The Second Winter, page 13
Yes, yes, I know, I know, Jurgen interrupted, unable to stop himself. He survived the blast, thanks be to God, and came home again in one piece, got married some years later, had a child — your father — and then one day, when he was playing with him on the floor, your infant father kicked your grandfather in the chest and dislodged the shrapnel into his heart, and he died like that, in his house, and what a strange world it is, am I right? Such a strange world, where a bomb can kill you half a lifetime after it explodes when you are safe inside the walls of your own home. Jurgen had managed to repeat the entire, well-worn story in almost a single breath, and when he reached the end of his tirade, he bent double and held himself propped up on his knees and wheezed and enjoyed the room’s laughter. Sparks flew up the chimney behind him, and the children — who were still awake, past their bedtime — began to chase each other in circles, caught up in their father’s merriment.
Amalia took a step in retreat. The laughter and voices faded. The children’s giggles trailed away. Once again, she surveyed the dining room. The candles had burned down, a few had gone out. There was nothing left for her to do but wait for the crystal.
Midnight was just a few minutes away by the time Amalia was setting the last of the goblets back into the display cabinet in the dining room. Mrs. Nielsen had come into the kitchen to send Birgit home an hour earlier. She had been planning to give them both a little present, two crowns each, but that was before the maids had broken the cup. The Royal Copenhagen had been in the family for two generations. Four crowns wouldn’t begin to pay for the damage. Still, it was Christmas. If Mr. Nielsen agreed, Mrs. Nielsen would look the other way and wouldn’t dock them any more than their Christmas bonus. Birgit had thanked Mrs. Nielsen and promised to return in the morning. Amalia, too — her hands clasped at the base of her puffy tummy, her eyes trained on the floor — had managed her own thank you, ma’am, just like Birgit. Now, she was stretching onto her toes. She slid the last glass back into its place, made sure that the arrangement was properly symmetrical, then closed the cabinet door. The latch snapped shut with a snug click.
Back in the kitchen, she took a cursory look around, then crossed stealthily to the pantry, where she had stashed a small package for herself on one of the upper shelves. On the floor above, footsteps thudded across the heavy planks, voices rumbled. Christina was still awake, and a peal of her laughter echoed down the stairs. The narrow pantry was dark, cool. Once again, Amalia stood on her toes. Next to a large sack of flour, her fingers found the cloth napkins she had tied together into a bundle. She hadn’t had time to wrap the bundle well, and the ends of the napkins began to unravel as she slid the package of goodies off the ledge. Once it was safely in her hands, she carried it to the counter. Loosening the knots, she picked up a small pie she had stolen from the cakes and treats the cook had spent the day preparing, set it next to the empty drying rack. The fragrance of baked blueberries hit her nose, mixing with the scent of soap from the sink. Underneath the pie were three savory tarts — one for Oskar, one for her father, one for her. She straightened them on the napkin, then set the pie carefully back on top. Her mouth watered as she tied the bundle back together, this time securing it properly. Her hands were shaking. She couldn’t remember ever going so long with so little food.
“What have you got there?”
Amalia’s heart burst inside her chest. She hadn’t heard anyone approach. As she twisted around, she tried to hide the package, and it slipped off the counter. The pie tin landed with a loud twang, and crumbs jumped across the floor. In the dim light, it was impossible to read Mr. Nielsen’s expression. “I was just leaving, sir,” she managed to utter.
“I can see that. With your hands full, too.” Mr. Nielsen started to chuckle, but cleared his throat instead. “It’s been a long day, hasn’t it?” As if to emphasize the point, in the living room the antique clock whirred then began to chime the twelve beats of midnight.
“Yes, sir.”
Pursing his lips, Mr. Nielsen stroked his mustache as he appraised the mess on the floor. Floorboards creaked over their heads. “You had better clean that up before the missus comes downstairs. You wouldn’t want her to see this. Stealing food from the party, she wouldn’t like that.”
Amalia’s hands tightened into fists. “I didn’t mean — I didn’t get the chance to eat —”
The huge man knelt with a wheeze and snatched up the pie tin.
