The Second Winter (2 page)

Watching them, Angela’s thoughts returned to her trek through East Berlin the night before. After losing her way, she had finally stumbled on the apartment block where her aunt lived with her husband. The garbage hadn’t been picked up in two weeks, and she had had to step over bags of trash
to enter the building. Martina Bloch was still awake, waiting. Even though the windows were blacked out with rags and newspaper, only a single lamp was burning. The old woman cracked the door open and peeked into the hallway, then grabbed Angela’s hands. A thin silver bracelet slid down her bony wrist. She pulled Angela inside and locked the door behind her, then held her niece at arm’s length in trembling hands.
You’re so beautiful, my dear
, the old woman said,
so tall and slender, so much like your father
. Despite his own desire to see Angela, Martina’s husband had already retired to the bedroom. He was seventy-six years old, and his health was failing. Through the thin walls, Angela had heard the creaks and whines and labored breathing of a fitful sleep. The smell inside the cramped apartment, of tinned sardines and weak tea, came back to her now with a sudden intensity.

“Which of these bags belongs to you?” The patrolman’s voice shattered Angela’s reflection. His eyes were on her, scanning her formal dress. She felt him pause over her bare shoulders, her breasts.

Outside, the rumble of engines became the whistle of wind — a sound Angela remembered from her childhood. Before he died in the war, her father had taken her sailing. The shrill, lonely rush of wind through the rigging and masts of the boats in the harbor had fascinated her. On the water, she hadn’t liked the cold, or the way the boat tipped, but there had been something spellbinding about the sound. “I — my name is — I play the violin,” she said. Although she was stuttering, the strength in her voice surprised her.

“And which bag is yours, Fräulein?”

“My suitcase is underneath with the others,” Angela said. “That violin there belongs to me.”

“This one?” The patrolman lifted the case.

Another bead of sweat slipped down Angela’s temple, tickling her skin. Her thighs were suddenly moist, and she remembered making love to Lutz the very first time. When his fingers had found her vagina, he had entered her so roughly that it hurt. Despite the violation, or perhaps because of it, she had come immediately. When he had grabbed her by the neck, she had smelled herself on his fingers.

The case slid off the rack with a scrape. Angela wondered whether the patrolman would notice that it was heavier than it should have been. “Is it locked?” he asked her.

Angela couldn’t find her voice to answer. Her body stiffened. Lutz’s fingers had dug into her spinal column at the base of her skull. His thumb had clamped her jugular. Her head had become light, her vision had blurred, her thoughts had soared away from her like hatched butterflies.

“Open it,” the patrolman said.

Angela couldn’t move.

“Open it,” the patrolman repeated. His eyes found hers.

“We’re all Germans,” a voice said, a few seats back.

“What’s that?” The patrolman pivoted stiffly, located the man who had challenged him.

“You heard me,” the man said. “We’re all Germans here.”

“There are laws,” the patrolman said.

“Why are you harassing us?”

Angela recognized the director’s voice. Had he realized that his violinist was smuggling something across the border in her violin case? He had been in the lobby this morning, drinking a coffee, when she had rushed into the hotel, just in time to grab her belongings and board the bus. She watched the patrolman’s hand tighten on the handle then shove the case back onto the rack.

“Where is your suitcase, sir?” the patrolman asked the director. His fingers loosened on the handle, then let go.

“Here you are,” the director said, proffering a small leather bag that had been resting at his feet. “I’ve already opened it. You can search my things. I have nothing to hide. None of us do. You’re only wasting our time.”

When the patrolman stepped past her, Angela shuddered. The lingering, antiseptic scent of his soap wasn’t strong enough to conceal the stench of animal underneath.
Just like a dog
, she thought.
This man is no better than a dog
.

Kraków, Poland. August 1938
.

