Winter Kept Us Warm Read online

  The next morning, the Armenians were summoned to Leo’s office. One of them was originally from Istanbul. “When we left Turkey, my father made a vow never to speak Turkish again,” the soldier said. Isaac explained that these men were not Turks but Central Asians who had been on an epic trek. The Armenian smiled scoffingly when Isaac said the word trek.

  “And if I refuse to translate?” the Armenian said.

  “You cannot refuse,” Leo said. “It’s an order.”

  Leo and Isaac went to the room where the Uzbeks were waiting, sitting stiffly at a table. The older man was wiry and small, his black hair streaked with gray. He had green Asiatic eyes, his skin thick and lined from exposure to the sun and the elements. The younger man was solid, muscular, with wide shoulders and large, veined hands. His face was as smooth as a child’s, except for a wispy mustache and beard. His eyes were the dark green of forests.

  They asked the Turkish Armenian to come into the room and called again for tea. The Armenian did not want to drink tea. “Let’s just get down to business,” he said, but Isaac told him that he had to drink tea, so he did. They all drank in silence, and then Isaac told the Armenian to start speaking to them in Turkish, which he did in a rote sort of way, without using his hands. The Uzbeks seemed to understand something, and the older man began to speak. He spoke for a long time. The Armenian interrupted him often, and finally the Armenian retold their story in the most perfunctory way, devoid of emotion or awe.

  They were father and son. One day, Russian soldiers had come to their village and ordered them to transport a group of forty horses and supplies to a place far away. After a full week of travel, they arrived at a Russian army base, safe but tired. The soldiers to whom they had delivered the horses fed them and told them to spend the night. That night they were awakened from a deep sleep by the sound of gunfire, and their hosts ran in all directions; some of them were killed and others taken prisoner by the new soldiers that had attacked in the middle of the night. These were the Germans, though the Uzbeks knew nothing about Hitler’s campaign to take over Europe. The father and son ran, too, and they hid in the stables with the horses, who were agitated and reared up and stomped and neighed, and try as they might, the two men could not calm them down. In the end, the Germans found them there, and they whipped the horses into silence and tied them together with one long rope, looping it around their necks so that if one fell, the others would fall with him. They tied the Uzbeks’ hands behind their backs and put them with the Russian prisoners. Then they made them all walk and walk and walk. Eventually they were put on a train, and after many days they came to a camp, where they worked at various jobs, felling trees and cutting firewood, making sure the officers’ fireplaces were always blazing, and cleaning the stables and tending the horses. There was not much food, and they were often hungry.

  Then one day more soldiers came. These were the Americans, of course. They attacked the camp and killed the horses. The father and son were captured yet again, along with their original captors, and forced to walk for a long time, until they reached the ocean, though they did not know it was the ocean, as they had never seen the ocean before. They were put on a giant boat, the sea was violent, and they were sick for days and could not eat. Finally they landed in a big city, where they were put on another train, and after many days, they arrived at the camp in the desert in the summer of 1944.

  In the fall, once it was cooler, the prisoners did logging work in the nearby mountains, and the Uzbeks had to work, too, even though it had been established by Isaac’s official report that they were not the enemy. Still, they did not complain. On the contrary, they worked harder than the other prisoners; Bidor kept his pockets filled with pine needles, and when he was sad, he would take a fistful and breathe in the smell of the forest. Since they were so far from home and they were not the enemy, Leo and Isaac got permission from the commanding officer to invite them to tea once or twice a week. After tea, they often walked together in the desert. The Uzbeks walked ahead, talking softly to each other, whispering almost, and Leo and Isaac whispered, too, out of respect for the desert and for the Uzbeks who were so far from home. Once, and only once, the Uzbeks asked for something—lamb. They wanted to cook a special meal, but the commanding officer did not grant Leo and Isaac permission to buy lamb. Although Leo and Isaac knew that the Uzbeks understood that it had not been their decision, they felt they had failed them. Still, when they said there would be no lamb, the Uzbeks just smiled, as they always did.

