Winter Kept Us Warm Page 8

  “What are they going to do with them all?” Leo said, thinking that these were the new numbers—the millions of dead soldiers, the millions of dead Jews, the millions of displaced persons.

  Winter

  In Ulli’s apartment, they kept a low profile, never raising their voices no matter how much vodka they drank. “Shhh,” they would say when they found themselves losing control, laughing too hard, or pounding their fists on the table. “We’ll be denounced,” they said. But though they made light of their precarious situation with the apartment, they understood the gravity, the tenuousness of it, as well. In the end, in the spring, after the long, cold winter, they were finally reported—by whom they could not be sure, though they blamed Frau Herscher, a dour woman who lived alone on the third floor and responded to their greetings with silent disapproval.

  But they had had their winter. They had been warm and had eaten and drunk and talked. If someone had looked in on them, observed them from afar, he might have seen something different—three people talking endlessly about useless things, drinking, cooped up in a stolen apartment, curtains drawn—but they did not feel the need for the outside world. Inside it was warm, and they were friends.

  Leo and Isaac had access to luxuries at the base, so they always arrived at Ulli’s apartment laden with delicacies—different varieties of Scotch and whiskey, vodka, ice cream, caviar, canned tangerines and pears. They cooked elaborate meals that were always accompanied by large quantities of alcohol. Leo and Isaac told stories demonstrating the stupidity of the United States Army and its commanders. “There’s the right way and then there’s the army way,” Leo and Isaac liked to say. The three of them talked about their childhoods, the games they played, their neighbors. They tried to imagine what they would be like when they were old.

  They memorized poems and recited them dramatically. Leo acquired an anthology of British poetry from the library on base, and though he could not understand why anyone would choose poetry over song, he developed a repertoire of his own and, because of his phenomenal memory, could out-recite both Isaac and Ulli even though both of them had been reading and memorizing poems since childhood.

  Their favorite was one that Leo discovered, “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold. They always ended their poetry nights reciting it in unison. Ulli still remembered it in its entirety, and she often found herself reciting the final stanza when she was cleaning up the rooms, sweeping old newspapers and candy wrappers into the trash, wringing out the mop with her bare hands:

  Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  They always cried when they recited “Dover Beach.” Did they cry because they knew they could not be true to one another or because they were, in fact, true to one another?

  Yet despite the warmth of winter, they longed for spring. They longed for the end of that particularly brutal winter, which lashed out angrily at all the dead dogs of Europe. It was the winter that turned so many people away from God once and for all. The bombings, the atrocities—for these, they could forgive their God—but the winter, that was a dirty trick. That could not be the work of the Divine, no matter how vengeful. Isaac, Leo, and Ulli enjoyed this sort of conversation. In fact, the small-mindedness of God was one of their favorite topics. They had a theory that if God existed, he would have to be small-minded. He would have to be the sort of God who unleashed the most brutal winter of the century on a continent of people who were already smashed into the ground.

  When spring arrived, however, it was not what they thought it would be, and they realized soon enough that they missed the simplicity of winter, the limitations of their apartment. They found themselves repulsed by the new season, by the sickly yellowness of daffodils and the feel of sun on their faces and the smell of soft rain that wafted in through the open windows. Still, they were always trying to believe in it, convince themselves that they really did want to be outside in the sun with all those flowers. So they went outside. They walked and ate ice cream. They sat in beer gardens.

  When spring came, Ulli could not sleep, so she began spending the longest hours of the night in the kitchen with Isaac. At first it was Isaac who talked, mostly about the people he was interviewing at the displaced persons camp. These were the released prisoners of the concentration camps as well as the refugees who had followed Hitler’s retreating army out of Eastern Europe because they were more afraid of the Soviets than of Hitler. It was Isaac’s job to weed out the innocent civilians from the collaborators. The former would be relocated throughout what was then called the free world, mostly to the United States, while the others were turned over to the Soviets. Sometimes he consulted with Ulli about his designations. Ulli was well aware of the irony in his asking her, a German, to assist him with this task, but only once did they actually broach the subject—when Isaac was examining the case of a Ukrainian man who claimed that he had hidden a family of Jews in his barn. The man had shown Isaac a ring that he said one of the women in the family had given him as a token of her appreciation.

  The man told Isaac that he hadn’t wanted the ring, but the woman insisted. She wanted him to give it to his future wife but, Isaac told Ulli, “I knew he was lying. I could tell by the way he handed it to me, as if it were only an object, not the ring of a woman he had saved. And then, when I was examining it, he asked me if I was Jewish, and when I told him that I was, he laughed and said, ‘I knew it,’ as if I were the one who was lying. Even though he knew his fate was in my hands, he couldn’t hide his hatred.” Isaac paused. “You know,” he continued, “that was perhaps the only time in my life I have really felt Jewish. My parents rejected all that. When I was a child, I wasn’t even quite sure what it meant to be a Jew, except that I knew I was a Jew, as were my parents and their Russian socialist friends. I asked my father about Jews on various occasions, but I never got a satisfactory answer. Sometimes he would say that we were the people of the Book, the Torah, but that the Torah was nonsense, though the idea of being people of the Book was not. He often ended his explanations by emphasizing that we were an ancient and unpopular people, and then I would ask why, and he would say we were unpopular because we were chosen by God, which was completely confusing because he didn’t believe in God. ‘What were we chosen to do?’ I asked him once, and he laughed and said we weren’t chosen to do anything, no one is chosen, but we all have to choose.

