Skeletons at the Feast

Chapter One

USUALLY, IT WAS ONLY WHEN ONE OF THE LOCAL SOLDIERS was home on leave that Anna and her girlfriends ever saw the sorts of young men with whom, in different times, they might have danced. And, as the war had dragged on, the pool of marriage prospects-in Anna's mind, often enough that meant merely her older brother Werner's acquaintances-dried up completely. The soldiers were either missing or disfigured or dead.

But then came the POWs. Seven of them, sent from the prison camp to help with the harvest.

And a week after the POWs arrived at Kaminheim, when the corn was almost completely harvested and everyone was about to begin to gather the sugar beets and the apples, there came four naval officers in search of a plow. They were planning to mark a groove through the estate that would be the start of an antitank trench. When it was complete, the trench would span the length of the district, bisecting some farms, skirting the edges of others. Meanwhile, different officers were visiting neighboring estates as well, and the Emmerichs were told that at some point in the coming month hundreds of foreigners and old men would follow them, and descend on the estate to actually construct the trench.

And while the very idea of an antitank trench was alarming, the presence of all those handsome young men-the Germans, the Brits, and that one very young Scot-made it a burden Anna was willing to shoulder. This was true, at least in part, because she didn't honestly believe the fighting would ever come this far west. It couldn't. Even the naval officers said this was a mere precaution. And so she would flirt with the Brits during the day in the fields, where she would work, too, and dance with the naval officers in the evenings in the manor house's small but elegant ballroom. Mutti would play the piano, joined after that first night by Callum Finella on Uncle Felix's accordion, while her father-though distracted by the news from the east-would look on benignly. Sometimes Theo would put his toy cavalrymen away and watch as well, appalled in the manner of any ten-year-old boy that these brave and accomplished soldiers wanted to waste their time with the likes of his sister and her friends. He followed the men around like a puppy.

Helmut did, too. But Helmut actually would work with the officers as long as their father allowed him away from the harvest, helping them to find their way around the endless acres of Kaminheim, and thus mark out the optimum design and placement of the trench. Then, after dinner, he would dance with Anna's friends-girls who, previously, he had insisted were too puerile to be interesting. Seeing them now through the eyes of the navy men, however, he was suddenly discovering their charms.

Certainly Anna worried about her older brother, Werner, who had already been wounded once in this war and was fighting somewhere to the south. But she had rarely spent any time with men as interesting as this eclectic group who had descended upon their farm that autumn. She and Helmut had learned to speak English in school, though she had taken her studies far more seriously than her brother, which meant that she alone in the assemblage could speak easily to everybody-the POWs during the day and the naval officers at night-and appreciate how erudite and experienced everyone was. At least, she thought, in comparison to her. She was, on occasion, left almost dizzy as she swiveled among conversations and translated asides and remarks. And the longer stories? She felt like a star-struck child. When she was in grade school she had met English families the winter her family had gone skiing in Switzerland, but by 1944 she remembered little more than a very large man in a very poor bear costume, and the way she and the English children together had endured his clownish shenanigans because all of the parents had thought the fellow was wildly entertaining. But since the war had begun, she hadn't been west of Berlin. In the early years, they had still taken summer holidays on the beaches of the Baltic or ventured to Danzig for concerts, but lately even those trips had ceased completely. Two of their POWs, however, had seen the pyramids; another had been to America; and Callum-the youngest of the group, the tallest of the group, and the only one from Scotland-had been born in India, where his father had been a colonial official, and had traveled extensively throughout Bengali and Burma and Madras as a little boy.

Even the German naval officers were more interesting than any of the country boys-or men-she had met in her district. They, too, had seen places in Europe and Africa she'd only read about in books.

Initially, she had worried that there might be unpleasant sparks when the Germans and the Brits crossed paths, especially on the first morning when the naval officers would be marking out a segment of the antitank trench in the very same beet fields where the POWs were working. But the two groups of men had largely ignored each other.

It was the next day, when she was working alongside the prisoners in the apple orchard, that one of the POWs-that exuberant young giant named Callum-segued from the usual flirtatious banter to which she had grown accustomed and had come to expect from him, to guarded innuendos about Adolf Hitler and then (even more problematic, in some ways) to questions about the work camps.

“You're such a nice girl, Anna, and so sharp,” he said, as the two of them stood together beside a particularly wiry tree, resting for a moment midmorning. There was a military policeman who must have been somebody's grandfather standing guard a hundred meters away, but he was so old he probably wouldn't have heard a word they were saying if they had been standing directly beside him. “And your family is much more hospitable than necessary-given the circumstances and all.” The POWs were sleeping in the bunkhouse that the farmhands had used before they had either run off or been commandeered by the Reich for work in the mines and the munitions factories.

“Thank you,” she said simply. She was unsure where this conversation was going, but that opening, that apparent surprise that she was such a nice girl, had her slightly wary. She'd been laughing with Callum for days, and the thought crossed her mind that perhaps she had misjudged him. Grown too comfortable-too friendly-with him. With all the POWs.

“So, I was wondering,” he continued, his voice nonchalant. “What do you think your Hitler is doing with the Jews?”

“My Hitler? You make him sound like one of my horses,” she said, aware that she was not answering his question.

“I didn't mean that. I meant…”

“What did you mean?”

“I had a mate in Scotland who was Jewish, a chum I played soccer with. We were friends, our parents were friends. He had family somewhere in Germany. And they just disappeared. There was talk of them trying to come to Edinburgh, but they couldn't get out. Eventually, the letters just dried up. Stopped coming. Then, at the stalag this summer, I met two chaps from Wales who had been in intelligence. And they said-”

She cut him off: “At school, they told me not to ask when I inquired. They told me I didn't know what I was talking about.”

“But you asked?”

Aware that she couldn't help but sound oversensitive, she answered, “Maybe it would surprise you, but I do have a brain behind my eyes. Yes, I asked.”

“It wouldn't surprise me a bit,” he said, smiling.

“I asked them where the Jews were going,” she continued. “Before the war, my parents had friends in Danzig who were Jewish. That's where my father went to university: Danzig. He grew up on a farm in another part of Prussia, but for a time he considered becoming a lawyer. But he's a very scientific man. And he likes working the earth too much. Anyway, he has never understood the Nazis' obsession with Jews. Never. My mother? It's different for her: She's lived her whole life here. She, too, thinks it's ridiculous, but she has always been a little oblivious of anything that doesn't involve the farm or this corner of the country.”

“They're both party members, right?”

She nodded. “My father wouldn't have the contracts he has if he weren't a member of the party. Even I know that.”

“Tell me, then: These friends. Your parents' Jewish friends. Where are they now?”

“One, I know, was my father's banker. I don't know his name, but he took very good care of Father and Mutti on their honeymoon. The inflation was so horrible that suddenly they couldn't pay their bills and Father's stocks were worth nothing. Somehow, the banker solved everything for them and they had a perfectly lovely holiday after that.”

“What do you think became of him?”

“He and Father lost touch. But I can tell you this: My father wrote letters on his family's behalf to different people. I don't know who or what the letters were supposed to accomplish. But he wrote letters for other friends, too. And for a few weeks in the summer of 1940, my parents had some Jewish friends who lived with us: a younger couple and their baby. A little baby girl. She was adorable. They had lost their apartment in Danzig. I was thirteen and I always wanted to babysit, but the mother wouldn't let the child out of her sight.” She could have gone on, but it was a memory she tried not to think about. There had been some talk about hiding the family-and hiding was indeed the word her parents had used-but so many people in the village had been aware of the Emmerichs' visitors from Danzig that the couple had refused her mother and father's offer of sanctuary and simply disappeared into the fog one August morning.

“I'm badgering you,” he said. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to. I have a habit of talking too much. You might have noticed.”

“You're inquisitive,” she said, unable to mask the small tremor she heard in her voice. The truth was, she didn't want to be having this conversation. She knew she wouldn't dare discuss these sorts of things on one of the streets in the village or in a city. One never knew who might be listening or how they might be connected to the party. And, suddenly, she felt an odd spike of defensiveness. “But you tell me: How am I supposed to know where everyone is in the midst of a war?”

“Well,” he said evenly. “You can keep track of the Jews because of the stars on their clothes. You've seen them.”

“Yes, of course I have. I've seen them in Danzig and I've seen them in Berlin.”

“Lately?”

“I haven't been to Berlin lately. Or Danzig.”

He used a handkerchief to wipe the perspiration away from his temples. The hair there was a bay that reminded her of Balga, her favorite horse. “The folks who will be coming to build the antitank trench,” he began, and she could tell that he was choosing his words with great care. “You know, actually digging where those navy blokes are leaving the plow marks? They're the lucky ones.”

“They'll be more prisoners like you.”

“Maybe. But I think they're going to come instead from those work camps. Not the prison camps. It will take hundreds of people just to dig through your farm. And, besides, it's one thing to put a group of us soldiers to work harvesting apples and corn and sugar beets. Trust me, this is luxurious compared to life in the stalag, and we are all deeply appreciative of your family's kindness. But it's quite another to make us dig antitank trenches. The Red Cross and the folks who penned the Geneva convention wouldn't exactly approve.”

“So, the workers will be the criminals from the camps? Communists and Gypsies. Why should that trouble me?”

“And Jews. That's my point, Anna. They're in those camps for no other reason than because they're Jewish.”

“What?”

“The Jews have been sent to the camps.”

“No,” she said. “No. That's not true.”

“I'm sorry, Anna. But it is.”

“The Jews have just been resettled,” she continued, repeating what she had been told at school and at her meetings with other teen girls in the Bund Deutscher Mädel whenever she had asked the question, but until that moment had never said aloud herself. Somehow, verbalizing the idea made it seem ludicrous. She certainly didn't add what so many of her teachers or BDM leaders had added over the years: They have to be resettled because they are not Aryan. They are inferior in every imaginable way, they are worse than the Russians and the Poles. Most have nothing that resembles an Aryan conscience, and they are interested in nothing but their money and mezuzahs and diamonds. Many are evil; all are conniving.

“And doesn't even resettlement seem, I don't know, a trifle uncivilized-even if it really is what's occurring?” he went on. “Think of that little family that was with you when you were thirteen. Why do you think there was talk of hiding them? I mean, suppose my government in England just decided to ‘resettle’ the Catholics-to take away their homes, their animals, their possessions, and then just send them away?”

Another prisoner, the balding mason named Wally, passed by with one of the wicker baskets they used for the apples and gave Callum a look that Anna recognized instantly as the universal sign to shut up. His head was cocked slightly and his eyes were wide. Callum ignored him and continued, “Those intelligence chaps from Wales. They told us about another camp. One further east in Poland. They had heard rumors-”

“I've heard rumors. We've all heard rumors. I've listened to your propaganda on the radio.”

“You listen to the BBC? That's illegal, Anna, you know that,” he told her, his voice mocking her good-naturedly.

“Everyone listens. And you know that.”

Wally dumped his apples in one of the shipping crates in the back of a wagon and started to say something, his mouth opening into an anxiety-ridden O, but then stopped himself and returned to the trees where he was working, shaking his head in bewilderment.

“Besides,” she said, angry now, “what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to go have tea with the führer and advise him on policy?” He paused, seeming to think about this, unsure what to say. She decided to press her advantage. “You would be in serious trouble, you know, if I told anyone what you were saying.”

“Indeed I would. I am putting my trust completely at your discretion.”

“Why?”

“Because you are very pretty and very smart, and until I was sent here I hadn't spoken to a girl who was either in a very, very long time.”

“Spare me,” she said, but she couldn't help being flattered. “I've gone just as long without the company of boys. They're all off fighting somewhere.”

“Ah, but then your navy men arrived,” he said, and she realized he was actually a little jealous of them. He seemed about to say more when Wally returned, this time accompanied by the Yorkshire schoolteacher named Arthur Frost. “Come along, Callum,” Arthur said firmly, “those apples won't pick themselves. No more dillydallying.”

Callum nodded agreeably and left, turning back to Anna once to bring his index and middle finger to the tip of his lips. At the time, she thought he was shushing her; later, she would conclude he had in fact blown her a kiss.

THEO MOVED TWO of his toy cavalrymen to the front of his column, and then had them ride to the river that Anna had helped him paint a year ago now on a piece of barn board. The board was at least a meter and a half square and he could carry it by himself-but just barely. Helmut had found it and his father had sanded it flat. In addition to the river, he and Anna had also painted trees and wooden fences on it, and a long trench winding its way down one of the sides, all as if seen from a low-flying airplane. He had wanted to add barbed wire near the trench, but Anna had convinced him that it would reduce the number of conflicts he could reenact by limiting his scenarios to the Great War. The trench, she had suggested, could be a streambed that had dried up in the summer if he wanted to stage a battle from the nineteenth century.

“Or,” he had suggested helpfully at the time, “one of the fire-fights Werner has been in.”

“That's right,” she had said, but he had been able to tell by the pause and the way her voice had quivered just the tiniest bit that for some reason she was troubled by the idea of him using his lead soldiers to reenact battles along the eastern front. He hadn't really expected at the time that he would, because he had only a pair of toy tanks, and battles these days demanded lots and lots of armor. Moreover, his two tanks were of a different scale than his lead soldiers. They were from another collection and they were barely the height of his fighting men, which meant that he rarely used them.

He did know boys who owned model tanks that would have worked quite well with his men. But they wouldn't have shared their tanks with him and he never played with them. He wanted to, and he would have been happy to join them if they had ever asked-he would have been happy and flattered and more than a little grateful-but they never did. Moreover, he knew they never would. Once he made the mistake of telling some of the boys in school about the scene he and Anna had painted for his soldiers, hinting that they should come to Kaminheim and bring their own model cannons and tanks, but they had laughed at him and suggested that they would sooner have gone and played in Moscow. It wasn't, of course, Kaminheim that kept them away; it was him.

He had set up his playing board this evening after dinner in a corner of the dining room underneath one of the sconces, and these two cavalry officers were reconnoitering the terrain. It was the summer of 1870, and they were deciding whether this might be a good spot to try and force a battle with the French Army of the Rhine.

He heard his father and the naval officer named Oskar in the hallway walking toward Father's office, and he went very still. Oskar had small eyes, a high forehead, and almost no lips, but he was calm and intelligent and Theo knew that his parents respected him. He heard his father pushing the door shut, but it didn't close all the way and he could hear some of what they were saying if he didn't move. They were discussing, as the grown-ups did all the time these days, the Russian front, but it seemed that Oskar was talking as well about the attempt that summer on the life of the führer. A few months earlier, in July, a group of officers had set off a bomb in the führer's headquarters in Prussia. Hitler had survived, but it seemed the conspiracy was extensive. Even now, months later, the SS was still rounding up individuals who were involved. At school and among the Jungvolk, people referred to those officers as traitors and discussed with undisguised glee how cowardly they had been when they were executed for their crime, but Theo had the sense when the subject came up at dinner that his parents believed the plotters had only had Germany's best interests in mind.

It seemed, from what Theo could hear, that Oskar did, too.

“The problem,” the officer was telling his father now, “is that we can't win the war. But we can't negotiate a peace now because of what some of Hitler's lackeys have done.”

“A negotiated peace was never an option. Churchill and Roosevelt said years ago they would only accept a complete surrender,” his father said.

“We are speaking in confidence, true?”

“Of course.”

“Have you heard about the camps?”

“I've heard whispers.”

“When the Russians find them? Or the Americans and the Brits? There will be hell to pay.”

“Tell me: What do you know?”

Suddenly Theo's heart was beating fast in his chest, in part because his father and this officer were discussing the possibility that Germany might actually lose the war, and in part because of whatever it was that Oskar was about to reveal. Before the officer had continued, however, there were great whoops of laughter and the sound of the front door swinging open. He felt a rush of cool air. Two of the other naval officers, Oskar's friends, had come inside, and then he heard Anna and Mutti greeting them and helping them off with their coats. Any moment now they would bring that giant Scotsman in from the bunkhouse and hand him the accordion, and everyone would start dancing. No doubt, one of Anna's friends had arrived with the officers. The two men had probably been off somewhere picking her up.

His father and Oskar emerged from the office, and Oskar greeted his associates. His father noticed him now on the floor and knelt beside him.

“I didn't hear you out here,” he said, and he rubbed the top of his head. “Have you been playing long?”

He had the sense that he would worry his father if he told him that he had. And his father had worries enough right now.

“No. I just sat down,” he answered.

This seemed to make his father happy. He motioned down at the cavalrymen. “The battle of Mars-la-Tour?” he asked.

“I hadn't decided.”

“Oskar reminded me of a book I think you're old enough to read now. It has a wonderful description of Von Bredow's Death Ride and the Prussian cavalry charge. Would you like me to see if I can find you a copy?”

“Yes, thank you.”

Over their shoulder one of the officers was boasting that he had brought honey for the schnapps from the village, and Theo heard a female voice he couldn't quite recognize start to giggle. No doubt, it was indeed one of Anna's friends: She had so many. Another night, Theo thought, he might have continued to move his lead soldiers around the board, alone on the dining room floor, but not this evening. He would join the crowd that would gather in the ball-room. Perhaps if he was unobtrusive, the grown-ups would let down their guards and he might learn whatever it was that Oskar had been about to reveal.

ANOTHER DAY, CALLUM told Anna about his uncle's library in Edinburgh. His uncle was a university professor there, and among the books on his shelves were novels by Russians that he was confident would convince her that not everyone born east of Warsaw was a barbarian.

“I don't think that,” she said. “My mother might. But I don't.”

Still, she was only dimly aware of most of the authors he mentioned. She wondered if their books had been banned in Germany, or whether they simply weren't available in their rural corner of the Reich. The same seemed to be true of movies he had seen, and specific operas and dramas he'd attended. It all made Callum seem almost impossibly erudite for someone so physically imposing and, yes, so young-it was hard to believe he was only twenty-and it caused her to rue, for the first time, all of the things she was being denied.

They also compared the beaches on the Baltic with those along the North Sea, and the castle ruins that dotted their landscapes. She expressed envy for how civilized the winters sounded in Scotland, and he, in turn, said he thought Scotch farmers would be jealous of the soil in which her family grew sugar beets and corn, and cared for their apple trees.

