The Second Winter, page 23
Fredrik’s back was to the door. “What,” he said, “did the police come inside?” He swiveled in his chair to see what had dampened the cheer. When he caught sight of his daughter, he opened his arms and offered her his lap. “Come,” he said. “Get yourself a glass, then have yourself a seat.”
Amalia wasn’t keen on letting her father know how relieved she felt to be included. But she obeyed and pulled the last of their four glasses from the cupboard and took a careful seat on her father’s thigh. “I fell asleep,” she said, “before I could make dinner.”
Fredrik filled her glass with an ounce or two of whiskey. “Nonsense,” he told her. “You’re working too hard anyway. Those bastards — what are they paying you? Fifty øre a day, isn’t it?”
Amalia took an experimental sip. Her father had never poured her a glass before. The liquid burned her lips and tongue, then cut a swath down her throat. Almost immediately, the alcohol went to her head. Now the expression on Oskar’s face made more sense. He wasn’t used to it either.
“Eh? Fifty øre a day?”
Amalia didn’t answer. Fredrik knew exactly how much they paid her, because he counted her earnings himself every week. Three crowns that went straight into his pocket. He would take the coins from her with a scowl on his face, as if he was doing her a favor letting her remain in his house for so little.
“Maybe it’s time to tell the Nielsens what they can do with their lousy fifty øre, what do you think?” He gave his daughter a squeeze. “Maybe then you can spend a little more time on yourself, the way a girl your age should. I know I haven’t been the best father, but things are going to change, I can promise you that.” He finished the whiskey in his glass, poured himself another. “Things are going to change.”
“I don’t want anything to change, Papa,” Amalia said.
“No?” Fredrik let out a guffaw, as if she had made a joke. “You hear that?” he said to Oskar and Polina both. “She likes to wake up at four and clean the shit off other people’s underpants.”
Amalia pulled herself from her father’s lap, but he grabbed her back again. She acquiesced and collapsed into him beneath the weight of his arm.
“Why don’t you sit down at the table with us?” Oskar suggested. “Amalia plays hearts better than anyone else,” he said to Polina.
“She’s beating us,” Fredrik told Amalia. “We taught her how to play just an hour ago, and already she’s beating us.” He pointed to the score, which he had been tallying on the tablecloth with a lead pencil. “Oskar and I almost have a hundred each already, and she only has twenty-three.” Amalia struggled to stand again, and this time Fredrik let her.
“I’ll deal you in,” Oskar said.
“Yes, sit down,” Polina said. “I think it will be much more fun when you are playing.”
Oskar dealt the cards, and Amalia sipped her whiskey. Her mood lightened, despite her reticence. Every candle they owned was lit. Some were burning on the counter, others on the table. The electric lamp over the sink was glowing, too. The room had never been so bright. She could not recall a moment like this one before in the little cottage.
“Give her twenty-three,” Oskar said to his father. “Like Polina. She should come in with the lowest score.”
“I’ll give her ninety-three,” Fredrik said. “The same score I have.”
“Give her sixty, then,” Oskar said. “In the middle.”
“I’ll give her ninety-three,” Fredrik repeated.
“That’s okay, I’ll take ninety-three,” Amalia said. “I don’t mind — I’ll take your score, Papa.”
“You’re a hard man,” Polina said to Fredrik, “aren’t you?”
Fredrik looked at her, and the room fell silent. Then he picked up his drink and held it toward Polina, waited for her to clink glasses with him. “Skaal,” he said, taking a swallow. He wiped his mouth. “A man who leads a hard life,” he told her, “turns into a stone.” He spoke the words somberly, as if he thought that this insight might excuse him for his brusqueness. “Of course, there isn’t much good in a stone. You can’t plant it and expect a statue to grow. Eh? You can only bury it.”
“Flowers blossom on top of graves,” Polina said, “don’t they?” She took a drink, too.
Fredrik’s eyes narrowed. He thought for a moment, and it looked as if the alcohol was going to take him to a darker place. Then he chuckled. “Okay, then.” He leaned forward onto the table, once again picked up the pencil. “You win. I’ll give her twenty-three.” He scratched out the score he had just written beneath Amalia’s name, wrote in another number. “Just like you. So now we’ll see who the better player is, eh? It’ll be between you and her.” He picked up his cards and began to arrange them.
