The Second Winter (4 page)

It was snowing again by the time they crossed the bridge on their way home. The sky had become dark, and Polina was pensive. When her parents saw how cold and wet she was, they would be upset. Julian, too, had fallen silent. After turning off the main road onto their street, they marched through the snow and ice without speaking, their eyes trained on the ground in front of them.

When they were just half a block from their houses, a single, sharp report echoed up the canyon between the buildings. Polina’s first thought was that it was a gunshot, and she froze in place. Only in retrospect did the sound distinguish itself into the slam of a wooden door.

“Is that your mother?”

The wind was gusting, and the snow was blinding her, but Polina followed Julian’s eyes. A woman, half naked — wearing a skirt Polina recognized, her shirt ripped and pulled down to her waist — stood uncertainly in the middle of the street. Her breasts were exposed. Her nipples stood out crisply, pinched by the cold into two tight, red circles. It took Polina a few seconds to comprehend the image. But Julian was correct. This was her mother. Polina reached for Julian’s arm. Something kept her rooted to the icy street.

“What is she doing?” Julian asked. “Why is she standing in the road?”

The jagged tip of Polina’s chipped tooth dug into the flesh of her lower lip. She blinked back tears as sharp as shards of glass.
Are we dreaming?

Julian took a step forward, then stopped. “Who’s that?” The mist was thick, and the snow was falling in a blizzard now. Behind Ania Dabrowa, the fuzzy outline of a man in a long coat emerged from the gloom, and then another and another.

“Mama,” Polina whispered.

Ania pulled her shirt back up to cover her breasts, but the fabric was torn, and it slid off her shoulders again. She was more concerned with this than with the men taking shape beside her. She gathered the remains of the shirt, held it in place at her neck.

The heavy crunch of the soldiers’ footsteps reverberated down the street. One of the soldiers — a man who wore a mustache like the Führer’s and whose cheeks were black with stubble as thick as soot — grabbed hold of Ania’s shirt and yanked it back down to her waist. He did this with a smile. A cigarette dangled from his lips, his rifle swung loose behind his arm. He twisted around for his comrades’ approval, and they gave it
to him. One of them shouted a word Polina couldn’t decipher. Another whistled.

“Mama,” Polina whispered again. Her voice was barely more than a hiss. Somehow, though, her mother heard it, and across the distance that separated them, their eyes met. Polina took a step forward. The soldier was fingering her mother’s chin. Smoke from his cigarette was mixing with the mist, like a tincture of blood dropped into a glass of water. There was hair on his knuckles — black hair that Polina could see through the snow. His fingernails were as yellow as wax. She took another step, but her mother shook her head —
no!
— and Polina stopped. Ania wouldn’t let go of her daughter’s eyes. She was determined not to let Polina approach.

And then, from behind her mother, Polina heard her sister crying. She tracked the sound. Her sister’s small body, writhing helplessly, was clasped in the arms of one of the soldiers. “Adelajda,” Polina whispered.

Julian drew a sharp breath and held it. His fingers found Polina’s shoulder. He wanted to shout, but he had no voice. Why wasn’t Polina doing something? This was her mother. This was her sister. These soldiers were taking them.

The wind gusted, and in front of the two children the snow and mist began to clear. A transport truck parked against the row of houses lifted itself from the shadows, and in the same moment Polina became aware of voices. It struck her that she had been hearing them for some time now. Women crying, children sobbing, a man chanting prayers. The truck’s engine turned over, and the large machine vibrated. In the cage behind the cab, through gaps in the wagon’s sides, Polina glimpsed fingers and hands. A child’s face was pressed into a crack — she could see a nose and a mouth and a wisp of hair.
The soldier twisted Ania around, then shoved her toward the rear of the truck. Adelajda screamed, and the other soldier extended his arms and carried her, kicking and struggling, behind the truck as well.

Julian, his mind made up, let go of Polina’s shoulder, then — without any thought for the consequences — started running down the street toward the soldiers.

Polina watched him slide, catch himself, then trip through the snow, picking up speed as he ran. She shouted for him to stop. But he kept running. One of the soldiers turned at the sound of the approaching footsteps. His hand flew quickly to his gun, and he whipped it from the holster. “No!” Polina shouted. And then she began to run, too. “Julian — please —
Julian
— no!”

