The Second Winter, page 30
When she jostled into Fredrik, the farmhand gave her a little shove, pushed her back into Oskar’s arms. Fredrik sneered at her, not yet able to swallow his anger, and their eyes connected as Oskar’s hand found her waist again. “There’s no reason to shelter her either.”
“You’re right, Father,” Oskar said. “It’s too dangerous — she can’t stay.”
Polina stiffened, uncertain whether she had heard him correctly.
The capitulation stopped Fredrik. He examined his son. The hallway was dark, lit only by the window in the children’s bedroom. Still, Oskar could read the relief in his father’s eyes. “You understand it’s for the best.”
“If they know she’s here,” Oskar agreed, “they’ll come back.”
“They said as much. It won’t be safe. Not for Amalia. Not for you.”
“So there is no choice, then.” Oskar pulled the girl closer to him. The smell of her hair was so strong that he could taste it. He was gripping her too tight, he knew that he was when he felt her ribs flex beneath his fingers. But he couldn’t let her go. The realization that he would speak the next words stunned him, but they tumbled from his mouth anyway. “We will leave tonight.”
Fredrik’s brow creased. He met Oskar’s gaze as he considered his words. “You, too?” He wanted to make certain that he had understood what his son was telling him.
Polina twisted away from the tall, bony boy. “This is your home, Oskar.” She clasped his arm, tried to confront him. “You know you can’t just leave —”
Oskar ignored her. His eyes hadn’t left his father’s. He didn’t really mean to leave, did he? The threat had slipped out so impulsively. Now the words were uttered, though, he recognized their truth. He was going to leave this house with Polina, and he was going to leave it tonight. “We’ll leave Denmark,” he said.
“Where?” Fredrik asked. It wasn’t really a question, and the word wasn’t spoken in disbelief. He simply wanted his son to lead him to the next step of this discovery. “Where will you go?”
“To America,” Oskar said.
Fredrik nodded slowly. He had heard that this was where the Jews would go, too, when they escaped the Nazis. To America.
“I’ll take the money,” Oskar said.
Again, his father nodded.
“It will be enough to get us to America, and once we’re there, it will be enough to keep us both safe, at least for a while.”
Fredrik gazed at his son. “This is something you’ve thought about?”
Oskar’s eyes dropped. The audacity of his declaration had stolen his breath.
“Oskar?” Fredrik reached for his shoulder. “I’m not saying I don’t understand. But you’re a fool if you think you will make her happy.” He gave the shoulder a squeeze. He wanted to seize his son’s attention. “Eh? You hear me?” He tightened his fingers until Oskar raised his eyes again. “You’re a fool if you think you’ll find more than a minute of happiness with her.”
Oskar tried to shrug his father’s hand off him, but the man’s grip was too strong. “I’m in love with her, Father,” he managed.
“You think so?” Fredrik’s lips formed a smile that his eyes didn’t share. “You can’t even see her, Oskar. You think you can? You’ll never be able to. Eh?”
“And you can see me so well?” Oskar tried again to wrest his father’s hand off him. “You think you know me well enough to tell me how I feel now?”
“Who is she to you? Eh? Think about it, Oskar. All you see when you look at her is what you want to see.”
“Isn’t that the way it always is?”
Fredrik shook his head. He had no answer to this.
“I tell you I love her, Father.” The next words, Oskar had to force from his mouth. “She loves me, too.”
Fredrik raised his other hand to Oskar’s other shoulder and squared him in front of him. “Is that what you think? Eh?” When Oskar turned away from him, he gave his son a small shake. “If that’s what you think, then you’re an even bigger fool than I thought.” He tried to find Oskar’s eyes but couldn’t. His son’s chest, he noticed, was still heaving. “She’s been beaten, Oskar. Don’t you remember that stray you tried to feed? She’ll draw blood if you get too close, just as surely as that bitch did. Oskar?” He waited for the boy to lift his eyes, but Oskar only glanced at him. Fredrik studied him, and the house fell still. “But I understand — I can’t say I don’t.” At last, the farmhand let go of his son. His fingers slid from his arms. He could feel Polina’s eyes on him, but he avoided her. “Come downstairs with me, why don’t you?” he said to Oskar. “Let the girl pack her things. Have a drink with me at least before you leave.”