She found herself wishing she had a fraction of the stories and experiences he had, and worrying that soon he would come to find her boring. All she knew, she realized, were horses. Horses and housework. Her father had taught her to ride-and, in all fairness, to ski and to hike-and her mother had groomed her well to be the wife, someday, of a farmer. A gentleman farmer, certainly. A landowner. An aristocrat, even. But, like her father, a farmer nonetheless.

He was completely unlike her three brothers-even little Theo-whose posture had always been perfect at the dining room table, and who seemed to stand with their ankles together and (inevitably) their arms folded imperiously across their chests. Could Werner and Helmut ever be anything but stern? She didn't think so. Perhaps there was still hope for Theo, but already he was being trained to be a soldier in carriage if not, in the end, in profession.

And yet their father was no martinet. He laughed and drank beer and had stories of his own he could tell. He would slouch on occasion. Listen with them to the BBC. Tell jokes about the Nazis, despite the reality that both he and his wife were party members. She asked her father that night if he had ever read books by the Russians Callum had mentioned, and he said that he had. Mutti had, too.

Of course, they had grown up in a different era. A different time. The world they knew wasn't decorated solely with red flags and black swastikas, and a person could still read novels written by Russians.

Chapter Two

JUDENJAGD. A JEW HUNT.

Not unlike a fox hunt. You searched for the Jews in the woods, and then you shot them. You shot them if they were mothers hiding alone with their children; you shot them if they were old men oblivious of the roundup in the village and were here in the woods gathering mushrooms. Or, if you didn't have the time or the inclination to view it as sport, you marched them at gunpoint-or with a whip-back to the village. You sat them in the square in the heat of the sun, and you shot the first one who happened to stand up and stretch.

Because, of course, you had ordered them to sit and rising was an act of disobedience.

Sometimes, as they were marched to the square, they would actually call out their farewells to their neighbors. You'd walk them down the street, past the houses with the windows shuttered-the local people always closed their curtains and windows-and you'd hear, Farewell, Edyta. Or, Good-bye, Roza. Or, Zofia, look after my cat-please!

Occasionally, when you were waiting for the last of the Jews to be rounded up, you'd make the ones you had perform-badly, of course-circus stunts. A human pyramid. Walking the clothesline you'd string a few feet off the ground between half-tracks. Basic gymnastics. These little stunts were most fun if you happened to have the rabbi among the lot.

And when the square was completely filled and the Jews were hot and thirsty and weak, then you herded them to a field outside of the town-often at the edge of the very woods where the Judenjagd had commenced. There the men would dig the graves. Sometimes, this talkative, stocky soldier named Joachim continued, taking another long swallow from the bottle of vodka he had commandeered-he was drunk, Uri thought, because no one would tell a person they had done such things if they were sober-you had them strip first so they were stark naked when they started to dig. Then, when the hole was roughly the size of the foundation for a modest house, you would order them to toss their shovels from the pit and lie facedown in the muck.

And they would, they would, Joachim went on, his voice incredulous. They would, they all would, even though they knew they were about to be shot.

And then any of the men who hadn't been ordered to strip and dig would be told to undress and walk into the grave, and they would, too! Occasionally, they'd be told to lie on top of the corpses below them. Facedown. And they walked just like sheep. The women were a little more resistant, especially when they had babes in their arms or toddlers squealing at their shins. They might beg for the lives of their children. But, eventually, they'd go, too.

It wasn't easy work, he said, even though the Jews were never armed. And it was never pleasant. The locals hated the clatter of the machine guns so much that the women would blast the volume on their radios-nothing but static most of the time-so their children wouldn't have to hear the sound of their neighbors being executed. One time, Joachim continued, he had to walk into the pit himself with-dear God-the Ukrainian volunteers (absolute pigs, he said) and shoot the Jews whose bodies were continuing to twitch, and he discovered that he was ankle deep in their blood. There was so much blood, the bodies were actually starting to float.

And so Uri asked him-and he phrased the sentence in a very few words-You did this yourself? They were sitting alone in the kitchen of a house on the outskirts of Auków on a beautiful autumn evening in September, because their company commander was in the village itself, meeting with their major about the withdrawal that was about to begin from this corner of Poland. Not a retreat, exactly, because they weren't turning and running as fast as they could this time. Ostensibly, they were merely pulling back to a more defensible position.

Still, this fellow soldier named Joachim had grabbed the vodka because he knew-they all knew-that eventually they would run out of more defensible positions and that maniac with the mustache in Berlin would tell them to stand and fight where they were. When Uri had first approached him, he had hoped to discover something more about the Jews shipped east from Schweinfurt because of the man's history with the Einsatzgruppen and the police battalions, and because he, too, was a Bavarian from the neighboring city of Würzburg. Uri had already learned that many of the group had indeed gone to Auschwitz, but some veterans from the First World War and their families had been diverted elsewhere. Some to Theresienstadt in the west, and some to CheBmno in the east. Ostensibly, these other destinations were survivable. At least that was what people said. If his family had gone to Auschwitz, then 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.

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 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 woman must have ventured into the village this morning while he slept, and either ratted him out on purpose or inadvertently said something to someone that sounded suspicious. An engineer with Organisation Todt? Him? After three days in a cattle car and a night in the woods? Plausible if you're seven years old, maybe.

Now one of them was rapping on the door and calling inside. His voice was crisp, businesslike, brutal. And then he heard the word: Judenschwein. They were calling inside for the… Jewish pig. Telling him they knew he was there. They called a second time. Then the door was sliding open-it couldn't swing precisely because of the way it rubbed against the coarse wooden boards that served as the floor-and there was absolutely no place where he could hide, no place where he could run. No train from which he could jump.

And so, unsure what he really was going to do with it, he grabbed the poker that was leaning against the fireplace, the only item he saw with which he might defend himself, and he swung it like an ax into the first of the two men to come through the door, not aiming, just twirling, a dervish with a baton, the wrought iron slamming into the soldier's chest, breaking bones in his rib cage and knocking the wind from him, as it sent him spiraling back into his partner. Uri saw the second man, a corporal, reaching for the handle of the Luger in his holster, but the fellow never had the time to withdraw it. The next half-minute was a blur in which Uri would recall what he had done with only the vaguest outlines: Raising the poker over his head and repeatedly clubbing each of the soldiers in the skull until he had broken through bone and begun to mash the steaming gray and white tissue beneath it into pudding. Using the pointed tip of the instrument to spear the soldier who continued to groan through the abdomen, the metal poking a hole through his uniform jacket and shirt and impaling him against one of the floor-boards in a geyser of peritoneal fluid and blood. Kicking-one final repayment for the deaths he had witnessed in the cattle car and the myriad afflictions and indignities he had endured for about as long as he could remember-both corpses so violently that they bounced on the wood.

When he was finished he stood back, shaking, on the verge of hyperventilation. He heard the noise of his rapid, labored breathing, the clucking of the chickens in the yard, and what he thought for a second was the sound of water dripping. He wondered briefly if the old woman indeed had a pump somewhere that he had missed. Then he understood: A thin rivulet the color of claret was trickling out from beneath the soldier pinned to the floor with the poker and dripping off a warped, sloping timber near the front entrance.

The magnitude of what he had done slowly set in. He had killed someone. He had killed two someones. And while he had to presume that they would have killed him first if he'd given them half a chance-or shipped him off to a camp that would have done the dirty work for them-a small part of him couldn't help but wonder about their lives when they weren't wearing those black uniforms and polished black boots. For all he knew, they had wives or girl-friends; they may have had small children waiting for them somewhere beautiful. Dresden, maybe. Or some lovely village on the Rhine. And while it was merely conceivable that he had just killed somebody's husband or lover or father, it was absolutely certain that he had just killed somebody's son. He had just killed two some-bodies' sons. In addition to snuffing out the lives of these men, he had brought sadness and despair to their mothers. He leaned over the corpses and stared at the mangled remains of their faces, at the pitch of their noses and the clefts in their chins. One had a receding hairline, evident despite the great gaping gouge marks in his skull, which seemed to make him even more human to Uri. The other, his ear dangling by a thin tendril of pinkish flesh to a flap of skin by his jawbone-a leaf, he thought, clinging to a twig in October-had eyebrows so thin they looked girlish.

Imperceptibly, his exhausted gasping had morphed into sobbing, and he fell to his knees and allowed himself to cry.

URI DIDN'T KNOW if the old woman failed to return because she didn't want to be present while he was being arrested or executed, or whether a more prosaic concern had detained her. But it didn't really matter to him. All that counted was that she was still gone and he had cleaned up the cottage as best he could, sopping up the dead soldiers' blood with his own clothing and sweeping their fragments of bone and broken teeth into the hearth. Then he started the hottest fire that he could, hoping to reduce his pants and his shirt and his shoes to ashes, while cremating the pieces of human flesh that he had swept with a broom into the blaze. Meanwhile, he buried the two soldiers in a section of earth where the woman's potato mounds merged with the dirt and feed and excrement of her chickens. One of the soldiers, the one whose uniform had holes in the coat and the shirt, was fully clothed. The other was buried naked.

And when Uri started down the road away from the village, he was wearing the uniform of an SS corporal, and in his breast pocket were the official papers of a soldier roughly his age from Cologne with the alliterative (almost whimsical in Uri's mind) name of Hartmut Hildebrand.

Chapter Three

IN THIS QUADRANT OF THE CAMP THERE WERE ONLY women, all of them young and (once) healthy. The middle-aged women and the old women had been separated out and executed upon arrival. So had the sick. But, Cecile thought, when her mind could focus on anything other than hunger, they-the survivors-all looked like dying old men. Small, stooped, dying old men. Bony old men. Their heads had been shaved and the hair never seemed to grow back. Instead they grew sores that never quite healed. Cecile had worried when she arrived and most of her clothes were taken from her-her angora-trimmed coat, her cashmere sweaters-but it wasn't the loss of a skirt or a blouse that had caused her to panic. It was the confiscation of her purse. Inside it were the pads that she needed because she was menstruating. When she had asked an SS guard what she was supposed to do-standing there naked with two small rivulets of blood trickling down her thighs-the woman had laughed at her, pushed her over the edge of a metal table, and then shoved the handle of her riding crop deep inside her vagina. When she had removed it, she had insisted that another prisoner, a secretary from Troyes with whom Cecile would become friends, lick off the blood.

“Eat, eat,” the guard had ordered, “it's the most nutritious food you'll get here.”

Since then Cecile had stopped menstruating. Most of the prisoners had. Here she was a twenty-three-year-old woman from a wealthy family in Lyon, and she hadn't had her period in five months. And, obviously, she wasn't pregnant. She hadn't seen her fiancé since he had been taken to a forced-labor unit over a year ago, and now she was being told by the other prisoners that she should give up hope that she would ever see him again. Even if somehow he survived-she told everyone that although he was an accountant, he was strong and in impeccable physical condition-they said that she wouldn't. They said that none of them would.

But she disagreed. After all, she still had good shoes. Very good shoes. It was a small thing, but when life was reduced to conditions this primitive and painful and demeaning, the small things were magnified greatly. Moreover, those shoes were her fiancé's hiking boots, a trace of the man that she loved. Certainly the boots were too big for her, but everyone had warned her to have warm, comfortable shoes at her disposal when they came to take her away. And so she did. She had also brought with her a pair of her crocodile dress flats, largely because she couldn't bear to leave them behind. But, thank God, she had. Thank God, she had brought the boots and the shoes with her. The camp had been running low on the clogs they were distributing to the new prisoners, and so the guards who were processing the trainload from France had told Cecile to keep her boots and then given her crocodile shoes to the prisoner nearest her, that secretary from Troyes.

And so while she was astonished some moments that she had survived this long in these conditions-while she was surprised that anyone had-there were other times when she simply didn't believe that she was going to die here. Death was no abstraction to her: She saw it daily. But her own death? She was young and (once) beautiful, and she had lived a life of such perfect entitlement that her own death was almost completely inconceivable.

A CART WITH DESSERTS. A tart. A torte. A small pot with crème brûlée.

The cart was draped in white linen, and the desserts were surrounding a purple vase overflowing with lilies and edelweiss. The secretary from Troyes was beside it in her mind, reveling in the warmth of a dining room in a restaurant in Paris with her mother and father and sisters, until the wind lashed a piece of broken twig against her eye and she blinked. Instantly the vision was gone, all of it.

Still, she stood where she was as the cold rain continued to soak through her uniform and tattered sweater and fill those bizarre crocodile flats as if they were buckets. Her toes were beyond cold; they had fallen numb. When they were inside, she cherished these shoes, and she understood how much better off she was with them than with those coarse wooden clogs many of the prisoners wore. But not today. Today she was as badly off as everyone else.

Normally they toiled in a clothing factory near the camp, but this afternoon they were working outdoors. The pile of dirt before her was not yet frozen, but it had grown hard, and she decided now that she was too weak to jam the shovel into the mound one more time. She simply couldn't lift it, she could no longer bear to place her foot-so frigid that she felt spikes of pain through the sole of her shoe whenever she pressed it against the rolled shoulder of the spade-on the shovel and force it once more into the earth. Her name was Jeanne, and she feared the only person left in the world whom she trusted, Cecile, was at least fifty or sixty meters farther down the track. Too far to help her. Had she been next to her, Jeanne imagined that Cecile would say something-find the right words or the right tone-to give her the strength to help dig out these buried railroad ties for another half hour. Or, if there were no words left (at least ones that could possibly matter), to be with her when she expired.

Because, Jeanne concluded, she was going to expire. Right here, right now. With her back to this damaged railway station, a low building with gray stucco walls and a roof-largely collapsed-of blue slate that looked almost like ocean water. She was going to die right beside this angry, quiet, determined prisoner whose name she didn't know and whose teeth were dropping from her mouth as if they were acorns in autumn. It was a certainty. Every moment she wasn't digging was a moment the guards might see her not working. And then they would prod her to dig more, and-when she couldn't-they would shoot her. They shot girls in the fields all the time in the summer and on the way back from the clothing works in the early days of autumn; she'd witnessed at least a dozen and a half die this way. Why not shoot one more here by the station, where last night Allied bombs had buried the track beneath small mountains of earth? Other prisoners would then dig her grave, which couldn't be any more difficult than trying to do the work of a bulldozer to excavate a patch of railway. And Jeanne didn't want to make work any harder for anyone. And so, she thought, let it all end here. Right here. Fine. It had been too much to shoulder for too long.

She was about to open her cold, gnarled fingers-fingers that once were straight and manicured and, in her opinion, one of her best features-and let the shovel slip to the ground, when she felt an arm on her shoulder. She turned and saw Cecile. Somehow her friend had worked her way over to her.

“Dig. They'll bring us back to the camp soon,” Cecile murmured, jabbing her own shovel into a looser section of soil. “A few more minutes, that's all. It's almost dark. Just dig. Or look like you're digging.”

“I can't,” she said, and she began to cry. She dropped the shovel and fell to her knees. Behind her she was aware that Cecile was trying to lift her up, to hoist her off the ground as if she were already a cadaver. The woman's arms were sliding beneath her armpits, the bones in Cecile's fingers blunt rods against her ribs and the bones beneath her shoulders.

“Leave me alone,” she sobbed. “Go away! Just leave me here!” But she was, somehow, once more on her feet. Cecile reached down and handed her the shovel.

“Lean on it. Really, just lean on it for a moment. Catch your breath. Then shovel a little bit more. That's all. Then we'll be done. You'll see. Just another few minutes.”

Just another few minutes. This was what her life had come down to: A series of small increments to be suffered, brief moments of torture to be endured. A walk across the camp without an SS officer talking to you. Singling you out for… something. A day, one more, when the infections in your feet hadn't spread up into your legs. Another morning when you were able to avoid the certain death that marked anyone sick enough or stupid enough to ask to go to the camp hospital. Another few minutes of shoveling.

Yet she was standing again. And holding the shovel. As if the towering mountain of dirt before her were food on a plate and she were the well-fed little girl she'd been twenty years earlier, she used her shovel like a fork and pushed the earth around like a vegetable that didn't interest her.

“I HAD A CAT,” Cecile was murmuring in the dark of the barracks. “She had tortoiseshell fur.”

“Her name?” asked Jeanne, her voice the insubstantial wisp it became in the night. For a week now, if she tried to speak much above a whisper at the end of the day, she would be reduced to paroxysms of coughing that angered some prisoners and caused others to worry that there was nothing they could do for her. Either way, Jeanne loathed the way the coughing drew attention to herself.

“Amelie. My fiancé loved her. Carried her around in his arms like a baby.”

“Where do you think she is now?”

“I couldn't guess. But she's a survivor. She's alive somewhere.”

“In Lyon?”

“I presume.”

“My boyfriend used to hate cats.”

“What made him change his mind?” Cecile asked.

“He didn't. He died. You know that.”

“You know what I mean.”

“And you know what I meant. He didn't change his mind. That's all.”

Cecile hated the way almost every topic of conversation eventually circled back to grief and death. She had begun with Amelie, her cat, and wound up… here. Perhaps this was why almost nobody spoke in the night. What was the point? “Maybe he's alive,” she said simply. “You don't know for sure he died.”

“I do.”

“But how?”

Jeanne sighed so loudly and clearly that for a moment Cecile thought it was the wind. Then: “Because he wasn't like your cat. He wasn't a survivor.”

“What did he do?” a new woman nearby asked. Cecile didn't realize anyone else was listening to them.

“He was a jeweler,” Jeanne said. “He was much older than me. For a while, he fixed the Nazis' watches. Their ladies' necklaces. He hoped that he could protect us both by being useful.”

“How much older was he?”

“He would have been forty-seven this winter.”

Cecile smiled, though she knew Jeanne couldn't see her face. “He must have been a friend of your parents. He was, wasn't he?”

“My parents hated the idea I was with him.”

“Did he fight in the last war?” this other woman asked Jeanne.

“He did. He was wounded twice. He thought it was pathetic how quickly the boys lost this time. He always felt his generation would have fought much longer.”

