Skeletons at the Feast

Chapter Sixteen

CECILE HADN'T REALLY BELIEVED THEY WERE DESTINED for work, even though she had said such things to Jeanne and to Vera and to anyone else who would listen. As often as not as they had walked west in the winter, she had begun to conclude that either there was no purpose to their marching other than to march them to death or they were being marched to a camp that was beyond the reach of the Soviets. Perhaps one with a gas chamber to asphyxiate the prisoners and a crematorium. She'd heard stories about such camps. And yet here they were, working by day at a factory that made a small part for airplane engines and sleeping by night in a barracks. During the last part of their trip, and the part that had covered the most ground by far, they had been locked inside windowless vans-not gas vans, as they had all briefly presumed, some grateful that their misery was finally going to be ended. Actual transportation vans. Eleven of them. They were driven inside the vans for two days and then deposited at barracks that smelled of alcohol. Each of the prisoners had a thin bunk to herself, a pillow filled with straw, and a blanket. Russian women had worked here before them and the blankets still were infested with body lice, but they were no longer sleeping outside or in barns, and they were given the clothing the Russians had left behind before they had-the Jewish women supposed-been executed themselves. And so while some of the prisoners concluded that eventually they would be machine-gunned or gassed as well, for the moment they had warmer clothes and their rations of soup and bread were more substantial. Not generous, not even remotely satisfying, but larger. Moreover, they were grateful for that soup, even on those days when it was watery and thin, because if nothing else it had been boiled and that meant they could drink it and slake their thirst without fear of typhus. And though the barracks weren't heated, the walls kept out the worst of the wind. Besides, it was March now and the sun was higher during the day and the most brutal weather was behind them.

And soon the Russians would get here. They had to. Or perhaps, Cecile and Jeanne had conjectured, they were so far west that the British or the Americans would rescue them first.

The barracks were about two kilometers from the factory, and they walked along the edge of a small village to reach it. Cecile still wore her hiking boots and Jeanne still had the crocodile dress flats that Cecile had given her. And always, whether it was dawn or dusk, they saw townspeople. Sometimes the townspeople would avert their eyes when they saw the women trudging back and forth, and sometimes they would go about their business as if the prisoners were invisible. They would pass them on their bicycles. They would continue to prepare the loosening soil for their gardens. If they were children, they would walk to their school. The prisoners knew they didn't dare say a word to the Germans, and the Germans, it seemed, had neither interest nor curiosity in this group that had replaced the Russians at the factory.

The work wasn't hard. Some days they assembled pistons, using four long bolts to attach the fire plates to the piston's crown; other days they screwed the parts of the nozzle together for the fuel injection system for a particular Junkers fighter. Always there was a Dutch foreman, a prisoner, too, who inspected their work. He wasn't especially rigorous, and the women grew to understand that his lackadaisical attitude was his own personal form of resistance. Could a badly fitted piston or imperfect fuel nozzle bring down a German fighter plane on its own? They didn't know for sure, but they could hope.

Cecile knew she wasn't actually recovering her health with her new diet, her threadbare jacket with lice, or the reality that she was no longer sleeping in the worst of the cold like a wild animal. But she understood, as did all of the other women, that it was going to take a lot longer to die in this fashion. They might expire walking to and from the gates of the factory. But they were no longer actively being killed.

THERE WAS ROUGHLY ONE guard for every ten or twelve women escorting them between the barracks and the factory. Usually, Cecile scoffed at the idea that any prisoner was even capable of trying to escape. All of the girls were disappointed that so many of the guards from their original camp-the real sadists, it seemed, women like Sigi and men like Pusch-had accompanied them when the vans had picked them up and were brutalizing them here, too, whenever the opportunity arose. The guards were supplemented by older men who seemed to live in the town with the factory. Most of them weren't SS, and many of them seemed a little frail-looking themselves. Still, they carried their guns and they walked the prisoners back and forth between the barracks and the factory, and the only time they spoke to the women was to yell at them to keep up or move faster. They didn't seem to see any reason to be kind to the prisoners.

Consequently, Cecile was surprised one morning when a guard, as he walked beside the column of women, unwrapped a piece of butcher's paper to reveal a plump, cooked chicken breast and offered it to her. The guard was one of the older men from the town.

At first she was afraid to touch it, and so she said nothing. She didn't think this was a trick precisely, but she wondered whether accepting it might be suggesting that she felt the camp wasn't feeding her sufficiently and lead to an additional punishment. Moreover, she was completely unprepared for this-or any-act of mercy. Finally, when she hadn't taken it from him, he shrugged and handed it to Jeanne, who promptly tore the meat off in pieces, giving some to Cecile and some to the woman on her right, and keeping some for herself. The three women ate their chicken ravenously, almost swallowing their chunks of meat whole. The guard was, Cecile guessed, close to sixty years old, and his uniform didn't match the outfits the other men were wearing. She wouldn't have been surprised if it was the uniform he had worn in the First World War.

On the way back to the barracks that evening she realized that once more she was marching near that guard, and so she went to him to thank him. To explain why she hadn't seemed more grateful in the morning. He looked at her as if he didn't have the slightest idea what she was talking about and ordered her to shut up, stare straight ahead, and keep moving.

Two mornings later she found herself walking beside the older man a third time. Once more he reached into his uniform coat pocket and, as if he were a magician unveiling a bouquet of flowers he had somehow concealed up his sleeve, pulled out an object draped loosely in butcher's paper. He unwrapped it and this time revealed for Cecile a cooked pork chop. He motioned for her to take it.

“Why me?” she asked him, a reflex, still a little afraid to reach for it.

From the corner of her eye she saw Jeanne eyeing the meat and then glancing at her as if she were a complete lunatic-which, perhaps, she was. There was a part of her that knew she should just grab it and eat it. Suck every small scrap of flesh from the bone. Before she had moved her fingers toward it, however, she heard another guard, a younger man named Blumer, screaming furiously at-she supposed-her. She curled her arms against her body and ducked, preparing for the blow. But Blumer, who had probably been a real soldier until he had lost an eye and a part of his ear, wasn't furious with her; she was, at the moment, all but invisible to him. Instead he was yanking hard at the older man with the pork chop, pulling at his sleeve so suddenly that he dropped the meat and it fell to the muddy street, where Blumer used his boot to smash the bone and grind the pieces into the ground. Then he whisked the fellow away from the column, ordering the other nearby guards to keep a close watch on the swine, while the rest of the group plodded on to the factory.

“When did they start hating us?” a woman named Eve asked her aimlessly.

“They've always hated us,” said Leah, a seamstress from Budapest who had only arrived at their original camp the previous autumn. “Even when I was a little girl, my friends all called me the Dirty Jew. My friends! Hitler simply made it acceptable to kill us.”

Behind them they heard the sound of a hard, vicious slap and reflexively turned. There they saw the old man who had tried to give them the pork chop on his hands and knees in the mud by the side of the road. Standing over him, shaking his head in disgust, was the one-eyed guard named Blumer.

IT WAS AN ALMOST idyllic existence compared to the other camp, and so most of the women knew it couldn't last-even Cecile. They had spent not quite six weeks here. Now the Soviets once again were approaching, and when the wind was right they could hear the periodic cannonade. As they walked to and from the factory, they saw the locals in the village either packing up wagons and carts to leave themselves or lining up in a park with a gazebo to drill with a group of Waffen SS. There the new recruits seemed to be learning to fire small arms and throw grenades, and sometimes Cecile guessed the explosions the women heard when they were inside the factory were merely a part of the training.

Still, they knew they were going to leave here soon, and they did. Usually they were awakened by a piercing, trainlike whistle at five thirty, but one morning the whistle went off closer to four thirty and they were roused from their beds and informed they were leaving that very moment for a different factory. They might stop for breakfast in a few hours, but only if they made sufficient progress.

And so once again they were walking, marching that morning in a direction that she thought was actually more northern than western. She was grateful she had her hiking boots and she presumed Jeanne was appreciative of the dress shoes she had given her. Yes, their shoes were falling apart-both pairs-but they were still better than those wooden clogs so many of the other prisoners were forced to wear. And while the sun hadn't risen and the air was brisk, it was infinitely more endurable than the march on which the group had been taken in late January and early February. No one knew for sure, but Cecile guessed at least a third of the group had died in those weeks, expiring in the cold by the sides of train tracks or roads, shot by the guards, or immolated one particularly awful night in great bonfires on wagons.

URI LOOKED UP into the woods, the first buds on the branches creating a small but perceptible green haze around the silver birch trees. The morning sun felt good on his face, and the last of the mist had almost burned off. Today he was wearing the uniform of a Russian rifleman named Barsukov, minus his cap, because the fellow had been shot through the head. Uri hadn't killed him, but he guessed he might have if he had come across the soldier first. He needed a Russian uniform badly.

The problem, of course, was that he spoke far too little Russian to pass for more than a few minutes if he tried to join the Bolsheviks. Moreover, their army was not nearly the shambles that the Wehrmacht had become; they would expect him to be with the right company at the right time. Unfortunately, yesterday the Germans-desperate old men and teen boys, and a few SS with mortars and antitank guns-had counterattacked and successfully retaken the nearby village. There was a factory there that made important airplane parts, and the Nazis wanted it back. When he had left an hour ago, there was still a pair of destroyed Russian tanks smoldering in a small park with an idyllic white gazebo, which, inexplicably, was completely undamaged.

Somewhere in these woods, however, he had heard a rumor that there was a group of armed Jewish resisters. Or there had been. They were living in a couple of caves and an underground bunker, and there were men and women among the group. Supposedly, the Russians had originally taken that village with their help. Somehow Ivan had contacted them ahead of time, and the Jews had blown up the bridge north of the town over which the Wehrmacht initially planned to send in reinforcements, and then cut the railroad tracks that linked the village with an officers' training school to the west. The town's mayor was a maniac, however, and there were just enough Nazi diehards in the area-and, unknown to the Russians, the remnants of a company of Waffen SS-to launch an assault on the Soviets before they could solidify their position.

In the chaos of the battle, he had melted from one side to the other.

Now, supposedly, the Jews had disappeared once more into the woods, into their hidden grottoes and fissures and dugouts. At least that's what he thought he had been told by another rifleman-a boy, really, from some icy village near Murmansk, who didn't seem to care that he spoke about seventeen words of Russian. Seemed to assume he was simply an Armenian or Azerbaijani from the Caucasus.

As he stood now at the edge of the woods, he considered his options. He could try to find those Jews, shed his uniform, and finally become Uri Singer from Schweinfurt once again. Or he could make one last attempt to reach Stettin and rejoin the Emmerichs. Just head straight north. That had certainly been his intention in the weeks since he had left the family, but it seemed there had always been a checkpoint, an artillery barrage, or a couple of extremist (and, at this stage, completely delusional) Nazis in the way. Like the mayor of this village and his entourage who had pressed him into service for their counterattack.

It surprised him how frequently he had thought of the Emmerichs this spring. Originally, of course, they had been nothing more to him than his ticket to the west. Or, to be precise, Callum had been his ticket to the west. But then something had changed, and he was left wondering: Was he so hungry for kinship and camaraderie that he had grown to like them? Was he that lonely and desperate to replace his own forever lost family? Apparently. Now, here was an irony: The people he felt closest to were the remnants of some clan of Nazi beet farmers from Prussia. A boy, his older sister, their mother. A paratrooper from Scotland who was captured almost the moment he hit the ground. He didn't honestly believe he had any sort of future with this family, but he also found himself thinking about them often. About where they were, whether they were safe. He would recall the impressive way that Anna and her mother and young Theo had managed those massive horses. The way they had endured no small litany of indignities and privations. He would hear in his head Mutti's determination to protect her children-a determination, he knew, that resembled his own mother's. Even that hulking paratrooper seemed more interesting to him now that he had some distance from the fellow, and he recalled instead their long conversations as they walked and the unexpected moments when they would laugh. Certainly Anna saw something in him. Cared for him. Besides, for all of the fellow's size, he was barely more than a boy. How old was he? Twenty? He shouldn't be so hard on the young man.

Likewise, had he become so unhinged that he thought Anna might be a worthy substitute for his courageous sister, Rebekah? Perhaps. He would see in his mind once again Anna's lovely yellow hair and the elegant curve of her cheekbones. Her face when it was flushed from another day in the cold. The way the smallest things could make her eyes sparkle. He knew the guilt that he felt for jumping from the train that his sister might have been on was never going to leave him.

Interesting that he felt remorse for that, but not for the innumerable Germans and Russians he had killed over the last two years. He had lost no sleep over their deaths-and had, in fact, felt only satisfaction each time he had assassinated some Brownshirt or SS thug. They deserved it. The whole German people, it seemed, deserved it. But then he would find the personal and the anecdotal in the cauldron. People like the Emmerichs. A child like Theo. A young woman like Anna. The other night he had gunned down two older German soldiers standing guard outside a jail in the village. But what if one of them had been Mutti's husband, Rolf?

He really had no idea who he was anymore. He had been so many people lately that he simply hadn't a clue. Which, he guessed, was a part of the reason why he was here at the edge of the woods, looking up into a hill in which there were still small piles of snow in the shade beneath some of the trees. Perhaps here was his destiny. Not Stettin, not the Emmerichs.

Still, how in the world was he going to find these partisan Jews if the Nazis back in that village hadn't even known they were out here somewhere? Perhaps that young Russian rifleman-rifle boy, if he was going to be precise-had been mistaken, and someone else had blown up the bridge and torn up those railroad tracks. They were right on the border that had separated Germany and Poland five and a half years ago, and in the area there might be Polish as well as Jewish resistance. There were also all of those Russian units eager to be among the first to reach Berlin. Perhaps the boy hadn't realized that his own artillery had taken out the bridge or the railroad.

He had his German uniform in his knapsack and wasn't sure now if he should dispose of it here. If he did find the Jews-or, perhaps, the Poles-it wouldn't look good if he was traveling around with a Wehrmacht corporal's outfit in his backpack. On the other hand, with the front this fluid it might not be advisable to be Rifleman Barsukov either. At least not for very long. If some fanatic Nazi didn't shoot him, the Russians would as soon as he opened his mouth. How could he possibly explain his bizarre picaresque these past two years to Stalin's NKVD without incriminating himself? He'd killed a lot of Nazis, but he'd killed a good number of Russians, too.

Besides, did he really want to wind up a Soviet citizen? His plan certainly wasn't to survive this nightmare only to wind up in a labor camp or a farm collective somewhere. Somehow, he had to get west. Which brought him right back to the Emmerichs and to Callum Finella. He would remind himself that the paratrooper might ease his entry into the British or the American lines. And then his internal compass once again would long for the north. For Stettin, where the Emmerichs might still be. If they had any sense, of course, they would have left by now and continued their own journey west. He hadn't heard if the Russians had reached that city yet, but if they hadn't already he guessed they would within days-unless they simply decided to bypass the town in their rush to Berlin.

Still, would he have lost anything if he ventured north to Stettin and discovered that the Emmerichs were gone?

Well, yes. Time.