Oskar mastered his breathing. Was this really happening? His words rang in his head. We will leave tonight — He had spoken rashly. In anger at his father, in relief after the soldiers had left the house. But his father was taking him seriously — his father was ready to let him take the money and go. And if he didn’t go, if he stayed, it was Polina who would have to leave, on her own. And then what would become of her?
“Yes,” he heard Polina say, “have a drink with your father, Oskar. It is better for you to talk this over, it is better if the two of you think about this some more.”
“Okay,” Oskar said. He tried to smile. “We’ll have a drink. Then Polina and I will go.”
Fredrik found his son’s shoulder again. This time, it wasn’t to demand his attention. He had the impression that he had never touched his son before, and now that he was touching him, he simply didn’t want to let go. Like Oskar, he hadn’t seen this moment coming. But perhaps it had been inevitable. Perhaps it was for the best. “Now,” he said. “Okay. I will go downstairs and set up a few glasses. If you’re leaving tonight, you had better see about your things, too. Come down, join me when you’re ready.” He gave the shoulder a final clasp, then turned away. His head still felt giddy after the narrow miss with Jungmann and the soldiers. His footsteps were slow and heavy on the stairs.
Oskar followed Polina into the bedroom. He ripped the sheet from the ceiling, then sat down on his mattress and leaned his elbows on his knees and watched her get dressed in the silvery light filtering through the window. The wind gusted against the cottage, the roof thatch shivered above their heads. His father was right. This girl, he realized — this creature with amber hair and ivory skin and narrow hips and breasts as hard as unripe fruit, this child who now owned his innocence — was a stranger.
Downstairs, Fredrik pulled the last whiskey bottle from the cupboard. There were barely two glasses in it. He uncorked the bottle, lifted it to his lips. The whiskey burned his tongue, warmed his chest. He set the bottle down, thinking to save the rest, grabbed two tumblers from the shelf. Then, impulsively, he lifted the bottle again, took another swallow. The alcohol cut a hole in his stomach, flowed through his veins. A memory of Jungmann inside the house rekindled his rage. His hands tightened into fists. Something had to be done about him, because he was the problem. Not Polina. Jungmann, the Germans. He sat down at the table. His jaw was clenched. He slipped his hand into his pocket, found a pill, swallowed it with another mouthful of whiskey.
By the time Oskar stepped through the doorway, Fredrik was finishing the bottle. He lowered it from his mouth, sat it onto the table at an angle, let the neck roll back and forth between his finger and his thumb. “It’s Jungmann,” he said. “Jungmann and Munk. They’re the ones who need to go.”
Oskar stepped past his father to the cupboard, searched for another bottle, came up dry. “I’ll go to the Nielsens’,” he said. “I’ll see if they’ll spare us a bottle. After all, it’s New Year’s Eve.”
“Is it?” Fredrik asked.
Oskar crossed from the kitchen to the vestibule. “If they don’t want to give me a bottle,” he said, “I suppose I can buy one from them.”
The pill was hitting Fredrik’s bloodstream with the alcohol, reviving him but disorienting him as well. Perhaps it was the stress from this afternoon, but he hadn’t felt this euphoric in some time. He envisioned the syringe in the drawer in the bathroom. The sores on his arms and legs where the needle had punctured his skin ached. His eyes glistened. “Sure you can,” he said. “We have the money now. Buy one.”
Oskar glanced upstairs as he pulled on his coat. He thought about calling to Polina, but she was fatigued from the ordeal and had decided to lie down for a rest before they started on their journey. There was no point in disturbing her.
From his chair in the kitchen, Fredrik watched his son leave. Upstairs, the girl shifted in Oskar’s bed — her hair was spilling over her face, she was propping herself up on an arm, licking her lips, perhaps she was touching the soft tuft of hair he had seen between her thighs as he was hoisting her into the attic. Outside, Oskar’s footsteps receded. Fredrik waited until they were gone. Then he stood from the chair. He paused for a moment at the base of the stairs, wavering, then stumbled into the cramped bathroom, shut the door behind him, quietly pulled open the cabinet drawer. The steel and glass syringe glimmered in the dim light.
