The Second Winter (10 page)

“We can’t take that.” Axel was standing next to Fredrik, peering over his shoulder. “You have to give it back to them.”

Fredrik’s fingers tightened on the jewels. He pictured the tiny cottage he shared with his children, the empty larder. When was the last time he had eaten a pat of butter without sneaking it from the Nielsens? In the last few months, he hadn’t been able to drink a simple beer without begging the barman
to increase his tab. Oskar had outgrown his own clothes and was wearing his father’s castoffs — this was becoming evident to everyone in Aalborg. The pittance of a salary that the Nielsens paid Amalia barely had time to grow warm in his daughter’s palm before he had slipped it into his own pocket. What kind of life was this? The sharp edges of a few settings dug into his skin. Perhaps he could even return a handful of this plunder to the chest in his mother’s room in Copenhagen. Imagine the look on her face! Fru Gregersen would never forgive him for stealing her most cherished belongings one by one and selling them for the price of a few bottles of whiskey and a couple of trips to the wrong side of town. But the war was taking its toll on everyone. The family was being brought to its knees by the occupation — this same proud, entitled family of strivers who had disowned him. It was only a matter of time before there would be no more artwork or other valuables left for the Gregersen family to sell. His mother would have no choice but to curtsy and accept his charity —

“We can’t take that,” Axel repeated. “Close it up, Fredrik — give it back to them.”

“What?” Fredrik raised his eyes to Axel’s. Even on his knees, he was nearly as tall as his partner. “What are you talking about?” He grabbed a bundle of cash — U.S. dollars bound into a tight roll with an elastic band — flung the green paper to the fisherman, squeezed the suitcase shut. “This is mine.”

“You know we can’t, Fredrik.”

Unmoved, Fredrik lifted himself back onto his feet. “He wasn’t born with this suitcase in his hands, any more than I was.”

“How will we make the rest of the trip?” the old man asked him.

“Shhh,” his wife said.

“Without that, we won’t make it any farther. How can you expect us to make it without that?”

“Shush,” his wife said.

“Please, Papa.”

“Have I somehow fallen into your debt?” Fredrik asked the Jew. “Now get into the boat, and this man will bring you across the channel to Sweden. If it’s meant to be, I’m sure you’ll find your own way.”

“When Gustav learns of this,” Axel said, “he won’t send me any more Jews.”

The argument fell on deaf ears. After this, Fredrik would have no further need for Axel’s Jews. He tucked the bag under his arm. “It’s getting late,” he said. Across the strait, orange flames were burning in pockets on the black water. “We have a long way back to the highway.”

The old man broke free from his wife and daughter, rushed the tall Dane. “You cannot take that —”

“Get into the boat,” Fredrik repeated. The discussion was finished. With one hand, he hustled the Jew into the dinghy. The old man’s coat was soft on his fingers. Maybe he would take it, too, after all. He yanked it off his shoulders as the old man tripped over the hull.

“Leave him be,” the fisherman said. He was growing worried that he would have to dispose of a corpse. “He’ll freeze without the coat.”

Fredrik took it in any event, tossed it to Oskar. “Give me a smoke for the road,” he said to the fisherman. At his feet, the surf turned as blue as the stones in his mother’s necklace. A wave broke against the sand and swallowed his heavy boots. Behind the fisherman, the family of fugitives huddled together on a bench in the rowboat, unable to do anything except watch as the tall Dane tightened his grip on the satchel then
waited, his shoulders hunched, for the fisherman to light his cigarette.

Then the three Danes were on their way again. Sunlight touched their necks as they retraced their footsteps across the beach, over the dunes to the pastureland that bordered the shore. Their shadows led them back toward the fence bordering Olaf Brandt’s property. The herbal tobacco singed Fredrik’s throat, but he smoked the dense Turkish cigarette to a nub anyway. The roots of his teeth ached in his gums. He tasted blood.

The cigarette was a memory by the time they reached the road. Ulsted lay in the distance, a smattering of gray buildings with red tile roofs. The clouds had parted, and steam rose from the saturated soil beneath the insistent heat of the sun. Oskar was two paces ahead of Fredrik and Axel, aware of their footsteps behind him but of little else. In front of him, the cracked asphalt had dissolved into a blur. Fredrik sucked on his teeth, spit, narrowed his eyes as he took in his son’s lanky body, his bony shoulders. The boy’s yellow hair was clumped in greasy strands that could have been a girl’s braids. “You’ve been pretty quiet,” the tall farmhand said.