Cecile thought about this. Her fiancé had fought hard. His whole regiment had fought hard. But one moment the Germans had been on the other side of the river from them, and the next there had been German tanks in their rear and German planes diving upon them and German artillery shells falling among them. What choice had they but to surrender? He had spent nine months in a POW camp before he was repatriated, and allowed, briefly, to resume his accounting practice. Soon after that he had been sent to work in a tire factory, and then-within eighteen months-to the forced-labor unit somewhere in the east. Neither job had demanded his skills as an accountant.

“That was a different war,” she said finally, hoping she didn't sound defensive.

“This isn't even a war. It's just a slaughter.”

“Soon the Russians will rescue us. They're fighting in Warsaw this very moment, you know.”

Jeanne rolled onto her side and groaned. “They're not. That's a rumor. The smoke? The Nazis are just burning the city. Last year they killed the Jews in the ghetto. Now they're killing the Poles.”

“Either way, there's fighting. And the Russians will get here.”

“Oh, God…”

“What?”

“You are always so hopeful. Maybe they'll get here, Cecile. Maybe. But this I know: Unless they get here tomorrow, or maybe the day after that, they won't get here in time for me.”

Cecile reached over and ran two fingers in circles over Jeanne's temples.

“That feels good,” the woman told her.

“Let me tell you a story,” Cecile said, resolved to find a memory she could share that no one, not even Jeanne, would associate with want and sadness and loss.

Chapter Four

MUTTI-IRMGARD WAS HER REAL NAME, BUT EVEN her husband now called her Mutti-was decorating a cake for Helmut with lingonberries while the Polish cook was baking bread. The kitchen was warm from the oven, a great iron box as black as the coal that fueled it. The cook was a woman from the village named Basha who Mutti guessed had been pretty once in a common sort of way but hadn't taken care of herself-she probably didn't get enough exercise or spend enough time outdoors-and thus had grown round and flabby with age. Her eyebrows were as thick and bushy as an old man's, and whiter than daisies. She had been with the Emmerichs almost a year now, arriving each day in the morning and staying until dinner was served.

Helmut, along with all the boys his age in his school, had been drafted into the Volkssturm and would be leaving in two days for training in Bromberg. The students had been told that their group would only be defending their district, but Mutti wasn't sure she believed this. And Helmut himself hoped this wasn't the case: In two months he would be joining the Wehrmacht anyway, hoping for the chance to fight in the sorts of faraway places his older brother, the visiting naval officers, and those English POWs all had seen.

“You know Mr. Emmerich will be next,” Basha was saying. “The Volkssturm will want him, too.”

“I know,” Mutti agreed. The cook wasn't precisely trying to start a fight, she decided, but she was endeavoring to poke at those spots that were the most tender. The Emmerichs already had one son in the army and a second now conscripted into the home guard. The idea that the country would take her husband as well was profoundly dispiriting. Mutti feared that she couldn't run Kaminheim on her own, especially once those workers-hundreds of them, perhaps!-arrived to dig the antitank trench. She had just returned from a shopping trip to Kulm, and even with her ration card it had been impossible to get half the items she needed. She felt that the natural order of things-a husband cares for his wife, and a mother cares for her children-was being upended.

“He fought the Russians twenty-five years ago, right?” Basha was saying.

“Twenty-seven. He rose to captain.”

“Then maybe he won't be needed in the Volkssturm.”

“No?” she asked, her voice in that single syllable betraying the small kernel of optimism the cook had given her. Perhaps he would be rewarded for his past service by being allowed to remain home. It didn't seem likely: Everyone was supposed to sacrifice for the Fatherland and the war effort, especially now.

“No. They'll give him some men of his own and put him right into the army instead. They'll send him off to face Ivan,” Basha continued, referring to the deeply feared Russian army with the oddly pejorative nickname some of the soldiers themselves used.

Mutti looked down at the bowl of frosting on the counter before her so the cook wouldn't see the way she had been taken in by this cruel joke. Dangling such a wondrous hope before her, and then whisking it away. Basha should be ashamed of herself. If Mutti had thought it was even remotely possible to find another cook, she would have fired the woman on the spot.

No, she wouldn't have done that. Mutti knew she was much fiercer in her mind than she was in reality. Besides, more days than not she actually enjoyed Basha's company, and the woman's relentlessly bleak sense of humor. Lately they had all been feeling the stress as the Russians had driven the army farther toward the borders of the Reich, and maybe they had all grown a little more snappish than usual.

She found three of the candles they used on the Christmas tree every year and placed them among the berries on the top of the cake. The twins' birthday was still months away, but the candles seemed like a cheerful idea to her. And Mutti desperately wanted something to seem cheerful-festive-right now.

“Well, if the army needs Rolf, that's where he'll go,” she told Basha, but the idea of her forty-nine-year-old husband being expected to fight the Soviet barbarians terrified her. He could still handle a rifle, but he hadn't shot more than foxes and hares on hunting parties in their park in a quarter century. And the weapons they seemed to use now? So different from that earlier war. So much more effective. So much more lethal. “We are all making sacrifices, aren't we?”

Both women looked up when they saw young Theo listening in the doorway. She thought the boy had taken his flat box with his wooden letters into the den to practice his spelling. This afternoon he was supposed to be working on his words and then, when he was through, with his penmanship. Clearly not. He had overheard what they had been discussing, and Mutti could see in Basha's eyes that the woman felt a small pang of guilt: It was one thing for her to torment a person she viewed as an entitled German aristocrat with the notion that her husband was about to be commandeered to fight the Bolsheviks; it was quite another to needlessly frighten a ten-year-old boy.

“Would you like a spoonful of icing?” Mutti asked her son the moment she saw him.

The child stared back at her, but said nothing. He was as shy as his two older brothers and Anna were extroverted, the sort of boy who was picked to play the enemy-the Russian or the American, usually-when the children played their loud, exuberant war games in the school yard. One night, in a moment of weakness before bed, he had let down his guard and confessed to her how most of the time he was just cast aside by the other boys and sent to the corner of the gymnasium or the field they had cordoned off as the POW camp. He would sit there, all alone, while the other children-even the girls as the army nurses with their pretend bandages made from white paper-ran and screamed and played.

“Icing?” she asked again when he remained silent.

Finally he shook his head no, and abruptly turned and dashed from the house. A moment later, through the kitchen window, Mutti saw him racing like a colt on his deceptively long legs-thin and sticklike, even in his wool trousers-along the manicured grass in the yard and then off into the apple orchard where the real POWs were at work.

THEO NO LONGER pretended to be one of Anna's horses when he ran-even when he was very little, he had never imagined he was his own pony, Bogdana, because that animal was too sweet and good-natured to fly across Kaminheim the way the stallions who had been named after castles would-but he did see the stallion Balga in his mind now as he raced away from the house and the kitchen and that witch of a cook. He ran past the elderly guard who more times than not seemed to have his ancient eyes closed, past the English schoolteacher and mason, and past the young men who he guessed hadn't done anything at all before they'd become soldiers. He was vaguely aware they were watching him, their hands full of apples, but he didn't care. He was just running, he was running fast. It was, in his opinion-and in the opinion of his schoolteachers and the women and old men who ran the youth camps where he spent so much of each summer-what he did best. He wanted to be as far as he could from the idea that his father might be about to be stolen from him, too. His father seemed to Theo to be the only grown man in the world who didn't seem to be lecturing him all the time about German honor and German bravery and German posture (what posture and bravery had to do with one another was inexplicable to Theo, but apparently they were related), or didn't find reasons to rap his knuckles with birch rods. Some days at school he would be so lost in a daydream that he wouldn't even be aware that his teacher, Fraulein Grolsch, was standing beside his desk until he would hear the whoosh of the rod and feel its sting on the bones of his knuckles. Of all the children in the school, there was no one whom Fraulein Grolsch-the niece of the district's gauleiter and someone who clearly cared passionately about all that Nazi marching and singing and flag-waving-seemed to dislike more than him. One day she made him march around the courtyard for two hours with a Nazi flag on a shaft so tall and heavy that he could barely lift it. If it fell, she warned him, she would beat him worse than she had beaten any child ever. His sin this time? He'd forgotten his pencil box at home.

Only when he had reached the edge of the orchard did he stop running and place his hands on his knees, catching his breath. As he gulped down great puffs of air, he looked up. There he saw two of the wicker baskets that were used to harvest the apples, and on the ground beside one was his big sister's navy cardigan sweater.

ANNA LEANED AGAINST one of the trees in the arbored apple orchard and felt the bark scratch her back through her blouse. She wondered how angry her parents or Helmut or Werner would be if they knew that just this moment she had kissed a Scotsman. She tried to envision the faces of the girls from her school or her summer camps if she were to tell them. Imagine: Her first kiss-soft, serious, mouths open and probing-and it had come from a prisoner of war. One moment they had been harmlessly flirting, as they did often, and the next they were kissing.

“Of all the places you've lived, which is your favorite?” she asked him now. It was not a subject that actually interested her this very second, but she felt she had to say something to fill the quiet that suddenly was enveloping them like a tent.

“Elgin,” he said simply.

“And that's in Scotland?”

“It is. Moray Scotland. North. On the ocean. But a very hospitable climate. That's where we lived when we returned from India.”

“Are your parents still there?”

He bowed toward her and she thought he was going to kiss her once more, and so she closed her eyes as a lock of his unruly hair fell away from his forehead and she parted her lips. But he didn't kiss her, and-embarrassed and angry-she opened her eyes. He was smiling, his face close to her, one arm straight against the tree behind her.

“You know,” he murmured, “I am sure someone could shoot me for kissing you. They wouldn't shoot you, of course. At least I hope they wouldn't. But me? It wouldn't be pretty, Anna.”

“Then why did you do it? Has it been that long since you kissed a girl?”

“Well, let's see. There were all those girls while I was being interrogated in France. And then there were the ones the guards brought into the prison camp for us. And, of course, there are just girls everywhere here on your estate. So, not all that long, really.”

She ducked beneath his elbow and gave herself some distance from him. She wished he had simply kissed her.

“You didn't tell me: Do your parents still live in…”

“Elgin.”

“Yes. That place. On the ocean.”

“My mother does. My father died.”

“How?”

“He drowned.”

The violence of his death jolted her, and she wasn't sure what to say. Then, after a moment, she told him honestly, “I'm sorry. I don't know what I'd do if something happened to my father-or to Mutti. Was he near the beach?”

“No. Nowhere near it, actually. Middle of the ocean.”

She saw behind him a dark red apple at the end of a spindly branch. It was enfolded by leaves and swaying ever so slightly in the wind. She understood she should leave this line of questioning alone, but she couldn't. And then, perhaps because it was better for her to speak aloud her conjecture than allow it to wallow inside her, she said, “It was a U-boat, wasn't it?”

“It was.”

“You must hate us.”

“I just kissed you.”

“Still. You must…”

“I try not to generalize with my hate. Certainly my father never did.”

“Your mother?”

“She's another story, a very interesting woman. Very complicated. She is quite capable of generalizing hate. As the wife of a colonial administrator, I gather, she started out rather well. But she managed to see slights everywhere. Especially when we were in India. I was just a boy, but even I could tell that she wasn't happy there. Didn't like being an outsider. Couldn't abide the heat. Still, she's resourceful-a bit like your Mutti. These days, she's a very tough war widow. Bitter. But, in all fairness, she is also extremely capable.”

“I presume she hates us.”

“Well, in her opinion you killed her husband and now you've taken her only son prisoner. So, yes, I'd say she doesn't have particularly generous feelings toward the Germans these days. But if she knew you, Anna, I think she might be slightly more forgiving. Not a lot, mind you. But you, I think, would at least give her pause.”

He leaned toward her again, but this time she kept her eyes open until she saw Callum close his and she felt his lips pressing gently against hers.

THE NAVAL OFFICERS left the Emmerichs' once they had finished gouging the long, painful-looking slices from the skin of the earth at Kaminheim, and Helmut went to the parlor in the manor house that night a little unmoored. Everyone felt that way: Suddenly, the very soil in which the family had grown sugar beets and apples and corn had been upended. And for what purpose? An antitank trench. And as deep as those great, sluicing grooves were, they were mere runnels compared to the chasms the naval officers said would replace them. Imagine, the captain had explained, the difference between a toddler's little dig at the seashore and an actual moat. After all, he'd added ruefully, these would have to stop tanks.

Helmut knew that he wasn't alone in his unease. Everyone felt a little anxious. But he also surmised that he was, justifiably, more anxious than the rest of his family-with the exception, no doubt, of poor Mutti-because he was the one who was leaving the next morning to join a Volkssturm unit in Bromberg. The reality was starting to sink in: He would no longer be a boy in short pants with a Hitler Youth dagger. He was about to become a soldier. And then, assuming he survived the next few months, he would graduate from the Volkssturm to the Wehrmacht. From a mere armband to a full uniform. To real training.

He thought it interesting that his mother had responded to the reality that her second son was now a man by baking him a cake and decorating it with lingonberries and candles-as if he were still a boy. Of course, those lingonberries had been delicious. Nevertheless, he felt as if the seriousness of what loomed before him had been diminished. It was as if Mutti didn't want to accept the fact that he, too, was about to become a soldier.

Alone now, he leaned over the table with the family's maps in the parlor. For over three years he had tracked the progress of the armies in the east, as they had neared Moscow and Leningrad and almost (but not quite) conquered Stalingrad. With toothpicks and colored paper he had made small flags denoting the divisions whose victories he would hear about on the radio, and whose defeats he would glean from rumor and innuendo and the simple fact that (suddenly) they seemed to be fifty or seventy-five kilometers west of where he had understood them to be. Occasionally, the German broadcasters would explain casually that the army was straightening its line or consolidating its front, but Helmut understood that was just a euphemism for withdrawal or outright retreat. It was clear that the Germans were not simply losing-Lord, that had been apparent for at least a year and a half-but that the end was near. The Russians were just east of Warsaw, and that summer there had been some sort of uprising inside the city itself. The Polish Home Army and Communists attempting to retake it block by block, he gathered. And while the rebellion was being successfully quashed-for all he knew, it was over now-the fact remained that the Germans there had their backs to the very same river that he had grown up with: the Vistula. Warsaw was a mere 180 kilometers to the southeast.

Only last year, nineteen months ago, the fighting had been as much as two thousand kilometers to the east. Of course, nineteen months ago they had also been fighting in North Africa. And France was a part of the Reich. As was Italy-the whole boot. Now Paris and Rome were gone, and eventually Warsaw would be, too.

He thought of his brother near Budapest-another of the great cities that would, he imagine, fall into the Allies' hands soon enough. Werner would have great scars on both of his legs for the rest of his life, a result of the burns he had endured when the tank on which he had been riding had been shelled and caught fire. Helmut didn't like the idea of Werner in a prison camp somewhere, but it crossed his mind that it wouldn't be the worst thing to happen to his brother at this point in the war if he was captured. Look at the way his own family was treating the Englishmen the stalag had sent them: They were more like houseguests than POWs. Surely the British or the Americans would treat his brother that kindly. Unfortunately, unless Werner's division was transferred to the Siegfried Line or Holland or Italy, that wasn't likely. If Werner was captured, it would be by the Russians, and that meant a prison camp in Siberia-if he didn't die first on the way there. Besides, it was almost inconceivable that his brother would ever wind up a POW: Werner would die fighting.

Helmut hoped he would die that way, too.

If, of course, he had to die.

In a perfect world, they would somehow find a way to repel the Russians and, just maybe, he himself would do something heroic in a great, final battle. Even though the Russians were on the verge of capturing Warsaw, it still didn't seem quite possible to him that these barbarians eventually would brutalize all of Europe.

From the ballroom on the other side of the house he heard the sound of music: Mutti was playing the piano and the Scotsman was playing the accordion. His uncle's accordion. If the naval officers hadn't left, there would be dancing, and he would have had to polka and waltz with one of Anna's friends: Frieda or Gudrun. Here, at least, was one small consolation to their departure: He thought Anna's friends were juvenile and frivolous-insufficiently committed to the war effort-and he didn't much like them (though lately, he had to admit, he did see the appeal of having a girl as pretty as Gudrun in your arms when you danced, and feeling her beautiful, small hands in yours).

He found it interesting that his father was allowing this Callum so much latitude. The other POWs had gone back to the bunkhouse for the night, where they belonged. Even their captain, that school-teacher, didn't seem to want Callum spending so much time in the house. It was, in the schoolteacher's opinion, fraternizing with the enemy.

Well, yes.

Perhaps that was precisely why his father was not simply allowing it, but was actually condoning it. Encouraging it. Maybe he was, in some way, trying to drive a wedge between Callum and his fellow POWs. Create a rift. Give them something to talk about other than, Helmut guessed, escaping.

Or, he wondered, did his parents actually like Callum? Clearly Anna did.

Helmut understood that his family didn't know the party leader well in their district, and had only met the governor once. This was farm country and the area was vast. But he knew that his father had never been impressed with either the party leader or the governor in their few face-to-face encounters. Nor did he approve of the way the district was being managed. Both officials had been brought in from Bavaria, the party leader actually taking control of a farm that previously had been owned by an officer in the Polish army, and running it about as poorly as humanly possible. His father had once called the two of them “real Nazis,” and he had meant this as an insult: In his opinion, they were uneducated and vulgar and coarse, and they didn't know how to handle an agrarian landscape at all. They didn't understand farmers at all. It was an insult to the region.

And they certainly wouldn't approve of the way a Scot POW was ingratiating himself into the Emmerich family.

