Skeletons at the Feast

Chapter Nine

THE REFUGEES IN THE COLUMNS MOVED AT DIFFERENT speeds once they were west of the Vistula, not unlike the runners in the middle stages of a marathon. The Emmerichs on occasion were passed and on occasion passed others. During their first afternoon without Helmut or Rolf, they spoke to almost no one, and when they bedded down for the night at the estate of a family they knew in Klinger-abandoned, too, they found when they arrived, and already occupied by a half-dozen other families trekking west-they were so exhausted that they barely opened their mouths. Even Callum was largely silent as he and Anna fed the horses and watched the animals sniff at the strange stalls. Mutti opened some of the canned meats they had brought, and selflessly shared the food-as well as some apples and beets-with the families there, since all of them were traveling on foot and hadn't been able to bring anywhere near the provisions that the Emmerichs had. She had, by her own rough calculations, given away about a day and a half's worth of their food. But it would have been indecent not to share what they had.

Anna had presumed that they would all sleep in bedrooms, on clean, crisp sheets that her parents' friends or servants would place on the guest beds, but other groups who, it was clear, hadn't even known the people who had once lived at this house had already commandeered those quarters. There were elderly married couples who seemed far too frail to be out on their own in the cold, and women (like Mutti) with children, and three female auxiliaries from the navy who were perhaps a year or two older than Anna. The auxiliaries claimed to have been on their way to Konitz on official business when their jeep was destroyed in an air attack, but there was an air of vagueness about their story and a decided restiveness in their eyes. Both Mutti and Anna had the sense they were lying, and hoped for the girls' sake that they would not be spotted by some doctrinaire Nazi who thought the war could be saved if he turned in these possible deserters. The girls had seized the couches and the divan in the den, but insisted on turning them over to the Emmerichs and slept instead on the thick carpet on the floor. Meanwhile, Callum slept beneath their comforters in the barn with the horses, because Mutti decided that there were too many refugees in the house to risk bringing him indoors. The next morning, he said the barn hadn't been too bad because of the amount of heat that was given off by the horses.

On the second night, the Emmerichs were forced to join Callum in a barn, because there was absolutely no more room in either of the two farmhouses where they stopped. At the first home, Anna peered through the windows while Mutti tried to negotiate their way inside, and she saw people packed so tightly in the living room that it looked like the young mothers were sleeping on their feet with their infants in their arms, while old women were asleep both on the dining room table and beneath it. The second house, four kilometers farther, was just as crowded, and Theo-despite his best efforts to transcend his age-was starting to grow a little hysterical with fatigue. And so Mutti had them camp that evening in the barn with, by the time the moon had risen, two other families of trekkers. They were still weeks from Stettin, and as they spread out their blankets and quilts on the hay, Anna guessed that if this trend continued they would be sleeping in the snow by the time they arrived there.

Nevertheless, she didn't complain. Even Theo didn't complain once he was off his feet and buffered by barn board from the chill winds, and they had all eaten apples and beets and the last of the bread they had brought. As they had the day before, they shared their bounty with the families with whom, suddenly, they were sleeping in unexpectedly close quarters.

But it was clear there was no alternative to spending the night with strangers. Besides, Anna reminded herself, how could she even consider whining when her father and Helmut were off fighting at the Kulm bridgehead and Werner was God alone knew where? At least, she reminded herself, they all had their winter boots and their parkas and their furs, and for the moment it had stopped snowing. And the presence of the moon high above had given everyone in the line trekking west the hope that tomorrow there might even be sun.

INDEED, THERE WAS SUN, a great lemon-colored haze brightening the eastern edge of the horizon in the first moments of the morning, and outside the village of Sliwice Cecile closed her eyes and looked up at the sky. She felt the warmth on the very cheekbones that stood out now like a razor ridge on a cliff. Their guards were stopping to rest for a moment, which meant they were allowed to rest, too. They weren't allowed to sit, but at least she and Jeanne could lean against each other, and not have to endure the pain of their shoes grating against the open sores and festering blisters on their feet. They knew they were among the fortunate ones, because Cecile still had her fiancé's old boots and Jeanne still had Cecile's crocodile dress flats-comfortable, though not warm. Some of the other women had actually chosen to march with rags wrapped around their feet instead of the clogs they had been given at the camp, because the snow got into the clogs anyway, and the rags didn't aggravate the cuts on their insteps the way the clogs did. Others decided to forgo shoes and rags completely, believing-mistakenly, Cecile thought-that their frostbite would not become gangrenous if the limbs remained iced. Then, of course, there were those women who already had gangrene, and there were many; many of them went barefoot, too, both because they found the numbness less uncomfortable than the spikes of cold pain they had been suffering and because they hoped they might die more quickly if they trudged ahead barefoot.

Everyone was envious of Cecile's boots and Jeanne's shoes, and some prisoners would express their jealousy with disarmingly angry glances.

Cecile sighed now, her shoulders and back rolling against Jeanne's. “While we can, we should eat some snow,” she said, though she wasn't honestly sure she would be able to stand upright again if she bent over. She thought she might simply fall over if she stooped, and then she risked being shot. Yesterday the guards had executed four women because they had been marching too slowly, lagging behind, or-in one case-because the prisoner had accepted the bread that had been offered by a teen girl as they had marched through a village. The guards had told them they were to speak to no one as they passed through the town, and this prisoner had simultaneously fallen out of line when she had reached for the rye and said something to the girl. The guard who shot her was Pusch, an older man who was known for his thick, white hair, his walruslike mustache, and for the way he refused to beat the prisoners the way most of the guards-especially the female ones-did. He said it was too much work to raise your rod to a Jew: It was much easier to simply shoot them instead.

Cecile guessed there were about three hundred prisoners in their feeble parade and perhaps two dozen guards. Half the guards were women, and sometimes Cecile tried to imagine who was sleeping with whom. Because, clearly, there were romances among the guards. The men tended to be fifteen to twenty years older than the women, and they were the only ones who had rifles. The women had truncheons and clubs. When a male guard wanted to beat you, either he would borrow one of the female guard's rods or he would use the butt of his rifle.

Finally Cecile could bear it no longer, and when none of the nearby guards seemed to be looking-and Pusch was nowhere in sight-she bent over and grabbed a handful of snow in her hand. She licked it slowly, because she had learned yesterday that if she bit into it quickly the cold would send daggerlike barbs of pain against her rotting gums and the holes where her teeth had recently fallen out. Then she passed the snowball back to Jeanne. Instead Jeanne swatted it out of her hand.

“Oh, please,” she said simply. “Spare me more snow.”

“It helps.”

“Not me. It only makes my stomachache worse.”

It was approaching noon, and Cecile was hoping that when they finally entered Sliwice they would be given some soup. That was when they had been fed yesterday: around lunchtime. There had been nothing at breakfast and nothing at dinner, but in the middle of the day they had been given a lukewarm cup of a watery soup made from turnips. Since they hadn't been fed yet today, Cecile was telling herself that they were falling into a routine and in a few moments they would be marched into the town and given their lunch. A tepid and largely flavorless soup. But food nonetheless.

Cecile looked ahead of her and saw the prisoner named Vera was saying something. Speaking to her. Vera was taller than most of the women, and so she tended to stoop so she wouldn't stand out. That had been a key to surviving the camp: be invisible. She didn't say much, but Cecile knew she was from Hungary and that prior to the war she had been a schoolteacher. For two years she had avoided deportation because she had had a Wallenberg passport, one of the documents issued by the Swedish diplomat in Budapest that said the bearer was a Swedish subject awaiting repatriation. Eventually the Nazis and the Arrow Cross fascists simply ignored the passports and deported the Jews anyway.

Now Cecile asked Vera to repeat herself. Sometimes she wondered if her hearing was falling apart along with the rest of her body-as if eardrums, too, could succumb to malnutrition.

“Have you heard where we're going?” Vera was asking.

“I haven't,” she answered.

“I hear it's Germany. They're going to put us to work in a munitions factory there. And we're going to be sleeping indoors again in a barracks right beside it.”

Jeanne turned to her. Her eyes were running in the cold. “You taught very small children, didn't you?”

The woman nodded.

“I thought so. Only a person who told fairy tales for a living could believe that sort of nonsense.”

Cecile felt Jeanne's shivering body against her back; if she hadn't, she feared, she might have slapped her. How many times had she saved Jeanne's life? How many times had she kept the woman going when Jeanne had all but given up? And still Jeanne hurled these malicious, cutting barbs at the other prisoners. At her. It was one thing for the guards to be cruel to them. But it was unconscionable for them to be cruel to one another. If indeed their husbands and their children and their parents were gone, then they were all that they had. When this war was over-and it did seem to be ending, didn't it?-they would all help one another to rebuild their lives. Wouldn't they? Isn't that what families did? What survivors did?

And didn't family members also discipline one another? Keep them in line? She felt like a mother now whose adolescent daughter had grown snappish, and she was about to snap back. To reprimand Jeanne. Before she had opened her mouth, however, the woman on the far side of Vera, another Hungarian whom Cecile barely knew, told Jeanne, “You think you're so clever. Well, you're just mean. How do you know the Germans aren't so desperate for workers they'll use us?”

“Because then they'd feed us!” Jeanne hissed. “If they wanted us to work, they'd give us something to eat!”

“Then you tell me,” the Hungarian said, wrapping her bony arm around Vera's shoulders. “Where are we going?”

“To our graves,” Jeanne said, narrowing her runny eyes. And then she collapsed, sobbing, into the snow.

ONCE MORE CECILE got Jeanne to her feet, and once more she joined the other women as they started to walk. They lumbered along, some stumbling, all concentrating on the normally prosaic task of placing one foot in front of the other while trying not to think about the pain that came with each step, or the hunger that made their stomachs throb, or the way their work pants or shifts invariably were stained with urine and striped with frozen swaths of liquid feces, because most of them had long since lost the slightest ability to control their bowels.

As they exited the far side of Sliwice, Cecile pushed from her mind her disappointment that the guards hadn't fed them. She tried to think instead about the sunshine and the blue sky, about the way the days were growing longer now. She tried to listen to the bird-song from the beech trees, and she considered reminding Jeanne that, yes, there still were birds in the world. She considered pointing out to her the reasonableness of Vera's supposition that they were going to be put to work in a munitions factory and thus soon would be fed. And she wondered about the carts. There were two of them, long, empty wagons, each one being pulled by a powerful draft horse. The guards had commandeered the animals and the carts from the sugar refinery in the town, and Cecile told herself it was because they were going to fill the wagons somewhere up ahead with provisions. With food and water for the prisoners. With bread and potatoes and milk.

She was considering all of these things, imagining the way cool milk would feel on her throat and her tongue, trying to remain hopeful, when ahead of her she saw an Austrian woman named Dorothea stagger and fall face-first into the road. One of the female guards, a woman perhaps her age with eyes the green of the Mediterranean at sunset and hair the color of freshly cut wheat, yelled at her to stand up. When the Austrian didn't, the guard began kicking at her, driving her boot so hard into Dorothea that the guard was spinning the body with her foot, rolling the woman off the road and into the dirty snow just beside it. Dorothea whimpered, but she made no effort to rise, and Cecile prepared herself for the poor woman's execution. Any moment now, Pusch or one of the other male guards would fall back in the column, turn the Austrian onto her stomach, and shoot her in the back of the head. And, sure enough, here came Pusch, as well as the guard named Trammler, annoyed, it seemed, because yet again one of the prisoners had faltered and slowed down the march.

Then, however, they surprised Cecile. Rather than shooting Dorothea, they actually lifted her up off the ground and brought her to one of the two carts they had taken in Sliwice. Pusch himself carried Dorothea in his arms as if she were his daughter and he were bringing her up to her room at the end of a long day, and then laid the emaciated woman gently in the cart.

“See,” Vera murmured to Jeanne. “They do want us alive. They need us and they'll feed us. Soon. You just watch.”

For another hour and a half they marched without incident, walking quietly west with the sun at their back. A little past three, however, another woman slipped on a patch of ice on the road and was unable to rise to her feet. She, too, was placed in the cart beside Dorothea. Cecile took comfort in this: Clearly something had changed. Perhaps it was exactly as Vera had said: The Germans needed them alive. Or, even if Vera was mistaken and their eventual destination was not a munitions factory and a warm barracks, perhaps the Russians were closer than they realized and the guards wanted to show their conquerors that they were treating their prisoners humanely.

More humanely, anyway.

In any case, it was possible, wasn't it, that the worst of the march was behind them?

By the time the sun had set they were somewhere between Sliwice and Czersk, and both carts were filled with prisoners. Easily a dozen women had allowed themselves to slip to the ground in the course of the afternoon when they realized they wouldn't be shot but would, instead, be allowed to ride in the carts. The women were sitting or lying down, some on top of each other and some sound asleep, their wheezing and snores filling the dusk like frogs in the swamps in the spring.

The guards stopped for the night when they saw a barn on a small hillside. It wasn't a large structure-it may have been built for horses, not cattle or livestock-and she feared that only the guards would be sleeping inside it tonight. They, the prisoners, would have to sleep outside in the snow. But perhaps there was a farmhouse just beyond the barn, and the guards-most of them, anyway-would sleep there, and the prisoners would thus get the barn. She had to hope that, because the temperature was falling quickly now that the sun had set and she wasn't sure even she could survive a night in this cold in the snow. And so she told herself that any moment now the guards would give them bowls of hot soup, and then herd them all into the barn for the night. Yes, it would be a tight fit, but all that body heat would help keep them warm.

And, sure enough, she saw that three of the guards were pulling down the wooden fence at a corner of one of the fields and using it to construct a fire. Two fires, in fact. Perhaps these would be the flames over which they would prepare them all a warm meal. Perhaps, in the meantime, they would permit them to sit before the fires and warm their skeletal frames.

But the blazes grew high quickly, despite the cold and the still air. They were by no means out of control, but the guards continued to toss thick wooden posts and long strips of fencing into them, until the tips of the flames were dancing high above them, the nearby snow was melting in nearly perfect, concentric circles, and the crackling fires were much too big to cook pots of soup on. Some of the prisoners rushed as close to the twin infernos as they could, rubbing their hands so near the flames that Cecile was surprised they weren't singeing the backs of their fingers. The guards didn't seem to mind. Pusch even smiled and shook his head, murmuring something she couldn't hear to Trammler and the female guard named Inga. In response Trammler smirked, but Inga looked slightly uncomfortable, and it crossed Cecile's mind that whatever Pusch had said had been filthy. A dirty joke of some sort that only men would appreciate. No doubt a joke at the expense of the prisoners.

Then, however, she saw two teamsters leading the draft horses with their carts full of prostrate women as close to the flames as the animals would venture, and then unhitching the horses from the wagons and walking them away from the fires. If Jeanne had been nearby Cecile guessed she would have reassured her friend that the heat must have felt wonderful to those women, and then abruptly her breath caught in her throat and she had the sense that she would have regretted every word. Because suddenly she knew what was going to happen, and she was starting to tremble. To shake in a way that she hadn't all day, despite the cold. Guards, five assigned to one wagon and six to the other, the men and the women working together, braced their gloved hands and their shoulders on the rear and sidewalls of the wagons and started pushing them forward, the wooden wheels turning slowly at first in the melting snow and softening earth, but then gaining speed so they had a momentum of their own, and then with a final push-she heard the guards exhale as one, a loud grunt that sounded uncomfortably like a cheer-they sent the two wagons into the flames, where these great infusions of fuel (flesh and fabric and wood) sent the tendrils of fire and the spirals of smoke spiking ever higher into the night sky, obliterating the stars and masking the moon. Around her the surviving women cried out and gasped, but the screams-if there were any-of the prisoners being cremated alive in the carts were smothered completely by the roar of the flames.

Not far from her was a heavyset female guard with mannish legs and shoulders as broad as a wardrobe. She shook her head and waggled her finger at Cecile and the women beside her. “Let that be a lesson to you,” she said. “Shirkers and stragglers will be punished.”

Chapter Ten

URI LEANED AGAINST A WOODEN FENCE, EATING A piece of rye bread slathered with lard, and watched the parade of German refugees pass by. It was endless. Absolutely endless. Old people, young people, families. Crippled soldiers. Many had sleds or carts that they were pulling themselves. The most pathetic were the children, especially in those first kilometers west of the villages. Invariably, the road heading west from every town was littered with dolls and stuffed animals and toy soldiers. With picture books. As the families had packed, the parents had weakened and allowed their little ones to take some toys or books. Then, however, as they began their trek west, they had discovered just how difficult it was to pull a heavy sled or push an overloaded cart, and one by one their children's precious objects had been tossed aside and left to molder in the ratty snow. He actually found himself feeling sorry for these people.

Though not that sorry. Just last night he had shot a pair of Waffen SS troopers on motorcycles as they had sped past him. Two quick shots. He had no compunction whatsoever when it came to executing anyone he could in an SS or an SA uniform. Wehrmacht?

Sometimes he spared them, even when the opportunities presented themselves for a clean shot.

He noticed that long strips of the fencing around him had recently been pulled down and used for bonfires in the field perhaps seventy-five meters distant. The snow was melted in two nearly perfect circles, and there were still impressive piles of smoldering black ash. He wondered if the Wehrmacht had had a field kitchen here yesterday or last night. Perhaps some of these refugees had actually been given a hot meal.

Many of the people who passed him were absolutely terrified. When there was sun they expected Russian planes would strafe or bomb them; when there were clouds, they wondered aloud if Ivan would start showering them with artillery shells filled with poison gas. Still, in their minds, being strafed or poisoned was an infinitely preferable fate to being overrun by the Russian army and captured alive: Even some of the children talked with great animation of their families' suicide plans in the event the Russians suddenly appeared before them. Some had stories of schoolmasters and party members who already had done themselves in.

Now Uri was just about to rejoin the procession himself. If anyone asked, he had orders in his pockets to join an assault group forming in Czersk. The army was going to try, yet again, to open a corridor into Danzig. That attack would fail within hours. Uri had absolutely no doubts. But he also didn't seriously plan to be anywhere near it. Czersk was west, however, and these orders-taken off the body of a corporal whose skull had been crushed just west of the Vistula when an artillery shell had sent a sizable chunk of the road into the back of his head-would get him there if anyone asked.