Julian reached the soldier before the man was able to aim his weapon. Clutching the pistol in his fist, clenching his jaw shut with a grimace, the soldier swung the steel butt across Julian’s face like a club. Julian collapsed at his feet, unconscious. The snow beside his face turned as red as his lips.

Mama, Julian, Adelajda. Mama, Julian, Adelajda
. As Polina ran, the three names resounded in her head like a heartbeat. The soldier’s knuckles were splattered with Julian’s blood. Everything else was out of focus. In the confusion of the moment, she didn’t see the shadows shift in the doorway next to her, and before she could reach the soldier — before she could go any farther to help Julian or to rescue her mother and her sister — she was caught in someone’s arms, yanked backward off the street. She fought blindly, but the man holding her was too strong, and he kept her pinned. When she realized that it was her father, she wanted to shout.
Papa!
He stopped her, though, with a hand over her mouth.

“Shhh,” he said. “Shhh.”

With her eyes, she pleaded with him to let her go. His hand, clamped over her nose and mouth, choked her, and she couldn’t breathe. She grabbed his wrists and tried to free herself.

“Shhh,” he said. “Polina — shhh.” He held her even tighter. His eyes narrowed, and she read his fear. “There’s nothing you can do, do you understand?”

She shook her head, squirmed.

“You belong to Czeslaw now, Polina.”

She was suffocating. She tried to suck air through his fingers. Then she surrendered. Her body relaxed. Her father held her up, forced her to look at him.

“Do you understand, Polina? You can’t be my daughter anymore. Listen to me, Polina.
Listen
. You can’t have anything to do with me or your mother. Understand? You belong to Czeslaw.”

Next to them, Polina saw her uncle, hidden in the shadows. His eyes were glowing like embers.

“Understand?”

When her father took his hand off her mouth, Polina didn’t speak. She remained still, staring at her father.

“Good,” her father said. Then he touched her cheek and raised his mouth in what should have been a smile. And then he let her go. Without more, he took a step out from the doorway and started walking down the street toward the soldiers.

“Papa,” she said, but he didn’t hear her.

When the soldier who had clubbed Julian pointed his pistol at him, her father stopped and raised his arms. The soldier shouted, and her father nodded at the truck. “My wife,” he said. He gestured so that the soldier would understand — his hands over his heart, a finger pointed at the rear of the truck, where Ania had disappeared. “My wife,” he repeated. He held his arms against his chest in the shape of a cradle. “My
daughter.” The soldier waited while the Pole approached, then grabbed him by the neck and shoved him toward the other prisoners. In the road, Julian was trying to raise himself onto his knees. Blood was still flowing from his forehead, but the soldiers left him alone. Polina watched her father climb up behind her mother and Adelajda, into the waiting cage. He had disappeared before she realized that Czeslaw’s hands were on her shoulders. Her uncle’s grip tightened. He pulled her backward until the shadows had swallowed them completely, and she let him.

January 1940
.

It was after midnight. In the sitting room of Czeslaw’s apartment, Polina’s cousins were asleep on the cold floor. In the narrow bedroom behind the kitchen, her uncle was snoring. The sounds of lovemaking — the rustle of blankets on the hard mattress, her uncle’s truncated grunts, her aunt’s gasps — had long since quieted. In the kitchen, the cast-iron stove ticked as it cooled. The air was close with the smell of cheap tobacco and her aunt’s horrible cooking — a veiny stew that had been simmering for more than a few days now. Polina lay in the hallway on a roll of blankets, her eyes wide open. As tired as she was, it wasn’t difficult to keep herself awake. In the last few weeks, it had been impossible for her to sleep. She waited as long as she could. Then, when she was certain that no one would hear, she sat up and gathered her things. She didn’t possess much — only the few pieces of clothing they had been able to recover from her house. She placed the doll her uncle had given her on her pillow, then stood from her makeshift bed as quietly as she could. She was already dressed — in preparation
for her escape, she had even worn her coat to bed — so all she had to do was sneak from the apartment without knocking into anything or stepping on one of her cousins’ hands. She let herself out the front door, then, when nothing moved inside, started down the stairs, running faster and faster the closer she got to the bottom.

