The Second Winter (33 page)

Still, Polina didn’t raise her eyes. “Why don’t you tell me something instead?” she said.

“Hmmm?”

Now she did meet his gaze. “Why don’t you tell me about your wife?”

Her presumption surprised Fredrik, then pleased him. This she could see in the series of expressions that crossed his face. “I have no wife,” he answered. “It’s better for a man like me to live alone.”

“The children’s mother, then,” Polina said.

Again, her boldness surprised him.

“The children have a mother, don’t they?”

“Children?” Fredrik grinned. “They are older than you, aren’t they?”

“Are they?”

Fredrik grunted.

“Anyway, they are still your children, and they still have a mother. Why won’t you tell me about her?”

On the stove, the water had begun to boil. Fredrik used this excuse to stand from the table. He grabbed the kettle, filled the pot. Polina had added so much tea before that the water colored brown almost instantly, despite the fact that this was the second steeping. By the time he sat back down, he had recovered himself and figured out how to answer her. “You want to know about their mother?” He gave the pot a little shake, filled his cup first, then hers. “Their mother — she was also a whore, just like you.”

Polina lifted her cup, once again blew on the tea to cool it. When the steam hit her forehead, she shivered. “Maybe I would believe that if there weren’t two of them.”

“What?”

Polina shrugged. “A man only makes a whore pregnant once.”

Fredrik’s surprise melted into mirth. This time, though, his laughter was directed at her observation rather than at her. He settled backward in his chair. “I don’t talk about these things,” he told her.

“No?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He set his cup back down, toyed with it for a moment, then changed his mind, decided to speak. “I made the mistake of falling in love with someone who couldn’t love me in return.”

“Why couldn’t she?”

Fredrik raised his hands, palms up. To anyone in the room, in the presence of this gigantic, rough man, it was enough of an answer.
Just look at me
.

“So you tricked her, then,” Polina said. “Or at least you seduced her. Is that what you would have me believe? You let her imagine you were someone else long enough to father two children with her —”

“I told you,” Fredrik responded. “I don’t talk about these things.”

“I have always believed,” Polina said, “that marriage is a sacred vow.”

“This from you? You’re a whore, aren’t you? What does a whore know about marriage?” Fredrik examined her more seriously. For a few beats, she returned the stare. Then her eyes dropped. Her cheeks flushed. “A man gets married,” Fredrik said at last, “to lock the demons out of his house. Elke opened the door and invited the devil back inside.”

“She wasn’t faithful to you?”

Fredrik ignored the question. “All she wanted was my name. Anyway, I never said we were married.”

“Did you hit her? When you found out —”

He snorted. “I should have.”

“But you didn’t?”

Again, Fredrik examined her, this time shifting forward in his chair, closer to her, placing an elbow on the table. “Is that what I really am to you?” he asked.

Polina managed not to fidget beneath his scrutiny. “Does she live close to you now?”

“Enough of this —”

“Does she?”

“In Skagen,” he answered, reluctantly. “On the northern coast, about an hour from here by train. The children never see her — not too often. I took them from her so that she could marry someone else.”

When Polina finally raised her eyes to his again, his face softened into a sudden, incongruous smile. He leaned across the table and with a long, nicked finger touched her cheek. She didn’t understand at first, until he came away with a tiny, downy feather on his fingertip, perhaps from her bed, which, when he flicked it, fluttered into the center of the kitchen. She fumbled for her cup, and the tea burned her lips and then her tongue, but she took a swallow anyway. “Still,” she said quietly, carefully, “you can’t punish them, no matter what their mother did to you.”

“Hmmm?” Fredrik looked at her as if he hadn’t understood.

“She is the one who doesn’t love you.”

“You think I am punishing them?”

Polina was still trying to reconcile her first impressions of Fredrik with this new one. Perhaps she had judged him too quickly — perhaps there was more to the man than his fists. “I think you’re pushing them away from you before they leave you first.”

Fredrik thought about this. “It doesn’t work to hold on to people,” he said. “The tighter you hold them, the less you find yourself holding.” Then he grabbed the whiskey and pushed his chair backward and stood from the table. He took a swig from the bottle, wiped his mouth. “Tell Oskar that I won’t be home until after midnight.” He was halfway out of the kitchen when he stopped. “It was a mistake for Oskar to bring you here,” he told her.

