Winter Kept Us Warm Page 9

  “In the end, the police towed it to a yard somewhere in the Bronx, and in order to get it back, I would have had to find a way to get to the Bronx, pay a huge fine for abandoning the car on the highway, and then arrange to have the car towed to a garage. I told them I didn’t want it, but they informed me that I was required by law to come in and file paperwork giving up ownership of the car in addition to paying the abandonment fine. I told them I would be there within the next few days. Every day for three days I got up fully intending to make the trek to the Bronx, but every day I never got around to it. I got embroiled in a book. I decided to organize my files. I walked downtown to get my groceries. And that was it.

  “For the next couple of weeks I felt triumphant, as if I had accomplished something extremely important. But soon that feeling of elation wore off, and I felt terribly selfish for contributing to the traffic, for falling prey to the absurd notion that my age gave me the right to inconvenience others, to be, in fact, a nuisance. I could not stop thinking about the people stuck there on the highway who had more important things to do than see an exhibit of Persian miniatures. Yet somehow, mixed in with this feeling of guilt was an urge to walk on the beach. I craved the smell of water and salt and sand, the smashing of waves. I had forgotten, I realized, that I had once been very fond of the ocean. I suppose I could have taken a bus to the beach. I actually considered going on one of those horrible tours to Atlantic City. I tried to convince myself that it would be amusing to go all the way to Atlantic City and not even enter a casino, but I knew I would return home in the evening feeling even more discontented. I knew I needed to do something. So here I am.”

  “You can stay as long as you like, Isaac. I’ll even put you to work if you want.”

  Isaac laughed. “It will be like old times,” he said.

  Abdoul came to the table. “Pardon, monsieur,” he said, bowing to Isaac.

  “Pas de problème,” Isaac said, nodding his head.

  Abdoul spoke a few words to Ulli in Arabic. It was obvious that he was upset about something.

  “Excuse us a minute,” Ulli said, leading Abdoul toward the kitchen, calming him down as they walked so that the other guests did not even notice something was amiss.

  After a while, Ulli reemerged from the kitchen and approached a woman who was sitting alone at a table near the window. Isaac had noticed her when he came in, her arms and hands cluttered with silver bracelets and gigantic rings with red and blue stones. As he passed her table, she had looked up from her book, and though he had nodded and greeted her softly in French, she did not smile. As the woman spoke now to Ulli, Isaac could hear the clanking of her bracelets, like chains, he thought, as she gesticulated, pointing toward the stairway and toward Abdoul, who was standing sullenly near the kitchen door, watching. Ulli put her hand on the woman’s shoulder and spoke softly, but the woman’s voice grew louder so that now all the guests were watching. Isaac wanted to tell them all to stop looking, that Ulli could handle it. Instead, he read up on Volubilis. According to the guidebook, the Roman ruins were exquisite and the bus ride out there charming. On the bus it was not uncommon to encounter traveling musicians on their way to the nearby shrine of Moulay Idris, named after the creator of the first Arab dynasty in Morocco. Though the guidebook described in great detail the beauty of the shrine’s calligraphy and mosaics, it also warned that it was prohibited for non-Muslims to spend the night in town.

  Ulli had managed to calm the woman down. Her bracelets were no longer clanking. Isaac looked up from his book as Ulli and the woman arose and headed for the stairs, the woman walking fast, as if she were proving something, but Ulli had no trouble keeping up, though she was surely twice the woman’s age. Abdoul came over to Isaac’s table to see whether he required anything more. “A little more coffee, perhaps,” Isaac said, hoping he would not regret it later. Abdoul bowed, and Isaac made as if to stand so that he could bow too, but Abdoul put his hand on Isaac’s shoulder. “Please sit, monsieur. You are our guest,” he said, bowing again.

  Of course he was a guest, Ulli’s guest, the hotel’s guest, but she had said that he could help. He tried to imagine himself chitchatting with the other guests, running here, running there, smiling as Ulli was doing, now that she had returned to the dining room. Looking at Ulli, one would never know there had been a problem. Slowly she made her way through the room. It was strange to see her so confident, so at ease. She had always approached life like someone who, surveying a stream she was about to cross, trusted neither the rocks’ stability nor her own sense of balance. Yet she wasn’t paralyzed by this. She stepped on the stones, crossed the river, and if she made it to the other side without falling, she was pleasantly surprised. If she didn’t, that was just the way things were.

  This is how it was when the landlord’s agent finally came to the apartment. It was a Sunday.

  Earlier Isaac and Leo had convinced Ulli to go out and enjoy the warm spring weather. They rented bicycles and rode around for hours. Each time they finished a lap, each of them secretly hoped that one of them would have the courage to suggest calling it quits, but no one did. They had paid for the entire afternoon, so they all felt obligated to keep riding. They paced themselves, like prisoners trying to make it through a day, a week, a month, a year.

