Winter Kept Us Warm Read online

  One Sunday, Hermann’s wife came to her parents’ door and left a note with their maid, Renate. The message was on a piece of stationery that had been folded and torn in half. Before Hermann, Ulli had been in the habit of doing her homework at the kitchen table while Renate finished the evening’s tasks. When Ulli first started coming to work in the kitchen, Renate had tried to be quiet, setting the dishes down without letting them knock against each other, keeping the cutlery from clanging, but after a while she got used to having Ulli there with her, and often, when she finished her work, Renate made tea and they sat together at the table, Ulli working and Renate reading one of her women’s magazines. Sometimes Renate would interrupt Ulli to show her a dress or shoes that she particularly liked, and once, Renate had shown Ulli a photograph of the boy from her village whom she loved. Georg was his name. In the photograph he was holding a lamb.

  After reading the note, which read, I must speak to you immediately. I am waiting across the street. If you look out the window, you will see me. Hannah Meyer, Ulli was annoyed with Renate, rather than with herself, who had brought it on. She was sure that Renate had read the note and understood its implications, so after that day Ulli avoided Renate as much as possible, and Renate accepted Ulli’s distance as easily as she had accepted her presence.

  Ulli had folded and crumpled the note, clenched her fist around it, and went directly, without looking out the window, to meet Hermann’s wife.

  “I am Ulli Schlemmer,” she said, holding out her hand.

  Hermann’s wife took her hand and produced a forced smile. “Hello,” she said. She moved closer, looking her straight in the eye. She had tiny teeth, like those of a child, which made her look both young and old at the same time. She looked at Ulli for what seemed to be a long time, as if she were trying to memorize her features so that she could paint her face afterward. Ulli did not avert her eyes, but focused her gaze on the woman’s lips and tiny teeth until Hermann’s wife said softly, “He does not want to see you anymore.”

  “He would tell me himself if that were true,” Ulli said calmly, though her heart was beating furiously. She felt both a terrible relief and all the old longing she had felt when she watched him racing around the classroom with the love of the infinite beauty of numbers.

  “He will not be at the hotel on Tuesday,” Hannah Meyer said.

  Ulli did not respond.

  Hermann’s wife put her hand on Ulli’s arm gently, as if she were trying to comfort her. “You are just a child,” she said.

  After Ulli stopped seeing Hermann, her days were devoted to her father’s typewriter business, which was booming as Germany geared up for war. At night, alone in her room, she cried, not because she missed Hermann, but because she did not miss him, and because she understood that what he had seen in her was not joy or strength or life, but weakness. She realized then that Hermann had chosen her because he thought she was like him, and it was this, this desire to prove him wrong, that gave her the strength to leave the Hotel Vienna behind.

  Then the bombings began.

  At first, while her parents and neighbors crouched trembling and silent in the bomb shelter, Ulli waited for the end, ready to confront the horrible death that awaited her. She believed that her lack of fear was a sign of strength, of bravery even, but with each attack it became more difficult to keep her fists unclenched, especially during that dreadful silence between explosions. She found that the more she gave in to her fear, the more Hermann receded into the background, and she understood then that she was afraid because she refused to give in, because, unlike Hermann, she wanted to live.

  Now, all these years later, as she got up from her chair to leave Isaac, his fever finally broken, his breathing even and relaxed, she understood that though Hermann had tried to take her with him into his despair, he had also saved her. For what if, instead of allowing herself to be pulled into Hermann’s soft and unhappy arms, she had been sucked into the fervor of the Hitlerjugend—the mountain excursions with fresh air and milk and plenty of sun, the facile camaraderie, the simple passions like hatred and pride and love of country? If she had allowed herself so easily to fall into Hermann’s arms, would she not also have looked for passion in the mass hysteria offered by National Socialism? Thus, in his strange way, had he not saved her from the worst of it by keeping her bound to that hotel room, so far removed from the tragedy unfolding around them? Yet he had pushed her back out into a world where the bombs were falling and where, in 1945, the bombs would finally stop.

  The Apartment

  It was terrible, the winter of 1945. If she believed in God, Ulli would have had to believe that God felt they had not been punished enough, that Europe needed more battering, more misery for its uncountable sins. By the end of the war, after hundreds of air raids, almost half the residents of Berlin had abandoned the city, escaped to the countryside, but Ulli and her parents had stayed behind, partly because they had no relatives in the country and partly because the buildings on their block stayed standing to the end, though all around them was shattered glass and rubble heavy with snow. At night the bombed-out structures groaned like dying soldiers, and Ulli lay awake listening to beams and bricks breaking loose and falling. Otherwise, the nights were quiet, some would have said it was a deathly quiet—the bombed-out blocks, the snow, the hunched citizens in frayed coats clutching bags of potatoes and carrots, more snow—but it was this quiet, this absence of sirens and airplanes overhead, the absence of bombs falling, that saved Ulli from despair.