Polina realized that Oskar was staring at her, and she met his gaze. When her face flushed red, she looked down at her cards, too. She couldn’t remember the last time she had blushed. But his eyes were so intense. She remembered the sensation of his flaccid penis in her hand the night before, at the hotel. His skin had been hot, moist. But he hadn’t shown an ounce of desire.
“And another thing,” Fredrik said, losing interest in his hand. He leaned across the table toward Amalia. “When I say enough of the Nielsens, that’s what I mean, understand?”
Amalia didn’t know what to make of her father’s behavior. As far as she could tell, he wasn’t that drunk. The bottle was half finished, but she had seen him drink much more, and his movements were controlled, his words weren’t slurred. The only difference tonight, as far as she could discern, was this girl at the table.
“They’re working you like a dog,” Fredrik continued.
“They’re not, Papa —”
“Who will start?” Polina asked, having finished sorting her cards.
Fredrik’s face broke into a clever smile. “And you know what happens to a girl if she works like a dog and eats and sleeps like a dog?” He lifted his whiskey to his lips, finished the glass. “She starts to look like one, too.”
Amalia blinked as if she had been struck.
“Now,” Fredrik said, grabbing the bottle by the neck and tipping it over his glass with a slosh, “I didn’t mean it like that. It was just a joke.”
Amalia set her cards onto the table. She tried to hold her emotions in check, but two tears rolled down her cheeks, cutting red lines into her chafed skin. “I don’t know what you mean, then,” she said, “if you don’t mean it like that.”
“All I mean,” Fredrik said, filling Oskar’s glass as well, and then Polina’s, “is that you used to be my little girl, eh? Don’t you remember? You were my little girl. When you were born, you could fit inside my hand. Did I ever tell you that?” He tilted the flask over Amalia’s glass, too, but there was no more whiskey left, not even a dribble, and he tossed the empty bottle into the sink, where it broke into three clean pieces. “I picked you up like this —” He demonstrated, cupping his hand palm up, as if he were weighing a heavy piece of fruit. “And your legs were shorter than my fingers, and your toes were tiny as, tiny as, I don’t know, tiny as grains of sand. They were pearls, that’s what they were, pearls. And your fingers, too, they were a centimeter long, and they were soft as cotton, even the nails. If I put my finger into your hand, you know what you did? You closed your hand around it, just like that, you squeezed, I didn’t have to teach you that, and it felt like I was sticking my finger into a flower.”
Amalia slid her chair backward. “You think I want to wake up so early and burn my hands in boiling water to clean their sheets and prick my fingers with needles to sew their clothes and stand all day in front of their sinks and stoves?” she asked.
“Don’t, Amalia,” Oskar said. “It’s okay. He doesn’t mean it so badly —”
“I do it for you, Papa. That’s why I do it. I do it for you and for Oskar —”
“Hey, what’s this?” Fredrik sat back in his chair, as if he was somehow surprised by his daughter’s reaction. “All I mean to say is you work so hard you don’t have time to take care of yourself like other girls do —”
“You mean like she does,” Amalia said.
“So now I want you to stop — that’s what I’m telling you — I want you to stop, it’s time to tell the Nielsens that you’re not coming back, eh?”
“And then what will we do?” Fredrik’s bluster had touched a nerve, and all the anxiety Amalia had accumulated in the last years, which normally she was able to conceal, came rushing from her in a torrent. “What then, Papa?” Her eyes blazed. She stared her father straight in the eye. “What will we do when there’s no money for us?”
“You let me worry about that,” Fredrik said. “Eh, little girl?” In his mind, the thousand crowns might as well have been a million. “If I tell you we’re going to be all right, then that’s the way it is, we’re going to be all right. I’m your father —”
“Are you?” Amalia demanded. “Are you my father?”
Fredrik looked stunned.
“All you do is drink,” Amalia continued. “All you do is spend the money I bring home. If you’re my father, why don’t you act like it?”