Axel peered at him from the corner of his eye. He wanted to make certain that the observation wasn’t meant for him. In front of them, Oskar didn’t seem to hear.

Fredrik resisted the impulse to grab his son, give him a shake. If it had been up to this weakling, the old Jew’s suitcase wouldn’t be tucked under his arm. All they would have to show for the night’s work would be the few crowns Axel had
been promised. Maybe they would all three be inside Johansson’s boat, helping him row the Jews across the channel to Sweden. Maybe Oskar would be looking for a safe place for the old Jewess to squat and take a shit. “You have something you want to say to me?”

Oskar woke to the threat in his father’s voice. He had been far away in his own thoughts. What would happen to the family from Austria once they reached Sweden? The old woman had managed to lug her silver to the boat at least. His voice escaped from his mouth before he knew what he would say. “I thought that the Gregersens were a rich family.” Behind him, his father stopped walking.

“What was that?” Fredrik was incredulous.

Oskar felt his heart touch his ribs. After a pause, his father’s boots scraped the rough asphalt again, four or five steps behind him. The hair stood up on the back of his neck. “Your mother is a lady-in-waiting to the queen, isn’t she?”

“Fru Gregersen is no more noble than a whore,” Fredrik said.

“Your brother, Ludvig, is a bookkeeper at the palace.”

“My brother is softer than you are,” Fredrik quipped. “My mother still coddles him. Does it make him a stronger man if he counts the money in the king’s pocket?”

“And your father was one of the king’s huntsmen.”

“My father?” Fredrik choked. “I don’t speak ill of the dead, but my father was a bastard — what do you know about my father? So he took care of the king’s horse and the king’s spaniels. He also threw me out of his house when I was sixteen —” Not that Fredrik had blamed him, of course, when his father had finally lost patience. He hadn’t left him any other choice. In fact, Nils Erik Gregersen had been a weakling. He had given Fredrik so many second chances that Fredrik could hardly
take him seriously anymore — after he had raided his mother’s jewelry box, after he drank all the liquor from the cabinet in the library, after he got one of the maids pregnant, after he beat up the mayor’s effeminate son and tossed his prized pocketknife off the overpass into the smokestack of a passing train. To Fredrik, it had almost felt sometimes that his father took a perverse pride in his errant son’s scandalous behavior, as if it befitted the scion of such a family and conferred its own status on him as patriarch. It had taken killing the Persian cat finally to force his father’s hand. Miav, his mother had called it. It was Fru Gregersen’s special pet — she doted on it, Fredrik had always thought, because it looked so much like her. He hadn’t meant to kill it — all he was trying to do was slip its pearl-studded collar over its fat head, maybe give its ribs a little squeeze. But then the cat had scratched him, and its neck had broken so easily. If he had buried the carcass in the bog or burned it in the fireplace, no one would have been the wiser. His real mistake had been to try to feed it to his father’s hounds. After that, his father had had no alternative. Sending him to Jutland to live on a farm and earn his own keep had been a fair compromise. His mother — who had herself discovered Miav’s gory remains on the summer porch — would have had him locked in jail. The fact was, though, however justified he may have been, Nils Erik had been a bastard, if a weak one. As surely as Fru Gregersen was a haughty cow and Ludvig a spineless sycophant who had never done an honest day’s work in his life. “What are you saying to me about my family?” Fredrik demanded.

Sensing the violence of his father’s temper, Oskar remained silent. This, though, only infuriated Fredrik more. Oskar had poked a stick into the ass of dogs best left sleeping. How dare he hold his own mother and father up to him as paragons just
because of their wealth and their name? Did it make them better than anyone else — these people who had renounced him and taken this same name back from him, their very own son — that they slept in beds their ancestors had made for them and walked in the shadow of kings? What did Oskar know about the Gregersens? They might not have had the luxuries he had had growing up, but Fredrik had never treated his children like fools, and he had never preferred one over the other. Once again, Fredrik’s footsteps ceased. “Stop,” he ordered his son.

Oskar faltered, but he forced himself to keep moving forward.

When his son continued to ignore him, Fredrik’s cheeks reddened. “Turn around and look at me when you speak.”

