Free Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian Page A

pinkish flesh to a flap of skin by his jawbone--a leaf, he thought, clinging to a twig in October--had eyebrows so thin they looked girlish.
    Imperceptibly, his exhausted gasping had morphed into sobbing, and he fell to his knees and allowed himself to cry.
    uri didn't know if the old woman failed to return because she didn't want to be present while he was being arrested or executed, or whether a more prosaic concern had detained her. But it didn't really matter to him. All that counted was that she was still gone and he had cleaned up the cottage as best he could, sopping up the dead soldiers' blood with his own clothing and sweeping their fragments of bone and broken teeth into the hearth. Then he started the hottest fire that he could, hoping to reduce his pants and his shirt and his shoes to ashes, while cremating the pieces of human flesh that he had swept with a broom into the blaze. Meanwhile, he buried the two soldiers in a section of earth where the woman's potato mounds merged with the dirt and feed and excrement of her chickens. One of the soldiers, the one whose uniform had holes in the coat and the shirt, was fully clothed. The other was buried naked.
    And when Uri started down the road away from the village, he was wearing the uniform of an SS corporal, and in his breast pocket were the official papers of a soldier roughly his age from Cologne with the alliterative (almost whimsical in Uri's mind) name of Hartmut Hildebrand.

Chapter 3
    IN THIS QUADRANT OF THE CAMP THERE wERE ONLY women, all of them young and (once) healthy. The middle-aged women and the old women had been separated out and executed upon arrival. So had the sick. But, Cecile thought, when her mind could focus on anything other than hunger, they--the survivors-- all looked like dying old men. Small, stooped, dying old men. Bony old men. Their heads had been shaved and the hair never seemed to grow back. Instead they grew sores that never quite healed. Cecile had worried when she arrived and most of her clothes were taken from her--her angora-trimmed coat, her cashmere sweaters--but it wasn't the loss of a skirt or a blouse that had caused her to panic. It was the confiscation of her purse. Inside it were the pads that she needed because she was menstruating. When she had asked an SS guard what she was supposed to do--standing there naked with two small rivulets of blood trickling down her thighs--the woman had laughed at her, pushed her over the edge of a metal table, and then shoved the handle of her riding crop deep inside her vagina. When she had removed it, she had insisted that another prisoner, a secretary from Troyes with whom Cecile would become friends, lick off the blood.
    "Eat, eat," the guard had ordered, "it's the most nutritious food you'll get here."
    Since then Cecile had stopped menstruating. Most of the prisoners had. Here she was a twenty-three-year-old woman from a wealthy family in Lyon, and she hadn't had her period in five months. And, obviously, she wasn't pregnant. She hadn't seen her fiance since he had been taken to a forced-labor unit over a year ago, and now she was being told by the other prisoners that she should give up hope that she would ever see him again. Even if somehow he survived--she told everyone that although he was an accountant, he was strong and in impeccable physical condition--they said that she wouldn't. They said that none of them would.
    But she disagreed. After all, she still had good shoes. Very good shoes. It was a small thing, but when life was reduced to conditions this primitive and painful and demeaning, the small things were magnified greatly. Moreover, those shoes were her fiance's hiking boots, a trace of the man that she loved. Certainly the boots were too big for her, but everyone had warned her to have warm, comfortable shoes at her disposal when they came to take her away. And so she did. She had also brought with her a pair of her crocodile dress flats, largely because she couldn't