In the distance he heard airplanes, and initially he presumed they were Russian. But they were coming from the west and so he changed his mind. Probably RAF or American. It wasn't likely they were German. These days the Luftwaffe still had planes, but their airfields were cratered, fuel was almost nonexistent, and it was nearly impossible to find any pilots left who had the slightest idea what they were doing. And so he lit a cigarette and leaned against a tree, waiting, wondering what the RAF's or the Americans' target would be. He thought it was possible it was that factory in the village he had just left. Of course, it was slave labor working inside there. Girls, he had heard, just like his sister. At this stage in the war, were those nozzles or pistons or whatever they made there so important that it was worth torching the Jewish prisoners assembling them? Of course not. He hoped those girls had left. Been moved somewhere else. He hoped the target was that officers' training school further up the tracks.

He couldn't see the planes because of the angle of the hill and the trees, but he guessed there were probably a half-dozen. Not a massive bombing onslaught, but not a single fighter or two planning to strafe a couple of horse-drawn Wehrmacht wagons, either.

After a moment, he decided the target most likely was the town. The engines were growing louder. And just as the bizarre idea was starting to form in his mind that he was the target, a lone man with a cigarette standing beside a birch, behind him he heard an explosion, then another, and the sounds of branches being shattered and trees upended, and he felt himself being lifted off the ground-his rifle, which had been slung over his shoulder, was suddenly twirling ahead of him like a baton and he was aware that he was no longer holding his cigarette-and he was flying as he never had before. Then he landed and the feeling was reminiscent of the experience of diving headlong from that train two years earlier; he might even have hit the ground on the same part of his hip. But he didn't have time to consider this more carefully, because the shells were continuing to churn up the ground and the forest, and tree limbs and clods of earth were raining down upon him like hail, and he could smell the fires that were igniting in the woods.

He scampered, rolling and crabwalking as much as he actually rose up on his legs and ran, but then he remembered his rifle and scuttled back for it. His knapsack, too. Somehow that had been blown off his back. Meanwhile, the planes were coming back, diving in at the height, it seemed, of his apartment house back in Schweinfurt. He grabbed his pack and felt around in the debris for his rifle, found it, and dashed as far from the woods as he could, into an open field and then down into a deep gulley beside it, aware that his hip was hurting and his hands were bleeding and there was a long red stain forming on his pants.

Ankle-deep in cold water, runoff from the snow on the nearby hills, he looked back now and saw that the mountain was completely ablaze and the planes were departing as quickly as they had arrived. But against the blue sky he saw the swastika on the tail of one plane and iron crosses on the wings of the others. The aircraft were German. Luftwaffe. He wiped at the blood on his leg and looked at it. Wondered if he was badly hurt. He didn't think so. Mostly, however, he wondered at the lunacy of this Nazi regime, its colossal hate. Here its air force couldn't find the wherewithal to protect Berlin or Hamburg or Dresden. But tell them there were Jewish resisters in the woods near some pathetic town on the border of what used to be Poland, and they could find the runways and the resources to bomb a small forest into ash.

He watched the creosote plumes rise into the air and obscure a wide ribbon of sky, but he knew the ground was still so moist that the fires would burn themselves out within hours. Still, he wasn't going to wait. Did he need a more convincing or obvious sign? No. He didn't. He was getting the hell out of Germany; he wanted nothing more to do with this country. Ever. And that meant he would limp north now to Stettin. With any luck, the Emmerichs and their Scottish POW would still be there.

Chapter Seventeen

THEO OPENED HIS EYES AND FELT THE SUN ON HIS face. Looked up at an ivory ceiling, at unfamiliar walls that were papered with columns of violets. A painting of the seashore, the water-color lighthouse on the cliff looking strangely like a sea serpent to him. It took him a moment to orient himself in this room, to place the bed and the bureau-both the brilliance of fresh chalk-and the window. Windows, actually, because there were two of them, and they were wide and tall. They faced east and north, and one was open just a crack. He thought he heard a ship, and so he understood instantly that he wasn't home in Kaminheim. And then, slowly, it all started coming back to him. The trip through the winter cold with the wagons, the nights in the frigid barns. Being warmed by the animals. The stay at Klara's, the dead Russians. The loss of the horses, the attacks from the air. The shelling. The rubble. And now, he believed, he was in Stettin. Finally. At the home of Mutti's cousin. At Elfi's. He tried to sit up in this bed on his elbows-the mattress was soft and it was almost as if he were sinking deep into it-but he couldn't. He couldn't. It was strange and then it was scary. For a moment he felt a panic at his immobility rising up from inside him, a desperate fear that suddenly he was paralyzed. But this wasn't paralysis; this was something else. It was as if either he were pinioned to the bed or a massive, invisible weight were atop him. And the panic began to recede as quickly as it had begun to appear. He couldn't say why, except that he was warm and he was aware of the smell-and, after a moment, the sound-of the surf, and he sensed it was spring. And so he began to relax. Or, rather, he felt something relaxing him. Eliminating both that sense of weight on his chest and the desire to fight. He heard himself singing somewhere inside him, his very own voice, and it was that folk song he liked about horses and clouds. He wasn't opening his mouth-he couldn't-but there was clearly the sound of music, and it made him content. Suddenly he had the sense that he was riding atop someone's shoulders as if he were a very little boy, and for a moment he couldn't say whose shoulders they were. But then, though he couldn't see the face, somehow he knew they belonged to Werner. The two of them were on a beach. And there in the morning fog before them was their father, smiling and waving at them as they made their way toward him across a wide expanse of sand.

He wondered what time it was, but then he didn't care. When it was time to rise, someone would get him. And perhaps then he would be able to move. In the meantime, he would stay here and doze, and he closed his eyes once again. Almost instantly he was asleep, his mind submerging itself in memories of the park behind Kaminheim, and the days he would ride his pony along the trails in the woods, or run back and forth between the seemingly endless beet fields and the house, or eat the delicious jam in the kitchen that Anna or Mutti always seemed to be boiling on the stove.

MUTTI WATCHED THE boy sleep. For a brief moment Theo had opened his eyes and Mutti's heart had leapt in her chest. It had been days. The child's gaze had seemed to wander all around the bedroom, taking it in as if for the first time. But, in the end, Theo hadn't seemed to notice she was there. It was as if she had been invisible. Or, perhaps, the boy really hadn't woken at all. His eyes had opened, but he had remained asleep.

Initially, the surgeon had hoped the tissue on his foot and lower leg would respond to treatment-warm water, lotions, elevation-and he would only need to cut off the toes. But it soon became evident that the foot wasn't responding and was in fact becoming gangrenous. Moreover, it was a wet gangrene, and it was spreading quickly up into the leg. And so instead of cutting away his toes or even his foot, in the end the physician had had to saw through the bone at midshin. The surgery had been performed at Elfi's because the small hospital already had been overwhelmed by wounded German soldiers, and there had been reports of patients with typhus. Consequently, the surgeon had recommended cutting off the leg in a bedroom of the house on the cliff. He was an old man, as accustomed to operating in homes as he was in hospitals.

And that, Mutti had presumed, was that. It was a tragic loss, but perhaps it would be the last loss the child would have to suffer. When Theo emerged briefly from the anesthesia, the boy had whispered in a hoarse, soft voice that he hoped he would be able to ride his horses by summer, and he wondered how hard it would be to run with a fake leg. He murmured that those were the things he thought he did best. Ride and run. Then he fell back into the gasinduced torpor.

Over the next few weeks he seemed to mend, fighting his way back from the agony and the shock and the weakness; he was even hobbling around the house on a pair of crutches with so much daring and casualness that Mutti found herself scolding the boy, reminding him to be careful, to take it slow. Mutti's cousin, Elfi, was telling the child the same things, though it was also clear that she thought Theo's behavior was more impressive than alarming. Together the two mothers even chuckled, briefly, at the resiliency of youth and took some much-needed comfort in it. It suggested to them both that their nation had a future after all, and the children would rebuild what their parents had destroyed.

By the second week in March, as the sun was warming the rooms that faced the water, it was possible to believe that the worst really was behind them. Yes, the army was losing and the Russians were nearing. But so were the British and the Americans. After five and a half years, the war was finally going to end. Hope, suddenly, didn't seem such a fanciful proposition.

Then, however, the infection set in. It set in weeks after the amputation, long after they had ceased to worry about Theo's recovery. Oh, they had still worried about his rehabilitation. About finding a good prosthetic limb in a country that could no longer even find coal. Yet even when his temperature started to spike, they didn't begin to fret. It was only when they couldn't bring the temperature back down that they began to grow anxious. When, for three days, they couldn't even get a doctor to come to the house. Finally, they bundled him up and Callum risked everything, carrying the boy inside the hospital from the wagon. But there were no beds available and the staff could do nothing for him. And so Callum carried him back outside and placed him in the wagon beside Anna, and together with Mutti they brought him home.

Over the last week and a half now he had gone from eating an occasional slice of toasted bread to sipping a little broth to, almost all of the time, sleeping. Three times in the last four days they had thought he was dying or had fallen into a coma. Once, for a brief and horrible moment, Mutti was sure that her youngest child was dead. But then the boy had inhaled and, a few hours later, opened his eyes. He hadn't spoken in half a week, however, and the weight had just melted away. They would moisten his lips with water and soup, keep cool compresses upon his forehead, and gently wipe the sweat off his neck. Everyone was a little dazed by his endurance.

When he had opened his eyes once more this morning, Mutti had sat up expectantly, convinced that this was it, this was the moment when her altogether astonishing little boy would turn that corner and begin to recover in earnest. But then the child's lids had sagged shut and his breathing had slowed.

Now Elfi put her head in the door, saw how quiet and still the mother and son were, and then gingerly entered the room. Mutti was sitting in the rocking chair that Elfi usually kept in the sunroom, and so she took the armchair by the window and dragged it next to the bed.

“You look like you're ready to leave,” Mutti said.

Elfi nodded. She was wearing her gray flannel traveling skirt, her most comfortable walking shoes, and a heavy cardigan sweater she had knit that winter with the very last of their wool. It was thick enough to keep her warm in the early morning and dusk this time of the year, but she could tie it around her waist during the heat of the day. She was also bringing with her a winter coat, because she knew well how cold it could still get once the sun had gone down. She fully expected more snow, and Mutti and Anna had described for her the ordeal they had survived before they had arrived here in February.

“But, if you want, I will stay. You know that, don't you?” she asked. “Sonje will, too.”

Mutti considered her cousin, her square face with the lines furrowing deep along her eyes and around her lips. Her hair was in that odd translucent phase, no longer blond but not yet gray or white, and it was pulled back tightly now into a bun. She had grown only a little wide with age, in part-like Mutti-because of the deprivations they had been enduring for a little more than two years.

“I do,” she told Elfi. “I know you'd both stay. But you have the chance to go now, and so you should.” People had been leaving Stettin ever since Kolberg had been surrounded, and now that Kolberg had surrendered, they were fleeing in massive, less orderly numbers. This was especially true since the German troops had begun to withdraw from Altdamm, just east of the Oder. Elfi and Sonje were planning to leave on what people were suggesting might be the very last train to depart Stettin. It was supposed to arrive around five o'clock, and so Elfi had said that she wanted to be on the platform no later than noon: Although much of the city had started west days ago, there were still plenty of people left, and it was very likely that a crowd was already forming at the station.

“What will you do?” Elfi asked her.

She had been thinking about this for much of the past couple of days, as Theo's condition had worsened and she had realized that the boy couldn't possibly travel. What, precisely, would she do? And the answer was simple. She would stay here. Elfi and Sonje would head west, catching a train that would take the two women to the comparable safety of central or northern Germany. What, in any event, was left of central or northern Germany. But they would go and she would stay. She wished Callum and Anna would leave, too, but-for the moment, anyway-they were refusing. They wouldn't leave her and Theo. She thought this was a decision more foolish than noble. It was far more probable that the Russians would hurt the two of them than her and her son. A middle-aged woman and an ailing little boy.

“Irmgard?”

She looked up. Since Rolf had been gone, she was called that so infrequently that it always gave her a small start. Sometimes she forgot that she was not simply Mutti. Mother. That she had other guises and roles and personalities.

“When will you follow us?” Elfi was asking.

“As soon as we're able,” she answered, and the idea crossed her mind that they were just playacting. Going through the motions. They were both pretending to believe that they honestly thought they would be reunited within days. That she and her children and Callum would harness the horses to the wagons and set out any day now, too. Or, perhaps, leave the horses to the Russians and find a train yet. Perhaps there would be another one tomorrow. Or the day after. Then she asked, “Has Sonje packed?”

Elfi nodded. “We won't wait for lunch to leave. We shouldn't.”

“No, of course you shouldn't,” Mutti agreed, and she reached for her son's hand, and when she did she felt a pang dart across her chest. The skin was cold. The very flesh was cold. She tried to control her breathing, to reassure herself that it might just be that the fever finally had broken and Theo's temperature was starting to fall. But she was the boy's mother, and she knew this was different. This was the cold you felt in the extremities when people were dying. When the heart was growing selfish and cocooning for the chest and the head whatever warmth it could offer, and allowing the fingers and toes, the hands and the feet, to fend for themselves. Quickly she tucked Theo's hand beneath the quilt and rubbed it between both of her palms.

In the hallway she heard Callum and Anna starting down the stairs, chatting about something. A part of her wanted to cry out to them that Theo was dying and to be still. To be silent. To mourn. But another part of her wanted to rise to her feet and order them out of the house. To insist they go west right now with Elfi and Sonje. Because Rolf and Werner and Helmut were gone-she had hoped for weeks that a letter might arrive, but none ever had, not from her husband or either of her sons-and now, before her eyes in this bed by the lake, Theo was leaving, too.

Instead, however, she sat quietly with Theo's cold hand between hers and felt Elfi's dry kiss on her suddenly moist cheek.

“You're crying,” Elfi said.

“I know.”

“Why don't we bundle Theo up and just bring him with us? We'll wrap him in quilts.”

Mutti realized her cousin hadn't any idea why she was tearing, and she hadn't the energy to tell her. Besides, then Elfi would stay behind with her. She would remain here because Theo's death was imminent, and then she would expect her cousin to accompany her and Sonje. After all, there would no longer be any reason for her to stay.

But the opposite was true, too, wasn't it? Once Theo was gone, what reason would there be for her to go? She'd have no reasons left to live but selfish ones. It would mean that everyone else but Anna was, it seemed, dead. And Anna had her paratrooper to care for her now; she no longer needed her mutti. No one would. Hers had been a life of service, and now there would be no one left to serve. Soon enough they would all run out of places to run, anyway; there would be no west remaining. Already the Reich was an hourglass, and the enemies were pressing hard against the upper and lower globes.

“You know we can't do that,” she murmured simply to Elfi. “But we'll catch up with you as soon as we can. I promise.” At breakfast they had created an elaborate list of all the people they knew and all the places they might go in Berlin, Neubrandenburg, and Rostock. All the places where they might seek refuge and where they might find one another.