  During the day, she walked for hours, from one end of the American Zone to another, avoiding human contact. On one of these walks Ulli found the apartment of a family who had disappeared. It was on a day when she felt that she could not spend another moment with her parents, sitting in their un-bombed home, talking about the future of their typewriter business, which to her seemed not like a future at all, but a return to the terror and drudgery of the past. On her previous walks around the city she had not been moved to wander into any buildings. Her whole purpose was to stay outside in the open, to breathe in the air. Interiors suffocated her. But she found herself climbing the worn wooden stairs, holding on to the banister, listening to her footsteps echoing in the stairway, pushing the door ajar, sitting down on the sofa, just sitting, waiting perhaps for someone to find her, to order her to leave. Outside, the day turned to dusk, the furniture to shadows. She grew hungry but could not bring herself to get up.

  At some point she must have lain down, for that is how she found herself in the morning when the sun flooded the room with light, and since she was reluctant to leave the quiet of the apartment, she drew a bath and lowered her body into the hot water until it grew cold and she began to shiver. It was then that Ulli decided that she could not return to her parents’ house, could not go on working at her father’s typewriter business, even though there was no lack of opportunity there. “An army needs typewriters, and there will, whether we like it or not, always be armies,” her father liked to remind her.

  Ulli’s father had been too old to serve in the war; by its end, he was over sixty. He had not done badly during the war, not well, not great, but he had managed to keep the business going. In fact, at the end, there were no typewriters left in the warehouse, though they had not all been sold. The Nazis had confiscated what was left, melted them down for the final effort. Ulli was the one who supervised the process, writing down all the serial numbers, as her father insisted, so there would be a record. Whether this was because her father expected to be reimbursed at some point, or whether he simply could not give up his meticulous business practices just because bombs were flying and the Soviet Army had reached their borders, she did not know.

  Ever since she could remember, her future had been the business. She was her parents’ only child, so her father began grooming her for the business from a very young age. When she was six, her father taught her how to type. He wanted her to have an appreciation for
their product, to master it, was how he put it, almost as if it were a wild beast that had to be tamed. He had developed a special training method and never hired secretaries who already knew how to type. “Once you have gotten used to bad habits, it is difficult to break out of them,” he said. Instead, he schooled his secretaries himself, and as a result, they were fast and accurate and graceful. “My pianists,” he called them.

  Every evening for an hour and on Sunday afternoons for two hours Ulli practiced, so that by age twelve she was a prodigy—one hundred and twenty words a minute without one mistake. Her fingers flew across the keyboard as quickly in French or English as they did in German. Her father was proud of her progress and often brought her to his office, where she showed off her peculiar form of acrobatics and was given sweets and kisses by her father’s secretaries. Each time Ulli reached a new personal best, her father rewarded her with a special outing to the racetrack or the zoo or for a drive to the country. She liked going to the racetrack the best, liked the sound of the horses’ hooves and the way she could feel people holding their breath, clenching their fists, their hearts beating.

  Her father never gambled, but he taught her how to concentrate on one person in the stands, how to watch and let herself feel as if she were that person, feel his joy when he won, his disappointment when he lost. “That way you can have fun without risking anything,” he said, and she believed this was possible, because he was her father and because she was still too young to understand that nothing was possible without risk. After a day at the races, her father always took her to dinner at one of his favorite restaurants, where he ordered champagne and let her have a whole glass for herself. During dinner they would go over the day’s races, counting up the money they would have won or lost had they bet.

  Sometimes one of the secretaries accompanied them on these outings. It was rarely the same secretary, but each one went out of her way to please Ulli, bringing her chocolates and telling her that she was “such a pretty girl.” Once, Ulli said that she would rather be smart than pretty, which caused that particular secretary to burst into laughter, as if this were the most absurd desire one could possibly have. Of course, all the secretaries were pretty, and they were all excellent typists, though by the time Ulli was an adolescent, none of them could type more quickly than she could. As far as she could tell, none of them was particularly smart, which didn’t seem to bother her father. Perhaps he was simply looking for some lightheartedness to relieve him of her mother’s somber presence.

  Ulli’s mother was much younger than her father. She was British, from a dreary town in northern England, and had met Ulli’s father when he was working in London for some kind of shipping company. The family had visited her hometown only once. Ulli’s grandparents lived above the dress shop they owned. The apartment was damp and cold even in April, the time of their visit. They went to church on Easter Sunday, and Ulli’s grandfather came home drunk late that night. In the morning he didn’t get up to open the dress shop, and her grandmother was crying, and Ulli’s mother held her hand and her father shook his head. On this visit, her grandparents paid Ulli little attention. She only remembered her grandmother asking whether she liked school. She answered in the affirmative because she could sense that her grandmother was not interested in Ulli’s true feelings about the matter. At one point, when they were in the middle of dinner and Ulli asked politely for the salt, her grandmother said that she was very sweet, which made her start crying because she had no aspirations to be sweet. On the contrary, she dreamed of flying across the Atlantic like Amelia Earhart or being a leader of men like Joan of Arc.

