The Second Winter (13 page)

“Hey?” The captain mistook his friend’s hesitation for reluctance. He hadn’t yet seen the prostitutes. “How long will you need the money? You have to acknowledge the point, Hermann — twenty-five percent for a week is a different proposition from twenty-five percent for a month.”

“I —” Hermann began, but then lost his train of thought. “A few days maybe.” An unshaven man with long, greasy hair emerged from the back room as well. He grabbed the slender girl by the elbow, then started with her toward the front of the bar. The black-haired prostitute followed. Hermann struggled to return his attention to the captain. “No more than a week —”

When someone whistled at the girls, at last the captain twisted on his stool to get a look behind him. He shifted forward again abruptly, fastened his friend with a scowl. “One would almost think, Hermann,” he said, unimpressed, “that you have never seen a whore before.”

“So what will it be, then?” Hermann demanded, still distracted. He was wondering what these two prostitutes and their pimp had been doing in the back room. He had heard of such things — The same door opened again, and now an officer in a German uniform stumbled out, tucking his shirt into his trousers. Picturing this animal with the prostitutes, Hermann felt suddenly flustered. He wanted to hurry the captain, to finish this discussion. “Will you lend me the money or won’t you?”

“Three thousand marks for one week,” the captain said. “Is that what you are asking?”

“One week,” Hermann confirmed. “No more than that.” The pimp shoved the front door open, and a fresh gust of wind reached Hermann through a crowd of anxious, hungry men who, like him, had fixed upon these women who could be had by any of them for a pocketful of coins. The rain was coming down in a torrent now. Splattered by the shrapnel of a few stray drops, the pimp paused long enough to flip up the collar of his coat. The heavy nylon tresses of the prostitute’s black wig hardly rustled. Wisps of the other girl’s hair caught the wind, and she had to swipe a few glistening, golden strands
from her mouth. Even then, her focus never once wavered from an imaginary point in front of her face. Her expression remained somber, and she never returned any of the men’s stares. Hermann had the impression that the night had spilled inside through the open door, stealing the light from her complexion. “At the end of the week, I return the three thousand to you, plus seven hundred and fifty for your trouble.” The pimp pushed the black-haired prostitute outside first, then the other girl. And then, swallowed into the ink, they were gone. As the door slammed shut behind them, Hermann felt himself overcome with a sense of loss that he wouldn’t have been able to explain.

“One thousand,” the captain said.

“What?”

“I give you three thousand for a week. You repay me four thousand.”

“That’s too much,” Hermann said. But his heart was no longer in the negotiation. His eyes hadn’t yet left the front door.

“It’s a lot of money you’re asking,” the captain said with a shrug. “You can take it, or you can leave it.”

At last, Hermann returned his eyes to his friend. “Okay,” he said.

“Okay?”

“But I need it by Friday, understand?” Then he couldn’t restrain himself any longer. He tossed a bill onto the counter to pay for his drink, started for the door. Behind him, the captain chased him with a few words.
She’s not worth it, Hermann — save your money, hey? I will want my three thousand back
. But Hermann barely heard him. A man wearing a hat barked something into his face. Another gave him a friendly shove — maybe this was a soldier he knew, though right now he recognized no one. He nearly tripped over a low table, stepped
on someone’s foot, caught himself on someone else’s sleeve. As he made his way through the bar, he realized that every single person in the room — every last person — was a man. That was what accounted for this stink. That was what accounted for this noise. There weren’t any women here. He stumbled to the door, reached for the handle.

Outside, he searched the street for the girl, but she was already gone. Leaning into the wind, he chose a direction and began walking. At the corner, there was still no sign of her. The neighborhood was empty. He twisted on his heel and started in the other direction. Hearing the echo of footsteps, he stopped to listen. In the distance, he imagined that he could hear voices — the growl of a man’s voice, a girl’s high-pitched titter. No streetlamps were burning, the city was dark. He peered into the grainy, tarnished haze of the rain but couldn’t see a thing, not even any movement. When the pale-eyed prostitute had stepped into the bar from the back room, the rest of the faces surrounding her had blurred. Her own face — her ivory skin, her sharp cheekbones, her soft hair, her colorless eyes — had acquired the clarity of a photograph. The image began to assume the character of an object — like the memory of a painting — and it hovered in front of Hermann’s eyes now, as distinct as a beacon. He started down the side street, following the voices.