One time, Helmut recalled, almost a year ago now, his teacher had pulled him aside and asked him all sorts of questions about his father. The teacher was an older man who took his party membership very seriously, and thought Rolf Emmerich did not treat his own with sufficient gravity. The teacher couldn't fight anymore, but he sure could march-and demand that his students march. Apparently, he felt that Rolf Emmerich had greeted him on the street with an insincere Heil Hitler. Had felt the salute was halfhearted at best, and downright condescending at worst. As if his father thought the very greeting had become a joke. This was what he had told Helmut, anyway. But it was also painfully clear to Helmut that the fellow had heard or overheard a lot more about his father's attitudes toward the party. Toward some of Hitler's lieutenants. Father was usually careful about what he said in public, and the truth was that he was of two minds about National Socialism. Certainly things had gotten better for most Germans. At least at the beginning. And while he wished that Poland and Germany had been able to negotiate a peaceful return of the German lands to the Fatherland instead of having to resort to war, he was as grateful as Mutti that Kaminheim was back where it belonged. But there was also an awful lot about National Socialism that he considered either ripe for ridicule or deeply troubling. The replacement of the old Christmas carols with those ridiculous songs about the solstice and motherhood? Absurd. The fixation on the Jews? Inexplicable at first. Then alarming. It was evident by the teacher's line of questioning that at some point his father had been indiscreet-perhaps made fun of those new song lyrics or the way one of the district's little Hitlers had been screaming at some rally-and the word had gotten back to this teacher. The salute, Helmut guessed, was only the last straw.

For a moment Helmut had paused in thought with the teacher, as they had sat alone in the classroom. It wasn't that he was contemplating actually validating the teacher's concerns or turning his own father in-even though there were moments when he considered his father's ambivalence about their government and their führer disloyal. It seemed to Helmut that the world had always been against Germany: jealous of its people and its culture, and determined to crush both. The country was fighting now for its very survival, and the last thing the führer needed was Rolf Emmerich badmouthing the party or party officials. Still, the primary reason that Helmut had sat there silently for seconds was the sheer unreality of the moment, the idea that here before him was an honest-to-God informant. Someone who ratted people out to the Gestapo. Perhaps there were those who needed ratting out. Shirkers and spies and people who really did want to undermine the regime. But not his father. And so Helmut had taken a breath and composed himself and, with as simple and unrevealing a face as he could assume, told his teacher that his father must have been distracted that day on the street when he saluted, and that his father cared deeply about the government and about the führer. Fearful that he hadn't said enough, he added quickly that they even had their signed photograph of the führer matted with red silk and framed, and it hung on the wall of their parlor. This was the truth. What he would have said if he were going to be scrupulously honest was that it hung there because his father was rarely in the parlor: He was more likely to be in the den or the dining room or the ballroom. Greeting a guest or a business associate in his office. It was Mutti who had cherished that image of Adolf Hitler-his mother had once had the sort of crush on the führer that was not uncommon among her middle-aged female friends-and it was Mutti who savored the light in the parlor. Still, he had said enough. The teacher let him go, and suggested they could speak again if Helmut had anything new to report: If he had heard or seen anything-heard or seen anything about anyone, not merely his father-that the teacher should know about.

As Helmut studied the placement of the flags of the German and Soviet armies on the map and the way the Reich was narrowing in its old age, he took some comfort from the reality that the party leader and the governor-his own teachers, even-clearly had far more pressing issues before them right now than the way the Allied prisoners were being treated at Kaminheim, or whether his father saluted people on the street with ample enthusiasm.

BEFORE BREAKFAST, when the sun had barely risen and the fog was only beginning to burn off the fields, Anna took Theo with her to the horse barn and together they saddled Balga and Theo's small pony, Bogdana. Anna honestly wasn't sure she had been as happy in years as she was in those final days of that harvest, and she felt almost flighty that morning. The two siblings rode past the fields where any moment the men would begin pulling the last of the sugar beets from the soil, past the orchards where Anna would join them in the afternoon, and past the pond where in August she had swum with her friends and her brothers those hot, steaming days when they hadn't been hiking or away at their summer camps. Anna was wearing a white linen shirt that she had ironed before going to bed last night, and the jodhpurs in which she thought she looked prettiest from behind. Never before had she worried about what she was wearing when she and her little brother had gone riding, but never before had there been a man at Kaminheim who had interested her in quite the way Callum had. She hoped she might see him-and, yes, he would see her-when they returned to the barn.

As they were riding through the marsh on the far side of the pond, Theo pulled his pony to a stop and called out to her.

“Yes, Theo?” she said, reining in Balga. The horse was dying to run-she could feel his muscles tensing beneath his satin coat-and Anna had the sense that when they had cleared the marsh she was going to have to let the animal air it out. Theo would be fine for a few minutes on his own.

“What will happen if the Russians get here?”

“The Russians won't get here,” she said reflexively. She wasn't sure she believed this, but she could hear the fear in her little brother's voice and felt the need to reassure him.

“But how do you know? How can you be so sure?”

Anna watched the pony, more plump than was probably healthy, snitch at a clump of high grass.

“I guess I don't know. Not for certain. But…”

“Tell me.”

“Well, it's one thing for them to take back the land we had conquered. It's quite another to take our land from us. Just imagine how fiercely Werner would be fighting if he were defending this country right here.”

Theo nodded and seemed to be taking this in. Then: “They might take Father, you know.”

For a moment Anna wasn't sure who they were. Did Theo mean the Russians? She must have looked puzzled, because Theo continued, “The army. Maybe the Volkssturm, but maybe the Wehrmacht.”

“Father? He's already done his duty-and that was a very long time ago. He's… old,” she said, and as that last word formed on her lips she couldn't help but smile in bemusement. Their father? In the army? He was strong and disciplined and smart, but these days he was a businessman and farmer. He ran the estate. She couldn't see him enduring the sorts of misery that had seemed to dog Werner. She didn't see why he should have to. “Why would you ever think such a thing?” she added.

“Yesterday I heard Mutti and Basha talking.”

“About Father leaving for the army?”

“Yes!”

She felt Balga once more straining beneath her and motioned to Theo that they needed to keep moving. When they reached the drier land on the far side of the marsh they began to trot, and over the sound of the horses' hooves she called back to her brother, “I'm sure if they did take him, it would just be for desk work. Right here, maybe. Or in Kulm. But he wouldn't be fighting like Werner.”

“Or Helmut soon,” Theo muttered.

“Yes.”

“But if Father does leave, there will hardly be any grown-up men left here at all. And that means I…”

“Go on.”

“It means I would have to be the man of the house. And I'm not ready for that. I know I'm not.”

“Oh, Theo, sweetie, you don't have to worry about such things!” she told him, working hard to suppress a small smile so he wouldn't think she was laughing at his expense when all she was feeling was affection for him. To her relief, he was still young enough to allow his vulnerabilities and his fears a small voice. All the other males-even the boys Theo's age-were already growing into blustering strongmen. Powerful Aryans who didn't dare admit to anyone that they just might be scared. “Everyone loves you as you are,” she went on. “No one expects you suddenly to be older than ten.”

“But I could be if I had to be. Don't you think so?”

“Of course I think so.”

“I just don't want to if I don't have to.”

“No, I agree. Who would? Besides, there will always be the prisoners,” she said, only half-serious, hoping to get a small laugh out of Theo.

Instead, however, her brother told her in a voice that was completely earnest, “No, they're leaving the day after tomorrow. I heard Father on the phone yesterday!”

Instantly she pulled her horse to a stop and turned to face the boy. “What?”

“They're being sent back to their prison camp.”

“No, that's not possible-”

“Yes, it is possible,” he said, his tone growing defensive because she hadn't believed him. “Even…”

“Tell me!”

“Even your boyfriend, Callum! I'm telling you, they're all going to be taken away!”

If she hadn't needed both hands on the leather reins, she thought she might have slapped him for that remark about the Scotsman. She'd never hit her brother before, but there was always a first time. “He's not my boyfriend,” she said simply, allowing a little sharpness into her tone.

Theo looked away. He didn't believe her, but clearly he had no plans to argue about this. Whether Callum was her boyfriend was the least of his concerns. “They're almost done with the harvest,” he went on, an apparently helpful clarification on his part.

“Who was Father talking to?” she asked.

“I don't know.”

“The agriculture minister? The commandant of the prison camp?”

“I said, I don't know.”

“Well, just because the harvest is finished doesn't mean Father can run Kaminheim with only you and me and Mutti to help him. He certainly can't. And-”

“And Father will be gone, too!” Theo snapped, turning back toward her. “It will just be the three of us! That's what I mean: I'm going to have to be the man of the house!”

She felt herself growing a little exasperated, and offered a litany of the different men from the village-the farrier, the veterinarian, the logger, the mechanic, the handyman, the chimney sweep-who would appear periodically at the estate.

“Have you seen Mr. Schenck lately? Or Mr. Lutz?” Theo asked, referring to the veterinarian and the mechanic.

“No, of course I haven't. We haven't needed them.”

“They're gone!”

“What do you mean they're gone?”

“I heard Father! Mr. Schenck is in the army now and Mr. Lutz has been taken to some factory in Germany. They're taking everybody!”

The contentment-the outright happiness-she had been experiencing at the horse barn had evaporated completely, along with the final vestiges of the morning fog, and she spurred Balga forward. Behind her she heard Theo urging on Bogdana. She realized she would have to slow her own horse when they reached the apple orchard so Theo could catch up to her before they returned to the grounds, and this only annoyed her further.

Chapter Five

THE WORKERS FROM ORGANISATION TODT NEVER CAME. The long, meticulous lines the naval officers had scratched into the eastern edges of Kaminheim slowly disappeared beneath wind and sleet and the winter grasses that sprung up even as the days grew despairingly short and the temperature in the evenings fell below freezing. There would be no deep crevasses gouged from the clay, no strategically placed gun emplacements, no firing pits from which anyone-boys closer in age to Theo than Helmut-might discharge their panzerfausts in desperation at stalled Russian armor.

No one from Todt called or wrote to tell the Emmerichs why, but as October faded along with the sunlight into November, they all presumed there simply weren't enough men. Apparently, there weren't even enough prisoners. The dike that was the Greater Reich was collapsing in so many spots, there were so many breaches on so many fronts, that the need to construct an antitank trench in their corner of the district was all but forgotten. Anna told Theo that the reason the trench wasn't being built was that it was no longer necessary: Their armies were stemming the Russian advance far to the east, and he needn't be afraid. It wasn't true, of course, but it made them both happy when she verbalized the notion, especially now that news of the slaughter in the recaptured village of Nemmersdorf had reached them.

And that news had reached them in every conceivable way the Ministry of Propaganda could imagine. Though Mutti had tried to shield her children from the stories, the tales of rape and mutilation were on the radio, in the newsreels, and in the press. There were leaflets about the slaughter distributed along with ration cards; there were posters on the walls of the villages and nailed to the trees along the roads. The underlying message always was clear: This-this unspeakable brutality, this unparalleled violence-is what awaits our women and children if we don't fight to the death to preserve our precious Fatherland. For weeks, Nemmersdorf was all anyone could talk about.

Meanwhile, the men from the village continued to leave as the weather grew cold. When Father needed the logger to help clear land for firewood because coal was growing more rare than gold, he was told that the fellow was gone, taken away at gunpoint in a truck along with his brothers and son. There was no sweep to prepare the manor house's many chimneys for the winter, and so Werner, home from Budapest in October for three days of leave, found the chains and brushes and spent his few days at Kaminheim climbing over the slate on the peaks and the eaves to clean the chimneys himself. No one in the town had any idea where the chimney sweep had been taken.

Soon after the naval officers left, most of the prisoners and their aged guard were taken away, too, returned to the stalag where they had spent the summer. The one exception? Callum Finella. Certainly there were martinets in the district, such as Helmut's school-teacher, who questioned Rolf Emmerich's patriotism or wondered if he was a party member only because it made it easier to run the business that was Kaminheim; but his farm also produced a great deal of food and he was part of a distinguished Aryan family. He had just enough clout that the authorities heard his plea for slave labor-just as, before that, Rolf had heard the pleas of his only daughter for Callum. She insisted that the two of them were friends and nothing more, and he acted as if he believed her. Mutti did, too. And since the needs of his estate matched the wants of his daughter-since, in his experience, there had to be another man on the farm capable of the heavy lifting that was demanded daily on an estate the size of Kaminheim, even in winter-he had argued convincingly that one of the prisoners should remain in his possession. The presence of the individual was going to be especially critical, Rolf realized, once he was pressed into service.

And that date came in the middle of November. Precisely as Basha, their cook, had speculated, Rolf Emmerich, though forty-nine years old, returned to the Wehrmacht. Not the Volkssturm. The army. Initially, his uniform had made his younger son Helmut envious, since Helmut would have to be satisfied with a mere Volkssturm armband until he turned eighteen in December and would graduate into the army, as well.

No one seemed to care that this meant a POW was left alone with two women, a boy, and a part-time cook on the estate outside of Kulm. No one worried for the two women because, after all, this Callum Finella was British-not Russian. And the Emmerichs (and their friends and relatives on the neighboring estates) had no idea why they were even at war with the British.

Might he try to leave the grounds of Kaminheim and escape? It was possible. But why would he? they asked themselves. If he went west he would only be going deeper into Germany and the likelihood that he would be shot as an escaped POW. And if he went east? Dear God, no one went east. All that was east were the Russians.

CALLUM HAD JUST wedged the hay bale against the barn wall and was starting down the stairs from the loft when he heard the boy singing. Theo's voice hadn't begun to change yet, and so it was still a lovely soprano. He was singing a folk song, something about a horse and some clouds, as he was mucking the stalls. For a long moment Callum stood perfectly still on the wooden stairs, listening to the child. He had studied French and German in school and had learned a fair amount more since he'd been taken prisoner-most in the last few months under Anna's tutelage-but he was still not completely sure what the song was about. When he finally moved, the step groaned loudly and Theo heard him and went quiet.

“Don't stop because of me,” Callum reassured him, jumping down the last few steps onto the barn floor. Theo wouldn't meet his eyes, and he realized the boy was embarrassed. “You have a wonderful voice.”

Now Theo looked up at him, but he was wary. He was in his pony's stall, shoveling methodically.

“You ever sing in a choir?” Callum asked, when the boy remained silent.

At this he shook his head.

“Well, you should. A church choir, maybe.”

“We don't go to church anymore,” he said evenly. Then he unhooked the stall door and emerged with the cart and his shovel, walking right past Callum as if he were invisible and into the stall for one of the draft horses.

“I rarely sing, but only because I can't,” he confessed to Theo. “I wish I could.”

The child threw him a bone and nodded, but Callum could tell he was only being polite. And so he was about to leave and get on with his other chores, when Theo surprised him. “I like the old songs,” he said. “Not the new ones they make us sing at school or they teach at the Jungvolk meetings. Helmut sings them much better than I do.”

“I doubt that.”

“He does. Werner, too. They have much bigger voices and can really sing the marching songs. I don't…”

“You don't what?”

He shrugged.

“Go ahead, Theo. You can tell me.”

“I don't like the marching songs.”

“I don't blame you. Seems to me they're just drinking songs anyway. You always want to sing them with a stein in your hand.”

“But everyone else likes them.”

“I just told you: I don't.”

The boy looked at him, but said nothing.

“You know, Theo, you don't need to apologize to the world that you're not Helmut or Werner.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” he said, realizing that he had just initiated a conversation he hadn't anticipated a moment ago, “that you seem to talk a lot about what you're not. Who you're not.” He leaned over the wooden half-wall of the stall, noticed the pyramidal clumps of manure in the straw.

“So?”

“So? Well, you're a good boy in your own right. Take your singing. Maybe your voice isn't as loud as your brothers'. I have no idea. But there isn't a boys' choir in Scotland that couldn't find a use for a voice like yours. You'd be a soloist.”

Theo sighed and blew on his hands. “I don't seem to like the things everyone else does.”

“I don't either.”

“No?”

“No. And it seems to me, no one thinks they like the right things at your age,” Callum said, though he guessed he was lying. But he also knew that ten-year-old boys always had the potential to bully the odd duck, and that tendency was undoubtedly exacerbated in this corner of the globe. He had a feeling the master race didn't have a lot of patience for a kid like Theo.

“Werner and Helmut were always popular. Somehow, they always knew their duty and did things correctly. People liked them. Students, teachers.”

“Is that what you've been told?”

“It's what I know.”

“I'll bet if you asked them, they'd tell you they never felt like they did everything right. Anyone who thinks he does-and this is one of my favorite words of yours-is a dummkopf. But that really doesn't matter. You're Theo. That's all that counts. And you don't ever have to apologize for who you are.”

The boy seemed to contemplate this. Ran his free hand along the well-muscled shoulder of the enormous horse.

“Besides,” he added. “Think of all the things you do better than anyone.”

“There isn't anything I do better than anyone,” Theo said.

“You are a very fast runner.”

“I guess.”

“And you ride very well.”

“Just ponies.”

“Someday it will be horses.”

“I hope so.”

Outside the barn he heard the wind, and high above them the weather vane swiveled with a shriek. The wind was coming from the north.

“I know so,” he told the boy, though he really knew nothing of the sort. “In the meantime, you sing. And don't worry that you're not Helmut or Werner. You're Theo, and that should be good enough for anyone.”

He felt a twinge of self-satisfaction after he'd spoken. Perhaps he had buoyed the boy's spirits after all. But then, his head down and his small shoulders hunched in his coat, Theo went to the rear of the stall and silently cleaned up the animal's droppings.

SHE CLOSED HER EYES, her mouth against the side of his neck. His skin was warm against her lips, and the collar from his shirt tickled her just beneath her chin if she moved. And so she didn't move. She remained there, perfectly still, aware only of the metronomic rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, and the sound of the logs that were being consumed by the flames in the fireplace. She was afraid to open her eyes, because the moment-the feel of his hand on her waist, his fingers firm against the flesh of her hip because her blouse had come untucked-was exquisite. She had never before felt a man's hands on the skin near her waist, and she could feel her whole body starting to flush. It was as if she had a high fever, except there was no pain. There was only eagerness (though precisely for what, she could admit to no one, not even to herself) and her sense that this was the start of something wondrous and new.

They were standing now in the bay window in the ballroom that overlooked the edges of the hunting park. Mutti and Theo and Basha were shopping in the village, and the two of them had Kaminheim to themselves. Anna had seen Callum carting the furniture from their terrace into the shed beside the house, and beckoned him inside when the sleet and hail had started falling in earnest. There were many chores that had to be completed regardless of the weather, but bringing the outdoor tables and chairs in for the winter wasn't among them in Anna's opinion. Especially with everyone else away for the afternoon.