Finally he pushed himself off the fence and started to walk. It had stopped spitting snow a little while ago and the skies were starting to clear. He walked for close to two hours, striding far more quickly than anyone else in the procession and passing everyone he saw. He felt pretty good and thought he might make Czersk by midday-in which case, he would have to make a decision. From there should he proceed northwest along what looked on the map like some garbage road to Brusy? Or should he stay with this crowd and push on to the southwest to Konitz? That was where much of this sorry spectacle was headed next. The road to Konitz was good, there might be food, and there were deserted houses and barns along the way where they might rest in the evening. But on the path to Brusy he would be less likely to encounter German soldiers. And since his orders were to be in Czersk, they did him no good once he was west of that town. He decided he would figure out what to do when he arrived in Czersk. It was likely the village would offer all the chaos he needed to find new orders or a new uniform.

He was within two or three kilometers of the town, noting the way the usually black telephone wires had grown white with snow in the course of the morning, when he noticed something that caused him to pause: He saw a broad-shouldered man a few years younger than him who wasn't in uniform and didn't seem to be either crippled or wounded. He was wearing wool trousers that weren't quite long enough for his legs, and what looked like an aristocrat's winter jacket that was straining desperately at the seams to contain his back and his arms. He was working with an attractive young woman with two blond braids to replace a wooden wheel on a cart, while a younger boy and, he presumed, their mother were looking on. The pair who weren't working had a dusting of snow on their hair and their shoulders-the woman was wearing a fur, the boy an excellent winter jacket-as did the bags of oats and apples the group had unloaded so they could repair the wagon. The young woman was trying to slip a new wheel onto the hub while the man held it off the ground, but it was proving difficult for even this very large fellow to lift the cart up on his own: For every sack or suitcase they had taken off the wagon, at least one remained.

Clearly this family had money: In addition to the cart with the broken wheel, they had a second one parked off to the side. And they had horses. Four magnificent horses. The animals were big, well-muscled stallions, their winter coats lustrous and long.

Curious, he stopped and knelt beside the couple trying to replace the wheel. He motioned at the cart. “You need some help?” he asked.

Beneath that cap the fellow had a thick mane of nearly carrot-colored hair. He barely looked up at Uri from the front axle. Averted his eyes, didn't say a word. Nobody did. A deserter, Uri decided, which meant that he was probably scaring the shit out of him-out of this whole family-and he had to restrain a small smile.

Finally the younger woman with the braids said, “No. But thank you. We expect to be back on the road in a few minutes.” He eyed her carefully now. She had a lovely, delicate nose and the sort of full, rich lips that seem always to be slightly parted on very beautiful women. And her hair was exactly that flaxen blond so coveted by Nazi propagandists in search of models. She looked a bit like the boy and a bit, he guessed, like their mother. But those three-the girl and the boy and their mother-looked absolutely nothing like this hulk replacing the wheel. Which meant that he probably wasn't related to them. He was probably this younger woman's fiancé or husband.

“You speak?” Uri asked the fellow.

Now he turned to Uri and nodded.

“With more than your chin?” Uri continued. There was a part of him that couldn't imagine him challenging a man this physically imposing as recently as two years ago. In the first months of his masquerade, he had been more likely either to flatter everyone he met or try to be largely invisible-a nonentity; but he had learned quickly that he was much better off among these people if he was brazen. They were far less likely to question a bully. And now, after nearly two years of fighting, it seemed impossible to Uri not to view every encounter as a confrontation.

The fellow mumbled that he did speak, but he didn't look up from the strut and he spoke in a tone that was striving for annoyance but had just a hint of unease. And there was something in the few syllables that sounded foreign to Uri. American, maybe. Or British. But certainly not Prussian. And certainly not the German Uri had heard growing up in Bavaria. And so another, more interesting possibility occurred to Uri: POW. Not a deserter, a prisoner. He knew that the Germans had been sending British and American POWs to the farms to work the fields the previous summer and fall. Not the Russians, of course. After all, the field work was downright cushy. Instead, the Russian POWs were expected to detonate or remove the unexploded bombs from the urban rubble of places like Hamburg and Berlin. Most of them hadn't the slightest idea what they were doing, and it was just a game of, well, Russian roulette. But they did know that if they were still alive by the time their own army arrived, they'd be killed anyway for surrendering. Or, if they were lucky, sent to some work camp in Siberia.

Uri gazed from this redhead-this Yankee or Brit-to the two siblings and their mother. Like those women he had come across in the castle the other day, one of them might very well have a hand-gun concealed in a cape or a fur. The pretty blond might have a pistol trained on him right now. Still, he didn't guess they would be crazy enough to shoot a Wehrmacht soldier in broad daylight while harboring a POW.

He wondered what it meant that they were bringing their POW with them. Was he just brawn, like their horses? A pet? Or was he something more? He had heard about romances between Allied POWs and the farm girls. The German men all gone, the girls bored to tears on their estates. Was this one right here before his very eyes?

Finally Uri motioned for the man to move over so he could help him lift the wagon, and the woman would be able to slip the wheel into place. He considered introducing himself, but he didn't want to put the POW in the awkward position of having to speak once again. “Here,” he said simply, “let me help. You can't sit here all day with a broken wheel.” Then he and the prisoner hoisted the axle just far enough off the ground that the woman was able to place the spare wheel onto the bar and secure it to the wagon. It took about half a minute.

Up ahead, coming from the west, Uri heard the metallic rattle that he instantly recognized as tanks. At least two, and maybe more. Given that the line was moving sluggishly to one side of the road-rather than fleeing like frightened kittens into the brush-he presumed the tanks were German. And, within seconds, he saw them: three Panthers motoring toward them, half on and half off the road so they didn't mow down the refugees. They each had infantry soldiers riding atop them, and they were moving with such purpose that he didn't fear anyone was going to try to recruit him into the assault group.

As they passed he saluted, the sort of lackadaisical wave he offered in lieu of a full-fledged Heil Hitler. He watched to see what the redhead would do, and he did, essentially, the same thing. Unlike Uri, however, he was actually sweating, despite the cold.

When the tanks' earth-flattening clanking was beyond them, he glanced at the piles of oats and provisions they had to load back into the wagon. Without asking, he went to one and lifted it onto the cart.

“Oh, we can do that,” the young woman said.

“I figured. But you can do it faster if you let me help. And fast is good now that the Russians have broken out of Kulm.”

The woman's mother gasped. “Kulm has fallen? Completely fallen?” she asked. She made it sound like Berlin had surrendered.

“Yes, of course,” said Uri. He couldn't imagine at first why she might care that such an irrelevant little place had been overrun. As far as he could tell, it was an obscure hamlet that served the aristocratic beet farmers who lived just outside it. But then he glanced at the horses and the quality of the clothes these people were wearing. No doubt they were part of that Kulm gentry. Had probably been on the road only a few days. “Are you from Kulm?” he asked, trying to soften his tone.

“We live there,” the young woman said. “My father and my brother were counterattacking the Russians there just the other day!”

Well, they're not anymore, Uri thought, but he kept that response to himself. In all likelihood, the pair was lying dead in a snowbank somewhere. The counterattack had been launched by old men and young boys, and-like everything the Wehrmacht did these days-it had been absolutely fearless and completely ill-advised, and virtually all those old men and young boys had been slaughtered.

The younger brother looked up at the sky now, and he gazed with such curious intensity that the adults around him all stopped what they were doing.

“What is it, Theo?” his mother asked.

“I hear buzzing,” he said simply.

Uri had been around enough artillery that he knew his hearing had gone to hell. He couldn't hear yet what this boy-and then, clearly, his older sister-could hear. But he knew what it meant when you heard a buzzing in the sky. The odds were good they were hearing planes. Lots of planes. Far more planes than the Luft-waffe could put into the air at one time these days. And then, before he could warn them, tell them his suspicions, they all heard the sound. In seconds it was transmogrified from insects to engines, dozens and dozens of them, and they saw the great, growling formation, one side actually luminescent as the long swaths of metal fuselage reflected the sun as they emerged from the clouds. The aircraft were British, and suddenly three of the planes were diving toward the column-he wondered if they had seen the German tanks that had just passed-and they all needed to get off the road.

Reflexively he grabbed the mother by her arm and pulled her with him into the fields, sprinting with her past those large, circular piles of ash and toward the barn beyond them. The POW and the two siblings were beside him, racing too, and he was aware that the formerly long and straight caravan had spread like spilled milk into the snow and the fields along both sides of the road. They were nearing the barn when the boy abruptly shrieked, “Waldau! I won't lose Waldau, too!” He let go of his older sister's hand and ran back toward the road, apparently worried about one of those horses.

“Theo!” the prisoner yelled, and then both he and the POW were dashing after the boy.

Up the road they all heard the sound of the screams and the missiles and the diving airplanes, a simultaneous, deafening cacophony, part machine and part animal, and watched as three Spitfires swooped down in a perfect line, one behind the other, their cannons ablaze, splintering the carts and slaughtering the stragglers who remained on the road. One wagon was flying through the air in two massive pieces, its rear wheels still spinning, as were the bodies of three old women who had been traveling together, one of whom had lost her legs in the blast. The air was alive with sheets of newspapers and the stuffing from pillows, and rags of clothing that were either drenched with blood or housing now-unattached arms and legs and feet. Beyond them they saw great plumes of black smoke swirling into the sky like tornadoes, fueled, Uri guessed, by the ammunition and petrol from those Panthers that recently had passed.

And still Theo ran hysterically for the horses.

High above them now the fighters were starting to circle back, preparing for a second pass over the remnants of the column before rejoining their massive, glistening flock. Uri and the prisoner caught up to Theo just as the boy was reaching the two horses that were still attached to the wagon. The animals' eyes were wild and their nostrils were flaring, and they were craning their powerful necks in all directions. But at least they weren't rearing up on their hind legs and attempting to break free. As for the other two? They were nowhere in sight, and Uri hoped for this boy's sake that they had simply run off, and hadn't been blown high into the sky in small pieces like so much else that had been standing on or beside this road just a moment earlier.

With the POW he tried to unhitch one of the animals, while the boy worked on his own to free the other. This was complete madness in Uri's mind, utter lunacy. Had he really lived through so much over the last two years only to get himself killed helping some Nazi boy save his damn horse? He and this prisoner weren't nearly as proficient with the clasps and the buckles as the child, but together they were able to remove the harness and grab the leather reins, and join the boy as he scurried with his horse from the road into the fields.

Behind them they heard more cries and more blasts, and they felt the ground shaking beneath them as they ran, but Uri had the horse now, and the last thing he wanted to do was waste even a second looking back.

FOR A LONG MOMENT after the planes were gone the five of them leaned against an outside wall of the barn. Uri and the POW stood with their hands on their knees, swallowing great gulps of cold air. The boy? He and his sister were each calming one of the horses, stroking them softly along their long, graceful noses. Their mother was standing under the eave, clearly a little numbed. She was, however, the first one to speak. In a tone that surprised Uri with its firmness and control, she said, “That was unwise, Theo. You know that, don't you?”

The child nodded, but said, “I've already lost Bogdana. I shouldn't have to lose Waldau, too.” His voice had just a touch of defiance to it.

“Bogdana was his pony,” the boy's older sister said, as if that explained everything. Then: “Thank you for helping us. That was completely unnecessary. But very brave.”

He looked up. He saw the little boy had cut his cheek at some point, just below his eye, and the blood was trickling like raindrops on glass past his ear and along the side of his jaw. Uri motioned toward it with his finger, and the child's sister reached somewhere inside her cape and found the sort of dainty handkerchief his grandmother used to use-he saw blue flowers, edelweiss perhaps, embroidered into one of the corners-and pressed it gently against the wound. “You hurt yourself, sweetie,” she murmured. The boy barely shrugged.

On the road before them the lucky refugees were already starting to restack their bags and their boxes and their suitcases onto their carts and resume their trek west. Others were sobbing over dead children, dead mothers, dead fathers. Some of the dead looked as peaceful as any Uri had seen, while others had died with their arms raised in either anger or despair at the sky. Some were lying perfectly still as their clothing continued to smolder.

Uri turned to this family around him. “What are your names? I know you're Theo. But I don't know the rest of you.”

“I'm Anna. And this is our mother.”

“And you?” This time Uri spoke directly to the POW.

“He's… Otto,” said Anna, answering before the man could even begin to open his mouth.

“Like hell he is,” said Uri.

“He's-”

Uri waved her off. “He's Otto. I understand.” He extended his hand to the POW. “I'm Manfred.” The fellow took his hand and smiled at him, his eyes as grateful as a spared fawn's.

“Thank you, Manfred,” the mother was saying to him. “Thank you for helping us save the horses.”

“We should find the others,” Anna said, meaning, Uri assumed, their other animals. She was still pressing her handkerchief against her little brother's cheek. “We have so much loaded on each of the wagons.”

“You're supposing your wagons are still in one piece. And your other horses are alive,” he said.

“That is hoping for a lot, isn't it?”

“It is,” he said. “But let's go see.”

URI STOOD WITH this POW over the carcass of what had once been a magisterial stallion. It looked like it had probably run fifty or sixty meters after the Spitfire's cannons had punched great holes in its side and caused the animal's steaming entrails to fall from its abdomen like the contents of a piñata.

“This was Labiau,” the POW said, kneeling. He took off his glove and ran his bare fingers along the horse's powerfully muscled shoulders. The fellow's German sounded vaguely Scottish to Uri. “I think they named most of their horses after castles.”

“You think,” said Uri. “They're not your horses, too?”

The POW realized his mistake and stood. “Yes, I think. I'm not a part of their family. So: Are you going to shoot me?”

The two men hadn't planned on separating from Anna and Theo and their mother, and Uri had the sense that wherever Anna was at the moment, she wasn't happy about the fact that the family's POW was alone with him.

“No,” he told the prisoner. “No more than you're going to shoot me.”

“Then what?”

He shrugged. “I'm going on to Czersk to rejoin my unit.” In the distance, beside an overturned wicker basket that had been blown far from someone's wagon or cart, they saw a horse browsing its contents. “Is that one of theirs, too?”

The POW nodded. “It is. Ragnit.”

“And your real name?”

The POW reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out some cigarettes. He handed one to Uri and kept one for himself. “Callum,” he said.

“English?”

“Scottish.”

“Where were you captured?”

“France. I'm a paratrooper.”

“And you wound up this far east… how?” Uri asked, lighting the cigarette and savoring the warmth of the smoke in his mouth and his lungs. He realized that he hadn't had a cigarette in at least three or four days.

“I was sent from the stalag to their farm to help with the harvest.”

“Alone?”

“No. Originally there were seven of us.”

“What happened to the others?”

“They were returned to the stalag.”

“But not you.”

“No. Their father knew someone. Pulled some strings. He realized he was going to be recruited into the army, and he wanted a man to help manage the estate when he was gone. Do the heavy lifting.”

“You know how much trouble you're in now, don't you?”

“How so?”

“Well, I'm not going to kill you. But many other soldiers would. And if the Russians catch you, well, that wouldn't be pretty, either. In their eyes, you'd be either a collaborator or a spy.”

“The plan-” Abruptly the POW stopped talking, alarmed that he was saying too much. But it was apparent now to Uri that there was a plan, or at least a vague hope, and it became clear in an instant to Uri what it was: This family, like so many others in this endless and tawdry procession, was going to cross the whole bloody Reich, if necessary, to reach the British or the American lines. And, when they made it, this Scottish paratrooper was going to be their goodwill ambassador. Their currency. Their proof that they weren't your run-of-the-mill Nazis. There was little doubt in Uri's mind that this Callum and Anna were lovers, and the reason the girl's parents were tolerating their relationship was because this paratrooper was going to be their daughter and son's ticket into whatever post-Hitler world awaited them. For all he knew, the girl's mother was actually hoping the two would marry someday, and they'd all live happily ever after on some Scottish moor. Or, perhaps, she was living under some delusion that in a few weeks' time this man's army would be joining hers to beat back the barbarians from the east. He'd heard people saying such things for a while now. Believing such things. It was, along with their pathetic faith in some wonder weapon that Nazi scientists were supposedly cooking up in underground tunnels somewhere, what kept them going.

Still, this girl's parents might be on to something. Not about the Brits and the Yankees ever aligning themselves with the Germans. And not about the wonder weapons. But he realized if he was still stuck in this German uniform when the end finally came, it would benefit him, too, to have a friend like Callum. He didn't honestly believe that would happen. That it could happen. But he had been a chameleon for so long, what if people didn't believe him when he insisted he was actually Uri Singer from Schweinfurt? What if he awoke one morning and the war was over, and he learned that all the Jews but him had been killed? What if he was actually unable to convince anyone who he was?

“Are you going to Czersk now, too?” he asked the paratrooper.

“Only because it's the next stop on the road.”

“And then?”

“Stettin, eventually.”

“I've never been to Stettin.”

“Me neither.”

“Well, why don't I go round up that Ragnit,” he said. Gently he touched the toe of his boot to the dead horse at his feet. “And you can tell the family what happened to this one.”

The Scot snuffed out his cigarette in the snow and nodded. He put back on his gloves and lumbered off, his shoulders slightly stooped by the weight of the news he was toting.

Chapter Eleven

CALLUM WALKED BESIDE ANNA ALONG THE PATH THAT linked a farmer's field to the road. There was hardpacked snow in the middle, but the innumerable wagon wheels that had preceded them had carved the two ruts on which they were leading the horses. They were down to three animals now, and so they had left behind a few bags of feed and one of the trunks. They had consolidated three trunks into two, with Mutti sacrificing most of her spare clothes. When they reached Stettin, she had said, her cousin would have plenty of coats and dresses to lend her.

It fascinated Callum. It fascinated them all. They were leaving a trunk by the side of the road packed with silks and linens and night-gowns, and no one was bothering to ransack it. No one cared. People could barely struggle forward with the few things they had: They couldn't have cared less about adding more. And so the trunk was just one more suitcase or bag or chest that would sit moldering in the snow until, perhaps, a Russian soldier finally got around to looting it.

