The Second Winter (41 page)

The stairwell was a blur. The next thing he knew, he was in the narrow passage on the second floor, squeezing through
the doorway into Oskar and Amalia’s room. He stopped when he saw Polina, but only for a second. Long enough to catch her eye. Long enough for her to read the violence of his thoughts in the weak, late-afternoon twilight. Long enough to smell her. Then he crossed the room, dropped onto his knees in front of her, grabbed her around her narrow waist. Her eyes were colorless. Her lips were only faintly pink.

When Fredrik raised a hand toward her, Polina thought that he was reaching for her face, and she lowered her chin toward his fingers. In itself, this surprised her, and she felt her chest heave. Instead, though, his fingers found the shoelace around her neck, and he lifted the ring from beneath her shirt. The piece of jewelry looked small in his giant palm. He examined the diamond, then tightened his fingers into a fist around it. The shoelace dug into her neck. When he let go, his hands slipped back down to her waist. Polina’s fingers sank into his greasy hair. His breath was hot and moist on her legs. His unshaved chin scraped her skin. But he held himself apart from her with a tenderness she didn’t expect.

“I don’t want you to go,” Fredrik said to her, and as he spoke his lips tickled her. Her skirt, she realized, had ridden to her hips. “Please,” he said, louder. “Please don’t go.”

Polina understood the words for what they meant. He was howling. This wasn’t an invitation to stay. “Shhh,” she said. That was all. “Shhh.”

“I recognized you,” he said, “from the first moment.”

The way one animal recognizes another
, she thought. Her fingers clasped his skull, and she wasn’t certain herself whether she was holding him away from her or simply holding him.

In her lap, Fredrik’s breathing slowed. In the fading light, she saw that his cheeks were wet with tears. The farmhand was crying. “Why are you doing this?” he asked her. The drug
was coursing through him in waves. In one instant, it was holding him aloft, permeating him with power. In the next, it was dangling him over a precipice, ready to drop him into a void. “Tell me, Polina. Tell me why.”

A shiver ran down her spine. Her fingers dug into his temples.
This was the first time that Fredrik had spoken her name
. His hands tightened around her waist. She concentrated on the sensation as his thumbs sank into her ribs. Her breath caught in her throat. She reminded herself that this man was capable of great violence. She remembered him, made small through the narrow crack in the trapdoor, sneaking up the stairs behind the soldier, wielding the carving knife. In that moment, he had been ready to throw away everything to protect her. His son, his daughter, his own life. Just to keep that soldier from discovering her. Yet a moment later, when that danger had passed, he had been equally willing to toss her out of the house to protect his son, his daughter, his small world here in the middle of this frozen, windswept, godless wasteland. This man’s heart beat, she knew, in the grip of that contradiction. She forced herself to exhale, loosened her fingers, let her fingertips touch his cheeks.

Fredrik continued to gaze at her. “Why him?” he asked her.

“Shhh,” she repeated.

His voice grew more urgent. “Why?” he asked. “Why him and not me?”

He hung on to her eyes as long as he could in the weakening light, until her face became a singular blur, until the pounding of his heart wouldn’t let him think any longer, and then he succumbed. His hands slipped from her waist to her thighs, then eased her legs apart. He was engulfed in darkness, there was nothing else but this taste, this pressure of her thighs, this softness of her hips in his hands, this texture on his tongue.
The taste shocked him. Of course he knew this taste. But there was something unexpected in the flavor, too. There was fear. There was anticipation. There was desire.

Her spine arched. She leaned her head backward, held on to his skull, pulled him into her. Her body began to tremble. But she held her eyes open and stared him straight in the face. She gasped for air. It struck Polina in this moment that, for the first time in her life, she wasn’t yielding. There was no memory of Czeslaw to terrify her. There was no thought of resistance, no yearning to escape. Then she silenced her thoughts.
This
was what she wanted. Nothing more.