Finally she felt him pulling her even closer into him, dancing her body so that they were facing each other. She opened her eyes and looked up, her breasts against his chest, and-without even thinking about what she was doing-she moved her legs so that they were surrounding one of his thighs, pressing her groin through her skirt against the hard muscle there. She thought he was about to kiss her, but instead he brought his lips to her ear and whispered simply, “You know, I dream of you.”

She did not know this, but she nodded, savoring the way his breath had given her goose bumps along her arms, and he continued, “I haven't dreamed of Scotland. Not lately. I've dreamed only of you.”

She considered telling him that she dreamed of him, too, but this would be a lie and she didn't want to lie to Callum. But she did think of him all the time-while assisting Basha in the kitchen, while mucking the horse stalls and feeding the animals, while sewing with her mother or reading with Theo in the evening-and so she confessed this to him. She told him how often she imagined being like this in his arms, the two of them alone, and how frequently she recalled their few, brief kisses in the apple orchard.

“Like this?” he asked, and then he kissed her chastely, a tease, barely parting his lips when he brought them to hers.

“No,” she said, emboldened. “Like this.” And she stood on her toes in her pumps and separated his lips with her tongue, burrowing and exploring the moistness and warmth inside his mouth.

There was a part of her that understood this was wrong, all wrong. So wrong that she was shaking. Trembling now in his arms as they kissed. But then she decided that her quivering had nothing to do with the reality that Callum was a prisoner and she was violating her family's trust by inviting him into the house now. By making love to him here in the ballroom. It had nothing to do with the reality that he was the enemy. Her trembling had nothing to do with anything, she concluded, but the fact that she was approaching eighteen and she was in the arms of a handsome and interesting man who was twenty.

BOYS, IT SEEMED to Anna, grew up faster than girls. They were sent off to war and vastly more was expected of them. She and Helmut were the same age, and yet he was treated as more of an adult than she was. Apparently this wasn't the case everywhere. She had the distinct sense that women had more responsibilities in the cities-and in other countries, even the Soviet Union. And, of course, there was no place in the world more barbaric than Russia.

“Here, look at this one,” her mother was saying to her now as she sat at the edge of her parents' bed, a small mountain of her mother's old clothes rising beside her. Her mother's voice was filled with mirth as she showed her another of her dresses from the 1920s. “I wore it when your father and I went to Berlin. Once I wore it to the opera in Danzig, but I felt completely out of place.”

Anna couldn't imagine her mother wearing a dress like this: It was a sheath of silk and it must have barely reached her knees. The straps were thin and the hem was trimmed with sequins and fringe. It was a crimson more lush than the red on the Nazi flag.

“It's very pretty,” she told Mutti. “You must have turned everyone's head.”

“Well, I certainly turned your grandmother's head. She gave me one of her dubious sniffs when she saw me wearing it. Couldn't believe I would appear in public in such a thing. But it was what many of us wore in those days when we wanted to look like we belonged with the city girls.”

They were taking her mother's old clothes from her dressing room closet and deciding which ones could be ripped apart and the fabric refashioned into something more appropriate. They had decided spontaneously that they were sick of their old dresses and would have to sew new ones.

“I don't know if there's enough material here for another dress,” she told Mutti, running her fingertips lightly over the frock.

“I agree. Perhaps we can turn it into a skirt for you-minus, of course, those ridiculous sequins,” she said. After a brief moment she added, “I have very fond memories of this dress. Your grandmother thought it looked like a slip, but your father certainly liked it. Those were fun days.”

“And nights, apparently.”

“Anna!” her mother said, feigning embarrassment, but Anna could tell that she was far more delighted by the memories than she was scandalized by her daughter's innuendo.

“I only meant those years must have been a lovely period. Better days than now.”

“Yes, they were.”

“Were you ever jealous of those city girls?”

“Sometimes. They all seemed so glamorous if you came from a community such as ours.”

“If I ever said I wanted to go to Berlin to be, I don't know, a secretary, what would you say?”

“I would say no,” Mutti said, but she sat down beside Anna on the bed and turned her attention squarely from the dresses to her daughter. “No sane parent these days would send her child to Berlin-or to any city. Parents who live in the cities are trying to send their children away. Get them as far away from the bombs as they can.”

“But after the war? Would you mind if I went to work in a city after the war?”

Mutti seemed to think about this. “I would. Your father would. We would miss you. But whether we would or we could prevent you? That would be something else. Now, you tell me: Why would you want to? This is the first I've heard of such a thing.”

“Well, it's the first time I've contemplated such an idea. I'm not sure if, in the end, I ever would want to.”

“Is there something particular behind this notion?”

She sighed. “Maybe it was the naval officers. And the POWs. And Callum. They have all seen so much of the world, they have all been to so many places. They all seem so sophisticated compared to me. And it's not merely that I feel sheltered. It's that I feel frivolous.”

“Do you think I have led a frivolous life?”

“Not at all. It just seems…”

“Go on.”

“It just seems there is a very big world beyond Kaminheim.”

Mutti looked at her with uncharacteristic intensity, and Anna couldn't decide whether her mother's eyes had grown wide because she was anxious or defensive. “There is, my dear. There is. But let us hope you don't have to see it any sooner than necessary.”

“I DON'T FEEL disloyal precisely,” Callum was saying to Anna another afternoon, when Mutti and Theo had gone to Uncle Karl's estate twenty-five kilometers to the east and once again left them alone at Kaminheim. They had just thrown another log into the fireplace, and the ice that was pelting the windowpanes seemed very far away. “I feel guilty. Horribly guilty. I am eating as well as you and your family and-”

“You think we are eating well?” she asked him, incredulous. They were on the floor before the fire, and she was leaning against his chest, her body between his legs. She knew they would have to get dressed soon, but she couldn't bear the idea that their time alone was just about over. She felt a little giddy. Mature, too. But still blissfully dizzy. Her hands rested upon his bent, oddly hairless knees, and she imagined for a brief second they were the oarlocks on the small rowboat the family owned for their pond.

“Well, perhaps you don't eat like you did before the war-”

“We don't eat like we did even a year ago.”

“But you still eat considerably better than a POW. And so I am eating dramatically better than I would have if your father hadn't finagled a way for me to remain here. Plus, I am sleeping in a bunkhouse, not the barracks of a prison camp-”

“And that will change. Any day now it will get much, much colder, and that bunkhouse was never meant to be used in the winter. Besides, it's absurd for you to sleep out there alone when we have nothing but bedrooms here in the house. I'll talk to Mutti tonight.”

“That's not exactly my point. My accommodations are fine.”

“But you will move into the house. I'll see to that.”

“My point,” he said, wrapping her more tightly in his arms, “is that your family may need me, but nothing I've done here has been especially onerous. A little heavy lifting. Cleaning some farm machinery. A bit of carpentry. And so a part of me feels as if I've deserted my mates-that I should be enduring their trials with them.”

“You didn't desert them. That would mean you had a choice. You didn't. Father wanted someone here and you were picked.”

“Still…”

She turned and craned her neck to face him. “I think I should be angry that you're not more grateful,” she said playfully. “I doubt most POWs had an afternoon like you just had.”

He moved out from behind her. Gazed at her. Pushed her bangs off her forehead, still a little slick with perspiration. “Oh, I doubt any did.”

“And so?”

He was, much to her surprise, blushing. When he didn't say anything, she added, “Maybe you'll protect us from the Russians. Maybe that's why you're here.”

“The Russians are British allies, my dear. It's one thing for me to replace the spark plugs on a tractor; it would be quite another for me to take up arms against my comrades. There's a word for that, you know: treason. And armies, mine included, frown upon it.”

“The Russians are not your comrades.”

“You know they are.”

“The Russians are the comrades of no civilized person. And you are very civilized-even if you do take advantage of German farm girls while their mothers are away for the day.” She tried to add a cosmopolitan pout to her voice when she spoke; she hoped she sounded like a flirtatious adult. But then she saw the look of trepidation on Callum's face, and she realized that inadvertently she had hit a nerve: He honestly did feel guilty. He really did have misgivings.

“The Russians are doing horrible things,” she continued simply.

“Everyone has been doing horrible things,” he corrected her. “We both know your army was not especially charitable toward the women and children in Warsaw when they finished quashing the uprising there this past autumn,” he added. Nevertheless, he brought her hands to his lips and kissed them. Then he stood up and, much to her disappointment, looked around for his clothes.

“You're not leaving, are you?” she asked.

“I am. But only with great frustration-and only because I would hate to see your reputation in tatters.”

She stood reluctantly and handed him his shirt. She admired his back, the way the muscles swelled near his shoulder blades as he pushed his arm into a sleeve, and how hairless this whole side of his body seemed to be-at least compared to his front. The sheer size of his back and his shoulders reminded her suddenly of Balga, and she tried and failed to suppress a small giggle.

“What? My nakedness makes you chuckle?” he asked, pretending to sound insulted.

“You're not naked anymore. You're wearing a shirt.”

She, however, was still completely nude, and was interested in-and intrigued by-how powerful this made her feel. She felt in command and surprised herself by scooting across the floor to him and taking his cock in her hand. He smiled down at her as she started to stroke it, and seemed about to shake his head no, no, they should stop. He should resume getting dressed. She should start getting dressed. But she could feel the blood engorging his penis and the organ growing once more against the palm of her hand, and he breathed in deeply and closed his eyes, his head rearing back like-again-her horse.

“Aren't you worried about your mother?” he murmured, the words drifting aimlessly up toward the ceiling.

She leaned her forehead against his thigh and looked at what she was doing, at the way the tip of his penis would appear and disappear, a magic hat in the midst of her fingers. “No,” she said, “not at all. At the moment, I'm not worried about a thing.”

Chapter Six

BY THE END OF JANUARY, THE FIGHTING WAS SO CLOSE they could hear it, the distant cannonade reminiscent of the soft and airy gurgle the prisoners sometimes heard from the women in the barracks before they died in the night. Almost without exception, those survivors who could still stand found themselves less likely to avert their eyes when they saw the guards. It wasn't that they had suddenly grown bold; it was that watching the transformation of each of the guards was irresistible. No two guards (or officers) seemed to change in precisely the same fashion, but when Cecile thought about it-and she thought about it almost as often as she thought about hunger and what she would do when, finally, she was home and saw her precious Lyon again-she concluded that any day now the Germans were either going to up and flee or they were going to start feeding them. Really feeding them. Caring for them. They would fatten them up so the Russians wouldn't see how severely they had been mistreated. How could they not? Whenever there was no falling snow to muffle the sound, everyone-prisoners and guards alike-could hear the explosions rolling slowly in the direction of the camp. The guards had to save their own hides. There were even rumors that the Red Cross was going to visit, and somewhere nearby there was a train car filled with cans and cans of tomatoes-one for each prisoner-that were going to be given to them any day now.

Meanwhile, most of the guards seemed less likely to fire a shot into the back of anyone's skull because the prisoner no longer could stand, or pour buckets of cold water on someone's head so they could watch her eyelashes freeze solid. Three days passed without a single woman being hanged by the camp gate because her sewing at the clothing works had been deemed subpar. There was one guard named Hedda who made a special effort to ask Cecile where she was from, and then told her how much she liked the French-how she had even visited Paris in 1937. Another guard had seen Jeanne swaying in line one morning, her strength flagging, and secretly given her the sausage that she had planned on tossing into the pile of scraps they gave to the camp dogs.

Clearly, the pace of death was slowing. It wasn't just the absence of dangling corpses at the entrance to the camp. A whole week went by when they were marched back to their barracks after a day stitching SS uniforms at the factory and saw that the guards had felt no need to build a bonfire at the edge of the camp for the corpses. (“At least, they're getting out,” a woman named Rosa had once mumbled to Cecile and Jeanne while they were standing in line, watching the thick, black smoke from the bonfire, to which Cecile had quietly replied, “I'd rather not leave here via the wind, thank you very much.”)

There was a different spirit in the camp. Not optimism precisely: Everyone was too tired or too hungry or too sick to feel optimism. But the sense of dread was starting to lift. The other prisoners stopped ignoring Cecile when she would prattle on about the future, or envying her formidable resiliency. They realized they all were alive-hundreds of them, still able to stand and walk and stitch-and soon the Russians would be here. And the Germans would be gone. And before they knew it, they would be home.

Not all the guards, of course, were discovering suddenly that they were still capable of feigning kindness, or that it might be time to treat their prisoners like human beings. Trammler and Pusch may not have shot anyone that week, but the two men had allowed the dogs to maul one woman badly; the black joke among the prisoners was that the animals would have killed the girl if there had been any meat left on her bones they could eat. And a female guard named Inga had whipped a prisoner because she had tried to be the last in line for their soup at lunchtime. There was occasionally something solid at the bottom of the great metal pots, something of substance, and so there was always some jockeying to be toward the end of the queue. This time Inga had seen the girl trying to lag behind and disciplined her severely. And so Cecile and the other prisoners did what they could to avoid those guards, wondering if at some point their instinct for self-preservation would kick in and they would come around, too.

Consequently, the prisoners were caught completely off guard when they were lined up in the snow one morning and informed they were going to be relocated. Moved west to another camp, one closer to the heart of the Reich. There their work would continue. The war would continue. Some of the prisoners, including Jeanne, had to stifle small sobs. But almost instantly they started to march-no cattle cars this time, they were going to walk west-most of the prisoners in coarse wooden clogs, few with socks, many with feet that were a moonscape of open lesions and raging abscesses. The fortunate had either a cape or a coat or a blanket. A coarse or ratty old sweater. Some had only their prison shirts. They were going to march, they were told, as long as there was daylight.

As they walked for the last time past the barbed wire and the guard towers, staggering in the direction opposite the clothing works, two jeeps filled with soldiers and wooden crates drove past them into the camp. A rumor was whispered along the line that the crates were filled with explosives, and the satchels with detonators and wires. Hours later they heard explosions that were louder than the distant rumbling they'd been aware of for days, and Cecile told everyone that she wouldn't be surprised if their rickety wooden barracks now were gone, if the piles of smoldering ashes-as well as the blackened but not obliterated bones that lay among the cinders at the perimeter of the camp-were buried beneath the churned-up dirt from the center commons. The idea gave her pause, and she wasn't precisely sure how she felt about this: Though she didn't want such unambiguous testimony to cruelty and barbarism to remain on the planet, she wondered if people would ever believe what she'd seen if there wasn't concrete proof.

Chapter Seven

URI HAD SEEN IT BEFORE AND HE IMAGINED HE WOULD see it again. The woods were starting to move.

The first time he had witnessed such a thing he had squinted, rubbed his eyes, and then stared. He'd worried that something he had eaten in the forest was poisoning him. Weren't there mush-rooms out there that could kill you? Give you hallucinations? After all, he was not witnessing boughs and branches swaying in a breeze or being whipped about in great swirling gusts: Here before him were shrubs and trees-small trees, but trees nonetheless-rolling forward, as if they had been uprooted from the earth and were lumbering toward him in a wide, slow wave.

Which, in fact, they were. Because they had been attached to the front and the sides of tanks and assault guns and armored personnel carriers. There were at least a dozen mechanized vehicles altogether that first time, emerging at once from the woods.

This time the foliage was camouflaging a mere pair of battered Tiger tanks, a jeep so crowded that it looked like a clown car from a circus, and a single assault gun. Such was the fate of the once-vaunted Wehrmacht. He heard the Germans were trying to counterattack the Russians at Thorn, but at this point the whole front was collapsing and this small assault group might be off to fight anywhere. If these warriors had seen him a year and a half ago, they would have ignored him completely. After all, he wasn't a part of their brigade. Now, however, they would be likely to recruit him. Manpower was so short and the divisions so maimed that assault groups were being cobbled together from whatever remnants could be found wandering aimlessly (often shell-shocked) in the woods. Signalmen. Medics. Cooks. It no longer mattered. And so Uri fell back into the copse of trees, retreating so quickly that he banged into a branch and a river of snow cascaded behind his collar and inside the back of his uniform coat.

When the group was across the field and beyond him, he continued walking west toward the Vistula. He had a little cheese left in some butcher's paper, moldy but certainly edible, and he decided to finish it off.

HE HAD HEARD there was a recently abandoned concentration camp a few kilometers south of the village, and he considered detouring there. Talking to the residents who lived closest to it. Asking whether any Jews from Schweinfurt or Bavaria had once been imprisoned in the place-and, if so, where they might be now. It was one of the smaller camps, all women, and they worked in a nearby clothing factory. He had been told by another soldier with whom he'd walked briefly that the camp didn't have a crematorium. That was a big distinction he had discovered: If there was no towering smokestack, it probably wasn't one of the death camps. This wasn't an absolute rule, of course, because even now they sometimes just marched the inmates into a field, had them dig ditches, and machine-gunned them en masse.

Unfortunately, the Russians were so close by the time he reached the town that a hobbled old man told him the buildings there already had been dynamited. There were no soldiers to ask about the camp, not even a few local Volkssturm recruits hoping to stall the Soviets with a brief rearguard action. And other than this old man, there didn't seem to be any locals who had stuck around. Not that the locals ever said much. Often they acted like they knew nothing. Still, if he was persistent he could usually learn whether the inmates were marched into the town to work, where most of the prisoners were from, and whether there were women who might be his sister's age. If you asked enough questions, someone always knew something.

In the end, he didn't bother to visit the remains of the camp or the farmhouses near its perimeter. He'd stood outside the barbed wire at other camps and gazed at their decrepit wooden barracks. And this time there wouldn't even be barracks to see. There would be only blackened debris and piles of earth. Likewise, he'd followed stories and rumors before: A train of Jews here. A train of Jews there. A group of women from Bavaria, some of whom might-might-have been from Schweinfurt. But it had never led anywhere concrete. His sister had to be dead, and there was no reason to remain this far east. At this point, he should do all that he could to get west.