On the surface, the Emmerichs seemed fine to Callum, even young Theo. But he knew they weren't. They were stunned by what they had seen and saddened by the loss of Labiau. Still, they were soldiering on, just as they had after Rolf and Helmut had left them at the Vistula. They were continuing now with neither hysteria nor histrionics, because, after all, they hadn't a choice. Nevertheless, he wanted to reach out and embrace them. Especially Anna. Since they had left the estate, it had been difficult to find moments when the two of them could be alone. They had found them, but the kisses and the embraces had been furtive. They certainly hadn't had either the opportunity or the inclination to make love. As a result, it had been the smallest of contacts that had mattered: One time Anna had removed her glove and taken his hand when he had still been riding inside the cart, smothered by all those bags of oats, and the connection-the rediscovery of her skin-had been electric. Another time, one of those nights in one of those barns, when it seemed as if everyone in the world was asleep but them, she had sat beside him and then curled against him, burrowing deep inside his jacket. For close to three hours they had whispered and dozed in their corner of the barn and imagined what their lives would be like when the war was behind them. And they had usually found brief moments to kiss: chaste kisses good night when no one was looking, as well as kisses that were wanton and moist and in other circumstances-simply being warm, perhaps, or being alone-would have left them aroused and desirous of more.

He considered the other girls he had known. He had had girlfriends before, but neither he nor they had ever thought that their relationships might have longevity, and he had made love with only one woman before Anna. The closest thing he had had to a serious relationship had been with the widow nearly twice his age with whom he'd been sleeping-clandestinely-until she had found a more suitable partner and remarried. Her name was Camellia, and her husband had been a friend of his uncle's. That was how they had met. She was tiny: small breasts and boyish hips and dark hair she kept bobbed in a manner that he understood was no longer fashionable. But she was ravenous in bed in a way that, until he was with her, he hadn't realized women could be. She had taught him an awful lot. But he had also understood that their relationship-perhaps even that was too strong a word, perhaps even in his mind he should use the term that she always had, which was dalliance-had never had any sort of future. Which, given the fact he was eighteen and nineteen years old at the time and he was being trained to hurl himself from an airplane above blokes who wanted to shoot him like quail, had seemed to make sense. She had actually remarried three weeks before he jumped over France, and he and his mother and his uncle had of course been at the wedding. Her new husband was a few years her senior and worked for the chancellor of the exchequer. The last time he saw her was as he was leaving the reception, and he had kissed her once on each cheek before returning to his barracks. It hadn't felt all that odd. She didn't even wink slyly at him, and he had murmured nothing to her about their past. Already she was back to being a friend of his uncle's. A woman from a different generation.

He thought now about how good it felt to be walking. To be on his feet. With this Wehrmacht corporal accompanying them, he hadn't even considered climbing back under the sacks of feed or the few bags of apples and beets that remained. Before they had set off again he had wanted to tell Anna or Mutti that this soldier knew he was a British POW, but there hadn't been the chance-and the corporal seemed in no hurry to confront anyone. Besides, with only three horses remaining it was clear that the Emmerichs wanted to burden their animals with his weight only when they absolutely had to. With any luck, he told himself, the German soldier's presence would actually prevent anyone from challenging his identity.

When they reached the end of the path through the field, they turned onto a paved road with a sign for Czersk. A teenage boy in a Hitler Youth uniform-no coat, Callum guessed, because he wanted to show off his dagger and his black scarf and his starched white shirt-was barking orders, but no one was listening. He was telling people to keep moving and to continue on to the northwest, but it wasn't as if anybody was going to stop, or anyone in his right mind would even consider turning left and traveling toward the southeast. Still, Callum was careful not to meet his eyes as they passed near him.

“I don't know what we would have done if you and that soldier hadn't rescued the horses,” Anna said to him suddenly. Mutti and the corporal were leading the wagon ahead of them, well out of earshot.

“Wasn't all that much. Theo was already up and at them.”

“Still…”

“It was all reflex,” he went on. “Besides, my sense is those that lived were going to be fine, regardless of what we did. Really. There is, it would seem, a good measure of luck involved when you survive something like this.”

She nodded. “Imagine if you'd been killed by one of your own planes.”

“It wouldn't be the first time someone was. And it wouldn't be the last.”

“Mutti was right. What you did-what you and Manfred did-was very brave.”

“He knows I'm no one named Otto,” he told her. He spoke suddenly, surprising even himself.

She turned toward him, alarmed, her eyebrows collapsing down around her eyes. “How do you know that?”

“He told me when we were rounding up Ragnit.”

“What did he say?”

He recounted for her the conversation he had had with the soldier over the remains of poor Labiau, occasionally pausing to listen, almost curiously, to the way the Hitler Youth lad was continuing to scream at no one in particular. The boy was behind them now, and as they had passed him it had grown clear to Callum how very much he was reveling in this role he had been given. He wondered why the boy was having so much fun. Did he really not understand that the end was near? Good Lord, he shouldn't be wearing that ridiculous uniform, Callum thought, he should be burying the damn thing.

“What do you think the corporal's going to do?” Anna asked him, her voice buoyed by little eddies of worry, when he had finished telling her about Manfred. She looked beautiful to him, despite the small, dark bags that had grown beneath her eyes. There were wisps of her lovely yellow hair emerging from underneath her scarf near her ears, and the cold had given her cheeks a rosy flush.

“I don't think he's going to do anything.”

“He doesn't care?” She sounded more incredulous than comforted.

“What? Does that seem irresponsible to you?” he asked her, smiling. “Do you want him to shoot me? Turn me in?”

“I'm just surprised. I'm relieved. But I'm also surprised.”

“I think he has perspective.”

She seemed to consider this. He knew how hard it was even for her to contemplate the end. Then: “Can we trust him? Can we trust him completely?”

“Well, I don't think we have a choice. And, as you observed, his helping me rescue the horses was a rather thankless task. It would certainly suggest he's a good egg.”

“Sometimes…”

“Yes?”

“Sometimes I wish you were German. Or I were English.”

“I know.”

“Everything would be easier.”

He thought of the first time they had kissed by one of her family's apple trees. And then of the time they had kissed beside a horse chestnut. And, once, near a beech. Always the air had been crisp because they had fallen in love in the autumn. “In weeks or months,” he said, “it won't matter.”

“But it will.”

“No. It's-”

“It's the truth,” she corrected him. “Where could we even live, if…”

“Go on.”

“If we even live through this?”

He saw Mutti and the soldier were engrossed in a conversation of their own and Theo was quietly singing one of his folk songs to himself. And so he took the liberty of actually reaching out his free hand and taking Anna's fingers in his as they walked. Instantly Anna glanced at Theo, saw her brother was oblivious of them, and allowed him to hold on to her.

“We'll live in Elgin,” he reassured her. “I've told you, we've plenty of castles in Scotland. You'll think you've never left home.” He had thought often about what would happen to them when the war ended. He had even imagined introducing Anna to his mother-his chic, stylish, well-traveled mother who, these days, didn't have a particular fondness for Germans. Nevertheless, he continued to believe that eventually they would all do well together: Although Anna viewed herself as a country girl, the reality was that by any standards but her own she was a bloody aristocrat. A horsewoman par excellence. Even her gloved fingers seemed elegant to him right now.

Still, he understood her fears. He knew she still didn't want to believe the rumors that were spreading fast now about what the Germans had done-for all he knew, were still doing-to the Jews. But he also knew she was beginning to realize there might be some truth to even the most horrifying stories. And so, like many of her neighbors, she had begun to wonder about what sort of retribution might be awaiting her. Not just from the Russians. But, perhaps, from the Yankees, the Brits, and the French, too. He could almost hear in his head his uncle's quiet but intense interrogation of this young German girl he had brought home from the war like a souvenir. Well, then, tell me, Anna: Precisely where did you think the Jews were going? Oh? What about the Poles, then-you know, your help? And what's this about your mother and the führer? She really seems to have been quite enamored of the old boy.

And yet Anna really didn't know much, did she? Insinuation. Hearsay. Stories. It was he who had first told her that the Jews were being sent to the camps. And what in the name of heaven was she supposed to do about it-about any of it? She had only just turned eighteen. She had led a life that was at once sheltered and isolated. It wasn't as if she had grown up in a city where she could see the discrimination that was occurring on a daily basis: watch the SA smash the glass windows of the Jewish businesses, round up whole families and send them away. Make them wear those bloody stars. It was more like naïveté, wasn't it? He almost stopped where he was and shook his head, as if he were trying to shed the idea from his mind like chill rain from his hair. Naïveté, indifference. What did that really mean?

He felt her fingers massaging his and exhaled. He told himself that right now he should be focusing on nothing but survival: his survival, and this family's.

Behind them, his hoarse voice finally disappearing into the clamor of the wagons and the animals and the general murmur of the refugees, the Hitler Youth squad leader continued his shouting, despite the fact that no one was listening.

MUTTI COULDN'T RECALL when she had ever been more tired. Her legs felt like giant blocks of granite she was trying to lift with her thighs, and her back was aching in a way it hadn't since she had been thrown from a horse when she was a child and been laid up in bed for six weeks. She remembered the slicing pain well. Then, however, she hadn't had to trudge westward all day long, leading the remnants of her family through the cold, the wind always pricking at their faces and wanting to freeze any exposed flesh.

She half-heard the horse behind her snort in the chill winter air and was vaguely aware of the animal as he shook his long winter mane. Mostly, however, she was focused on this handsome corporal who, like a guardian angel, had appeared out of nowhere and helped to salvage three of their horses and was now leading Ragnit so she could rest her arms. She had been telling him stories of her own sons, of Werner and young Helmut, to pass the time, and he had been telling her about some of his own experiences in the war. She was aware that he was consciously shying away from whatever he had endured in battle, and she surmised this was both because he was such a modest young man and because he wanted to spare her any images that might cause her to worry even more about her husband and her boys. Besides, as Rolf had said on more than one occasion, real soldiers didn't talk about war. It was only the cowards who felt the need to tell people stories about what they had done. And clearly this Manfred was a real hero of the Reich.

Now he was helping to buoy her spirits with his conversation, and to ensure that the Emmerichs kept their place in the stream. There had been rumors that Cossacks-not merely Russians, but Cossacks!-had been sighted nearby.

“Where are your parents?” she asked him. “Are they still in Schweinfurt?”

“They are.”

“Have they lost much in the bombing? Until recently, we've been spared this far east. But I know that the western cities are a frightful mess.”

“I haven't been home in a while. But my sense is I wouldn't recognize my old neighborhood.”

“My cousin said Stettin is largely unscathed.”

“Good. You and your family should be safe there for a while.”

She thought about this. For a while. He hadn't emphasized those words, but they had seemed a meaningful coda.

“Where do you think we'll stop the Russians?” she asked, longing for the sort of reassurance she had once gotten from her husband and her oldest son.

He continued to stare straight ahead, but she saw a small, ironic smile forming at the edges of his-she noticed now-painfully chapped lips. “Oh, I'm just a soldier,” he said modestly. “I don't know anything. I just go where I'm told and do what I can. You probably know more about what's going on than I do.”

“I know this,” she said. “I never thought I'd be running for my life from the Russians. How did this happen? Is it just that their country is so big? Do they just have so many young men they can afford to lose?”

He seemed to contemplate this. “I've asked myself that, too: How did this happen? And it seems to me it has less to do with the Russians-the Russians or the western armies, even-and much more to do with us. I think when this is all over, the Germans will have only themselves to blame.”

She recalled how her husband and her brother had talked on occasion about the foolhardiness of attacking Russia-how the Reich had plenty of land and didn't need to take on Joe Stalin. She assumed this was what Manfred was referring to now: the difficulty of waging a war on two fronts. They, the Germans, should have been satisfied with the state of things in 1941 and made peace with Britain. After all, no one had any gripes with the British. Look at Callum. Or the other POWs they had had working for them on the farm through the autumn. Good boys, fine young men. It didn't make any sense at all to be at war with Great Britain.

“Yes, we just don't have the manpower,” she murmured, hoping she sounded both agreeable and wise.

“Well, we don't. But that isn't what I meant. I meant we haven't exactly been a civilized empire ourselves. The answer to your question, ‘How did this happen?’ It's actually pretty simple. We asked for it.”

She thought of how long and thin his face was, and how much he had probably suffered. It was as if he had emerged whole from an El Greco canvas, just walked into the world from the frame.

“I've heard that our armies behaved badly sometimes,” she said simply. “But then I think of soldiers like you or Werner. Or Werner's friends. We had naval officers at our home in the fall, and they were nothing but gentlemanly. We played music together, they danced with my daughter and her friends. All completely civilized. And so I have to ask: Who? Who then are these German soldiers who have done the things people whisper about? Where are they?”

“I've met some. And it's not just the soldiers. It's the whole German people.”

“Who have you met?” she asked. “What have you seen?” She realized that she sounded like a devastated child: a girl who has just learned there are no such things as fairies. Instantly she regretted the tone and tried to reclaim a semblance of dignity. “Tell me, please. I want to know.”

He shrugged. “The eastern front is more barbaric than the west, I'll admit that. But there have been atrocities everywhere. And the worst has had nothing to do with the front lines. It's what we have done behind the lines. Behind the barbed wire.”

“The work camps? Yes, I've heard stories about them. But I'm sure they're exaggerations, aren't you?”

“I'm not sure of that at all.”

“Have you been inside one?”

“No. But once…”

“Please. I can bear it,” she told him. “I seem to have lost my home and virtually everything I've ever owned. I'm a strong woman, I assure you.”

“Once,” he said, “I was on a train.” His voice had taken on an uncharacteristically somber cast. “It was filled with Jews being sent east.”

“You were a guard?”

“No, I wasn't a guard. I was simply a courier. I was bringing some papers to a general in the east. The jeep I was in was strafed and the driver was killed. But I heard a train coming and it was going in the right direction, and so I hitched a ride. There I saw firsthand how we were treating the Jews. It was disgusting. Shameful. Old people, children-everyone-were just jammed into cattle cars. No water, no food, no bathrooms. Inside there they were dying. Literally: They were expiring.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe they were criminals.”

“The children? The old people? You know that's not true.”

“But why would we do that? That's what I don't understand. What could possibly be gained from killing the Jews? It doesn't make sense.”

He stopped walking, halting the horse, and stared at her. His eyes seemed sympathetic and kind, and she couldn't decide if he felt guilty for sharing with her what he had seen, or whether he was baffled by how little she knew. Perhaps it was a little of both.

Behind them, on the other side of their wagon, she heard Anna calling out, asking if she was all right.

“We're fine,” Manfred shouted back, but Mutti felt his gaze holding her in place. Then, his voice much softer, he said only to her, “No. It doesn't make sense. It makes absolutely no sense at all.”

IN THE MIDDLE of the night, Uri awoke and told Callum-who heard him rise-that he was going outside to have a cigarette. They were camped on the floor inside a village gymnasium with perhaps two dozen other refugees, all of whom were asleep at the moment. Callum had said he would join him, but Uri had insisted that he remain here with the women and Theo. You just never knew. And then he walked as quietly as he could in his boots over the sleeping women and children, offering a hearty Heil Hitler as he exited the gym to the ancient policeman with a Volkssturm armband who was nervously patrolling the streets.

They were near a train station, and Uri had learned that one of the ways he could slow the ovens was to slow the trains. And so he lit his cigarette and strolled casually there: The village was largely deserted this far east, but he knew there were still trains passing through here going north and south. He'd heard one of those vexing whistles only an hour ago.

When he arrived, he saluted the two guards. They chatted briefly about the state of the war-the pair were noncommittal, unsure who he was and whether he might be the sort who would turn them in if they said something defeatist-and how, at the very least, the trains were still running. Yes, they were slowed by air strikes, but they were still on the tracks and that was testimony to how much fight the nation still had left. He agreed and offered each of them one of the precious cigarettes he had gotten from Callum. They accepted. And then, as they were lighting them, he shot them both. Two quick shots, into the base of the skull of the first and into the face of the second, because that second soldier had turned, stunned, at the sound of the blast. Then Uri had gone inside and shot the fellow who was, apparently, in charge of marshaling the trains onto the proper tracks: It was possible, he saw, to switch and cross the cars onto parallel tracks at this particular station.

He wouldn't have blown up the tracks here, even if he'd had any explosives-which, other than a pair of potato-masher grenades, he didn't. That sound, far louder than three quick shots from his Luger, would have alerted any troops that happened to be nearby. Besides, he didn't have to tear up the tracks to sow a little chaos. Not here. He could stall the trains for hours while the engineers tried to figure out which tracks their cars were supposed to be on; with any luck, one might derail. Now that would gum up the works.

Outside he heard voices and the sound of heavy boots on the cobblestones on the street. Already soldiers were coming. And so quickly he ducked out the back door and disappeared into the dark behind the station. Then he started toward the gymnasium, moving-as he did often in the night-with a speed and a silence that once he wouldn't have thought possible.

AT DAWN, Anna traded one of her gold earrings to an elderly woman in the village who rumor had it had potatoes and sausage and bread for sale. They still had apples and sugar, but they had boiled the last of their beets the night before and finished off their remaining tins of canned meat: Their small party had eaten some and given the rest to a young mother and her children who said they hadn't eaten all day. Mutti had been surprised by how quickly their food was disappearing, but they had been generous both with strangers and with themselves. Now Anna bartered with this crone as she stood on the stone steps before the woman's front door. She still had a necklace and bracelets, and she knew that her mother had jewelry as well. Nevertheless, this gold earring was half of a pair that had belonged to her grandmother, and it was the last piece she owned that once had been worn by Kaminheim's original matriarch. The earring was the shape of an oak leaf.

“You have horses?” the woman asked, her voice affectless and cold, when she handed over a half-dozen potatoes that were sprouting eyes the color of dried paste and starting to soften and shrivel with age. Her face was hard-bitten and lined, and her silver hair was hanging lank and unwashed. Anna had heard that she had a husband who couldn't walk, but supervised the transactions from a room near the entrance to the house with a loaded gun in his lap. She had told Mutti none of this.

“We do.”

“I have apples.”

“We have apples, too. A few anyway. We have apples and oats,” she said, smiling in a way that she hoped appeared friendly. “We used to have an orchard.”

“I'll save my apples for someone else then.”

“What about the sausages and the bread?”

“Sausages?”

“I gave you the earring. You were supposed to give me some sausages and a little bread. Isn't that what we agreed?”