The quicker he walked, though, the farther away the voices trailed. He was nearly running when he lost them completely. He came to a stop at an intersection, out of breath, held himself still with one hand resting on the corner of a building. His coat was becoming soaked. The wind cut through his wet uniform to his skin. He took note of where he was, one street away from the harbor at Nyhavn, then turned and, hunching his shoulders, his hands in his pockets, retraced his steps through the black.

December 1941
.

Sitting in the window of a small hotel a couple of weeks later, the pale-eyed prostitute stared outside at a commotion in the street. A German military automobile was parked half a block down the Nyhavn canal. A man in a lieutenant’s uniform had left the car and crossed the cobblestone road to the next hotel over from this one, where, standing on the steps in front of the glass-paned door, he was engaged in conversation with a heavyset woman dressed in a morning coat. It was early December, and it was a gray day. It was cold — cold enough that it should have been snowing. Here in the harbor, though, the air gusting off the sea was laced with so much salt that the rain didn’t freeze, and the girl’s view was blurred through glass streaked with rivulets of rainwater. Her curiosity was piqued. It was not yet eight o’clock. In this rough section of the capital, it wasn’t usual to see anyone outside, other than a stray sailor or two, until noon.

The other prostitutes would sleep into the afternoon. The girl had woken as she always did, exactly at seven. For years, she hadn’t been able to sleep longer. And this was time she cherished — she could sit by herself with her thoughts, without a sound to disturb her, without another voice, without anyone’s mouth, without anyone’s fingers, without the stench of sweat, without the delirium of pills or alcohol. She knew how strange the other girls considered her. She couldn’t remember feeling
normal
, not for as long as she could recollect. She enjoyed no connection to anything. Sometimes, the notion of stepping off the cobblestones into the harbor and sinking to the bottom of the cold green sea offered its own perverse comfort. Her breath fogged the window, but she didn’t wipe the glass. She had been watching the German for about three minutes now, since he had first knocked on the door of the hotel. Maybe he was lost, or maybe he had forgotten something when he was drunk.

When the woman at the door couldn’t help him, she called inside the hotel, and a few moments later a man with the beginning of a beard appeared, squinting in the dim morning light. He dropped the butt of a cigarette into the street, pulled his pajama top tight around his throat, shoved the woman back into the foyer behind him. The German asked him a question, and the man rubbed his scruffy, grizzled chin with stubby fingers. Even from a distance, his teeth were yellow from coffee and tobacco. Then he pointed down the street at the hotel where the girl was resident. There was no chance that she would be seen inside her dark room. Nevertheless, some instinct prompted her to duck backward, behind the curtain.

She watched with new interest when, following the hotelier’s directions, the German started down the sidewalk, his eyes fastened on the sign posted above the door beneath her. It promised a hotel — but this, like many of these small inns
lining the canal, was a brothel. His footsteps reached her ears through the glass. When she leaned toward the window, the light glistened on her forehead, and the pale skin of her cheeks became translucent. When she licked her lips, they brightened into the deep, rich color of a rose.

Two or three minutes passed before the German’s knocking roused the brothel’s pimp from his bed. A door slammed inside the building. The girl thought about running. She couldn’t recollect ever having seen this soldier before, and she had no reason to think that he was coming for her. Still, she searched the room for her shoes. Her coat was crumpled under the bed. But she was only imagining things — and anyway there was, of course, no escape for her. She belonged to her pimp, and there was nowhere she could hide. Footsteps shuffled down the stairs, the locks twisted in the door. The German lieutenant’s voice was a muffled series of indistinct syllables. Søren Pound’s replies rumbled through the walls.
Yes, yes. But we are all asleep. You will have to come back later. Don’t you know what time it is?
The meaning of the German’s next words was unmistakable. He was not going to be put off. The girl stood from the rickety chair. When the curtain dropped, the air thickened. She crossed the room, sat down on the edge of the narrow bed she shared with another prostitute named Olga, touched her on her bony shoulder.

