The Second Winter (18 page)

Fredrik snatched the package from his daughter. The movement was so rough and clumsy, and Amalia’s fingers were so frozen, that she lost her grip on the bottle of wine, and it struck the stone hearth, where it shattered into a million green shards in a pool of liquid as dark as blood. Fredrik leaned forward to examine the mess, then tore open the bundle. When he saw what was inside, he snorted, then tossed the treats into the fire. Amalia’s face flushed red. Tears stung her eyes. It had happened so quickly — she was too stunned even to ask her father
why
.

“I won’t have you bringing me their scraps,” he said. “Understand? And you don’t need it either, do you? Look at you — look how fat you are.”

A sob choked Amalia’s throat.

“Clean this up,” Fredrik said, gesturing toward the broken glass.

Amalia knelt at his feet. She gathered a few of the larger pieces, then stopped. She was on the verge of collapse. “No,” she said. “No, I won’t.” Then she stood on weak legs and left the room and climbed the stairs.

Oskar was lying in bed, but he wasn’t asleep. Fredrik’s children shared a bedroom. It was divided roughly into two by a closet in one corner, which gave the room an irregular shape. On the side without a window, Oskar’s narrow, steel-frame bed was pushed snug against the wall. A sheet nailed to the ceiling provided a privacy screen, but it didn’t keep out sound. He listened as his sister pulled off her clothes. The coils of the mattress and the wire mesh beneath it squeaked when she sat down. He knew this series of screeches well. In his bones. He
had heard these sounds in his sleep going on years now. They had become a reassurance to him. His sister was home, he wasn’t alone. Her stiff sheets rustled as she lifted her legs off the floor. The bed groaned, she exhaled. A few minutes later, Oskar realized that she was crying. “You’re late getting home,” he said, in a whisper. “I was starting to worry.”

“I have to wake up soon,” she replied. “I had better sleep.” Downstairs, the grate clanged when Fredrik threw another log onto the fire. The smell of smoke climbed the stairs.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m just tired.”

Oskar’s eyes had long since adjusted to the dark. He focused on his hands. His father had asked him to dig a trench inside the barn, to keep out the runoff from the accumulating snow and ice. A callus had torn off from the pad of his thumb, and the wound was throbbing. “Not much of a Christmas,” he said. This was the second Christmas since the German invasion. In his memory, the first hadn’t been quite as meager.

Amalia tried to stifle her sobs. “I didn’t eat,” she said.

Oskar picked at the ripped skin on his thumb. “When I was four or five, Dad gave me a tiny boat for Christmas — you probably don’t remember, because you were still a baby. He made it for me himself — he split a walnut in half, then glued a bench inside, a small sail, too, cut out of paper.” He was speaking softly. Amalia had to strain to hear him. And then he stopped. A memory teased his consciousness, almost too distant to grasp. He was squatting next to a stream of runoff on the side of a road, holding the walnut shell in his fingers. This had been long before the war, when the family still lived in town with their mother, too. He had dropped the vessel into the stream, then had started after it. When it reached a hill, it sped faster and faster, then, before he could reach it,
abruptly cascaded into a storm drain, lost. A few days after, he had come upon the tiny boat again, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, floating serenely in a pool of water formed behind a dam of branches in a ditch. It hadn’t occurred to him to marvel that the water that carried the toy made this very same trip every time it rained. His fascination lay with the miniature boat. He took a step into the icy water to retrieve it, then thought better of the impulse and let it go where it would. Maybe he would chance upon it again, somewhere else.

“I remember the dress Dad gave me one year,” Amalia said.

“I got an air rifle that year,” Oskar remembered. “One that really worked. I shot it with Dad, and I hit a bird.”

“It was a white dress,” Amalia said. “A big white dress, made of lace. I still have it, I think. But it’s too small for me now.”

Oskar, who had been thinking about the poor bird he had killed, thought about his sister instead, coming back downstairs, beaming, in her dress. “Do you remember,” he asked, “what Christmas felt like then?”

“We were children,” Amalia said.