The woman seemed to think about this. Then: “Very well,” she said, and she shut the front door and disappeared back into the house. Anna waited a moment and then knocked. No one answered and so she rapped her fingers against the door once again. This time when no one came back she felt a swell of umbrage and offense rise up inside her: She realized that she had parted with her grandmother's earring, and all she had to show for it were a half-dozen mealy potatoes. A part of her comprehended perfectly well that adding a few sausages to the transaction would have made it no less demeaning and exploitive in the long run, but her resentment was tangible: As real as the ice and the snow, as concrete as the soreness in her back from sleeping last night on a gymnasium floor. As painful as the blisters on the sides of her feet. And so she banged her fist hard on the door twice and swore. Used words she had never before spoken aloud. She might have made a scene right there on the street, staying and swearing at the couple through the heavy wooden door that separated them from her, but her family was waiting. They were supposed to keep moving. And so she turned and started back, not completely sure why this small injustice was so affecting, but unable to stop shaking as she walked.

THEO TOOK ONE of their last apples and was feeding it now in slices to Waldau, his favorite, as Anna and Callum started harnessing the other two animals to the wagons. Waldau would be next. Theo liked the feel of the horse's coarse tongue on his open palm as the stallion pulled the fruit into his mouth.

In the last few months, even soap had become scarce and they had had to bathe with a putrescent-smelling cleaner that was made from animal bones and lye, and its stench reminded Theo of the swamp. He knew if one of their horses ever got ill and died, the family would have eaten its meat and made soap from its bones. The whole idea had made him a little queasy. Making soap out of Waldau? Eating meat that had once been Bogdana? He would sooner starve. He would live without soap.

One day in school, Fraulein Grolsch had demanded that all of the students try on a gas mask, because there were rumors that the Allies were going to start gassing them: either the Russians with long-range artillery shells or the Yankees and Brits with bombs they would drop from their airplanes. There were only two masks for the entire class, however, and so the children had taken turns pulling the devices over their faces and hoisting the thick rubber bands behind their heads. Invariably, the bands had pulled at their hair and some of the girls had shrieked for attention, and no one had found it easy at first to breathe through the filter. Theo recalled now how he had asked-yet another stupid, unthinking thing he had said that had further diminished him in the eyes of his classmates-if the government would be giving them masks for their animals. The students had all gotten a real belly laugh out of that one. He hadn't honestly expected that anyone had bothered with such a thing, and he was really just thinking aloud. Imagining. But it hadn't struck him as a completely nonsensical idea, because this was farm country and the horses were critical to the farms. And he knew that in the First World War they had made gas masks for horses. After all, if you could convince a horse to wear a bridle and a bit, was it really such a stretch to expect the animal to don a mask, too? Apparently not. And if there were going to be masks for animals, Theo would have been sure to tell his parents so that they could get ones for all of their horses.

“Theo?”

He looked up; it was Anna.

“We should hurry.”

He nodded and led Waldau to the second wagon. No one had told him why they must hurry, but he had overheard Anna and Mutti talking and so he knew. It wasn't just the Russians. Last night someone had assassinated two Wehrmacht soldiers near the train station and then murdered the stationmaster. As a result, two trains that had been traveling in the night had taken the wrong tracks and collided. They had all heard the noise and presumed at the time it was an Allied bomb. One of the trains, the one moving northwest, was filled with refugees; the other, traveling southeast, had been filled with soldiers. The trains had been approaching the station so neither had been moving quickly. Nonetheless, there were injuries, a few as serious as concussions and broken bones. And for the time being the saboteurs had succeeded in clogging this stretch of track.

As he stood high on his feet to lift the bridle over Waldau's head he felt an unexpected twinge in a toe and grimaced. Still, he whispered into the great horse's ear, “You will never be eaten and you will never be gassed. I promise.”

“SO, YOU'VE ALWAYS been here on the eastern front,” Callum asked Manfred as they walked along a quiet stretch of road. There were other refugees, but for the moment they seemed to be bobbing almost leisurely between the waves and once more Callum was grateful to be on his feet.

“I have.”

“Is it as frightful as everyone says?”

“I think so. But this is my first war, so I don't have a lot to compare it to,” Manfred answered, and he smiled.

“Everyone presumes the eastern front is much more horrific than either France or Italy. I take that implication as a compliment.”

“Because it suggests you and your American allies are so civilized?”

“Precisely,” he replied. It was true, they were civilized. He was sure of that. He and his mates had a much higher regard for human life than either the Russians or the Germans. The western Allies were, he imagined, every bit as brave as these other people. But they were also less likely to kill-or be killed-senselessly.

“Well, we're all nastier on this side of Europe,” Manfred told him. “Trust me: If your parachute had landed over here, we wouldn't have taken you prisoner.”

Callum thought about this and listened to the sound of the horses' hooves behind them. Their metronomic clopping made him think of a clock, and he tried to place in his mind precisely where he was a year ago now. Then two. Then three. He saw himself once again as a student and recalled the face of Camellia. “You married?” he asked the corporal.

“I am not.”

“Girlfriend? Fiancée?”

“Neither.”

Anna was on the driver's box on the wagon behind them. She must have heard what they were saying, because she called out to them now, “Manfred is just a warrior.” She was teasing him, a small swell of sarcasm in her voice. “He is one of those German men who have too much knight in their blood. I know the type well.”

The corporal turned back to her and said, “Now for all you know, I was a mild-mannered young lawyer before joining the army. Or a docile schoolteacher. For all you know, I am actually an extremely peaceful person.”

“All right then,” Callum said, and he clapped the man on the shoulder good-naturedly. “What did you do before the war? We're all ears.”

“Do you know what you remind me of?” Manfred asked him instead of answering the question.

“Absolutely no idea. Haven't a clue.”

“A Saint Bernard. That's what you are. A very big dog. The sort of creature that hasn't figured out yet that he has ham hocks for paws. Wants to jump on the couch, even though he's the size of a pony.”

“Quite through?”

“All done.”

“Well, I was expecting much worse,” he said. And he was. “I rather like big dogs with favorable dispositions.”

“You didn't tell us what you were doing before the war,” Anna pressed the soldier.

“I say he was a lawyer,” Callum told her. “It was the first profession that popped into his head a moment ago.” He turned to Manfred: “Am I right?”

“No.”

“A schoolteacher then? Really? I wouldn't have guessed it.”

“You will be disappointed.”

“Dear God, you weren't a student were you?” he continued. “Have you been in the army that bloody long?”

“I worked in a ball-bearing factory.”

“Well, that's honest work. Why would I be disappointed?”

He seemed to Callum to be pondering this for a moment. Then: “Perhaps because I was. It wasn't quite what I expected I would be doing with my life when I was fifteen or sixteen years old.”

Overhead the clouds parted just enough that they all felt great shafts of sun on their faces, and as one they reflexively stared up into the sky. “I don't think any of us wound up doing quite what we expected,” Callum said. His stomach growled loudly and he thought of how hungry he was. For a moment he envisioned himself as a Saint Bernard, and he wished they hadn't finished off all of their meat and their bread and their beets.

THAT DAY THEY passed through a village and had lunch by a warm stove in the kitchen of a carpenter and his wife who seemed oddly prosperous. They were having meat for lunch, some sort of stew made with pork and root vegetables, and they offered the trekkers real coffee. The couple was packing to leave, too, when the Emmerichs passed by and they noticed Manfred. Because Manfred was in uniform, they insisted on inviting them indoors to eat and rest. They wanted to finish off the food they had left that they couldn't bring with them, so the Russians wouldn't get it.

As they ate, the carpenter shared with Manfred and Callum-who said not a word-the secret behind his success: He always got wood because he had joined the party. And, since 1942, he made nothing but coffins. “These days, I can't make too many coffins,” he said, his voice at once oddly satisfied and rueful. The pair had two sons, both of whom were missing in action. Their daughters, both married, had gone to Prague where, supposedly, they would be safe from Allied air attacks.

Theo thought Manfred seemed to pay the man special attention when the carpenter told him how recently there had been columns of prisoners passing by, and one of the groups had been nothing but women. Rows and rows of them, he had said.

“And they were marching west?” Manfred asked.

“They were. Starving things. Jews. Belinda here managed to give some of them food. Bread and the last of our sausages. She snuck it to them as they passed. Some of them didn't even have shoes. Can you imagine? I mean, they're just Jews. But still. I'd heard about such things, but never seen them with my own eyes.”

“Where were they from?”

“Well, the east.”

“No,” Manfred continued, his voice a little testy now. “I meant what countries were they from?”

“I heard some of the girls speaking French. I heard others speaking Polish. Even, I think, a little Russian.”

“Any German?”

“A few, maybe.”

“How old were they?”

“At first I thought they were older than me, and I am sixty-two. It was only when Belinda got close to them that we could tell. They were in their twenties and thirties. They'd have to be. Any older and they would have perished by now in this weather.”

Theo watched Manfred seem to take this in. He thought the soldier was seething inside and working hard to maintain an even facade. And his sister? He could see anger on her face as well, but something else, too, and when he understood what it was he grew scared: It was guilt. Shame, as if she were responsible. He felt a small chill in the room, despite the heat from the stove, and for the first time he began to wonder: Was this-those prisoners-why the whole world seemed so mad at his country? Was this what those British POWs and Callum on occasion had whispered about? He had a sense that was just beyond perfect articulation in his mind but nonetheless absolutely apparent to him: When this war was over, he and his family-all Germans-were going to have to live with the black mark of this (whatever this was) for a long, long time.

Chapter Twelve

ANNA WAS VAGUELY AWARE THAT SHE WAS FAR FROM the comforts of her own bed in Kaminheim. She was wrapped tightly inside a pair of quilts, half-buried in the hay in a barn. Another barn. Not even a gymnasium, albeit an unheated one, such as the one where they had spent the night before last. This barn was far from the main road, perhaps a kilometer distant. They had come here for privacy and quiet. To escape the throngs. She wasn't freezing, but her feet-despite the reality that she had slept yet again in her boots-and her fingers were chilled. Her nose was running from the cold, and when she removed her hands from beneath the quilts she was stunned to discover how warm her face was. Was it possible she had a fever? Was this why she was shivering? Slowly she began to focus, but still she kept trying to push full wakefulness away, as if it were a suitor at a dance she was trying to avoid. She recalled how they had stopped here last night. Her family and Callum and Manfred and the three horses had all taken refuge in one corner, while another family had taken the side nearest the entrance, and the humans had all been grateful to have the heat generated by the Emmerichs' animals. For dinner, Manfred had shown them how to bake the potatoes in the wild: He had buried them in a shallow hole, and then built a fire on the patch of ground directly above them.

Now Anna could tell by the hazy light that was coming in through the cupola and a pair of eastern-facing dormers that day had broken. She heard the low rumble of voices, men's voices, but she couldn't make out what they were saying. It didn't sound like Manfred and Callum, and so she guessed it was that other family. But then, when she visualized those other refugees-their name, she thought, was Sanders-she could see in her somnambulant fog only one male. A grandfather. There were the grandparents, a married daughter and a daughter-in-law, and two small girls. And neither of the voices, as she tried to concentrate, sounded much like the girls' elderly grandfather.

Nevertheless, for another moment she allowed herself to drowse and to wonder, almost as if she were witnessing this happen to somebody else, at the idea that she was sleeping in a barn and she might be coming down with a fever. Might? No, not might. It all came back to her now. Yesterday she had started to grow ill and had nearly passed out. They had stopped here because she simply had to rest. And now it was just so much easier to remain curled in a ball under these quilts, to allow her fever-if, indeed, she had one-to run its course, than to rise from the hay and begin the hard work of continuing west. Melting the snow so she could wash. Feeding the horses. Rummaging for a piece of bread they had scavenged or a small handful of the muesli they had bought with a bracelet. When she'd been younger, there had actually been a servant girl who had laid out her clothes for her in the morning and then had her breakfast waiting. A Polish girl. Jadwiga. She guessed the servant had been with them through 1941. Then? Deported somewhere. The girl's parents were taken, too. Mutti had been devastated. Her father had made phone calls. Sent telegrams. But there had been nothing that either of her parents had been able to do. It seemed that Jadwiga's father had been involved with the Communists. Perhaps even the resistance.

Anna was just beginning to wonder where the rest of her family was-Mutti and Theo-when she was pulled abruptly from her torpor by the distinctive, full-throated whinny of her horse. Balga was, it sounded, just outside the barn. And he sounded furious. She sat up now, imagining that Manfred or Callum was mishandling the animal in some fashion, antagonizing him inadvertently. Instead, however, she saw Balga silhouetted in the massive barn doors, rearing up on his hind legs while two men she didn't recognize were trying (and failing) to convince the horse to remain still so they could place a saddle upon him. These, she realized, had been the voices she had heard.

She rose, pushing her quilts off her, and stormed toward the pair. The cold struck her like a slap, but she didn't care, because these fellows were trying to steal her horse-and she wasn't going to stand for that. Her family had already lost Labiau; they couldn't afford to lose Balga, too. They simply couldn't. She didn't know where the rest of her family was, but she didn't hesitate. She would simply insist that these other refugees leave her horse alone. Steal someone else's. When she was halfway across the barn, however, she stopped, realizing in an instant how ill-advised it was for her to have even considered confronting these men. Because they weren't mere horse thieves; they weren't pathetic refugees like her and her family. They were Russian soldiers-perhaps even Cossacks-working in fur hats and long uniform coats, with bandoliers of bullets draped over their shoulders like scarves. She started to crouch, but it was too late: They had seen her. And they started to laugh, despite the reality that one was straining desperately to hold Balga in place by the reins, and the other was holding on to a heavy-looking saddle with both hands.

The soldier nearer to her dropped the saddle into the snow, said something to the other soldier, and started toward her. He had a long, drooping mustache and perhaps two days' growth of beard, and he had an exasperated smile on his face as he sauntered across the barn: First the horse, she imagined him thinking, now this. Meanwhile his partner let go of Balga's reins and then fell against an exterior wall of the barn so he wouldn't be kicked by the animal's wildly flailing front hooves as the creature scurried a dozen meters away before stopping. From there the horse eyed them warily, snorting, and raised his nose high into the air. She started to call for him, but the words caught in her throat. She realized the only place she could run was further into the barn, and that would do her as little good as standing her ground. Perhaps she could try to dash past the Russians and jump atop Balga, but the horse was probably far too riled to allow her to climb upon him with neither a saddle nor stirrups. Besides, it seemed unlikely that she would get past the two soldiers. They'd simply grab her like a small chicken. And so she remained where she was, in a half-crouch beside head-high bales of hay, telling herself that she was unmoving now because she was feverish and there was nothing she could do. Suddenly she felt so sick and fatigued that she almost didn't care if they raped and killed her right here. In this barn outside of some village she'd never heard of. Fine. Let it all end this morning. And then, in little more than a heartbeat, the soldiers were surrounding her. She realized that neither was especially tall, and she could look them both in the eye.

“Do you speak Polish?” the one with the mustache asked her, his own Polish marked by an eastern-sounding accent she didn't recognize.

She nodded. She smelled, she thought, chocolate-delicious, real chocolate-on his breath. She wondered if she was a little delirious, or whether they really had eaten chocolate for breakfast.

“She speaks Polish,” he said to his comrade, as if this were a great revelation. Then to her he continued, “Your horse-and I'm presuming that is your horse-is a demon.” He looked back over his shoulder toward the open barn doors. Balga had inched a few meters closer and was peering inside.

She glanced down at her boots, wrapped her arms around her chest. She wasn't sure what she should say-if she should even say anything. She realized her teeth were chattering.

“I am Lieutenant Vassily Kuptchenko. This is Corporal Rostropovich. And you are?”

“Anna,” she said, the word elongated by the clacking of her teeth.

They both bowed slightly, gallantly, as if they were noblemen. The lieutenant pointed at the piles of quilts and her cape in the mound of straw behind her. “Go get your coat. Or at least one of those quilts. You're trembling.” She took a fleeting peek behind her, but she couldn't bring herself to turn her back on the men. When she remained riveted in place, the lieutenant said something to the corporal in a language she didn't understand, and the soldier went and brought her cape to her. Gently he draped it over her shoulders.

“Where… where… is my family?” she said, the short sentence again punctuated by her shivers.

“We saw the wagons and the horses. But no one else.”

“They're gone?”

“They didn't leave you, I'm sure. Your army set up a field kitchen a few kilometers from here, back toward the road. They're probably getting breakfast,” he told her.

The corporal rolled his eyes and murmured something under his breath that caused the lieutenant to smile.

“Forgive me: There was a field kitchen. Now there's just a field. Your army left rather quickly.”

“We've been overrun?”

He brushed the idea away. “Not yet. But you will be. It's all chaos right now. But you should go. Not everyone is as tolerant of nice German girls as I am. I assume that demon of a horse will let you climb upon him?”

“But my family? What about my family?”

“Child-”

“I'm not a child!” she said, blurting the words out. She feared the moment she had spoken that she had made an egregious mistake. She should have just gotten on Balga and ridden off to find Mutti and Theo. Tracked down Callum and Manfred. Given the two of them-the two of them and her mother and brother-a piece of her mind for leaving her here all alone. What in the name of God were they thinking? But the Russian lieutenant didn't seem to have been angered by her remark.

“Fine, you're not a child. More the reason to run,” he said, and he held up his hands as if he were balancing a plate on each palm. The corporal was nodding his head earnestly. “Maybe if you're with us, that monster will let us get a saddle on him for you.”

“That doesn't look like his saddle.”

“It isn't.”

“There's a saddle he knows in one of the wagons.”

“The one with all that feed?”

“The other one.”

“Fine. You take the saddle, if that's the only one he'll allow on his back. But we'll keep the rest. You really are getting a bargain, you know.”

She was still shaking, and she wasn't even sure she was capable of riding Balga right now. But she guessed she hadn't a choice. These two soldiers were gentlemen. Or, at least, decent human beings. It was unlikely the next Russians would be as well. And so she started past them toward the entrance to the barn, walking with her head held high-but she hoped, not haughtily-experiencing at once fury over the way she had been abandoned by her family and gratitude toward these two Bolsheviks for sparing her life.

