Winter Men Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2014 Turbine DK & Jesper Bugge Kold

  Translation copyright © 2016 K. E. Semmel

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as Vintermænd by Turbine DK in Denmark in 2014. Translated from Danish by K. E. Semmel. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2016.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503954755

  ISBN-10: 1503954757

  Cover design by Turbine DK

  Cover photograph by Ronny Rischel Photography

  To Karina, Malte, and Elvira

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  Hamburg, Germany, November 10, 1938

  PART TWO

  Buenos Aires, Argentina, October 25, 1962

  PART THREE

  Santa Cruz, Bolivia. July 24, 1975

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  He who dares not to choose his path will end as the stair upon which the powerful tread.

  Carl Scharnberg, Danish poet (1930–1995)

  PROLOGUE

  Coroico, Bolivia, May 6, 1983

  The city lay in the deep slumber of siesta. Only wild dogs and cats, on their eternal quest for food, could be seen wandering the streets. The dusty village rested on the crest of a small mountain, with a view of the lowlands a quarter mile below, its angular ravines, and a roaring river, whose thorny temperament could make it seem both inviting and terrifying. The warm currents of air from the citrus groves and the coffee plantations down in the valley wafted effortlessly up the slope, then fused in a tart aroma on the rooftops, right where the fog usually settled like a thick cap. But on this day the sky was clear. Before entering their houses early that afternoon, everyone had noticed with some astonishment the absence of the fog.

  In the city square a mirage made the summer heat visible. It shimmered uncertainly above the cobblestones, where a man in a loose-fitting cotton shirt was shouting curses at one of the emaciated mutts. The dog skulked off with its tail tucked between its legs. Outside a decrepit tavern with shuttered windows stood three wooden tables. One had served as the Padilla family’s dining table for several generations; another, its tiles cracked, had once stood in one of La Paz’s most luxurious homes; the last one, the most rickety of them all, had been made by the owner of the tavern. There were a few faded umbrellas around the tables, their original colors nearly impossible to determine. A window in the little apartment above the tavern was wide open. The curtains followed the rhythm of the gentle breeze, fluttering slowly back and forth with a kind of affected indolence.

  The man who lay on his bed was old. His hands were folded on top of his blanket, and his glasses rested on the nightstand, where they kept company with a glass of water. His skin had turned yellow from many years spent in the piercing sunlight, and his wrinkled cheeks were sunken. He had an untroubled look about him. From his bed, the old man had a view of Cerro Uchumachi. The green mountain with its soft curves might very well have been the last thing he saw before he died early that afternoon.

  His family would not miss him, for he had no family. Nor had he any friends left. He had called himself Hector Morales, but everyone knew that was not his name. They called him, simply, the German. Although he had arrived in the city more than eight years earlier, very few people had ever spoken with him. No one knew where he was from or where he had been before he’d come. No one knew his story, but in Coroico you kept your stories to yourself, and the only foreigners who lived here had something to hide.

  The few who had exchanged pleasantries with him described him as a friendly, educated man, and the women said that he always lifted his fedora and nodded if he passed them on the square. He always followed the same route, and his slow amble—cane in hand—conformed to the pace of the city. People hurried only when summer’s powerful rainstorms came.

  After his daily stroll through the city, he always sat on the same bench on the square. There he sat year after year, watching. He never made any attempt to strike up conversation, and the residents grew used to him the way they would a lamppost or a fire hydrant.

  He was buried in the dry red soil of the cemetery behind the little stone church. The ceremony was held without fanfare, its only participants a priest and a grave digger. A wooden cross, which would soon be discolored by the sunlight, was placed at the gravesite. It read, “Hector Morales, ?–1983.”

  Salzburg, Austria, March 10, 1947

  The harder it rained, the heavier his jacket became. Huge drops soaked the coarse fabric, which thickened at the shoulders. A raindrop trickled past the protective shield of his collar and slid down his neck. It continued down his shirt and between his shoulder blades, where its progress was finally checked by the edge of his undershirt; an icy sensation spread through his body. He shivered. The cold made him impatient. As he took a long drag on his cigarette, the drenched paper unraveled in the rain, and the wet tobacco landed at his feet. He scowled and glanced reproachfully at the dark sky, whose color answered his question: the rain had no intention of ceasing anytime soon.

  He looked around. The once-beautiful train station was still in disarray. Bombs had destroyed the waiting room, and debris and twisted iron lay in disorderly heaps beside the tracks so that it wouldn’t disrupt the trains. The weather was like a response to the melancholy of the place. The scenery reminded him of the nightly alarms, of the wrenching blasts of sirens that had knocked the wind out of him, of the bomb bays that had rained death down onto them, and of the panicked waiting when everything grew still. And of the awful relief of finding yourself alive while people who’d lost their loved ones crumpled to the ground or the stairs or into his arms in despair. It had been the same here. The same terror, another city.

