The Second Winter (9 page)

“This stuff will kill you, Gregersen,” the truck driver said. “It will rot your bones from the inside out.” Still, he shoved the tablet into his mouth and swallowed. The bitter taste made him grimace. “So you’ve got four hours,” he said to Fredrik, wiping his hands on his coat. “My crew is waiting for me in Sindal. I figure we’ll be passing back through Ulsted again at about ten.”

Fredrik nodded. “Ulsted,” he echoed. “On the side of the highway.”

“We won’t stop,” the truck driver said. “It’s too dangerous. If we see you, we see you. Otherwise, you’re on your own.” He lifted himself into the truck, slammed the door behind him.

The Jews’ silver rattled in the old woman’s arms. Fredrik shouldered past Oskar, gave the old Jew a shove, started leading them toward the sea.

Forty minutes later, the sky was laced with chalky phosphor. The mulched farmland rolled away from them beneath their
feet, glittering here and there in the dark where slick stalks of scattered straw caught the first, nearly invisible rays of morning light. The old woman had long since abandoned her city pumps. After a hundred yards, the shoes were ruined. Another hundred yards farther, the heels had snapped off and the red leather had separated from the soles. Now her stockings were torn and her toes were bleeding. She dragged the bundle of silver behind her, no longer caring to possess it at all, only afraid that, if she let it go, Fredrik might lash out at her. The girl had stumbled more than a few times, and her feet and knees were bleeding as well. Like her mother, she hadn’t once opened her mouth. Her father hadn’t stopped complaining since they had begun the journey on foot. His litany had lost words, instead had become a series of groans and moans, squeezed from his lungs as if with every step another stone were being dropped onto his chest.

“Shut up, will you?” Fredrik gave the old Jew a push. The old man stumbled and caught himself with another groan. “The sun will be up soon. Keep moving, faster.”

Oskar slowed a step to help the old man through a dense marsh. Fredrik would have chastised his son, but at last the fence bordering Olaf Brandt’s property on the east stenciled the haze. They were almost at the coast. The wind picked up, blasting salt into Fredrik’s eyes. Beyond the fence, the flat, steel-gray plane of the sea hovered in the mist, no more than a thousand yards in front of them. The rhythmic lap of waves penetrated the gloom, punctuated by the shrill cry of seagulls.

“That must be Johansson’s trawler,” Axel said.

Fredrik followed the direction of the shorter man’s arm. Shimmering on the otherwise unmoving sea, a weak lantern cast a circle of light onto the water. Within the glow, tiny waves rippled. From this perspective, the pattern could have
been the flutter of snow in a car’s headlamp. Fredrik traced a line back from the small fishing boat to the shore, where he located yet another lamp burning, this one even weaker. The Swedish fisherman was waiting for them on the sand with his rowboat.

“Yeah, that’s Johansson,” Fredrik confirmed. In the distance, next to the rowboat, another flame sparked. The fisherman was lighting a cigarette. As far away as they were, Fredrik could practically smell the burning tobacco. The last time he had seen the one-eyed Swede, the fisherman had given him a Gauloises, something he had taken from a fugitive whom he had run across the straits. The cigarette had been as fat as a small cigar. He started forward again, allowing Axel to take the lead.

Arriving at the fence, Axel steered them sideways for about thirty or forty yards, until he located a gap large enough to crawl through. There, parting a tangle of broken wires and rotted stakes, he directed Oskar through first, the old woman next. When he reached for the girl, though, Fredrik grabbed him by the wrist, gave it a savage squeeze, shoved the old man toward the hole formed by the fallen posts instead. The professor’s body was almost too battered to bend, but he was small and thin, and he fit through with only a little prodding. After that, Axel didn’t wait for Fredrik. He had understood his intention. He followed the old Jew to the other side, then herded the group forward without Fredrik or the girl.

The fleshy young woman didn’t protest. At first, she wasn’t certain what was happening. She watched her father and mother dissolve into pixels, then raised her eyes to Fredrik. The handsome Dane who smelled like sweat brushed the suitcases and packages she was carrying from her arms. They hit the soil with a quiet thud. His hands tightened on
her shoulders. Still, the girl didn’t resist — she let this man whom she had dared to tease with an adolescent smile guide her downward. Then the gesture grew more violent. She slipped backward onto the wet soil. Mud oozed through her coat, through her clothes. The tall man didn’t immediately follow her to the ground. He stood above her, his chest heaving — long enough for the girl to imagine that the moment might have passed. But then he knelt beside her, a knee between her thighs, and the girl knew.

The dark swallowed the man whole — everything except his lips, which had turned as white as his teeth. His hand found her vagina, and a sound escaped from her own throat that the girl didn’t recognize. Her underpants tore with a rip. The huge man’s fingers were made of concrete. His breath was hot on her cheek. She closed her eyes, clamped her jaw, waited. A belt slithered through a buckle. Heavy fabric separated from buttons with a series of muffled pops. His hands settled into the earth on either side of her. In her confusion, she clasped this brute’s arms and pulled herself against him in an awkward embrace, as if she somehow believed that she could with tenderness entice this man whom she was holding to protect her from the beast who was on top of her. When the stubble on his chin dug into her skull, she twisted and tried to find his ear.
Don’t
, she whispered. Her voice didn’t belong to her. She had no idea what language she might be speaking.
Please, don’t
. But the stone fingers wrapped themselves around her neck beneath her chin.

And then a voice interrupted them. “Father?” And in that same instant, the world fell completely still. The wind whistled, seagulls shrieked. The man had stopped breathing. Footsteps approached, slick on the muddy ground. “Father — where are you?”

The fingers softened back into flesh. The man shifted. “Stay back,” he growled.