As she passed through the open doors, squinting slightly against the daylight, she saw poised on either side were Callum and Manfred, their backs flat against the barn board. Callum was to her right and Manfred was to her left, and they were both holding guns: The paratrooper was grasping the antique pistol her mother usually concealed under her cape-it had been her husband's during the First World War-and the Wehrmacht corporal had his rifle in his hands. She realized they knew the Russians were a couple of steps behind her and were going to ambush them, and the thought was just beginning to formulate in her head that she should tell Callum and Manfred that these soldiers were kind-that they hadn't harmed her, that they were actually sending her on her way. But the notion was still germinating, finding a warm spot in her mind to put down roots, when the two men spun and were firing. She spun with them, heard a voice-was it her own?-actually screaming No! Don't shoot!, the words running together, but she was an instant too late. As she turned, she saw from the corners of her eyes that one of the Russians was being lifted up and off the ground by the force of the bullet-was this the one named Vassily?-and the other, the corporal, was simply buckling at the knees and collapsing silently into the straw as if he were one of the elk that were shot each year in the park behind Kaminheim.

For a long moment her ears were ringing the way they had on that first day of their trek, when the Russian shell had exploded beside them as they had approached the Vistula, and so she was only dimly aware of the echoes from the two gunshots. Or of the cries of the birds that had disappeared abruptly from the nearby trees. Initially, she didn't even realize that with careful, tentative steps, Balga had inched closer to her. Mutti, too. And Theo. All she was cognizant of was the smell from the gunshots and the way these Russian soldiers had been only steps behind her just a few seconds ago, and now they were dead in the straw at her feet. They each looked as if their last thought had been only surprise. Not terror, not fear. Not even anger. They had both been shot in the chest, though the almost point-blank wound inflicted by the rifle had created a black, bowl-like chasm in Vassily's coat, and long wisps of steam were rising up from it into the barn. The hole in the corporal's coat was smaller, but no less fatal.

She felt Callum beside her, and she could tell that he wanted to hold her. To comfort her. But she didn't care. She was angry at him. She was angry at Manfred, too. Furious.

“They didn't hurt me!” she said finally, and she could hear the harshness in her voice. “They didn't mean any harm!”

Callum knelt before the corporal he had killed, staring almost aimlessly at the body before him. He seemed numb.

“Do you hear me!” she said, shrieking. “You didn't have to kill them!”

Manfred squatted beside Callum and pulled the bandolier of bullets up and over the corpse's head. He laid it out flat on the ground beside him. Then he removed the man's holster and pistol and started emptying the pockets in the fellow's pants and coat, extracting papers and maps and tobacco. A photograph in an envelope. Yet more bullets. Dried meat in wax paper. A little cheese. Chocolate. Stubs of pencils. A pair of field glasses. A knife in a leather sheath. A canteen. A small bottle of vodka.

“This is good,” Manfred said to no one in particular. “All helpful.” He took a bite of the cheese and seemed far more interested in the weapons and the food than he was in the papers. He handed the meat to Callum, but the Scot shook his head no. Literally turned away.

“Aren't you listening to me?” Anna shouted at them both. “You killed them and you didn't have to!”

Callum seemed to hear her for the first time. He sat down in the hay and tossed the pistol onto the ground. “I've never killed anyone,” he said simply. He looked a little woozy.

“I still find that almost inconceivable,” Manfred said, putting the tobacco in a pouch in his own overcoat.

“I told you, the drop was a complete boondoggle. We were captured almost instantly.”

“Well, you've killed someone now,” he said, rising to his feet and clapping Callum on the shoulder. “It's not so hard, is it?”

“It wasn't. But it is now.”

“Of course, you did shoot a pair of your allies,” Manfred added, slinging his rifle back over his shoulder. “That can't be good.”

“That's not funny.”

“Perhaps not. But it is ironic. Prost! ”

“Are you completely insane? Do you feel nothing?”

“I did the first time I killed someone. I actually sobbed.”

“Well, then. Leave me be.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. Was prost the wrong toast for a Scotsman? Should I have said cheerio? Slàinte, perhaps? What are the proper remarks? You tell me.”

“L'chaim,” Callum muttered.

“Come again?”

“I said l'chaim. But that would be absurd, wouldn't it? Even if I were Jewish, I would never say l'chaim around here. Oh, no. You'd pin a star on my coat and ship me off to God alone knows where.”

For a brief moment Anna thought Manfred was going to hit Callum, despite the reality that the POW must have had forty or fifty pounds on him. His eyes widened ominously and his breathing seemed to stop. But then he inhaled deeply and blew the hot air in a stream into his hands. She looked back and forth between the two men. She felt invisible, despite the way she had yelled at them, because they were so absorbed in each other. And so she reached out for Manfred's arm and spun him toward her, since clearly he was the one who had initiated this needless slaughter. “Don't you understand?” she hissed at him. “You didn't have to kill them! They were leading me back to Balga!”

He seemed to think about this. Then: “Very nice. They were letting you keep your horse. And the two wagons? And the other horses? What were their plans for them?”

“They-”

He waved her off. “They were Russian soldiers. The people trying to kill us, remember? Look, I know what they were doing, I heard them. I was just outside the barn. Fine, they didn't rape you. You were lucky-”

“I was lucky?” she asked, her voice an uncharacteristic snarl. “Lucky? Where were you?” She turned to face her mother and her brother. “Where were all of you? How could you have left me alone like this? I'm sick, I'm tired. I have a fever!”

Mutti tried to enfold her inside her arms, but she pushed her mother away.

“Yes, you might have a fever, sweetie, I know,” her mother murmured, and then her eyes welled up and she stood there helplessly. “We were just getting some breakfast. Getting you some breakfast. We thought we might even find a doctor among the other trekkers. We were only gone a few minutes, and we thought you would be fine for a moment. We wanted you to rest. We didn't know there were Russians so close. We just didn't know…”

Anna noticed that Theo was holding a wicker basket with a couple of biscuits in it and a porcelain mug filled with soup. It looked like it was beans with a little fatty meat floating on top. Theo started to hand it to her, but she brushed her brother aside.

“These two were probably scouts. Or artillery spotters,” Manfred said, motioning at the bodies in the straw. “Doesn't matter. We should join everybody else and get moving. Ivan isn't far behind.” He looked down at Callum. “You should take the rifle-and one of those bandoliers. And…”

“Yes?”

“And I'm sorry if I seemed a little callous just now. I've seen a lot and sometimes I forget myself.”

The Scot nodded, grabbed the firearm, and pushed himself to his feet. Manfred took Balga's reins in his hands and started to lead the animal back toward the wagons.

“How do you feel?” her mother asked her. “Can you travel?”

“Of course I can travel. I don't have a choice now, do I?”

“Would you eat something then? Please?”

She shook her head. “Later, maybe.”

“And you really must drink something.”

“Oh, no, none of you need to help me,” Manfred was saying. “I'll get the feed bags on the horses, I'll get them harnessed to the wagons. I'll throw the blankets and quilts in the back. You all: Just keep chatting and dawdling.”

“I'm coming,” Callum yelled out to him, and then he went to assist the German soldier, passing by her without saying a word.

“What should we do with those men?” Mutti asked, and with just a small twitch of her head she motioned down at the ground. “We can't just leave them here.” Theo was staring at the bodies, too. A small, thin rivulet of blood had begun to trickle across the frozen ground beneath the corporal; a stain the color of rotting cherries-more black than red-was waxing imperceptibly into a moon around the crater in the lieutenant's chest.

“What, you want to bury them, Mutti? Like your Luftwaffe pilot?”

“Is there time? You said they weren't going to harm you.”

She was still shivering, and she honestly didn't know anymore whether it was because of the cold or because she was sick or because she had been surprised as she woke by these two enemy soldiers. But she didn't care. She knew only that she was miserable. Still, she reminded herself that her mother was miserable, too. Her mother was losing, in essence, a lifetime's worth of work-her home, the farm, and everything there. Meanwhile, two of her three sons and her husband were off fighting the Russians somewhere.

She glanced over at Callum and Manfred and saw that it was going to take them a few minutes to attach the animals to the wagons. She was more proficient than either man with the horses and so she went to them. She told them that she and Theo could finish harnessing the horses if they could dig a grave for the Russians. She reminded them that they had brought a shovel from Kaminheim.

“I know I would want my husband and my sons to have decent burials if they were killed somewhere far from home,” Mutti added.

Manfred dropped the reins to his sides and folded his arms across his chest. “You would?” he asked.

“Yes, absolutely.”

“No, I don't think so. Forgive me. But if we bury those two, their wives and mothers-whoever-will never have any idea what happened to them. At least not for a very, very long time. But if we leave them where they are, someone will find them.”

“Besides, do you know how bloody hard the ground is?” Callum said. “Burying them would be no picnic, I promise you. It might not even be possible.”

From the road they heard an explosion, then another. Anna glanced reflexively in that direction-all the humans did-but the horses were already growing accustomed to the sound and barely looked up. She guessed the bodies would grow cold and then freeze before night. Or wolves might drag them away. Or crows might peck at the exposed flesh until it was gone.

“We could put markers where we've buried them,” Mutti said, and Anna wondered if her mother was envisioning precisely the same things that she was.

Manfred looked at Callum and then shook his head. He seemed beyond annoyed to Anna: He seemed downright disgusted. Nevertheless, he went to the back of the wagon and grabbed both the shovel and the pitchfork.

“Fine,” he mumbled, tossing the pitchfork like a baton to the POW. “We'll try to bury the damn Ivans. And then we are getting the hell out of here. Okay?”

“Thank you,” she said. “I know it must seem ridiculous.”

“The ground will be softer inside the barn,” he said to Anna. “We'll bury them there. As your mother suggested, we'll put their IDs on the marker,” he added, his tone softening slightly, his face losing its severe cast. “You're…”

“Yes?”

He clasped his hands behind his back as if, she thought, he were a boy pretending to be a man. Or, maybe, because otherwise he would have reached out to touch her when he spoke. “It is ridiculous. But you and your mother are kind to want to do this. And kindness is in short supply these days.”

Then he walked into the barn, muttering something to Callum, and she heard only the very tail end. It didn't make sense to her, at least not completely. It was something about her and her family as Germans. As those people. As something other than him, as if he weren't a German himself-or, possibly, as if he no longer wanted to define himself as one. She kept thinking about this as she wrestled the horses into their harnesses, wondering what he had meant. She made a mental note to ask him about it at some point, perhaps when they had once again put some distance between themselves and the Russians.

Chapter Thirteen

THE SKY WAS AS RED AS HOT COALS, AN UNDULATING river of crimson, and Cecile was confused. For a brief moment she thought it was the end of the day and the sun merely was setting. But as she staggered half-awake through the front doors of the train station she realized it was still dark to the west and it was the eastern sky that was alight. Yet clearly it wasn't morning, either. And, besides, when had she seen a sky like this at daybreak?

“That must be Berent. The whole village must be on fire,” Jeanne was murmuring, and she sounded more awed than frightened. Berent was no more than eight kilometers behind them. Around Jeanne the female prisoners were starting to form into lines.

Cecile vaguely recalled encouraging her friend to curl against her for warmth when they had gone to sleep a few hours earlier on the cement floor of the train station. When the guard had kicked her awake just now, it had taken her a moment to realize that Jeanne already was gone. Up and about. Apparently they were not going to wait any longer for the train to arrive that-the guards had told them-was going to take them to their new destination. And so the prisoners were being assembled outside in the cold, and once more they would resume their trek west on foot.

“I wonder if there was an ammunition dump in Berent, or an arsenal, maybe,” Jeanne was continuing. “So many of the buildings there were stone. Otherwise, I don't think the town would go up like that.”

Cecile nodded and took her place in line with the other women in the road before the train station. There were two streetlights and she was surprised they were on. Usually in the night the Germans dimmed everything to protect themselves from air attacks. She saw that one of their male guards, that bastard walrus named Pusch, was speaking to a pair of young German soldiers she'd never seen before who were sitting atop motorcycles. The three of them were using a flashlight to study a map, evidently deciding which roads were safest.

“There was an SS company back there,” Jeanne said. “In Berent. I just heard. I wouldn't be surprised if they set the whole town on fire themselves. You know, leave nothing for the Russians? Or maybe they're just going to fight to the death.” She spat on the ground and then rubbed her hands vigorously over her arms. “Well, good riddance to them. Good riddance to them all.”

“You're feisty tonight,” Cecile told her.

“Well…”

“You can tell me.”

“When you were asleep, Vera found mess kits under one of the benches. Three of them. Soldiers must have forgotten they were there. And when the lights were out, we feasted.”

She felt a pang in her stomach, part hunger and part hurt. “And you didn't wake me?”

“You sleep so little. We didn't think you would want to be disturbed.”

She realized she was experiencing more than hurt: This was outright betrayal. Jeanne and Vera hadn't wanted to share this unexpected bounty. And after all she had done for Jeanne. For all of them. She was absolutely positive that if it weren't for her, Jeanne would be dead now.

“What was in them?” she asked, unsure why she was tormenting herself this way by inquiring. Did she really need to know? But in the same way one can't resist picking at a scab, she was unable to prevent herself from asking.

Already, however, Jeanne understood her mistake. “Really, not that much,” she said sheepishly.

“Not that much?” This was Vera. Incredulous. “We gorged! There were tins of meat and tomatoes and canned milk! There was knäckebrot, and the crackers were still crisp-which meant that mostly we broke them into pieces and sucked on them,” she said, offering them all an ironic, toothless grin. “There was even hard candy!”

Jeanne was gazing down at the ground, her guilt a dark halo behind the prickly hair on her head. Cecile imagined them silently unwrapping the crackers and opening the tins with one of those small can openers that came with the kits. In her mind she saw them using their fingers like spoons to extract the meat, then licking the lids from the cans to get the last drops of tomatoes and milk. And then she willed those images away. She reminded herself that all she had left was her attitude. Her mind. They could take everything else from her: In the end, they might even take her life. But they couldn't take away what she thought. They couldn't take away hope. Perhaps Jeanne and Vera simply needed that food more than she did. Fine. Perhaps the two of them wouldn't get through this without that unexpected discovery. Well, that was fine, too. She would.

She reached over to Jeanne with her hand and tenderly lifted her face by her chin. “It's okay,” she whispered. “I want you this spirited. I need you this spirited. It's how we'll survive.”

Her friend looked into her eyes and Cecile wasn't sure how she was going to respond. What she was going to say. Then, like the wind that precedes a thunderstorm, the air between them grew charged and Jeanne was shaking her head and her bony shoulders and starting to sob. She gave in to long, eaglelike ululations of despair-loud, heaving wails of remorse that merged with self-recrimination and self-loathing. Cecile and Vera together tried to embrace her, Cecile cooing softly into her ear that it was all right, to let go of the guilt, but Jeanne continued to cry, her eyes shut tight like a child's, as the tears streamed down the wrinkles in her gaunt, emaciated face. “No, I am horrible,” she howled suddenly. “I am as bad as they are!”

She was shrieking in French, but it didn't matter. Pusch had heard her-everyone at the train station had heard her, the prisoners were glancing at them from their places in line-and he was marching over to them now. The last thing he was going to endure in the middle of the night was a scene from a hysterical Jew. One of the female guards was joining him, an unattractive woman with a broad forehead and elflike eyes. The two young soldiers on their motorcycles looked at them idly, not nearly as interested at the moment as the other prisoners or the guards, and then one of them started to fold up the map.

“Shhhh,” Cecile was whispering, “you must settle down. It's all right.” But already it was too late. She felt Pusch's hands on her shoulders; he was pulling her away from Jeanne. The female guard-was her name Sigi?-was trying to wrench Vera away. But Vera was holding on tightly to Jeanne, her dirty, gnarled fingers grasping the front of poor Jeanne's striped prison shirt and ragged jacket, begging Jeanne so desperately to calm down that she, too, was sounding half-crazed. Suddenly Pusch took his rifle off his shoulder and slammed the butt into Vera's back, holding the gun as if it were a battering ram. Vera let go of Jeanne's clothing and collapsed onto the road, one hand reaching instinctively back for her kidney.

“And you,” he hissed at Jeanne, his eyes half-closed in anger. “And you,” he repeated. Sigi pushed Jeanne to the ground so she was on her hands and knees like a cow, still shaking her head and bawling. Pusch turned his rifle around in his arms and aimed it at the back of her head. So this, Cecile thought, is how it will end for my Jeanne-and, she realized, she really did view Jeanne as hers, a possession and a pet and a totem of sorts, a good-luck charm that she had to keep alive to assure herself that she, too, was still breathing-shot on a road outside a train station in the middle of the night. Now she was sniveling as well, but her cries were almost silent, certainly not loud enough to be heard over Jeanne's frenzied wailing or Vera's elongated moans.

And yet when Pusch pulled the trigger and the blast was still reverberating in her ears, Cecile realized that he hadn't shot Jeanne. He'd killed Vera. He had meant to execute her friend, but in the second that he was aiming his rifle down at the back of Jeanne's skull, Vera had rolled into Jeanne and taken the bullet instead. In, it appeared, her neck. Now she was flat on her back, still alive but clearly dying fast, choking on the blood that was seeming to run from spigots in her mouth and the gaping hole by her larynx. Cecile wondered: Had Vera rolled into Jeanne on purpose? Or had she been spasming from the blow to her kidney and simply had the misfortune of twisting her body in that direction? The wrong direction?

To their right she heard the two soldiers starting up their motorcycles. One seemed to be shaking his head in annoyance, exasperated either by the wailing Jew or by the way Pusch had shot one of the prisoners. She couldn't decide. And then they sped off, their motorcycles leaving behind trails of blue smoke in the frigid night air.

“You,” Sigi was saying, “you Jew pig,” and Cecile choked back her tears and stood at attention because she realized that Sigi was speaking to her. “Get that body out of here. I don't want to soil my gloves with Jew blood.”

She averted her eyes and bowed her head, a slight, obedient nod. Jeanne was only whimpering now; her cries had grown soft.

Pusch murmured something to Sigi that she couldn't quite hear and then he was shouting to the women behind them, commanding them to get back in line, telling them there was nothing that interesting to see. They were going to set off once again within minutes. He and Sigi glanced over at the spot where the two regular soldiers on motorcycles had been; they seemed surprised the two men were gone.

“Pigs, too,” Pusch mumbled, spitting on the road and narrowly missing Vera.

