The Second Winter (43 page)

The last sensation he would remember was the spreading of her wings, and then being borne aloft on Polina’s slender back, effortlessly, through a sky drawn, like song is, too, in whispers and ink.

Goodbye, Oskar
.

When dawn broke, Oskar was standing at the Nielsens’ gate in the pouring, icy rain, saying goodbye to Amalia again.
The metallic pulse of Fredrik’s saw echoed up the hill from the side of the barn, in rhythm with his heartbeat. His sister’s lips brushed his cheek. Her whispered parting warmed his ear. Then he became aware of the hard, lumpy, damp pillow. Had he been dreaming? He woke slowly, shivering. The bed was much colder than it should have been. The blankets had fallen off during the night, and he had been too worn out to notice. He woke because Mads Knudsen had arranged for their passage on a Danish icebreaker berthed in the harbor at Helsingør. The icebreaker was leading a Swedish ship through the naval blockade into the North Sea, and the captain had agreed to take Oskar and Polina as far as he could, then smuggle them onto the merchant ship. Oskar had told himself to wake at the first sign of light — the crew wouldn’t wait for them — and that is what his body had done. He reached for the blankets. The salty taste of Polina’s hair teased his tongue. Then he realized that he was by himself in the bed, and he opened his eyes. The air was thick and dusky, the hotel was silent. He lifted himself onto his elbow. The room was empty. Polina was gone.

She could have been in the bathroom down the hall again, as she had been last night, but Oskar knew that she wasn’t. He sat up onto the side of the bed, rubbed his eyes with his palms. Her bundle of clothes was missing from the floor next to his suitcase. His head ached from the alcohol. His thoughts moved slowly. He stood, crossed to the window.

Outside, the small town was blanketed in mist. The morning was still, the narrow street was deserted. When the hotel door opened beneath him, he knew that it would be Polina. Oskar watched her step onto the sidewalk. Vague recollections tugged at his consciousness. The rustle of fabric when she pulled on her clothes. The scrape of her hands on the floor, searching for her belongings in the dim light. The squeak of
leather as she dug through his suitcase for the packets of crowns. And then her voice in a whisper,
Goodbye, Oskar
.

She paused beneath the window, looked up and down the street as if she wasn’t certain which way to go. Then, slipping the makeshift bundle beneath her arm, she ducked her head and started walking. Watching her through the glass, in his own way Oskar understood. If she had been able to love him, she would have stayed. She didn’t look back, not even a glance, and Oskar never saw her face again. Her footsteps quickly faded, and just like that he was alone. This girl who had led him from his home with his father and sister was nothing but a memory, a name. Polina.

Seagulls screeched down by the strand. When the wind blew, the mist swirled like smoke. This village was on fire. This country was smoldering. There was nothing left for him here — if he tried to stay, everything he held would dissolve in his hands like ash. Oskar thought about counting the money in his pocket. But it didn’t matter how much Polina had left him. He would take whatever he had and go. He found his trousers and his shoes, got himself dressed. There was no time left for reflection.

He didn’t notice the diamond ring until he was reaching for his suitcase, on his way out the door. He stopped still, opened the case, lifted the ring from the shadows. The old shoelace he had fashioned into a necklace for Polina slipped between his fingers and hung from his hand, catching the weak light. He held the diamond in his palm, gazing at it. Then he slipped the shoelace over his head and tucked the ring under his shirt. The cold stone cut a path down his chest. He had to hurry. He left the hotel and headed silently for the launch. His footsteps chased him down the empty alleyway.

January 2, 1942
.

Fredrik wasn’t a good driver. He had driven trucks and tractors for decades. This was part of his work on the farm. Behind the wheel of an automobile, though, he lacked the same confidence. Rather than borrow the car from the Nielsens, he had decided to take his motorcycle instead. It was a BMW with heavy tires. The roads were still icy, even after the rain, which had melted the snow. But the machine would get him to the coast. He didn’t have any gloves. He had given them to Oskar. So he wrapped his hands in rags, then kick-started the engine and climbed onto the rumbling, cumbersome ride. At four in the morning, it was still pitch-black. The headlamp barely lit a path in front of him.

