The Second Winter (8 page)

The farmer was standing a few steps removed from the Jews, engaged in quiet conversation with Axel. Oskar stood in the shadows behind them, watching. “This man is your driver,” the farmer said in broken German to the Jews, raising his voice. “He will take you to the coast.”

The old Jew’s eyes had lit with a glimmer of hope upon seeing Fredrik, and he still clung to it despite his misgivings. He cleared his throat, addressed the tall man. “Perhaps you can help us.” His German was distinguished. He spoke like a professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna, because this, until the Germans annexed Austria, was what he had been. “This gentleman here is telling us that we owe him fifty marks each for our last two nights here with him. Our contact told us that we were to pay him fifty marks — I mean to say, fifty marks in total —”

Fredrik shrugged. “We had better get moving,” he said to Axel. “The storm hasn’t let up. The roads will be muddy.”

The old Jew turned to the farmer. “I was told fifty marks,” he insisted.

“It’s a hundred and fifty,” the farmer replied. His German accent was thick, as if he was mocking the language. “Fifty each, or I instruct my friend here to drive you south again. He doesn’t care which direction he’s driving, isn’t that right, Gregersen?”

Fredrik barely heard him. “Are these your things?” he asked the old Jew, speaking in Danish.

The professor glanced at him, then turned back to confer with his wife. He wanted to protest longer. “They’re robbing us, Maria,” he insisted. “They’re taking advantage of our situation, when we will need every last mark we have.” But the fear on his wife’s face alarmed him. Her cheeks were taut, her eyes were stricken. They were at these people’s mercy. They had left their home behind. They were running from certain slaughter. When her husband remonstrated, she shook her head. She had heard enough. She bent down to open an elegant leather satchel at their feet. Fredrik’s eyes fastened on the suitcase. The old Jew touched his wife’s forearm, knelt next to the bag himself. He dug around inside, then withdrew a small handful of German currency. “Here you are, then,” he said to the farmer. “One hundred and fifty.”

The farmer took the time to count the bills before pocketing them.

“Are these all your things?” Fredrik asked again.

“Yes,” the young woman answered him, paying special attention to him still, Fredrik noticed.

He scooped up their belongings in his massive hands. “Get the rest,” he said to Axel.

“I’ll take this one myself,” the old Jew said, pulling the leather satchel out of Axel’s grip.

Fredrik’s eyes met the old Jew’s. “Sure you will,” he said. Then he led the way out of the barn, into the storm. The rain drenched him as he shoved their carefully packed goods into a crude wooden crate. “You’ll travel underneath,” he said to the old man. “You and your wife and your daughter.”

“Underneath?” The old man’s glasses were slick with rain, and he couldn’t see where Fredrik was directing him. He raised his voice to be heard, continued to speak in German. “I don’t understand. Underneath what?”

“Shhh,” Fredrik said. “Quiet, understand me?”

“Underneath the truck,” Axel said, in German that was even worse than the farmer’s.

“There,” Fredrik said. He grabbed the Jew by the shoulder. Beneath his fingers, the old man’s bones felt as light as a bird’s. “There!” He shoved him roughly toward the side of the truck, directed him to a gap in between the oversize tires. From there, it was possible to climb onto a steel platform that had been hung from the truck’s chassis.

“We can’t climb in there,” the old man started to protest.

“Yes we can, Papa,” the young woman said.

“Yes we can,” her mother said, at the same time.

The Jews were hesitating, wasting time. Fredrik threw the wooden crate into the rear of the truck, fastened the gate, checked the ties on the tarp. “You’ve got two minutes,” he said. “There’s room for eight people. You’re just three. Climb in. Get your clothes dirty. I’ll leave with you or without you, understand? Two minutes.”

Oskar helped the young woman in first. As she slid into the gap, Fredrik disappeared around the truck. Axel climbed into the cab on the passenger side. The engine turned over with a guttural rumble. The lights carved tallow columns into the rain. When the girl’s skirt caught on a spear of rusty metal and
hiked up her leg, Oskar’s eyes were drawn to the black hair matted against the white fabric of her underpants. He continued to stare until the girl had pulled herself onto the platform and her mother was climbing in after her.