“All right then,” Elfi agreed, and awkwardly-because Mutti would not stand up and risk releasing Theo's cold, cold hand-Elfi embraced her. A moment later Sonje came in to say good-bye, too, and to thank her for letting her come with her from Klara's. Again, Mutti didn't rise from the chair or release Theo's fingers. Then she heard Callum and Anna saying their farewells to the two women downstairs, their voices largely, but not completely, muffled by the stairway and the corridor that separated them.

She presumed that Anna would join her in a moment. Either sit with her, as she did for a large part of each day, or spell her, which she did, too, when Mutti needed to stretch her legs.

Outside the window she watched a pair of seagulls shooting down from the sky toward the rocky shore at the base of the cliff.

Then she closed her eyes and rested her head on the pillow beside Theo, praying in her mind that this one child be spared, though she realized that-for the first time in her life-she didn't believe there was anybody there who might listen.

WHEN THEO DIED, the train with Elfi and Sonje-six cars, each one overflowing with women and children and men who were either wounded or very, very old-was three hours to the west of the city. It was so crowded that many of the passengers had to either hold their suitcases over their heads or balance them on their shoulders because there wasn't room on the floor. It had arrived a little past seven at night and didn't stay long.

In the morning, Callum dug a grave in a patch of softening earth in the backyard that looked out upon the water. Again Mutti noticed the seagulls. As Callum worked, she recalled once more the grave she had dug by herself in September 1939 for the Luftwaffe pilot who had been shot down near Kaminheim and crashed in their park. The sky had been blue that day, too. Midmorning she had happened to notice two planes in the sky, darting around each other as if they were a part of an aerial barnstorming show, but then abruptly she saw a wide, frothy rope of black smoke trailing behind one. It dipped its wing and then, as the other plane continued to the north, started to plummet like an arrow into the park between the marshes and the beet fields. She'd never witnessed anything like this: A plane was about to crash. She half-expected she would see a parachute emerge and the pilot floating safely through the air, but she didn't, and then she realized that she wasn't merely watching a plane auger into the ground: She was watching a person-a pilot-die. She didn't actually see the aircraft when it smashed into the earth, but she was standing on the terrace and she felt the stones shudder beneath her feet at the impact.

The small dogfight had occurred in the very first days of the war, soon after their Polish field hands had fled, the workers unsure whose side they were supposed to be on. At least that was what Mutti had told herself at the time. When they returned after the Polish surrender, however, it was clear by the combination of contrition and resentment that marked their attitudes that they had been hoping for a Polish victory. They had known very well whose side they were supposed to take, and it wasn't hers.

Earlier in the month, almost immediately after German tanks had crossed the Polish border, the Poles had rounded up Rolf and Werner-along with most of the other German men and male teenagers in the district-and were detaining them in the school-house and one of the churches in Kulm. Helmut was not quite thirteen, just young enough that they hadn't bothered with him. And so after leaving Anna and Helmut and little Theo back at the house, she alone had ventured to the wreckage. There, much to her surprise, she discovered that the fires already were burning themselves out. Right away she spied the German's body, even though the cockpit had collapsed violently around his chest and his legs. He was dead and his head was twisted almost completely around so that the back of his skull was pressed against the glass canopy, but he didn't appear especially disfigured. No scorch marks, no burns. She pulled off his helmet and was surprised by how young he looked. Not much older than Werner. His eyes were closed, as if he merely were sleeping.

Like her Theo now.

His hair was jet black and his bangs had fallen over his forehead.

She couldn't bear to leave him where he was. There wasn't anything she could do about the blackened and twisted metal, but she could, she decided, bury this poor young man. In addition, she could alert his family. Let them know what had happened. And so she dragged him from the remains of the plane, aware by the way his legs sagged like great bags of cornmeal that the bones there had probably been ground to a fine powder and that even most of the bones in his arms and his rib cage had been shattered. She could feel long splinters that once had been scapulae underneath his flight jacket.

Initially she couldn't find his papers, but as she rooted around the pockets inside his vest she discovered them. His name was Hans-Gunther Sprenger, and he was from Leipzig. He was twenty-three. She carefully put the papers aside so she could return them, along with the watch he had in his pocket and the gold ring he was wearing, to his family. Then she prepared the young man for burial. She washed the body with alcohol there in the field and decorated his forehead with oak leaves. She placed a bouquet of wildflowers from the field inside his hands. And all by herself, because she didn't want to frighten poor Helmut who was already alarmed by the sudden way the older boys and men had been taken away, she dug a grave. The soil was dry and rocky here, and it took most of the day. But with only a shovel and her gardening gloves, she dug a rectangle big enough and deep enough for a casket-though, of course, there would be no casket. There would be only a corpse wrapped tightly in sheets. And then in a German flag. She had one hidden among the hay bales in the barn.

When she had laid Sprenger in the dirt, she said the Lord's Prayer and thanked him for his service. She placed beside the body some of the dials and pieces of the cockpit that had been thrown clear of the fuselage. The combination of the corpse swaddled in sheets and the items she had placed beside it gave the burial an unexpectedly Egyptian feel, she decided. Then she covered the body with dirt, flattened the ground with the back of the shovel, and used a honeycomb-shaped piece of debris from the wing as a tombstone.

Days later, when the men were back home and the Germans had taken control of their corner of the country, they dug the pilot back up. Rolf and Werner and the wheelwright crafted for him a decent casket, but then a Luftwaffe administrator appeared and returned Sprenger to Leipzig, where he was buried with full military honors. Mutti remained in touch with the airman's family until 1943, but Sprenger's mother stopped writing after the pilot's father died fighting in Italy. Mutti never heard from her again.

Now, here in Stettin, she placed another makeshift marker atop another makeshift grave. They had discovered in Theo's bag that the child had brought with him the wire currycomb with the wooden handle on which Helmut had meticulously engraved the name Theo and his birth date and the words Kaminheim's von Seydlitz, a reference to a great Prussian cavalry commander under Friedrich the Second. It had been Helmut's birthday present for his younger brother two years earlier. While Callum was digging the grave, Anna hammered the comb into a piece of timber that was leaning uselessly against the stone foundation in the basement of Elfi's house, and then painted below the comb a line from a Wagner opera the family had particularly liked. The line was sung by a young woman named Senta, but the character sings it before she throws herself into the sea and so it was fitting here on the cliff, and Anna thought Theo would have liked the sentiment more than he would have been troubled by the idea it was a line that belonged to a girl: “Here I stand, faithful to you until death.”

Then the three of them buried the boy, standing for a moment in the morning sun beside the flattened earth with the tombstone made of timber, aware of the sound of the surf and the gulls and-somewhere to the east and the south-artillery fire.

When they were done, Anna and Callum went to harness the two horses to one of the wagons. It didn't seem to make sense anymore to bring both wagons. They only had the two horses, Ragnit and Waldau, which meant they didn't need all that feed. Besides, it was Balga who had been the insatiable eater, the warhorse with an appetite that matched his charisma. Moreover, the snow was largely melted now and the pair that remained could graze on the spring grass that was slowly transforming the world from gray to green. And Theo and Sonje were no longer traveling with them: They were down to a party of three. Fewer people, fewer horses. Everything was dwindling. If they ever did reach the British or the Americans, Anna wondered who would be left.

It was as they were finishing the task, as Mutti was draping a sheet over the divan in the bay window that looked out upon the street, that the three of them saw Manfred. A motorcycle roared down the almost preternaturally silent road and skidded to a stop perhaps a dozen meters from the horses, kicking up gravel and dust. At first neither the lone woman inside the house nor the young people with the animals outside recognized him. Instead of the gray and green uniform of a Wehrmacht corporal, he was wearing a rubberized motorcycle coat, with an officer's shoulder boards attached to loops there.

“He's a bloody captain,” Callum said, the incredulity apparent in his voice, and together with Anna he started over to him. “The man deserts his company for weeks at a time in the middle of winter-in the midst of an enemy offensive, for God's sake-and he winds up an officer come the spring.”

Manfred was wearing a steel helmet with an eagle and a swastika on the side, and when he pulled it off Anna thought his face looked longer and thinner than ever. His cheekbones seemed especially chiseled because he had shaved in the morning. When she went to stand beside him, she smelled soap and was surprised. She understood intellectually that the reality that he had found a place to bathe and shave before coming here didn't belie the privations he had almost certainly endured. But it seemed to suggest to her a level of comfort and ease that she hadn't expected. And, for reasons she did not initially understand, it upset her, and so instead of greeting him warmly-or even politely-she blurted out the first thought that came to her mind, the first news that mattered: “Theo passed away. He died just last night.” And then, suddenly, her shoulders collapsed and she was sobbing, and she felt Callum's large hand on her back and she shook it off with a violent shudder as if it were an animal that had leapt there unexpectedly from a branch in the jungle.

“What? How?” Manfred asked, and he reached for her. He started to embrace her, to pull her into him, and she pushed him away, too, just as she had Callum. She was angry and she wasn't sure why. But she knew she was. Yes, Theo would most likely have died even if Manfred hadn't left them-deserted them-back in February, but the fact he hadn't been present when her little brother had finally expired infuriated her. And while she could see that she wasn't being reasonable, she didn't care. She just didn't care at all. She had seen too much, she had heard too much, she had lost too much. At the moment, she simply wanted nothing to do with either of these men. With any men. With the men, like her father and her brothers, who were dead somewhere for reasons that made absolutely no sense, and with men like these two-men who were all too willing to fight the first chance they got, who had shot those Russians needlessly in that barn and would probably have shot each other by now if it weren't for her and Mutti and Theo. She turned from them both and stormed up the front walkway, where she saw Mutti standing just inside the heavy wooden door. Her mother saw her tears and the way she was shaking her head in disgust, but before the woman could even try to console her Anna barreled upstairs to the guestroom in which she had been staying and threw herself facedown on the bed. The paper blackout shades were still on the glass, and she was glad. She wanted the room to be dark. She knew they had to leave Stettin soon-they should have left yesterday, or the day before that-but she no longer cared. Let the Russians do what they wanted. Theo was dead, as-she had to presume-were her father and both of her soldier brothers. She simply didn't give a damn whether the Russians raped her or hanged her or crucified her. Let them do to her what they did to those poor girls in Nemmersdorf and Pillau. To her own cousin, Jutta. She found herself envying the German children who had been given small envelopes with poison to carry with them, or-like Gabi-been taught how to slash their wrists. If she were braver, she thought, she would have cut her wrists long ago.

Outside her room she heard the sound of her mother padding up the stairs, but she lacked the energy to push herself off the bed and go lock the door. In a moment she was aware of the mattress sagging just a bit when her mother sat down beside her, and then she felt one of Mutti's strong hands making gentle circles around her shoulders and her spine and massaging the back of her neck. She didn't know how her mother could do it, how her mother could handle so much. She just couldn't imagine how anyone could shoulder a loss this great after so many others.

Mutti said nothing, and soon Anna heard her own cries slowing to mere sniffles. She was relieved that her mother wasn't asking her questions and seemed content at the moment merely to rub her back and ruminate on the cataclysmic losses that she herself had no choice but to endure.

CALLUM SAW THE two rucksacks strapped to the motorcycle and the clothing that was protruding from the loosely buckled opening at the top of one of them. He recognized the color of a Russian uniform, but he didn't say anything. There were myriad explanations, but none in the paratrooper's opinion were going to shed an especially favorable light on Manfred. It was strange, but Callum found himself viewing the corporal-or, perhaps, the captain-as a Machiavellian deserter and thinking less of him for it. But then he would remind himself that someone who deserted the German army was thus his ally and should be viewed as a friend. It was the reality that he had deserted them. This was what it was about Manfred that disturbed him now. Moreover, he recalled those moments in February when it had seemed to him that Manfred was trying to catch Anna's eye-or, perhaps, she was trying to catch his. He feared that Anna saw something in Manfred, something he lacked, and the notion made him uncomfortable. Why was it, he wondered, that Anna had only broken down when Manfred had arrived? Was it simply the fact that Manfred was German, too? Had these people become such an insular tribe under Hitler-such a race unto themselves-that they were drawn to each other like seals in April and May? He told himself he was being ridiculous, reminded himself that Anna was his and his alone, but his anxiety continued to linger.

“Did the boy suffer long?” the captain was saying to him now.

“Yes, I think so,” he told Manfred. “He was in and out of consciousness, and that might have spared him some pain. But his mother suffered. As did Anna. It wasn't pretty to watch.”

“And you think it was an infection from the amputation?”

“Versus?”

“Typhus, maybe.”

“No, it wasn't typhus.”

“He seemed like a nice kid-”

“He was a wonderful boy. He was smart. Courageous. Plucky. Don't call him a nice kid,” Callum snapped. “It sounds like you're dismissing him. It's as if you feel you have to say something, and so you say he's a nice kid. Well, Theo was that. But he was also bright and giving and stronger than any of us realized. Yes, he was quiet. And he was shy. But that child didn't miss a thing. And he endured a hell of a lot this winter before he died. I have a cousin who's fourteen, and I can't imagine him putting up with half of what poor Theo did before he passed away. You told me in February you don't have any brothers or sisters, so I doubt you can even begin to imagine that sense of loss.”

“I've lost others.”

“Losing your mates in battle is not the same thing. That's hard, too-”

“Not that you'd know.”

“All I meant is that Theo was one hell of a good chap. I don't want to see his memory diminished.”

“I'm sorry for him. And for his family.”

“Thank you.”

The German looked at him briefly with his eyebrows raised, clearly a little bemused by the way he had accepted the condolences on behalf of the Emmerichs-as if he himself were a part of the family. Then Manfred seemed to shrug it off and asked, “So, do you think I should bother to put the motorcycle in the carriage barn? Or should I just leave it right here on the street for the Russians?”

“I don't suppose you're actually going to join the defense of this city.”

“I'm not sure there is a defense. Everyone is scurrying west as fast as they can.”

“Then why in the name of God would you leave the motorcycle behind?” Callum asked him. “You can't possibly prefer walking.”

He tapped the gas tank. “No petrol. I coasted the last stretch on fumes. And there isn't a liter of fuel to be found in all of Stettin.”

“Not even for a dedicated soldier of the Reich?”

He smirked. “Ah, and none for me, either.”

“So you're going with us… again?”

“I am.”

“Why?”

“I like your company,” he said, not even a trace of sarcasm in his response this time.

“Tell me something.”

“Yes?”

“How have you not been shot?”

“By the Russians?”

“By your own bloody army. I would think you would have been executed by now, not advanced to an officer.”

He seemed to think about this. Then: “I do my share, it seems.”

“Where have you been the last four or five weeks? Dare I ask?”

“Well, I haven't been hiding out in a lovely house near the Baltic. Tell me, is this the first time they let you out? Have you been a house pet-an indoor cat-the whole time?”

Callum inhaled slowly through his nose and tried to remain composed. He was a Scot in the middle of Stettin. He was unarmed at the moment and he was talking to a German captain. And, the truth was, he had indeed spent most of his time here either indoors or in the backyard. His greatest, most risky excursion? Carrying Theo to and from the hospital. He was only outside in front of the house now because they were harnessing the horses and loading the wagon, and were about to try to catch up to the long columns of refugees streaming west. And while Mutti must have suspected that he and Anna were now something more than friends, they had not gone out of their way to specify their relationship for the woman. He and Anna had discussed whether they should. But first the fact they were in Elfi's house had precluded them, and then Theo had gotten sick. And so instead of answering Manfred's question he said simply, “You got here just in time. If you'd come half an hour from now, we might have been gone.”

