Winter Kept Us Warm Read online

  “I didn’t call you to discuss cars,” Isaac said, and he proceeded to tell her about an announcement he had seen at Columbia for a yearlong training program for simultaneous interpreters. “Meet me tomorrow at eight on the steps of Butler Library,” he said. “I’ll give you all the information then.” He did not ask her whether she wanted the information or whether she was free to meet him at eight. Of course he knew she was free. Of course he knew that she had nothing in the world but time.

  There were twenty of them when they started out, and by the end of the day, only six, all men except for Ulli. As soon as the tests began, a confidence came over her, similar to the calm she had felt while sitting in the bomb shelter, listening to the planes flying overhead, watching the shaking hands of her neighbors and their rocking back and forth, wishing she could tell them that she was sure, absolutely-without-a-doubt sure, that they would not die that night. The test had gotten harder throughout the day, starting out with basic translations of vocabulary and phrases, eliminating those who did not know the words for peacock or quagmire, and culminating in an almost impossible task: for thirty minutes she had to sit in a booth wearing earphones and repeat into a tape recorder, word for word, the stream of sentences in English, Russian, German, and French flowing into her ears, all while writing the numbers from one to one hundred backward. She accepted the requirements, lost herself in the challenge, felt that she could go on forever, for hours, days even, simply speaking and writing out numbers. She felt unfettered—she would almost dare to say free—for the first time since she was a child, when freedom was so much easier to come by.

  The key was to keep up a rhythm, to take the words in and spit them out again without allowing the mind to get bogged down in meaning. They tried to trick them, she learned later, spewing out pages and pages of Nazi propaganda and nihilistic religious tracts, trying to trap them in their own beliefs, in anger, in meaning, but she did not grasp the meaning of what she heard and what she repeated. To her they were only sounds. She came home from the tests, which lasted more than eight hours, physically invigorated, as if she had spent the day hiking in the mountains.

  Ulli had not told Leo about the program, and she made Isaac promise not to mention it, not because she thought Leo would be opposed, but because she did not want his sympathy if she were not accepted. When she got the official results a few weeks later, Ulli called Isaac, and he insisted they celebrate. “We will tell Leo at dinner,” he said.

  “Isaac has invited us for dinner this Friday at his favorite Czech place on Second Avenue,” she told Leo a few nights beforehand.

  “What’s the occasion?” he asked.

  “Apparently it’s a secret,” she said.

  When they arrived, Isaac was already ensconced at a table in the corner next to the fireplace. “Prost,” he said, raising his glass to them. “I’ve ordered goose, for old times’ sake.”

  They had cooked a goose for New Year’s in Berlin. Ulli had traded three bottles of commissary American whiskey for it. The butcher was ecstatic and claimed to have ridden his bicycle sixty kilometers to his uncle’s farm in order to acquire the goose. They spent the whole day cooking, making a special prune and orange sauce, but ultimately they were disappointed by the bird, which turned out to be fatty and tasted vaguely of grass. At midnight they had gone up to the roof to toast the New Year, the first postwar year, and they left the rest of the goose up there for the crows. Leo insisted that the crows would eat the goose with pleasure, but Isaac and Ulli were not convinced, because it seemed a form of cannibalism. In the following days, she thought of going up to the roof to check on the goose, but she never did.

  At the restaurant, they did not remind Isaac of their disappointment, and when the goose came, surrounded by baked apples on a yellow platter, they marveled at it and consumed the bird gleefully, although it too was fatty, but at least this one did not taste like grass. The plum dumplings, however, were perfect and the slivovitz went down smoothly. During dessert, it began to snow, and they watched it through the window from their warm table beside the fireplace. Isaac would not let Ulli announce her achievement until the very end, after they had eaten strudel and finished off the slivovitz. Then he stood and proclaimed, so that the entire restaurant could hear, “It is with great honor that I announce that Ulli Schlemmer has been accepted into the simultaneous interpreter training program at the United Nations.”

  The other diners broke into thunderous applause, and Ulli stood and thanked everyone, and Leo picked her up, lifted her high into the air, insisting that everyone in the restaurant drink a toast to her and to the United Nations.

  “To Isaac,” Ulli said, raising her glass. He had moved to the other side of the room, and she thought she noticed his lips trembling, as if he were trying to keep back tears, but Leo swept her up again and kissed her hard, and when she looked back at Isaac, he was clinking glasses with a portly diner and laughing.

  For the first few months of training, there were only words, like water surrounding her, holding her up yet capable also of doing her in. Even when she left school for the day, she translated every word she saw or heard or thought. She translated the hundreds of conversations she heard every day: on the bus, in the subway, in shops, on corners, on telephones. At night she stuffed cotton into her ears and walked from their apartment to Columbus Circle and back, repeating the word blank over and over again so that she could rest. “Blank, blank, blank, blank,” she said while she brushed her teeth, while Leo caressed her breasts. In the middle of the night Leo would have to shake her. “You’re talking again,” he would say, and Ulli would force herself to stay awake so that he could sleep.

