Ice Brothers

by Sloan Wilson

  “Can you come ashore with me?” Brit asked as they neared the wharf.

  “I can’t keep the boat waiting, and I don’t want to keep it going back and forth.”

  “Why not spend the night? Your Mr. Green looks as though he could handle anything.”

  Remembering that Brit had first taken Nathan to be the captain, Paul felt an absurd stab of jealousy. He suspected that she would have bedded any man who happened to be the commanding officer. With his courtly manners Nathan might still have a chance to join what was probably Brit’s line of lovers. Hell, how long could the line be in this desolate place and why was he becoming so damned Puritanical? Paul felt miserably disloyal when Brit looked up and smiled at him, her narrow face under the hood of her parka looking oddly childlike in the shadowed moonlight, undefended, vulnerable.

  “I’d like to have you spend the night,” she said, taking his hesitancy as indecision.

  He knew two things: that duty required him to spend his nights aboard his ship in a place like this, and that he would spend the night with Brit anyway. The fear that men would die when he finally closed with the Germans and that he would have to force himself to be brave enough to disregard his own personal safety and run more risks than any of them was building in him. The commanding officer of a ship can’t go dodging behind things, assign a safe spot for himself or just lie down when the gunfire starts. He’d been tempted to hug the deck during his one brief experience at being under fire, but he hadn’t let himself and it had been only luck that the bullets which had hit Blake and Sparks, who also had been too brave to seek cover, had missed him. The death rate for lieutenants, and especially for young commanding officers, is almost always higher than for the enlisted men or senior officers.

  So … if he was about to die, it would of course be folly to spend this moonlit night alone. That wouldn’t sound like much of an excuse if he made it before a board of investigation which would look into the sinking of the Arluk if something went wrong, but it sounded right to him. No one aboard the ship had worked harder than he had ever since he’d come aboard, he deserved to take any reasonable break he could get—

  “Stop making excuses for yourself,” she said. “You know you’re going to do it. Just say yes.”

  “You already know me too well. You’re right. I’ve made my excuses and I’m all yours. Let’s get on with it, for God’s sake.”

  After they’d climbed onto the wharf, Paul told the men to go back to the ship and get him in the morning.

  “Better make it afternoon,” she said. “I’m going to get the Eskimos together for you.”

  “Come at about fourteen hundred,” he said. “I have an important meeting.”

  Neither Stevens nor Krater made any jokes about official business and neither smiled as Krater saluted, said, “Aye, aye, sir,” and gunned the boat away.

  When they got in the cabin of the ketch, Brit turned up the fire in the range, took off her Eskimo clothes and pulled on her reindeer sweater. The fact that that seemed to be almost the only good garment she had suddenly seemed endearing and he kissed her.

  “I don’t think you love me anymore,” she said.

  “What gives you that impression?”

  “The whole time I was aboard your ship, you were looking at me as though you thought I was crazy.”

  “I was glad to see you were so impressed by my fishboat.”

  “If you’d been in Denmark when the Germans marched in, you’d know why. Oh, we had a few ships, all right, before we gave them up, but we didn’t have men like yours. We were so weak that we were afraid even to hate the Germans too much. Can you understand that?”

  “I think so.”

  “You’re afraid to hate people if they have too much power over you. You have to keep imagining that there must be something good about them.”

  Paul remembered how hard he had resisted hating Mowrey.

  “In Denmark, just before we left, a friend of my husband told us a kind of joke, if you can call it that. He said that when the war was finally all over and Hitler had been captured, the Russians and Americans tied him to a stake in Berlin. They surrounded him with dried branches sprinkled with gunpowder and they led a train of gunpowder all the way through Europe, winding across Russia, coming back through every country all the way to Norway. Have you heard this story?”

  “No.”

  “Way up at the northern tip of Norway they lit that long train of gunpowder and all the people of Europe lined up on both sides to watch it go sputtering toward Hitler’s stake. It was announced everywhere that any person, anyone in all Europe who didn’t want Hitler burned at the stake could put his foot on those sputtering sparks and put them out. The sparks traveled through every country and no one tried to put them out. Everyone cheered them on until the sparks were only ten feet from the brush around Hitler’s stake. Then one old Polish woman stepped forward and put them out. ‘Let’s do it again,’ she said.”

  Paul laughed.

  “But my point is that when I first heard it, I was afraid to laugh—the Germans might get me for it. And I was afraid of the hate in that story. I felt that hate as intense as that could only result in death for everyone.”