  “I didn’t even know my parents had been raised religious until I was twelve. I didn’t know one single prayer, had never set foot inside a synagogue, but that man could sense that I was Jewish, and he hated me for it. I never want to hate like that,” Isaac said. “Never.”

  “I can’t imagine you hating anyone,” Ulli said.

  “War can change people. Perhaps if I had not been hated, I would have learned how to hate, too, like everyone else.”

  “Not everyone,” Ulli said.

  “No, not everyone,” Isaac said, “but too many, so many.”

  And Ulli knew he was thinking about her, about what she had chosen and done or not chosen and not done, and she could not help but feel that Isaac had enlisted her aid not only to assuage his doubts about her but to punish her as well.

  Still, when Isaac could not determine from the evidence or from intuition whether a DP was lying or telling the truth, he gave the person the benefit of the doubt, acquitted him, so to speak, and Ulli wondered whether that was also partly because of her, because he wanted so much for her to be innocent, to give her the benefit of the doubt.

  “But what i
f he was one of those who should not be allowed to forget?” Ulli asked on one occasion after Isaac had made such a decision.

  “His guilt will follow him whether he is wasting away in prison behind the Iron Curtain or whether he is comfortable in a cozy little house in America,” he said, and she knew this was true.

  The Russian lessons began one night when there was a lull in the conversation. Ulli looked down and saw Isaac’s book lying on the table, the unfamiliar Cyrillic letters embossed on the spine. “Read to me,” she said. She thought that hearing Russian coming from Isaac’s mouth might soften her memory of the night when the Russian soldiers came. Perhaps then, she thought, she would finally be able to speak about it—not to Leo, which would change everything, and that was the one thing she could not bear, but perhaps she could tell Isaac.

  “But it’s in Russian,” Isaac said. “You won’t understand a thing.”

  “It will be soothing,” she told him. And it was. She allowed the words to flow over her, to be pure sound rather than language with meaning and memory. After three pages he stopped and asked whether he should continue.

  “Please,” Ulli said, so he continued, stopping every once in a while to see whether she wanted him to go on. He read for about an hour, and she concentrated on the sound of the words coming from his mouth.

  “I could teach you,” he said when he had finished a chapter.

  “If I could understand, it wouldn’t be as beautiful,” she said.

  “Or it would be even more beautiful,” he said.

  But the lessons were not about the beauty of the Russian language, nor did they turn out to be a battle against the past, for how could mastering a language ever change that? No, the lessons were simply how she survived the long, sleepless nights of spring. They were something to occupy her mind, to muffle the laughter of the Russian soldiers. Yet she believed at the time that—especially because Isaac spent his days recording the experiences of the displaced persons and thus understood that, in one way or another, no one had come out of the war unscathed—if he really wanted to know, if he really wanted to know her, he would have asked. Tell me, Ulli, what it was like when the Red Army came. Later, however, she understood that even if he had asked, she would not have spoken about the past. All she wanted was to make it through the nights to the morning, to that first cup of coffee and Leo with his plans and thick thighs and the silly songs and drawn-out toasts. So she chose learning a new tongue over speaking. Leo over Isaac.

  Breakfast

  In the morning, the sun filled Isaac’s room at the Hotel Atlas. The avocado-colored walls were aglow with light, giving everything—the sheet that covered him, his pants folded neatly over the back of a chair, the lampshade—a greenish hue. He recognized it as morning light, though he remembered lying down in the early afternoon, before lunch, even. Could he have slept so long? So much can happen while one is sleeping, like that first night when he had let Leo go with Ulli into the bedroom, when he had sat there like an idiot, watching as he always did.

  Why was the sun so strong? Who had opened the blinds?

  He closed his eyes again, closed them hard. He breathed in, counting to twenty, then letting his breath out slowly. It had been months since he had made it to twenty. He did it again. He was strong, rested. It was time to get up.

  That night, he had not gotten up. He had sat on the sofa watching them dance, banging into the furniture, clinging to each other while he did what he always did: observe. He had done nothing to keep them from making that terrible mistake, just as he had done nothing to prevent the Uzbeks from being sent back to the Soviet Union. Remember Bidor, he could have whispered in Leo’s ear, and Leo would have let go of Ulli, gone with him back out into the night, away from her, into the snow. But he hadn’t gotten up; he had stayed on the sofa that night and all the other nights.

  But he was getting up now, going downstairs. He had not come this far to waste away the morning. “‘Arise ye prisoners of starvation,’” he sang as he swung his legs over the side of the bed, placed his feet on the floor. “‘Arise ye wretched of this earth,’” he continued as he put on his clothes hastily, without washing up. He took the stairs, still humming, hands in his pockets, without holding on to the rail. How long had it been since he had done that?