A young girl crossed a bridge on the outskirts of Kraków slowly, one hand trailing behind her, her fingers running over the rusty guardrail. In her other hand, the girl clutched a doll with black hair and a red dress. Mossy green, the Vistula rippled beneath her in the breeze, but the water could have been standing still. The river was low, barely flowing at the end of a dry summer. Beyond the sandy, stony expanse of the riverbank, reeds were drying into gray stalks. In the distance, through the heavy iron girders that supported the span, the spires of the Wawel Cathedral carved an ornate edge into the hazy afternoon sky — or perhaps it was the invisible weight of the sky, the young girl reflected idly, that gave definition to the stones of the cathedral. It was a long, hot day at the height of August. If not for the wind, the humidity would have been stifling. The high-pitched buzz of cicadas and crickets was so loud that the girl didn’t hear the approach of a bicycle. The rattle of its
wheels over the cobblestones penetrated her thoughts in the same moment that the rider called out to her.

“Hey there, little beauty.”

Polina twisted around. Her hair, uncut and unruly, caught the wind and tangled in front of her eyes. She swiped at it. She had chipped a front tooth the week before, and when she squinted into the sun, her raised lip revealed a small gap. Her first thought upon hearing the voice was that it belonged to her uncle — her father’s brother, Czeslaw — and this sent a twinge through her heart. But the man on the bicycle was a stranger. The dark stubble on his cheeks and a split in his dry lips drew themselves from the blur of movement. His eyes fastened on hers. They were black, but they shined like polished stones. The wind gusted, tossing her hair across her face again, wrapping her white linen dress against her thin body. Then the stranger had pedaled past. She turned on her heel to watch him, then once again started on her way. After a few paces, she reached for the guardrail, as before let her fingers trace its rough texture. She liked the feel of the rusty iron bubbling through the thick paint. The tiny holes had sharp edges, and despite the heat, the slick, mottled gloss was as cold as a slab of ice. It struck her that the metal was disintegrating. The bridge wasn’t as solid as it appeared. If she moved slowly enough, she might step into a void.

At the far side of the river, she continued on the road, then dropped down onto a path that led through a thicket of birch trees into a field that was lying fallow. She walked listlessly, and the sun baked her through her dress. She stared at the rocky path at her feet, but her thoughts were elsewhere. She didn’t look up until she was in the shadow of an old plaster barn. Catching sight of a boy dressed in clothing handed down from his older brother, she smiled, but the expression fled just
as quickly. She hesitated, then took a few more steps, keeping herself hidden beside the barn.

Julian was lanky, as thin as a rail. He was about half a year younger than Polina, but already he was a few inches taller. This was a new development. Last summer, when they had played — which they often did, since they were neighbors and it was convenient for one of their mothers to look after both of them — Polina had hardly noticed him. His nose had always been runny, his hands were always dirty, his shirts had holes, he kept his pants up with a rope belt. She had begged her mother not to let him into the house. Now Polina found herself thinking about him even when he wasn’t there. When she was close to him, she liked to stand on her toes to see if she could still match his height. Since he had become taller, his shaggy black hair had thickened, and she had noticed his eyes, his white skin, his too-red lips. At night sometimes she fell asleep wondering if he was thinking about her, too. She approached him slowly. His back was turned toward her, and he didn’t hear her footsteps. In front of him, the chickens squawked.

Polina leaned into the wall of the barn. Bits of white plaster crumbled onto her bare shoulder like flour. She grasped a piece of embedded wood and squeezed until tiny splinters pierced her fingertips. Ten feet from her, crouched behind a fence post, Julian scooped up a handful of rocks, chose a black shard of flint, then took aim at the captive birds. Polina understood his intention, but when he raised his arm then jerked his wrist and sent the sharp stone hurtling into the coop, she gasped anyway. The missile struck the rooster, and when the rooster lifted its wings, a couple of feathers floated through the dusty air. It let out a shriek, leaped across the hard ground, pecked one of the hens — as if the hen had been the cause of its injury. When the rooster settled back down, Polina could see that the rock
had left a gap in its feathers. A sliver of skin was showing, red with a trickle of blood. Julian was already weighing the next rock in his hand, getting set to whip it at the helpless bird.

Polina didn’t think to shout. She bounded from the shadows, closed the distance to the boy, grabbed his arm before he could fling the stone.

“Hey!” Julian twisted around as if old Farmer Madeja, to whom these chickens belonged, had caught him in the act. His expression went from startled to terrified to flustered in the space of a second. “Hey,” he said, more softly. “What are you doing?”