Polina returned his stare.

“This talk,” he said, “you realize it hasn’t changed anything, don’t you?”

Polina considered what he was saying. “Yes,” she said, when he still didn’t move from the doorway, “I realize that.” But she knew that it had.

Polina hesitated at the threshold of Fredrik’s bedroom. The small cottage was so quiet that the tick of the clock in the sitting room reverberated up the stairwell. She placed a hand on the cold brass knob, then, glancing over her shoulder, pushed the door open.

Once inside, she stopped again. She had been expecting something else — the lair of a beast. Instead, the room, however spare, was surprisingly kempt, even inviting. A window had been left open a crack, and the air was fresh, sweet with smoke from the chimney. Though the bed wasn’t made, it was pulled together, and Fredrik had covered it with an old yellow bedspread. The edges of the cloth were frayed, but the material was a luxurious damask linen, evocative of a grander past. Flanked on either side by a matching mahogany nightstand, the bed itself was a four-poster, too large for this cottage. The Oriental carpet, too, belonged in a different house, and it was centered precisely at the base of the bed. Soiled clothes were tossed into one corner, but carefully, all in a tidy heap. A
lone antique armchair, which was missing a leg and had been flipped onto its side, constituted the sole piece of disarray. Fredrik had attempted to fix it, but the wood had split, and he hadn’t been able to figure out yet how to glue the leg back together. The tools he had brought upstairs for the project — a screwdriver, pliers, a drill, and a bundle of rusty wire — were laid out in a neat row beneath the window, but had since been forgotten and were collecting dust. There was no other furniture except an aging dresser, and the room, as small as it was, felt empty somehow. On one of the nightstands, a painted metal alarm clock sounded out a heartbeat in tandem with the tick of the wall clock downstairs. Otherwise, Polina realized, there wasn’t a single object on display, not on any surface. A shiver constricted her shoulders. She hugged her arms to her chest, then, taking another glance behind her, ventured into the enigmatic room.

The rickety dresser creaked as she tugged on the top drawer. Its frame gave beneath the force, and it wobbled as the drawer finally jerked open. Polina lifted out the garments inside — a shirt so badly torn that it was useless except as a rag, a lone sock, a singlet stained with blood. She dropped these onto the floor, then pulled the drawer out farther, searched it inside all the way to the back with her fingers to make sure that it was empty. She repeated this exercise with the next drawer down. The third drawer didn’t want to budge. Its contents were heavy, and she had to lift it and cheat it from side to side finally to pry it open just an inch or two. The musty smell of decaying paper wafted from the gap. She pried it open farther, revealing a cache of leather-bound books. The names of the authors, stamped in gold on the spines, meant nothing to her. Tolstoy, Flaubert, Zola, Dante. She picked one up, lifted the cover, ran a finger over the engraved lettering of the title.
Anna Karenina
. As worn as the edges were, the pages were still crisp. The novel hadn’t been read. She mouthed the first line, softly, fumbling with the written words.
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
. Closing the book, she set it down on the floor, then emptied this drawer, too. The last drawer, again, was stuck and didn’t want to give up its secrets. Spying an old boot peeking out from the closet, she used it to bang the drawer a few times in order to loosen it, then was able to pull it forward. The drawer, however, proved to be empty, save for a bundle of old pencils and three or four chipped and bent lead soldiers.

Standing back up, hands on her hips, she surveyed the room. Downstairs, something creaked, and she held herself still, listened. But it was nothing — the house reacting to changing temperatures outside, perhaps. In the faraway distance, she could hear the sawing of wood, closer, the quiet howl of the wind. This was a constant sound in Jutland, and she had already become used to it. She swiveled on her heel, pursed her lips. At last, her eyes settled on the broken, overturned chair. The wool upholstery, which had once been white, was now so grimy that it was gray, especially in a dark patch next to a hole in the chair’s side. The hole itself, Polina remarked, wasn’t a tear but a slit, sliced cleanly. She crossed the room, reached her hand inside. A smile creased her lips. She pulled out a notebook first, then a bundle of paper crowns.

