The Second Winter, page 4
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.
FREDRIK
4.
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.”
The rumble of its master’s voice didn’t soothe the rogue dog. It lifted itself onto its front legs. Its eyes became vicious, shiny slits.
“Old man Karl —” Fredrik muttered, alighting upon a distant memory. “He was a bastard, a real bastard, did I ever tell you that story? He used to invite the younger boys upstairs to play with his model ships — boys too little to cut his flaccid pecker off and stuff it down his throat. I tried to tell my father, but he always treated me like a fool — he wouldn’t listen —”
When the dog pounced, Fredrik read the fear in its eyes even before its feet left the ground, and he knew that the hesitation would cost the beast its life. He sidestepped, caught the dog by the neck. Its fangs gnashed, but before the dog was able to bite, the farmhand snapped its windpipe, hurled it to the ground, crushed its spine beneath his knee. The dog let out a strangulated yelp, then went limp. When Fredrik stood again, both he and the pig examined the carcass with the same dispassion.
“Too bad,” Fredrik muttered. He was still catching his breath from the exertion of the brief fight. “You were a good dog to have around.” Then he shrugged, turned his attention to the wounded pig. “Come on home now,” he said to the pink animal. He recognized the jagged bite of the gash in its neck. He had seen the same markings in the broken skin of the fowl and foxes the dog brought into the house from time to time. He untied a rope looped around his waist. The cold wind nipped his hands.
When he approached the pig, it took an uncertain leap away from him. Perhaps the animal remembered the farmhand’s rough fingers, the pinch of his huge, powerful thumbs. It lost its balance on the uneven ground, and its front legs folded. As if it wanted to pray, Fredrik thought. And this made him smile. Then he grabbed the pig by its neck. The rope whistled as he cinched it tight. The pig squealed.
“Get up,” Fredrik said. “Or I’ll kill you here. Understand?” He gave the rope a fast jerk.
The pig bleated but acquiesced. It followed him into the wind. Sleet pelted its face. It cried. Exactly like a baby cries. With every hobbling step, it expressed the pain that was shooting through its body. Fredrik understood — it was pleading with him. You’re going to kill me anyway, aren’t you, farmhand? You have a gun in your pocket. Why don’t you use it? Why don’t you kill me now and let me die a more noble death? But Fredrik ignored the argument. As long as the pig had power enough to walk, he would take advantage of its strength. The animal could carry itself to the slaughterhouse. That was what all the animals did. If he killed the pig now, he would have to lug it back to the farmhouse, almost a mile away, over the crest of the hill. He gave the rope another sharp tug. The pig shrieked again.
“Hurry it up,” Fredrik said. “You don’t realize how cold it is out here when a man’s coat gets wet.” When they left the loose shelter of the copse, the wind grew stronger. His feet sank into the mud.
From a distance, over the knoll, Fredrik was able to see that they had a visitor. A black Citroën was parked in front of the cottage the Nielsens provided for him as the caretaker of their farm. Recognizing the car, he started forward more quickly. Amalia was at the Nielsens’ house, where she helped with the sewing and cleaning. Normally, Oskar, eighteen years old, would have been outside, completing his chores, but he had woken this morning with another headache. So it would be yet one more day where seventeen-year-old Amalia would carry more weight than her older brother — and Oskar was the only one at home. Fredrik wondered what his son would say to Johan Jungmann in his absence. Oskar couldn’t be trusted, not in a situation like this.
When he reached the cottage, Fredrik hitched the pig to the fence at the front, then climbed the stairs. The porch shook under his weight. He pushed open the door, and the rush of wind receded into whispers. His grandmother’s elaborate clock — one of the few heirlooms that had followed him to Jutland in the years after his father had tossed him from the family’s house in Copenhagen — ticked audibly from its station on the wall in the cramped sitting room. The fire had burned down to coals. Of course Oskar hadn’t thought to stoke it with another log. Fredrik threw an angry glance at his son, who was standing at the stove in the kitchen, then pushed past Jungmann to the hearth without a greeting, as if he weren’t there at all, chucked a couple of wood scraps onto the grate. They had torn one of the barns down the month before, and ever since they had had enough fuel to burn. Losing the second barn hadn’t meant much to the farm, not since the Nazis had appropriated half their livestock at the end of August.
“I was just leaving,” Jungmann said. He had been fastening his coat in the vestibule when Fredrik entered. His hat was already back on his head. “Your boy told me that I missed you.”
“What else has he been telling you?” Fredrik demanded.
Jungmann removed the black homburg, revealing a balding pate. “He’s a polite boy, Gregersen. Polite but tight-lipped.”
“What have you been asking him, then?” Fredrik approached the smaller man. The front hall was narrow. When the councilman took a step in retreat, his coat scraped the wall. “You don’t have any right to come inside. Not when I’m not home.”
“You have something here you don’t want me to find, Gregersen?”
Fredrik wiped his long nose with the back of his hand. His nostrils were running from the cold. He could still smell the pig’s blood on his fingers. “The last time I saw you, you were sitting at dinner in the Café Albert, eating sausages and mustard with a bunch of Krauts. You were the only Dane at the table, but I still had the impression you were brothers.”
“If I don’t talk to them, they only make the rules without me.”
Fredrik grunted.
“I don’t expect you to like what I do.”
