The Second Winter (5 page)

Inside the apartment in East Berlin the night before, Martina Bloch had led her into a dark utility room behind the kitchen, where the odor of rust and mildew had been thick enough to taste on her tongue. The plaster on the walls, saturated with steam from the unventilated stove, was as tawny as parchment. When her aunt bent down, Angela could count the vertebrae of her spine through the thinning fabric of her sweater. The old woman pushed aside a broom whose bristles were tangled with cobwebs, a pair of worn shoes, a pile of clothing that needed mending, then grabbed hold of a small cardboard box, pulled it free from the clutter.
Why don’t you carry that into the kitchen, would you, dear?
Angela set the box on the kitchen table, waited while the stooped woman struggled with the flaps. The cardboard was beginning to
disintegrate. Martina lifted an antique envelope from the shadows, and an object slid against the thick paper with the telltale slither of finely worked gold. The pendant and chain slipped into the old woman’s hand. In the dim, incandescent light, the stones had sparkled with the brilliance of a flame.
This was sent to us after your father’s — after your father was killed. It’s very valuable, I think. Here, let me put it around your neck — that is the best way for you to take it across the border, like something you have always owned
. Around her neck, the platinum chain had seared then chilled Angela’s skin.

Angela refastened the clasp beneath her chin and turned her attention to the violin case resting on the desk. She twisted the old-fashioned locks sideways, lifted its hard, shiny leather lid. The cool light from the window hovered above the polished wood of the instrument. This was an illusion, a trick caused by the parabolic curvature of the plate. The familiar smells of linseed oil and resin wafted into the room. The D string had broken in concert the night before. Had that been just yesterday? She gripped the neck of the violin that had been handed down to her when she was a child. Its heft was so familiar that she barely realized she was holding it. She twisted it out of the velvet, set it down on the desk. The strings resonated off-key, the snapped wire scraped the desk top. Her eyes settled on a sheaf of photographs hidden in the well of the case.

Her aunt’s hands had been stained with age spots. The old woman’s papery skin had stretched taut on her tendons as she grasped the photographs and worked them out of the box where they had lain hidden with the pendant for a quarter century.
These were taken by your father. During the war. That is how he avoided combat. He was a photographer — this you know already — decorated. Some of these are very good. They belong in a museum. Well, they belong to you now
. When Martina passed
her the photographs, the old woman’s fingertips had been icy, as if she had drawn her hands from snow.

Angela could barely remember her father. The last time she had seen him, she had been nine years old. What she remembered most strongly was his uniform — in her mind almost exactly the same green wool uniform the border patrolman had been wearing earlier today. The sweet odor of tobacco drifted back to her, so powerfully that she swiveled toward the door, to make certain that she was still alone.
Hermann Schmidt
. A fuzzy image flitted through her head of a blond-haired man with pale skin and translucent eyes, a nervous smile, perfectly clean spectacles. She flinched, remembering the feeling of his fingers on her cheeks, on her shoulders, in her hair, when she ran into his arms.
Daddy
. Standing in front of her aunt, lifting the photographs out of her cold hands, she had caught a glimpse of this man in his sister’s face, and then she hadn’t been able to hold on to the recollection any longer.
Daddy, Papa
.

The edges of the photographs dug sharply into her fingers. There must have been fifty of them. Somehow, her father had managed to deliver them to his sister, and Martina had kept them hidden all these years, secreted among her own belongings. Angela hadn’t had time to look at them the night before. She brought them with her to the bed, sat back down, straightened them on her lap. The light was growing darker, but she didn’t want to stand again to switch on the lamp.

The picture on top was dusty, grainy. The scene was inconsequential — a battlefield in the morning. A group of soldiers stood in a cluster next to a truck, distant, out of focus. She examined the photograph for a meaning, then lifted it off the pile, set it beside her on the bed. The next shot framed the same scene. Now, though, in the foreground, a young soldier
lay in the dirt, a corpse. Half of his face was gone, and what remained was a pulp made black by the rudimentary chemicals of the old film. The stark contrast with the first photograph unnerved her. Had her father set the sequence up deliberately?