“That was four years ago, wasn’t it?”

“Six,” Amalia corrected him. “That was the same year we moved here.”

“We haven’t seen Mother,” Oskar said. “We used to see her, at least for Christmas. Or Uncle Lars, either — remember Uncle Lars? He used to bring us presents.”

“I’m making her a sweater,” Amalia said.

“Are you?”

“I haven’t finished yet. It’s red, but I’m not sure — I don’t know what color she’ll want.”

“Red,” Oskar said. “She has a red jacket. I remember how much she likes red.”

Brother and sister stopped talking. Downstairs, the fire crackled. Their father settled backward comfortably in the large armchair.

“All you had to do,” Oskar said, raising his voice suddenly, nearly into a shout — these were words directed at his father, “was tell her Merry Christmas. That’s all.
Merry Christmas
.”

In the aftermath of the outburst, the house waited, as tense as a hound with its ears pricked. Outside, the wind gusted. The roof thatch ticked, the rafters creaked. Amalia stopped crying. What was Oskar doing? He had never challenged his father before. “Eh?” A few beats passed. Fredrik’s boots shook the floor as he dropped his feet from the ottoman. “What’s that?”

Amalia could hear Oskar take a deep breath. “She’s been out working all day,” he said. “Didn’t you know that? All day on Christmas Eve, and she’s seventeen, and all she wanted — all she wanted from you — was to hear you say Merry Christmas. No gifts. Just Merry Christmas.”

“Shhh,” Amalia said.

The strain of Fredrik’s weight tested the chair’s aging armrests. The floorboards complained as he gathered himself, pushed himself to his feet. When he reached the base of the stairway, his shadow darkened the room upstairs. The banister whined. The stair treads sagged beneath his boots. He was so tall that he had to bow to squeeze through the doorway. The smell of whiskey accompanied him into the small room, the sweet smell, too, of the fire. He took two uncertain steps, banged a boot against the corner of the closet, stopped at the sheet. A vague silhouette hovered on the thin cloth.

Oskar stopped breathing. The reprisal would be sharp and disproportionate. The back of his father’s hand would bruise his cheek, maybe tear his lip. Only a few months ago, Fredrik had beaten him with his belt until his back had bled. Oskar
watched as his father’s gigantic hand approached the edge of the curtain. The sheet dipped backward, and in the dim light, Fredrik’s cheeks glistened with the sheen of an oily halo. He rocked slightly, and the fabric began to tear from one of the nails. Oskar tried to swallow his fear. He readied himself for the lashes that would follow.

But Fredrik didn’t approach farther. He stood where he was, staring back at his son, catching his breath as if the short climb up the stairs had winded him. Then he let go of the sheet, took an unsteady step toward Amalia’s bed instead. “Is it really Christmas?” His voice was incredulous. He didn’t sit down. He swayed in front of his daughter like a birch tree.

Amalia didn’t answer. She drew her blankets to her chin. All her father could make out was the fuzzy outline of her shape, the tears glistening beneath her eyes.

“My little girl,” the farmhand said.

Oskar raised himself onto his bony elbow.

“You know you’re my little girl,” the farmhand said. “Don’t you? You’ve always been my little girl.”

And you’ve always been my daddy
. But Amalia couldn’t speak the words out loud. They formed a whisper in her mind, a memory of what she might have said years before.

“It’s Christmas, and I don’t have anything for you.”

“I don’t want anything,” Amalia whispered.

“Maybe a story,” Oskar said.

Remembering his son, Fredrik swiveled, grabbed at the sheet, tore it from the first two nails. It dropped, opening a cavity into the small space Oskar considered his own. “What kind of story? What do you mean?”

“She always likes to hear the same thing,” Oskar said.

“Does she?”

“You know she does.”

Fredrik shook his head. His unwashed hair hadn’t been cut in months — in a year, maybe — and it hung over his ears. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“About when she was born,” Oskar said. “You know how it always makes her laugh. To hear how she wasn’t breathing when she was born, how when the midwife handed her to you she was turning blue and you handed her back and the woman had to spank her and shake her to make her breathe.”