“Do you know which roads are still open?” Sigi asked him. There was just a trace of nervousness in her voice. “Did they tell you?”

“They did,” Pusch said. “The commandant and I know which way to go. We'll be fine.” Then he looked down at Vera, whose desperate, labored breathing was starting to slow. “At least we'll be fine if we hurry up and get out of here. You heard us,” he barked at Cecile. “Get this pig shit off the road!”

Instantly she bent over Vera, whispering into her ear-lying into her ear-that she would be fine, and lifting her shoulders off the ground and cradling the back of her injured neck in her hands. The bullet, she realized, must have passed right through, because she felt her palm growing moist with the woman's blood. She wasn't sure how to move her without causing her yet more pain, but she didn't have to worry long. Vera's eyes rolled up toward her forehead, there was one last convulsion somewhere deep inside her chest, and then she was gone. Jeanne crawled over to them, still sniffing back tears, and said, “I can help.”

Cecile wasn't sure Jeanne really could, at least all that much, but she nodded. They each took one of Vera's arms at the shoulder and together were able to drag her off into the snow on the side of the road.

“We can't bury her,” Cecile said, kneeling beside the body. “I wish we could. But we can't.”

Jeanne looked at her, wide-eyed, and Cecile was afraid that Jeanne, despite her despair, was going to snap at her for saying something so obvious and dull. But mostly she had just been talking to herself. She did wish they could bury Vera. But they hadn't the time, the ground was rock solid, and even if Pusch had given them shovels she doubted they had the strength left to dig.

She was wrong about Jeanne, however; the woman's eyes, she understood, had grown wide because she was about to be sick. Her friend turned away from Vera's body and, suddenly, she was spewing into the grimy snow the meat and tomatoes and the knäckebrot she had consumed, the vomit tinged with white from the canned milk. When she was done, when all that was left was a long tendril of spit linking her lips to the icy ground, she murmured, “I had forgotten what it was like to be full. I had completely forgotten.”

Behind them Pusch was screaming, “Move, move!” And so Cecile bent over and pulled down Vera's eyelids and kissed the woman good-bye on her sore-ridden scalp. Then she and Jeanne stood, and with the little energy they could muster they rejoined the other prisoners as they trudged their way west in the night.

Chapter Fourteen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you serious?” he asked the soldier.

“Absolutely. Your Balga? A terror.”

“He's a horse!”

“He's a giant. They're all giants.”

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

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

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

“My sister could probably teach you better than I could.”

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

“You mean after the war?”

“Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “After the war.”

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

“Definitely.”

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

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

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

“Whose house is this?” Manfred was asking Mutti.

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

“Or someone is,” Callum muttered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And how old is Gabi?”

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

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

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

He shrugged. “Or Russians.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It's a cocoon,” said Sonje.

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

“Butterflies with guns,” Sonje added pleasantly.

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

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

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

“Now, it seems to me that people from England have far more in common with Germans than-for example-the Slavs. Your skull is much more like mine than those of many of my neighbors,” she went on.

“That's only because my skull is still here. Most of your neighbors' skulls had the common sense to get out of here and head west.”

“I am serious. This is science. You map the brain by the bumps on the skull. It's a known fact, for instance, that the Aryan cranium differs from the Slavic cranium or the Jewish cranium. It is far more regal, and it has fewer bulges and ugly swellings. And compare the line of your jaw to the line of mine,” she continued. “Though I will say this: For a large man and a Celtic, your jaw is not especially apelike.”

“And the jaws of most Celts are?”

“Don't be insulted. It's simply that the jawlines of all races are more apelike than ours.”

With that he lifted her hands off his head and then pushed his way to his feet. “If you'll excuse me,” he said, “I'm going to go get some water.” He was no longer trying to hide the exasperation in his voice, and it was with great, purposeful strides that he started in toward the kitchen.

MANFRED STOOD ALONE with Sonje in the pantry, mesmerized by the plenty at his fingertips, helping the girl decide what they all would eat for dinner. The two of them hadn't spoken more than a dozen words to each other here when abruptly she turned to him, grabbed at the fabric of his uniform shirt with one hand, awkwardly reached around the back of his neck with the other, and started to pull him toward her. Into her. For a split second he thought this stranger was going to try to kill him and he was about to throw her aside, when he realized that she was, clumsily, trying to bring his lips down to hers. She was about to kiss him. Then she was kissing him. Her tongue was trying to force its way through his own lips and teeth, and she was using her hand to push his skull so hard into hers that he feared she would chip off the top of one of his incisors.

He pulled away and reached behind him to take her hand off the back of his head, but the fingers on her other hand were grasping his shirt with such tenacity-such ferocity-that he allowed them to retain their leechlike hold.

“Take me with you,” she begged, speaking so quickly that at first he didn't quite understand what she was saying. “I will be your whore. I will be your army whore and do whatever you want. Anything, anything at all. Better to be an army whore for a German hero than to be left behind here for Ivan.”

“Oh, I agree,” he told her.

“Gabi's mother has lost her mind. It's gone, completely gone. She's insisting we stay. But we can't; you know we can't. You know we'll be raped and killed if we do.”

He rested a hand upon her fingers. He could feel her nails against his chest through the layers of fabric from his shirt and his undershirt.

“Of course you can come with us,” he said. “And my sense is, if you put your foot down and say you're coming with us-that's all there is to it-Gabi and her mother will come, too. At least they might. Either way, please, let's have no more talk about army whores. Okay?”

She lowered her gawking eyes in a manner that she must have thought was flirtatious and nodded. But then she took her free hand and-though Gabi's mother and the guests were nearby, either through one door that led to the kitchen or through another that led to the dining room-surprised him by grabbing at his crotch. He presumed she had meant this as a bit of erotic foreplay, a taste of the carnal delights that awaited him, but her fingers and her palm, if they reminded him of anything, struck him as only the mouth of a snake.

CALLUM OFFERED TO help Klara set the table in the formal dining room, but she insisted that he rest with the others. And so he went exploring, wandering aimlessly through the conservatory and the living room and the two small rooms that served as maids' quarters. The house was darker than Kaminheim-and not simply because the electricity was out and it was illuminated entirely by candles and whatever oil lamps they were carrying with them-but he guessed it was at least as big. In the library he ran into Manfred. He was sitting on the arm of a leather easy chair, with a book open on a round table beside him, three candles surrounding it. He was hunched over the text and so his face was in shadow.

“What have you got there?” Callum asked.

“A biography of Richard Wagner.”

“Ah, a favorite of your führer.”

“Apparently.” The corporal flipped it shut. Beside it was a second, thinner volume. “How much German do you read?”

“A little,” he said. “Not enough to make much sense of your Wagner biography. But it wouldn't be my choice in bedtime reading, anyway. I don't mind biographies, but he didn't write much for the accordion.”

Manfred smiled. “How come you didn't bring the instrument? You brought whole wagonloads of stuff. But not the accordion.”

“Wasn't mine to bring. Belonged to Anna's uncle.”

“Think it was an oversight?”

“Probably.”

He smiled: “Sure they weren't just sick of your playing?”

“No one gets sick of my playing.”

He shook his head. “I guess I'm just not a fan of the accordion.”

“Well, that's because you've never heard me play.”

“You're that good?”

“I am.”

“In that case, maybe it's just a problem of association. I always associate the accordion with bullies and beer.”

“Oh, it's much more elegant than that. It has its earliest roots in Berlin, but it evolved in Vienna and London, too. A hundred years ago, folks were fiddling with bellows and reeds all across Europe. You play an instrument?”

“No.”

“Go on!”

“Really, I don't.”

“I'm shocked. A cultured German like you?”

“I worked in a ball-bearing factory, remember?”

“Nevertheless,” Callum murmured. He was honestly surprised.

“Here. This will show you how cultured Germans really are,” Manfred said, and he opened the second book on the table to a specific page and handed it to him. “Even you should be able to get the gist of this. Small words. Big pictures.”

He put his oil lamp down on the desk. “A children's book?”

“Believe it or not, yes.”

“Oh, good. Now we're motoring along at my speed,” he said happily, but instantly the sense of mirth that had been welling up inside him evaporated. He saw that the illustrations were watercolor paintings of noses. The noses were grotesquely large and wart-covered, and said to typify those of the Jew. There were five of them on the two pages. And then there was a separate nose that was elegant and small and presented as typical of the Aryan countenance.

“Clearly you don't believe this rubbish,” he said, unable to hide the indignation in his voice.

“Clearly.”

“A few minutes ago, Gabi was trying to analyze my head. God…”

Down one of the long corridors they heard a bell ringing: It was the sound that Klara had said would signal that dinner was being served. When Callum turned back to Manfred, he saw the other soldier had blown out the candles on the table and his face was lost to the darkness.

MUTTI RECALLED WHAT had happened to her brother and his family when the Russians had reached his estate and decided she would tell Klara what she knew-what Helmut had seen. It might convince the woman to bring Gabi and Sonje and join her group as they trekked west. Yet there was a part of her that wondered if even with that knowledge Klara would reconsider. The woman seemed a little daft now. Certainly Klara had always been eccentric-an artistic temperament without any artistic talent-but this evening her behavior was verging on the peculiar. The girls' behavior, too.

Still, she was astounded at their energy. At everyone's energy. The young people's in particular. Anna was continuing to rest and, hopefully, recover, but after feasting on canned asparagus and spaetzle and pot-roasted boar, the other young folks hadn't stopped dancing. They had even executed with precision an exquisite gavotte. Klara had a lovely, light touch at the piano, and Mutti was reminded of those delightful evenings in the autumn when Anna and her friends had danced with those handsome naval officers who had come to Kaminheim to design the antitank trenches. Moreover, Manfred and Callum were such gentlemen: Not only were they waltzing with Klara's sadly unattractive daughter and her friend, they were also showing Theo how to dance with the girls. Her little boy was indeed growing up. She wished that Anna felt well enough to dance, too, but it was heartening just to see her warm and content and sipping a glass of red wine on the love seat. Her cheeks, once again, had some color.

“I wonder if you'll come back when the war is over,” she heard Gabi saying to Callum, while Klara was skimming through the sheet music on the piano in search of another song. Certainly no one here seemed to care that he was Scottish. She watched him glance at Anna, who raised her eyebrows behind Gabi's back and smiled at him. Imagine: Did Anna really think that her own mother was born yesterday? That her own mother didn't know what was going on between her daughter and this foreign paratrooper? She remembered when she and Rolf had been courting; it wasn't all that many years ago that she had first flirted with the man who would eventually become her husband.

“Oh, I think there's a pretty good chance,” he said, and it was clear to Mutti that he was speaking more to Anna than to Gabi.

“Good. I will expect you. I will hang a glass ornament in the guest bedroom window here where you will stay,” she said, and Mutti wondered if the girl was getting tipsy.

“A glass butterfly,” Sonje added. “Because by then we will all be out of our cocoons. So, a butterfly for Callum and a…” She paused, looking deeply into Manfred's eyes. “And what would you like, Corporal? What kind of glass ornament should await your return?”

“Oh, I will be flattered by whatever you suggest,” he said. He looked away from her and briefly his eyes rested on Anna. Mutti couldn't decide what he was thinking, but when Anna looked up-perhaps sensing the corporal's attention-he quickly turned toward the portrait of Eckhard on the far wall. Her daughter, she thought, seemed slightly troubled by the corporal's gaze. Almost as if she were changing the subject, she reached into the tin on the table beside her for one of the florentines and took a small bite.

“Maybe tonight my mother will allow you to sleep with one of Father's dogs,” Gabi suggested to Manfred. “A man should always have a wolfhound by his bed, shouldn't he?”

“Oh, I don't think we need to cart them around the house. But I thank you,” he told her, his voice drifting, and Mutti couldn't imagine why anyone would bring one of those stuffed dogs with them to a bedroom. Even in a room this large it took the smell of the fire and the tea and the scented candles to smother their stench.

“The führer always sleeps with a wolfhound, you know. Blondi,” Gabi continued. She was speaking almost directly into the corporal's ear.

“Blondi is a German shepherd-not a wolfhound,” Sonje corrected her.

“No, she's a wolfhound.”

“You're wrong.”

“And she was a gift from Goebbels.”

“From Bormann,” Sonje insisted.

“Goebbels.”

“Bormann.”

“Oh, please, does it matter?”

“I'm just saying-”

“You're just being a Jew. A know-it-all Jew,” Gabi snapped at her.

“I'm just being right,” Sonje said.

“Girls,” Klara said, raising her voice ever so slightly and drawing the word out. “We have guests. No need to squabble. What always is more important is what we agree upon. And we all agree that the führer has a beautiful animal named Blondi and that sometimes a man wants to sleep with a dog.”

At that Gabi tittered slightly, but then Klara's usually kind face turned to a glare. “You know I do not approve of prurient thoughts,” she said.

“I'm sorry,” Gabi murmured, though it was clear that she wasn't. Not at all. Then she turned to Sonje, and it was evident to Mutti that the moment-already irreparably curdled-was about to get worse. “But Sonje was acting like a Jew: a selfish, piglike, know-it-all Jew. A Jew who probably opposes our führer. A Jew who lives off the sweat of others. A Jew who seduces-”

“Enough!” This was Manfred, and everyone in the room turned. Mutti was embarrassed for Gabi. She was embarrassed for them all. Living outside of Kulm had meant that she had been spared having to hear firsthand this sort of nonsense about the Jews. Certainly in the early days of the war she had worried about her family's acquaintances who were Jewish-hadn't Rolf written letters and telegrams to everyone he could think of on behalf of some families?-but in the last two years their own situation had become so precarious that she had grown oblivious of their plight. She had Werner to worry about. And she had to learn to make do in a world where everything, it seemed, was suddenly scarce. Nevertheless, she had never believed the sort of claptrap that appeared in Der Stürmer or that Gabi was giving voice to now.

“Enough,” Manfred continued, a mere echo of the word this time, but his anger clearly unabated. “No Jews are living off the sweat of others. No Jews are seducing your precious Aryan children. No Jews-”

“That's right,” Sonje said, oddly adamant, and she was, much to Mutti's discomfort, pressing her body against Manfred's and burrowing her cheek against his chest. “That's absolutely right.”

“Tell me, Corporal, are you a Jew lover?” Gabi asked him.

He pushed Sonje down into the love seat almost atop poor Anna and then took Gabi's fleshy upper arms in his hands, clenching his fingers so firmly around them that Mutti could see the fabric of her dress sleeve crinkling and she feared for a moment that he was hurting her.

“I don't care that I am a guest in your family's house. I will not abide your monumental ignorance,” he told her, lowering his face into hers, his eyes unblinking.

“I was only-”

“He's right, you know,” Callum interrupted. “Say one more word like that and I'll walk out that door and put a bloody arrow at the end of the driveway pointing up here for the Russians. I'll even paint them a sign: Nazis and food, right this way.”

Gabi looked nervously toward Klara, but her mother was leaning over the piano, crying soundlessly and running the fingers of one hand abstractedly over the woodwork just above the keys. When she saw her mother was going to offer neither assistance nor comfort, she stiffened her back and stood up a little straighter. “That man is a prisoner. Your enemy. Are all of you going to allow him to talk to me like this?”

Mutti felt she should do something-say something-to deescalate the tension. Comfort Klara, maybe. Chastise Gabi. Calm Manfred. But she realized that she was tired, so very, very tired. Wasn't it only a moment ago that these young people were waltzing together contentedly? Still, she wished she could find the words to calm Manfred and silence this strange, half-insane Gabi.

“Manfred, would you have one more dance in you for a sickly girl from the country?” It was Anna speaking, and she had risen to her feet. Her lips were parted just the tiniest bit in a modest, demure smile, though it was clear from the slight quiver there that she was nervous-or, to be precise, unnerved by both Gabi's erratic behavior and Manfred's anger. She rested her fingers gently atop the corporal's shoulder, a leaf coming to rest on a low branch in the autumn, and Mutti worried that what looked to the rest of the room merely like a bit of practiced, coquettish charm was driven actually by the need for help with her balance. Her daughter, she knew, wasn't tipsy-but she was weak.

Without turning to Anna, Manfred released the other woman and allowed his strong arms to drop to his sides. He exhaled loudly, and Mutti hoped his anger might diminish now to something like a more harmless exasperation. She knew the effect a beautiful young girl like Anna could have on a young man. She had been such a girl herself, once.

“Ah, a little sympathy for a soldier home from the front. I won't say no,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, dipping her head slightly, and Mutti thought the storm was going to pass. Had, in fact, passed. But not yet. Sonje was glaring at Anna as if she, a friend of Klara's family, had some proprietary hold on the soldier. Meanwhile, Callum was muttering something in English that she didn't hear well enough to translate in her mind, but she thought was an aspersion upon Manfred's character. It sounded as if he were implying that Manfred actually was hiding from the front. Or running from the front. But he was most certainly not a soldier home from the front. She was surprised by this odd spike of jealousy from him and wondered if she had missed signs of it earlier.

“Do you really feel up to that?” she asked her daughter, but it was only out of obligation-because she thought as the girl's mother she should ask. The truth was, the sight of her daughter dancing with this handsome Wehrmacht corporal gave her a pleasant, maternal pride. It allowed her to fantasize what might have been if the war hadn't taken such a nasty turn and sent them all scurrying like scared animals from Kaminheim.

“Yes, Mutti, I think I can dance once,” she replied and then, when she saw Callum, she continued, “twice even. I don't think my evening would be complete if I didn't have the honor of dancing with every handsome soldier we have in our presence.”

Klara sniffled and looked up from her piano, and abruptly her mouth and eyes opened wide like a fish's. There were long stretches of tears running over the swell of her cheekbones and linking her eyes with the cut of her jaw. “Wonderful!” she exclaimed. “I know just what to play!”

Gabi was biting the insides of her mouth so angrily and obviously that she was sucking in the flesh on the sides of her face. Then, almost as if her head were on a spindle, she turned suddenly to Sonje and ordered her to dance with her. “Come, butterfly. Join me so neither of us has to dance with the enemy.”

Callum, Mutti thought, looked relieved.

