limp, when he had told her that he was with Organisation Todt and he was researching the area for a railroad spur they were contemplating. She lived alone with a half-dozen chickens in this ramshackle cottage on the outskirts of the village--no electricity or telephone or running water--and he guessed he would be safe here until she ventured into the small hamlet and told someone there was a stranger passing through. He felt a bit, in this regard, like Frankenstein in that moment in the story when the monster is befriended by the blind old man in his house in the woods.
    He thought