“That would have saddened me,” he said, and he took a pair of the leather straps that were dangling near the horse's chest and buckled them together.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“I have to ask, then: Why?”

“Why have I come back?”

“Exactly. Is it Anna?”

At the far end of the block, along the cross street, they watched a German staff car speed past and then, a moment later, a pair of half-tracks loaded down with soldiers driving in the opposite direction.

“There are staff officers still here in town,” Manfred said and he sounded surprised-almost incredulous. “I would have thought they would have left days ago. Most of this ship is underwater. The rats should be long gone.”

“You didn't answer my question. Are you in love with Anna?”

Manfred seemed to smirk. “Oh, I don't think I know her well enough to be in love with her.”

“But you might be?”

“No, not likely. You can sleep easy. And I promise you, I didn't come back here because of her. Can we leave it at that?”

“We can,” he said. “But I really don't see why you're with us and not with your unit.”

Nearby a shell fell and exploded, one of the first to hit the outskirts of the city itself. Callum guessed it was no more than three or four blocks distant, and along the street a block to the west. A plume of brackish smoke began to curl up into the spring air. Seconds later another shell detonated even closer, this one no more than a block away, and the men watched as both horses sniffed at the air.

URI HADN'T PLANNED on telling Callum his story that moment. There were still plenty of Nazis who would have been all too happy to gas him or shoot him, despite the fact their cause was irretrievably lost. And he certainly didn't want to get into the details at the start of an artillery barrage. But, the truth was, a reason why he had come back was this Scotsman standing before him now, and so-almost impulsively-he said, “I don't really have a unit.”

“Well, that's a surprise. How come? Dare I ask?”

“Because, my friend, I'm a Jew,” he said, the words liberating in a way he hadn't expected, a stupendous, bracing, and unforeseen release. Abruptly, his story was spilling from him. “You asked if I know loss? Trust me: I know loss. I've spent two years trying to stay alive by hiding out in the German army-and for a few days not precisely in Ivan's army, but with a Russian coat on my back-and my goal now is to get to your army in the west. Get to your people or the Americans. I want out of Germany. I want off this continent. And so if I have come back for anyone, Callum, it is for you.”

“Me?”

“Indeed.”

In the doorway, driven outside by the proximity of the falling bombs, were Mutti and Anna, each of them wrapped in a shawl and carrying a small bundle with clothing. The larger suitcases were already in the wagon. The air was starting to fill with dust from the building on the next block that had been hit, and somewhere in the distance there was a siren.

“I'm trusting you not to tell them,” he added before the two women had reached them.

“Why?” Callum asked. “You know them. You can't possibly think they're anti-Semites.”

“You're the first person I've told, and I only told you because I thought it might make our walk together a little more peaceful.”

Callum wasn't completely sure he believed him. He thought he did. And he wanted to believe him. But this fellow seemed willing to do whatever it took to survive-impersonating all manner of German or Russian soldiers-and now he was insisting he was Jewish. It was just as likely he was SS. Nevertheless, he had come back here to be with them. And that had to mean something. Moreover, he had made them all feel a little safer when he had been with them, hadn't he? He was a chameleon, but he was also as tough as any soldier Callum had met in either army.

Still, he wasn't going to hide something from the Emmerichs. “If you don't tell them, I will,” he said finally.

“Tell us what?” Mutti asked. “Is it about the Russians?” She sounded almost fatalistic.

“Manfred here has a bit of a bombshell.”

“Uri, actually. My name isn't Manfred. It's Uri.”

Mutti looked a little perplexed to Callum, and then her eyes widened as if she understood. “You're a spy?” she asked.

Anna turned to her mother, took the bundle from her arms, and tossed it unceremoniously into the wagon. “No, Mutti, I don't think that's what he means at all.” She looked at him, her eyes still red from her tears, and said, “Is this your way of telling us you're Jewish?”

He realized that he was shifting his feet anxiously. “Yes.”

“Fine. It's lovely to have you with us once more as a traveling companion. We missed you. Now, shall we leave?”

A small series of shells landed on the next block, close enough that Waldau snorted nervously and turned his massive neck as far as he could in the direction of the noise.

“I told you they wouldn't care,” said Callum.

“Okay, then,” he agreed, and he took the two rucksacks off the motorcycle, tossing one over his shoulder and grasping the other by one of its buckles.

“Why don't you put those in the wagon?” Anna suggested. “I think the horses can handle them.”

He thought about this, but only for a moment. Then he placed the packs in the long farm cart beside the bags of feed and the luggage and turned back to the women.

“Mrs. Emmerich?”

“Yes.”

“I am so sorry about Theo. He was”-and here he paused, glancing briefly at Callum-“a courageous and wonderful young man. I can't tell you how much I liked him. It's a terrible loss.”

She looked back at him with a strength that he found a little disarming. “It is,” she said. “But I thank you. And I am sure you have had your losses, too.”

He nodded. He had, he had. He could feel Anna and Callum watching him, and their gazes made him uncomfortable. He realized he had put them at risk by revealing his identity and began to regret his spontaneity with the Scotsman. “As far as you all know,” he told them, “I'm Captain Heinz Bauer.”

“Not… Manfred?” Mutti asked.

“No. And you've absolutely no idea I'm Jewish.”

“Do you really believe anyone cares at this point in the war?” Anna wondered, an eddy of annoyance in her voice.

“Oh, I don't believe it. I know it.”

“What? Have you seen something?”

“I see things every day.”

“Something specific?”

He rested his fingers on the handlebar of the motorcycle. “Bauer-the fellow whose uniform I'm wearing-had just delivered orders to the commandant of a work camp to march his Jewish prisoners west. Young women, all of them. They could have left them for the Russians to liberate. But they didn't. Even now, the leaders of your Reich are gassing or shooting or walking as many of us to our deaths as they possibly can. Bauer's orders, and the signed receipt from the commandant, were in this coat.”

Anna seemed to be absorbing this, contemplating the idea that there were whole camps of female prisoners being marched away from the front. “Where are they now?” she asked finally.

“The women? I don't know. I assume they're on the road somewhere.”

“And this Heinz Bauer?”

“He's on the road, too.”

“But he's not walking, is he?”

“No,” Uri said. “He's not. He's not even breathing.”

In the distance they heard planes approaching from the east, which meant in all likelihood they were Russian. Callum looked up, his eyes scanning the flat, gray horizon, and took the lead for one of the horses. Anna took the other. Then, without saying a word, the four of them started their way down the street and out of the city of Stettin.

Chapter Eighteen

WHEN THEY HAD FIRST STARTED TOWARD WHAT THEY were told would be a new factory in a new town, they had walked four abreast, taking up roughly half the width of the road so vehicles could wind their way around the procession. Now, however, it was their third day and the columns had grown ragged. The length of the parade also had shrunk. Their first night they had been fed some boiled water with celery slivers and spring grass floating atop the surface like pond scum, but otherwise they hadn't eaten since they had left their barracks and begun marching to the northwest. Some of the prisoners had started to collapse yesterday between midday and dusk, perhaps a dozen of the girls, whereupon the oneeyed Blumer or a guard named Kogel would shoot them in the back of the head. Others, as many as six or seven if she had overheard the guards properly, had escaped by simply melting into the woods that bordered some of the towns. Four more had tried to flee and been caught, and the procession had been shaped into a half-circle in a meadow beside the road so everyone could watch Blumer and Kogel and a guard whose name Cecile did not know strip them, whip them, and beat them until the white and pink of their emaciated flesh looked like the remains of animal carcasses. Then they, too, were shot. She guessed when the prisoners had originally left the factory there had been about 150 of them. Now it was closer to 125.

None of them knew where they were going, but Cecile was taking comfort from two realities: The weather was considerably less nightmarish now than it was when they had set off from the camp at the end of January. It was chilly and today they had been forced to march all afternoon in a cold rain so their clothes clung to them, thick and heavy like chain mail made of ice, but the snow was all but gone and only at night did the temperature fall below freezing. It was also clear that they were in a more populated section of the country. There were still stretches in which they would walk through farmland or woods, but those stretches were shorter than they had been in January. She wouldn't use the word civilized to describe where they were-no part of Germany was civilized in her mind, not even Berlin, because it was still filled with people who either would do this to her or would allow it to happen-but the towns were much larger and she never felt as if they were walking in an endless, near-arctic wilderness.

And so an idea formed in her mind that night as she lay down among bales of hay in a cow barn between Leah and Jeanne, the three of them pressing their bodies tightly together for warmth. Even though four of the girls who had tried to escape had been rounded up and beaten to death, at least six or seven others had gotten away. As a result, the guards were being more attentive. But escape might nevertheless be possible because the weather was more accommodating and there was a greater chance they might be able to find shelter or someone to help them. There were rumors-treated by the prisoners with the reverence that small children have for fairy tales-traveling among the girls of a priest in one nearby town who had a way to hide Jews, and of a mayor in another hamlet who actually helped Jews get the papers they needed to pass as Aryans with the necessary pedigree. She also recognized the names of some of the towns through which they had marched, and had the sense that here there had to be Germans-either Germans who were good or Germans who simply could see the end was near and it was in their best interests to help a couple of Jewish girls who were flirting with death-who might feed them. Warm them. Offer them refuge.

There were guards here in the barn with them, as well as guards just outside. And so Cecile had no illusions that it might be possible to merely slip away that moment into the night. The next morning, however, might be a different story. There would be those first minutes when the girls would be herded from the barn into their lines to march-she had no expectations they would be fed-and there was usually chaos as they all maneuvered from wherever they were expected to communally empty their stinging bladders and diarrheic bowels to their spot on the road. Moreover, the sun probably would not yet have risen. Perhaps in those brief moments of bedlam, she-she and Leah and Jeanne-could melt into the woods. And here, on the northern side of this barn, there were woods, a forest of evergreen, oak, and birch. The guards would thus have them stand to the south, but still… still… there would be that brief frenzy as they exited, the guards themselves sleepy and hungry and anxious.

The key to her plan? Leah, the girl from Budapest who had once been a seamstress. Leah's German was impeccable. If she and Jeanne kept their French mouths shut, Leah might be able to pass as a refugee Christian from the east until they could find a sympathetic household. She could ask the right questions of the right people. Find a kind priest. Or a convent. Anyplace that might provide asylum. It was a long shot, of course, because how did you know whom to ask? But were the odds really any worse than simply continuing on yet another death march? In three days their group had shrunk by a sixth, and no one-at least none of the prisoners-had the slightest idea where they were going or when they would get there. Consequently, she gently tapped the girls on either side of her, poking first Leah and then Jeanne, and whispered to them what she wanted to do.

“This is your plan?” Jeanne grumbled, her soft voice near a whimper. Occasionally her body would spasm against the cold. “We run into the woods and find someone to help us?”

“There are people here. Lots of people. You've heard the rumors about priests and mayors who are hiding Jews.”

“And I don't believe them. If we've heard those tales, so have the Nazis. Any priest who helps us is hanging by his neck somewhere or is long dead in the ground.”

Outside in the night there were great whistles of wind, but there was no longer the sound of the rain on the roof of the barn. “You're probably right,” said Leah, and briefly Cecile's heart sank. Then, however, the seamstress continued, “But the people here have seemed a little more uncomfortable when we've passed them. A little sickened, even. That's a good sign. Maybe we could find someone.”

“All we'd have to do is pass long enough to get a name-or an address.”

“Why not? We're just going to die if we keep on this way.”

Beside her Jeanne snorted. “For months you kept telling me to be strong. Be patient. All fall and all winter, that's all you kept saying. The Russians will get to us, the Russians will save us. Now you've changed your tune. Why?”

“Because I have a sense of where we are in Germany.”

“Oh, we're in Germany now, instead of Poland. That makes me feel much better. Much more confident.”

“This war is going to be over soon. The Americans and the British have crossed the Rhine. All we need is a place to hide for a little while. Till the summer, maybe.”

“Do we stay together tomorrow morning or do we separate?” Leah asked.

“I think we separate. Scatter.”

“Ah,” Jeanne muttered. “Very good. Then we will use our compasses and our radios to make sure we rendezvous at the same point in the woods.”

“We agree to return to this barn tomorrow night. At dusk. How's that? Then we walk back to the town we passed through earlier today. There was a church there. And so there must be a priest.”

Cecile felt Leah pressing her chest against her back, trying to spoon ever more tightly against her for warmth. “Do we have a signal?” Leah asked.

“You mean in the morning?”

“Yes. For when we escape.”

She contemplated this for a moment. “I don't think we need one. But in that moment when the guards are screaming for us to go to the bathroom and line up, that's when we leave.”

“We should go in different directions,” Leah offered. “And not at exactly the same second.”

“Yes, that makes sense,” Cecile said, pleased with all that the woman was contributing to the plan. “And so we'll do this? We'll leave?”

“Absolutely,” said Leah.

“Jeanne?”

There was a pause. “Jeanne?” She put her ear against her friend's chest, afraid that the woman had, once and for all, stopped breathing. But the chest rose and then fell, and with her head against her friend's body, she heard Jeanne informing her, “Don't worry, I was only thinking. Not dying. At least not immediately dying. But, yes, I'll go. I've thought I was going to die for six or seven months now, and I'm still here. Still starving. Still cold. At this point, I might as well expedite the process by trying to escape.”

THE FEMALE GUARDS were screaming at them to get up and get out, cursing them for either dawdling or moving too slowly, when most of the girls were moving as quickly as they could, and Cecile stood and started to stumble toward the wide barn doors, open now for the first time since they had been herded in here the night before. She could see that the skies were overcast and it was drizzling outside, and the sensation of proceeding toward the great square of light from the dark of the barn was reminiscent of walking through a tunnel. She glanced once at Leah, their eyes met, and she nodded. She tried to capture Jeanne's attention, but she couldn't find her: Already her friend had fallen behind. At least two girls were either incapable of rising or they had died in the night, and the female guard kicked once at each of their bodies and then bellowed for Blumer. He wasn't far away and Cecile passed him as she approached the entrance, shrinking against the door so she would not be in his way, while anticipating the sound of his pistol, two shots, in the coming moment. Then she looked back and saw Jeanne: The woman was plodding with the gait of a sleepwalker toward the entrance, her arms wrapped tightly around her frail frame and her hollow eyes blinking against the daylight. Cecile tried to catch her attention, too, because-and she felt guilty for even thinking such a thing, but it was a reality-the additional chaos that would occur when Blumer shot the women left in the barn might be exactly what she and Leah and Jeanne needed to disappear successfully into the woods.

Already the other prisoners were starting to squat in a line in the field to the south of the great structure, some silently and some straining. Others didn't bother to crouch, but simply stood where they were and allowed their pee to run down their legs. At this point, what did it matter? All of them seemed oblivious of the rain that was continuing to fall.