“What are
you
doing?” Polina asked him, without any pause.

Julian returned her gaze. He noticed how pale her eyes were. His own were bright. Their surface was as wet, Polina thought, as if he had been crying.

“Look at his wing,” she said finally.

Julian didn’t budge.

“
Look
at his wing,” Polina said again. This time, she let go of her doll and grabbed hold of Julian’s face and tried to twist him toward the coop.

“Stop it,” he protested. Her fingers dug into his skin.

“Look,” she insisted, “and I’ll let go.”

Julian capitulated, and Polina took her fingers away.

“You cut him,” she said. “You made him bleed.”

“He was hurting her.”

“What?”

“The rooster,” Julian repeated. “He was hurting her.”

But Polina didn’t hear him. The memory of her uncle Czeslaw’s hands on her rib cage, lifting her, overcame her. She had left her house — earlier today, only one or two hours before — and she had started down the road to find Julian at the barn, as they had agreed. Her uncle had ridden up behind
her on his bicycle and asked her to climb onto the bike behind him. She hadn’t wanted to, but she hadn’t resisted when he hoisted her up. As lithe as she was, she was too heavy to be carried like a child. The steel rack behind his seat gouged her skin. She hated the feeling of his waist beneath her fingers, but she didn’t have any choice. If she didn’t hold on to him while he was pedaling, she would have fallen. The cobblestones became a blur below the tires. They crossed the bridge, then wound through the streets on the other side of the river to the apartment where Czeslaw lived with his wife and two ugly sons. Her uncle squeezed her neck as he led her up the stairs. The rancid smell of dirty laundry assaulted her. The light had been dim. Czeslaw brought her through the kitchen into the bedroom where he and her aunt slept together on a mattress on the floor. She had never been in this room before, and it felt foreign to her, as if she had entered a different apartment altogether, one that didn’t belong to this same city she knew as her home. There was a doll lying on the mattress that caught Polina’s eye.

After that, the next thing Polina could remember was Czeslaw sitting in a wobbly chair beside the mattress, pulling on his shoes. He pointed at the doll, which was now on the floor. It had a face made of china, hair cut from a horse’s tail, a body stitched together in silk, stuffed with cotton. When she didn’t move, he picked it up, shoved it into her arms.
It’s for you
, he told her.
Don’t you want it? It’s a little girl. See? Just like you are
. Then he had lifted the doll’s red dress to show her the fabric body underneath, and his laughter had made her shiver. Beneath the dress, the doll’s torso and legs had the clumsy shape of a cow udder.

“He was trapping one of the chickens against the fence,” Julian said.

“What?” she managed.

Julian liked the way her lip stretched taut over her chipped tooth and uneven bite. The incisors on either side of her front teeth jutted into the skin, turning her upper lip white. It reminded him of Polina as he remembered her years before, with one front tooth missing, the other not yet fully developed. “He was pecking at her. Look.”

She followed his finger to one of the hens at the far side of the coop. Its head and neck were bald of feathers where it had been attacked.

“He was going to kill her. If I didn’t throw the rock, he would have eaten her, I think.” Julian was still gripping the second rock. He had made his point to Polina. He lifted his arm again, took aim.

“Don’t,” she said.

Julian squinted at his friend. Hadn’t she heard him? “He needs to learn his lesson,” he said.

Polina shook her head. “Just don’t,” she said. “I don’t care what he’s done. Just don’t hurt him anymore.”

Julian let the rock slip from his hand. It landed on the hard, dry earth at their feet with a quiet thud. He fingered a small object in his pocket. “I was going to give you something,” he said. “Now I don’t want to.”

“What is it?”

Julian tightened his fingers around the smooth chunk of raw amethyst at the bottom of his pocket. “I found it in the river this morning,” he said. When he drew out his hand, the worn stone caught the sunlight like a jewel.

Polina took it carefully from his palm. She didn’t thank him for the gift, but just slid it into her own pocket.

“I thought maybe you would want to keep it,” Julian said.

Realizing that she had dropped the doll, Polina snatched it up by its arm.