Fredrik’s hands shook. One foot rested on the toilet. A pant leg was drawn up to his knee. He ran two fingers along the side of his calf, then decided upon a puncture hole that had scabbed and was nearly healed. Gritting his teeth, he clasped the steel syringe, slid the needle’s hollow point into the wound. The pain was sharp, but in the very same instant it was forgotten. He stood upright. The pant leg dropped back onto the top of his boot. He spread his hands out flat on the edge of the sink, stooped forward, closed his eyes. From the moment he had first seen her, he had known that the girl would be his. He had tried to forget her, but to no avail. And now she was about to disappear. An image of her face began to draw itself in his mind. The cold from the porcelain radiated up his arms. The amphetamine gathered itself into a tiny ball in his chest, then made itself tinier still, centered itself like a chunk of ice in his heart. When the small, poisonous ball detonated, the explosion obliterated everything else. Fredrik felt himself sliding backward. He struggled to hang on to the picture of Polina but couldn’t. The room darkened, and it slipped through his fingers like a wisp of smoke as he blacked out. Then he was opening his eyes again, sitting up on the floor, wondering how long he had been unconscious. He took hold of the doorknob, pulled himself to his feet, stumbled from the bathroom into the hall.
The stairwell was a blur. The next thing he knew, he was in the narrow passage on the second floor, squeezing through the doorway into Oskar and Amalia’s room. He stopped when he saw Polina, but only for a second. Long enough to catch her eye. Long enough for her to read the violence of his thoughts in the weak, late-afternoon twilight. Long enough to smell her. Then he crossed the room, dropped onto his knees in front of her, grabbed her around her narrow waist. Her eyes were colorless. Her lips were only faintly pink.
When Fredrik raised a hand toward her, Polina thought that he was reaching for her face, and she lowered her chin toward his fingers. In itself, this surprised her, and she felt her chest heave. Instead, though, his fingers found the shoelace around her neck, and he lifted the ring from beneath her shirt. The piece of jewelry looked small in his giant palm. He examined the diamond, then tightened his fingers into a fist around it. The shoelace dug into her neck. When he let go, his hands slipped back down to her waist. Polina’s fingers sank into his greasy hair. His breath was hot and moist on her legs. His unshaved chin scraped her skin. But he held himself apart from her with a tenderness she didn’t expect.
“I don’t want you to go,” Fredrik said to her, and as he spoke his lips tickled her. Her skirt, she realized, had ridden to her hips. “Please,” he said, louder. “Please don’t go.”
Polina understood the words for what they meant. He was howling. This wasn’t an invitation to stay. “Shhh,” she said. That was all. “Shhh.”
“I recognized you,” he said, “from the first moment.”
The way one animal recognizes another, she thought. Her fingers clasped his skull, and she wasn’t certain herself whether she was holding him away from her or simply holding him.
In her lap, Fredrik’s breathing slowed. In the fading light, she saw that his cheeks were wet with tears. The farmhand was crying. “Why are you doing this?” he asked her. The drug was coursing through him in waves. In one instant, it was holding him aloft, permeating him with power. In the next, it was dangling him over a precipice, ready to drop him into a void. “Tell me, Polina. Tell me why.”
A shiver ran down her spine. Her fingers dug into his temples. This was the first time that Fredrik had spoken her name. His hands tightened around her waist. She concentrated on the sensation as his thumbs sank into her ribs. Her breath caught in her throat. She reminded herself that this man was capable of great violence. She remembered him, made small through the narrow crack in the trapdoor, sneaking up the stairs behind the soldier, wielding the carving knife. In that moment, he had been ready to throw away everything to protect her. His son, his daughter, his own life. Just to keep that soldier from discovering her. Yet a moment later, when that danger had passed, he had been equally willing to toss her out of the house to protect his son, his daughter, his small world here in the middle of this frozen, windswept, godless wasteland. This man’s heart beat, she knew, in the grip of that contradiction. She forced herself to exhale, loosened her fingers, let her fingertips touch his cheeks.
Fredrik continued to gaze at her. “Why him?” he asked her.