Amalia woke to the sound of the motorcycle’s engine. The exhaust pipe was loose, and the cylinder fired its syncopated rhythm with a guttural roar. When Fredrik revved the motor, the growl reverberated over the sleeping farm, and the pigs
began to bleat. Amalia sat up in bed and looked out the window in time to see her father circle to the top of the driveway then follow a fragile column of yellow light through the gate. She watched him disappear, then got out of bed, stumbled into the bathroom.

When Fredrik reached the coast above Copenhagen, in Hornbæk, his hands were so cold that he had lost feeling in his fingers. Beneath the rags, his knuckles bled. When he stood off the motorcycle, his thighs ached. He leaned the machine onto its kickstand where the asphalt met the dunes, then, bending into his steps, climbed the steep bluff. The sun was rising, and the clouds had begun to clear. By the time he reached the top of the hill, a band of golden sunlight was stretching across the flat, steel surface of the water like a flaming slick of oil. The wind gusted, and tall grass tickled his fingers. The sun carved shafts from the air. He stood still on the hard sand, raised a hand to his brow, and scanned the sea.

Beneath him, far in the distance, a huge merchant ship was skimming through the mercury, as grim as a factory. Diesel exhaust billowed from its stacks, as if the gigantic hull had itself caught fire. He watched it glide across the strait, carving a route between chunks of ice set adrift by an icebreaker. Behind it, the seawater churned in its wake, etching a white tail that betrayed its path. Of course, Fredrik had no way of knowing if this was the ship that Oskar was on, or where this ship was headed. But he held his hand up anyway, into the sky, and waved.

New York. April 1991
.

Across the well-lit gallery, a tall, silver-haired man was standing in front of a photograph labeled with a simple title underneath:
Polina
. It had been difficult for Angela Schmidt to include this particular photograph with the rest of the collection. She understood that it was a defining composition for her father. Without it, she doubted that the publisher compiling her father’s work would have been interested in the others, no matter their historical importance. Still, Angela couldn’t help but feel some shame. Her father’s photography revealed his horror of the war. But — in Angela’s mind at least — this image of the girl in his room in Copenhagen exposed him. He had been a part of the atrocity, not just an observer. She watched the man whose gaze was fixed upon the black-and-white portrait, ignoring the crowd in between — the New Yorkers who had gathered here on this Sunday in April. For them, this opening had become a social event. The exhibit had
been written up in the
New York Times
. They congregated in small groups around the photographs, hardly noticing them at all, more intent upon one another. A small chunk of the Berlin Wall, emblazoned with green and red and black streaks of graffiti, sitting in a glass case labeled with a date —
9 November 1989
— attracted more of their attention than her father’s images. There was something different about this tall man. When she had first caught sight of him, she had mistaken him for a European. Now as she moved closer to him, she realized that, despite his age, he was dressed in the jeans and flannel shirt and worn boots of an American wrangler. In the few minutes she had been watching him, he hadn’t once looked away from the photograph.

What a wonderful success, Angela
. But Angela barely heard the praise. She smiled at her U.S. editor without taking her in, continued in a straight line toward the portrait of Polina.

“Excuse me,” Angela said to the man.

It took a moment for the words to penetrate. When he turned to face the gray-haired woman, the man’s eyes registered his recognition. She took note of his weathered skin. When he extended a hand toward her, she noticed how scarred it was before she grasped it. “I knew your father,” the man said.

This stunned Angela. Very quickly, though, she realized that the information wasn’t a surprise. There had been something intimate in the way this man was looking at the girl in the photograph. “You knew her, too,” Angela said, “didn’t you?”

The man’s mouth formed the semblance of a smile.

