The Second Winter, page 24
PAPER HEARTS
21.
Jutland. December 28, 1941.
Polina became aware of the stiff pillow before she opened her eyes. Bristles of straw pierced its rough slipcover, poked her cheek, scratched her skin. During the night, the air inside the cottage had been redolent with smoke. Now she woke to the smell of Amalia’s sweat and the dank, ferrous odors that rose from the kitchen and the cooling bricks of the hearth. The dusty, grassy scent of the pillow reminded her of her house in Kraków. She had slept on a pillow stuffed with straw there, too. She remembered this fragrance, this texture. She remembered waking and running her fingertips over the lines and indentations imprinted in her cheek after a long sleep. She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. It had been years since she had slept so well. Dangling from the shoelace, the diamond ring slid between her breasts, and a forgotten emotion stirred inside her. Perhaps there was something special about this house. Perhaps there was a place for her here. She tried to fasten down the feeling. And then it struck her that, for the first time since the war began, her thoughts were tinged with hope.
Downstairs, there was a sudden crash, and the small house shook. Clutching her nightshirt to her chest, Polina sat up on the mattress. She had woken at six when Oskar stepped from behind the curtain and stumbled from the room, then had fallen back to sleep again. She could tell from the light filtering through the window that it was already eight or nine. She had assumed that she was alone. Had this been the sound of a door being slammed? No — the noise was too violent for that, too sustained. Her feet touched the rug. She pushed herself up from the bed, tiptoed to the door.
On the floor below, nothing moved. She crept to the stairs. At the landing, she waited, listening. A man snorted and groaned, and, as uncharacteristically weak as it was, she recognized the voice as Fredrik’s. Holding her nightshirt closed, she hurried the rest of the way down the stairs and peered into the kitchen. The giant farmhand lay sprawled on his back beside the table. Blood was oozing from a gash on his scalp, over his ear. Polina took a tentative step toward him.
His eyes opened just a crack, but Fredrik saw the fuzzy outline of someone approaching him. His head was reeling from his fall — his vision hadn’t cleared. The taste of amphetamine was so strong in the back of his throat that he wanted to gag. He scrambled backward, clawing the air, half raised himself against the cabinet beneath the sink. His boot hit the table and knocked it sideways, sending everything on the tabletop — the salt cellars, a couple of stray glasses, a plate of bread that Oskar had left for Polina, some silverware — splintering onto the floor in a broken heap. By the time he recognized the girl, he had squeezed himself into the corner. The fear in his eyes dissipated, but not before Polina had seen it. He pushed himself up, stood to his full height, held himself steady with a hand on the edge of the sink.
“You’re bleeding,” Polina said.
Fredrik grunted. He fingered the wound on the side of his head. This wasn’t the first time that he had blacked out like this. In fact, the spells had become more frequent than he wanted to admit. The amphetamine he was consuming was to blame. His body needed to sleep — it almost felt as if he had forgotten how. This was the first time, though, that he had actually harmed himself.
“You’re hurt,” she said.
“I don’t need your help.”
Polina took a step closer. “Let me take a look.” Reaching for his wrist, to move his fingers away from the cut, she wasn’t prepared for the swipe of his knuckles. The blow glanced off her forearms. Still, the contact nearly knocked her off her feet.
“Stay back,” he barked.
Now Polina kept her distance. Her eyes dropped, and she wondered whether to stay or to go.
“Clean this up,” Fredrik told her, gesturing at the mess on the floor. He found a towel on the counter, pressed it to the side of his head, took it away to measure the amount of blood. The cut was deep, almost to the bone. The wound wasn’t dangerous, but it would be difficult to stanch the bleeding. He clamped the towel to his head, pushed past Polina toward the bathroom. “Save the salt if you can,” he instructed her. “It wouldn’t do to waste it.”
She waited until he had disappeared into the bathroom. The pipes whined as he opened the taps. Then she knelt on the hard, cold floor to gather the scattered kitchenware and pick up the broken pieces of glass. When she dropped the debris into the trash, it hit the bottom of the empty container with a shrill, vitreous clank.
There was tea steeping on the table for him when Fredrik emerged from the bathroom. Polina had poured a cup for herself as well, and she was carrying it with her as she left the kitchen and headed for the stairs. “Sit down with me,” Fredrik told her. Then, when she hesitated, “Oskar is in the barn with the pigs.”
“I’m cold,” Polina objected. She wasn’t only making an excuse. She was wearing nothing else beneath her nightshirt, and her feet were uncovered. The fire hadn’t been lit since the early morning. It was no more than forty degrees inside the cottage.
“Sit down,” he repeated. “Drink your tea with me.” He took a seat at the table, then waited for her to join him before picking up his cup. “My daughter is across the way at the Nielsens’ house.”
Polina sat on the edge of a chair and blew on her tea. She had filled the pot with too many leaves, and the brew was sour. It crossed her mind to begin a conversation herself, but she had little to say. If he didn’t mind the silence, neither did she. She was finishing the dregs, already preparing to stand from the table and leave the kitchen, before Fredrik finally decided to open his mouth.