URI THREW ANOTHER log on the fireplace, pushed the massive screen with the finials of eagles in front of it, and collapsed on his back onto the couch. Suddenly, he was almost too tired to retire to the maid's room in which he was supposed to sleep. Their hostess had placed him in one and Callum in the other. It wasn't that there was a shortage of bedrooms upstairs; rather, it was Klara's sense of propriety: She wanted her daughter and Sonje and Anna to be on one floor, and these two men on another. The only male allowed upstairs? Young Theo. Now Uri closed his eyes, vaguely aware that Callum was extinguishing the oil lamps and blowing out the candles. Everyone else was in bed for the night.

“So,” he said, not even trying to suppress a yawn. “When was the last time you ate like we did tonight?”

“Actually, the food was pretty impressive at the Emmerichs' right up to the end. Things were rationed and some things were much harder to come by than others. But, remember: The place was a working farm.”

“Oh, great: The POWs are eating better than the soldiers. Very nice.”

“There is an irony there.”

“I haven't eaten like tonight in years. Since I was a little boy.”

“Really? Not even before the war?”

He thought of the privations he and the other Jews had endured in Schweinfurt. The possessions they had bartered for food. “Not even,” he said simply. Then: “So, how long have you and Anna been lovers?”

“Pardon me?”

“Don't be coy.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Only if you're breathing and have eyes. The dead? They wouldn't notice,” he said.

“Well, it didn't stop you from dancing with her.”

“Certainly not. So, tell me: How did you convince an Aryan princess to fall for you?” he asked. “I'm interested.”

“Why?”

“I just am,” he said. His arms were folded across his chest and he imagined himself as a mummy. Somewhere oddly far away he heard Callum starting to answer. Telling him something about an apple orchard at Kaminheim. The extensive harvest. But he felt another yawn rising up inside him. Gave in to it. And was asleep.

ANNA AWOKE, shivering, from a dream and pulled the quilt and the sheet up and over her head. Curled her knees into her chest. She couldn't quite recall what she had dreamed; it hovered like a coil of mist just outside of her reach. But she thought she had been a child in the dream, and as she trembled a blurred image came to her of herself as a little girl in a pinafore and blue dirndl dress. The pinafore, she thought, had been decorated with cherry red hearts. Perhaps she was carrying a basket of flowers she had picked. Perhaps not. What was clear was that the sun was high and she was warm: She could still feel the heat on her face.

The wind was rattling the windows here-it was still dark outside-and she thought if she had been home at Kaminheim and there hadn't been a war that the sound would actually have reassured her. After all, she would have been safe in her bed in a house that, once, had seemed indestructible to her. Now? Anything-people, horses, whole buildings-could disappear in a moment. For all she knew, Kaminheim was gone. Shelled. Ransacked. Or, perhaps, merely occupied. She saw in her mind Russian officers in her father's office. In the parlor. Russian soldiers pillaging the kitchen and the pantry. She fretted about the horses, but she told herself that the Russians would need them-and, thus, feed them. They wouldn't suffer too terribly. But she did worry about Theo's pony. Would the Russians have any use for such a good-natured little creature? Unlikely. The animal might be nothing more to them than a hot stew, and the image caused her to grimace.

And yet even now, despite all they were enduring and all they had lost, life's smallest, most irrelevant dramas went on. She wasn't sure whether this was an indication of how resilient people were, or how pathetic. But she had danced that night with Manfred, and Callum had briefly grown a little jealous. It was unfounded, of course: The corporal had been charming and gallant once they had started to dance, but it was clear that he didn't have a particular interest in her. And now, her pride slightly wounded, she wondered why. Perhaps, she told herself, it was because he was older: eight years. Not a huge difference. But it was possible this was too much in his eyes. Maybe-and this idea actually caused her a small ripple of annoyance-he thought eighteen was too young to be interesting. Well, she had only danced with him to calm him. To settle the room.

She ran the edge of the sheet over her forehead and cheeks, which were damp and hot. She decided she was flattered by the idea that Callum was jealous of Manfred. There was no cause, of course: Her heart belonged entirely to the Scottish paratrooper. A man like Manfred? He was too much like Werner and Helmut. A Teutonic warrior. A killer.

Still, there was clearly a deep streak of rebellion in him that her brothers almost completely lacked. He was with them now, wasn't he, rather than with his unit? And even if he had no special fondness for her and she wasn't attracted to him-at least, she reassured herself, in a meaningful way-she was nonetheless glad he was with them. Oh, she had been angry with him when he and Callum had shot those Russian soldiers. She had been incensed at both men. At the time, it had seemed senseless. Now, however, in the dark of the night, it struck her as a somewhat more reasonable course of action. Those men were going to steal their provisions. They were a part of the army from which her family was fleeing.

Still, it had been more death, and Manfred's reaction to what they had done had been so very different from Callum's.

A powerful gust shook the window glass in the bedroom and she opened her eyes. Tomorrow they would be out in that cold once again. And so what did any of this matter-Manfred's indifference, Callum's attraction-when it was possible that none of them would even survive the month, much less make it through the winter?

No, it wasn't likely they'd perish. They couldn't. She told herself she was being melodramatic because she was sick and scared and it was the middle of the night. The truth was, there was no reason to believe that any of them would die. She had the sense, suddenly, that Manfred would see to that.

IN THE MORNING, Mutti awoke to the sound of someone knocking on the door to her bedroom and cooing that coffee-real coffee-was brewing, and for one brief, lovely moment she thought Rolf was beside her in bed. She could feel his warmth; she could hear his low, steady breathing. The pillows once more were those on which she rested her head in Kaminheim, great soft nests of goose feathers, and the bed was the one in which she had slept with Rolf since the day they were married. It was only when she reached out her fingers to brush his cheek and feel the comforting stubble there that she realized she was alone. She was at Klara's and Rolf was…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tell me.”

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

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

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

“I agree.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Fifteen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You're frightening Theo.”

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

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

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

“Sometimes you people are such…” Callum began.

“Such what?” Manfred asked.

“You're such barbarians.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

He sighed. “Only because you haven't asked.”

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

“Well, my sense is-”

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

“They?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Without saying a word Uri put his hand up and signaled for Callum and Mutti to halt the horses. Instantly the Emmerichs saw the soldiers, too.

“Get in the cart, Callum,” he murmured. “Trade places with Anna.” Anna, as far as they knew, had fallen back to sleep among the bags of oats, a snug warren beneath the quilts. They still had a sizable amount of feed left for the horses, because whenever they could they had fed the animals with the hay they found in the abandoned barns where they slept.

“You don't think they'll search the wagon?” he asked.

“No. Mutti, Theo, and two young women traveling west? Seems pretty natural to me. They'll be fine.”

“What will happen to them if I'm discovered?”

“After they shoot you? They'll shoot them.”

“That's comforting,” Callum said, nodding, and he climbed over the side of the wagon and gently woke Anna. Her hair once more was wild with sleep, and for a moment she didn't seem to realize where she was. There was a trace of the cross-hatching from the burlap on her cheek. She stretched her arms over her head, and Uri imagined her waking in her warm bed, the sun bursting through curtains in the window, on a peaceful spring morning on that estate of hers. The image-the entitlement-briefly rankled him. Made him wonder where his own sister was. How she had died. All she had endured before she had finally been killed or succumbed to starvation or disease. He had the sense that Anna had come to like him more than she should given her supposed affection for this paratrooper, though he thought it was also possible this was mere arrogance on his part. Still, there was a part of him that wanted to put his arm around Callum's shoulders and tell him, So, my young friend. Anna's people? They're trying to exterminate mine. Trust me: There's no danger I am going to fall for her. He wouldn't say such a thing, of course. But the idea crossed his mind.

“She looks better, doesn't she?” her mother was saying to him. He feared he'd been staring and quickly glanced back toward the cemetery. There he noticed that the angel on one of the nearest tombstones had lost a wing and the marble at the break was almost albino white. The rest of the statue was ash-colored with age. He looked more closely now at the gravestones and saw other angels-as well as granite women and men, their robes and sandals seemingly inadequate even for stone in winters this brutal-that had lost their arms and their heads as well as their wings. There were decapitated rock cherubs and sheep. He presumed at some point there had been shell fire here, and under the rolling mantle of snow the ground had been chewed up by the explosions, the caskets splintered, and whatever was left of the bodies scattered like dust along the earth. There probably were other tombstones that had been obliterated completely, the remnants-pebbles and slabs and chunks-buried as well beneath the fresh snow.

“How long was I sleeping?” Anna was saying. Suddenly she was beside him, wrapping her head in a shawl as she spoke.

“Two hours. Maybe three,” Callum said from the wagon. “We didn't realize you were in such a deep slumber.”

“I was dreaming.”

“What of?” This was Theo.

She sniffed at the air, wrinkling her nose in a way that made Uri think of a rabbit. “Werner and Helmut,” she told her brother. “But you were in the dream, too.”

“What were we doing?”

She smiled at the boy. “We were all at the sea. At that beach you love east of Danzig, and we were all on a holiday. There was a boat in the distance. A big one. Helmut and Werner were dunking you in the waves.”

“I'm too old for that,” Theo said, clearly disappointed that even in Anna's dreams he was deemed a small child. Meanwhile, Uri was left wondering at the way his big sister had taken the night-marish story they had all heard about the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff and somehow in her sleep generated images that left her content.

“You are indeed, my little love. You are indeed.”

“Where were you? It doesn't sound like you were in the water with us.”

She paused. “I was sitting on a blanket on the beach. Watching. And the sun? Glorious. Hotter than it ever is in reality, I think. Scorching. The sand was almost too hot for my toes. But I was very happy.”

“You weren't alone, were you?”

Anna rolled her eyes at her brother, but Uri could tell that the boy had hit a nerve. “Tell me who!” the child insisted. “Who was on the blanket with you!”

“No one. I was alone.”

“You're lying, I can tell.”

Uri saw her glance at him briefly, almost against her will. Then she squeezed her brother's shoulders through his coat, pulling him against her. “Big sisters are allowed their secrets,” she said into Theo's ear, and-though Uri knew it was exactly the wrong thing to do-he glanced up at Callum in the wagon. The paratrooper's gaze was darting back and forth between Anna and him, and the fact that Anna had looked fleetingly in his direction-rather than in Callum's-hadn't been lost on the Scot. Uri could see the hurt in his eyes. And now, he realized, by glimpsing up at Callum he had made it clear to this other soldier that he, too, was aware of who had been on the blanket beside Anna in her dream.

The moment was broken abruptly when somewhere in the woods in the distance, somewhere behind the SS soldiers, they heard a single shot. “Russians?” Mutti asked him.

“No,” he told her. “Most likely a deserter. The SS simply taking care of someone without the proper papers.” He sensed Callum was continuing to stare at him as he said this, and when he turned, he saw he was correct. Only when they heard the SS soldiers signaling for the line to move along did the paratrooper finally disappear beneath the feed. Uri decided that when he rejoined this crowd in Stettin, he would have to be careful not to antagonize this Scotsman. He would have to watch what he said, and he would have to stay the hell out of this Anna girl's dreams. Besides, he liked Callum. But he couldn't focus on any of that right now. He handed Anna his pistol and told her that she should not be afraid to use it. Then he asked Mutti for the address of her cousin in Stettin and, once he had it, started to march with authority back down the road. Against the current, against this boundless stream of refugees. Their good-byes had been brief and, in his mind, completely unsatisfactory. But he had to move fast and he had to move as if he had a purpose, at least until he was far, far from those SS goons.

Then, when he had some distance on the checkpoint, he would figure out how, once again, to reinvent himself.

DESPITE THE COLD, the ground was spongy and soft at the checkpoint, a mix of mud and motor oil and horse manure. Off to one side of the road, opposite the SS soldiers' truck, Anna saw four strong horses tied to the wrought-iron fence that surrounded this edge of the cemetery. Two had their mouths and noses hidden by army feed bags, and two were looking on testily. On the other side of the intersection there was a large mound of debris, clothes and toys and suitcases that families were discarding here. She guessed the suitcases belonged to the men in the truck. But that hairless doll in the torn smock? Or the chipped wooden sword and its matching scabbard? There were certainly no coats or capes, but she saw linens and spring bonnets and picture frames-large ones for paintings and small ones for photographs-with the images removed. Someone had left behind a box that must once have held fine silver, and while the utensils were long gone, the container was still here, the felt lining filling now with snow and clods of mud churned up by people's boots as they passed.

Anna thought the SS soldiers actually looked more tired than menacing, perhaps even a little bored. Still, two of them were coldly pulling almost every male they found from the line and herding them into the back of the vehicle, where the recruits were listening to the music and propaganda-offered at the moment in equal parts-on the Volksempfänger radio that was resting on the truck's cab. The other soldiers, the pair who had been smoking cigarettes, had taken a half-dozen of the men with them to the edge of the forest, and briefly Anna feared they were going to execute the group right here and now. Much to her relief, however, she understood after a moment that instead the soldiers were about to give them an impromptu lesson on how to fire a panzerfaust. One of the soldiers was leaning a ratty piece of barn board with a hand-drawn Russian star against a dead chestnut tree at the edge of the cemetery, while the other was showing them how to rest the small cannon on their shoulders. He was warning them to avoid the flame that would exit the rear of the weapon and spurt easily two meters behind them.

Some of those men, she thought, didn't look fit to work on her family's farm, much less try to stop Russian tanks. They were more likely to kill themselves than slow Ivan's advance. She wondered: Weeks ago had one of those men been her father? An aging veteran of the First World War expected now to do what men half his age-with better weapons and better training-had been incapable of accomplishing? It was pathetic, just pathetic, and she was at once mortified and embarrassed and angry.

One of the soldiers who was reviewing her family's papers looked up at her. “Something bothering you?” he asked.

She focused on him, at the shadowy stubble and the deep bags under his disturbingly boyish green eyes, at the pencil-point-thin scar that ran along his jaw from his earlobe to his chin, and tried to erase the frown from her face. Still, the absurdity of his question astonished her. Was something bothering her? She was a refugee. She had been sleeping in the homes of strangers or in barns or outside in the snow for weeks. She was hungry; she was cold. Of course something was bothering her. But she held her tongue and said-trying to sound pleasant-“I've been sick.”

“With what?”

“I don't know. Not typhus. I'm getting better.”

He nodded. “I'm glad,” he said, and his relief sounded oddly genuine. “It seems you have two brothers in the army, yes?”

For a moment she was curious why he was asking her this and not Mutti-the head of their household. But then she got it. He simply wanted to talk to her. A young woman.

“Yes. My older brother is fighting outside of Budapest. That's Werner. I'm not sure where Helmut is. He's my twin. But he's east of here, with our father. The last we heard, they were part of the counterattack on the Kulm bridgehead.”

“That was weeks ago,” he said.

“I know.”

“No word since then?”

She shook her head and quickly he looked down from her to the papers in his gloved hands. “And your father is Rolf,” he said, trying to fill in the silence before it grew awkward. “My father is named Rolf, too. I haven't seen him in months, either.”

“I'm sorry,” she murmured, assuming she had to say something.

“He's fine. He trains teenagers to fire antiaircraft guns in the west. They're boys practically-not much older than this young fellow,” the soldier continued, motioning toward Theo. “He travels between the factories and sets up the batteries. I'm sure your father is fine, too.”

Her first thought was to tell him, You don't believe that. Once more, however, she restrained herself and said simply, “I hope so. We all do.”

“Where are you going?”

“Stettin.”

“Do you have family there? Or friends who are expecting you?”

“My mother's cousin lives there.”

“It's just the four of you?”

“Yes,” she said, wondering why he would even ask such a thing. She thought instantly of Callum, buried beneath the feed, and Manfred, behind them now somewhere amid the long columns of refugees.

“It's awfully dangerous for women and children to travel alone,” he said.

She felt a small eddy of resentment: If they actually had a man with them right now, he would be taken away from them and asked to stop a tank with a slingshot. She considered telling him the story of the pair of Russian scouts in the barn, perhaps omitting the small detail that they really did have two males traveling with them at the time and each of those men had shot one of the enemy soldiers. She was awed at the rage that was festering inside her and wondered if it stemmed from the fact that Manfred was gone. Did she actually feel more vulnerable now that he had left them? “I know,” she said evenly.

“Do you have anything you can use to defend yourself?”

She reached under her cape and revealed the pistol Manfred had given her. She wanted to give him no reason to search her or the wagons. In addition to Callum, she recalled that the rifles they had taken from the Russian soldiers were in the cart, too.

He looked at it, and despite the fact she had shared the gun with him willingly, his tone changed from one of vague solicitude to suspicion. “Where did you get this?”

“It was Werner's,” she said quickly, reflexively.

“Werner is your brother in Budapest?”

“That's right.”

“And why doesn't Werner-your-brother-in-Budapest have it?”

She shrugged, hoping her breathing sounded normal, her voice natural. “When he was home on leave, he gave it to me. He knew we were going to have to evacuate soon.”

“Rather defeatist of him, don't you think?”

“No.”

“When did your brother return to his company?”

“I don't recall the exact date. But it was early January,” she lied.

He turned his attention toward Mutti for the first time.

“Do you love your son? This Werner in Budapest?” he asked.

Sonje was huddling against Mutti, and Theo was standing beside them. The boy, for reasons Anna couldn't fathom, was standing on a single foot like a stork, and she wanted to ask her brother what in heaven's name he was doing, if only to divert this SS soldier's attention away from their mother. Already, however, her mother was releasing Sonje and rising up to her full height. “Yes, of course I do,” she replied.

“Do you worry about him in Budapest?”

“I don't know what you're implying, young man, and I don't believe I want to know. But, obviously, I worry about my son in Budapest. I'm a mother and I'm a wife. That means I also worry about my son and my husband who are fighting somewhere to the east. And, if you are desirous of a complete litany, I will also tell you that I worry about my brother-in-law who is defending our country on the western front,” she continued, as if she were speaking with an inattentive and slightly annoying schoolboy. “And while my older son wanted his sister to have a way to protect herself and her family, his attitude is anything but defeatist. If you had a sister, wouldn't you want her to have a way to protect herself? For goodness' sake, you just said yourself that it's dangerous out here.”

The soldier actually smiled at her and seemed slightly and appropriately abashed. For goodness' sake. Anna chastised herself inwardly for fretting for even a moment about what her mother might say.

“As a matter of fact, I do have sisters. Two,” he said. “And, yes, if they weren't safely at home right now painting plates, I expect I would want them to carry handguns, too.”