  Bidor started visiting Leo when he was on guard duty. He appeared in the deepest night, when the only sound was Leo’s sick heart beating and the muffled whoosh of the ocean in his ears—which Isaac said was actually his eardrums vibrating, but he liked to think of it as the ocean, which he had seen only once in his life. On the first night, Bidor asked Leo for a cigarette; then he walked a few paces away, lit the cigarette and smoked, his back to Leo, looking up at the stars. When he finished the cigarette, Leo called to him, saying, “More?” and Bidor returned for another. “Take it with you to the barracks,” Leo said, but Bidor went back to where he had been standing, lit the cigarette, and smoked, though this time he did not turn away from Leo. When he finished this cigarette, he walked back to where Leo was, said thank you, and turned toward the barracks.

  The next time the moon was hidden. It would be more difficult for Bidor to find his way to the guard post, Leo thought, but then he heard footsteps, and he knew who it was, and he let him approach without shining his flashlight on him. If it had been an enemy, he would have been dead. He let the footsteps draw nearer, waiting to distinguish Bidor’s figure, but all he saw was darkness. How could Bidor see where he was going? Were his eyes more trained to the night? He was humming a mournful tune. Or perhaps, Leo thought, it was a lullaby. Then Bidor’s arms were around him, his breath on his neck. Afterward they stood side by side, looking out at the darkness, smoking. “How did you know?” Leo asked.

  Bidor spoke for a long time, and Leo listened. It sounded beautiful, like the night, like Bidor’s lips, like his green eyes that Leo could not see in the dark, but he knew they were there, and he believed at that moment that he understood what Bidor was saying, that he was telling him about the night in his village and the sound of horses approaching, the smell of fires burning and lamb cooking. He wanted to tell Bidor something soothing about his own hometown, but he could think of nothing except the fires spewing from the smokestacks of the steel mills. Sometimes, he said, if it was a really dark night like tonight, you couldn’t even see the spires, and the flames looked like they were dancing in the sky all on their own. “Look,” he said, and he waved his cigarette in the air. “Can you see the ball of fire dancing?”

  Bidor took the cigarette from Leo and held it straight out in front of him. He began to turn, slowly at first, then faster and faster, and the fire at the end of the cigarette turned with him, drawing a circle of fire in the night.

  Even after weeks had gone by and Leo awoke every morning in Ulli’s bed feeling strong, he always expected that one morning he would not be able to move beyond his memory of what had happened to Bidor when Leo was supposed to be keeping him safe. Yet he kept feeling strong, and he started to believe he was cured, that the valve in his heart was not getting thinner at all but expanding, opening itself up. And they were making money, he and Ulli together, not a lot, but enough to get them started, for that is how they saw it, as a beginning, not an end in itself. It was their secret too, something Isaac was not a part of, though he wasn’t stupid, far from it, and he must have suspected. But as long as they said nothing, it was still a secret. They were the perfect team, he and Ulli. Ulli was a good salesperson. She had her connections with the women she interpreted for, and through them there were more and more clients. There was, it seemed, no German in Berlin who could keep himself from American cigarettes and whiskey. Cigarettes and whiskey were what got them through the winter, through picking over the rubble and c
leaning up the rubble, through dead sons and brothers and fathers and all those dead Jews. Leo procured the goods, typing out the purchase orders, taking a box here, a bottle there. It was easy. Still, they were cautious. “Never be greedy,” Leo always said, for he knew all too well the consequences of greed, though later he would understand that it was not greed but desire that made him and Bidor crave carelessness, as if their lack of concern were their own secret language, as if it replaced all the words they did not share.