She saw Leah was moving to the end of the line, fading behind the woman at the very end, and then squatting. Sitting. Then-and here she felt her heart starting to pound-Leah was rolling along the wet grass, away from the prisoners and the guards. Inside the barn she heard the first shot and the birds on the peak of the barn flew high into the air from their perch. Cecile watched everyone reflexively turn toward the sound, and when she looked back toward the end of the line she saw that Leah was rising to her feet and starting to run toward the woods, her legs moving as they hadn't in years.

Quickly Cecile followed her lead. She went to the end of the line, took a spot beside-and then behind-the very last woman, and crouched like a toddler. She closed her mind to the smells all around her and breathed, as she did always at this moment of the day, only through her mouth. She had to pee badly, she felt pressure and pain in her groin, but she didn't dare start because she knew she wouldn't be able to stop. She realized that she had lost Jeanne-hadn't actually seen her emerge from the barn-and so she scanned the lines and the meadow, but she didn't see her friend anywhere. She guessed it was possible that for some reason the woman had remained inside, but it seemed that by now all of the prisoners who were living had been marched outside into the field.

The guards were hollering for them to finish their business and line up so they could be counted, and the woman before Cecile stood and started away, the back of her ragged trousers moist from the grass and brown with her feces. Cecile moved in the opposite direction. A foot, then two, crabwalking toward the woods. Still, however, she kept her eyes open both for Jeanne and for the guards. She honestly wasn't sure that she would be capable of rising to her feet in a moment-and in a moment she would indeed have to-and scurrying toward the woods if she didn't know for sure that Jeanne was escaping, too, because she was convinced that without her Jeanne would die. Her friend would simply give in to the pain and the hunger and the cold. Why not? Many of the prisoners did. Jeanne had given up perhaps a half-dozen times already and it was Cecile's encouragement alone that had kept her going. But any time now she would hear Blumer's second shot, and that would be her chance to run for the woods-and run she would, she told herself, regardless of whether she had seen Jeanne. She had to hope that her friend was already scuttling through the brush somewhere, scampering far from this motley column with whatever energy she could muster.

“You there! Stop, stop now!” It was one of the female guards roaring, and Cecile stood perfectly still, fearful that they had seen the way she had edged just a bit toward the forest. But it wasn't her they had noticed. Why would they? She was, essentially, still with the group. It was Leah. The guard had seen Leah.

“Now, stop!” the woman screamed again, but it was clear Leah knew she didn't dare. They'd shoot her anyway. Besides, the woods were no more than thirty meters distant. She'd be there in seconds. And so Leah kept running along the wet ground, and even when she heard the gunshot she didn't break stride. She didn't turn around to see that the male guard named Kogel had come up beside the woman who had ordered her to stop. There he was, his arm extended parallel to the ground, his pistol aimed at Leah as she fled. He was about to fire a second time, and Cecile knew he wouldn't miss twice. The idea entered her mind that she would be responsible for her friend's death-directly, clearly, unequivocally responsible-and she experienced a dagger of guilt so pronounced that it caused her to emit a small, choking cry. But then there was Jeanne. Beside the two guards. Or, rather, between them. Her friend wasn't in the woods, she was still back with the other prisoners. And she was pushing Kogel's arm upward toward the sky as he discharged the weapon once more, sending the bullet uselessly into the overcast mist as Leah disappeared into the woods.

Meanwhile, from inside the barn, almost like an echo, came Blumer's second shot as he executed the other prisoner who had failed to rise from her patch of straw. The birds that had returned to the peak flew off. And then, when they were still circling above the fields and the trees in search of a quiet place to land, Kogel shoved Jeanne to the ground, where she had neither the time nor the inclination to beg for mercy, and at point-blank range he discharged his pistol once again, this time into the back of poor Jeanne's skull.

Cecile couldn't hear what the female guard said to Kogel, but it was clear by her countenance and the way she was using one of her gloves like a rag to wipe Jeanne's blood and the gray-white tissue from the prisoner's brain off her skirt that she was annoyed. He had shot the woman at such an angle that the two of them had been sprayed with the gelatinous ooze from the inside of her head.

SHE WALKED BETWEEN women whose faces she knew but whose names were a mystery, and while one of them wanted to talk, Cecile was now all but incapable of speech. It wasn't that she couldn't stop crying-though that was a factor. It was that she no longer gave a damn and there was absolutely nothing she wanted to say. Her oldest friend from the camp was dead and it was her fault and only her fault. Moreover, Jeanne-grumbling, whining, meandering Jeanne-had actually died so that Leah might live. The woman had given herself up. Halfheartedly Kogel had looked for the seamstress in the woods, but he had spent no more than four or five minutes wandering through the soggy underbrush. They needed to get the column moving. And so Leah was on her own now somewhere in this foreign countryside, hopefully speaking her elegant, perfect German to someone who would shield her until the world had come to its senses or the Russians had arrived and it was safe for her to emerge from the shadows. Meanwhile, Cecile was left alone with her incapacitating guilt. She neither deserved to live nor saw any possible future. For the moment she would keep marching, struggling on with the other prisoners, but one of these times when the bastards allowed them to lie down or sit, she simply wouldn't bother to rise. Jeanne had died fast and it couldn't have been very painful. One bullet, she decided, and there would be no more hunger or pain or cold. That's all it would take. A little bit of courage and then forever she could let go of this enervating charade she called hope.

Chapter Nineteen

THERE WERE LARGE ANTITANK GUNS AIMED AT TWO of the bridges, and the white paint on their barrels had started to peel. Anna guessed that once she would have found the weapons frightening-or, at the very least, disturbing. The same with the shell fire that seemed, their first morning back on the road, to be falling only blocks behind them. Or the skeletal remains of the brick buildings, their whole front and rear walls sheared off. Or, certainly, the corpses of the hanged men, their bodies still dangling from makeshift scaffolds with the handwritten signs tied to their jackets that said, simply, “Coward.” But she didn't. The litany of the absent in her life had grown so long and the future was so relentlessly bleak that she had grown numb to it all. She could see that her mother had, too. It was odd: Anna was continuing on this path now only for the sake of her mother, and she had the sense that her mother was doing the same only for her. Mutti, Anna had decided, couldn't possibly believe that she would ever see her husband or her two older sons again. They were as dead and gone as poor Theo. And they all knew they would never return to Kaminheim-assuming Kaminheim even was standing.

So what was propelling this woman forward, Anna would ask herself, what was giving her mother the resolve to put one foot in front of the other and, sometimes, take the lead lines of one of the horses? In the end she decided that she herself was the answer: Mutti would not give up completely so long as she had even a single child remaining.

At one point they stopped to rest the horses and allow them to graze on the early spring grass, and a pair of women older than Mutti came up behind them and exhorted them to keep moving. Their skin was whiter than milk, and they were each carrying a single elegant valise. Their skirts-though streaked with mud and fraying along the hems-were stylish. They were both wearing leather riding boots.

“Ivan's back there,” one of the women said to Mutti. She had a kerchief around her head that looked as if it had once been a part of a window curtain. “You can't stop.”

“We'll just be here a minute,” her mother told them.

“Suit yourself,” said the woman. She then remarked, so casually that Anna found herself studying the storyteller to see if she was lying, that she had been raped multiple times only two days before and was here now only because the Russians had passed out drunk after assaulting her. A third woman, a friend of theirs, was dead because she had resisted: She had been shot, her corpse violated, and the body was left impaled on the ends of two captured German bayonets. The woman claimed that both she and her traveling partner had been attacked in broad daylight by a half-dozen Soviet riflemen. Then, after the soldiers either had fallen asleep or left them to find other, younger victims, the women had continued on their way west.

And so Anna helped Callum harness the horses so they, too, could resume their trek. Overhead there were seagulls circling the field where the horses had been grazing. She thought how lately when she had looked into the sky, it had usually been because she had heard airplanes approaching. It was surprising-and reassuring-to notice something as mundane as seagulls looking for food in the fresh grass and loosened soil.

“Would you like to ride for a bit? You've been walking all morning,” Callum asked Mutti, but her mother shook her head. She would continue on foot.

“I just don't understand why the Russians are so brutal,” her mother said after a moment. “Was war always this horrid? Is this a secret you men always have known, and you just never told the women?”

Uri had been sharing his story with Callum off and on for hours now, and when he heard Mutti's remark he turned to her and asked, “Do you really wonder?”

“I do.”

“After all you've heard about what your armies did these past years in Russia-or just last autumn in Warsaw-can it possibly be a mystery? My God, after what some of your people did to my people, do you even have to ask?”

Behind them they heard motorcycles, and then four Wehrmacht engineers sped past them on the vehicles. Anna saw they barely paid any notice to either Uri or Callum. “I can see why you don't want to remain with those boys,” Callum said, motioning toward the German soldiers, already disappearing into the distance. “But tell me: Why aren't you just waiting here now for the Russians? Why is it so important to you to get to the west?”

“I didn't go through hell the last two years only to wind up a Communist on some collective farm in the Ukraine,” he answered. “Besides, somehow I don't think the NKVD would take kindly to my having impersonated a German soldier since 1943. They probably wouldn't even believe that it was an impersonation.”

“You could always drop your drawers,” Callum said lightly, and Anna couldn't resist turning to watch her mother's reaction. Mutti was staring straight ahead, pretending not to have heard.

“I could, yes. But I have also spent the last two years peeing only in the dark or when I'm alone. I hate to think of the damage I've done to my bladder.”

The idea crossed Anna's mind that she had only the vaguest idea what a circumcised penis might look like. She had seen her twin brother's genitals when they had been children, as well as Theo's. And she had seen Callum's. It seemed, she decided now, an awful lot of work to care about such things. Too much work for an issue that didn't seem that important.

“You're blushing.” It was Uri and he was speaking to her.

“Have you absolutely no sense of decorum at all?” Callum chastised him, but his voice was light and good-natured.

“Nope. That's what happens when you live your life on the run. You tend to care less about such niceties. Of course, it was you who just suggested that I drop my drawers for the Russians.”

He was grinning. And then, suddenly, Callum was grinning. She loved it when the two men wound up smiling together at precisely the same time.

IT WAS ALMOST as if the town house had been charmed: The structures to its immediate right and left-every house on the block on this street in the village-had been bombed or shelled recently. The buildings either had been reduced to large mounds of fallen timbers, crumbling stone, and dust or were the skeletal cutaways the Emmerichs had witnessed so often as they had trekked west. Unlike in the past, however, there were no refugees camped out in these husks or families who had chosen to remain. There were ornery, skinny dogs wandering the streets, growling at the horses; there was the occasional rat; and there were birds-mostly crows. But otherwise there was no sign of life in the town. Everyone either had died or had fled.

But then there was that one town house. The windows facing the street were broken and the wooden shutters on the second floor were askew, but the brick facade was largely undamaged and the slate roof was mostly intact. The curtains on the second floor and the drapes on the first, all a little shabby now, would occasionally billow out through the frames like a ghost.

It was nearly seven in the evening and the sun had set, and so they decided they would stop here for the night. To savor their good fortune. There wouldn't be running water or electricity, but perhaps there might be beds or couches inside on which they might sleep. In the three days since they had left Stettin, they hadn't dozed for more than a few hours at a time, and always those naps had been inside barns or-one night-on the floor of a bombed-out gymnasium.

But they had, once again, managed to put some distance between themselves and the army that they were trying to elude. It wasn't, however, that they were making such good time: They had simply veered farther away from Berlin, trekking not exactly along the coast but still well north of the capital. Uri believed that by now the Russians almost certainly would have overrun them if the Soviets hadn't been so focused on the prize to the south, and their race to plant the hammer and sickle atop the Reichstag. Moreover, by remaining so far to the north their small group had also managed to separate themselves from the hordes heading west or southwest. There were long intervals when they had had the road to themselves.

Now as they all stared with some measure of disbelief at the brick town house, Uri took his rifle off his shoulder and approached the front door. He said that he was just making sure it was empty.

“You want some help?” Callum asked, and Uri nodded.

But the house was every bit as deserted as it seemed, an odd oasis in the midst of the rubble that once had been a small hamlet. They were all asleep within the hour.

ANNA FELT SOMEONE gently rubbing her arm, long, tender strokes, and she opened her eyes. The room was dark and it took her a moment to orient herself. She recalled that she was in a town house in… in that place without a name. In the one town house that remained standing in the whole village. She was in a small bed-a child's bed-in a room by herself, while her mother was resting in the massive bed in the other bedroom on the floor. She was buried deep beneath quilts because the windows had been blown out in the bombing and there was no heat. But she had been warm enough to have fallen into a very deep sleep. Until now. Until someone-Callum-was rubbing her arm. Waking her up. The men had been asleep downstairs on the couches, but now one of them was upstairs.

She looked up at him, and even in the dark saw him bring one finger to his lips. He was wearing his gloves.

“Are the Russians here?” she whispered. She was so weary that the idea didn't fill her with dread. Terror, she realized, was an emotion that demanded energy.

“No,” he said, smiling. “Nothing like that. Nothing like that at all.”

“Then what?”

“Come with me. There's something I want to show you.”

“What time is it?”

“Not quite two thirty.”

She nodded. She'd been asleep, she thought, for just about seven hours.

“Come, come,” he said again, his tone almost boyish. “Hurry!”

Though she had gone to bed in her clothes, the moment she emerged from beneath the bedding she felt a nip of the frost in the air.

“Do I need my boots?” she asked.

He nodded. He already had them in his hands.

“Are the others awake?”

“No. This is just for you. For us.”

When she had her boots on, he helped her slide her arms through her parka and gave her her gloves. Then he led her down the stairs, past the living room in which Uri was sleeping, and outside. He took her hand in his and she looked up at him. His face was inscrutable: not anxious, not whimsical, not stoic. It was the face of a man, she thought, who was impassively reading a book. Over his shoulder he had slung a backpack.

As they started down the street, past the piles of debris, she heard a wolf howling in the distance, and the sound-so different from the rumble of artillery-caused her to smile slightly to herself. A wolf in the night. How natural.

“Can I have a clue?” she asked him.

“No. But you'll see it for yourself in a moment.”

And indeed she did. They quickly reached the edge of the village, the end of the last block. He pointed, but she would have been blind not to see it. She was surprised she was only noticing it now, and decided she must have been looking down at the street as they walked, either because she was so sleepy or because she was being careful and watching her step as they navigated their way along the churned-up cobblestones that once had been road.

“The northern lights,” she murmured, and she felt him squeeze her fingers and then wrap his long arms around her and pull her into him purposefully. They were standing at the edge of a lake, and there were three fountains rising up from the horizon, over the Baltic Sea in the distance, each of the sprays a throbbing column of gold that flickered like a gargantuan candle. They were illuminating the sky, causing the tips of the highest evergreens to stand out in relief, while reflecting off the glassy surface of the lake. It was almost as if the fountains of light were coming toward them as well as shooting up into the sky. There were two passing clouds the rough shapes of ovals, and it looked to Anna as if they were eyes in the face of the universe-a countenance that tonight was the color of saffron. “I've never seen them so beautiful,” she said.