Nearby there was a small explosion, and almost as one she and Theo winced and turned toward the sound, her brother finally dropping that other foot for balance. One of the older men had just fired the panzerfaust. The red star was completely untouched, but she thought one of the tombstones-easily twenty meters to the right of the target-had been obliterated. When she looked back at the SS soldier before her, he was rolling his eyes in disgust.

“And that's what's going to save the Fatherland. Please. Heaven protect us all,” he said, and he placed Manfred's pistol back in her palm and returned to her both the Emmerichs' and Sonje's papers. Then he looked at their wagons, his hands on his hips, and paused.

“May we continue?” she asked him.

He ignored her as if he had a sudden, more pressing thought, and marched over to Waldau. Waldau and Ragnit were leading one cart-the one in which Callum was hidden-and Balga the other. He ran his fingers along the animal's velvetine cannon of a shoulder. “I see you have two wagons and three horses. I hate to do this to you, but I don't have a choice: I'm going to have to confiscate one of your animals. But they look like good, strong pullers: You'll still have a horse for each wagon,” he said, and then he motioned for the soldier beside him-a studious-looking fellow with round eye-glasses who was no older than Werner, Anna guessed, but with an oddly weathered face for a man so young-to remove the harness linking the horse nearest him from the wagon. Instantly her mother and Sonje glanced at her, and she could see the alarm in their faces. It wasn't, she sensed, merely the reality that they were about to lose a second horse that was troubling them. Certainly Mutti had to know that Ragnit was capable of pulling the wagon away from this checkpoint on his own, even with the added weight of the parastrooper buried beneath the bags of oats. She looked back at them, trying to understand what, suddenly, had them so unnerved.

“That's Waldau,” Theo was saying to the men. “He's named for a castle.” Her brother's voice had a quiver to it that Anna recognized. This was his favorite horse, other than that pony of his they had left behind at Kaminheim, and he was trying hard to keep from crying.

“I know the castle,” the soldier with the spectacles was saying patiently, and something about the tenderness in his tone made her wonder if it was possible that he was old enough to have children of his own. He pulled off his gloves so he could more easily manage the buckles on the bridle and the reins and the leather suspenders that fell across the animal's neck and chest. “I know precisely where it is in Prussia.”

“We've already lost Labiau,” Theo continued, as he watched the soldier begin to unhitch the horse.

“Ah, another castle,” he remarked.

“He was killed by a plane that strafed our column,” the boy added, and Anna found herself mesmerized by her brother's resilience, by the way he was holding back his tears even now. And so before she knew quite what she was going to say or do, she was pointing at Balga and suggesting to the soldier, “Would you please take this animal instead?”

The soldier paused and shrugged. His partner, the one who had examined their papers, went over to Balga and eyed him more closely. “You realize, don't you, that I could take all three of your horses,” he said, a statement, not a question.

“I do know, yes.”

“Well, then: Why this one?” he asked. “Is there a problem with him I'm missing? If he's dragging this wagon on his own, he must be quite some animal.”

“He's my horse,” she said simply. “That's why. The first one you picked is a favorite of my little brother. He's already had to leave his pony behind. If possible, I'd like him to keep this animal in his life. He's lost so much else.”

He eyed her deliberatively and once more studied the horse, his gaze resting a long moment on the coronet above each of the animal's hooves and then up and down Balga's legs. He looked at the animal's mouth and finally shrugged. “I really have no idea what I'm supposed to look for in a horse's mouth. Do you? Teeth, gums? I've just no idea at all. I've never owned horses; I grew up around streetcars in the city. All I know is I'm supposed to round some more up. This one seems as good as the others,” he mused, pushing an unruly forelock of dark hair off his forehead and instructing the other soldier to take Balga instead.

“You don't have to do that,” Theo told her.

“I do, sweetie. I do,” she said to her brother. Then, with a sickening flutter in her chest, she noticed the boots. Callum's boots. Both of them. Clearly this was what her mother and Sonje had seen a moment ago, this was what had caused their eyes to widen in fear. She could see the thick rubber soles, and as high on one leg as his ankle. His feet were actually sticking out. The SS soldiers were so focused on the horses, however, that they hadn't looked back yet. But, eventually, they would. They would. How could they not? Eventually their eyes would roam casually in that direction, and there would be the two shoes. They stood out against the canvas bags like lit candles on a Christmas tree.

“Here, let me do that,” she offered quickly, struggling to make the words sound normal when she felt as if she were trying to speak with a giant popover in her mouth. She realized that she needed an excuse to stand between the soldier and the incriminating side of the wagon. Once there, perhaps she might be able to drape something atop Callum's feet. Her cape, maybe. But why? Why in this cold would she do such a thing? Still, as she began to work the complicated series of straps and buckles that linked the animal with the wagon she wondered if it would seem suspicious to either of these SS troopers if she were to go and rearrange the bags of feed behind her. She decided, however, that she hadn't a choice, and she was just starting in that direction when the soldier without the eyeglasses, the one in charge, suddenly ordered her to halt, to stop whatever it was she was doing. He snapped at the old men in the truck behind him to be silent. To shut their mouths. He commanded his partner to cease work on the harness. His face grew into an elongated mask with a rictus of rage in the middle, but otherwise he, too, stood perfectly still. She didn't dare venture a glimpse back at the boots, those awful, incriminating boots that were about to get them all-even her poor, young, innocent little brother-killed, and instead kept her eyes fixed upon this suddenly furious soldier. And then she understood that his anger had nothing to do with the boots, nothing at all. It had nothing to do with anything he had seen. It was what he had heard. Was hearing. Abruptly he jumped up onto the hood of the truck and reached with both hands for the Volksempfänger radio on the cab. She had been so focused on his questions about her brother and Manfred's pistol and where they were going that she hadn't been listening to the broadcast. She had been aware that some particularly somber music had been playing, nothing more. Now she realized that the music had been replaced by an announcer, and in tones even more solemn than whatever song had been on the radio he was describing an air raid on Dresden. For a brief moment she felt only relief: This wasn't about the paratrooper in their wagon. It was only about an air raid. And air raids were, unfortunately, common these days. But then she understood this was a raid of a very different sort, a very different magnitude. Apparently Dresden was gone, all but burned off the map in the night, the once lovely city bombed in mere hours into ruins. The British, the announcer was saying, may have used a new, more deadly sort of explosive: The firestorm that engulfed the city seemed to have melted even the stone buildings that were two and three hundred years old, and there were reports that the Elbe itself was ablaze. He said the casualties were well into the tens-perhaps even hundreds-of thousands, and this attack represented an escalation in the RAF's medieval brutality: After all, Dresden was known for porcelain, not munitions. It was almost completely undefended. Even the Art Academy and the Belvedere, with all of their paintings and pottery and sculpture, had been bombed, an indication that the western Allies were as shameless and savage as the Russians. Still, he vowed that the führer's new wonder rockets would exact revenge on the United Kingdom from London to Glasgow, and this sort of viciousness would only stiffen the German resistance. It would never, he insisted, encourage capitulation. Then, after a drumroll, the grave music resumed.

The SS soldier was still holding the radio before his face, and Anna wondered if he might raise it aloft and hurl it from the roof of the truck like a boulder. But he didn't. He had merely been trying to hear every detail the announcer was offering. Now that no more news was forthcoming, he put the Volksempfänger down on the cab and jumped to the ground from his perch atop the vehicle. “Wonder rockets. That's horseshit,” he said, a little calmer now, his rage having been subsumed by disgust.

His partner murmured a pair of female names to him, and Anna presumed the fellow was referring to the soldier's two sisters-the ones who were home somewhere painting plates. She watched him place his hands on the man's shoulders, squeezing them firmly and saying something more that she couldn't hear. But she understood: Those poor girls lived in Dresden. That's where the family was from. The two men were both envisioning those sisters in the firestorm.

Then the soldier with the eyeglasses returned to them, but only to take Balga away. He was going to lead the stallion to the wrought-iron fence with the other horses at the edge of the cemetery. Briefly the animal looked at Anna, those big, dark eyes uncomprehending and curious. A little wary. He snorted once at the stranger, and it was clear that he was being led away under duress. But it looked to Anna as if he was going to be stubborn only, not vicious. She saw Theo already was walking Waldau to the second wagon.

“Don't bring him too close to those other animals,” Anna called out to the soldier, just in case, and Balga's ears twitched at the sound of her voice.

“He might kick them?” he asked.

“Or you.”

“And you said he was your horse?” the soldier asked.

She nodded.

“Come then,” the soldier said. “Say good-bye to him. And then you had better get on your way.” Quickly she went to the animal. For a moment she ran her hand along his mane and heavy winter coat, pressing and warming her palm against him. Then she brought her fingers to her lips, inhaling one last time his scent, and pressed them against his cheek. When she pulled them away he brought his nose almost to hers, and exhaled from those great, gaping nostrils a puff of steam that smelled perfectly sweet and struck her as the gust from a fairy-tale dragon. He didn't take his eyes off her, and she decided that what she had initially supposed was wariness in her animal's intense countenance was actually more akin to despair.

WHEN THE SS CHECKPOINT was well behind them, Sonje grew animated: She unleashed a frenzied, fist-pounding assault on the sacks of feed underneath which Callum was hiding. Mutti realized that the girl's sudden, violent anger at the paratrooper was unreasonable: It wasn't he, after all, who had bombed Dresden. He wasn't a pilot. He'd never even fired a bullet at a German before surrendering. Besides, it was growing increasingly evident to Mutti that her people had asked for this. She, with her blind eye, had asked for this. Hitler, that man whom she had once viewed as the führer-as her führer-had tried to bomb most of Europe into submission. He and that pompous fop Göring. She recalled Manfred's story of that train full of Jews, and she shuddered. What else had they done? What else?

Nevertheless, she was so worried about Sonje's precarious mental health that she didn't defend Callum as the girl lashed into him. When the young man climbed from the wagon, it only got worse. Sonje's grim face grew red as she ranted, and it looked as if she might physically attack him. But Mutti concluded that Sonje needed to vent-they all did, she guessed, for different reasons-and she would give her that opportunity, as unfair as that might be for poor Callum. Even Anna seemed to have realized that everyone would be better off if they allowed Sonje her say.

“I can't even bear to walk beside you right now!” she was telling the paratrooper when he climbed from the wagon, her voice strident and shrill. Callum seemed largely unperturbed, as if it were easier to allow this wave of anger to wash over him than it was to rise up and risk it cutting his columnar legs out from under him. Occasionally he would glance at Anna, and he seemed more bemused than defensive, but he was listening and nodding, as if he were receiving nothing more from Sonje than a shopping list for the village. “Are you really the people we are supposed to surrender to? You are no better than the Russians! No better at all! You are a horrible, violent people and you are brutes! When will you have had enough? When? When you've killed every last woman and child in Germany? Destroyed every single home and museum?”

Mutti presumed that part of Sonje's anger stemmed from fear: from the reality that Manfred had left them. She knew that she herself felt a little bereft, a little more anxious, and so why wouldn't Sonje-or, for that matter, her own daughter? Why shouldn't all their tempers be a little short? It was a small miracle they weren't constantly snapping at one another now that their Wehrmacht corporal was gone. It wasn't that Manfred was braver than Callum-though Mutti had to admit to herself, he probably was. Unlike their young Scot, Manfred would not have allowed himself to be captured without firing a shot. Rather, it was that he was resourceful and focused and just a little bit fierce. Moreover, he was a man in a uniform: His presence gave them a clout the other refugees lacked. The result? When they'd had this handsome Wehrmacht corporal as a part of their group, they couldn't help but feel a little bit safer, a little more secure.

“Barbarians!” Sonje was insisting, shaking her head. “Barbarians!” she repeated.

Yes, it was clear that Manfred had spent more time away from his unit than he probably should have; but she couldn't begrudge the man that, not after all he had endured in his years in the army and all, undoubtedly, he had seen. Besides, he might have saved Anna's life in that barn. Who knew what those Russians might have done to her in the end?

“And now Dresden!” Sonje hissed, her voice eerily reminiscent of Klara's when she said the name of the city, but Mutti had the sense that the girl's tirade might finally be winding down. “Why would you bomb Dresden? What could possibly be gained from bombing Dresden?”

She shook her head and wiped at her eyes and her cheeks with her gloved fingers, and Mutti reached out and rubbed her back in long, slow circles. Russians, British, Americans, she thought. Perhaps Sonje was right. Perhaps it didn't make a difference in which direction they walked. It really did seem as if the whole world was against them.

“What, Mutti?”

She looked over at Anna. She hadn't realized that she had spoken aloud just now.

“What were you saying?” her daughter was asking her, the girl's eyes shining and a little wide with concern. Callum, too, was watching her.

“Oh,” she said to them both, noting an especially forlorn-looking birch by the side of the road. “I was just being an old woman. Talking to myself, I guess.”

“You are hardly an old woman,” said Anna.

“I wasn't three or four months ago. I think I am now. I seem to be easily distracted.” She heard the despair in her voice and felt ashamed. Had she ever before sounded so gloomy?

“Well,” her daughter was saying kindly, “the mind's bound to roam when all we do is walk out here in the cold. Half the time, I find myself nodding off on my feet. Just listen to the horses' hooves: It's like a metronome. Of course we get distracted!”

We. Anna was kind enough to say we, Mutti noticed, and so she stood up a little straighter. Stopped rubbing Sonje's back. She forced herself to take strides that were longer, more vigorous, and reminded herself that she still had a part of her family with her. Her lovely daughter. Her brave little boy. This was a great blessing. And it meant, as their mother, that she had to remain steadfast and resolute, and do all that she could to protect them. Under no circumstances could she allow herself to break down and become an additional burden.

“Come,” she said to no one in particular, “we should keep moving. It won't be dark for another few hours.”

ANNA UNDERSTOOD ON a level that was more intellectual than visceral that aging represented a steady winnowing of life's possibilities. She grasped death from bullets and bombs and bayonets far better than she did death from old age and cancer. But she was not uncomprehending of the reality that the infinite steadily contracted, the options narrowed, and eventually one's future would be as shallow as a spoon. As predictable-and enervating-as the mud that followed the first thaws in March. And so as they walked on toward Stettin, three more days beneath a dreary, ever-lowering sky, in her mind she recited a litany of names. Yes, they did get distracted. All of them. They were distracted as much by their memories of what-of whom-they had lost as they were by what loomed before them. Gone, she thought, at least for the moment, was Werner. And disappeared behind him into that great fog of battle were her father and Helmut. Her twin. Then there was her mother's brother, dead, as well as the obdurate man's daughter and daughter-in-law and grandson. There were Klara and Gabi, not certainly dead but most likely dead. Russians, two killed in a barn in the midst of an act of inexplicable kindness. No, that wasn't right: It wasn't an act of kindness at all. They were stealing everything her family had: They had simply chosen not to rape and murder her in the process. Funny how a war altered one's definition of mercy.

And then, of course, there were the animals, some profoundly beloved. There were the animals they had left behind at Kaminheim and the ones they had lost since starting west: Labiau, senselessly butchered, and Balga-her favorite-commandeered. Already she could see the physical strain on the two horses that remained. Callum was walking beside the wagons most of the time, but at least once or twice each day he had been forced to crawl beneath the remaining bags of oats and one of the horses had had to struggle extra hard to proceed. She had sacrificed her suitcase soon after they had left that first SS checkpoint, telling no one when she did it, though in hindsight it hadn't been very heavy and she had regretted her sacrifice as soon as they had stopped at the end of that day. Still, when she had looked into the eyes of Waldau and Ragnit, when she had watched the white foam ooze from their mouths, she had been almost unable to bear it.

Yet as they trudged west, the loss she found herself ruing with a frequency and a depth that surprised her was neither her father nor her brothers nor even her precious horse. It was Manfred. It wasn't that she cared for him more than anyone else. She was quite sure of that. (She was, wasn't she?) But she nonetheless found herself thinking of him even when she tried not to. She thought of him when Callum was trying to cheer her up with his stories of the Scottish coast and what a life might be like for them in Elgin. His accent pained her now, because while his German vocabulary was extensive-he was, more or less, fluent-his pronunciation was still slightly off, and every conversation reminded her of how different they were. She thought of him when Theo was asking her if she thought there was a chance they might come across new boots for him soon, because his, he said, were getting a little tight. Manfred was capable and ingenious: He would have found her brother some boots. And she thought of him when she traded two bags of feed for a small sack of muesli and a little milk, and when Mutti would talk reverentially about her husband and her two distant sons. Mutti was, essentially, whistling in the dark, talking aloud about how resilient the Emmerich men were, and how they would get through this. They would, she was certain. They'd find a way.

Anna was considerably less confident, but she wasn't going to disagree with her mother. You believed whatever was necessary to keep putting one foot in front of the other in this cold and gray and ice.

Almost imperceptibly, however, over those three days the fields and the forests were slowly transformed into lawns and garden plots, still white with snow or silvery pearl with ice, but the houses were growing closer together and eventually they grew even into rows. Behind them, to the east, the front had apparently stabilized. The Russians were no longer licking at the rear wheels of their wagons.

And then, as if Mutti were discussing a common bird she had seen at a feeder at Kaminheim, one morning her mother casually remarked that they were on the Altdamm road and Altdamm was an eastern suburb of Stettin. Any moment, she said, they might hear the sound of ships in the great harbor. She reminded them that her cousin lived at the edge of the city-on a cliff overlooking the lake-and she guessed they would be there by midafternoon.

Anna turned to her brother, who at the moment was riding on the driver's box of the wagon Waldau was pulling.

“We did it,” she said, and she found herself smiling more broadly than she had in a very long while. “We made it.”

Theo tried to smile back, but she was surprised to see there were tears running down his cheeks and his eyes were red. Theo, crying? The child struggled so hard to be brave that she wasn't sure if he had cried once since they had left Kaminheim.

“Sweetie, don't cry,” she said to the boy. “Don't you see? We're here. Tonight you'll have warm food and a warm bed.”

The boy sniffed back a small sob and said in a voice that was barely above a whisper-it was hushed and scared, as if he didn't want Mutti to hear him-“Anna? I think…”

“Tell me, sweetie.”

“I think something bad has happened to my foot.”