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

about how he had always liked that part of the book, and how his sister had, too. His family's copy of the novel was tattered and old, because it was one of the stories the Nazi regime had considered decadent. They had banned it, and so Uri's edition had been his father's when he had been a teenaged boy.
    He wondered where his family was now. How he could go about finding them. Whether he could go about finding them. Probably not. He realized he had never been so alone in his life, and the sensation was so upsetting--disturbing both because his family was gone and because he felt, on some level, that he had deserted them--that he imagined if he were a child he would just curl up in a ball and wail. He knew he would never have jumped from the train if his parents or Rebekah had been in that cattle car with him.
    The woman insisted that she was, like most of her neighbors in the town, a German who had never fully accepted Polish rule for the two decades between the wars. Whether this was true or she was lying to him because she believed he was a Nazi was irrelevant in his mind. No doubt, she was a staunch anti-Semite. But he wouldn't have given a damn if she were the devil himself, because for the first time in four nights he was going to sleep in neither a cattle car nor the woods. Granted, his bed was a rag-filled comforter in a corner of a kitchen that, he speculated, hadn't been mopped in his lifetime. But he was exhausted and, thus, deeply relieved by the prospect of sharing a nook in this cottage with the rats and the spiders and the balls of living dust the size of his fists. He was grateful to this old woman, and if it wouldn't have revealed too much about his life and put himself at risk, he would have thrown himself at her feet and kissed those gnarled toes with mustard-colored talons for nails.
    uri awoke the next morning with the sun, and for a moment was unsure where he was. He thought he must have slept oddly for his hip and his knees to be so sore. Then, when he heard the chickens outside the back door, he recalled the woman, the cottage, and the train. Gingerly he stood and looked around for her, wondering if she was outside feeding the birds. She wasn't. Nor did she seem to be planting potatoes in the rows of mounds that marked most of her yard. For dinner last night they had eaten potatoes from last autumn's harvest, eggs, and still more moldering celery. He wasn't sure if this old woman ever ate anything but potatoes and eggs and moldering celery. Still, he had eaten ravenously. He was glad the woman was blind: His own mother would never have forgiven the ill-mannered barbarity with which he had devoured the meal.
    She had an outhouse, primitive he guessed, even by the standards of outhouses, beside the chicken coop, and he was just about to pick his way there through the birds when he heard the voices. Neither, he realized with alarm, was the impenetrable blend of Polish and German and who knew what else that marked the woman's conversation. They were speaking German--his German. Bavarian German. And, worse, they were male.
    He peeked carefully through the remnant of what she had told him was her late husband's nightshirt that served now as a window curtain, and felt the hairs on his neck bristle and a wave of nausea rise up from his abdomen into the back of his throat. There approaching the front door were a pair of soldiers in the black uniforms of the SS. They were young and tall and moving with the assurance of predators in a wood in which they know they are the very top of the food chain. A chicken scuttled across their path, and one of the men kicked it so violently that the bird squawked in pain as it briefly went airborne. Uri fell away from the window, against the wall, realizing that they were about to knock, would hear nothing, and then enter the shack. There was no lock on the door, but he didn't believe it would have mattered if there had been. They would have come in anyway, because the old