  It was Isaac who found them in Leo’s office, Bidor kneeling on the floor in front of the swivel chair. Why hadn’t Isaac knocked? Why hadn’t Leo locked the door? Now, as Leo sat there at the table drinking the coffee Isaac had brought him in the cup that belonged to a family that had disappeared into the rubble, Leo wondered whether that was what he had wanted, to be found out by Isaac so that the floodwaters would be released and either he would drown or Isaac would save him. But he had neither drowned nor been saved, though Isaac, he was certain, thought he had saved him. Leo did not know what Isaac had seen, nor did Leo tell him that it was Bidor who had sought him out in the night, for that would be implying that he had been unwilling or innocent, and he was neither. “It is best if you have no contact with them now,” Isaac had decided, and Leo had accepted this punishment.

  Isaac became the sole protector of the Uzbeks. He continued to drink tea with them and walk with them in the desert. Leo wondered whether the three of them walked together now or whether Isaac still walked behind while they talked of things that he could not understand. At first, after Leo had been banished, he watched Bidor through his office window, watched him get on the truck that took them to the forest, watched him line up for roll call every morning, always hoping that Bidor would sense him watching, that he would turn around and see Leo’s face in the window. In the beginning Leo both worried and hoped that Bidor would come to him again when he was on guard duty, and when Bidor didn’t, he did not cease to hope, even though he imagined that Isaac had made it clear to Bidor as well—keep your distance. He wondered whether Bidor was hoping that Leo would come to him, despite the danger, or whether he accepted Leo’s absence as he had accepted his presence, as he had accepted all the things that had happened to him, that had brought him so far from home, so far from anything he could understand.

  When the war was over, all the prisoners were sent to Idaho, where they were to be processed for repatriation. The Germans were going home to their families, to their bombed-out cities and their dead. Russian soldiers who had allowed themselves to be taken prisoner had been proclaimed traitors to the Revolution by Stalin, who made it clear that upon their return, they would be put under arrest and shipped off to Siberia. It was this proclamation, this knowledge that the Uzbeks were doomed, that brought on Leo’s weakness. His legs began to feel heavy, as if they were bloated with water. Walking felt like running up a mountain. His arms ached. His shoulders burned. His hands and feet went numb. If the Uzbeks were sent to work in the mines, their lungs would fill with dust. Every day the mere act of breathing would become more difficult, and at night they would lie awake, concentrating on their own wheezing, afraid that if they did not keep vigil over every breath, their lungs would give up the fight. And if they worked on laying railroad tracks, bent over, hacking at the frozen earth with picks, it would be the cold that would get them. One by one their toes and fingers would succumb to frostbite, and if they did not hack the dead digits off with the same picks they used on the frozen earth, gangrene would set in, and that would be the end.

  Isaac did not want to tell the Uzbeks that they weren’t going home like everyone else. “Even if we bring in the Armenian, they won’t understand. Stalin means nothing to them,” he said.

  “We can try to tell them something, that they are going to another prison, a more difficult prison, that they will have to be strong. If not, they will think we betrayed them,” Leo said.

  Isaac was silent.

  “We should never have been kind to them,” Leo said.

  “That would only make things easier for you.”

  “You are afraid to tell them to their faces, afraid to look them in the eyes and tell them you are sending them to their deaths. Do you think that when they are no longer here, you won’t think about them, you won’t hear them cursing those who were supposed to protect them?”

  “There is nothing we can do, Leo,” Isaac said. “Soon it will all be over.”

  Before the prisoners were shipped off to be repatriated, the army sent Isaac on a mission to bring the crazy Russian—the one who thought that Stalin was living in his brain—to the military hospital in San Francisco. All this time, since this man had arrived on the same train as the Uzbeks, the army had put up with his rages—the howling in the middle of the night, the throwing of dishes. Leo had written the reports accounting for the broken chairs, the smashed eyeglasses that they kept replacing because he was as blind as a bat without them. But now the army had decided that they could not send him back in this condition. Perhaps they were afraid of being censured, that the Soviets would say Look what the evil Americans have done.