“No, sir, let me get that —”
“Don’t panic.” Still leaning over, he looked up at the girl with a red-faced smile. She froze where she was, uncertain whether to kneel down next to him. “I’m just teasing, Amalia. It’s Christmas. You’ve been a real help around here. The sewing, the laundry, even farm work when I need it. Gertrude told me something about a cup. That’s why I came downstairs.” He set the pie tin on the counter. “I thought I would give you your bonus.” He glanced over his shoulder, then dug his hand into his pocket. “You can’t tell the missus, agreed?”
“No, sir, you don’t have to do that.”
Mr. Nielsen pulled out a few crowns, without counting them held them toward her. When she hesitated, he grabbed her by the wrist and shoved the coins into her hand. “Not a word to Gertrude, understand?”
Amalia felt her cheeks burn.
“Well, good night, then,” he said. “You had better clean that up before you leave, though — not a crumb on the floor, or Gertrude will find it, you know how she is.” He paused in the doorway. “And why don’t you take a bottle of wine, too?”
“Sir?”
Mr. Nielsen opened the door to the pantry, grabbed a bottle from one of the shelves, set it down on the counter. “For your father. I know how much Fredrik likes a glass.”
“Sir — please — I mean thank you — it’s not necessary —”
“Merry Christmas, Amalia,” Mr. Nielsen said. Then he left the kitchen. She waited until his footsteps reached the stairs, then dropped the coins into her pocket, bent to her knees, gathered together the pie and the tarts, bundled them carefully back into the napkins. The room was dark, but despite her fatigue, as Mr. Nielsen instructed she made certain that no crumbs were left hidden in the shadows. Then, grabbing the bottle from the counter, she switched off the light and let herself outside.
Across the white expanse that separated the two houses, lights were still burning downstairs in the cottage. The weak yellow glow coruscated on the smooth layer of snow in the pulse of the storm. The distance was deceptive. The cottage lay less than a quarter of a mile from the Nielsens’ manor. But Amalia couldn’t simply short-cut across the field. As soft as the snow looked, the ground underneath was uneven and rough. Sleet sprayed her face, stung her eyes. She brushed a hand over her cheeks as if she was wiping tears, tucked the bundle beneath her arm, set out up the driveway toward the gate.
As the huge house shrank behind her, the landscape swelled around her. For the first few minutes, the cottage only seemed to get farther away. With the moon hidden, shadows swallowed it until it was barely visible at all. The glow in the windows dimmed. The bottle of wine turned to ice in her hands. It would be warm inside, she told herself — and how good it would feel finally to get off her feet. And it was these thoughts, and the prospect of surprising her father and brother with the food, that tugged her forward through the cold. By the time she reached the front path, her shoes were soaked. She slid on the stairs, caught herself on the banister. When she pushed the door open, the heat from the fire seared her face.
From his chair next to the hearth, Fredrik looked up at her through bleary, drunken eyes. He had been dozing, and he nearly lost control of a bottle of whiskey propped on his knee. “Where have you been?” he asked. “I thought you were upstairs asleep already with your brother.”
Amalia stamped the snow off her shoes in the vestibule. Her feet ached as they began to thaw. The cottage was abruptly quiet after having braved the long walk outside. “Isn’t Oskar still awake?”
Fredrik shrugged his shoulders.
“I brought you something,” Amalia said.
Fredrik turned away from his daughter, stared into the fire. He had just placed another log on top a few minutes before, and flames were clawing the tarry chimney.
“Are you hungry? Have you eaten?”
Fredrik located the bundle in her hands. “Something to eat?”
Amalia made sure that she wasn’t tracking snow inside, then approached her father. “It’s from the Nielsens,” she said, offering him the food. “From their Christmas dinner —”
Fredrik snatched the package from his daughter. The movement was so rough and clumsy, and Amalia’s fingers were so frozen, that she lost her grip on the bottle of wine, and it struck the stone hearth, where it shattered into a million green shards in a pool of liquid as dark as blood. Fredrik leaned forward to examine the mess, then tore open the bundle. When he saw what was inside, he snorted, then tossed the treats into the fire. Amalia’s face flushed red. Tears stung her eyes. It had happened so quickly — she was too stunned even to ask her father why.