“I don’t understand,” he began, taking his time — leaning back in his chair until the wood creaked underneath him, narrowing his eyes as if he were contemplating something that would perplex a man with a far larger mind, “why it is that Oskar brought you back here from Copenhagen. And, to tell you the truth, I don’t understand either why you came back here with him.”
Polina set her cup down. There was a draft in the kitchen, and she suppressed a shiver. Her cheeks, though, were warm. “Perhaps,” she responded, “he realized if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be able to forget me.”
Fredrik rocked forward in his chair, reached for the pot of tea. The girl’s candor hadn’t surprised him. She wore it naturally, as many whores did. She had been stripped of artifice, just as she had been stripped bare of everything else. He poured himself another cup. By the time he thought to refill hers, too, there were only a few drops left. He let them dribble from the spout, then set the pot back down with a clank. “And you?”
Polina understood the question. She simply wasn’t certain how to answer it.
“Do you spend your time thinking about him?” Fredrik prompted her, mistaking her silence for confusion.
“I think that it takes a woman longer,” she answered at last, “to come to know a man.”
Fredrik acknowledged the parry with a sniff. He started to take a sip of tea, then stopped. “You’re not interested in him,” he said. “He’s still a boy, and you’re not the innocent he thinks you are.” He was lifting his cup to his lips when the cut on his scalp opened again, and a large drop of blood rolled down his cheek. He didn’t react quickly enough to keep the drop from tumbling off his chin and splashing onto the rim of his cup. The blood mixed with his tea and splattered onto his lap.
“Do you have a needle and thread?” Polina asked him, ignoring his last accusation.
“The bleeding will stop,” he said.
“It needs to be stitched.”
“In the drawer,” he told her. He nodded toward the cabinet next to the sink, then watched her as she crossed the kitchen to retrieve the sewing kit. Polina had been eating well in the weeks since she had left the hotel on Nyhavn to live with Hermann. There was evidence of this in the luster of her hair, and she had filled out a bit. Still, her limbs were long, and they were thin. Her shoulders were slender at the top of her sleeves. She was younger, Fredrik thought, than he had realized.
The only thread she could find was coarse and black. When she lit a match to sterilize its point, the needle turned red in the flame, which flared around the steel as if the metal refused to be touched. “Bend toward me,” she instructed him. “You’re too tall, even if I stand.”
Fredrik rested his elbows on the table and tilted his head. The blood was still flowing, and she tamped the gash with the towel, then separated its edges with her fingers. His hair fell in her way. When she combed it backward with her fingers, the flap of skin lifted, and the blood flowed even faster. “We will need to clean it first,” she told him.
“There’s whiskey in the cupboard.”
After she had poured enough to soak the towel, he grabbed the bottle from her and drank a swig before allowing her to continue. She knew how much the alcohol would burn, but the farmhand didn’t flinch. He didn’t flinch, either, when she penetrated his scalp with the point of the needle. Closing the wound was no different from mending a ripped sock. Perhaps his skin was somewhat tougher, and the blood oozing from underneath the stitching was bothersome. But in the end the result was identical. “I used to do the same for my father,” she said, as she tied the last knot. She pulled the thread tight, bent forward to grab it in her teeth. When it snapped, it left a thin line of blood on her chin.
Fredrik ran his fingers over the stitching. “I’ve had worse cuts.”
“It should be okay now.”
“Heat up some more water,” he told her. “There’s enough tea in the pot for another cup each.” He combed his hair over the gash while he waited for her, then wiped the blood from his fingers and his cheek with the towel. “And where was this?” he asked her, when she had taken her seat again.
Her forehead creased with puzzlement — she wasn’t certain what he was asking her.
“You said you did the same for your father,” Fredrik explained. “Where?”
Polina took the bloody rag from him and folded it onto the tabletop. “His hands, mainly,” she replied — and this made Fredrik snicker. “He was a carpenter,” Polina said, misconstruing Fredrik’s reaction. “When he could find work, at least. He worked with his hands, just like you do — so his hands were often cut — his arms, too.”
Fredrik’s smile broadened. Polina’s answer had reminded him of a joke. He decided that he might as well tell it to her. “A man walks into a brothel,” he began, then he remembered some detail he had forgotten, and he started again. “A whore takes a man’s hand and leads him into her room in a brothel. He sees a bed on one side of the room and a chair on the other. So he turns to the whore and he asks her, where is it you prefer to have sex?”
Polina’s eyes had dropped.
“And the whore answers, in the ass.” Fredrik chortled, but Polina didn’t look up again or even smile. “In the ass, do you understand?” He grabbed the bottle and took another large swallow. His scalp was throbbing. The whiskey would take the edge off the pain, certainly. “I meant to ask you where your father lived,” he said, in between gulps. “Not where he cut himself when he was sawing wood.” Polina remained quiet, and he decided to prod her. “You’re a Jew, aren’t you? A Polish Jew — a refugee. The Nazis brought you here from Poland, I suppose.”
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.
22.
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.
