Winter Kept Us Warm Page 10

  “I wouldn’t be able to do it.”

  Of course not, Isaac thought, but he let it go, thought instead of Simone sitting at her patient’s bedside, breathing in the sour breath of the dying. “And she was such an active child—they both were—but particularly Simone. She’s a runner. She’s done I don’t know how many marathons, not the official ones. She waits until the week after the New York Marathon is over, and then she runs it on her own. When she was seven, she was already running around the block ten, twenty, sometimes thirty times. I would watch her from the kitchen window, and every time she passed, she would wave. Juliet ran only because of Simone, because Simone said that she had to, that it would make her strong.”

  “How did she get into this profession?” Ulli asked.

  “She started during college. Her first client was a Sephardic Jew from Salonika. He had a terrible skin disease and was in constant excruciating pain. Apparently he had had other health-care workers, but Simone was the only one who knew how to move him, how to bathe him without causing pain. During her last year of college she worked for him full-time, lived in as they say, and when she graduated, she stayed on until he died two years later. I would never tell her this, but I was relieved when he died. I understood her attachment to him and admired her sense of duty, but I was sure that once she was free of the responsibility, she would embark on her own life, her real life, but instead she found another live-in health-care position. And after that woman died, there was another, and another, and another. There is no shortage of old and sick people.”

  “You are implying that she stayed in this line of work out of some kind of weakness or fear, but perhaps the opposite is true.”

  “And what exactly is the opposite, Ulli?” Isaac asked.

  “Maybe she is one of the few who has the strength to do this kind of work. Do you think she would have been happier or more successful if she had become a doctor so she could just swoop in, patch up a body, and send it on its way? Isn’t it more difficult to listen to the same stories over and over again, to lift patients onto the toilet, to look in at three and four in the morning just to make sure they are still breathing?”

  “This is what I always tell myself. This is what I know Simone wants me to believe. But I’m not sure whether it is what she believes,” Isaac said.

  “And what about life outside of work? I imagine she’s not married,” Ulli said.

  “Simone is a lesbian,” Isaac said.

  “Does she have a girlfriend?” Ulli asked calmly, though she found that she was trembling. It was not that she was surprised or disapproved, but rather that she did not allow herself to think about who her daughters had become and what role she, and Leo, had in who they turned out to be.

  “Not as far as I know. When I ask her about such things, she says she will let me know if there is ever somebody worth telling me about.”

  “Has she had someone serious in the past?”

  “When she was in college, but I don’t think the girl took it seriously. She ended up getting married and becoming quite a famous journalist. She won some kind of big prize for her coverage of the war in El Salvador. Simone brought her to dinner at the house once. She was a vegetarian, which wasn’t common in those days, but we made a big meal—mushroom barley soup and a vegetable ragout. She knew more about history than most of my students, but it was obvious that she didn’t love Simone, that she just enjoyed the attention.”

  “And Juliet? After Iraj’s father, was there anyone?”

  “Not anyone I have ever been presented with,” Isaac said.

  “We sound like two old women with nothing to do except worry about marrying off our daughters,” Ulli said.

  Isaac laughed. “As cliché as it sounds, I just want them to be happy.”

  “Remember how you used to say that happiness was overrated?”

  “That was when I was young and believed that one had to be tortured and miserable in order to do great things,” Isaac said.

  “And you don’t think that anymore?”

  “Perhaps what I think now is that greatness is overrated.”

  “I don’t know about greatness, but I still think happiness is overrated,” Ulli said.

  Isaac almost found himself saying, That’s because you didn’t have children.

  The woman with the bracelets was back. She was leaving.

  “But you are not scheduled to leave until Sunday,” Ulli said.

  “I have changed my mind,” the woman said coldly, her bracelets still. “I will pay for all the reserved nights if that’s what you want.”

  “I hope you don’t think we want you to leave,” Ulli said.

  “I didn’t say that. I said no such thing,” the woman said, lowering her voice as if this were a secret.

  “Please, why don’t you sit down, have a cup of tea with us. There’s no need to rush, and it’s getting to that time of day when it is best to stay indoors.”

  “I do not want any more tea. I’m sick to death of tea,” she said, the bracelets back in action. “I just want the bill.”

  “But only for the nights you stayed,” Ulli said.

  “If you insist . . .”

  “I do. Can I call you a taxi?” Ulli asked.

  “No. Please don’t go to any trouble,” the woman said.

  “Abdoul will help you with your bags,” Ulli said.

  “I have already brought them to the lobby,” she replied.

  “I hope the rest of your trip is more pleasant,” Ulli said, bowing ever so slightly.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said.

  “Come,” Ulli said.

  The woman followed Ulli, walking a few feet behind her, her eyes looking straight ahead, focusing, it seemed to Isaac, the anger and sadness and guilt of all her years on Ulli’s back. If one bored a hole right there, one would hit Ulli’s heart, Isaac thought.

  “She’s gone?” Isaac asked when Ulli returned to the table.