“I won’t have you bringing me their scraps,” he said. “Understand? And you don’t need it either, do you? Look at you — look how fat you are.”
A sob choked Amalia’s throat.
“Clean this up,” Fredrik said, gesturing toward the broken glass.
Amalia knelt at his feet. She gathered a few of the larger pieces, then stopped. She was on the verge of collapse. “No,” she said. “No, I won’t.” Then she stood on weak legs and left the room and climbed the stairs.
Oskar was lying in bed, but he wasn’t asleep. Fredrik’s children shared a bedroom. It was divided roughly into two by a closet in one corner, which gave the room an irregular shape. On the side without a window, Oskar’s narrow, steel-frame bed was pushed snug against the wall. A sheet nailed to the ceiling provided a privacy screen, but it didn’t keep out sound. He listened as his sister pulled off her clothes. The coils of the mattress and the wire mesh beneath it squeaked when she sat down. He knew this series of screeches well. In his bones. He had heard these sounds in his sleep going on years now. They had become a reassurance to him. His sister was home, he wasn’t alone. Her stiff sheets rustled as she lifted her legs off the floor. The bed groaned, she exhaled. A few minutes later, Oskar realized that she was crying. “You’re late getting home,” he said, in a whisper. “I was starting to worry.”
“I have to wake up soon,” she replied. “I had better sleep.” Downstairs, the grate clanged when Fredrik threw another log onto the fire. The smell of smoke climbed the stairs.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m just tired.”
Oskar’s eyes had long since adjusted to the dark. He focused on his hands. His father had asked him to dig a trench inside the barn, to keep out the runoff from the accumulating snow and ice. A callus had torn off from the pad of his thumb, and the wound was throbbing. “Not much of a Christmas,” he said. This was the second Christmas since the German invasion. In his memory, the first hadn’t been quite as meager.
Amalia tried to stifle her sobs. “I didn’t eat,” she said.
Oskar picked at the ripped skin on his thumb. “When I was four or five, Dad gave me a tiny boat for Christmas — you probably don’t remember, because you were still a baby. He made it for me himself — he split a walnut in half, then glued a bench inside, a small sail, too, cut out of paper.” He was speaking softly. Amalia had to strain to hear him. And then he stopped. A memory teased his consciousness, almost too distant to grasp. He was squatting next to a stream of runoff on the side of a road, holding the walnut shell in his fingers. This had been long before the war, when the family still lived in town with their mother, too. He had dropped the vessel into the stream, then had started after it. When it reached a hill, it sped faster and faster, then, before he could reach it, abruptly cascaded into a storm drain, lost. A few days after, he had come upon the tiny boat again, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, floating serenely in a pool of water formed behind a dam of branches in a ditch. It hadn’t occurred to him to marvel that the water that carried the toy made this very same trip every time it rained. His fascination lay with the miniature boat. He took a step into the icy water to retrieve it, then thought better of the impulse and let it go where it would. Maybe he would chance upon it again, somewhere else.
“I remember the dress Dad gave me one year,” Amalia said.
“I got an air rifle that year,” Oskar remembered. “One that really worked. I shot it with Dad, and I hit a bird.”
“It was a white dress,” Amalia said. “A big white dress, made of lace. I still have it, I think. But it’s too small for me now.”
Oskar, who had been thinking about the poor bird he had killed, thought about his sister instead, coming back downstairs, beaming, in her dress. “Do you remember,” he asked, “what Christmas felt like then?”
“We were children,” Amalia said.
“That was four years ago, wasn’t it?”
“Six,” Amalia corrected him. “That was the same year we moved here.”
“We haven’t seen Mother,” Oskar said. “We used to see her, at least for Christmas. Or Uncle Lars, either — remember Uncle Lars? He used to bring us presents.”
“I’m making her a sweater,” Amalia said.
“Are you?”
