The Second Winter Read Free Page B

Polina snatched it up by its arm.
    “What’s that?” Julian asked her.
    Polina didn’t answer.
    “You’re too old to play with dolls,” Julian said.
    “I’m going to call her Polina,” Polina said.
    “She doesn’t look anything like you.”
    Polina shrugged. “She doesn’t cry,” she explained. “Neither do I.”

    That same night, Polina couldn’t sleep. The smell of cigars climbed the stairs. Her father’s voice shook the walls of the small house. Polina liked the sound, because it comforted her and she could picture his face and his eyes with the cadence of his words. An hour before, as the family was finishing dinner, Czeslaw had knocked on the door with a bottle of vodka, store-bought and unopened, and after he and his younger brother swallowed a few shots, he had pulled a box of cigars from his pocket, too. At the kitchen table, Polina had gone so quiet that her mother asked what had come over her. Her father grabbed her cheek between his index and middle fingers and gave her skin a soft twist. After so much sun earlier in the day, the gesture had lost its tenderness. Her skin felt chafed.
Ahhh, leave her alone, Ania. She just doesn’t like to see her father drink. That’s it, isn’t it, sweetheart?
His eyes fastened upon her.
You don’t like to see me drink and laugh and enjoy the company of my brother?
Polina didn’t answer.
Here
, he said to her.
Why don’t you help me with this splinter?
He held up a hand and showed her a long, thin sliver of wood that ran half the length of his finger beneath a thick layer of skin.
I can’t reach this one myself — I need your little fingers
. She stared beyond the hand into her father’s eyes. Then she ran from the kitchen, up the steep staircase to the small room she shared with her sister.Through the walls, she heard her uncle’s voice.
She’s a strange girl, I think. When she’s quiet, you can’t really imagine what she’s thinking
. Then her mother’s.
She keeps her own company most of the time. Except for Julian. She doesn’t even play with Adelajda
. Now, the rumbles through the walls had become less distinct. Polina listened with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling through the gray air, aware of her baby sister’s shallow breathing in pockets of silence.
    After some time passed, she slipped from beneath her covers and climbed into bed with Adelajda. Her sister was only five — there was nearly a decade between them, and Polina had little natural affection for her — but, suddenly, she wanted to be next to her. In her sleep, Adelajda shifted on the mattress, dropped an arm onto Polina’s shoulder. Her hand squeezed her biceps, twitched. Her skin was damp with sweat. Polina lay still, concentrated on the feeling of her sister’s fingers on her arm, listened for her father’s voice, tried but wasn’t able to figure out what he was saying.
    When she finally closed her eyes, she was already asleep. She didn’t wake when the front door slammed and her uncle stumbled out of the house into the unlit street. A few minutes later, her arm slid off the side of the narrow bed. Her fingers grazed the floor, but still she didn’t wake.
    December 1939 .
    The snow fell in flurries. At noon the sky was so dark that Polina thought that it was night. She sat beside the window in the kitchen and stared outside at the white blanket settling over the courtyard behind the house. A fire smoldered in the stove, remnants of the coal her father had lit at dawn.Polina’s mother was on her knees in the bathroom, scrubbing the floor. Her hair, covered in a kerchief, was coming loose from the bun, and she tucked a long strand behind her ear, then continued with her work. She was the firstborn child of a rabbi in Warsaw, but Ania Rabinowitz Dabrowa wasn’t a practicing Jew. Outside the family, no one knew of her ancestry. Polina’s father was Catholic, and that is how Polina had been raised. Her mother had never wanted to make things difficult for Aleksy, even