Sitting down on the edge of the mattress, she opened the notebook in her lap and began leafing through it. A few sheets seemed to keep a tally of Amalia’s wages, others to track the balance of various loans. For the most part, though, page after page, it was nothing more than a list of sundries and figures.
Ham for Easter, 1.25. Sugar, .15. Another pair of shoes for O., .50. Remainder, 28.85. Plus October, 43.85
. When she reached
a page in the middle of the ledger that contained only a few sentences, she stopped. Fredrik’s handwriting was very precise, and she had no trouble reading it. The first three words were written large.
NO MORE DEBTS
. Underneath, the lettering was smaller but no less resolute.
A man only owes who he wants
. Polina pondered the words, then flipped the page. The rest of the notebook was filled only with numbers reflecting Fredrik’s meager household account, no further cryptic notes.

She closed the ledger and was about to turn her attention to the roll of bills, when something fluttered from the last pages — a small scrap of fading red construction paper, cut with scissors into the crude shape of a heart, the way a child would fashion it. She picked it up from the floor, turned it over. There was nothing written on either side to identify it. It could have been inconsequential. It could have been a Christmas decoration that had found its way between the pages of the notebook, or something that one of the children had given to their father. But she knew that it wasn’t. She brought it to the base of her nose. The faint scent of expensive perfume made her shiver again, as she had when she first entered the room. She examined the heart a second time, front and back, as if she might somehow have missed some writing that could establish its provenance, then slipped it back into the ledger.

After replacing the notebook in its hiding place inside the broken chair, she counted the money. The thought, to tuck a few bills into her pocket, never crossed her mind. She rebundled it, then returned the money into the hole, too, and, after stuffing the clothing and books back into the dresser drawers, left the room.

“A man walks with a whore into her bedroom.” Fredrik’s voice carried over the other voices in a dimly lit bar in the village of Aalborg. It was already late, nearly ten o’clock, and the patrons were drinking up before curfew. Conversations were growing louder. Fredrik held an empty shot glass in one hand, with the other was propping himself up on the oak counter. Even slouched, he was head and shoulders taller than anyone else in the room. The man standing beside him was sipping the froth off a mug of beer. The next man over was lighting a cigarette, listening as Fredrik began his joke. “There is a chair on one side, a bed on the other —”

The man lighting the cigarette blew smoke through his teeth. “You’re an idiot, Gregersen, an idiot — you know what an idiot you are? I was the one who told you that joke. Don’t you remember? That’s my joke.” He grabbed the shorter man standing between them and shook his shoulders hard enough to spill his beer. “Steen here heard me tell the joke to you, didn’t you, Steen? Hell, even Svend heard me tell the joke —”
He twisted to get the attention of the bartender. “Isn’t that right, Svend? I’ve told this joke to all of you — to everyone here — haven’t I?”

“A hundred times,” the bartender agreed.

“A thousand,” Steen said.

Across the room, a farmer with slack cheeks and a gray beard raised his glass in a salute. Another man seated at the same table shouted over the noise, “Her ass, eh? She likes it in the ass.”

The man with the cigarette grabbed his whiskey, returned the farmer’s salute. “You see? It’s my joke. And everybody’s heard it already.”

Fredrik twirled his empty glass slowly between his massive fingers, then set it on the counter and signaled the bartender for another shot. “That might be, Pedersen,” he said, “but the difference here is that this time the woman isn’t a whore.”

“No?” Pedersen arched his eyebrows. The cigarette dangled from his lips. He was a lanky, gregarious man who looked significantly more intelligent than he was — a favorite of the other customers at the bar.

Fredrik shook his head. “No,” he said. “This time the woman is your mother.”

Steen choked and snorted a mouthful of beer through his nose. Pedersen cleared him away with a push, and the smaller man, still drowning, took a step backward to wipe his face clean. Behind the counter, the bartender was filling Fredrik’s glass, and he laughed, too, silently, but hard enough to sprinkle the oak counter with whiskey.
Cheers to that
, someone else said.
Did you hear that?
another man chuckled.
Pedersen’s mother takes it like the Greeks
.