The Second Winter Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 buzzingin 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.

3 .
    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 theweight 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,