Winter Kept Us Warm Page 11

  No one seemed to notice him, so he stood in a corner. He grew braver and took an empty seat at a table whose occupants seemed particularly drunk. Someone offered him vodka, and he accepted. He grabbed a piece of bread from the breadbasket, and no one seemed to mind. Someone filled his glass again. One of the men at his table showed him a plaque he had received for twenty years of service to architecture. “Congratulations,” Isaac said, and everyone at the table clapped, and more vodka was drunk. He ate what was left of the bread and announced that he was going to look for a dance partner. Someone slapped him on the back, and off he went. He was actually planning to leave, but the music stopped. A fat, important-looking man stepped onto the stage and started giving a speech about how architecture was the most glorious of socialist endeavors because it represented both the greatness of the socialist ideal and the strength and sweat of the Soviet worker. The man droned on. Isaac stopped listening, but he felt that it would be rude to leave during the speech. The members of the string quartet were sitting very straight and quietly in their chairs, but then the only woman in the group dropped her bow. Everyone ignored it except for him. He smiled at her, and she smiled back, and that was Gita.

  He sat through the fat man’s speech and another speech and through the final toasts to architecture and the Soviet Union, to Lenin and Marx and a lot of people whose names were unfamiliar to him but who must have been members of the Academy of Architects; when their names were called, they stood up and bowed, and everyone clapped. Then it was over, the members of the string quartet packed up their instruments, and Isaac followed Gita out the door into the snowy night.

  “Excuse me,” he called after her. At first she did not turn around, although he knew she had heard him. “Miss,” he tried again, and this time she turned.

  “Yes?” she said, and then he didn’t know what to say. She was about to turn back around when he noticed that she was not wearing a hat.

  “You really should wear a hat in this weather,” he said, and she laughed and told him he should take his own advice, and that was how it started.

  They walked for several hours, and when they were too tired to go on, she sneaked into his hotel with him.

  “It’s so warm in here,” Gita said as soon as she stepped into the room.

  “Too warm almost,” Isaac said. “Either the heat is on too high or it’s hardly on at all.”

  “Let’s open the windows,” Gita said. They opened all the windows, and they made love on the floor beneath the windows, and the snow fell on their naked bodies. “It’s always warmer when it snows,” Isaac said.

  “Yes,” Gita said, pulling him closer.

  On that first night, the phone rang late, long after they had fallen asleep. “Are you sure you are in the right place at the right time?” a voice said in heavily accented English.

  “Excuse me?” Isaac answered in Russian, but the man had already hung up.

  He told Gita it was a wrong number—the caller had wanted room 602 and his was 601. She stayed with him at the hotel almost every night until he left, and every night the phone rang. The calls were always in English and always in the form of a colloquial question or a cliché. Once a man asked, “Is everything good to go?” and another time, “Is it always darkest before the dawn?” Each time, he told Gita it was a wrong number, and she told him he should complain at the front desk, but he said it wouldn’t do any good.

  He had expected to be watched, but he hadn’t planned on doing anything worth watching. He asked her once whether she was afraid that something would happen to her after he was gone, and she told him that the chairman of the Academy of Architects was a close friend of her late husband, who had drowned himself in the Neva River three years earlier. That was how she got the position as the head and only librarian of the Academy of Architecture. Still, he knew how precarious such connections could be, and he wondered whether the Academy of Architects itself was responsible for the phone calls. Perhaps because of these concerns, he felt that their happiest times together were when they were not in the room, though he knew how much she enjoyed the privacy she had at the hotel, for she lived in one room with her two children and her mother in a communal apartment shared by four other families. On many evenings he sat at his desk in the meager light, reviewing his notes while she soaked in the bathtub.

  They talked mostly about their children. Her son, Shura, she told him, was quiet and thin and already proving to be a talented oboist. Her daughter, Vera, had little interest in music and books but was devoted to swimming. She practiced every day after school for hours, after which she came home and devoured huge amounts of food. Gita was surprised that his girls did not take music lessons, and he explained that they liked music but preferred the written word to all other forms of artistic expression. He told her that sometimes he worried that they liked to read too much, that neither of them talked about their classmates or their teachers, and that on Simone’s last birthday he had suggested that she invite some of her classmates for a party, but she just wanted to have a quiet dinner en famille instead.

  He did not tell Gita that his daughters were motherless and he wifeless. He knew that she assumed, because of his silence, that there was someone besides his daughters waiting for him to come home, but he could not tell her the truth—that being with her reminded him that Ulli did not love him, never did, and never would. Instead he gave Gita all the gifts he had brought for his relatives, the snowsuits and pantyhose, the soap and aspirin. On their last evening together Gita presented him with a photograph of Shura and Vera standing stiffly in the park, dressed up in their new snowsuits, and Isaac gave her the photo of Simone and Juliet, which he had brought to show his relatives.