Farther down in the pile were a series of pictures taken in a concentration camp. The images were very nearly unreal. Jews herded into filthy barracks, dressed in rags stained with excrement. Behind bars, men so malnourished that their eyes seemed to plead not for mercy but for death. Children forced into labor. Well-fed soldiers smoking and playing cards in the midst of this unimaginable suffering. Angela lingered over the first few, then paged through the rest more quickly. A dull ache was beginning to cramp her stomach.

She stopped short when she reached a picture of a man in uniform, framed in a mirror, striking an oddly formal pose. “Daddy,” she said out loud.

She lifted the photograph from the others. This one was developed on different paper. Most of the others had been matte. This photograph was heavier, shiny. Her own reflection floated on its surface next to her father’s face. She held it toward the window, tilted it slightly to keep the refracted light from blocking her view, studied this man’s strange but also familiar expression. As she remembered him, his mouth was tense, his lips were white, raised in a forced smile. Behind his spectacles, his eyes were lined with deep creases. The camera on a tripod next to him was nearly as tall as he was. He held a shutter-release cable in his right hand. His left was tucked smartly into his jacket pocket. Angela noticed the steel cross hanging from a ribbon looped through a buttonhole at the center of his chest. Had this been a proud moment for him? She couldn’t tell, not from his demeanor. She took her time, then flipped the picture over, began to consider the next one.
Her heart wasn’t in this exercise any longer, though, and she barely understood the scramble of pixels that described the burning shell of a factory in some northern European city.

As she reached the end of the pile, something continued to nag her. And then it struck her — the photograph of her father in the mirror was too heavy for a single sheet of photographic paper. Now that she had become accustomed to the weight of these photographs, she knew that this was true. Her posture stiffened. She found the photograph again, examined its edge. A second photograph was in fact stuck to the first, as if the two sheets had been set down together when they were still wet. She slid her nail between the sharp edges.

The second photograph didn’t want to come unglued. Angela wasn’t certain why — after all, this entire pile of photographs shared the same mystery — but her pulse had begun to quicken. She pried the two sheets apart, and at last they separated with a slight rip. The smell of acetic acid filled her nose. Her eyes sank into the texture of the forgotten picture underneath like fingers dipped into the cohesive surface of a still pond. At first, she was so overwhelmed by the sensuality of the photograph itself that she didn’t see the image it captured. And then she brought the frozen saturation of dyes into focus.

Angela blinked. Tears blinded her. Embers lodged in her lashes. Staring back at her was the most arresting girl she had ever seen.

Reflecting on this moment later, as she often did, Angela wasn’t able to explain the intensity of her reaction. What she would remember was the way the photograph assembled itself in front of her, piece by piece. Even in black-and-white, the girl’s eyes were a nearly colorless shade of blue. Her hair was amber, her skin ivory. The symmetry of her nose was marred by a barely perceptible twist — perhaps it had been
broken. She was biting her lower lip. One of her front teeth was slightly chipped. And then there was her long neck, and then her naked shoulders. She was covering her breasts with a forearm. Enough of her slender frame was visible, though, for Angela to appreciate how young she was — seventeen years old, sixteen? Her other hand held up a torn skirt. Her ribs were bruised. Slowly, the greasy marks on the girl’s neck, on her shoulders, distinguished themselves into fingerprints.

Angela turned the photograph over. In pencil on the back, so faded that the scrawl was nearly gone, she read a name she hadn’t noticed before.
Polina
. Angela didn’t possess many things from her father. Her mother had left her some letters, though, and this was handwriting that she recognized. Her father had written with flourish. The corner of the photograph cut into her palm. She lifted it, weighed it, measured it as a physical object, turned it back over.

When she looked at the image again, some of its initial luster was already gone. Exposed to the air, the finish was relinquishing its vitality. But the girl inside continued to stare back at her with the same loss and the same defiance, and with the same profound beauty. As Angela looked closer, the background behind the girl began to take shape, and the opaque edge of a long mirror drew itself from the softer shadows. It came as a small shock to her when she realized that Polina was standing half naked in the same room where her father had shot his self-portrait.