  “I wish they would really burn him at a stake, but not the English way. That was really quite a quick death. Our Indians did it better. They built a ring of fire around the stake just close enough to sting a little, and they gradually closed it in. That way they could keep a man screaming for about three days.”

  “Isn’t it nice that no one is going to report you for saying that? Even when I got here, I was afraid to let hate all out. If the Germans won the war, after all, Greenland like everything else would be theirs. I didn’t know they were at Supportup, but I admit there have been rumors that they’ve been up and down the coast. Swan kept saying that after all, they’re just human beings and it’s wrong to hate anyone. So I bottled up my hate the way I used to bottle up my sex when I was a child.”

  “And now you can release it?”

  “Yes. You’ve made me feel safe enough to hate them. Since they’ve taken my country and my family, I would say it’s about time. I’ll do everything I can to get the natives to help you. A lot of them are halfbreeds, not Eskimos, and they don’t have any mystique about refusing to fight men.”

  “Guns and I will train them.”

  “Train the women too. Some of them are stronger than the men.”

  “We’ll teach them what we can.”

  “So how about me? Will you teach me to shoot a gun?”

  “If you really want.”

  “If you are going to take the Eskimos to fight the Germans, you’ll need an interpreter. I’ve studied their language for a year. I’m writing a book on it—that’s how I keep myself busy here. I’m the best interpreter you can get. It’s your damn duty to take me along.”

  “If you can take the training, you can come.”

  “Now you’re really making my ultimate fantasy come true, a dream I was even afraid to remember when I woke up in the morning for two years. I will kill Germans. I will cover the ground with their goddamn blood.”

  Brit’s passionate desire to kill Germans was somehow connected to her desire to make love, and he soon discovered that whenever she started talking fiercely, she soon pulled him into a bunk. On this night of her release, as she called it, he wondered if she would leave him any energy for so mundane a pursuit as fighting. When he thought he was too tired ever to rise from her bunk again, she insisted on showing him a sauna which was the pride of the settlement. It was a small wing which had been added to Swanson’s house, but it had a separate entrance, and Brit assured Paul that it was for the use of anyone in the settlement, though the Eskimos appeared to believe that only Danes were crazy enough to sit in fire and allow themselves to be boiled alive.

  There was a tiny vestibule in which they waited while she fired up the coal stove, a dressingroom with two shower stalls and the sauna itself, a cubicle with three tiers of benches and
birch paneling which had been imported from Denmark. While it heated up, they took showers. The water was only lukewarm and the stone-paved floor of the dressingroom was icy. The sauna itself was deliciously steamy when they finally entered it. At first Brit wore a towel like a skirt and he did the same. Although that was all they wore, there was something peculiarly unsexy about the sauna with its hard wooden benches, the bright electric light set in the ceiling and the heat, which almost immediately became oppressive to Paul. Spreading her towel on the second tier, Brit stretched out on her back and sighed contentedly. Her slender body was already glistening with sweat. Even in the harsh light, it had the perfection of grace and strength, though there was no hint of voluptuousness as she lay with her breasts flattened out. Without an ounce of surplus flesh but with no bones showing, she looked like a young athlete, except for a row of stretch marks across her narrow waist.

  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 mo
ve, 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.”

  “Lots of people in Europe and lots of Danes in Greenland are doing that right now—pretending that the Germans are really not so bad after all, they’re human after all. That’s what Swan kept saying. And I went along with him …”

  “Level with me. When I first came here, did you know the Germans were at Supportup?”

  “I admit I suspected it, there were all kinds of rumors of Germans landing all up and down the coast. Swan knew it, I don’t know how, but he protected all of us by keeping information like that to himself. He did the lying for all of us. I don’t know whether to thank him or hate him for that.”

  “I wish you had told me what you suspected.”

  “I thought of it, but can you understand when I say I couldn’t imagine the Germans being defeated? When you come out of Europe, it’s hard to imagine that. I thought that if you went into Supportup, they’d kill you, then come over here and kill us. In my way I tried to protect you, I tried to protect all of us. And anyway, I could have told you nothing but rumors and suspicions. I didn’t really lie to you.”

  He said nothing.

  “Except you were right to suspect me, and I’m not dead sure you trust me a hundred percent now.”

  “My only suspicion now is that you’re trying to boil me alive.”

  From beneath the bottom bench she took a bucket of lukewarm water which felt deliciously cool as she slowly poured it over his head and shoulders. When he had dried his face with a towel, she gave him a glass of icy water, and poured one for herself.