“Me either. In Scotland, we call them the merry dancers. Sometimes I've seen them more colorful than this. Some violet, some red. But I've never seen them look quite so much like bloody torches.”

She burrowed against his shoulder. “Bloody,” she repeated.

“Yes. Bloody torches.”

“Would you do something for me?” she asked.

“Anything. You know that.”

“Never use that word again. Bloody. I know what you mean. But lately there has just been too much real blood.”

“I'm sorry, I only-”

“Shhhhh,” she said, as the lights shimmered to the north and that wolf she had heard back in the village bayed once again at the sky. “I know what you meant.” Then she turned toward him and stood on her toes to kiss him. He tasted like one of the old pepper-mints they had found in a tin by the fireplace on the first floor of the town house, and she guessed that she probably tasted like sleep. But she didn't care and she had the sense that he didn't either. When they parted she started to nestle back into his coat, pressing her elbows and her arms against her ribs, but he was already pulling his pack off his shoulder and unbuckling it.

“Watch,” he said proudly. He removed a blanket that had been rolled into a tube, and as if he were a magician with a cape he whisked it flat like a sail and allowed it to float to the ground. Then he reached inside the bag and removed a bottle of schnapps and a single tall water glass.

“I couldn't fit a second glass in here,” he said apologetically. “And there didn't seem to be any crystal in the house.”

“Do you really think you're going to take advantage of me in this cold-with the ground as a bed?” she asked him, raising her eyebrows in mock horror, but she knew she was just being coy.

It wasn't that cold, not after all they'd endured. And she was, suddenly, hungry for him in a way that she hadn't been in a very long time-perhaps ever-and she felt a warm quiver between her legs.

“True, no bed,” he said, but then he motioned up at the golden fires in the sky. “Still, I can't think of a better canopy, can you?”

She tried once more to nuzzle against him, and this time he wasn't preoccupied with his pack and he wrapped his arms around her. Kissed her. The truth was, she thought, beds were overrated: When they had used her bed back at Kaminheim, she had seen around her the accrual of her childhood self-dolls and clothing and books-and she had found the sheer quaintness of the silt to be antithetical to her idea of herself as a woman. As a lover. On other occasions, including their last night at Kaminheim, they had used his bed in the maid's room, and that had been infinitely more fulfilling. She considered herself fortunate that so many of the other times when they had made love, it had been on the oriental rugs in the living room at Kaminheim-thick and sumptuous and romantic-or on the divan in the ballroom, or, yes, outside in the apple orchard. There had been beds in Elfi's house in Stettin, of course, but the quarters were close and Theo was dying and it hadn't crossed their minds to avail themselves of them. At least, she knew, it hadn't crossed her mind.

The thought of her little brother momentarily made her reassess what they were doing, but she felt Callum's hand working its way beneath her coat and her sweater, finding her breasts and stroking and cupping them, and the sensations there became her focus. At some point he had taken off his leather gloves and the palms of his hands were warm and her nipples were growing hard against them. She massaged the back of his head as they kissed, her fingers deep in that red, red hair and along that long and elegant cleft at the base of his skull, and then she allowed her neck to fall back so she could stare up at the lights that were dancing low and high and everywhere in between in the sky. Then she felt him lifting her up and off the ground and laying her softly on the blanket. He knelt beside her and kissed her some more, his tongue-blunt, serpentine, hot-moving down her neck and then jumping over her clothes to the flesh at her waist. He tugged at her skirt, unfastened the two hooks along the side, and started to pull it down. She arched her hips to make it easier for him to slip it off her legs and over her boots, and then she spread wide her thighs. The air was more invigorating than cold and she felt ripples of goose bumps rising up along her flesh. A moment later he was inside her and the sky above them was alive with color, great flaxen plumes of light that were illuminating the horizon as far as she could see. She recalled what the Vikings had named the phenomenon: the reflections of the dead maidens. Typically Nordic, she decided, with its implausible beautification of death. She had seen enough of death to know it was never beautiful. It was delusional to think otherwise. Henceforth, she resolved, she would refer to them in her mind the way Callum had: They would be the merry dancers.

She could feel him gazing down at her, watching her.

“Good?” he asked, a wrinkle of worry creeping into his voice in even that one syllable. Clearly he sensed that her mind was wandering tonight. “Are you warm enough?”

“I'm fine,” she reassured him, her voice a purr for his benefit, and she smiled. She hadn't felt this alive since they had left Kaminheim. “I'm just fine,” she murmured, and then she gave herself over completely to the swelling rush inside her that would build and build till she came.

THE SUN WAS higher and hotter than it had been on any day since they had started west months ago, and there were rumors that to the south of them the western Allies were nearing the Elbe. They had the sense that they themselves were close to the Americans and the Brits.

Now they rested at the edge of a shallow river that ran parallel to the dirt farm road and allowed the horses to browse upon the moist spring grass. Anna and her mother were in the knee-deep water, bathing, shielded from the two men by the wagon.

Uri sat down on a stone the size of a footstool at the side of the road and stretched his legs out before him. Callum collapsed flat in the grass and for a moment lay on his back with his eyes closed against the sun. Then, when he had caught his breath, he sat up and pulled off his boots and stared at his socks. They were ash gray now, but once they had been white. He had two more pairs in his pack, but he knew they were even worse: They smelled unbearable and were riddled with holes.

“When I'm home,” he said, “I am never going to wear boots again.”

“Nonsense,” Uri told him. “You'll be wearing boots again by November. You'll have forgotten your blisters by then.”

“I doubt that.”

Uri took the tobacco and two sheets of cigarette paper from his pouch and started to roll a cigarette for the Scot. “You forget pain. We all do. We tell ourselves we remember the specifics, but it's all just a lot of pictures and words in our heads. No sensations. I think we actually remember life's humiliations much better. The degradations. The cruelties. But the pain? We seem to forget what pain actually feels like. It's a cloud after the sky has cleared.”

“You are awfully philosophic this morning.”

“I can finally see the end.”

“Well, I will never forget how much my feet hurt.”

In the river behind them they heard Anna shrieking cheerfully because the water was so cold. Uri handed Callum the cigarette and rolled one for himself. “You won't even be thinking about your feet in a couple of months,” he continued. “You will be married to that girl back there and you will be home in your beloved Scotland.”

“There were times when I didn't think I'd ever hear her laugh again,” Callum said, and he motioned his head in the direction of the women. “Her or her mother.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Tell me: What are you looking forward to most when you get to America? If you get there. What's the one thing?”

“Oh, I'll get there. I've no doubts. The one thing? Mass transportation. The subways and the buses they have in New York City. Like you, I don't ever want to walk again. I am going to ride everywhere.”

“And where will everywhere be?”

“I want to go to school.”

Callum nodded and seemed to think about this. “I usually see you as so much older than me.”

“Six years. Not so much.”

“And so I usually think of you as having finished school. I keep forgetting they didn't let you.”

“Of all the things they took from me-other, of course, than my family-that's what I want back the most. An education.”

“I must confess, I don't think much about that. I guess I will enroll in university. But when I'm done? I honestly don't know. I really don't. After all this… after the last year… well, I just can't imagine what God has in store for me. I can't conceive of what possibly could come next.”

Uri took a long drag on his cigarette and decided his throat was too sore. He really wasn't enjoying it much, and so he licked his thumb and forefinger and squeezed the smoldering tip. When he was sure it was extinguished, he placed it back in his pouch.

“What about you?” Callum was asking. “When you finish school, then what?”

“I've lived my entire adult life just trying to get through the present. Today. I have never for a moment thought much about what I will be doing tomorrow.” He stared up into the sky, savoring the warmth against his eyelids. “And I certainly don't think there's a God in heaven who has a plan for me. Or, for that matter, for anyone.”

“No?”

“No.”

“No plan or no God?”

“Either.” Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. It always surprised Uri when he recalled a prayer. Was this, he tried to remember now, what he was supposed to say when he was dying? Was this the incantation that would ensure that he didn't die alone-that would link his passing with the passing of all other Jews? He thought so, but it had been so long. Still, he wondered if Rebekah had whispered this prayer when she'd been killed. If she had, he hoped it had given her comfort. In all likelihood, it had given his parents some consolation; perhaps it had helped his sister in some fashion, too.

He heard Callum taking another long drag on the cigarette, but he didn't open his eyes. Then he heard a songbird. The water as it rolled through the channel on the other side of the wagon. Anna and Mutti, giggling once again in that river. One of the horses snorting. A fly. Finally he said to Callum, “If my sister were alive, I might view tomorrow differently. But there's no one now. Just me. And so I don't. I just try to keep myself alive. But even that seems less important than it once did.”

“It's plenty important.”

“No, not really. I'm not the last Jew left in Germany.”

“What?”

“There are others. I know that now. I didn't always. But I swear to you, there were moments when the only thing that kept me going was my determination to live so I could someday tell people what the Germans were doing.”

“That was a lot of pressure to put on yourself.”

“It seemed to matter.”

“You know…”

“Yes?”

“You could always come to Scotland.”

“Excuse me? I couldn't possibly have heard you correctly,” Uri said, turning from the sun to the paratrooper and smiling at him.

“Oh, I'm sure America is a terrific place. I liked most of the Yankees I met. Not all. But most. Anyway, it was just a thought.”

“Ah, yes. I could just move in with you and Anna. Is that what you had in mind?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, you could. My mother has plenty of room. I'm sure we'll live there when we first arrive.”

“And what would I do in Scotland?”

“Same as you'd do in America. Go to school. Meet a nice girl. Fall in love.”

“Huh.”

“Think about it.”

Behind him, Uri could hear Anna and Mutti emerging from the water and starting to get dressed. He didn't precisely view Mutti as anyone's mother but Anna's; likewise, he didn't see Anna as a sister. But his own mother and his own sister were long dead. So, certainly, was his father. His whole family. He didn't know the details-would never know the details-of how they had perished, and on some level he was relieved. But there was still a part of him that craved the specifics: where and when and who was responsible. Who held the angry, barking dogs on their leashes? Who raised high the truncheons, who marched them into the pits? Who fired the machine guns? Or, perhaps, switched on the gas? These were Germans and Poles and Ukrainians with faces and names, men and women who before the war had had families and ran streetcars and bars and butcher shops-people he and his sister and his parents might have seen on any sidewalk and hardly given a second look.

“Uri?”

“Yes?”

“I'm serious.”

No, he wanted out of Europe. He wanted away from those streetcars, those bars, those butcher shops.

But then there were these few survivors of what had once been a family named Emmerich. There was this Scot. The reality was, these people were the closest thing he had to a family now. They were all that he had in the world. With this thought-one he found at once oddly and uncharacteristically hopeful-he stood up and hollered good-naturedly at the women. Asked them if they were decent, and whether the men might actually get a chance to bathe, too.

FOR ANOTHER WEEK they walked and they slept and, on occasion, Mutti or Anna rode atop the wagon. Every other day, it seemed, there had also been moments when the men-both of them now-would need to crawl quickly beneath the feed because they were nearing diehard SS troopers who, even though it was clear that not even the führer's wonder weapons or the death of an American president could possibly roll back the tide, were either commandeering deserters or shooting them outright. Whole truck-loads of teen boys passed them, the vehicles heading toward the Oder or the outskirts of Berlin, where the young men would be expected either to repulse the final Soviet advance or to die trying. Many looked as if they were Theo's age, their cheeks in some cases rosy and round, in others hollowed out by hunger and dread. One day there were snow flurries and on another it rained, but frequently the sun was so warm that they all tossed their jackets and capes onto the wagon and walked for hours in only their blouses and shirts.

They were no longer a part of a lengthy column. There were still plenty of other refugees on the roads: They passed mothers with children, exhausted old people, and men of all ages who had lost all manner of limbs. But the tragic and interminable parade that had started west from East Prussia and what once had been Poland had all but dissipated. Some elements had simply given up and allowed themselves to fall prey to the Russians, while others had reached whatever destination they had originally had in mind. Still others-many, many thousands, it seemed, based on the bodies and the debris that littered the roads that spring-had died in the cold of January and February and March. One afternoon they learned a pair of Wehrmacht battle groups were counterattacking a Russian spearhead no more than ten or twelve kilometers to the southeast, and that particular Soviet column was now moving away from them toward the southwest. Other days, their footsteps would be energized when they heard how the British and the Americans were moving in great numbers into the heart of the country, encountering only the most token resistance virtually everywhere. The four of them knew that the distance separating them from their western saviors (and that was how all of them viewed the Brits and the Americans that April) was narrowing.

Still, the walking was hard. The ground was often sloshy and soft, and though pilots were less likely to waste time strafing them since they weren't part of a caravan easily seen from the sky, occasionally an aircraft would swoop down from the clouds and fire a missile or two in their direction. A wagon no more than fifty meters ahead of them was blown up one afternoon by a British plane, slaughtering a sweet young mother and her two little boys: The Emmerichs and Callum and Uri had rested with them for thirty minutes in the middle of the day, only hours before the woman and her sons would be killed. Another time, they passed through the smoldering remains of yet one more town that recently had been bombed, and in the rubble of what had been the stone schoolhouse they saw the bodies of students. There were easily a dozen of them, perhaps a few more, all girls, and at first they assumed that the children had been brought there to protect them. Then, however, when Callum and Uri went to pull some of the stones and fallen timbers away to examine the corpses-make sure that none of the girls were still breathing-they realized that the bodies were largely unscathed. Moreover, there was very little bruising or blood, even on the parts of their bodies that had been crushed by debris from the crumbling structure. They understood then that the girls had probably been poisoned, their lives taken from them by adults who feared a far worse death awaited them when the Russians arrived.

No one in the group was precisely sure anymore where they were going. At one point Anna suggested they consider Schweinfurt, since it was far to the west and Uri might know people there. But it was also far to the south-so far that the distance, even after the hundreds of kilometers they had trekked, seemed prohibitive. Moreover, Uri wanted nothing to do with the city: He was quite certain that all of his family and friends were dead, and anyone still there had been all too happy to see the city's Jewish population degraded, deported, and, in the end, exterminated.

Consequently, their plan was simply to continue west, trying to avoid the major cities with their desperate, inevitable congestion-and, at night, the air raids that continued to pulverize the metropolitan areas even now. They would steer clear of Berlin at all costs, given the desperate battle that loomed there. When they heard cannonade to the east, they walked briskly; when they heard only bird-song, they allowed themselves the opportunity to shamble.

IT WAS URI who spotted the woeful column first. Their road was almost converging upon the one the column was on, separated from it at the moment by an expanse of triangular field cratered by shell fire and filled with the remnants of charred and blackened Wehrmacht vehicles-wagons, motorcycles, half-tracks, and what Uri alone recognized as the remains of two or three small, turretless Bushwhacker tanks. The soldiers had probably been encamped there when they had been spotted by an enemy pilot and attacked from the air. It must have been at least a day or two earlier, however, because there were no signs of soldiers either wounded or deceased, and the dead horses had started to smell.