EXHAUSTED, HE STOPPED at dusk in the ruins of a long-abandoned castle. He wasn't completely sure in the twilight, but he had the sense that the fortress had fallen into disrepair centuries before Nazi or Soviet bombs had demolished it. He didn't detect the acrid stench of gunpowder, and despite the ice and the snow that covered the ramparts like frosting and filled the crenels in the sole remaining turret like mascarpone cream in a parfait glass (a dessert his mother would make him as a child), he could see the dormant tendrils of ivy and the leafless branches of the thin trees that had grown up between the stones.

He climbed the stairs to the tower where he planned to try to sleep for a few hours. He was just starting to kick away the snow there with his boot when below him he saw the children. Three of them. They were bundled up so tightly in blankets and furs that he couldn't tell if they were boys or girls, but he guessed by their height that they were all between the ages of nine and twelve. They were strolling almost leisurely through the arch where once there might have existed a great wooden door with a wrought-iron grate and wrought-iron spikes. Then, behind them, came two adults, both women. The small group had entered the castle from the side opposite him, and thus hadn't yet discovered his footprints. He crouched behind one of the crumbling stones along the wall and watched them, unsure whether he should reveal he was here. There was a good chance one of those women was armed, and in the dusk she might think he was a Russian and shoot him on the spot. That, of course, would be a fitting irony: For almost two years now he had shot Nazis, knifed Nazis, garroted Nazis, and-that very first time-bludgeoned and impaled Nazis with a fireplace poker. Conversely, he had fought Russians with rifles, panzerfausts, machine guns, and potato-masher grenades. If there was a God, and at this point he had no reason to believe that there was, Uri thought he would have a lot of explaining to do when he died. A lot of death to account for.

Most of it, however, had been in self-defense. Even when he was part of various attacks and counterattacks on Soviet positions, it had been self-preservation.

And so just imagine, he speculated, if it all turned out to have been for naught because one refugee mother or sister or aunt, protecting her cubs, took a potshot at him in the dusk of some crumbling castle with her late husband's (or brother's) Luger because she thought he was Russian. Or, perhaps, because she recognized his uniform and presumed (not unreasonably, given how he was dressed) that he was a Nazi himself. It was possible. Maybe the men absent now from this family were a part of the Polish resistance-or had been before some SS sadist had executed them-and these women would shoot anything in German attire.

They were clearly going to camp here for the night, and that meant that any moment one of them might cross the inner bailey and ascend the very same steps he had to this tower to see precisely where they were or to stand guard. And the last thing he wanted was to shoot some poor woman simply because he had surprised her and she was about to shoot him, and so he decided he would call down to them. First in German, but then in his pigeon Polish. Before he had opened his mouth, however, just as the three children were trying to cocoon inside one of the casemates that was still standing-trees seemed to be bookending the castle slabs now-he heard the sound of a vehicle and then, after the engine had stopped, laughter. Deep, guttural, back-of-the-throat laughter. There, just outside the castle wall below him, was a Russian jeep with two soldiers.

Had the front disintegrated so totally that the Russians had gotten behind him? Now that would be a disaster, as well: To have survived nearly two years by masquerading as a German soldier-German soldiers, actually-only to be overrun by the rampaging Soviets before he could either return to his original self or find a new guise.

As the soldiers emerged from the jeep, Uri realized that he could see the women and the children on one side of the castle wall, and the Russian soldiers on the other. But the Russians were oblivious of the civilians and the civilians were unaware of the Russians. One of the soldiers, a stout, walleyed sergeant with a rat's nest of red hair, was peeing into the snow, and Uri gave himself license to hope they would be here but a moment and move on. And after that he would figure out how he himself would move on. But then the second soldier, a lanky fellow with deeply pockmarked cheeks and a crooked beak for a nose, motioned toward the castle, and they started walking through the gate and inside the ruins.

Now the women saw them and, exactly as Uri had feared, one pulled a small gun from beneath her cape and fired. Her aim was comically bad and she missed both men completely. Instantly the soldiers were upon her. Both of them. The sergeant tackled her, the air reverberating with his howls of relief and mirth that the shooter was a woman and they had not stumbled upon retreating Wehrmacht or home guard. His partner ripped the gun from her fingers, chuckling when he saw the diminutive size of the pistol that almost had killed them. Together they pulled away the hood of her cloak and discovered that the woman was perhaps thirty, with golden hair and a long and gaunt but not unattractive face. She looked more angry than terrified.

Then the soldiers stood and motioned for the woman to remain there on the ground, while they rounded up her sister or friend and their three… girls. Yes, Uri could see now that they were girls. The four other females were lined up against the wall, a grown-up and three youngsters, and when the woman on the ground tried to roll in the snow to see what was happening, the Russian sergeant stepped on her. Barely bothering to look down at her, as if he were popping a rolling balloon at a birthday party with his foot, he smashed his boot flat into her stomach, causing what might have been a shriek of pain to be reduced to an airless gasp.

“Mommy!” the smallest of the three girls cried, and it looked as if she were going to say more but one of the older girls silenced her. Still, it was too late. She had drawn attention to herself and the tall soldier was scrutinizing her carefully. Then he pulled off his glove with his teeth and slid his hand under her coat, reaching down, it seemed, deep into her underwear. He said something to his comrade in a language that was largely foreign to Uri, but he got the gist of it: He'd take this girl first. They were going to begin by raping the girls in front of the women rather than starting with the two adults. The sergeant chuckled at this idea, removed his pistol from his holster, and aimed it down at the woman beneath his boot. She pleaded with him, begged him to take her instead, and he smirked and nodded. Said, Uri thought, that everyone would have a chance.

Quietly Uri pulled his rifle off his shoulder and unclipped the safety. He could take out the Russian standing with his foot atop this mother easily, but the other soldier would be a tougher shot. He was no more than fifty or sixty meters away, and at that distance there was no reason to believe the bullet wouldn't travel right through the fellow and lodge itself deep inside the child: The angle was such that if he aimed for his head, he might shoot the poor girl in the chest. If he aimed for his heart, he might shoot the child in the stomach. Certainly there was a chance that the moment he fired at the first Bolshevik-that one who was now seeming to grind his boot into the woman on the ground-the second would reflexively move away or take cover, and in that instant Uri could blast him, too. But it was equally likely that he might use the child as a shield and fire back at him from behind her.

Already, however, with almost preternatural speed, the Bolshevik had ripped off the poor girl's coat and was tearing open her dress, turning her nearly upside down as he pulled her underpants off her spindly legs so, suddenly, she was stark naked in the cold and the snow. She was screaming, a hairless wild animal with a hillockless chest-all rib cage and pancake-flat areolae, with a pencil dot for a navel-screaming so loudly that the soldier smacked her hard with the back of his hand and her whole body corkscrewed into the ground.

And so Uri gazed at the sergeant through the sight on his Mauser, aimed at a spot on his tunic just about where the fellow's heart would be, and fired. As if the gunshot were the dial that turned down the volume on a radio, the world instantly went quiet except for the echo from the blast. The child stopped howling and the woman stopped pleading, and even the wind seemed abruptly to cease. The sergeant never even turned to see the source of the shot, he simply collapsed into the snow beside the woman. Already, however, Uri was spinning the barrel of his rifle toward the second Russian, who he saw in his sight had his pants at his knees and was fumbling for something-his holster, his penis, Uri couldn't say-and gazing like a frightened animal directly at him. Instinctively Uri calculated the girl would be safer if he fired at the Russian's head, even if it meant a smaller target. This shot wasn't as clean: He took off the soldier's ear and a thin sliver of skull, sending a sizable chunk of hair and scalp splattering against the naked abdomen of the child. Still, he hadn't killed him. It looked like there was a lot of blood, but he barely had slowed him. Fortunately, as the soldier reached for his own gun, he put just enough distance between himself and the girl that this time Uri was able to fire into his stomach. And then, as he fell to his knees, into his chest. And, because Uri was absolutely furious that this bastard had been about to rape a child, into his face one more time.

Only then did Uri stand from his firing position in the tower and work his way down the stone steps to the family. He figured they should get that child dressed and take advantage of the fact they now had a jeep, and drive as far west as they could.

Chapter Eight

IN HIS CRISP, FRESHLY TAILORED UNIFORM AS A Wehrmacht private, Helmut accompanied his father east to Uncle Karl's estate. The drive usually took less than an hour, but today they had to battle against the crush of evacuees who were clogging the roads, and the trip took most of the morning. They weren't completely sure what they would find when they arrived at the home of Mutti's garrulous, indefatigably good-natured older brother, because the day before the phone service that far east had been cut. But when Mutti had called Karl two days earlier, the last time the siblings had spoken, shells had been falling sporadically in the corners of his property and the outbuilding where he stored the tractors in the winter had been damaged. Nonetheless, Karl had been adamant about staying.

As far back as Christmas Day he had told the Emmerichs, “I will greet the Russian commander as one civilized man to another. Maybe their soldiers are peasants, but I've heard their leaders are well educated. Some grew up before the revolution with the sort of reasonable privilege one expects from officers. On occasion, you know, class means more than country. Really, that's often the case. And so I wouldn't be surprised if we have more in common than any of us realizes. Of course, that presumes it ever comes to that and they actually reach this part of the Vistula. But who's to say they will? War is all about tides, and the tide should be with us again soon.”

Helmut knew that his father thought Uncle Karl's optimism was completely unwarranted-that the man was dangerously sanguine about the prospects for his house and his farm and his family. His wife had succumbed to cancer two years earlier and his children were grown: His younger son had died in Stalingrad (and still, still, Karl harbored the delusion that the Russians and Germans would get along if they came from a certain class) and his older son was a staff officer with a Volksgrenadier division in the west. But his older son's wife lived with him now. Karl's one daughter did, too, returning home after her husband was captured in France, and bringing with her Karl's first grandson, a robust toddler with blond spit curls who was built like a beer keg. Neither Helmut nor his father liked the idea of two young women being left to the mercy of the Russians, but throughout the whole month of January Karl had rebuffed his brother-in-law's entreaties to join the Emmerichs if they went west.

When Helmut and his father reached the gates of the estate, the shelling had momentarily subsided. But there were great potholes in the driveway and the splinters from one of Karl's favorite oaks-as well as pieces of trunk the size of railroad ties-littered the road to the manor house. They finally gave up and parked in the snow a hundred meters from the front entrance.

Karl's daughter, Jutta, greeted them, her son swaying uncertainly beside her, despite the fleshy Doric columns that passed for his legs. Her lips were the pink of cooked fish, and thin as paper. But her eyes were wide and darting around her-out into the yard, up into the sky-and though she was standing still there was a frenzied quality about her that reminded Helmut of the way boars twitched when they were cornered at the end of a long hunt. Jutta was a decade older than Helmut, and once-before she had become a mother, before her husband had been captured, before the Russians had retaken most of Poland-he had thought she was among the most glamorous women he had ever seen outside of Danzig or Berlin. No longer.

She brought them into the den, where Karl was having a glass of schnapps and staring out the mullioned windows toward the east. It was a flat white vista, the snow having long smothered even the foot-high remnants of the corn, with the edge of a silvery birch forest in the distance. Karl was wearing a paisley dressing gown made of silk, his bulbous cheeks were covered with white stubble, and Helmut found himself growing embarrassed for the man. Helmut had never viewed his uncle as especially slothful (though he did feel that Uncle Karl indeed lacked Rolf Emmerich's tireless discipline), but he had never before seen the man in a dressing gown at lunchtime. He had never before seen him drinking at lunchtime. Then he grew more than embarrassed: He grew angry. The idea that he and his father were in their uniforms-that they had risked their lives to come here, that they were using precious hours of leave when they should have been packing their own estate-started to rankle him.

The man pulled the drapes, instantly darkening the room. All of the furniture-the desk, the sofa, the cherry bookshelves that climbed along two of the walls from the floor to the ceiling-was cumbersome and heavy. He offered them both a drink, cavalierly waving the crystal decanter in their direction. Helmut listened as his father politely declined, then watched as Rolf sat down on the arm of the sofa, hooking his thumbs inside his wide black officer's belt. Helmut took this as an indication that he could sit, too. His cousin and her son watched from the doorway, standing. Then the child clicked the heels of his feet together, imitating other soldiers he had seen. Quickly Helmut stood and clicked his heels together in response, and the chubby boy grinned. For a moment he wondered how he could have missed how beautiful this tiny boy's smile was. Then he recognized it: It was the lively smile he remembered from his cousin before her life had started to come apart.

“I'm not going, Rolf,” his uncle was saying. “I grew up here and I plan to die here-though not, I assure you, anytime soon. But I stayed back in thirty-nine when our troops crossed the border and everyone said the Poles were going to kill us. You did, too. And it was all a great disturbance, great chaos. And for what? The Poles were fine-”

“The Poles are not the Russians. And things were different in 1939.”

Karl poured yet more schnapps into his glass, and finally put the decanter down on the blotter on a corner of his desk. Helmut saw there were three stacked cardboard boxes beside it, and for a moment thought that while his uncle was insisting he was going to stay, he was nonetheless gathering up those items he would take with him in the event he did decide to evacuate. Then, however, he saw the note his uncle had scribbled on the top of the highest of the cartons: Karl was instructing one of the servants who remained to burn it. To burn them all. To, it seems, burn these three boxes along with the other papers that already had been gathered and left in the shed.

“Yes,” his uncle said, “things were different. We were younger. But otherwise, war is war and-”

“Things happened in Russia. You know that. For them, this is revenge. Retribution.”

“Oh, please, don't talk to me about revenge and retribution. My son died in Stalingrad. If anyone should feel there are scores to be settled, it's me. It's us. It's the Germans, who at the moment are getting hammered on all sides.”

“You've talked to Felix,” Rolf said, referring to his own brother who had served in Russia before being transferred to the western front. “And I know you've talked to my son. I know what Werner has told you.”

“So? This was war. War is never pretty.”

“This was beyond war.”

“SS brutes and thugs,” he said, shaking his head dismissively. “Neither of my boys-and neither of yours-was responsible. My sons were soldiers, nothing more. No axes to grind. Same with Werner, and young Helmut here. I'm a farmer, Rolf, and so are you-despite that fancy uniform you've put on. The fact is, we grow food, and whether you're a National Socialist or a Bolshevik, you have to eat.”

“The Russians are not going to distinguish between the SS and the rest of us. We're all just Germans to them. Don't forget Nemmersdorf.”

Karl seemed to contemplate this for a moment, and then motioned for his daughter and grandson to leave the doorway where they'd been listening, waving his hand without the glass as if he were brushing a fly away from his nose. Almost instantly Jutta retreated, taking her son by his fingertips. Briefly the boy resisted her, but Helmut smiled, again clicked the heels of his boots, and the child went, too.

“I am sure ghastly things happened there,” he said finally. “Ghastly. But I am also sure that Nemmersdorf was an aberration, and the Russian officers have since reined their men in. Besides, I wouldn't be surprised if our illustrious Ministry of Propaganda hasn't exaggerated things a bit. They do have a tendency to scream when a whisper would suffice.”

“We did worse.”

“Not my son. And not your brother. My son told me a great deal before he died, and so I understand it was vicious. But, more times than not, we were simply defending-”

“And as for the work camps-”

“You believe those stories? My God, Rolf, we're a civilized people!”

His father rose from the arm of the sofa. “Mutti would like you to come with us,” he said, his voice verging on stern. “And even if you refuse, I must insist that we take your grandson and the girls.”

“You are referring to my daughter and my daughter-in-law. I believe the role of father trumps uncle. You are in no position to insist upon anything, Rolf. I'm sorry.”

“You're being ridiculous.”

“And you're panicking. When it's time to leave, the authorities will tell us.”

“No, they won't. That would mean admitting defeat. The Russians will be at your door before anyone official will tell you to go.”

“Fine. Then I will greet Commander Ivan with”-and here he pointed at the decanter of schnapps on the desk-“Commander Berentzen, and we'll get along famously. Let's face it: These days, you and I-our families, our world-are nothing more than skeletons at the feast anyway.”

Helmut didn't think his uncle was drunk, but he recalled how the man was known for an almost superhuman ability to hold his liquor. He wondered now if his uncle had been drinking all morning.

“Karl-”

“No. There is nothing more to discuss.”

When they left, Jutta and the boy were there in the front hallway, and this time Helmut saw real fear in the poor woman's eyes.

ANNA AND HER father stared for a long moment at the silver and crystal and china they had left in the snow in the hunting park, and neither said a word. Both, however, were thinking the same thing: The platters and salvers looked like headstones, and the park now resembled a graveyard. But the ground was rock solid, and they hadn't the time to bury anything properly. They had tried, but it was just impossible.

Now her father put his gloved hand upon her shoulder and murmured, “Don't tell Mutti.” He was sweating from his exertions, despite the cold, despite the way their breath rose like steam in the still air. “We'll tell her it's safely hidden.”

She nodded. “She thinks we're coming back,” Anna said simply.

“And we might, sweetheart. We might.”

“But you don't really believe that.”

He paused, and in the silence the rumble of the distant artillery seemed to grow closer. Then: “No. But I've been wrong before in my life. And I will be again.”

“We're still leaving tomorrow?”

“That's the plan,” he said, and then he changed the subject. “We got a long letter from Werner this morning. I haven't read it yet, but Mutti says he sounded good-better, even, than one might expect.”

“How…”

“Yes?”

“How will he find us if we're not here?”

“Mutti's writing him. We'll find each other.”

His answer wasn't at all satisfying, but Anna didn't want to burden him further by pressing the issue. He was, she realized, about to leave his life's work. This farm, the estate. He had grown up on a farm, but for a time had left that world behind when he had contemplated becoming a lawyer. But he had missed it too much, and as a young man had married a country girl and thus wound up a farmer after all. An excellent farmer, it would turn out, as well as an exceptional businessman. He had been a quick study and a hard worker. He had also been profoundly intuitive, always, and now, as if he sensed what she was thinking, he went on, “We'll wire Werner from Stettin. It'll be fine.”

“We're going that far?”

“We might have to.”

Mutti had a cousin in Stettin. Once they had visited the family, detouring there after an excursion to Berlin, but that had been years ago. In the first months of the war. She had been twelve, and this cousin was older than Mutti and her children had already left home. Anna's principal memories of the visit were the hours she spent entertaining young Theo while the grown-ups reminisced for hours in a light and cheerful room that looked out upon a lake that fed into the Baltic.