The Russian girl was only nineteen, but her skin was slack, her breath smelled like meat. Her hips were wide, and her arms were as thin as sticks, riddled with needle tracks. She had only fallen into bed three hours earlier, and she didn’t respond when the girl shook her. A few seconds passed in silence, then she gasped for air like a diver coming to the surface with pearls, and after began to snore. The girl waited, then gave her shoulder another, firmer shake. When Olga opened her eyes,
she focused on the younger Polish girl without recognition. “Oh — it’s only you, Polina,” she said, settling back into the bed. “What do you want? Is it time?”

Polina remembered the stink of her breath and the heat of her embrace from the middle of the night these last months since they had been sharing this bed, and her desire to escape translated itself into another impulse. She wrapped her arms around Olga.

“Is it already time?” Olga repeated.

Polina shook her head.

“What is it — what are you doing? Why are you waking me?” Olga spit the words like phlegm.

“I’m afraid,” Polina whispered.

Olga pushed her away. “Leave me alone.”

The patter of rain drummed the window. In the room above them, two prostitutes turned over in bed. Springs whined, floorboards creaked.

“They’re coming for me.”

“Who?”

Inside the hotel, footsteps shook the stairs. Their room was two flights up. Polina listened.

“What are you talking —” But Olga didn’t finish her question. She fell back to sleep, snorted, stopped breathing completely. Polina held on to her and waited. The footsteps climbed the building to the second floor, then approached down the length of the hall. Søren didn’t knock. A key scratched the lock. The knob twisted with a squeak. The door opened. Polina looked up from her awkward seat on the bed.

“Come with me,” Søren said. When she stood, his fingers sank into her shoulder. She remembered this same grip from her first night in his hotel. The pimp had an enormous penis. Flaccid, it hung halfway down his thigh. He didn’t become
erect until he had beaten her. Then he was inside her, ripping her, and it took him forever to come. But it was his fingers that she remembered, gouging her shoulders, separating her arms from her body. She didn’t try to resist him now. He twirled her toward the door like a puppet, and she tripped in front of him down the narrow hall. Safe in the uncomfortable bed, Olga hadn’t woken again, and when she finally did, she wouldn’t remember a thing about the morning. Another roommate would assume the Polish girl’s place. Polina was taking these next steps alone, as she had so many before.

Hermann stood waiting for her at the bottom of the staircase, bathed in light as thick as paint. It glowed on his green uniform like an aura, shimmered weakly on his cheeks. In his spectacles, it shone with crystalline brilliance, as cold and crisp as rays refracted in the lens of a microscope. His lips parted when he saw her. He had spent the last week looking for her. And now she was his.

In the room above the bakery, nothing felt right.

The German army had garrisoned a number of city blocks just outside the old town. Soldiers were given makeshift barracks partitioned from the larger buildings. Officers occupied the apartments above the retail stores that lined the streets. In this industrial room, the windows were oversize, framed in steel. Hermann Schmidt had favored the apartment because of the light. Before him, it had belonged to a Dane who repaired bikes. Now it was his studio. He had salvaged a desk, which doubled as his dining table, a few filing cabinets, a bed comprised of a thin mattress resting on a rickety cot. A freestanding wardrobe stood in one corner, a mirror hanging from one of its doors. The rough-hewn floor was uncovered, stained
with grease. A kerosene burner supplied the heat, but it was too small to keep such a large room warm. The bathroom consisted of a toilet and a sink, only a rudimentary shower. There was no kitchen. A hot plate was set up on the desk. Rats scurried through the walls at night, pilfering food from the bakery underneath. But it wasn’t the austerity or the bleakness of the apartment that bothered Polina. It was something else, something that she could only feel in her bones.