Still, it was what was across the field that caused Uri's heart to race: There, no more than two hundred meters distant, was a plodding line of the most pathetic, despairing old men he had ever seen. At least he thought they were old men. Most of them were clad in shirts and trousers that even from this distance he could see were little more than threadbare rags, but some seemed to be wearing sacklike shifts and skirts and kerchiefs on their heads. There were also a few in striped prison uniforms. He guessed there were a hundred of them, perhaps more, and without exception the group was haggard and stooped and lumbering along at a crawl. He counted nine guards, three of whom seemed to be female.

“What do you make of that?” Callum was asking.

“The old men?”

“Old men? Are you blind?” the paratrooper admonished him, his voice indignant. “They're girls! They're young women!”

Uri squinted and studied the column of prisoners. He decided that if Callum was right, then those guards deserved to be shot. Hell, they deserved to be shot regardless of the age or the gender of the walking skeletons they were prodding along.

“Women,” he murmured, when he realized that Callum was correct.

“Young women!” Callum said again, more loudly this time. “Girls! Some are probably the same age as Anna here! Some could be as young as your sister!”

Anna and Mutti had come up beside them, standing so close that he could feel the warmth of Anna's breath and smell the damp wool of her sweater. Her parka was in the back of the wagon at the moment.

“Are they…” Mutti began.

“They're Jews,” Callum said to her. “No doubt, they're Jews.” He was at once incredulous and disgusted, and it sounded to Uri as if he were chastising the woman. This, he was saying in essence, is what your people are doing. Have done. Here it is in full view: No more hiding it behind barbed wire fences and cement crematoriums, no more burying the corpses in ditches. Here's a whole bloody parade of the walking dead.

Mutti held her hands before her mouth and a small moan-a cry, almost-escaped. “They're girls, you say?” she murmured finally.

“Yes!” Callum said. “They're Jewish girls! Here's what your ten-thousand-year Reich was really all about!”

Uri watched as the column seemed to drift: It looked to him as if the individuals were bobbing in a river. It made absolutely no sound.

“Those guards: the most abominable bastards on the planet. What kind of person would do that?” Callum was muttering. Uri had never seen him so angry. Didn't know the Scot had it in him.

“Well, then,” Uri said, aware of precisely what he wanted to do-what he was going to do-and wholly unconcerned with the ramifications. “Let's take care of them.” He pulled his rifle off his shoulder and released the safety. “I'd suggest you get one of the Russian rifles out of the wagon.”

“What are you doing?” This was Anna, and he heard a little tremor in her voice.

“I am going to kill that fellow”-and he paused as he squinted through the sight, moving his rifle like a pointer-“right there. The one with that ridiculous white mustache.”

“But there are too many of them,” Mutti said.

“And, I'd bet, they're all cowards. They're pathetic bullies and cowards.”

His angle now was such that he was going to have to shoot the man in the back. So be it. He aimed heart level, just to the left of the guard's spine and below the man's scapula. And then he squeezed the trigger, experienced the recoil in his shoulder as he heard the blast in his ear, and watched as the guard with his pre-posterous resemblance to a walrus fell like a straw man whose braces have been removed, the fellow's knees buckling, his chin rolling into his neck, his arms flapping once like a dancer's. The idea somehow crossed Uri's mind that he might have been eating something as he walked: He thought he saw a large chunk of bread fly from the man's fingers as he died.

CECILE HEARD THE gunshot and saw the black bread Pusch was gnawing-she knew that his teeth were as bad as most of the prisoners', though in his case it had everything to do with slovenly personal hygiene and not malnutrition-fall to the mud near her feet, and for the briefest of seconds she thought one of the prisoners around her had somehow acquired a gun and shot the guard for the bread. And so she didn't dare pick it up. Consequently, a woman named Luiza darted around her with the speed of a rabbit and scooped it off the ground, in one fluid motion brushing a clod of dirt from the crust and tearing off a piece the size of a ball of milkweed.

Then, however, Cecile watched as the armed male guards fell to their knees and aimed their rifles in the direction of the field they were passing. She was confused: The pasture was filled with dead horses-their carcasses being nibbled by crows-and wagons and destroyed Nazi vehicles. Were there Russians-or, better still, Americans-hiding among all those burned-out tanks and trucks? The idea crossed her mind that this was it, their moment of liberation was at hand, and any second now Allied soldiers were going to rise up from behind the wrecks and demand that their guards surrender. In her mind they were all wearing French army uniforms, because she realized that was the only Allied uniform she knew, and she felt an unfamiliar pang of giddiness. But she was pulled from her brief reverie when that female guard named Inga bellowed furiously, “Down, now! Down, down, down!” and then, suddenly, swatted her so hard on the back of her head that she fell forward onto her knees on the road beside Pusch. The dead guard was on his stomach and there was a hole in the back of his tunic around which a red stain was already starting to spread.

Across the field, beyond the blackened metal hulks and twisted lattices of steel, she saw a wooden farm wagon and a pair of horses. She thought-but she wasn't completely sure-that she had seen people near them from the corner of her eye, falling abruptly almost flat onto the ground. One moment they had been there, and in the next they had been gone. Clearly, however, the guards thought the gunfire had come from there. Their suspicions were confirmed almost instantly: There was a second crack-a female guard near Cecile shouted once, as much in surprise as in pain-and this shot had very definitely come from somewhere near that wagon. Perhaps a dozen and a half meters to her right, the Hungarian guard-a woman who was about the age of her prisoners and seemed to have the same disdain for the Germans as she did for the Jewish women she was herding west-had been shot. Apparently the guard had been up on her knees. Now, when Cecile turned, she saw the woman flapping on the ground as if she were a live fish on a dock, shrieking in a dialect that was unfamiliar to Cecile, and trying, it seemed, to pull something out of her side-as if she had been shot with an arrow, not a gun. The other guards were flat on their stomachs, eyeing the wagon, trying to see where the shooter was, and ignoring the woman who was writhing and screaming for, Cecile presumed, help.

Then, however, she saw Blumer rising up and darting into the field, diving quickly behind the remains of a half-track before a shot whizzed harmlessly past him. The guard had a potato-masher grenade on his belt and he reached for it, signaling to someone-another guard, she assumed, probably Kogel-to cover him as he scuttled closer still to the horses and the wagon and the faceless shooter.

Beside her there was a prisoner on her hands and knees whose name Cecile thought was Vivienne, but that was little more than a guess based on something she may or may not have overheard, and the fact the girl usually spoke French. Vivienne was younger than she was and had arrived at the factory in February from another camp. “Cecile, I'm leaving!” she whispered urgently. “Come with me-now!”

“Just run away?”

“Yes! Into the woods! Come with me, you've nothing to lose!”

She saw in her mind that awful moment when Kogel had executed Jeanne-there he was again, his arm straight with his pistol at the end, an extension of his hand-shooting her friend in the back of the head as Leah fled into the dark of the forest. She was just starting to wonder where Leah was-an image formed in her mind of the girl in a farmhouse somewhere, perhaps sitting before a fire in a wide brick hearth, a bowl of soup and an actual spoon in her fingers-when there was another gunshot in the field. She turned toward it, reflexively putting one of her hands over her eyes like a visor. There was Blumer, within a stone's throw of the wagon and the horses, shielded from it by the charred remains of a tank.

“Cecile, this is it,” Vivienne was saying, “I'm going.” And then the girl was gone, crabwalking carefully toward the woods, scuttling on her fingers and feet, her eyes darting back but one time.

Kogel spotted her almost instantly. “You, stop!” he shouted, but instead Vivienne stood up and started to run in her clogs, her legs stretching out one last time, the wind just starting, perhaps, to whistle in her ears, before the guard shot her with his rifle and she collapsed in the brush at the edge of the trees. Then he turned and aimed a second shot at one of the horses across the meadow, firing, apparently, for no other reason than anger and frustration and spite. The animal whinnied, reared up on its rear legs, and then sunk into the ground in its harness. Briefly it tried to reach the hole in its side with its nose, to nuzzle it, examine what had occurred there and would cause it to die, but then the horse's long, great head rolled around as if it were dangling on the head of a stick, and the animal expired. Kogel pulled his rifle down and surveyed the field. He seemed oddly satisfied.

She glanced back and forth between the body of the prisoner at the edge of the forest-a young woman whose forehead may once have been stroked by parents as they softly cooed her name-and the Hungarian guard, who was continuing to wriggle and moan and was now slapping at her side with the open palm of one of her hands. At least Vivienne had been granted a quick death, Cecile thought, and decided that she might as well try to scurry into the woods, too. Probably she would be shot, and that would be fine. There were no liberators here, no army about to rescue them. There was one idiot somewhere across that field with a gun. That was all.

And so she was about to stand when she noticed that Blumer was rising up from his crouch behind the tank to hurl the grenade at the wagon, blow it up and kill anyone behind or beside it-those lumps of clothing she had seen briefly falling to the ground-including the one horse that remained alive. She watched, hypnotized, sad for the horse that was about to die in a way that she wasn't for whatever people were near the wagon. He had pulled the pin and his arm was rearing back, when there were shots-two, maybe three, she wasn't sure, because it happened so fast-and Blumer with his one eye and mutilated ear was doubling over, the grenade beside him, kicking out his leg to try to push it away. But it was too late, far too late, and the grenade was exploding, the flash sending a cloud of dirt and fabric and flesh and metal from the tank high into the air, the plume darkening one vertical swath of sky and instantly making the world smell like sulfur and smoke. She wasn't quite sure what happened next because she had ducked into a ball, her arms across her face and her head, her eyes closed. When she opened them, she saw there was a gaping hole in the ground where a moment earlier Blumer had been kneeling. Kogel was on his back, dead-shot, she assumed, because the grenade couldn't possibly have done him in-and there was a large man with red hair and a smaller one in, of all things, a German uniform running across the meadow toward them and then disappearing behind the metal carcass of a half-track. She looked around and realized that the pair hadn't needed to dive behind the vehicle for cover. Pusch and Blumer and Kogel were dead. The Hungarian was dying. The other guards-three other men and two other women-had seen this skirmish as a reason to flee. To escape themselves before they were held accountable for all they had done. Around her the prisoners were starting to rise, to mill about, and so she did, too. She stumbled over to Vivienne, and much to her surprise she found that the girl was still breathing. Her eyes were small slits in the hollows of her skull and the front of her worn shift was soaked with her blood, but she looked up at Cecile and murmured, “In my pocket, there's a photo. Take it.”

She carefully lifted the girl's head and rested it on her own bony thighs. Then she saw the slit in the tattered dress and reached in. She found the picture instantly, an image of five children and two parents. The father was wearing a white V-necked sweater, and his eyes and his cheekbones were striking. He could have been a movie star. The mother was lovely, too, though there was something vacant about her eyes-as if, perhaps, she were blind. The children looked as young as three or four and as old as fifteen or sixteen. The family was on the deck of a cruise ship, and Cecile had the sense that the small, rocky islands in the background were Greece. The children were in tidy shorts or sleeveless summer dresses, their mother in an elegant skirt and a blouse. She was wearing pearls. All of their faces were windblown and their hair in vacation-like disarray.

“On the back,” Vivienne sputtered.

She turned it over and saw five names, including, yes, Vivienne, and the words father and mother in French.

“Where are you from?” Cecile asked.

“Limoges.”

She nodded, recalled a visit there once with her parents when she'd been a little girl, and stroked Vivienne's forehead with her fingers. Then gently she dabbed at the spittle that was forming on the prisoner's lips.

“Cecile?”

“I'm here,” she murmured.

“Tell them what happened. Please.”

“Your family…”

“Yes.”

“I will.”

“I never gave up. That's what I want them to know. My parents. My brothers and sisters. I know they can't all have died.”

“No,” she answered, “of course not,” but she didn't see any reason why it wasn't possible that this whole family had been machine-gunned or gassed or simply worked till they collapsed in a quarry or a brick factory somewhere. Certainly the woman's younger siblings were dead. “Someday,” she added, “you'll tell them yourself.”

“No.” The word was barely the tiniest puff of air, a syllable spoken without even moving her lips.

“What is your name?”

“Viv…” she answered, too weak now to link together more than a syllable at a time.

“I know that, silly,” she said. “Your whole name. Your surname.”

The girl started to nod, to answer. But this time when she tried to breathe she discovered that she couldn't, and she grimaced with the pain of the effort, her eyes and mouth becoming parallel lines below a series of deep creases upon her forehead. Her eyes opened one last time, the panic and fear and desperation apparent, and Cecile willed herself to smile down at this scared dying girl, to keep her own tears from her eyes. And then Vivienne-like the litany of others who had died near Cecile, beside Cecile, or in her very arms-died, too.

She looked up and saw a woman with a mane of yellow hair protruding from beneath her dirty kerchief wandering through the field toward the prisoners. She had worn but elegant leather riding boots on her feet, and Cecile thought she appeared to be a few years younger than she was. Near her an older woman in a coat with a tired-looking fur collar was already starting to kneel before two other prisoners and hand them… something. Bread, perhaps. And there was that German soldier offering his canteen to a prisoner, and that tall fellow with terra-cotta red hair literally lifting another prisoner off the road and carrying her to a patch of earth in the field where there was sun and the ground was warm. She noticed that the crows had flown back and resumed their lunch on the entrails of the dead horses.

Some of the other girls started to follow the redheaded man onto the grass. Others looked around nervously, wondering whether even this-this apparent rescue-was a mere trap of some kind. An ambush. A trick. They glanced down the road to the east and to the west; they peered apprehensively at the woods. Some even scanned the sky.

Then one of the girls walked over to Pusch, leaned over his body, and spat. She glanced around to see if anyone had noticed, her eyes mischievous and childlike. And then, with the suddenness of lightning, she kicked the dead guard in the ribs, using her clog like a bludgeon. She kicked him in the face, too, slamming the front of her clog into his nose and mouth with such force that the head seemed almost to lift away from its neck.

Other prisoners watched for a moment-but only for a moment. Within seconds the girls were kicking and stomping on the corpses of all the dead guards, battering them with their feet, and when that wasn't sufficiently satisfying, using the butts of the guards' rifles to smash the bones in their faces and pummel their skulls into the earth. They cheered as they worked and, like that first girl, spat on the bodies. Then they turned on the Hungarian guard-the woman still hadn't died-and they drilled their clogs into her wherever they could and walloped her with the rifles, swinging them like axes in some cases and in others like plungers, until she grew completely silent and her body moved only in response to the way it was kicked or beaten or shoved.

Cecile wasn't sure how long she had been watching when the German soldier came over and squatted on his haunches beside her. She knew enough not to be scared of him, despite the uniform. Hadn't he just killed or driven off their guards? He asked her if she spoke German and she said that she did, though she was French. He asked her if the girl in her arms was a friend.

“I didn't really know her,” she answered.

He ran his hand gingerly along the line where the girl's hair was growing back along her forehead. “What was her name?”

“Vivienne. I never got to know her last name.”

“And what's your name?”

“Cecile Fournier.”

“I'm Uri. Uri Singer.”

“That sounds-” she said, but she stopped herself before she could finish the sentence.

“I know what it sounds like,” he said. Then he smiled slightly and added, “And, yes, it is.”

“Jewish.”

He nodded.

“I thought we were all going to die.”

“You and the other prisoners?”