“I haven’t finished yet. It’s red, but I’m not sure — I don’t know what color she’ll want.”
“Red,” Oskar said. “She has a red jacket. I remember how much she likes red.”
Brother and sister stopped talking. Downstairs, the fire crackled. Their father settled backward comfortably in the large armchair.
“All you had to do,” Oskar said, raising his voice suddenly, nearly into a shout — these were words directed at his father, “was tell her Merry Christmas. That’s all. Merry Christmas.”
In the aftermath of the outburst, the house waited, as tense as a hound with its ears pricked. Outside, the wind gusted. The roof thatch ticked, the rafters creaked. Amalia stopped crying. What was Oskar doing? He had never challenged his father before. “Eh?” A few beats passed. Fredrik’s boots shook the floor as he dropped his feet from the ottoman. “What’s that?”
Amalia could hear Oskar take a deep breath. “She’s been out working all day,” he said. “Didn’t you know that? All day on Christmas Eve, and she’s seventeen, and all she wanted — all she wanted from you — was to hear you say Merry Christmas. No gifts. Just Merry Christmas.”
“Shhh,” Amalia said.
The strain of Fredrik’s weight tested the chair’s aging armrests. The floorboards complained as he gathered himself, pushed himself to his feet. When he reached the base of the stairway, his shadow darkened the room upstairs. The banister whined. The stair treads sagged beneath his boots. He was so tall that he had to bow to squeeze through the doorway. The smell of whiskey accompanied him into the small room, the sweet smell, too, of the fire. He took two uncertain steps, banged a boot against the corner of the closet, stopped at the sheet. A vague silhouette hovered on the thin cloth.
Oskar stopped breathing. The reprisal would be sharp and disproportionate. The back of his father’s hand would bruise his cheek, maybe tear his lip. Only a few months ago, Fredrik had beaten him with his belt until his back had bled. Oskar watched as his father’s gigantic hand approached the edge of the curtain. The sheet dipped backward, and in the dim light, Fredrik’s cheeks glistened with the sheen of an oily halo. He rocked slightly, and the fabric began to tear from one of the nails. Oskar tried to swallow his fear. He readied himself for the lashes that would follow.
But Fredrik didn’t approach farther. He stood where he was, staring back at his son, catching his breath as if the short climb up the stairs had winded him. Then he let go of the sheet, took an unsteady step toward Amalia’s bed instead. “Is it really Christmas?” His voice was incredulous. He didn’t sit down. He swayed in front of his daughter like a birch tree.
Amalia didn’t answer. She drew her blankets to her chin. All her father could make out was the fuzzy outline of her shape, the tears glistening beneath her eyes.
“My little girl,” the farmhand said.
Oskar raised himself onto his bony elbow.
“You know you’re my little girl,” the farmhand said. “Don’t you? You’ve always been my little girl.”
And you’ve always been my daddy. But Amalia couldn’t speak the words out loud. They formed a whisper in her mind, a memory of what she might have said years before.
“It’s Christmas, and I don’t have anything for you.”
“I don’t want anything,” Amalia whispered.
“Maybe a story,” Oskar said.
Remembering his son, Fredrik swiveled, grabbed at the sheet, tore it from the first two nails. It dropped, opening a cavity into the small space Oskar considered his own. “What kind of story? What do you mean?”
“She always likes to hear the same thing,” Oskar said.
“Does she?”
“You know she does.”
Fredrik shook his head. His unwashed hair hadn’t been cut in months — in a year, maybe — and it hung over his ears. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“About when she was born,” Oskar said. “You know how it always makes her laugh. To hear how she wasn’t breathing when she was born, how when the midwife handed her to you she was turning blue and you handed her back and the woman had to spank her and shake her to make her breathe.”
“She looked like an angel,” the farmhand said. “That’s all I remember about that. She was the tiniest baby I have ever seen, and she looked exactly like an angel.”
Oskar peered at his father. In her bed, Amalia looked at him, too. The fire downstairs was casting its shadowy glow all the way up here, and the light undulated on his shoulders and in his filthy, greasy hair.
