The Second Winter (37 page)

At the Nielsens’ house, Amalia was carrying a bundle of soiled linens down the length of the hallway upstairs. Her foot scuffed the carpet, and she tripped and lost her balance. As she fell, she tried to catch herself on a decorative table. Her hand struck a porcelain bowl, and the pottery skidded across the tabletop. If it had hit the floor, the bowl would have shattered, certainly. But by some miracle, when it left the table, it landed instead on the laundry Amalia had been cradling in her arms. Her knee scraped the carpet, her wrist wrenched backward. Her gaze remained fastened on the bowl. She heaved a sigh of relief when it didn’t break. Tears stung her eyes. No one in the house seemed to have heard.

Picking herself up, she returned the bowl to the tabletop. Her hair had come loose, and she collected it back into a bun. Then,
glancing up and down the hallway first, to make certain she wasn’t being watched, she reached into her apron. Her pocket turned inside out in her haste, and she stuffed it back into place. After another quick look behind her, she slipped a chunky tablet she had stolen from the vial in her father’s coat onto her tongue. Even as she swallowed it, she told herself that this would be the last time. She wouldn’t let this become a habit.

She gathered the laundry, started once again down the hall. Behind her, a door opened, but she didn’t hear it. Old man Poulsen leaned his head into the hallway, peered at Amalia’s retreating figure. Light was streaming into the house through an oversize window at the end of the corridor. Despite the clouds outside, this light burst into the hallway and surrounded Amalia in a halo so bright that the old man had to squint. He watched her shrink as she walked. The light grew brighter. At last, he had to shield his eyes with a hand. At the base of the hall, when she turned to glance behind her, he couldn’t see her face. She had become a black silhouette, flat and featureless. The bundle of laundry in her arms had become indistinct, and the old man wondered if she was carrying one of the children.

Amalia noticed the old man, and she smiled. The old man didn’t return her greeting. She opened the door to the rear stairs, carried the laundry down to the kitchen. Dropping the bundle into the utility sink, she twisted on the taps. Steam from the faucet billowed into her face, and she closed her eyes. The water was nearly overflowing when she remembered to open them again.

In the barn, Oskar had dropped the shovel and taken a seat on a crude bench Fredrik had fashioned from two logs and a
splintered plank. Slivers of wood pierced the fabric of his trousers. He was suddenly out of breath. He had woken this morning at five and had been busy all day without a single break. A pig had escaped, and he had found it half frozen on the far side of the property. After that, he had had to cross the farm a second time to repair a fallen section of fence. He hadn’t eaten breakfast, and now he was missing lunch. His heart was racing. If he didn’t sit, he might tumble.

He took a few deep breaths and steadied himself. Behind him, the pigs were bleating. They needed to be fed. The hens squawked. He twisted on the bench to see if something was disturbing them, but the barn was empty. He faced forward again, leaned his elbows onto his knees, let his head hang. At his feet, he noticed a few stray feathers. He picked one up and examined it in the dim light. When he held it at a certain angle, its barbs turned from gray to purple. He gripped it by its quill, brushed the soft tip of the vane against his chin. This made him shiver. He let the feather drop, watched it flutter to the hard floor of the barn.

A few minutes later, after a rest, he was feeling better again. He stood from the bench and crossed to the barn doors. The air was thick with mist. Across the icy yard, the windows of the cottage were dark. A thin trail of smoke was rising from the chimney, and he breathed the sweet smell into his lungs. He narrowed his eyes and tried to see inside through the plaster walls.

Upstairs in the cottage, Polina was standing next to the window beside Amalia’s bed. When Oskar stepped into the light at the crack between the barn doors, she took a quick step
backward, hid herself in shadow. His face was pensive. His eyes were focused into a squint. His mouth was raised in a loose circle. His front teeth showed white beneath chapped, cracked lips. Not for the first time, Polina remarked to herself how beautiful he was. He had grown up on this farm, a slave to his father. Fredrik had worked him from morning until night, seven days a week. His hands were bloody despite how callused they were. His face was weather-beaten. His nose had been broken and was misshapen. He only cut his hair when it tangled. He hardly ever bathed. But there was still something soft about him. His mother must have been a beautiful woman. He had Fredrik’s height, Fredrik’s arms, Fredrik’s build. But he had a woman’s eyes, he had a woman’s lips, a woman’s cheekbones.
That was it
. He must have resembled his mother, and yes, Fredrik must have fallen in love with the woman for good reason. Polina took another half step backward. She didn’t want him to see her.

Behind Oskar, the shadow inside the barn formed a black background without any depth. The longer Polina stared at him, the less connected he became to the objects surrounding him. She had the impression that he was floating.