Her father took his fingers off her shoulders and clapped his hands together with the sort of exuberance he might have exhibited if he were about to build a snowman with her. It was so sudden that it caught her off guard. Then he picked up the two shovels from the ground, brushed the snow off them, and said-his voice almost mirthful-“You are the world to me, Anna: you and your brothers and Mutti. I hope you have always known that. At this point, you're all that matters. Everything else? Irrelevant. Those plates in the snow? The wineglasses? The carving knives? The Russians can have them, for all I care.”

“Grandmother wouldn't want that, of course,” she said, trying to sound equally cavalier about all they were losing. Though she hadn't known her grandmother well, the woman's inordinate affection for the family crystal and china was legendary, and a source of running jokes at holiday meals. The woman had been dead for nearly a decade, and still everyone would look warily toward the stairway that led to her long-empty bedroom and sitting room whenever someone accidentally broke a glass or discovered a chip on one of the plates. They half-expected to see her gliding down the steps and into the dining room, her nearly floor-length dark skirts sweeping across the heavy carpets and polished wood.

Her father smiled at her small joke and Anna was pleased. “No, she wouldn't,” he agreed. “But your grandmother was not completely unreasonable. Unlike your uncle Karl, she would see that we haven't any choice but to leave. To go west. She would…”

“Yes?”

“She would have been a veritable whirlwind of organization and efficiency,” he said and then sighed. “I don't know what the next weeks or months hold for us. For any of us. All we can do is our duty. I'm sorry it has come to this. But it has, and there is nothing else to be done. Now, since we can't bury these valuables, please start loading one of the wagons with feed for the horses. I think that should be the next task. Leave room in the other for the suitcases and trunks, and whatever your mother will pull from the pantry.”

“How many horses will be coming?”

“Four. Two wagons. Four horses.”

“Bogdana won't be one of them, will he?” she asked, referring to Theo's pony. She knew how this would sadden her brother.

Her father shook his head ruefully. “I'm sorry for that, too. I realize how disappointed Theo will be. But I want only the strongest horses we have.”

“What about Balga? I know when you think of him, you think only of his speed, but-”

“I know how powerful Balga is. Plan on having him help lead one of the wagons. Also, bring Waldau. Theo likes him, too, doesn't he?”

Anna nodded. Theo wasn't a strong enough rider yet or even physically large enough to manage Waldau outside of their training ring, but he did indeed love that animal. Bringing that horse would be some consolation for the boy.

“Pair him with Balga,” her father continued.

“And the other animals?”

He hesitated. Then: “The Russians will be here soon enough. The horses won't go hungry.”

“And the car, Father?”

The car-the vehicle that her father and Helmut had driven to Uncle Karl's that morning-was a BMW sedan from 1934. It was big and roomy, and Anna had fond memories of long drives in which she had dozed in the deeply cushioned backseat. It had grown nearly impossible to find replacement parts for the engine as the war had dragged on, however, and there was no longer a spare tire.

“No car. We don't have much petrol left. We used almost the last we had this morning when Helmut and I went to your uncle's.” Together they started back toward the house, and the snow felt heavy on her boots. She noted once again how differently her father moved in his army uniform: His strides were longer, his posture more erect. “And I can't imagine petrol will be easy to come by in the coming months,” he added. “Whatever Germany has will be needed by the army.”

There was one final question pressing upon her, and she wasn't sure how to broach it. Whether she could broach it. But it was a subject that had been troubling her for days: their prisoner. Her Callum. Neither her father nor Mutti had given her any indication at all of their plans for the man. He had been living inside the house for over a month now, but his room was the slim maid's quarters off the kitchen and she had been careful to give her parents no inkling that he was anything more to her than a field hand she found entertaining in the absence of other, more appropriate companions. He had dined with them while her father and Helmut had been gone, but now that they were back to load up the house, once more-with an unspoken understanding of his real position-he had vanquished himself from the dining room.

“Father?”

“Yes, sweetheart.”

“There is one thing we haven't talked about,” she began tentatively, aware that she could still raise a different topic if she proved unable to ask about the POW.

“The Scotsman,” he said.

“How…”

“How did I know?”

“Yes.”

He shrugged. “This farm works because I do. I'm sure I'm not aware of everything that goes on under my roof,” he said, and she glanced at him, but he seemed to be consciously averting his eyes. “But I do think about the people who live here. My family. My servants. My farmhands. I try to do what's best for them-what, in my opinion, is best for them.”

Behind them there was a particularly loud blast, but her father seemed almost oblivious of it. He continued, “And that includes the Scotsman. A part of me thought it would be best for everyone if we just left him behind. Allowed the Russians to find him-emancipate him, if you will-and let them send him home to his Scotland. The Russians are, after all, his allies.”

“But you're not going to do that,” she said, hoping there had been no trace of entreaty in her voice and it had sounded to her father as if she were merely continuing his train of thought.

“No, I'm not,” he told her. “I'm not because I don't trust the Russians. And, in truth, I don't trust the Germans. At least all of us. The Russians are slaughtering virtually everyone in their path, and we-SS, SA, Wehrmacht, it no longer matters-wouldn't look much more kindly on a British soldier wandering aimlessly in our midst. But Callum is a good man. And he has value.”

“As a worker?”

“As a Brit. We're going west, Anna. Your mother and I agreed last night that to keep you and your little brother safe, we will trek as far west as we have to. And that means that eventually we may reach the British or the Americans at the western edge of the Reich. If we do, it would be helpful to have Callum with us to, well, vouch for us. Speak on our behalf.”

She said nothing because she knew her voice would betray the giddiness and the relief she was feeling. She couldn't imagine where she would be in a week, but the idea that Callum would be with her made the future less ominous.

“Go get him,” her father said. “Have him help you load the feed.”

She nodded carefully, biting her lower lip so it wouldn't transform itself into a smile. It was starting to spit snow once again, and it was possible to imagine that the field guns in the distance were merely the echoes of an approaching storm.

NORMALLY IN THE NIGHT they might have played music or unraveled sweaters to make mittens for the men fighting at the front. Anna and Mutti would knit, and Theo would write the soldiers small notes. It was part of the total war effort, and now that Theo was old enough to be a member of the Hitler Youth, his contribution was the letters. He liked writing the notes, because it meant that he had something to bring when he attended the meetings. And that, in turn, lessened the chance that the boys who led the group would find reasons to pick on him. But he also liked the challenge of finding something to say to a stranger that might make him feel better. Perhaps make him feel a little less frightened. Theo knew he would be scared if he were a soldier. All he had to do was envision his brother Werner's scarred legs to know how dangerous it was out there, or think of the long list of neighbors and cousins and the older brothers-and fathers!-of schoolmates who were dead or missing in action to know how hazardous it was to be a soldier. He didn't honestly know if more people were dying now than two or three years ago, because he wasn't sure how aware he had been of what was occurring when he was seven and eight years old. But you couldn't go into the village, it seemed, without seeing a young man on the street with an empty sleeve where there should have been an arm, or the pants leg of his trousers pinned up as he hobbled along on a pair of crutches. It was awfully clear that he had to be certain that what he wrote to the soldiers was uplifting.

Sometimes, he would begin with the suggestions of the older man who was in charge of their unit. The ideas were bland, but the words nonetheless seemed to give him momentum. Thank you for protecting us from our enemies, he would begin. Or Thank you for serving the Fatherland. Heil Hitler! But then he would allow himself a little creativity.

I hope these mittens keep you warm. My sister knitted them. She's the prettiest girl I know.

I hope these mittens keep you very warm. My sister knitted them. The wool is from an old sweater my brother doesn't need anymore.

I hope these mittens keep you very warm. My sister knitted them. The wool is from an old sweater my brother doesn't need anymore, but only because he's gotten very big in the shoulders from fighting and marching. He was hurt once when he was riding on a tank, but he's fine now. He has scars on his legs, but he can walk and run.

I hope these mittens are the warmest you've ever had. My sister knitted them. The wool is from an old blue sweater my brother doesn't need anymore, but only because he's gotten very big and strong in the shoulders from fighting and marching. He's an excellent soldier. He was hurt once when he was riding on a tank and a Russian fired a shell at it, but he's fine now. Mostly he's fine. He has bad scars on his legs, but he can walk and run and I know he is very proud to serve the Fatherland. He wants to be a farmer when the war is over, like our father. I hope you are safe. Heil Hitler!

There were always more notes than there were mittens, because it took a lot longer to knit a pair of mittens than it did to write a note-even when you were as conscientious as Theo. As a result, the care packages were supplemented with decks of playing cards and hard candies and whatever trinkets a local family could spare. Almost everything of value was scarce, but the group leader said it was the notes that mattered most-which left Theo even more worried that his letters were painfully inadequate, and thus resolved to spend even more time on each one. It also left him wondering why in the world some young man hunkered down in Italy or behind the Siegfried Line wanted to hear from some boy from the middle of nowhere. Didn't they have families of their own to write them? Their own girlfriends and wives and, in some cases, children?

Evidently not. At least not always.

Still, he had to be careful not to write notes that were too long, because he had a quota he was supposed to bring to each meeting. If he brought too few notes, he would be yelled at. If he wrote notes that were too brief, he would be yelled at. It was a balancing act and-like everything else, it seemed-a source of pressure.

He thought there had once been a time in his life when his days had been fun. Wasn't he smiling in the photographs taken when he was a very small child? But he honestly wasn't sure.

And now tonight, instead of gathering with his family in the ballroom or the parlor, he was alone in his room and he was supposed to be packing-though he wasn't supposed to pack much. Again, the mixed message: Be thorough, but bring as little as you can. And so instead of watching Anna knit or listening to his mother or Callum play music, he was finding his warmest clothes and his favorite books and trying to wedge everything into a suitcase. Not even a trunk. A suitcase. It just didn't seem possible.

Tomorrow they were going to leave, but he hoped it was only for a short while. He wasn't sure how he was going to say good-bye to his pony. When his father had told him that Bogdana wasn't coming, he had had to fight hard not to cry. Same as when he had been mucking the animal's stall later that afternoon. He had felt his eyes welling up, and he'd had to look away from the animal as he worked. Who was going to care for him until they returned? Everybody was leaving. His father had suggested that Basha-their cook-and her brother would care for the animals, but he had his doubts. He detested Basha. Thought she had never liked the Germans. Her brother, too. The man was a mean-spirited giant with a single eye and an arm that was always twitching, which was probably the reason why he was even still around, rather than working in a coal mine or a factory in Silesia. He certainly couldn't-or wouldn't-help much with the animals. And neither Basha nor her brother was about to stand up to the Russians if they asked for the horses.

He looked now at the books and the shirts and sweaters and underpants he had folded on his bed. At the long pants. No short pants, not on this trip. That, he guessed, was the one consolation to leaving home in the winter. He hated short pants. When he was wearing them, it reminded everyone that he was a boy and his legs were thin. Pathetically thin. So thin that the other children invariably made fun of them-as if they needed one more reason to tease him or hurt his feelings. Still, even without the short pants he had no idea how he could possibly bring everything with him that Mutti had said he must pack. Just no idea at all.

WHEN ANNA HAD FINISHED packing and she knew that her parents and her brothers were in their rooms for the night, she crept silently to the maid's room where Callum slept. The house's front door had been open so often during the day and evening as they had traipsed back and forth to the wagons that the downstairs was frigid, far colder than the bedrooms upstairs-especially her room, which had had a small blaze burning in the fireplace for the last couple of hours. The air was far from arctic, but she found herself pulling her robe tightly around her.

“Is my family trying to freeze you to death?” she asked him, kicking off her slippers and crawling beside him beneath the quilt on the slim bed as quickly as she could. He was still awake, too, since he was expecting her. Normally the room was warmed slightly by the stove in the kitchen, but they had been so busy organizing and packing that evening that Mutti had instructed Basha simply to create a buffet from whatever was left in the icebox. Apparently, there had been nothing worth heating up, and Basha had never lit the stove.

“Don't tell me a little ice on the windows is too much for a Daughter of the Reich,” he murmured, teasing her and pulling her against him. He was wearing Werner's woolen long underwear, and even in the dark she could tell that it was far too small for him. She ran her toe along his leg and realized that the ankle of the underwear was stretched tightly around his shin. Reflexively she ran her fingers down his sleeve and discovered that the wrist of the long underwear was at least two inches up his forearm.

“How can you breathe in this outfit?” she asked him.

“Oh, I'm fine. I was actually wearing considerably more layers until a few moments ago.”

“Well, if you think you have any chance of convincing me to remove one single article of clothing, you are mistaken.”

“You've already taken off your slippers.”

“And that's going to be all, I assure you.” She curled her hands into small balls and pressed them between their chests. She heard a mouse racing along inside the exterior wall, and couldn't imagine how a creature that tiny could survive in cold this severe.

“Ah, but you're here,” he whispered, and she thought about this-how her entire world was starting to collapse, and that she had chosen here, this thin mattress, on which to take solace. They didn't even know where they would be sleeping tomorrow night. After a moment she nodded. “Are you warm enough?” she asked him. “I was kidding a minute ago when I mentioned my family. But maybe you should be sleeping upstairs.”

“I'm all right. Really, my sweet, I am. But you don't need to stay here. I'm flattered you've come to the icebox to join me, but I think you should savor a few hours of sleep in your bed. Tomorrow will be here before you know it.”

She hadn't considered how long she was going to stay. There was no question that she would be in her own room when Mutti would come for her at dawn. But she hadn't decided whether she had come downstairs to hold him briefly and kiss him good night, or whether she might stay longer. Before her father and Helmut had returned, she had come here with some frequency. Now? It was a considerably more risky endeavor.

“Of course, I never slept the night before a jump,” he went on. “Even the practice jumps.”

“It must be terrifying to jump from a plane. I've never even flown.”

“It wasn't the fear of getting killed that kept me awake. After all, on the practice runs there was no one shooting at you. It was the fear of botching the jump in some fashion-in some fashion that would be embarrassing or might complicate the whole affair for your mates. And I worried about how I would respond during the actual fight.”

“From what you've told me, you responded just fine,” she said, though the truth was that he had told her almost nothing. Like Werner, he shared with her only the most basic, unembellished details-and not particularly many of them, at that. It wasn't that she was the enemy and he had secrets to protect; it was merely that he was a soldier and soldiers, even young ones such as Werner and Callum, didn't seem to want to discuss what they had seen and done. And so all she really knew was that he hadn't shot anyone-at least that's what he had said. And that he had spent most of his time on the ground the night of the jump in a swamp, while the woods around him were on fire because another plane had crashed there. Whenever she envisioned that Allied plane, she thought of the Luftwaffe fighter that had been shot down over Kaminheim, and the dead pilot in the wreckage in the hunting park. Nevertheless, she hoped that someday she would get to see the world from an airplane, and she told him that now.

“It's overrated,” he said.

“Really?”

“Well, it is if you're a paratrooper. No windows. Bad seating. Most blokes spend a good part of the ride either vomiting or trying not to vomit. Airsickness and terror: a mighty bad combination.”

“Maybe if you had a comfortable seat and a window.”

He rose up on his elbow now and looked down at her. She could see his face in the light from the candle on the windowsill, and he was smiling at her. “Maybe,” he said, the two syllables oddly wistful. Except that he was smiling.

“Your face doesn't match your words,” she said.

“What?”

“You sound sad. But you look happy.”

He seemed to think about this, but only briefly. And then, instead of answering her, he bent toward her and kissed her, his lips soft and his tongue tasting slightly of candy cane-probably from one of the very last treats they had remaining from Christmas. His fingers started to inch under her robe and against her nightgown, and then they were grazing her collarbone and her neck. They were oddly, surprisingly warm, and suddenly the layers of flannel separating their bodies seemed a barrier that was at once considerable and frustrating: She loved him and who could say when they would ever get to lie together like this again. She wanted to feel his skin against her skin, the cold be damned, and she wanted to feel him running his fingers over her nipples and holding her breasts in the palms of his hands. She wanted to feel him inside her. And so she sat up and pulled her nightgown over her head, and he followed her lead and climbed from her brother's long underwear. She had planned on leading his fingers to her breasts, but already his hands were there, and she felt a shiver as they started to brush in circles over her nipples. She allowed herself a soft purr, aware that outside the wind was blowing the fallen snow against the windows and somewhere nearby there was a mouse, but that didn't matter, that didn't matter at all. His erection was pressing against her, she could feel it against her hips, and she grasped it in the dark beneath their quilt. Stroked it gently, felt the moistness at the tip.

“I'm beside you,” he whispered, a slight pant in his voice because, she could tell, of the way she was massaging his penis. “How could I be anything but happy?” And then he kissed her again, this time on her forehead, her eyes, her nose. But he surprised her by scooting over her mouth. An image crossed her mind: Her hand was replicating her vagina, and it made her want to lick her palm for him. But he raised himself up once again and pulled away so she could no longer fondle his cock. Already he was retreating under the tent of their quilt, slipping down toward her waist and her knees so that she could no longer see him. She knew what he was going to do because they had done this before, and at first she had been shocked. She had been shocked that he would even have such an idea. But then she realized this was just one more way that he had experiences far beyond her ken, and she had given herself over to him and to what he was doing and, yes, to the sensations. He had used his tongue on her in much the same way that she would touch herself when she was alone, only this felt so much better: the orgasms so intense, especially that first time when the feelings had coiled inside her, building until she had come so powerfully that she had feared she was going to pee on the rug at the edge of the ballroom.