  Gradually, however, as she became a swifter and more accurate interpreter, meaning returned to her, and by the time she graduated and got her first job, she no longer dreaded waking up in the morning or spending the day longing for sleep. In fact, she slept very little. It seemed to her that the less she slept, the faster she was able to interpret and the truer she was to the words.

  In those first years as an interpreter, her colleagues were all men. One would expect that the men would not have been pleased by her presence and would have made it their business to belittle her, but she experienced nothing of the sort, perhaps because she was the best among them. She never stumbled, never hesitated, never resorted to paraphrasing. After work they often went out drinking together, and they treated her more as an honorary man than as a woman. When Leo came along for drinks, they were friendly toward him, and he always made an effort to enjoy their company.

  He had started his own business by then, specializing in insurance plans for the booming construction industry. They had moved out of the apartment in Yorkville to a larger, sunnier place on Central Park West. From the living room and bedroom they had an unobstructed view of Central Park. Ulli’s work often took her to Vienna, and when she returned to New York from a conference, she always brought Leo a gift. His favorite was an Ottoman snuffbox, on the cover of which was a bearded sultan. He used it for his cuff links and kept it on the night table next to the bed. She liked to think of him lying in their bed with the box on the table next to him. Sometimes she wondered whether he was always alone in that bed when she was away, but mostly she was too busy to think about that.

  Howard’s War

  Leo was proud of Ulli’s accomplishments and admired her ability to concentrate so intensely. She never missed a beat, never let a word slip through her fingers, Leo liked to tell his clients, who out of politeness asked about his wife, never expecting a whole lesson in the workings of the United Nations and the importance of the interpreters. We’re a team, he would tell them, both of us protecting the world in our own way, Ulli keeping war at bay, Leo guarding financial security.

  “I wouldn’t want my wife traipsing around the world. I like to know that she’s safe at home,” Leo’s partner was always saying.

  “My wife can take care of herself, that’s
for sure,” Leo said, proud of being proud of Ulli.

  Now it was Ulli who did not come home until after midnight. It was Ulli who returned tired from a long journey, full of stories, full of words. Missing Ulli brought Leo a strange kind of comfort. When she was gone, he stood at the window looking out at the darkness of Central Park and the ring of lights around it, imagining her in her hotel room in Vienna. In his imaginings there was always a balcony, and he pictured her on it, looking out at the city, smoking the last cigarette of the evening. By the time she finished her cigarette, her hands and face would be numb, for she would not have put on her coat just to stand out on the balcony, but inside it was warm, and the sheets were soft, and soon she would fall asleep thinking of him. Leo imagined that she was thinking also about their bed in Berlin. If he concentrated on Ulli in their room in Berlin, on the cold outside and the sound of wooden beams loosening and crashing to the ground, he could not imagine his life without her.

  With Ulli strong again and Leo’s business growing, all was stable, peaceful, secure. There would be no harm in going down to the Village every once in a while when she was gone or when important talks were going on and she practically lived at the UN. It was like having a special meal out, a treat. It was, he told himself, another form of insurance, a way to keep the longing contained so that he and Ulli could continue what they were building. And it worked. His forays downtown helped him stay strong for Ulli, for when she returned. Until one night, in a dark bar in the Village near the docks, Howard found him. “I knew we would meet again,” Howard said.

  “So did I,” Leo said, for deep down, or maybe not so deep down, he had known that he could not run from Howard forever.

  They did not stay at the bar by the docks, but walked through the quiet streets of the West Village to an Italian café far from all that commotion, as Howard put it. “Of all the places, why did you choose that dive?” Howard asked.

  “Why did you?” Leo asked, and they both laughed.

  The Italian café became their regular meeting spot. Sometimes they went to a bar afterward, where they would part ways, going solo into what Howard called “the bowels of earth.” “We’re like miners,” he liked to say, “going down all clean and full of vigor and coming up to the surface again with blackened faces and burned-out lungs.” Other times Howard took Leo to the theater or the opera, for which he always insisted on paying, no matter how much Leo protested. Leo enjoyed going to the theater, but he didn’t get what Howard, or anyone, saw in opera. Once, after an excruciatingly long performance, Leo started to tell Howard how he really felt, but he knew that if he were truthful, Howard would no longer take him to the opera and that would mean Howard would go alone. The thought of him alone at the opera was more than Leo could bear.

  At first Leo thought that Howard told him things because he was lonely and had no one else to talk to aside from his customers, with whom he could not possibly talk about what he talked about with Leo, but gradually Leo understood that he, too, needed to tell his story, and he realized that he had never really exchanged secrets with anyone, not even Ulli. What secrets, he wondered, was Ulli keeping from him?

  It was easier to talk to Howard about Bidor than about Ulli. What he had felt for Bidor was something Howard understood. It was what Howard called situational love. “If you had met him under different circumstances, if he had not been condemned to the cold cruelty of Siberia, you would hardly remember him,” Howard said.

  “Perhaps I would remember him better. Maybe if I didn’t have that image of him bent to the ground, hacking at the frozen earth, I would remember the green of his eyes and the power in his arms.”

  “Perhaps,” Howard said, but he was not convinced. “You are confusing guilt with love.”