“Who was she?”

The man didn’t answer. It occurred to him now that he couldn’t, not really. He had never been able to define her. He had never been able to capture Polina any more perfectly than Hermann had in this photograph.

“Do you know what happened to her?”

“No. I lost track of her. I don’t know if she lived or died.” The man’s voice was a confusion of accents. He read the progression of Angela’s thoughts. “I’m Danish,” he explained. “But I left Denmark —” —
during the second winter of the war
. He didn’t finish the sentence. He had noticed the scintillation of gems beneath the thin fabric of Angela’s shirt.

She followed his stare to her own chest, then raised her eyes again. “It belonged to my father,” she said.

The man nodded his head, but he couldn’t speak.

Angela took hold of the platinum chain, lifted the pendant from beneath her collar. When she held it in her hand, the man took a half step backward. “I nearly parted with it. When I left my husband, I thought I would need the money.” She met the man’s gaze. “But I decided to keep it after all, and I’m glad that I did.”

The man didn’t ask to hold the jewelry. He simply raised one of his twisted hands, extended a callused finger, touched the smooth surface of the sapphire.

“I would like to hear how you knew my father,” Angela said.

The man thought about this. Already, this encounter had brought back too many memories for a single day. He had known when he read the notice about the exhibit, before making the trip to New York, that it wouldn’t be easy to confront these images from his past. He had long since buried these ghosts, and they wouldn’t wake quietly. He hadn’t expected, though, that his reaction to the photographs would be so visceral. He looked once again at the image of Polina, standing half naked in the apartment above the bakery in Copenhagen. He remembered this skirt clutched at her waist. He remembered these hands. He remembered her colorless eyes and her broken teeth. The smell of dust overwhelmed him, and for a
split second he was standing in the German lieutenant’s studio again, following this Polish girl in his peripheral vision, reading her face through the shadows.

“Was he a good man, my father? As you knew him, I mean —”

Angela’s voice reached the man from a great distance. When he looked at her again, he had grown older.
War can make criminals of heroes
, he thought,
and heroes of criminals
, and he remembered the day when he had seen Fredrik’s name on a list of Danes who had given their lives to the resistance. But he didn’t reply. He returned her gaze. Then he turned and left the gallery. Just like that. It wasn’t an insult to her. It was the act of a man of few words. Angela didn’t realize until he was already gone that she hadn’t asked his name.

“Wait,” she said, but it was too late.

Oskar pushed through the doorway onto the sidewalk, let the door close behind him. He had to shake the feeling that he was stepping into snow. The photograph of Polina had brought him back to Copenhagen again. Back to the winter of 1941. He hesitated, uncertain of his direction, imagining a maze of cobblestone streets twisting and turning through the frozen city, through the mist, back to the train station. For a fleeting moment, he lay in bed again, in Polina’s arms, in the small hotel in Korsør. In a few more steps, around the next corner perhaps, he might find himself with his father and sister one last time, in their little cottage in Jutland. Then a yellow taxi slid past. A truck honked, a couple of pigeons took flight. The cacophony of New York confronted him. He looked upward into the pale sky through eyes made of glass. The sun touched his face. And he continued walking.

It took me about three weeks to hammer out the first draft of
Fredrik’s Want
— which was this novel’s original title. I based the story on what I recollected from hazy childhood tales of my father’s uncle, who actually was a brute and a member of the Danish resistance during World War II, but my purpose in writing the book had little to do with this man or Denmark during the war. To me, the story was metaphor.
Fredrik’s Want
as I first conceived it was what it is, on a primal level, to be a father, and this was something I had the audacity to believe I could teach to my children. After finishing the first draft, it took almost four more years to turn that rough metaphor into the book it is today, and in that process I learned more from my children about what it means to be a father than I will ever teach them, through this novel or otherwise. I am indebted to both Ray and Melissa, profoundly, not only for their actual work as my most staunch critics but for their love and their insight.