Sloan Wilson - Ice Brothers

The sedentary life aboard ship and Cookie’s meals had left Paul heavier than he had ever been in his life. At sea he had showered and changed his clothes so quickly and unthinkingly that now his own body looked strange to him, bulky and unlovely. Feeling her eyes on him, he was self-conscious as he lay on the bottom bench.

“You are a very powerful man,” she said.

“A damn fat one, I’m afraid.”

“Do you ever get any exercise aboard the ship?”

“I’m always too tired even to think of it.”

“Did you exercise a lot before the war?”

“No. To tell the truth, I always hated sports. There were always too many other things I wanted to do.”

“Like what?”

“Make money. Make love. Sail a boat. Read anything unless I was supposed to read it at college.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Why?”

“You have such a powerful chest, shoulders and arms. If you weren’t an athlete, they must be pure inheritance.”

“So far as I know, none of my ancestors within memory were athletes.”

“Within memory …”

He laughed. “Sometimes I like to think I am the descendant of the old Norse warriors, but I’m afraid the truth is that I come from good peasant stock. My ancestors probably developed their strength with shovels and hoes.”

“My people were all intellectuals, if I can believe my father. He’s very proud of that. If you’re intellectual, it is almost a virtue to be weak.”

“I guess there are different kinds of weakness, different kinds of strength. My grandparents were good at making money. Nobody in my family has been good at much of anything since.”

The rising dry heat in the tiny room was making him feel claustrophobic. He did not understand the workings of the sauna and thought she was going to cool it down when she took a bucket of water from beneath the bottom tier and poured it on flat stones which apparently were heated by a stove beneath. Clouds of steam almost asphyxiated him.

“How much hotter is it going to get?” he asked, glancing nervously at two doors, one leading to the dressing room and one at the side of the little cubicle. His claustrophobia gave him a terrible suspicion that they might be locked and he wanted to try them.

“We’re just beginning,” she said with a laugh. “Do you want a cold drink?”

“Yes!”

She opened a small door built like that of a safe into a wall near her. It contained a pitcher of water, two big glasses, several liqueur glasses and a bottle of Aquavit.

“Say, that’s pretty damn fancy.”

“In peacetime the Danes up here live well. Aquavit or water?”

“First the Aquavit.”

As she poured the clear liquid into the cold glass, which quickly beaded with steam, she said, “This reminds me of a story I’ve been afraid to think of for a long time.”

The story had been told to her, she said, by a professor at her university, a Jew who had relatives in Poland. When the Germans first came into Poland, she said, they began by confiscating all the property and bank accounts of the Jews. The relatives of her friend had survived for a few weeks by selling their household effects. All their glassware, china and antiques were displayed in their livingroom, and German soldiers went from house to house looking for bargains.

“This German major came in,” Brit continued. “My friend’s cousin was just a young girl and she was terrified of him, but at first he was very polite. He complimented her on the quality of her crystalware, which had come down in her mother’s family for generations. He particularly admired an antique decanter which stood surrounded by long-stemmed liqueur glasses on a silver tray. ‘How much do you want for these?’ he asked. The girl named a small sum, perhaps a third the peacetime worth. The major smiled. Holding the delicate glass up to the light, he turned it slowly before dropping it to shatter on the floor. ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘for an incomplete set?’”

“Jesus Christ!” Paul said.

“I don’t know why, but that story makes me hate them even more than all the reports about their shooting Russian prisoners by the hundreds of thousands, and even butchering the Jews by the million. My mind won’t accept all that, but the cruelty of that major dropping one glass, that really got to me when I first heard it.”

“That’s our brother Nordics, all right.”

“That damn story upset me so when I first heard it that I kept telling myself that it was just propaganda, that it couldn’t be true. The Jews kept inventing stories like that, my father said. When the Germans first came into Denmark, they looked more or less like ordinary men, even more silly than most because they tried to act so superior.”

“That must be quite a burden for them,” Paul said.

“The first Germans I saw struck me as rather comic. Here they kept talking about the blue-eyed blond superior race, and most of them had dark hair and pot bellies. We Danes had the blue eyes and light hair, but we still had to hear them boast about how they were the true Nordics, the superior race.”

“I don’t know how they do it with a straight face.”

“At first it was easier for me to think of the whole invasion as a comic opera. We didn’t put up enough resistance for much bloodshed. When the Germans said all the Jews had to wear yellow stars of David on their sleeves, practically all us Danes did, and that made us real heroic, even if we only did it for a few days. It was a good joke, a fine new act in the comic opera.”

“It still must have taken guts.”

“Not really, because most of us couldn’t imagine that the Germans would really do anything about it. When they began making a lot of arrests and people started to disappear, the yellow stars came off quickly enough. That was when Jon said we had to get out. The ketch belonged to a friend of ours. It all seemed so easy at first. We’d both been bored by our jobs for a long time and had talked of going to Greenland. Jon was a great sailor, and I’ve sailed all my life. We knew they patrolled the coast with boats and planes, but if we waited for fog and darkness, we didn’t think there’d be much danger.”

“I guess a good many have escaped.”

“We almost made it without any trouble at all. We were a hundred miles offshore in international waters when the fog finally lifted. When we heard the plane, we thought it must be British or American, and Ron, my son, stood up and waved. It circled around and even when we saw the swastikas on its wings, we didn’t think it would attack us. We were in international waters and we were flying a Danish flag. My father hoped they’d think we were a fishing boat — they encouraged all our fishermen to keep on working, and some of them used little yachts.”

Brit paused and with a trembling hand refilled their glasses with Aquavit.

“The plane circled us twice. Ron kept waving. Then it came in low toward us and I saw that flickering on the lead edge of his wings. Jon threw himself over our boy, knocking him into the bottom of the cockpit. I did that crazy thing, throwing the cup in my hand. There was a terrible splintering sound, and then the plane was gone. My husband and son did not move, and my father was crying.”

“But you still had the guts to make it over here.”

“I hardly knew what I was doing most of the time. The crazy point I’m trying to make is that after a while, dad began to justify the pilot of the plane. He said it was probably a mistake. Then he said they probably had orders to attack anything in a certain sector, and the pilot had no choice. He just couldn’t accept the fact that our enemy was so evil and so powerful at the same time. Can you understand that?”

“Sure.”