  “Yes, walked off on her own into the sun with those two ridiculous suitcases. I don’t know why people travel with so much luggage. I never took anything more than what could fit under the seat in a plane. Even when I was moving to a new position in a new country, I always sold off my belongings and started anew. You would be amazed at how much stuff some of the other UNESCO people would drag around with them. One of my colleagues, a mild-mannered man who devoted his life to eradicating polio, insisted on bringing his collection of cricket bats with him wherever he went. He had hundreds of them, dating back to the beginning of cricket, whenever that was.”

  “Why did you try so hard to get her to stay after how horrible she was?” Isaac asked.

  “Because later, once she is back home, the embarrassment she feels for having left will be much stronger than the embarrassment she felt for jumping to conclusions.”

  “Do you even think she knows that she left out of shame? She struck me as the kind of person who does not give much time to self-reflection,” Isaac said.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Ulli said. “Perhaps I was just projecting. The truth is, we don’t know a thing about her, and now I am the one who has jumped to conclusions.”

  “It’s only natural, isn’t it, to fill in what we do not know?” Isaac said.

  “Natural perhaps, but in the end, not very satisfying.”

  Isaac felt his air passages tightening. He reached into his pocket for his inhaler, but instead of taking it out, he held it for a moment just for reassurance. He coughed, but only once, and then he let it go. “Did you never think of replying to my letters, Ulli?”

  “Of course I did. Of course I did.”

  “Well, that’s why I came to see you. I was tired of trying to fill in the blanks on my own.”

  “And how did you do such a thing?” Ulli asked.

  “I imagined your loneliness. I thought of you walking alon
e down a busy street in an important city. I saw you sitting at a table in a restaurant, surrounded by people, and everyone was laughing except you. You were looking off into space or toward the door, wondering how much longer you had to sit there before you could leave. Sometimes I pictured you lying awake in the dark next to a man who was snoring.”

  “Did you think of me that way because that was how you really thought my life was or because you were angry and wanted me to suffer?”

  “Both.” There. It was said, finally, once and for all.

  Gita

  In the beginning, Isaac had not been angry with Ulli. He had the girls to think about, and his career. During those years he did not think of Ulli each time he looked at Simone and Juliet, though they looked like her, and Leo too, had her blue eyes and Leo’s sturdiness. Instead he saw himself in them—in the way Juliet played with her hair while she was reading and Simone walked with her hands clasped behind her back. The anger resurfaced after Gita, though he suspected it had always been there, following its own ebb and flow.

  He met Gita on his first trip to the Soviet Union, upon which he had embarked with guarded excitement. He had no specific expectations for the journey, though he certainly had not set forth looking for romance. In fact, the purpose of his trip was entirely practical. He had exhausted the information available in the United States on the group of nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals he was researching, and since, at twelve and thirteen, the girls were old enough to be left in the care of his old friend Katya Ladijinskaya, he had no excuse not to seek his fortune in the archives in Leningrad. He and his parents had left when he was barely three years old, so he had no memories of the land at all, but he hoped at the very least to feel some swell of emotion upon finally returning to the country of his birth. Russian, as his parents never let him forget, was his mother tongue, despite the fact that both his tongue and his pen preferred French and English. But when he arrived, he was disappointed with the absence of snow. He had been expecting everything to be white. Instead, all he saw were gray and brown—gray buildings and gray roads, brown hats, brown coats, polluted brown skies—so that he felt the weight of those two colors on him like a heavy but not so warm blanket.

  On the way from the airport he and the taxi driver did not talk except to confirm the name of his hotel. He knew that people preferred not to talk to foreigners, so Isaac did not want to make the man nervous by engaging in chitchat. Still, he was planning on looking up his relatives, though he was prepared for the fact that they might not want to see him. If they did agree to meet him, he had brought photographs of his parents and his daughters, as well as snowsuits and pantyhose, blue jeans and Palmolive soap and Bayer aspirin. He was worried that the snowsuits would be too bright, that the children would be embarrassed to wear yellow or red or blue, though he knew that children did not worry about such things.

  “Do you have a hat?” the taxi driver asked him as he lifted the three large suitcases out of the trunk.

  “I am not accustomed to wearing a hat,” Isaac said.

  “Here in Leningrad the winter is very cold,” the driver said, as if he thought Isaac had never experienced winter. “You must buy a hat.” The taxi driver was the first of dozens to be concerned about his lack of headgear, though the others were all old women. These women were relentless, accosting him on the street with their grave warnings about the horrors of frostbite.

  “Look,” he told one old woman. “There’s not even any snow on the ground.”

  “Just wait,” the woman said. “Just wait.”

  After that, he almost gave in and bought a woolen cap, but at the last minute he changed his mind. He would not, he decided, be bullied by old women.

