The Second Winter (32 page)

When Amalia extinguished the flame, the kitchen was plunged into darkness. She waited until her eyes adjusted, then filled the teapot and carefully poured out two cups of tea. As she handed one to her father, the touch of his fingers on her arm gave her a small jolt. Her heart melted in her chest, and she thought about embracing him. But then she realized that he simply wasn’t yet able to see. He fumbled for the cup, and she passed it into his hands, then took a seat at the table across from him.

An hour later, when Oskar opened his eyes, he couldn’t remember falling back to sleep. His dream returned to him. The scrape of threshed wheat against his back felt so real that he thought his skin might be torn. He was still facing his sister’s bed, and he stared at the curtain, slowly lifting the smooth rectangular plane out from the dim light. Outside, a rooster was crowing in the coop. The sun hadn’t risen yet, and he wondered whether Amalia had already left. Holding his own breath, listening, once again he became aware of Polina’s gentle breathing on the other side of the room, and then, when he inhaled, of the vague, soapy scent of cheap perfume.

Jutland. December 28, 1941
.

Polina became aware of the stiff pillow before she opened her eyes. Bristles of straw pierced its rough slipcover, poked her cheek, scratched her skin. During the night, the air inside the cottage had been redolent with smoke. Now she woke to the smell of Amalia’s sweat and the dank, ferrous odors that rose from the kitchen and the cooling bricks of the hearth. The dusty, grassy scent of the pillow reminded her of her house in Kraków. She had slept on a pillow stuffed with straw there, too. She remembered this fragrance, this texture. She remembered waking and running her fingertips over the lines and indentations imprinted in her cheek after a long sleep. She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. It had been years since she had slept so well. Dangling from the shoelace, the diamond ring slid between her breasts, and a forgotten emotion stirred inside her. Perhaps there was something special about this house. Perhaps there was a place for her here.
She tried to fasten down the feeling. And then it struck her that, for the first time since the war began, her thoughts were tinged with hope.

Downstairs, there was a sudden crash, and the small house shook. Clutching her nightshirt to her chest, Polina sat up on the mattress. She had woken at six when Oskar stepped from behind the curtain and stumbled from the room, then had fallen back to sleep again. She could tell from the light filtering through the window that it was already eight or nine. She had assumed that she was alone. Had this been the sound of a door being slammed? No — the noise was too violent for that, too sustained. Her feet touched the rug. She pushed herself up from the bed, tiptoed to the door.

On the floor below, nothing moved. She crept to the stairs. At the landing, she waited, listening. A man snorted and groaned, and, as uncharacteristically weak as it was, she recognized the voice as Fredrik’s. Holding her nightshirt closed, she hurried the rest of the way down the stairs and peered into the kitchen. The giant farmhand lay sprawled on his back beside the table. Blood was oozing from a gash on his scalp, over his ear. Polina took a tentative step toward him.

His eyes opened just a crack, but Fredrik saw the fuzzy outline of someone approaching him. His head was reeling from his fall — his vision hadn’t cleared. The taste of amphetamine was so strong in the back of his throat that he wanted to gag. He scrambled backward, clawing the air, half raised himself against the cabinet beneath the sink. His boot hit the table and knocked it sideways, sending everything on the tabletop — the salt cellars, a couple of stray glasses, a plate of bread that Oskar had left for Polina, some silverware — splintering onto the floor in a broken heap. By the time he recognized the girl, he had squeezed himself into the corner. The fear in his
eyes dissipated, but not before Polina had seen it. He pushed himself up, stood to his full height, held himself steady with a hand on the edge of the sink.

“You’re bleeding,” Polina said.

Fredrik grunted. He fingered the wound on the side of his head. This wasn’t the first time that he had blacked out like this. In fact, the spells had become more frequent than he wanted to admit. The amphetamine he was consuming was to blame. His body needed to sleep — it almost felt as if he had forgotten how. This was the first time, though, that he had actually harmed himself.

“You’re hurt,” she said.

“I don’t need your help.”

Polina took a step closer. “Let me take a look.” Reaching for his wrist, to move his fingers away from the cut, she wasn’t prepared for the swipe of his knuckles. The blow glanced off her forearms. Still, the contact nearly knocked her off her feet.

“Stay back,” he barked.

Now Polina kept her distance. Her eyes dropped, and she wondered whether to stay or to go.

“Clean this up,” Fredrik told her, gesturing at the mess on the floor. He found a towel on the counter, pressed it to the side of his head, took it away to measure the amount of blood. The cut was deep, almost to the bone. The wound wasn’t dangerous, but it would be difficult to stanch the bleeding. He clamped the towel to his head, pushed past Polina toward the bathroom. “Save the salt if you can,” he instructed her. “It wouldn’t do to waste it.”

She waited until he had disappeared into the bathroom. The pipes whined as he opened the taps. Then she knelt on the hard, cold floor to gather the scattered kitchenware and pick up the broken pieces of glass. When she dropped the debris
into the trash, it hit the bottom of the empty container with a shrill, vitreous clank.

There was tea steeping on the table for him when Fredrik emerged from the bathroom. Polina had poured a cup for herself as well, and she was carrying it with her as she left the kitchen and headed for the stairs. “Sit down with me,” Fredrik told her. Then, when she hesitated, “Oskar is in the barn with the pigs.”

“I’m cold,” Polina objected. She wasn’t only making an excuse. She was wearing nothing else beneath her nightshirt, and her feet were uncovered. The fire hadn’t been lit since the early morning. It was no more than forty degrees inside the cottage.