Then Polina caught sight of her own reflection on the surface of the window. It had been a long while since she had paid any attention to herself. She had seen her reflection in mirrors, but only in passing. Now she noticed how broad her forehead was becoming. Her nose had grown longer. She didn’t recognize the expression in her eyes. Her lips were fuller than she remembered, and she could see how red they were, even in this nearly translucent likeness. No, she hardly recognized herself at all. She felt her cheeks flush, though she wasn’t certain why. Blinking, she let go of the image on the glass, focused once again on the barn.

Oskar, though, had disappeared from the crack between the doors, and there was nothing there for Polina to see any longer except the blank canvas of the barn’s dark shadow.

In Isabella’s room, Fredrik was slumped on the floor next to the bed. He had emptied the syringe into his arm. His back was pressed against the sharp edge of the metal bed frame. His breath was so shallow that his chest wasn’t moving. His arms were resting on his thighs, his hands were open, palms up. His legs were splayed, his feet were bare. The light was seeping slowly from the room. Maybe the air was seeping from the room as well. The walls were moving closer. The gap between the curtain and the wall was shrinking into a dot. When voices were raised downstairs in the whorehouse, Fredrik didn’t move, not a single muscle. His cheek twitched, but this happened so briefly that it might not have happened at all.

There were footsteps on the stairs, punctuated by the squeak of polished leather. The swish of heavy wool echoed down the length of the corridor. In a room across the hall, a woman was moaning and a bed was creaking. The footsteps approached, then stopped on the other side of Isabella’s door. Knuckles rapped the door, and the door rattled in its frame.
Isabella?
The customer spoke the name softly, but with the unmistakable accent of a German. He knocked again, waited. The doorknob moved. The latch clinked. Still, Fredrik didn’t wake. The door fell still again. Isabella’s disappointed customer found another whore. Music floated through the building like down that has escaped from a pillow.

When Fredrik opened his eyes, it was dark. On the bed behind him, a black-haired woman with olive skin was lying on top of the covers. She wasn’t moving. One arm hung limply
at her side, the other was draped behind her head. Her breasts had been heavy, and they lay flat on her chest and rolled off her ribs, half hidden by the thin fabric of her shirt. Her mouth hung open, and her chin was scabbed with dried mucus. A small stain of blood darkened the arm by her side, just beneath the fold of her elbow. Fredrik pulled himself to his feet. He didn’t look at the bed, not once. He had known that Isabella was dead from the instant he returned from his shower. There had been no reason to feel for a pulse.

He gathered his clothes, pulled on his boots, then let himself out the door. Outside, the snow didn’t melt when it touched his face. Behind him, the music crackling on the radio’s tinny speaker faded. He didn’t know which direction to walk.

Jutland. December 31, 1941
.

Johan Jungmann stood in front of his bathroom mirror, a razor in one hand. His other hand was resting on the rim of the washbasin. Without his glasses, he looked like a different man, even to himself. The brass frames, the slivers of crystalline glass, had become part of his face. His vision wasn’t so poor that he couldn’t bring his image into focus. A drop of blood was rolling down his cheek an inch beneath his eye. He had nicked himself with the razor. He watched the red liquid thin as it mixed with the water on his skin, then vanish into a foamy mass of shaving cream at the base of his jaw. Another drop welled from the cut, then followed the first, and a diluted, pink sheen spread across his cheek. He looked into his reflection, struggled to define just what it was that was so different about him without his glasses. Perhaps it was how naked he seemed. Without the corrective lenses to shield them, his eyes became organs.

He splashed his face with hot water, then tore a ragged square of tissue from the toilet roll and stuck it to the cut. Then he picked up his glasses from the edge of the sink and placed them back onto his nose, wrapped the thin metal temples behind his ears. The water drained from the basin with a hollow gurgle.

In the hallway, he paused at the door to his daughter’s room. It wasn’t yet seven. Mia, his wife of eight years, was still in bed, and he hadn’t expected any sound from Kirsten’s room either. The quiet patter of his daughter’s voice filled him with emotion. Resting a hand on the knob, he tried to make sense of what she was saying, but he couldn’t decipher a word.

When he opened the door, Kirsten was sitting on the floor in front of her bed. Dressed in her flannel nightgown, the little girl was holding something in her hands, playing a child’s game. Behind her, the curtains were pulled back from the window. Although it was early, enough light was streaming inside to throw the four-year-old’s face into shadow. She looked up at her father. Only the tip of her nose glistened in the light. Her hair shimmered as if it were spun from gold. They had given her a new dollhouse for Christmas. It had been an extravagant present. Jungmann had intended it as much for Mia as for Kirsten, indirectly, at least. He knew that his wife would be reassured by the display of confidence the gift represented, despite how difficult their circumstances were becoming. If the Germans dissolved the Danish government, there was no telling what would happen — not just to his income but to him. Kirsten, though, had mostly ignored the toy. She had lost interest when her father tried to show her how to move the dolls about inside without upsetting any of the furniture. By the end of the evening, she had dug her old cloth doll out from the closet where Mia had hidden it, and this was what she was cradling now.