Now his hands were massaging her thighs and his head was between her legs, his mouth moist and warm and insistent. In a moment, she knew, he would gently part her pubic hair and stiffen his tongue, and he would be brushing it against her so rapidly that the sensations would swell till she came, and then, when her legs might still be shaking, almost abruptly he would be holding his body up on his arms and sliding inside her-which, now, gave her a pang of apprehension. They had always used the condoms she had found in Werner's bedroom, and she wondered if they had one left. She had given him the box soon after she had discovered it, because she didn't think it was right that such things should reside in her bedroom. What if Mutti discovered them there? But she didn't know if they had any remaining. Still, it seemed impossible at first to open her mouth and ask him. To stop him. She couldn't get pregnant, however, she simply couldn't-not by him, not now. Perhaps not ever. And so she found the resolve within her to reach down for his head, to get his attention. At first he thought she was merely urging him on, massaging his scalp as he lapped at her vagina. But then she asked him, put the question out there. He stopped what he was doing and rose up from beneath her, and he smiled. “Oh, I wish we'd had the time to be such bunnies that we'd gone through Werner's whole stash.”

“We've one left?”

“Actually, I believe we have two,” he reassured her, and then he disappeared once more between her thighs, and she gave herself over to the feelings there, closing her eyes to the ice and the snow and the death: to the reality that somewhere, not very far away, their army was trying desperately to slow a juggernaut of Russian barbarians. For the moment, all that mattered was that she was with Callum, her Callum, and their bodies were warm and electric and very much alive.

IT WAS STILL DARK when Helmut awoke, and even in the midst of the spring planting or the autumn harvest no one would have been up for another hour and a half. Even today, the morning of their departure, he knew his mother and father wouldn't be rising for a short while. They'd done most of their packing yesterday, and the house was now without power and there was only so much more they could do in the cold and the dark. And so he considered going back to sleep, but once more he saw in his mind the fear in the eyes of his cousin Jutta. The oblivious, happy smile on her son. His uncle's irresponsible complacency in the face of the Bolsheviks.

But mostly he saw Jutta's eyes.

He knew his father was right: Karl and his family had to evacuate, and they had to leave now. If Karl refused, then at the very least he should allow his daughter, his daughter-in-law, and his grandson to join the exodus working its way west. And so Helmut rose and dressed as quickly as he could by the light of a candle, climbing into his new winter uniform and his snow boots, and wrapping his wide belt around him with its weighty, holstered Luger. Then he scribbled a short note for his parents. He didn't believe the roads would be crowded at this hour of the night-it couldn't possibly be as bad as it was yesterday morning-and so he guessed he would be at his uncle's by sunrise. And either he would convince his uncle to gather his family and join him, or he would simply take the two women and the boy.

He grabbed an apple as he passed through the kitchen and found himself glowering at the door to the maid's room. He wasn't sure what he thought of his parents' decision to bring the Scot with them when they went west. He liked the idea of another man on the trek-especially a man as large and physically intimidating as Callum. But, in truth, how helpful would this particular fellow be? Half the time he'd probably be hidden beneath bags of grain and apples and sugar. And when he wasn't? He was a soldier who'd never even fired his gun at the enemy before surrendering. Besides, the last thing his family should do was encourage whatever inappropriate feelings already existed between the prisoner and his twin sister. His parents already gave the man far too many liberties and extended to him far too many kindnesses.

When he reached the barn, he saw there was just enough petrol in the BMW to reach his uncle's estate; he would refill the tank there to get home. His family wouldn't approve of this excursion, but if he brought Mutti's brother and the rest of the clan back, he would be a hero. And right now the Reich needed heroes. It needed them desperately. He had yet to see any fighting-he'd only finished his training last week-and a part of him longed for the respect that his older brother received when he was on leave. To accomplish the things his brother had on the battlefield. To be taken seriously as a soldier.

He didn't expect he would actually see any Russians, and that gave him confidence; at the same time, it diminished in his opinion the scope of the task before him. How heroic was he really if the most difficult parts of his endeavor were battling a river of refugees moving in the opposite direction, and then cajoling his fat, stubborn uncle to come with him?

Then, however, he remembered the shells that were already falling on his uncle's estate, and he stood a little straighter. Yes, the Reich needed heroes, even if they were only eighteen and their mission was to rescue their families.

URI DROVE THE two women and the three children as far as the Vistula, and then he gave them the Russian jeep. They'd spoken little as they had driven through the night, partly because the women were so shaken and partly because the children actually slept in the back of the vehicle. But he learned the women were sisters, and the three children all belonged to the older of the siblings. The younger sister hadn't married yet. They both insisted they had never joined the party, though these days, Uri knew, anyone who bragged about being a party member was either an idiot or a fanatic. Still, he found it revealing how many people were so quick to tell strangers they'd never been Nazis.

“I wasn't in the party either,” he informed them, appreciating the irony. “I don't think they would have had a lot of use for a person like me.”

The pair implored him to stay with them when they reached the frozen river, to continue to protect them as they went west. But he told them that wasn't possible. He said that he needed to return to his unit. The truth was, of course, that he didn't have a unit, and among the critical lessons he had learned in his different guises in the Wehrmacht was that no one was going to question him so long as he was near the front. It was only when he was in the theoretic safety of the rear that he was in danger of being found out or-and this would have been a bizarre turn of events-shot as a deserter. Yes, he would get west: He had to. But he would have to move judiciously.

In the headlights from another vehicle parked now along the bank of the river, he saw a couple of green Volkssturm teens and a captain with one arm attempting to manage the horde trying to cross this stretch of ice. He climbed from the jeep and started toward them. As he walked a little closer, he recognized that the fellow was, much to his surprise, Captain Hanke-his commanding officer as recently as October. Then the man had gone home to Dortmund on leave and there, Uri had heard, been wounded in an air raid. Apparently he had lost an arm.

Uri had liked Hanke, and Hanke had seemed to like him. The Hanke men had been soldiers for generations-long before there had been a Nazi regime and a world war to compel them into the service.

Already Uri saw that an old couple with a wheelbarrow were descending upon the Russian jeep, begging to put their bags of clothing in the back with the children. Begging to somehow squeeze onto the vehicle themselves. One of the young women looked back at Uri, pleading with him with her eyes to try to solve this problem, too. Rescue them as he had at the castle. He raised his eyebrows and shook his head, shrugging his shoulders. There wasn't anything he could do. There wasn't anything anyone could do. There really wasn't room for the old couple and the meager remnants of their lives, but you really couldn't leave them behind either. Still, this man was persistent and loud, and he beseeched them that if nothing else the family had to find room in the vehicle for his wife. They had to. He said she had a bad heart and she desperately needed to sit. And so, finally, Uri strolled back to them, rested his hand on the warm hood of the jeep, and suggested to the woman in the front passenger seat that she climb into the back and allow the old lady into the vehicle. He reminded her that this was where she had been when he had been driving.

Then he turned away and called out to Captain Hanke, jogging over to the man. Suddenly he had to be away from these refugees. From all refugees. From this whole whining and scared and despairingly sad parade. The officer recognized him instantly, and Uri was pleased. Hanke even had a small smile for him.

“You need some help here?” he asked the captain. “It looks like it's going to get ugly.”

“Oh, it's actually been very civilized so far,” he told Uri. “It won't get ugly till later.”

“When the sun comes up and the real crowds arrive?”

He craned his neck and looked to the south. “When the engineers get here. Then we're going to blow up this ice bridge to slow the Russians. That's when things will get nasty-and that's when I will indeed need your help.”

THE MOON WAS mostly obscured by clouds and there were absolutely no stars. Yet the snow was oddly luminescent, as if it had its own source of light-like, Helmut thought, those fish that supposedly lived in the sunless depths of the ocean-and the birch trees were eerily skeletal. Helmut found the cold air more bracing than uncomfortable. There were few families on the road, but he did pass some. And they all told him the same thing: He was going the wrong way. A fellow soldier, his head bandaged beneath a wool cap, warned him that the Russians had pierced their lines everywhere-that, in fact, there was no line left. An old couple pulling two small, sleeping grandchildren on a sled said they had seen a Russian tank on the outskirts of the village.

When he reached the final stretch of road before his uncle's, the sky was lightening to the east, though it was clear there was going to be no sun again today. He was almost out of petrol, but he was so close it really wouldn't have mattered if the car had come to a dead stop right here. He knew from his visit yesterday with his father that he would be unable to drive all the way to the manor house anyway. Still, he coasted whenever he could.

He was just stepping down from the BMW when he heard the metallic rumble approaching. He climbed back on to the vehicle's running board to see, hoping to God it was German tanks or, perhaps, some long antitank guns on trailers. It wasn't. There, no more than half a kilometer distant, were three massive Russian tanks lumbering across one of the fields where his uncle grew rutabagas and carrots. They were moving parallel to the road and clearly didn't give a damn about him or his family's BMW. Because clearly they saw him. If the commander inside any one of the tanks wanted, he needed only to spin his tank's turret and obliterate the car with a single shell.

He jumped back into the driver's seat and raced as far up the driveway as he could, stopping only when he reached the fallen oak where he and his father had parked yesterday. Then he ran to the house, aware even as he churned his legs in the snow that something was different. Something had changed. He couldn't have said precisely how he knew this, and he told himself that his foreboding had been triggered, naturally enough, by the sight of three Russian tanks cavalierly driving westward behind him. Soon, however, he understood his premonition was well founded: He saw that the estate's high and wide front doors had been shattered, the wood slivered and the hinges bent like old playing cards. He stepped over what now were little more than sharp pieces of kindling and called for his uncle. He called for Jutta. A crow flew past him, swooping toward him down the stairs and then darting outside through the hole where the front doors once had stood. The heavy tapestries of hunters and herds of elk that usually adorned the eastern wall of the entrance hall had been slashed with bayonets, and each bulb on the great chandelier-all of them encased in globes with the faces of wood nymphs-had been exploded.

He tried to convince himself that Karl had come to his senses and left with his family, but he didn't believe this. He walked gingerly across the broken glass from the light fixture, saw that the kitchen and the pantry had been ransacked-the doors ripped from the cupboards, the jars of pickles and cabbage and jam smashed onto the floor-and then across the shattered remnants of the mahogany dining room table into his uncle's study. Which was where he saw them. All four of them. The boy with the beautiful, cherubic smile had been hung as if he were a small pig by his ankles from one of the acorn finials atop the high cherry bookcases, his throat slashed so deeply that his head was dangling by twinelike shreds of muscle and skin. The women, including poor, frightened Jutta, had been tied facedown to Uncle Karl's broad desk, their legs naked, their dresses pulled up over their hips. There was dried blood caked like icing along the insides of their legs, and-almost hypnotized-he stared for a moment at the eggplant-colored bruises that marked their buttocks. After they had been violated (or before, for all Helmut knew), each woman had been shot once in the back of the head.

And on the floor nearby, still in his dressing gown, was Uncle Karl. Even in death the man's eyes were wide. The body was on its side, almost curled into a fetal position, and there was something causing the back of the dressing gown to tent. He knelt, pulled the silk aside, and saw that someone had taken the man's crystal decanter full of schnapps and thrust the bottleneck as far into the man's anus as it would fit.

HELMUT WANDERED STUNNED, almost somnambulant, to his uncle's garage, where he found a can of petrol that the Russians must not have noticed. There he filled the BMW. Then he left and joined the throng traveling west. Although he was moving in the same direction as the stream, the trip home still took him nearly two and a half hours. When he passed a woman with five children and all of their suitcases and cartons trudging along on foot, he packed them into the car with him and brought them as far as the entrance to Kaminheim. The only traffic he encountered moving east was two trucks pulling antitank guns, the weapons' long barrels painted white for the winter.

His parents were furious when he got home. His mother, he saw, had actually cleaned the kitchen with the cook in his absence and was draping the furniture in the ballroom with white sheets when he arrived. Their anger dissipated quickly, however, when he told them what he had seen at Uncle Karl's. He didn't share with them all the details, especially after Mutti lowered her head and grew silent. He could tell that it was the death of the boy that first had shocked and then dispirited her. For a long moment she simply allowed herself to be rocked in her husband's arms, her face buried in his chest. She said nothing, though occasionally her body shuddered as she tried to suppress her sobs. She was struggling to maintain a semblance of composure, to prevent her grief and her panic from overwhelming her, but he knew her well enough to know that she would succeed. Then she would resume packing with her usual efficiency and organizing his sister and brother for their departure.

Finally he heard his father murmuring-his voice soft but firm-that it was important they were on the road well before lunchtime. And, sure enough, Mutti stood up a little straighter, pulled away from her husband, and wiped at her eyes.

“Helmut,” she said, just the smallest quaver in her voice. “Please check on your brother. See if he needs any help.”

ANNA WENT OUTSIDE into the chill morning air when she heard what had happened to Uncle Karl and Jutta and the others, and listened to the firing to the east. She had known people who had died-mostly men, of course, including her cousin at Stalingrad, but some women, too-and she had even known people who had died in their apartments or town houses when RAF and American bombers had incinerated whole city blocks. A girl from a BDM camp in one case, friends of her parents in another. But this was a first: the deaths of people she was related to who had been violated-tortured-before they had been slaughtered. She wasn't completely sure why Helmut had insisted on telling her so much more than he had told their parents, but she sensed by the way his forehead was furrowed and his eyes were glassy that he felt a powerful need to unburden himself to someone.

Callum appeared beside her now and dropped at his feet the trunk he was carrying. She recognized it as Theo's, though she knew that most of what had been wedged into it was either provisions for the trek or valuables that her parents thought they might barter as they made their way west. She and her mother had sewn small, secret pockets into some of their dresses and skirts in which they would hide jewelry, since it was possible that diamonds and gold might be the only currency with any value someday soon. Like her, Theo was taking a single suitcase.

“I'm sorry,” Callum said to her simply. “The people who did that to your family… well, they weren't soldiers, you know. They were just criminals.”

She thought about this, but the idea offered little comfort. What difference did it make? “I'm scared,” she said simply. She realized that she really hadn't been before. She had been agitated and apprehensive, she had felt a deep and nagging unease. But until now she hadn't been frightened.

“I can't say I blame you.”

“I tell myself it was all my uncle's fault. You know, he did this to himself. To his family. Because he wouldn't listen, he wouldn't leave. If he had, they'd all be alive today. All of them. You realize that, don't you?”

“I do, yes.”

“Still: I'm scared.”

“Because of the Russians…”

“And because it's all over! Everything!” she said, raising her voice more than she'd meant to. “I've never lived anyplace but Kaminheim. Now I don't even know where I'll be sleeping tonight!”

Though her father or mother or Helmut might appear at any moment, he put his arms around her and pulled her against him. She was wearing only a sweater and so she was shivering. He stroked her hair, careful not to disturb the long braid that ran down her back. She murmured something into his chest, but he couldn't make it out and so he gently lifted her chin with his thumb.

“They…” she began again. Her eyes were moist, but she wasn't crying and it might have been the cold alone that was causing them to water.

“Your uncle's family?” he asked.

“The Russians,” she said, her voice almost bewildered. “They must have been very mad.”

A gust of wind whipped the snow on the walkway into a series of small, tornado-like swirls, and the noise momentarily drowned out the cannonade.

“Apparently. But that sort of behavior is always inexcusable,” he said, wishing he had found a word that suggested the gravity of the Russians' atrocities. He was parroting, he suspected, something his own priggish uncle once must have said. “Even in the worst moments of a war, it's intolerable. No British soldier would have done such a thing. You know that, don't you?”

“I know you believe that.”

“It's a fact,” he said, instantly regretting how curt he had sounded.

“I wouldn't have thought German soldiers would, either. But from what you've told me-from what your radio people claim-they did, and that's probably why the Bolsheviks are so barbaric now.”

He considered this and wondered, as he did often, what sort of soldier he would have been if he hadn't fallen from the sky into a bog and been taken prisoner so quickly. He didn't fear he would ever have done anything cowardly: He was twenty and still had the remorseless confidence of late adolescence. And he knew that he had handled himself well enough when he was helping his fellow paratroopers survive their first moments in the marsh after that disastrous drop. Rather, what made him curious was how capricious his captors had been before he was sent here to Kaminheim to help with the harvest. The guards, he had observed, might dispense a completely unwarranted kindness upon one POW because there was something they liked about the particular Brit's or American's attitude. He was quiet, perhaps. Or he would smile once in a while. Meanwhile, they would beat another prisoner senseless with their rifle butts because they were annoyed with the fellow's sluggishness or the way he wore his overcoat, or they simply didn't like the shape of his jaw or the color of his eyes.

And, Callum presumed, it was a thousand times worse on the battlefield. Those Germans who captured him: Sure, they wanted prisoners they could interrogate. But had they had a less seasoned commander, they probably would have just opened fire and machine-gunned the paratroopers as they struggled from the swamp. And that would have been absolutely fair and reasonable. Hell, if he'd seen a group of German paratroopers in some bog near Elgin in the midst of an invasion, he wouldn't have asked a whole lot of questions before opening fire.

Still, he would never have killed a civilian. Never. Nor would he have raped some poor girl because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was certain that none of his mates would have, either.

Likewise, he couldn't see Helmut doing such things.

Yet Helmut's peers very well might. And Werner's probably had. For all he knew, they had done far worse, if that was possible. And if they hadn't actually raped the girls they had come across in Russia, it was only because they didn't rape dogs and pigs, either. It was beneath them.

What the Russians were doing wasn't forgivable. But it was, he feared, understandable. In their minds, they were just taking an eye for an eye.

And so he had to admit that he was a little relieved, too, that he was going west with the Emmerichs and not staying behind to greet the Russian army. It wasn't just that he wanted to protect Anna. It wasn't just that he wanted to be with her. It was, he thought, his best shot at surviving this nightmare.

THEY LEFT WELL before lunchtime, just as Father had insisted. They left on foot, six more people and four more horses, joining the river of refugees planning, if necessary, to walk the width of Germany in the winter. They left as the snow flurries once more began to coat the road and the roof of the manor house, as behind them the chimneys grew cold. They were a solemn, largely silent procession, their thoughts punctuated always by the sound of the cannons, because by this point there was nothing to say. Anna glanced once at Theo and saw the poor boy had a face that was resolute: He was striving to be as grown-up as his older brothers, soldiers both, as sure and as steadfast as Callum. He was also, she imagined, simply too scared to cry now. Didn't dare. She guessed they all felt that way on some level.

As they passed between the imposing stone columns that marked the entrance to Kaminheim, she noticed that neither of her parents ever looked back.