Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian

into the apple orchard where the real POWs were at work.
    theo no longer pretended to be one of Anna's horses when he ran--even when he was very little, he had never imagined he was his own pony, Bogdana, because that animal was too sweet and good-natured to fly across Kaminheim the way the stallions who had been named after castles would--but he did see the stallion Balga in his mind now as he raced away from the house and the kitchen and that witch of a cook. He ran past the elderly guard who more times than not seemed to have his ancient eyes closed, past the English schoolteacher and mason, and past the young men who he guessed hadn't done anything at all before they'd become soldiers. He was vaguely aware they were watching him, their hands full of apples, but he didn't care. He was just running, he was running fast. It was, in his opinion--and in the opinion of his schoolteachers and the women and old men who ran the youth camps where he spent so much of each summer--what he did best. He wanted to be as far as he could from the idea that his father might be about to be stolen from him, too. His father seemed to Theo to be the only grown man in the world who didn't seem to be lecturing him all the time about German honor and German bravery and German posture (what posture and bravery had to do with one another was inexplicable to Theo, but apparently they were related), or didn't find reasons to rap his knuckles with birch rods. Some days at school he would be so lost in a daydream that he wouldn't even be aware that his teacher, Fraulein Grolsch, was standing beside his desk until he would hear the whoosh of the rod and feel its sting on the bones of his knuckles. Of all the children in the school, there was no one whom Fraulein Grolsch--the niece of the district's gauleiter and someone who clearly cared passionately about all that Nazi marching and singing and flag-waving--seemed to dislike more than him. One day she made him march around the courtyard for two hours with a Nazi flag on a shaft so tall and heavy that he could barely lift it. If it fell, she warned him, she would beat him worse than she had beaten any child ever. His sin this time? He'd forgotten his pencil box at home.
    Only when he had reached the edge of the orchard did he stop running and place his hands on his knees, catching his breath. As he gulped down great puffs of air, he looked up. There he saw two of the wicker baskets that were used to harvest the apples, and on the ground beside one was his big sister's navy cardigan sweater.
    anna leaned against one of the trees in the arbored apple orchard and felt the bark scratch her back through her blouse. She wondered how angry her parents or Helmut or Werner would be if they knew that just this moment she had kissed a Scotsman. She tried to envision the faces of the girls from her school or her summer camps if she were to tell them. Imagine: Her first kiss--soft, serious, mouths open and probing--and it had come from a prisoner of war. One moment they had been harmlessly flirting, as they did often, and the next they were kissing.
    "Of all the places you've lived, which is your favorite?" she asked him now. It was not a subject that actually interested her this very second, but she felt she had to say something to fill the quiet that suddenly was enveloping them like a tent.
    "Elgin," he said simply.
    "And that's in Scotland?"
    "It is. Moray Scotland. North. On the ocean. But a very hospitable climate. That's where we lived when we returned from India."
    "Are your parents still there?"
    He bowed toward her and she thought he was going to kiss her once more, and so she closed her eyes as a lock of his unruly hair fell away from his forehead and she parted her lips. But he didn't kiss her, and--embarrassed and angry--she opened her eyes. He was smiling, his face close to her, one arm straight against the tree behind her.
    "You know," he murmured, "I am sure someone could shoot me for kissing you. They