“Are you okay, Rachel?” the old man asked his daughter. “Are you okay, Maria?” he asked his wife.

And then it was just Oskar and the old Jew standing in the rain together, and when Oskar reached out to help him into the gap, the old man shrugged the boy’s hand off him as roughly as he knew how. “To hell with you, you dirty Danish bastard,” the old man said.

Oskar waited until the old man was safely underneath the carriage, then climbed into the cab next to Axel. The overweight truck started forward through the slick mud with a lurch. Fredrik followed the weak headlights onto the dark road. The hard seat dug into Oskar’s ribs.

By the time they reached Agersted, it was already after five. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but farms were rousing themselves from sleep. Here and there in the dark, lit windows gave dimension to the landscape, and the salty air was tinged with smoke swirling from chimneys. The rain had stopped, but the wind was still blowing. The rich farmland was covered with a blanket of mist. They had two miles left to walk to the coast — at least half an hour across the pastures in between, probably forty-five minutes, an hour if the Jews didn’t move quickly enough. At sunrise, when the air began to clear, the fisherman waiting for the Jews would set sail. To linger any longer would draw suspicion from any Germans stationed along the coast. Fredrik reached into the gap between the tires, grabbed the first arm he touched, yanked the old woman out. The bones in
her wrist bent in his hand, and she tried to resist. “You’re hurting me,” she said, but he didn’t let go. He dragged her clear of the truck, dropped her onto the wet, sandy soil, reached back inside for the girl.

Oskar helped the old woman to her feet while Fredrik pulled her daughter out. The girl was rattled from the journey, and her teeth were chattering. Her hair was splattered with mud, and it clung to her cheeks. Fredrik let his hands travel over her breasts — he was surprised at how firm they were. She didn’t complain. She stumbled, fell to her knees, lifted herself up without help.

The old man was next. Fredrik reached into the gap. The cashmere coat was wet, but the fabric was still softer than anything the laborer had felt for many years. It triggered a memory — something dating back to his childhood at the family’s villa outside Copenhagen — but just as quickly the memory flitted away. His fingers wrapped around the old man’s feeble shoulder. The Jew wasn’t helping him at all. He had gotten used to the truck. Maybe he didn’t want to go any farther. “Come on, you old sow. If you don’t get yourself out of there, I’ll leave you here. Understand?”

Fredrik tugged, and the old man’s head emerged between the oversize truck tires like a calf’s head from the vagina of a pregnant cow, wet with its mother’s blood. His glasses had slipped, and they bound his mouth like a gag. His thinning hair covered his forehead, thick with coagulating plasma. One eye was open, the other was closed. This made Fredrik snicker. The old man had become a clown — they would pay him well at Tivoli for a performance like this. He made sense of a gash at the top of the Jew’s head. A rock must have kicked up from the front tires, clipped him across the pate. Fredrik deposited the limp body on the mud. He was calculating whether
the cashmere coat could somehow be made big enough to fit him — Amalia was handy with a needle and thread, but no, it was far too small, it would fit Amalia better — when the old man coughed and opened both his eyes.

“Is he all right?” Axel asked from the shadows.

“What happened to him?” Oskar wanted to know.

“Harold!” the old woman said. Her voice emerged in both a whisper and a shriek.

“Hush!” Fredrik warned her.

“Harold,” she said again.

“Papa, what is it, what is it?” The girl fell to her knees next to her father, pulled him free from Fredrik’s hands.

“He’s been hit by a rock,” Fredrik said, stating what he thought was the obvious. “Didn’t you notice when you were underneath? You must have heard something. A loud thud, I guess. Didn’t he shout?” He straightened up, left the girl alone to take care of her father. He joined Axel at the rear of the truck.

In the dark, the door of a barn opened, and Farmer Brandt’s cousin — who would take the truck from them and drive it to the market up north — stepped outside, punched into a silhouette by the soft, flickering light of a lantern behind him. Axel paused long enough to identify him, then reached inside the truck for the crate containing the Jews’ belongings. “Olaf doesn’t look so happy to see us this morning,” he said to Fredrik.