“Sit down,” he repeated. “Drink your tea with me.” He took a seat at the table, then waited for her to join him before picking up his cup. “My daughter is across the way at the Nielsens’ house.”

Polina sat on the edge of a chair and blew on her tea. She had filled the pot with too many leaves, and the brew was sour. It crossed her mind to begin a conversation herself, but she had little to say. If he didn’t mind the silence, neither did she. She was finishing the dregs, already preparing to stand from the table and leave the kitchen, before Fredrik finally decided to open his mouth.

“I don’t understand,” he began, taking his time — leaning back in his chair until the wood creaked underneath him, narrowing his eyes as if he were contemplating something that would perplex a man with a far larger mind, “why it is that Oskar brought you back here from Copenhagen. And, to tell you the truth, I don’t understand either why you came back here with him.”

Polina set her cup down. There was a draft in the kitchen, and she suppressed a shiver. Her cheeks, though, were warm. “Perhaps,” she responded, “he realized if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be able to forget me.”

Fredrik rocked forward in his chair, reached for the pot of tea. The girl’s candor hadn’t surprised him. She wore it naturally, as many whores did. She had been stripped of artifice, just as she had been stripped bare of everything else. He poured himself another cup. By the time he thought to refill hers, too, there were only a few drops left. He let them dribble from the spout, then set the pot back down with a clank. “And you?”

Polina understood the question. She simply wasn’t certain how to answer it.

“Do you spend your time thinking about him?” Fredrik prompted her, mistaking her silence for confusion.

“I think that it takes a woman longer,” she answered at last, “to come to know a man.”

Fredrik acknowledged the parry with a sniff. He started to take a sip of tea, then stopped. “You’re not interested in him,” he said. “He’s still a boy, and you’re not the innocent he thinks you are.” He was lifting his cup to his lips when the cut on his scalp opened again, and a large drop of blood rolled down his cheek. He didn’t react quickly enough to keep the drop from tumbling off his chin and splashing onto the rim of his cup. The blood mixed with his tea and splattered onto his lap.

“Do you have a needle and thread?” Polina asked him, ignoring his last accusation.

“The bleeding will stop,” he said.

“It needs to be stitched.”

“In the drawer,” he told her. He nodded toward the cabinet next to the sink, then watched her as she crossed the kitchen
to retrieve the sewing kit. Polina had been eating well in the weeks since she had left the hotel on Nyhavn to live with Hermann. There was evidence of this in the luster of her hair, and she had filled out a bit. Still, her limbs were long, and they were thin. Her shoulders were slender at the top of her sleeves. She was younger, Fredrik thought, than he had realized.

The only thread she could find was coarse and black. When she lit a match to sterilize its point, the needle turned red in the flame, which flared around the steel as if the metal refused to be touched. “Bend toward me,” she instructed him. “You’re too tall, even if I stand.”

Fredrik rested his elbows on the table and tilted his head. The blood was still flowing, and she tamped the gash with the towel, then separated its edges with her fingers. His hair fell in her way. When she combed it backward with her fingers, the flap of skin lifted, and the blood flowed even faster. “We will need to clean it first,” she told him.

“There’s whiskey in the cupboard.”

After she had poured enough to soak the towel, he grabbed the bottle from her and drank a swig before allowing her to continue. She knew how much the alcohol would burn, but the farmhand didn’t flinch. He didn’t flinch, either, when she penetrated his scalp with the point of the needle. Closing the wound was no different from mending a ripped sock. Perhaps his skin was somewhat tougher, and the blood oozing from underneath the stitching was bothersome. But in the end the result was identical. “I used to do the same for my father,” she said, as she tied the last knot. She pulled the thread tight, bent forward to grab it in her teeth. When it snapped, it left a thin line of blood on her chin.

Fredrik ran his fingers over the stitching. “I’ve had worse cuts.”

“It should be okay now.”

“Heat up some more water,” he told her. “There’s enough tea in the pot for another cup each.” He combed his hair over the gash while he waited for her, then wiped the blood from his fingers and his cheek with the towel. “And where was this?” he asked her, when she had taken her seat again.

Her forehead creased with puzzlement — she wasn’t certain what he was asking her.

“You said you did the same for your father,” Fredrik explained. “Where?”

Polina took the bloody rag from him and folded it onto the tabletop. “His hands, mainly,” she replied — and this made Fredrik snicker. “He was a carpenter,” Polina said, misconstruing Fredrik’s reaction. “When he could find work, at least. He worked with his hands, just like you do — so his hands were often cut — his arms, too.”

Fredrik’s smile broadened. Polina’s answer had reminded him of a joke. He decided that he might as well tell it to her. “A man walks into a brothel,” he began, then he remembered some detail he had forgotten, and he started again. “A whore takes a man’s hand and leads him into her room in a brothel. He sees a bed on one side of the room and a chair on the other. So he turns to the whore and he asks her, where is it you prefer to have sex?”

Polina’s eyes had dropped.

“And the whore answers, in the ass.” Fredrik chortled, but Polina didn’t look up again or even smile. “In the ass, do you understand?” He grabbed the bottle and took another large swallow. His scalp was throbbing. The whiskey would take the edge off the pain, certainly. “I meant to ask you where your father lived,” he said, in between gulps. “Not where he cut himself when he was sawing wood.” Polina remained quiet, and he decided to prod her. “You’re a Jew, aren’t you? A Polish Jew — a refugee. The Nazis brought you here from Poland, I suppose.”