“No. The Jews. All of us. I tried to keep my hopes up, but these last weeks… it was gone, all gone. I thought they were going to exterminate us all.”

“I thought so, too. There were times when I wondered if I was the only one left.”

She offered him the smallest of smiles. “Your name should be Adam.”

He chuckled, but the sound was rueful and she thought he was just being polite. “No, not me,” he said. “I am not the beginning of anything. If anything, I am the end of everything.” Then he cradled Vivienne's head in the palms of his hands and laid it gently on the ground so Cecile could stand.

“Tell me…” he said.

“Yes?”

“Did you know any Jews from Schweinfurt?”

“Is that where you're from?”

He nodded.

“I may have. I don't know. Were you looking for someone special? Your wife? Your parents?”

“My sister.”

“What is her name?”

“Was her name, I suppose. It was Rebekah.”

She had probably known girls named Rebekah; she had probably known German girls named Rebekah. But none came to mind now. She shook her head. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“Don't be. It would have been a miracle if you had,” he told her. Then he added quickly, “Well, we have to get you some food,” and he motioned his arm at the prisoners in the fields and the prisoners still pummeling the Hungarian guard and the prisoners staring wide-eyed into the sun. “We have a little in the wagon, but not nearly enough for all of you. But we'll find some.”

“How?”

“There's a village up ahead. We may be able to wait there for the Americans. At the very least, we'll be able to rest for a bit and scare up something to eat.”

“Is…”

“Go on.”

“Is the war over?”

“Not yet,” he told her. “But soon. Very soon. And I believe, at the very least, it's over for you.”

THE VILLAGE WAS no more than three kilometers distant, but even that seemed too far to expect some of the women to walk. Still, Uri didn't think they could possibly bring back enough food and water-assuming they could even scare up provisions there-for the whole group with a single horse and a single wagon. Waldau was strong, but he was weary. He guessed that the women who felt up to it could come with him to the village, and those who didn't could stay where they were. Callum and Anna and Mutti could wait with them.

When he told Anna his idea, she looked up at him and said, “Bring back a doctor, too. They need a doctor badly. All of them.” Her voice sounded very small. She was sitting on the grass, rubbing the blackened and mangled feet of a woman who seemed unconscious.

“I imagine the village will be mostly deserted,” he said. “If there's a doctor anywhere near here, I'm sure whatever's left of the army has pressed him into service. But I'll try to find out how close we are to the Americans and the British.”

“They must be near,” said Mutti.

“One would think so,” he agreed. He didn't want to get their hopes up, including his own, but when he looked at the map he guessed the western Allies might be as close as fifteen or twenty kilometers. It could be more. They'd heard that the British and Americans had paused, as if they had reached an agreement with the Soviets to be sure that each side received an equitable share of the remains of the Reich. Nevertheless, their armies were within reach-though, of course, so were the Soviets. It was possible that by remaining with the prisoners, the four of them would be overrun by the Russians. But these women were viewing the Russians as their liberators. And for the prisoners they would be. But for the four of them-especially for Anna and Mutti? The Soviets might be merciless.

And so a different idea began to formulate in Uri's head: He would tell the Emmerichs that they should leave the horse and the wagon behind and proceed ahead without them. The two of them should just walk west as quickly as they could. For all he knew, they might reach the Americans or the British by tomorrow. Meanwhile, he and Callum and the women who could walk would bring back whatever food and water and medicine they could find. But Anna and Mutti should leave now-make one last dash for the west.

He decided he liked this plan; he liked it a lot. He would strip off his German uniform, climb into some of Werner's ragged old clothes they had in the wagon, and allow his circumcised penis to vouch for his identity. And Callum? For God's sake, he was a POW. The two of them would be fine. He didn't completely believe this, but he reiterated the idea in his mind. They'd be fine. He shared his plan with Callum, and then he squatted beside Anna and told her what he thought they should do. And then he climbed atop the charred metal husk of a tank and clapped his hands together and shouted to get the attention of the women around him. He was just starting to speak-just beginning to open his mouth in earnest-when he heard the rifle shot and then, before he could even turn in its general direction, felt himself being punched ferociously hard in the chest. He fell backward off the tank, the wind, it seemed, knocked completely out of him. He was aware that Anna was shrieking-he thought she might have been saying no, but already her voice sounded to him as if he were underwater-and he felt the back of his head hitting the ground. Then he was staring up into the bluest sky he had ever seen. For a split second he felt crushing pain and experienced a pang of frustration at the realization that he had come so far only to die now. He wondered who had shot him, and he wondered at the way the myth he had concocted of his indestructibility was so easily shattered. One bullet: That was all it took. Apparently, his soul was negligible, after all. But this recognition lasted just the briefest of moments, because then he was, much to his surprise, in the dining room of his childhood home in Schweinfurt, once again a teenage boy, and he and little Rebekah were using long, slender spoons to scoop the mascarpone cream from the tops of parfait glasses, and their mother and father were chatting casually about nothing. At least nothing of consequence. Then they were laughing. And the sky was blue there, too, more blue than even this Anna girl's eyes, and the sun was streaming in through the gauzy curtains. He was warm and content and his stomach was comfortably full. And then: Nothing.

CALLUM SAW THE shooter instantly: It was one of those older men who had been guarding the women, and so Callum shot him. He picked the man off as he was pulling his rifle down and starting to retreat into a thicket of pine. His first bullet only wounded him, and so Callum shot him a second time. Then he scanned the field for any other Germans, saw none, and stood there, panting, for a long moment over Anna and Mutti as they crouched above Uri's body. Two of the prisoners were with them, including one whose name he had overheard was Cecile. Uri's eyes were open, but it seemed that he was already dead. His first thought? It had all happened so quickly. One minute Uri was with them, and the next he was gone. Anna was crying gently, shaking her head and shuddering. He knelt beside her, and when she realized he was there she leaned into his arms, as Mutti, once again, used her forefingers to gently shut the eyes of a body emptied abruptly of its soul.

“I know,” Callum murmured, his chin against the top of Anna's head, his chest against her almost violently trembling body, “I know.” He wasn't sure what he meant-if, in fact, he meant anything. What it was that he knew, he couldn't say. I know it's hard? I know it's tragic? I know you'll miss him? “I know,” he whispered softly. “I know.” Surrounded by a small sea of starving, tortured women, he thought to himself-and he heard the words in his head in Uri's frequently mordant voice-Please. I know nothing at all.

Chapter Twenty

HELMUT EMMERICH PRESSED HIS KNEES AGAINST HIS chest and wrapped his arms tightly around his shins: He was an egg. He couldn't have made his body any smaller. Still, however, he feared that the toes of his boots could be seen from the road if any of the Soviet soldiers happened to glance to their right at the remnants of the stone wall. And the column was endless, absolutely endless. First there had been the trucks and the half-tracks, and then there had been the assault guns and the tanks. And, dear God, in the whole history of the war had there ever before been so many tanks in one place? It just didn't seem possible. It had been an interminable parade of them, a procession so long that for a while it had seemed to Helmut that the ground was never, ever going to stop vibrating beneath him. And now there was the infantry and the horse-drawn wagons. Every living man from Belarus had to be marching past him right now-or, for all he knew, every living man from the Ukraine. And Georgia. He had heard a variety of languages and dialects as the troops walked along. He guessed it was an entire tank corps and a rifle division marching west.

It was not simply terrifying-though that was the principal sensation-it was frustrating. After all, he had been sure that he had, finally, gotten ahead of the Russian army. He wasn't merely far, far to the west of Kaminheim: He was west of the Oder. He was west of Dresden. After nearly four weeks of hiding, of skulking, of lurking… of stealing carrots from root cellars and eating nothing but snow for days at a time… of using his last bullet a week ago now when he had shot at a hare and missed…

Evidently the war was over, or it would be within days, because clearly there was no Reich remaining. There was no Germany left. He knew how far west these soldiers were, and he had heard just enough rumors and stories to know that the western armies were well beyond the Rhine and the Russians were fighting in Berlin. Moreover, these Soviet riflemen were a joyful bunch, and that meant something, too. They were singing and laughing and whooping up a storm as they marched.

He considered, as he had often that winter and spring, simply surrendering. Just giving up. And if he was ever going to surrender, now was as good a time as any. There were plenty of officers marching past and plenty of witnesses: It seemed unlikely that they would shoot him right here by the road. At least he thought it was unlikely. They would, after all, have to do something with him if they didn't shoot him. And so while they might not execute him out here in the open right beside this stone wall, he guessed in the end some lieutenant and a pair of riflemen might escort him seventy or eighty meters into the woods and shoot him there.

He decided he would remain where he was. He stared down at the tears in his pants and the way the skin he could see on his knees had grown as coarse as sandpaper. He reminded himself that eventually the sun would set once again and this army would be gone. He would be able to uncoil his body, to rise up and go…

That, of course, was the problem. This morning, just when he thought he had finally gotten west of Ivan, here he was. Again. And so Helmut was beginning to fear there was no place left in the west that could become his eventual destination. Yes, the war was all but over, but he could only dimly imagine what sort of world was going to remain when there was nothing left of the Reich to bomb into rubble. The one thing he was certain of was that there would no longer be the Germany he had known his whole life. He still had vivid memories of Kaminheim when it had been a part of Poland, since he had been a Polish citizen for the first twelve years of his life. But even as a little boy he had viewed himself as a German. And the world that was dawning wanted no part of the Germany he knew. What would remain of the empire that once stretched from the westernmost tip of France to the oil fields in the Caucasus? From the ice of the Arctic Circle in Finland and Norway to the desert heat of North Africa? It would become a compact little vassal state. The victorious armies would divide up the nation the way the Germans and the Russians had carved up Poland into halves.

Well, such was the fate of conquered nations since the beginning of time.

Still, he didn't want to die. He had seen more than his share of death, including his father's in that ludicrous counterattack on the Kulm bridgehead hours after the two of them had said good-bye to Mutti and Theo and Anna, and he wanted to postpone his own as long as he possibly could. Somehow he had survived ill-advised counterattacks on Russian positions for almost two months, until he alone in his battle group was alive, and he couldn't imagine he had any luck left. It wasn't that he was afraid of death-though he could readily admit to himself that he was. It was the fact that his father was dead and he had to presume that Werner was dead, and so it seemed to Helmut that he alone was left to look after the Emmerichs who remained. Consequently, he vowed to stay where he was until this latest procession was past and then-as he had for weeks now-try to work his way west.

IT WAS THE BRITISH who reached the female prisoners in the field first, a long column of Churchill tanks that had pressed to the south and the east of Lübeck. When they saw the women-by no means the first camp survivors they had encountered-they radioed back for medics and set up a hospital inside what was rumored to have been an estate Martin Bormann had commandeered for a mistress. An opera singer. Some of the women had scattered by then, fearful that the Germans would return, but most had been incapable of fleeing. Anna and Callum had already filled the wagon with whatever food they could find in the village, which hadn't been much. They made two trips that first afternoon-on their second excursion, they returned with all the blankets and quilts they could steal-and a third one the next morning. Waldau never faltered. Mostly they brought back moldering root vegetables they discovered in sand barrels in empty basements and loaves of bread that were so hard they were like clubs. Still, they softened the bread in hot water they warmed over a fire and boiled the vegetables into a hot soup. No one was able to eat much, but everyone was able to eat something. They'd been there a little more than a day when the British tanks arrived, a loud, rumbling procession that caused the earth to tremble and caused Anna and Mutti and Callum to hold their breath until they knew for sure that the approaching army wasn't Russian.

In the days that followed, more and more British troops arrived. Canadians, too. And, suddenly, Callum was gone. Interrogated first-at length, apparently-then cleared, and then absorbed back into the army. Anna saw him one more time before he was returned to his division. He had hoped, he said, that she would come with him. There were displaced persons all over Germany, and did it matter whether she was a refugee here or seventy-five kilometers farther south? Probably not. But she and Mutti were assisting the nurses at the makeshift hospital, doing whatever they-or anyone-asked. They cleaned bedpans and washed dirty sheets, they fed soup to the girls. They assisted the translators to find out who the prisoners were and where they were from. They acted as intermediaries with the Germans living nearby.

And so Callum told her that he would come back for her as soon as he could. He didn't know when that would be, but he was confident he would return before long. In the meantime, he urged them to stay where they were so he could find them.

There was, however, no chance that either of them was going to leave. The camp in which they were staying with other refugees was adequate, and Mutti seemed no less discomfited by the slit trench that was their bathroom than she was by the fields and woods she had used so frequently that winter and spring. There were soldiers who hated the German refugees for what their people had done, but there were others who seemed to view them merely with boredom. They gave chewing gum to the children in the camp-often having to explain what it was-and cigarettes to the younger women. They tended to ignore the women Mutti's age, as well as the men who were there-none of whom, it seemed to Anna, could possibly have been younger than fifty-five or sixty.

Every so often, Mutti would bring up her husband or her sons, and her hopes that they would all be reunited before the end of the summer. Anna would say nothing to disabuse her of this possibility. She would carry the dinner trays for the women who were, slowly, starting to mend, and she would read to them from the books that she found in one of the massive house's bedrooms. She became friends with a woman named Cecile, and told her what she could of the man who had rescued them-had, arguably, rescued them both. And she would do whatever they or the British doctors would ask of her, though it seemed the women wanted only to sleep and sip broth and inquire whether the suddenly omnipresent Red Cross had found someone they loved: A husband. A sibling. A father, a mother, a child.

In the first days there was never any news to report. By the end of June there was, and invariably it was bad.

Sometimes, the British wondered if her silence, other than when she was reading aloud to the patients, was sedition. Some conjectured that she might actually be an unrepentant little fascist, and perhaps had secrets she was shielding. Who knew what her father or her family really had done during the war? Others, however, sensed the truth: She rarely opened her mouth unless she was speaking the words of authors long dead because she felt she had lost all moral authority to speak a word of her own. She and her family had prospered under the Nazis; now the Nazis were gone and there was a price. Besides, when she saw these women in their cots and their beds in the estate, she understood that the more she spoke the more likely she was to cry. She didn't precisely hate herself-nor did she hate her mother, though when she would look at Mutti she would experience daggers of frustration that her parents and their whole selfish generation had forgotten the most fundamental of human decencies-but the guilt was nonetheless debilitating. Sometimes, she wanted to rail at Mutti, at all the refugees her mother's age, and ask them what they had been thinking. How they could have done this to their children-to the world.

She began to pray, but it had been a long time and it seemed that praying took a concentration she lacked. Moreover, other than the health of the camp survivors around her and the safe return of her father and brothers, she wasn't quite sure what to pray for. One of the other young women among the refugees, a war widow a few years older than Anna, told her that she personally prayed for forgiveness. The war widow said she hadn't been a party member, but that didn't matter.

And so Anna tried that, too. Unfortunately, with Callum gone-Callum who had loved her despite her naïveté-she wasn't confident that self-loathing wouldn't forever be her companion and cause her to walk with a distracted, disconsolate gaze. She didn't care so much whether the world would ever forgive her people; but she did hope that someday, somehow, she would be able to forgive herself.