  No one had noticed his cigarette fall apart. The few others on the platform were focused on themselves. A junior officer in the dusty green uniform of the Americans was engrossed in kissing his companion. He uttered a couple of bungled German phrases and made her laugh, and they kissed again. An older, official-looking man, his suitcase between his legs, stood rocking on the balls of his feet like someone who believed it helped to make the wait more productive. Behind him stood a corpulent woman clutching a child’s hand. He noticed how tightly the woman’s coat was cinched around her waist, flattening her bosom. The buttons were about to burst, and when she moved, the seams creaked. The boy, who was licking a lollipop, stopped abruptly, his eyes widening at the sight of the approaching train.

  Smoke from the steam boiler enveloped the platform, and the locomotive’s screeching brakes drowned out the silence. He waited as passengers disembarked through the smoke. He stepped onto the footboard and took his place in the compartment, where an elderly man was already comfortably seated; they nodded at each other with the cool reserve of strangers.

  He regarded the train car’s shabby appearance without concealing his revulsion and decided that it would have been better if the train had been abandoned on a sidetrack. The paint was peeling, the leather seats were split and missing armrests, and some of the windows were cracked. He noticed the stench. He recalled it from his childhood—the unmistakable odor of
decay, the same smell that rushed at him when he lifted the heavy lid of the chest in his grandparents’ attic. Inside was his grandfather’s old uniform, from a war no one talked about anymore.

  Though he knew he should close his eyes and let his exhaustion overcome him, he’d planned to enjoy this trip. He lit another Gauloises and leaned back in his seat. He watched through the window as the train rolled past the Austrian landscape: Bad Gastein Waterfall, Böckstein Church, Our Lady of Good Counsel, the entrance of the long Tauern Railway Tunnel. He absorbed his impressions along with cigarette after cigarette.

  His left arm jittered up and down like an impatient child. The ruined nerve had started its daily revolt, and though he was all too familiar with the nerve’s behavior, he studied it. The arm had become a storyteller. Not one that told fairy tales with happy endings, but one that should be kept well away from children and the fainthearted, one that chronicled the horrors of war—and who he had once been.

  He still regarded himself with a certain level of astonishment. In his mind, he did not see himself as a man wearing an SS uniform. But others had seen something different. What people had seen was a Nazi. But he was no Nazi, and he’d never been one. Before the war, he had dissociated himself from everything remotely connected to Nazism; he had been respected and popular, and everyone had considered him an educated man. A uniform had changed all that. If you were a member of the SS, you were guilty. That’s how they thought, the ones who owned Germany now, but they didn’t know him. He wasn’t guilty—or at least he didn’t feel guilty—but he’d had the standard SS tattoo of his blood type on his left upper arm, and that had amounted to an admission.

  He carried many sensory impressions from the war that he’d gladly forget. One was the smell of charred flesh—the stench of his own skin the time he’d put the heated blade of his hunting knife against his upper arm. The tattoo had to be removed. The skin had sizzled and bubbled like something in a saucepan. He came close to fainting but continued resolutely down his arm despite the pain coursing through every inch of his body. The small blond hairs on his arm disappeared faster than he could see, and the awful stench of burned hair and flesh assaulted his nose. An explosion of agony jolted from his arm to his chest, as though shrapnel were being pressed upward until it bored into his brain. He fought to maintain consciousness as a scream filled his throat. To relieve the unbearable pain, he’d leaped into a nearby pond in the woods, and there he had remained for several hours, until his body temperature fell dangerously low.

  He pulled a flask from his inner pocket. His eyes darted toward an oncoming train. The sharp taste of alcohol met his tongue, and the aftertaste lingered in his mouth. He weighed the silver flask in his hand and estimated that it was half-full. He ran his fingertips carefully over the engraving on the side of the flask. The tiny inscription in the metal made him feel lonely, as the two letters formed the initials of his brother, the dead man.

  His life had changed so much. The war had blown a deep crater in the center of his existence, leaving behind a city without houses. Although the war was in the past, it was never far from his thoughts. But everything else in his life felt distant. He missed Hamburg; he missed Sunday trips on Jungfernstieg, sailing on the Elbe, and spending days with his family in their large white house beside the Alster.

  He returned the flask to his pocket. The elderly man across from him had fallen asleep and now buzzed like a honeybee, his nostrils quivering with each breath. He wondered whether he had been a victim or an executioner during the war. He searched for any sign that might give him an answer, but all he saw was an elderly man in a shabby tweed suit.

  The trees’ leaves had changed color several times since he’d begun his flight. His was a journey without a destination; he still didn’t know where he would end up. There would be more cities, but the only place he wanted to be was the only place he could never see again. He’d set off from Hamburg just as British tanks were rolling into the city and walked south without any destination.

  He remembered Germany right after the war as a confusion of soldiers: Russians, Americans, Brits. And Germans who just wanted to return home to their girlfriends, wives, families, and friends—if any remained. They marched across the country in endless columns—though they’d lost the war, they continued to display discipline. Most of them hung their heads, disillusioned, but a few officers held their heads high, proud of their war. For those who’d not yet been taken as POWs, it was another story. Before, they’d stuck together and fought together, but now every man fended for himself and many fought internal battles against themselves. He’d managed to make it through the war without firing a weapon, and yet he, too, was fleeing, trying to hide from the various armies of the world.