  “What’s wrong, dear?” her grandmother asked, making matters worse, but Ulli had known that it was useless to try to explain why she was crying to someone who thought that sweetness was a desirable quality, so she simply stopped. “There, there,” her grandmother said, reaching over and tapping her stiffly on the back, completely unaware that she had been the cause of the tears. “Children are such mysteries,” she said sadly, and Ulli wanted to tell her that adults were the strange ones, the ones who equated politeness with kindness, but she knew her grandmother would not understand. Her grandfather was even more aloof. When she looked in his direction, he turned away, as if he believed that by doing so, he would become invisible. Perhaps he did this with everyone, but she was too young to make a study of him.

  In 1944 Ulli’s maternal grandparents were killed by German bombs. Upon receiving the telegram, her mother cried for five or ten minutes and then stopped abruptly, dried her eyes, and announced that she was going to take a walk. During the ten minutes that she was crying, Ulli tried to put herself in her mother’s shoes, concentrated on feeling her sadness the way her father had taught her to do with people at the races, but it didn’t work. Her mother finally returned soon after nightfall with a bag of oranges. Ulli had not seen oranges for months. Where her mother got them, she did not say, and Ulli did not ask. Her mother began setting the table with the white lace tablecloth and the good silver. She arranged the oranges carefully on her best Delft platter. They ate them all—three each—savoring every bite, not speaking. With her mother there were never many words, and Ulli never quite knew how to be with her.

  They did have their times together. Sometimes in the evenings after dinner her mother would ask Ulli to read to her. “What would you like me to read?” Ulli would ask, and her mother always said it did not matter, that she felt like listening to Ulli’s voice; that was all. Ulli did not know whether her mother even listened to the stories she read from her favorite books, her mother never commented on them, but when Ulli looked up every once in a while to see whether she was paying attention, her mother was always looking right at her, sitting forward a little bit on her chair.

  One time when Ulli and her mother were in the middle of ironing, her father swooped in and announced that he was taking Ulli to a concert. She had never been to a concert, so she was excited. She had to get dressed immediately or they would be late, and she ran to her room to do so, abandoning her mother and the ironing. It was only once the lights were dimmed and the concert started that Ulli thought of her mother standing at her ironing board, alone, but she forced the image out of her mind and concentrated on the bows moving up and down, convincing herself that her mother had no interest in going to concerts.

  Perhaps she remembered this so vividly, remembered the music—it was Mozart, one of the later symphonies—because this might have been the first time she was aware enough to rationalize, to reinvent the story, create her own version of what in fact was happening, for isn’t that what so much of memory, so much of life, is—reinventing a more palatable version of one’s own actions? Ulli suspected that her parents didn’t know how much she struggled to balance their affections, to make sure that she divided herself equally. She never held it against them.

  Ulli was sure that her mother knew about the secretaries, but she did not seem to mind being left at home, or perhaps this was Ulli’s hope, her version of what her mother was feeling. She supposed her mother preferred not to know the details. On the rare occasion when her father joined them for dinner, Ulli always felt that her mother was trying too hard to make pleasant conversation, so Ulli tried to entertain them both with stories about school and long summaries of the adventure books she loved to read. Sometimes Ulli talked so much that her father would have to remind her that the purpose of dinner was to eat.

  Ulli did not know why her parents got married. There was not even a story about how they met. She liked to think that in the beginning there was something that drew them to each other, but all she knew about them as a couple was the fact of their being married and having her. It was only after Hermann that she understood how quickly passion could turn into unhappiness, but at least this realization gave her hope that her parents had once been happy together, that they could be this unhappy only because they missed something.

  Despite the fact that she preferred silence to con
versation, her mother insisted on English, and Ulli’s father happily complied, as he was quite proud of his linguistic abilities. In fact, he was the one who schooled Ulli in the mysteries of English spelling and the fine points of its grammar and punctuation, even though he had tremendous difficulties with r, th, and w.

  In those days English was not the lingua franca, yet it was, perhaps, the one thing that held their family together, not because they used the words to communicate, but because the words, the language, set them apart from everyone else. Children went out of their way to hide such things as the foreign origin of a parent, so Ulli looked upon her parents’ decision to flaunt their difference with a certain degree of pride. On the rare occasions when they were in public together, her family would pretend they were wild characters and speak loudly in English about their various exploits. One of their favorite stories was that they were thieves who had just robbed an important jewelry store. Ulli and her father talked about where they would hide the goods and what they would do in Argentina following their successful escape. Even her mother found this amusing and would add embellishments to the story. Of course, after the National Socialists came to power, they no longer amused themselves in this way. In fact, they did not speak English again until the Americans arrived at the end of the war and English became a tool that helped them survive in the world rather than retreat from it.

  When Ulli found the apartment, she informed her parents that she would be moving. They were surprised, though they should not have been, especially her mother. She supposed her parents believed that the worst was over, and perhaps it was.