  “There you are,” Ulli said as he entered the dining room. The other guests were eating breakfast—bread and butter, jam, coffee, tea, fruit. She was wearing the yellow slippers.

  “Would you like the European or the Moroccan breakfast?” she asked.

  “The Moroccan,” he answered.

  “Coffee or tea?”

  “Coffee.” He had given up coffee a few years ago. His doctor’s idea. He had taken his advice, though the change made him feel neither stronger nor less tired.

  She brought him bread and cheese and olives. The coffee was thick and bitter. Isaac watched Ulli move from table to table, greeting her guests, laying her hand lightly on a shoulder, nodding, removing plates, conferring with Abdoul, who darted from the kitchen to the dining room and back in a matter of seconds, balancing all the guests’ needs on his tray. After a while Ulli took a seat at Isaac’s table.

  “How long did I sleep?” Isaac asked.

  “About twenty hours, I think. You got heatstroke from your outing. You were burning up with fever.”

  “Perhaps it’s the jet lag too.”

  “Yes, that can be very disorienting. Maybe you’d better take it easy today,” Ulli suggested. “Tomorrow, I was thinking we could go to the Roman ruins at Volubilis, and tonight we will have a special dinner. I have already been thinking about the menu.”

  “That’s not necessary,” Isaac said. “I really require very little.”

  “Of course it’s not necessary, but this is a hotel, you remember, and it is my job to make sure you are comfortable. It will be nice. It has been a long time since I have had the chance to sit down to dinner with an old friend,” Ulli said.

  “I would be more than happy to help with the preparations. It would do me good, in fact, to be useful,” Isaac said.

  “One doesn’t have to be useful every moment of one’s life. That’s why we invented vacations and hotels.”

  “I haven’t come here for a vacation.” Isaac looked down at his coffee cup, which was empty.

  “Would you like some more coffee?” Ulli asked instead of responding to his statement.

  “No, I’d better not.” He looked up again. “I read about the ruins at Volubilis in the guidebook,” he said, taking the guidebook out of his pocket and showing it to her.

  “You see, you do imagine yourself on vacation. Otherwise you wouldn’t have bought a guidebook.”

  “It’s Juliet’s. She left a box of them in the basement. She spent a lot of time here in Morocco, before you were here, of course. She’s lived in so many countries that I don’t even think I could list them all, but she’s settled down now. Even though California seems so far away from New Jersey, it’s close compared to Paraguay and Poland. It’s nice to have her in the country, though it makes me feel old that she’s no longer wandering, that even Juliet is no longer young.”

  “Didn’t you visit her when she was living abroad?”

  “No. I’m afraid I haven’t done much traveling, except for my research. She always came for a visit in the summer. I haven’t even been to Russia since it became Russia again. When I was a boy, I read everything I could about Marco Polo and dreamed of traveling all over the world, but I am really not well suited for it. Whenever I am away from home, all I think about is returning.” Isaac paused, and Ulli took a sip of coffee, lifting the cup slowly and setting it back in its saucer without making a sound. “Not now, though. Now I am happy to be here,” he said.

  “I’m glad,” Ulli said. “I’m glad you’re here, too.”

  “It’s a beautiful hotel, Ulli. It must be nice to have something to take care
of, something that provides a structure for your days. I did not realize until after the girls were grown how much I depended upon it—the bath and bedtimes, the doctor’s appointments and school meetings, shopping for school clothes in the fall, homework.”

  “But you had your work. Even after they were grown up, you had that, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but I have grown tired of my work. When I retired, I thought I would just take a break. I reread all of Balzac and Thomas Mann. I kept waiting for ideas, but nothing came. So I kept reading, but after a while I got tired of reading. I found myself nodding off in my reading chair. I found myself counting the pages left until the ends of chapters. I would sit for hours just listening to the radio.”

  “Then you came to see me,” Ulli said.

  “Yes. I’d begun to feel paralyzed, and then I lost the car. If I hadn’t lost the car, I might not be here.”

  “What do you mean?” Ulli asked.

  “I drove to New York, planning on going to the museum. There was an exhibit of Persian miniatures. It was terribly hot and humid. There was a jam on the West Side Highway, and after I’d been sitting in traffic for almost an hour, the car simply died. It didn’t overheat in the usual way that cars overheat. There was no smoke coming out from under the hood, no smell of wires burning. Of course, I don’t have a cell phone—though Simone has been bugging me about getting one just for emergencies like this—so I couldn’t call for help. Instead, I simply got out of the car and began walking. I just left it there in the middle of all that traffic. Later I felt bad about it, about making the situation worse, but at the time it seemed like the only thing I could do. The car died at around Eighty-sixth Street, so I walked to the Seventy-ninth Street exit and down the exit ramp. My original intention had been to find a garage, but I found that I was happy to be walking, despite the heat, despite the fact that my car was sitting dead on the West Side Highway.