“She looked like an angel,” the farmhand said. “That’s all I remember about that. She was the tiniest baby I have ever seen, and she looked exactly like an angel.”

Oskar peered at his father. In her bed, Amalia looked at him, too. The fire downstairs was casting its shadowy glow all the way up here, and the light undulated on his shoulders and in his filthy, greasy hair.

“Anyway, I don’t want to tell any stories,” Fredrik said. “I don’t like stories. I hate them. They make me dizzy, and I’m already dizzy enough. I have something else.” He faced his daughter again. “I have something else for you.” Then he twisted back around on his unsteady feet and left the room. His boots rattled the stairs, the front door opened then closed with a slam. From outside, Oskar and Amalia could hear the crunch of his unsteady footsteps in the snow.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Amalia whispered.

Oskar laced his sore, aching fingers behind his head, stared up at the dark ceiling. It had been a long day for him, too. Five minutes passed, then ten. He listened to the rasp of Amalia’s breathing, fought to keep himself awake. No doubt his father had forgotten whatever he had set out to retrieve. Or maybe he hadn’t gone for anything at all. Maybe he had just moved his drinking to the barn, where he could enjoy his whiskey in
peace. Then the snow crunched again. Oskar opened his eyes, pulled himself from the beginning of a dream. Fredrik slid, fell to his knees with a curse, stumbled across the porch. The front door opened and closed, and once again the farmhand made his way upstairs.

“Here,” Fredrik said, as he appeared in the doorway.

Amalia sat up. “I can’t see what you’re holding,” she said.

“Here,” Fredrik repeated. He crossed the cramped room. When he sat down on Amalia’s bed, the springs squealed like a dying pig, the frame nearly gave way. Something in his hand was sparkling. A delicate chain was draped over his fingers.

“Daddy — what is it?”

“It’s for you,” Fredrik said. He found Amalia’s hand, in a rough gesture passed the necklace to her.

Amalia couldn’t see the jewelry well, but she understood that this was something she couldn’t own. Where had such a pendant come from? They barely had money enough to eat. “I can’t —”

“Take it,” her father insisted.

“But where did you get it? Is it really for me?”

“Just take it,” Fredrik said. His voice was rougher than he wanted it to be. Frustration welled in his throat. Realizing that she probably wouldn’t keep it no matter what he said, he stood from the bed, took a step into the center of the room. Oskar could see the outline of his brow and cheeks when he turned to face him — the rest of his body melted into the shadows. “It’s time to sell the rest,” Fredrik said to his son.

Oskar rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

“I can’t do it myself. They’re watching me. So it’ll be up to you.”

“I can do it,” Oskar said.

“Not here. Not in Aalborg — not anywhere around here. In Copenhagen. I know a few people — you’ll do it there.”

Oskar met his father’s gaze through the dark.

Amalia was studying the pendant. Even in the dim light, the tiny diamonds shimmered. The sapphire in its center was as large as a pebble.

“Put it on,” Fredrik said to her.

“Daddy —”

Fredrik returned to her bed, grabbed the necklace from her, lifted it over her head. The chain tangled in her hair, then found its place around her neck. “There — jewels for an angel.”

Amalia’s eyes glistened. What had her father done? This pendant was worth more than anything she had ever seen in the Nielsens’ house. Next to it, Mrs. Nielsen’s pearls were a string of teeth.

“Now —” When Fredrik sat back down on Amalia’s bed, the flask in his pocket sloshed, and he remembered it. He drew it out, twisted off the top, brought the bottle to his lips. “If it’s Christmas, we sing songs, don’t we?”

Oskar sat up in his bed, stared at the blurry figures of his father and sister across the room.

“That’s what we do on Christmas, isn’t it? We sing songs.” And then the farmhand’s voice, raised in song, filled the small cottage. And a few measures later it was joined by his daughter’s, and then by his son’s, and they sang the only song Fredrik knew, the only lullaby he could remember singing them, years before, when his daughter really was an angel and his son was a blond soldier too young for war.