  On the second day of Isaac’s absence Leo went to see the Uzbeks in the recreation hall, where they sat every evening smoking and watching the other prisoners play pool. “I wanted to say goodbye,” he said, and they understood “goodbye” and held out their hands. They each shook hands with him. “Goodbye,” they said.

  “Tea?” he asked.

  “Tea,” they said. It occurred to him only then that Bidor’s father probably did not know why Leo had stopped being their friend.

  He led the Uzbeks to his office, where he prepared tea while they waited patiently, not talking. They sat now like men who had been sitting in chairs their whole lives, with one arm over the back, legs crossed. They had learned a few more words too—delicious, sugar, spoon, table, telephone. Once Leo was sitting with them, the tea served, they began pointing to these things, pronouncing the words carefully, smiling proudly. They continued—“please, thank you, you’re welcome, work, sing, happy, sad”—listing all the words they had learned.

  “Yes, very good,” Leo said after each word, which he knew made the whole thing even more ridiculous, but he did not know what else to say that they would understand.

  When they finished their tea, he did not offer them more, for he could not bear to look at them knowing he would not save them. After they were gone, Leo found pine needles on the floor by their chairs.

  The day of the great transport came. Everyone was up early, everyone except the Russians, who refused to rise from their cots. “Up and at ’em,” the soldiers called, and they hurled curses back and turned to the wall. In the end, they had to be dragged from their beds. Leo watched it all, watched the Germans clean and crisp, eager and ready, watched the Uzbeks watching the Russians being pulled from their beds. They were not smiling. What, he wondered, was their interpretation of what they saw? Could they even imagine that there were people who did not want to go home, that home could be more dangerous than war?

  Breakfast over, the prisoners lined up to get on the buses. It was Leo’s job to call out the names and check them off as they boarded. “Bidor,” he called. “Otabek.” The Uzbeks walked straight and tall to the bus, and Leo checked off their names.

  When everyone had boarded, even the Russians, who, after they had been dragged out of bed, had become strangely docile, Leo checked his list one more time—everyone was accounted for. The commanding officer gave the order to close the doors, and the buses started moving. Some of the prisoners waved and some did not. The Uzbeks waved. Leo had not wanted to look, but he knew they would not understand his coldness as shame, not until they were handcuffed on the other side, not until they knew they were not going home, so Leo waved and smiled, and then they were gone. Would it have been more difficult to drop bombs on cities, to shoot the enemy in the head or straight through the heart? If it were so difficult, Leo thoug
ht, if it were more difficult than putting the Uzbeks on the bus, then why were there so many dead?

  The next day, Isaac returned from his mission, which had not gone well. The crazy Russian had gotten completely out of control and was shot dead by the military police.

  “At least he didn’t have to go to Siberia,” Leo said.

  “Not everyone who gets sent there dies, you know,” Isaac said.

  “It’s living there that frightens me,” Leo said.

  “We cannot know what is unbearable unless we have lived it ourselves.”

  “We can imagine.”

  “Try to let it go, Leo. Try to think of the future. There is nothing we could have done,” Isaac said, though they both knew this was just what people said when the opposite was true.

  “As a matter of fact, I am thinking of the future. I’ve reenlisted,” Leo announced.

  “I thought you hated the army,” Isaac said.

  “I do,” Leo said.

  “I see,” Isaac replied, accepting his answer.

  When Leo thought they would be saying goodbye, wondering whether Isaac would write, whether he would ever take Isaac up on his offer to start his future in New York, wondering whether Isaac had offered only because he knew that Leo would want to run like hell from Isaac, from everything Isaac knew about him, Isaac reenlisted too.

  “They’re sending me to Berlin to interpret for the displaced persons,” he said.

  Leo was going to Berlin.

  “I thought you hated the army,” Leo said.

  “I do, but they need interpreters,” Isaac said. “They say there are millions,” he added.