  “I didn’t say that I loved him, but I cared about him. That’s something, isn’t it?”

  “Of course it’s something,” Howard said. “There was nothing you could have done, you know.”

  “That’s what Isaac always said.”

  “In war there are no solutions, but we keep on thinking that war leads to solutions.”

  Howard had not sat out his war—the Great War, the war in which more people died than any other war in the entire history of mankind. Howard had killed. Howard had medals, which, one muggy summer evening, he and Leo tossed from the Palisades into the Hudson River. “Thank you,” Howard said when it was over. “I could not stand the weight of them any longer.”

  “To valor,” Howard said, raising his glass, for he had brought champagne to mark the occasion, to send his medals to their death.

  Howard said that the worst thing was that he had never cried for the young boys he killed. He hardly remembered the feel of flesh giving in to the thrust of his bayonet. But he had cried for the boy who died in his arms, who did not feel the kiss Howard planted on his lips when they were already blue.

  All people, Howard said, had one moment in their lives, one moment that distinguishes them from all the other poor fools who walk this earth. That was his moment. After that, there were just the days of his life, the steady stream of eyes, the opening and closing of gates, the dinners and lunches, the back rooms.

  “Who was he?” Leo asked.

  “A boy who was too young to die,” Howard said.

  “So you didn’t know him?”

  “No, but after that, there could be no other.”

  “But how can you live without love?” Leo asked.

  “One can live with the memory of love,” Howard said. “One can get up every morning, boil an egg, put it in a wooden cup, crack it, scoop out the nourishment. One can wash the wooden cup and set it back in the cupboard, put on one’s hat and coat, open a store, sell glasses, grind lenses, sweep, balance the books. One can keep on living because dying is not an option.”

  But Leo didn’t want to live with the memory of love. He wanted to breathe it in, wrap his arms around it, feel it in his bones.

  The Shrine of Moulay Idris

  Isaac walked up the stairs to his room, where he began to pack his bag carefully, making sure not to waste any space. It was a small bag, and everything had to be folded just right; otherwise he would not be able to close it. When all that was left was the leather toiletry case, the one Simone and Juliet had given him when he went on his first trip to the Soviet Union, he stopped. Simone had warned him that things might not go well, that Ulli might not want to see him. “If it’s something you have to do, then you must do it, but you have to be prepared. People don’t change, not really. They just become more and more like themselves.”

  “Ulli is not one of your clients,” Isaac said.

  “I just don’t know why now, after all these years, you want to see her.”

  “Don’t you have any interest in knowing what happened to her, how she’s doing?”

  “Not really,” Simone had said. “I don’t see how it would make a difference. And the asthma.” She paused. “You have to be careful.”

  “Maybe the dry air will be good for it,” Isaac said. “Maybe I will be cured again as I was in Arizona.”

  Simone put her hand on his shoulder. “I just don’t want you to get hurt,” she said.

  But Isaac was tired of being careful, tired of sleeping in the afternoons, tired of counting his breaths, tired of memories.

  “I am prepared,” Isaac said, holding up his inhaler like a torch.

  And he had been prepared, and then Ulli had seemed so pleased to see him, and she had given him the best room, with a balcony, and he had bought her those silly babouches. She just needed some time to get used to his presence. He had not come all the way to Morocco to be left again with nothing. Still, she needed time. He understood that, and he could entertain himself. He had always been good at that. He would go to Volubilis by himself. It wasn’t the pyramids, but it would be spectacular nonetheless. “‘Arise ye prisoners of starvation, arise ye wretched of thi
s earth,’” he sang, as he used to do when Simone and Juliet were reluctant to get out of bed.

  “Enough, enough!” they would scream, burying their heads under the blankets, but he would continue singing until they had no choice but to rise, rub their eyes, and get ready for the day.

  He did not think it would be so easy to slip out of the hotel unnoticed. He thought the employees would be all over him, warning him about the sun and about not staying out for long. He had planned to make up something about going to the souk again to buy gifts for his daughters now that he was leaving. Don’t worry about me, he thought he would have to say, but he made it to the lobby, through the lobby, and out the door without encountering anyone.

  Abdoul caught up with him before he got to the first corner. “Monsieur,” Abdoul said.

  “Abdoul,” Isaac said.

  “Where are you going, monsieur?”

  “To Volubilis,” Isaac answered proudly, forgetting his plan to lie about his outing.

  “I will call a taxi,” Abdoul said.

  “No. I will take the bus. In the guidebook it says that there are buses to Volubilis at the market.” He took the book out of his pocket, as though offering proof.

  “It is a very old bus,” Abdoul said.

  “I like old buses,” Isaac insisted.

  “It is not a good idea,” Abdoul said.

  “I will be fine. I assure you,” Isaac said, adding, “I take full responsibility.”

  Abdoul shook his head and explained how to reach the market. When he finished, he made Isaac repeat the directions, which he was able to do without error. “There are many small streets,” Abdoul warned. “You will not be able to read the names, so you must pay close attention, and when you get to the market, you must ask for the bus to Volubilis.” Abdoul went over the directions a second time and made Isaac repeat them again.