The flavor of her own oily hair permeated the girl’s mouth. When she opened her eyes again, the boy emerged from the shadows in a blur. His face was stricken with concern.

“What are you doing, Father?”

The man let go of her, but she could nevertheless sense the tension in his body. It felt to her as if he was ready to explode. “What you should be doing. Eh?”

“Axel says you must come now. He says we must hurry.”

The man considered his son. He yanked his trousers back up over his naked ass. Then at last he stood. The absence of contact left the girl suddenly cold. Her legs shook. The man lifted her off the ground, thrust her bags back into her arms. She lost her balance, but the boy gripped her elbow, managed to keep her upright. In the aftermath of her terror, even Oskar’s gentle touch sickened her, and she felt herself retch. Mud slid down her thighs. Silently, madly, she began to weep. Her clitoris was vibrating like a string stretched too taut on the neck of a guitar, and the incongruity of this dysfunction blinded her. As Oskar directed her through the gap in the fence, all she could see was a series of geometric blacks and grays. Rusty wires snagged her skirt, scratched her scalp, pulled her hair. On the other side, Fredrik gave her a shove. His hand dug into her back. She tripped, caught herself, followed the rustle of clothes into the dark. A minute later, they had rejoined the group. Her feet sank into sand. Tears streamed down her face.

She wanted to reach for him, but her father didn’t turn around. The old man’s jaw was clenched. His shoulders were stooped. He saw nothing farther than the droplets and smudges on his glasses. The pain that racked his body was long forgotten. His face was contorted by a series of deep, symmetrical
creases into the picture of grief. At the sound of the huge Dane’s approach, his arms tightened around the leather satchel, which he carried now like a child against his chest. When his daughter bumped into him, he bent his head toward her enough to caress her shoulder with his cheek, but neither slowed. Once again, in the familiar presence of her father, silent sobs convulsed the girl’s body. Her father closed his eyes and squeezed his hands into angry fists so tight that his knuckles captured the silvery light of dawn like moonstones or pearls. They kept on walking.

The sun peeked over the horizon, casting a narrow orange finger all the way from Sweden to the wide strand on the Danish shore. Small waves crested, and the froth sank into the golden sand at Ingmar Johansson’s feet. When the crunch of footsteps broke the silence, the Swedish fisherman flicked his cigarette into the saltwater. It catapulted end over end in a fiery arc, then disappeared. The fisherman had lost his left eye in an accident with the rough edge of a fishing net some years before. When he blinked, the blind side of his face flinched, but it was only a sympathetic gesture — a remnant from the time when he possessed a second eye. He didn’t wear a patch. The wound had healed into a twisted whorl of skin. As Fredrik approached, it took a moment for him to understand that the fisherman was smiling — his was such a difficult face to read. “Another minute or two, and I would have left,” the fisherman said, with an accent that grated on Fredrik’s nerves. Smoke streamed from the fisherman’s nostrils.

“We had a rough night,” Fredrik said.

“So this is what you bring me? Only three?”

“You were expecting more?”

The fisherman shrugged.

“Any sign of the Germans?” Axel asked him.

The fisherman thrust out his lower lip. Fredrik thought that he looked like a fool. “A frigate passed by yesterday night. But it’s been quiet. I don’t expect trouble.”

“Put your bags in the boat,” Fredrik said to the Jews. But when the old man took a step toward the beached craft, Fredrik grabbed him by the shoulder, stopped him in his tracks. “Not that bag.”

“What do you mean?” the old man asked him.

“Put your bags in the boat,” Fredrik repeated to the old woman and her daughter. The girl tripped against the side of the dinghy, dropped her bundle on the deck. Her shin hit the hull with a loud thunk. Her mother scurried through the dark to her daughter’s side.

The giant’s hand, the old man realized, had gripped the leather satchel. “What do you think you’re doing?” he protested, wrapping both arms around the suitcase.

Fredrik stripped him of the bag without a word, sent him flailing backward toward the rowboat. The old man bumped into his wife, spilled onto the deck like a marionette. His head hit a steel fitting hard enough once again to tear the thin skin of his scalp. He scrambled back onto his feet. “You can’t — It’s stealing.” He was almost too dizzy to stand. His wife and daughter pulled him backward, restraining him from attacking the huge Dane.

“Shhh,” his wife said.

“Papa, don’t,” his daughter said. “Just don’t.” And the family watched helplessly as Fredrik weighed the small satchel with a shake.

“What are you doing?” the fisherman asked him.

Sensing an opening, the old man entreated the fisherman. “You can’t let him. He can’t just take our things.”

Fredrik glared at the little man. “Shut your mouth,” he told him. “Or I’ll shut you up myself.” The Jew’s bleating would attract the attention of the other fishermen who were also heading to their boats on the sound. It was dark, but they weren’t alone. Word had a way of spreading.

“You can’t take that,” the one-eyed fisherman said.

“Why not?” Fredrik asked.

“He can’t,” the old man repeated.

“Not until you pay me, anyway,” the fisherman said. He grinned, but the concern didn’t dissipate from his lopsided expression.

Fredrik grunted. He set the leather satchel onto the sand, knelt next to it, worked the brass lock in the dim light.

“You’ll never figure out how to open it,” the old man said.

This made Fredrik sneer. He slipped a finger under the clasp, flexed his arm, broke the satchel open with a quiet rip. When he pulled the bag apart, his breathing stopped. Beneath a few bundles of bills, the polished surface of a treasure of gemstones shimmered in the dim light. Reaching inside, a memory of his mother’s jewelry chest blinded him. Her favorite piece had been a chain of diamonds interlaced with strands of precious, uncut blue and yellow stones that she had worn around her fat neck on special occasions. The scent of her perfume teased his nose. As a child, the powdery smell had reminded him of the barbershop.