“Shhh,” she repeated.
His voice grew more urgent. “Why?” he asked. “Why him and not me?”
He hung on to her eyes as long as he could in the weakening light, until her face became a singular blur, until the pounding of his heart wouldn’t let him think any longer, and then he succumbed. His hands slipped from her waist to her thighs, then eased her legs apart. He was engulfed in darkness, there was nothing else but this taste, this pressure of her thighs, this softness of her hips in his hands, this texture on his tongue. The taste shocked him. Of course he knew this taste. But there was something unexpected in the flavor, too. There was fear. There was anticipation. There was desire.
Her spine arched. She leaned her head backward, held on to his skull, pulled him into her. Her body began to tremble. But she held her eyes open and stared him straight in the face. She gasped for air. It struck Polina in this moment that, for the first time in her life, she wasn’t yielding. There was no memory of Czeslaw to terrify her. There was no thought of resistance, no yearning to escape. Then she silenced her thoughts. This was what she wanted. Nothing more.
Time passed, how much she couldn’t say. She was present, but, too, she was far away. The sounds that echoed through the small room were too foreign to have been uttered by her. And then, as footsteps shook the stairs, she wriggled backward and, when he wouldn’t let her go, fought to push this man away from her.
When Oskar returned, he understood that the kitchen was empty even before he had let go of the door. He heard their voices upstairs as soon as he entered the house. He didn’t close the door behind him. There was no explaining his reaction — it was instinctive, not controlled. The small cottage lost its geometry. The bottle of whiskey that one of the maids had carried to him from the Nielsens’ pantry was still clasped in his hand as he started up the stairs. He stumbled, fell, picked himself up again.
Fredrik didn’t hear him enter. Oskar crashed through the doorway, teetered above them in a daze. The light was nearly gone from the day, but the gathering dark couldn’t hide them. Polina’s skirt remained fastened around her waist, hiked above her hips. She was pushing herself backward on his bed, caught in Fredrik’s grip, unable to escape. Off his knees now, Fredrik was grabbing her, pulling her onto her back as if she had no weight at all. In his hands, Polina was no longer the girl Oskar knew — she was a bundle of disconnected bones and pale flesh. The pillow was as white as milk in splinters and crescents beneath the wild mass of her hair. Disheveled like this, he did not recognize her at all.
The bottle of whiskey dropped from Oskar’s fingers, tumbled onto the floor. He took hold of his father’s shoulders with both hands, yanked him backward. His arms had never felt so powerful. He had never known such fury. He was blind. He didn’t see his father anymore. He simply attacked.
The farmhand was surprised by Oskar’s strength. His son lifted him off the girl, and he wouldn’t have been able to stop him. Fredrik, though, had spent his life chopping wood and shoveling dirt, pounding nails and sawing boards. He weighed twice as much as his young son, and he was infinitely more vicious. Oskar couldn’t imagine the violence of which his father was capable. Had he chosen to, he could have collected himself and silenced his son. But Fredrik didn’t fight back. He let Oskar’s blows rain upon him. He made no move to protect himself. He didn’t even wince.
Polina’s face contorted. She picked herself up from the bed but didn’t think to straighten her clothes or cover herself. She screamed. Her fingers dug into Oskar’s shoulders. But she wasn’t able to budge him, and Oskar didn’t stop. He reveled in his strength. He would destroy his father. He would tear him apart. He would kill him. And he could do it. Because this man whom he had feared so much was nothing more than a man just like he was. He was nothing more than a mean laborer on a desolate farm. His fist connected with Fredrik’s cheek, and, his legs buckling underneath him, Fredrik dropped to the floor. He was too strong for this single blow to fell him, but it had. He looked up at Oskar, saw the girl, saw his son raise his boot above him, then closed his eyes. When Oskar’s boot dug into his ribs, he didn’t feel it. He was no longer there. He was no longer in this room. He was somewhere else. The day had come. Yes, the day had finally come, and he was nowhere at all.
And then Polina had found the whiskey bottle on the floor, and she had smashed it into the back of Oskar’s skull like a club, the last rays of light had scurried and leaped from the room, the day had fallen completely still.