  It was only now, sitting across from Ulli all these years later, that Isaac understood, finally, that it was wrong not to have written back to Gita. He should have told her about Ulli, and that he was sorry, terribly sorry, for he had truly believed, at the beginning of things, that the memory of Ulli would recede and he would be left only with Gita. But when he was home again, listening to the Mozart Oboe Concerto with his daughters as dusk turned to night, it was Gita who receded. As the sky went dark and the last movement began, he closed his eyes and gave in to thoughts of Ulli, until the record was over and Simone or Juliet turned on the light.

  Perhaps if Gita had not said that she loved him, if she had asked for money, if she had asked for anything at all, he would not have thrown the letters away. Perhaps then he would have written back, kept in touch in a paternalistic sort of way. When his colleagues went to the Soviet Union, they could have brought her money. The dollars would have made her life easier. But there were no demands, just reports about the flowers in the Summer Garden and her children’s latest accomplishments and the last line, which simply and always read I love you.

  After Gita’s letters finally ceased, about a year after Isaac returned from the Soviet Union, he wrote to Ulli about his sojourn behind the Iron Curtain. The girls are asking about you more and more, he wrote, though this was not true. He suggested that Ulli come for a short visit. She would not have to stay with them. She could stay in New York and they could meet in the city. He missed her. He told her that. It has been too long, he wrote. He carried the letter around in his pocket for weeks, until he could almost feel it pressing on him, weighing him down, but he could neither mail it nor throw it away. At night he put it in his night table, and he almost heard it beating from inside the closed drawer, like Poe’s telltale heart.

  One evening in early spring, when the air was especially pungent, he and the girls went for a long walk through the quiet streets of their town. They looked into picture windows at the purple glow of televisions. “What a pity to spend a beautiful evening like this in front of a television,” Isaac said, and the girls agreed.

  “Let’s walk until the sun comes up,” Juliet suggested, and so they walked, up and down hills, around suburban loops, through silent downtown
s. When the sun came up, they were far from home, and by the time they made it back to the house, the birds had already settled down and worshippers were arriving at the Lutheran church up the street. After he had settled the girls in their beds and kissed them good night, breathing in the smell of spring in their hair, he understood that Ulli was not capable of appreciating the smell of spring in her daughters’ hair, so he tore his letter into pieces so small that not one of them contained an intelligible word.

  “I don’t know why I didn’t leave you and Leo that first night,” Isaac said to Ulli at the breakfast table after a long silence during which he wondered why she didn’t jump up to attend to something rather than sit there with him, thinking about his anger. “I could have walked back to the barracks by myself, but instead I lay awake listening to you and Leo—and then silence, which was even worse. I should have told you then about Leo before you . . .” Isaac paused. “Before you fell in love with him.”

  “I don’t know whether I would have listened. I would have said that none of it mattered. I would have believed that my love was enough. That’s what people always believe, that love is enough. But it isn’t.”

  “I think that on some level I wanted to see everything fall apart. I wanted you to come running to me when it happened, though I suspect that if you had run from Leo, you would have run from me too. And you would never have come to the United States and we wouldn’t have had the girls.”

  “Maybe that would have been better.”

  “Not for them, not for me. It wasn’t always easy, of course,” Isaac continued. “Especially when they were teenagers.”

  “I missed all that,” Ulli said.

  “Yes. You did,” Isaac said. He remembered that he had forgotten to pull the shades down in his room as Ulli had told him to do. “The room will turn into a furnace if you let the sun in,” she had said, and he had been reminded of an article he read in The New York Times about indentured servants in Brazil who produce charcoal. The workers had to go inside the ovens, into the furnace, and shovel out the charcoal. Sometimes they fell onto the burning embers, so they wore thick clothing, which made the heat even more unbearable.

  “I forgot to close the shades in my room,” Isaac said.

  “I’ll send Abdoul to do it,” Ulli said, but he was already getting up.

  “No, I’ll go,” Isaac said.

  “You’ll come down again for lunch?” Ulli asked, looking at her watch. “I usually eat at one.”

  “One, yes. That will give me some time to rest. I am feeling tired, Ulli,” he said, though he wasn’t feeling physically tired at all.

  “It’s from the trip and the lingering effects of the sunstroke. You’ll be fine after a rest,” she said, jumping to her feet, relieved to be excused from the conversation. “If you need anything, just call the front desk,” she added as he headed for the stairs. He would use the banister this time, take it slowly, one step at a time, but he wouldn’t stop until he reached the landing, and he wouldn’t turn around to see whether she was still sitting at the table, watching him to make sure that he was all right, which of course he was. He didn’t feel the least bit out of breath, just a little tired. Where, he wondered, did she get all her energy?

  A dry breeze brushed his face when he opened the door to his room. She was right about the blinds. The room was already hot, but he went to the window to pull down the blinds anyway. He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes, then remembered that he had left his inhaler in the pocket of his jacket, which he had hung on the chair. It should be by the bed just in case. But he was too tired to move, so he closed his eyes again and slept.