“We need to keep walking,” Axel said. His eyes were focused on the bend in the road about half a mile in front of them, where the highway disappeared into a small copse. He wondered whether Olaf Brandt had already driven past Ulsted. If they had missed the truck, they had a long day in front of them, and he was nervous about the army patrols around the landing strips above Aalborg.

“Stop and face me,” Fredrik repeated. “Do you hear me?”

At last, ten paces from his father, Oskar stopped. When he turned, the sun caught him in his eyes. It was glistening above his father’s head as if Fredrik’s scalp had burst into flames. At his sides, Fredrik’s hands were gripped into fists that might have been forged from steel, and they, too, shimmered in the sun. In that moment, despite his fear, Oskar remembered an illustration from one of his childhood books. His father had turned the book’s pages with him sometimes before he fell asleep. Thor had stood on a craggy, purple mountain, clasping a hammer with an orange handle and a shiny head. The
glossy drawing had been separated from the other pages by a sheet of waxy tissue paper. When the tissue was flipped, the overhead light had flared on the drawing underneath with the intensity of a match being struck.

“Now tell me what nonsense you’re speaking,” Fredrik ordered. When he took a step toward him, Oskar felt his knees weaken.

“There’s no time for a fight,” Axel said.

“I figured you for a coward,” Fredrik said, imagining that Oskar was too afraid to open his mouth again.

But a few more words did escape. “I didn’t know that we needed to steal,” Oskar said.

“Steal?”

Oskar nodded toward the bag clutched under his father’s arm. “I thought that the Gregersens were the ones who had to worry about thieves.”

Acid welled inside Fredrik’s stomach, into his esophagus, strangling him as forcibly as a pair of hands beneath his chin. This soft-skinned, timid
boy
dared to lecture him? Where did every morsel of food he had ever tasted come from? Who had taught him how to walk? Who tolerated the very beating of his juvenile heart? Oskar had no right to judge him. Unlike with his own father — to whom Fredrik owed nothing — Oskar owed him a debt of gratitude with so many facets that it was impossible to contemplate. Did he not see what his father was doing right now to keep his family fed? How loudly would he still whimper if any of the horrors being suffered by the family of Jews were visited upon Amalia or him instead? Would any of the Gregersens or their dead ancestors come to their rescue then? Fredrik was blinking back his fury when the sputtering growl of an engine broke the stillness behind them.

Axel raised a hand to his forehead, squinted into the glare. “It’s a truck,” he said.

Fredrik took another step toward his son. “Shall I show you what it means to be a Gregersen?” he threatened.

“But it’s not Brandt. Fredrik? It’s a German truck.”

The words penetrated Fredrik’s anger. Behind him, the rumble of the engine was crescendoing. The truck was bearing down on them. From the pitch of the engine, Fredrik recognized it as a heavy diesel. He swiveled around. It was a military vehicle — a troop transport. The cab was painted olive green. The cargo bay was wrapped in black canvas.

“What do you want to do?” Axel asked.

“They’ve already seen us,” Fredrik said.

“Are they going to stop us?” Oskar asked.

“Turn around,” Fredrik commanded, still on the verge of exploding. “Keep walking.”

“Should we run?” his son asked.

“Do as I say,” Fredrik said, “or I will drop you myself. Understand?” His jaw worked as he sought to control himself. “We’ll keep walking. We’re three farmers heading back home from the market. There’s no crime in that.”

Oskar hesitated, then turned and began walking again.

“You can just relax,” Fredrik said. “Act natural. It’s normal to stop and look when a truck approaches you on an empty highway.”

Oskar stopped when Axel and his father did, and the three Danes stood on the side of the narrow road as the dark truck bulked over their shoulders. Barely visible through the flat windshield, three blond soldiers stared them down as they approached, crammed together on the seat in the cab. Oskar met the gaze of one of the soldiers, and the German’s scowl
made him shiver. Then they had barreled past. The engine whined as the driver geared down. Catching a glimpse into the cargo bed through gaps in the canvas, Fredrik could see a few crates, a bundle of blankets. Otherwise, the truck was empty.

“There,” Axel said, winking at Oskar. “Danger’s passed.”

“Bastards,” Fredrik muttered. He was starting forward again when the truck slowed to a sudden stop. Its tires screeched on the asphalt. Its engine stalled, then rumbled back to life. Oskar glanced backward at his father, and Fredrik read his worry.