  Now and then, he felt that death would have been a good solution, an acceptable solution. He often wondered why he wasn’t dead. Like so many others. Why was he alive, and how could he actually live with what he’d seen and done? A long life lay ahead of him, but his desire to live it was minuscule. Yet he was too cowardly to die. Which was why he was sitting on this train.

  A young, delicate-looking woman entered the compartment. She acknowledged the others the way a servant girl greets her master. He couldn’t help but notice the large birthmark stretching across one cheek, from her ear down to her chin. She turned her head; she’d dealt with this kind of inquisitive gaze before. She removed her red rain jacket, whose color reminded him of Christmas. Suddenly he was a child again. Thinking about Christmas Eve. The smell of pine needles and oranges mixed with frying food in the kitchen, the memory of an out-of-tune music box and his brother’s joy upon seeing the flash of a pair of skates beneath the wrapping paper. A lump formed in his throat at the thought of his brother, and he gulped a swig from the flask to wash it down. He would never see him again. A Luger’s bullet had been his escape route. He envied his brother’s courage in choosing that path.

  His journey had brought him to Munich, and there he’d ceased to exist. Thanks to false papers, he became Stefan Mohringer, a traveling salesman from Mannheim; the surname “Strangl” would not be passed on. The name stopped here. No one wished to utter it any longer; it was a shameful name. Its laying to rest in the very city where Hitler had set into motion Germany’s march toward hell went unnoticed.

  His escape hadn’t followed any predetermined plan. He’d hidden in a safe house with so-called friends, then crossed the border into Austria during the winter, alongside two other former SS officers. While the others had continued on to Italy, he’d decided to head to Linz.

  He stayed in Linz for only a short time, changing residences regularly. He—who’d always lived in the same city—had now become a rootless nomad, a man without a home, a man without a trade. Most recently, he’d spent a few months living in Hallstatt, where he worked as an accountant and did paperwork at a small joinery. The joiner hadn’t asked him any questions, and the idyllic city had been a perfect place to plan his future. And try to forget the past. He’d rented a basement room from a widow who was not yet thirty. She didn’t call herself a widow, but he guessed that’s what she was. Her husband had been on the eastern front and hadn’t been heard from since 1944. Even several years after he left, she still leaped to her feet every time the creaky garden gate announced a guest and thrust open the front door with hope in her eyes, only to be disappointed once again.

  The train ground to a halt. He was startled by the opening of the compartment door. A conductor asked to see his ticket. He grew fearful—as he did at the screech of a door, the ring of a telephone, a person walking too close to him—and the feeling lingered for hours afterward.

  Beyond the city of Spittal an der Drau, the terrain dipped into a valley, and he could discern the river Drau through the cracked window. That meant they would soon reach Villach, fittingly called the “gateway to Italy.” Here he was to meet a man by the name of Mr. Dubak, who would arrange temporary lodgings for him and get him a new passport for a price.

  As the train
rolled into the station, he stood and nodded kindly to the elderly man, who had opened his eyes in confusion every time the train had come to a standstill. He was supposed to meet Dubak that evening at Café Leopold. He had arrived in town early, so he sat beside the window in a restaurant and ordered beef soup and a Stiegl beer. As he ate, he watched the activity in the cobblestone square. The bronze statue in the center of the circular plaza was a gathering place for the city’s doves, and they had made their presence known, shelling it with yellow excrement. He couldn’t tell who the statue was supposed to depict, but he guessed it was one of Austria’s many composers. Wasn’t that what the country was known for? Mozart? Haydn? Strauss? Schubert?

  He placed a few bills under his plate and crossed the plaza to Café Leopold. Kaiser Joseph II was the name on the bronze plate beneath the doves’ decoration.

  Anton Dubak was right on time. He, too, had served in the SS. Now he made a living helping people with the means and the need to flee the country.

  “Mr. Mohringer?”

  “Yes, I’m Stefan Mohringer,” he said softly, still unaccustomed to his new name.

  “Yes, of course.” It was impossible not to notice the enormous gold ring on the hand Dubak offered him.

  They sat in a booth in the back corner of the establishment, and Dubak gestured to the waiter for two beers.

  “So you’d like to disappear?” Anton Dubak asked, leaning over the table.

  “I want to get out of Europe.”

  “And you have the cash?”

  He laid the envelope on the table, and Dubak counted its contents with the air of a man who’d done this many times before.

  “Wonderful.” Dubak smiled broadly, revealing two gold teeth in his lower jaw. “In a week you’ll be across the border in Italy. Until then, I’ve found a place for you here in the city.”

  He checked into an old family hotel near the city’s center, close to the train station. The bellhop ushered him to a room that appeared to have been furnished a century earlier. He lay on the bed, sinking deep into the soft mattress. He was exhausted and fell asleep quickly.