“Now that’s enough,” Fredrik said. His fist slammed the table, and two of the candles toppled over. Droplets of red wax splattered the cloth. Amalia stood. Her chair scraped the floor, and she tripped on it as she fled. Her hip hit the table, and yet another candle fell. The light seemed to flee the room with her.
“You can be very cruel,” Polina said, in the aftermath.
“Enough!” Fredrik shouted. Behind him, Amalia was shuffling up the stairs. His fist pounded the table a second time. Oskar jumped in his chair. “I said enough!”
Polina continued to look at the farmhand. Oskar gazed at her, then lowered his eyes. His leg was bouncing on his chair. They had been having such a good time together, and then everything had fallen apart so quickly. His father sat silently, daring Polina to speak. Oskar was certain that she wouldn’t hold her tongue. But the room remained still.
At last, Fredrik stood from the table. He walked from the kitchen, then from the house. The door swung open, hit the side of the cottage, then slammed shut. Afterward, Oskar became aware of the sound of sleet tapping the glass. Amalia’s footsteps creaked on the floorboards above their heads.
“Your hands.”
Polina’s voice penetrated Oskar’s thoughts slowly, like water through sand. At first, he wasn’t certain what she meant. Then he saw the red stain spreading out beneath his fingers. He had been squeezing the lip of the table as if he would snap it. He relaxed his grip, turned his hands over, examined them. A couple of the blisters had burst again, and a few of the deeper cuts were oozing. “It’s nothing,” he said.
“It must be painful,” Polina said. She reached for his fingers.
But Oskar didn’t let her touch him. He pushed his chair backward, stood from the table. The heat inside the house was suddenly too much — the walls were as hot as the iron walls of a furnace. His face was bathed in perspiration, his stomach was knotted. The whiskey had torn a hole in his gut. He walked from the room, followed his father outside. It was as he had told her — these cuts, these blisters were nothing. He had grown up with pain, and he would feel it again and again. When it stopped, it would only be because he was dead.
He stood on the porch and listened. Inside the house, the stair treads creaked beneath Polina’s faint weight. In the distance, his father cut an uneven path through the slush. When he reached the edge of the property, the gate opened and closed with a rusty squeak. Closer, the wind blew. It cried in his ears, and it blew and blew.
In the middle of the night, Oskar woke in a sweat. His first thought was that Polina was under the thick, stiff covers with him. He had been dreaming of her. Polina had been lying on her back in a field. The sun was burning, there was no wind, no rain, no snow, just the sun and long, green grass and a clear, blue sky. Naked, he had floated on top of her, then he had been inside her, surrounded by her, embraced. And then they were standing together, and she was pushing him backward onto a bale of hay, and stalks of cut, drying grass were poking into his skin, and she was still on top of him, he was still inside her, undulating with her as if the two of them were swimming. In his half sleep, Oskar’s body remembered the feeling of her arms around him at the hotel in Korsør the night before. His penis was erect, tangled in his undershorts. The hard, lumpy pillow took shape under his cheek, and he realized that he had to urinate. His arm had become numb underneath him, and his head ached from the raw, cheap alcohol. He opened his eyes.
Behind the curtain tacked to the ceiling, the dark was impenetrable. He tried to peer into it, but couldn’t distinguish anything beyond the gauzy veil, not even the outline of any shapes. Only very slowly did he become aware of the whispers emanating from Amalia’s bed. How long have you been the only woman in the house? This was Polina’s voice. My mother used to live with us, too, Amalia told her, but my father found a letter to another man. Oskar wanted to distinguish more words, but couldn’t. The hushed conversation continued for a while, then subsided. He closed his eyes again, concentrated until he was able to separate Polina’s shallower breath from Amalia’s. The rhythmic pulse of the two girls’ breathing began to hypnotize him, holding him on the verge of his own sleep. Blackness surrounded him like water. He opened his mouth, but there was no air. His arms were bound to his waist. He couldn’t swim. He felt himself drown.