  Footsteps

  Around dinnertime, Ulli checked in on Isaac. He was breathing steadily, one of his long arms hanging over the side of the bed. Peaceful, as if all he had wanted was to say what he had come to say, to be here with her, and now that he was, he could rest.

  Ulli did not sleep that night. She went to bed at her usual hour after checking on Isaac one more time, after doing the books and going over the chef’s order for the next day’s supplies. She read for a while, but that only made her more awake. And it was so hot, even at midnight, as if the earth had ceased to spin and night was just a sham, nothing more than a curtain lowered between her and a sun that still raged in full force behind it. She went to the window and stood watching, feeling a strange excitement, as if she were waiting for someone, but then she remembered that Isaac was already there, sleeping in room number fourteen. He should have written first, given her some warning, some time to prepare. But he was here, and she could not sleep. She leaned out the window, breathed in the air, but it wasn’t enough. How frightening it must be for Isaac to be always at the edge of suffocation. How could he even sleep at all?

  In the lobby, the night guard, a boy really, one of Abdoul’s nephews, was sleeping, but she didn’t wake him. He was not supposed to sleep when he was on duty, of course, but he always did, and really it didn’t matter. Before him, there had been no guard. She hired him only as a favor to Abdoul. The boy had had a hard time. His father had died in a mining accident and his mother was ill.

  She walked through the medieval stone gate that surrounded the old city and onto the road that led down the hill to the Ville Nouvelle. She thought it would be cooler once she was out of the narrow streets of the old city, but the air was still, and she could smell sheep dung and diesel, though there were no cars now, no vehicles at all. In the distance a dog barked once and then was quiet.

  In the Ville Nouvelle she stopped to look at shopwindows, though there was nothing in any of them that she wanted. She liked that—looking at things other people wanted and then not wanting them. It made her feel young and old at the same time, as if she were both full of idealism and too old to care. She came to a fountain and sat on the edge, running her hand through the water, which was warm, like bath water. It had been years since she had taken a bath or gone for a swim, and in all those years she had never missed it, the feeling of floating, of letting one’s limbs succumb to water. She heard footsteps approaching. She pulled her hand from the fountain, but did not get up or turn around. She sat with her wet hand in her lap and looked up at the stars. She was not afraid, she told herself. They are only footsteps. But she was afraid, and then the man was standing in front of her, and she could smell the alcohol on his breath, and he sat down next to her.

  She stood up and started walking back toward the road that led to the walls of the old city. At first she thought he was not following her, and she could feel her heart slowing down, her limbs unstiffening. She wanted to look back, of course, but she kept walking, and after a while she was no longer afraid, and a car drove by, carrying with it a warm breeze but a breeze nonetheless, and by the time she reached her street, she was feeling sure that now she would be able to sleep.

  And then there he was, grabbing her arm, pulling it up behind her back. “Quiet,” he said, and she could feel the blade on her neck. “Walk.” They came to the hotel, and he told her to open the door. Had he been waiting for her all these years, waiting for her to walk out into the night so that he could attack her? How did he know? But everyone in Meknes knew her, the old lady of the Hotel Atlas. That’s what they all called her. What a ridiculous name, she thought, as if anyone could hold up the weight of the world. I should have awakened the boy, she thought as she turned the key in the door. “Shhh,” the man said into her ear. “Shhh,” he said again, pressing the knife to her neck. She tiptoed past the boy, who was still sleeping, his head resting on his arms on the reception desk. The man pushed her gently now, through the lobby and the dining room to the kitchen. “Shhh,” he said. This is how it will end, she thought, and she closed her eyes and was calm. From far away she heard the Russian soldiers approaching, whistling and laughing. He stopped in the middle of the kitchen, as if surprised that they had come so far, as if he did not know what to do next, and his grip on her arm relaxed for just a m
oment, and then he gripped her tightly again. But that moment of hesitation had occurred and could not be undone. She lunged for a pot sitting on the counter, knocked it to the tile floor, where it landed with a deafening clatter, and Ulli, unable to regain her balance, fell too, pulling her attacker, who did not let go of her arm, down with her.

  Abdoul and the boy at the reception desk were there in a moment, switching on the lights as they came, running. Abdoul grabbed Ulli’s attacker, pulled him up from the floor, punched him so that he fell to the floor again.

  “Enough,” Ulli said, and Abdoul left him on the ground, weeping.

  Ulli knew that if she called the police, the whole town would know about the attack by morning unless she paid a bribe. But she had learned over the years that paying bribes for intangible favors like silence was a waste of money, that eventually they would sell the information to one of her competitors in the Ville Nouvelle who would spread the word about the dangers of the old city. They would, of course, neglect to mention that he had followed her from the Ville Nouvelle, that if she had stayed in the old city, she would have been safe.

  Abdoul pulled the man from the floor, dragged him out of the kitchen to the lobby. Ulli came as far as the lobby, where she gave him the keys to the Mercedes. “Take him far away from here, but do not hurt him.”