Fredrik didn’t hear him. Even as he helped Axel lift the crate, his fingers were remembering the texture of the old Jew’s coat. The memory of a smell, of urine and wool, permeated his nostrils. Growing up in Copenhagen, though there were more than enough rooms in the house, he had shared a bedroom with his older brother. When Ludvig was ten years
old, he was still wetting his bed. Fredrik was only nine, but he was already the taller and stronger of the two. The stench of Ludvig’s piss had woken him. It was a sickly odor, but cloying, like the fragrance of a flower — not the smell Fredrik had come to associate with piss in his adult life. One night, he had gotten out of bed, gathered his brother’s blankets, and, without having a clear idea of what he intended, shoved them into Ludvig’s face. If Ludvig’s screams hadn’t brought their father into the room, he probably would have suffocated him. Those blankets of Ludvig’s, the ones he had soiled with his piss, had been cashmere, too, every bit as soft as this old man’s coat. Fredrik steadied his hands on the crate, squeezed his eyes shut, quelled the sensation of sleep rising from inside his chest. It was as insistent as nausea.

Olaf Brandt made a quick assessment of the old man’s condition, then approached the two Danes behind the truck. “If he dies, you carry him.” He was a short, stout man, but he wasn’t intimidated by Fredrik’s size. He placed a meaty hand on the taller man’s shoulder. “Understand? You carry him.” The rotund truck driver had woken up and filled his belly with fried fish. The stink clung to him like cologne.

Fredrik bristled, then focused on the crate, pried off the lid with his callused fingers.

“Understand?” the truck driver asked again. He gave Fredrik an extra shake, and Fredrik’s body stiffened.

“He understands,” Axel said.

The truck driver ignored him. “I don’t want a corpse on my property.” A cloth suitcase came undone in Fredrik’s hands, and a few garments spilled. The truck driver tried to give them a kick. His boot passed through a silk scarf with so little resistance that the buffoon nearly lost his balance. “His things, too,” the truck driver said, cleaving to his point. “If he dies, you
carry him to Sulbeck. Dump his body in the sea. I don’t want a shred of evidence he was here.”

“Take it easy, Olaf,” Axel said. He put an arm around the truck driver’s shoulders, guided him away from Fredrik.

“They’re becoming a real pain, these Krauts,” the truck driver said. “They used to leave us alone. Now they’re asking questions.”

“Oskar,” Fredrik said, raising his voice. “Bring them here. Tell them to hurry. They’re going to have to carry their belongings themselves.”

The old Jew stumbled toward him, on his feet again. His forehead needed stitches. Blood was oozing down his face. In the dark, it looked like oil. “I’ve been hurt,” he said to Fredrik in German. “I don’t think I can carry all these things. We’ll need your help.”

Fredrik shoved a handful of loose clothes at the old man. “All of it,” he said. The old man didn’t react, and Fredrik pressed the clothing into his scrawny chest. He found the Jew’s wife over his shoulder. “All of it,” he repeated to her. Thinking to intervene, Oskar bent to gather a few loose items himself. Fredrik gave him a shove. When he tried to continue — quietly, without protest — his father gave him another.

“Let him alone, Fredrik.” Axel’s voice was tentative. There would come a time this morning when Fredrik would snap. He could feel it. “If Oskar wants to carry these Jews’ suitcases, let him.”

Noticing a nerve twitching in Axel’s cheek, Fredrik snorted. “You don’t have to worry about me,” he said. “We’ve done this before, haven’t we?” He forgot about Oskar, pulled the vial from his pocket, slammed two pills back like a salute. After finding the saliva to swallow them, he held the small brown
jar toward Axel, waited for him to open his hand, meted out a rough chunk of amphetamine.

The truck driver’s eyes narrowed, but he held out his palm anyway when Fredrik offered him a pill, too. He examined the tablet on the tips of a greasy finger and thumb, held it to his nose, took a suspicious sniff. “Where are you getting this?” Fredrik returned the jar to his pocket. His attention had already been drawn back to the Jews. The old man was clinging to his leather satchel, nothing more. The daughter had a suitcase in either hand. The wife had collected as many things as she could into an old lace tablecloth and had hoisted the lumpy package into her arms. The bundle, he noticed, clanked when she moved with the unmistakable twang of silver.