Just before dawn, the silence in the children’s bedroom was disturbed by heavy footsteps. Fredrik was still wearing the same clothes he had worn the day before. His feet were clad in his boots, icy from the trek home from Aalborg. He made no effort to tread softly, but neither Polina nor Oskar woke. Both were exhausted from the exertion and stress of the journey from Copenhagen. Oskar rolled to the other side of his bed and pulled his blanket over his head. Polina didn’t stir at all. Opening her eyes, Amalia found herself clinging to this stranger lying next to her, in the same position in which she had fallen asleep. One hand was tucked under her own cheek. The other lay over Polina’s ribs, hanging loosely at the base of Polina’s firm breasts. The footsteps approached, and she peered up at her father. In the gray light, his face was a blur.
“What is it you’re doing there?” Fredrik asked.
Amalia was confused by the question. “Is it time to get up?” she responded.
“What kind of behavior is this?” her father demanded.
And then Amalia realized that the skin beneath her arm was naked, and when she pushed herself away from Polina, she saw that the covers had fallen off and they were sleeping outside their shirts. Her face flushed, though the dark concealed this. “I’m only sleeping,” she said. She found the lapels of her nightshirt and yanked them over her slack breasts.
Fredrik hovered above her for a few beats longer, then finally withdrew. “It’s already almost five,” he said from the doorway. “You overslept.” Still, neither Polina nor Oskar woke. Amalia waited for her father’s footsteps to recede, then pulled herself from bed. She passed a hand over Polina’s thigh as she stood, perhaps with the hope of waking her. But the Polish girl only turned over on the mattress, then gathered the blankets around herself and began to breathe even more deeply.
Downstairs, Fredrik was waiting for Amalia in the kitchen, standing with a hip propped against the counter, his arms folded across his chest. The flame burning under the kettle provided the only light in the room, and soft shadows darkened his eyes and danced across his cheeks. Amalia stopped in the doorway, uncertain what her father might be thinking, especially after the words they had exchanged yesterday. Again, her cheeks flushed. This time, Fredrik was able to see it.
“She’s very sweet,” Amalia said, tentatively.
Fredrik didn’t say anything in return. His expression didn’t change.
“She’s very young, I mean,” Amalia said, as if to correct her observation. She waited for her father to say something. On the stove, the pot began to rattle. “She told me that her mother is Jewish — her parents were taken away —”
Fredrik’s eyes narrowed. In the dim light, Amalia thought that he looked angry.
“Father?” She took a step into the kitchen, then stopped and tried to read him, and father and daughter continued to gaze at each other like this as the water began to boil.
“Make us some tea,” Fredrik said to his daughter. “And make it strong — I haven’t slept.” He pushed himself away from the counter, and when she passed him on her way to the stove, the unfamiliar scent of this other girl who had shared her bed with her circulated through the air, mingling with the smells Fredrik had brought home with him from the brothel. Instead of thinking about this, Fredrik gave consideration to the day in front of him. The chair’s legs scraped the floor as he sat down. “Yeah,” he said, as if they were in the middle of a conversation, “there’s so much snow this year I can’t reach the fence to fix it. I’ve never seen so much snow. Not as long as I can remember.”
“She’s very beautiful,” Amalia said. “Isn’t she?”
But Fredrik ignored her. “It will stop soon enough,” he said, as though she hadn’t spoken. “I’m sure it must — it always does. The sun wants to shine. It feels different this year, though. Doesn’t it?”
When Amalia extinguished the flame, the kitchen was plunged into darkness. She waited until her eyes adjusted, then filled the teapot and carefully poured out two cups of tea. As she handed one to her father, the touch of his fingers on her arm gave her a small jolt. Her heart melted in her chest, and she thought about embracing him. But then she realized that he simply wasn’t yet able to see. He fumbled for the cup, and she passed it into his hands, then took a seat at the table across from him.
An hour later, when Oskar opened his eyes, he couldn’t remember falling back to sleep. His dream returned to him. The scrape of threshed wheat against his back felt so real that he thought his skin might be torn. He was still facing his sister’s bed, and he stared at the curtain, slowly lifting the smooth rectangular plane out from the dim light. Outside, a rooster was crowing in the coop. The sun hadn’t risen yet, and he wondered whether Amalia had already left. Holding his own breath, listening, once again he became aware of Polina’s gentle breathing on the other side of the room, and then, when he inhaled, of the vague, soapy scent of cheap perfume.