Time passed, how much she couldn’t say. She was present, but, too, she was far away. The sounds that echoed through the small room were too foreign to have been uttered by her. And then, as footsteps shook the stairs, she wriggled backward and, when he wouldn’t let her go, fought to push this man away from her.

When Oskar returned, he understood that the kitchen was empty even before he had let go of the door. He heard their voices upstairs as soon as he entered the house. He didn’t close the door behind him. There was no explaining his reaction — it was instinctive, not controlled. The small cottage lost its geometry. The bottle of whiskey that one of the maids had carried to him from the Nielsens’ pantry was still clasped in his hand as he started up the stairs. He stumbled, fell, picked himself up again.

Fredrik didn’t hear him enter. Oskar crashed through the doorway, teetered above them in a daze. The light was nearly gone from the day, but the gathering dark couldn’t hide them. Polina’s skirt remained fastened around her waist, hiked
above her hips. She was pushing herself backward on his bed, caught in Fredrik’s grip, unable to escape. Off his knees now, Fredrik was grabbing her, pulling her onto her back as if she had no weight at all. In his hands, Polina was no longer the girl Oskar knew — she was a bundle of disconnected bones and pale flesh. The pillow was as white as milk in splinters and crescents beneath the wild mass of her hair. Disheveled like this, he did not recognize her at all.

The bottle of whiskey dropped from Oskar’s fingers, tumbled onto the floor. He took hold of his father’s shoulders with both hands, yanked him backward. His arms had never felt so powerful. He had never known such fury. He was blind. He didn’t see his father anymore. He simply attacked.

The farmhand was surprised by Oskar’s strength. His son lifted him off the girl, and he wouldn’t have been able to stop him. Fredrik, though, had spent his life chopping wood and shoveling dirt, pounding nails and sawing boards. He weighed twice as much as his young son, and he was infinitely more vicious. Oskar couldn’t imagine the violence of which his father was capable. Had he chosen to, he could have collected himself and silenced his son. But Fredrik didn’t fight back. He let Oskar’s blows rain upon him. He made no move to protect himself. He didn’t even wince.

Polina’s face contorted. She picked herself up from the bed but didn’t think to straighten her clothes or cover herself. She screamed. Her fingers dug into Oskar’s shoulders. But she wasn’t able to budge him, and Oskar didn’t stop. He reveled in his strength. He would destroy his father. He would tear him apart. He would
kill
him. And he could do it. Because this man whom he had feared so much was nothing more than a man just like he was. He was nothing more than a mean laborer on a desolate farm. His fist connected with Fredrik’s cheek,
and, his legs buckling underneath him, Fredrik dropped to the floor. He was too strong for this single blow to fell him, but it had. He looked up at Oskar, saw the girl, saw his son raise his boot above him, then closed his eyes. When Oskar’s boot dug into his ribs, he didn’t feel it. He was no longer there. He was no longer in this room. He was somewhere else.
The day had come
. Yes, the day had finally come, and he was nowhere at all.

And then Polina had found the whiskey bottle on the floor, and she had smashed it into the back of Oskar’s skull like a club, the last rays of light had scurried and leaped from the room, the day had fallen completely still.

January 1, 1942
.

In the early morning, Oskar left the house carrying a small suitcase. He only possessed a few extra pieces of clothing, so the case wasn’t heavy. He stepped outside onto the porch and measured the weight of the sky through a squint. Polina was inside the narrow vestibule behind him, lacing her shoes, and she followed him out a moment later. Amalia had given her a wool sweater, and before leaving in the morning for the Nielsens’ house, she had taken in the waist of one of her heavier skirts. Polina carried her old clothes in a bundle under her arm. They were nicer than the garments she was wearing now, but they were too thin to offer protection from this cold. She gripped Oskar’s arm, marched with him down the icy stairs. When they reached the driveway, their feet sank into the slush. During the night, the snow had turned to rain. The frozen layer of ice that covered the earth was beginning to thaw. Muddy water soaked their shoes. Leaning into the wet wind, they set
out together in small, slippery steps across the field toward the barn.