When the gray plastic phone on the nightstand rang, Angela jumped. She touched her heart with her fingers. Then she picked up the heavy receiver and spoke to her husband. “Lutz,” she said. “Lutz.” And then she closed her mouth and her eyes and waited for the reassurance of his voice over the long-distance wire.

Jutland, Denmark. November 1941
.

A tall farmhand stood alone in a harrowed field, contemplating the earth at his feet. The wind was howling, blowing from the east. Rain wasn’t falling yet, but the sky was low. Drizzle hung like gauze in the air, then whipped sideways in horizontal sheets in the stronger gusts. It peppered the farmhand’s face, swamped his left ear, stung his eyes. But he hardly noticed. The earth was soaked in blood. He lowered himself into a squat, lifted a clump of dirt from a furrow. Its tilled edge was as smooth as if it had been cleaved from a diamond. Squinting, he studied the bloody soil, then scanned the barren field for signs of a wounded animal. When he dropped the clod, a broken barley stalk scraped his fingers. He wiped his hands on his thick wool trousers. The blood was fresh — the wounded animal couldn’t be far. Fredrik hoped that it wasn’t one of the Nielsens’ pigs, but he already knew that it was.

He patted the Luger in his pocket, set out over the dale toward the copse on the southern border of the farm. The rich land undulated in front of him like the swells of an ocean, steel gray, petrified into obsidian. His boots dug into the hard mud beneath the weight of his long, lanky body. As lean as he had become in the year and a half since the war had reached Denmark, he was heavy. Isabella, his favorite whore in Aalborg, had laughed at him and told him that he was getting fat. She was an immigrant, from Italy, and he didn’t understand her well. Still, he hadn’t liked her laugh. His blackened fingers had clamped her mouth shut, and he hadn’t let go until she bit him.

Five minutes passed without much change in the landscape, and then he was standing in the shadow of the thicket. The naked birch trees swayed in the wind like seaweed. Above him, the iron blades of a windmill completed a turn, then swung sideways when the storm shifted direction. The rusty mechanism whined. He shielded his eyes with a hand and, as he had come to do over the years, without thinking read the sky. At last, rain was beginning to fall. The squeal of the pig barely reached him over the rush of sleet and hail.

Sheltered beneath the eaves of a shed, the farmhand’s dog lay poised like a lion, panting despite the cold. Its eyes were narrowed, trained on its prey. Washed scarlet in its own blood, the pig was still on its feet. It had reached the end of the property, seeking refuge in the trees. The fencing prevented it from straying any farther. Perhaps it sensed already that it was running out of time. Its heart was beginning to fibrillate. Its breathing had become shallow. When it raised its head, its face mimed a scream.

When Fredrik stepped into view, the pig glanced at him, then — still hungry in spite of its imminent death — went back to sniffing the ground as if the shepherd-collie weren’t sitting
a leap away. It shoved its snout beneath a particularly large clump of dirt. Blood leaked down its front legs. The dog didn’t stand. But its muscles tensed as it readied itself for the kill.

“You don’t want to do that, Bruno,” Fredrik said. The dog’s face twitched. Fredrik noticed the dried blood matting the fur around its mouth. “A chicken last week, now a pig,” he growled. “You’re not just hungry, Bruno, are you? You’re enjoying this.” He met its stare. “Or perhaps you just don’t like it anymore when I tell you what to do? You don’t like being a second-class citizen —” Reflexively, he raised his left hand and contemplated a series of faint scars on his knuckles — the type of scars one might expect to find on the knuckles of a man who, as a child, had been disciplined with a ruler. “Maybe someday someone will tell me what that means, eh?” When he returned his attention to the dog, his right hand strayed to the pistol in his pocket. He wasn’t thinking about the scarcity of bullets or the proximity of the Nazi barracks on the road to Aalborg. Still, he left the weapon where it was. “I knew your mother, you ugly mutt. Your father could have been one of the Nielsens’ sheepdogs. Or maybe the mongrel that belonged to the old man who lived in Sulsted. What was his name? The old sailor from Sulsted. He was captain of a schooner, just like
gamle
Karl — a pederast, too, same as
gamle
Karl.”