  What frustrated him most about the Soviet Union was the waiting. Of course he had known about the lines for buying food. Everyone knew about those. But he had no way of knowing what the waiting really meant, how it could affect you, eat you up like cancer until you became lethargy itself. Every meal involved layers of waiting. First he waited for the waiter to bring the menu. This could take up to one hour, despite his vigorous requests and gestures. Then he waited for the waiter to take his order. Even such a simple thing took some time because they had to go through the entire leather-bound menu until he happened upon the only available dish, the pork cutlet or cabbage soup that was being prepared that day. Once, he tried asking the waiter what they really had to offer, but the waiter merely nodded at the menu, and they had to go through the whole sham the way they always did, until he hit on the right answer. After the ordering was completed, he waited for the food to arrive, which could take up to two hours if the restaurant staff were so inclined. Finally, there was a good half-hour wait until the waiter brought him the check.

  The first three days of his stay, he arrived at the archives promptly at nine and waited in vain for someone to let him in. He had gone to great lengths to arrange access, and he had a thick folder of signed and sealed papers to prove it, but no one actually showed up until the third day. Once he finally gained access to the archives, an old woman with a large ring of keys walked up to the door and took her time turning the key in the lock. “Wait,” she told him gruffly as he tried to follow her inside. The door slammed, and it was another thirty minutes before he was allowed to enter.

  He never knew when the archives would open, though the sign on the door clearly said that the archive hours were from nine o’clock to five thirty, Monday through Saturday. Sometimes they opened at ten, sometimes at nine thirty, sometimes at eleven. He never knew when they would close, but usually, at about three—three thirty if he was lucky—the woman told him it was time for him to pack up his things. Once—perhaps she had fallen asleep—it was almost seven before she told him she was closing.

  Because of the erratic schedule at the archives, in order to make full use of the hours that they were open, he did not have time to waste on breakfast and lunch, so he was ravenous by the time he ate his dinner, which he always had in the hotel restaurant. He thought sometimes of trying out another hotel restaurant to see whether it was more efficient, but by the end of a long day he was always too debilitated for such experiments.

  In the morning, instead of eating breakfast, he ran. He thought he would call a great deal of attention to himself with his running, for exercise of this type was certainly not popular among the Soviets, but he soon found that no one seemed to pay him any attention at all. In the mornings, he noticed, people were quiet and slow, as if they were still dreaming in their warm beds. It was at night that the old women stopped him about getting a hat.

  As far as he knew, there were only three other guests at the hotel during his entire two-month stay. There were two portly Romanians who, whenever he passed them on the stairway or in the lobby, switched from Romanian to loud, heavily accented French. “Bonjour, monsieur,” they said to him.

  Isaac would bow slightly and reply, “Bonjour, Messieurs.” He did not know what their business in Leningrad was.

  The other guest was a handsome African who always wore traditional African clothing and, each time they met, inquired in English after Isaac’s health and the health of his family. Once, they drank tea together in the restaurant and talked about how they missed their children, though Isaac did not say that he worried about how they were getting along with Katya Ladijinskaya, who was not always easy to get along with. Still, he found a rhythm to his days and was content to immerse himself in the stories of people who had died before he was born. There was safety in knowing that their lives would never touch his, that he could learn the intimate details of their business anxieties or troubles with the authorities, yet they would never demand anything of him in return. On Sundays the archives were closed, so Isaac walked. He walked from one end of Leningrad to the other. Then he would write the girls a long letter about what he had seen. He put off calling his relatives.

  Isaac realized that he was waiting for a snowstorm, that he th
ought somehow a snowstorm would make him realize that he really was in the Soviet Union, not just in a dusty library reading through the personal papers of minor intellectuals. He was sure that once it snowed, he would call his relatives and they would invite him to their humble apartments where they would drink plenty of vodka and eat good black bread and something special that they had waited in line for hours to acquire. They would talk about his parents and his grandparents. He would learn things about them he had never known, and in the end, the children of his cousins and second cousins would don their new snowsuits and they would all walk him back to his hotel in the snow.

  It did snow, but instead of calling his relatives, he met Gita. It was snowing when he emerged from the archives, so instead of heading to the hotel for his usual bad and prolonged dinner, he walked in the opposite direction. He walked without paying any attention to where he was going—turning abruptly onto small lanes when he felt moved to do so, walking in the middle of the large boulevards, which had become impassable to vehicles. Noisy groups of men invited him to join them for a drink. He wished them a joyous evening and continued on his way. Sometimes they ran after him, trying to convince him.

  Every once in a while he passed another lone walker, and they smiled at each other. When he had walked for almost two hours, he realized that he was cold, so he looked around for a place to have tea or a piece of bread and cheese. But he was in a residential district, and there was nothing. Still, he did not turn around. He was not ready to return to the hotel. And then he saw the lights—not hundreds of lights like at the opera, although to him it seemed like hundreds of lights—illuminating the first story of a large, square building. He climbed the stairs to the building and pulled on the massive iron doors. He had not expected them to open, but since they did, he walked in. Inside, there was music. He followed the music and came upon a large hall filled with tables at which were sitting men and women in brown suits. Everyone was enshrouded in cigarette smoke. At the end of the hall on a small stage was a string quartet playing a waltz. Above the stage was a banner that read academy of architects annual banquet. There was a dance floor, where half a dozen couples were dancing. The men whipped the women around much too forcefully, and still the women laughed.