Fredrik looked up from his work on the woodpile. When the door slammed, he paused long enough to take stock of his son and this Polish girl, moving in step, arm in arm, carrying their belongings with them. Then he wiped his brow and bent over the woodpile again and continued to work the saw. His jaw throbbed, his cheekbones were swollen and bruised, his ribs pinched his lungs, but he refused to be hobbled. The drugs and alcohol he had consumed in the last days had left his body weak. It felt good to sweat and to breathe, to labor like this through the tremors. His eyes focused on the metal teeth ripping shards of oak from the trunk of a sapling. He lost himself in the rhythm of the cutting. The long blade sank lower into the wood. When their footsteps became audible, he paid no attention. Perhaps they would stop to say goodbye, or perhaps they wouldn’t. What did it matter? In either case, they were leaving, and this was work that had to be done. Without more wood, he and Amalia would freeze. There were only a few shovelfuls of coal left in the cellar, barely enough to get them through a single night. And after this, a fence needed repairing. The pigs were hungry. He was just at the beginning of another long day, and he didn’t have time to spare. Sentiment was a luxury that this farm couldn’t afford.

Oskar and Polina passed out of view, entered the barn. The smell of mildew and rot drifted down from the ceiling. The roof needed replacing, just like the roof of the cottage. This was something that he and his father had meant to undertake in the spring, once the weather cleared. Now Oskar wouldn’t have to. He set his suitcase down, grabbed the shovel, sank the blade into the dirt floor to the left of one of the posts, beside the pigs’ trough. The money Oskar had taken from the
photographer lay about two feet under the surface, wrapped in newspapers, bound in twine. He dug the last few inches carefully, then knelt to scrape the soil out by hand. When he picked up the bundles of notes, they emerged in a cloud of dust. He shook them clean, and clumps of earth scattered across the hard floor. Polina ran her fingers through his hair when he bent over his suitcase. This tenderness confused him in retrospect, when he thought about it afterward. He stopped to look up at her, then snapped the case shut, stood to his feet. It would be wise to get started.

Outside, they paused in front of Fredrik. The farmhand stopped sawing. Oskar remarked that he wasn’t wearing his gloves. His fingers were red, clamped around the edge of the cut log, gripping the handle of the saw. Then — just as Oskar was wondering why — his father reached into his rear pocket, found the gloves, handed them to his son. They were a workman’s gloves, but they would keep his hands warm, too. It was cold, and Oskar had a long way to travel.

“Thank you,” Oskar said.

When Fredrik smiled, his lip cracked, and his mouth began to bleed. He noticed because of the warmth and the flavor, and he swiped at the mess with the back of his hand. Polina tugged Oskar’s sleeve, and he understood that it was time to leave. He tightened his grip on the suitcase. It was a little heavier now with the money inside it. Then he started to walk. Polina held on to his arm. He concentrated on the soft grip of her fingers there, and then on the splash of her footsteps in the dirty snow next to him. Behind them, the saw worked itself back into a rhythm.

At the top of the property, a voice called out Oskar’s name, and he stopped, turned back around. The rain was coming down so steadily now that it was difficult to see. He squinted,
held up a hand, searched for Amalia. She had been running for five minutes already, all the way from the Nielsens’ house, and she was out of breath. Her cheeks were flushed. She ran with one arm across her chest, with her other hand lifting her skirt so that she wouldn’t trip. Her hair was soaked, and so was her shirt. She had dashed out of the house without a coat. “Oskar, Oskar.” Her shouts caught up to them before she could. Her breath steamed from her mouth in billows. She could barely take another step. “Oskar, wait, Oskar!”

Oskar waited for his sister. When she reached them, her eyes were thoroughly red. Her face was so wet from the rain that they wouldn’t have otherwise known that she was crying. “You don’t have your jacket,” Oskar said.