Outside, the wind whipped fiercely through her clothes, but she hardly noticed the cold. She felt nothing but relief. She had the sense that she was breathing for the first time since the afternoon when her family had been stolen from her. She buried her hands into her small bundle of belongings, then set out in the direction of Julian’s house. There was no moon, and the streets were dark. She walked in the center of the road until her eyes adjusted, then slipped into the shadows and meandered through the village toward the river.

As she crossed the bridge, the wind blew even harder. She bent her head down, but the cold bit her cheeks anyway. She closed her eyes and stopped, took a deep breath, then started forward again. Her toes had lost feeling, and she was having trouble with her balance. The blood was thickening in her veins. When the wind gusted, her vision blurred. She fastened on a memory of Julian’s face, and it was this that kept her moving forward.

She was almost across the bridge before she saw the patrol on the other side, and by then it was too late to run. Two men in long coats approached like specters. Even before they reached her, she knew that they were Germans. She could smell the wool of their uniforms, the sweet scent of the machine oil they used to lubricate their weapons. When they were standing directly in front of her, she saw nothing but their eyes. Then she collapsed. The next thing she knew she was lying on the backseat of a German automobile and the engine was buzzing
in her ears, the car vibrating beneath her, and dim streetlamps were gliding past, illuminating the interior with their yellow glow. Disoriented, she focused on the pulsing profiles of the soldiers’ faces in the front seat, consoling herself with the thought that they would take her wherever they had brought her mother and father and sister. No matter what, even if she was interned with them in a prison camp, this would be far better than another day inside her uncle’s apartment.

But the soldiers didn’t bring her to her family. Instead, they drove her to a building in the countryside where other women were being kept as well. The man who had been driving stepped from behind the wheel and yanked her from the rear seat and led her inside, to a small, dank room without windows. Time passed. The door opened and closed, opened and closed, and Polina forgot about the sun and even the moon and let the dark surround her.

The dark had the weight of water. It reminded Polina of a pond where she and Julian would sometimes swim. The water was so murky that it was impossible to see beneath the surface. It clung to her arms and legs like oil, and it had the flavor of leaves and honey. She closed her eyes and kicked her legs and stretched for Julian, and she wondered if she would ever reach the surface again.

West Berlin. August 1969
.

In a single room at a nondescript hotel in West Berlin, Angela sat on a narrow bed, her hands in her lap, her chin resting on her chest. Her eyes were closed. She wasn’t praying, but she could have been. She was reliving the relief she had felt, a few hours earlier, when the engine rumbled back to life and the bus finally started to roll forward again. The large tires sank into potholes and crunched over gravel on the way out of the parking lot onto the road that led through the checkpoint into the West. Even now, the syncopated idle of the diesel engine continued to reverberate in her bones. When she opened her eyes, she took the furniture in — the gloss of weak light on the nicked surface of the shabby desk, the way the desk legs rested on the nylon carpet — and wondered at the opulence of her country. The war, as distant as it felt here in this new world she inhabited, had entombed half her country in its wake. Behind the Iron Curtain, the citizens of East Berlin lived beneath the
weight of so much oppression. The most common things — the basic accoutrements she took for granted — for them were luxuries. She had the sense that she had left her aunt far in the past, not merely a few miles behind her.

She stood from the bed and crossed to the window. The blackout shades were open, and she pulled back the sheer polyester privacy drape, too. A streetcar was sliding past four floors below. The metallic screech of its wheels on the tracks was muffled through the glass. She watched it round the corner out of view, then, remembering the necklace, slipped a finger under the platinum chain and lifted the sapphire pendant from her neck, examined it in the fading afternoon light. Over time, the setting had been damaged, bent, but the stones remained in place. A ring of diamonds formed a fiery circle around the edge. In their center, a large, pale sapphire glimmered, cut into a geometry of sharp facets. The priceless piece of jewelry confounded her as much as it thrilled her. Where had her father gotten it?