  The agent rang the bell just as they finished dinner. They had been drinking vodka since before the meal, so they were quite drunk.

  “You are?” the agent asked when Ulli opened the door.

  “Ulli Schlemmer,” she answered.

  “May I come in?” the man asked.

  She led him to the living room. He sat down and took some papers out of his briefcase. He put on his glasses and started looking through the papers. “Just as I suspected,” he said without looking up.

  By this time Leo and Isaac had come into the living room too. Leo offered him some vodka.

  “I do not touch anything Russian,” the man replied, still without looking up.

  Isaac laughed. “Perhaps you would like some beer then?” he suggested, approaching the man unsteadily. The man leaned way back into the sofa, shielding his face, as if he expected Isaac to crash right into him. “Or cognac?” Isaac said, bending over, speaking right into the man’s ear, though he did not whisper. “We have quite a large selection.”

  “No, thank you. I will not take much of your time. Now, Fräulein Schlemmer.” He looked at Ulli, and Isaac backed away, joining Leo on the green velvet sofa. “It has come to our attention that you are not the authorized tenant of this apartment.”

  Ulli neither agreed nor disagreed with his pronouncement.

  “So you have found the authorized tenants?” Isaac asked.

  “We have found one authorized tenant, a soldier. He has been in the hospital all this time,” the man replied, pushing his glasses up, though they had not in the least bit slipped down his nose. “He’s blind now,” he added, then paused. “This paper”—he handed it to Ulli—“specifies that you are not authorized to inhabit this apartment and that you must vacate the premises by five p.m. tomorrow.” He crossed his legs.

  Ulli looked at the paper and then handed it to Isaac, who read it carefully and returned it to the man.

  “It is for you to keep,” the man said, handing Ulli the paper again.

  “Thank you,” Ulli said. “Will that be all?”

  “Five o’clock tomorrow,” he repeated, putting the rest of his papers back into the briefcase.

  “More vodka?” Leo asked when the agent had gone, understanding that something serious had just occurred. He poured them each another glass.

  “We always knew someday it would come to this,” Ulli said.

  “Come to what?” Leo said. “It’s just an apartment. The important thing is that we’re together and we are drinking vodka.”

  “Yes, to us and to vodka,” they said, and they drank until the sun came up.

  A
fter she lost the apartment, Leo and Ulli moved into a hotel, and Isaac moved back to the barracks, but Ulli and Isaac continued the Russian lessons, meeting at a café once or twice a week. For a short time, before they all left Germany, Isaac had a local girlfriend, a quiet, tall nurse who sang. She was older than Isaac and had been at the front with the wounded. She wore a small gold cross around her neck, and Leo and Ulli called her “the Christian,” privately as well as in front of Isaac, who didn’t seem bothered by the cross. Once, the four of them went out for afternoon coffee and pastries. “Karlotte has a beautiful voice,” Isaac blurted out. “Why don’t you sing for us?” he said, placing his hand gently on hers.

  And she did. She stood up and sang “Ave Maria,” softly but quite nicely. When she finished, the other customers at the café clapped, and she smiled shyly and thanked them. She did not say a word until she and Isaac were walking to the trolley stop together. When Isaac asked why she had been so quiet, she simply said, “They are not my kind of people.”

  “And what exactly are your kind of people?” Isaac asked.

  “People who understand that there are some things you shouldn’t laugh about,” she said.

  “But they weren’t laughing,” Isaac said.

  “Not out loud, but you could see it in their eyes.”

  “You do not understand,” Isaac said, but he knew what she had felt. He knew that when the three of them got together, they didn’t let anyone else in.

  Isaac escorted Karlotte home after that conversation, rode with her all the way on the streetcar to the end of the line, where she lived in an apartment with her mother. He saw her a few times after that, but more out of duty than interest, and then his orders to return to the States came through, and it was easy to extricate himself. She did not cry when he told her he was leaving. “I do not think I would like to live in America. Everything is so new there,” she said, as if he had asked her to come along.

  Ulli returned to the table. “Sorry, there is always something,” she said. “My guest was convinced that one of my employees stole a bracelet from her room, but what she doesn’t understand is that they would not risk their jobs for the few dirhams they could make off a silly silver bracelet. Moroccans don’t even wear silver. They think of it as primitive and backward, what Berber nomads wear. And then of course we found it. Actually, I found it, because she refused to look, just stood in the doorway with her arms crossed. It was on the floor behind the sink.”

  “It’s a wonder she would even know she was missing a bracelet,” Isaac said.

  Ulli laughed. “I have found that the more possessions people have, the more obsessed they become with keeping track of them.”

  “That’s why I’ve been thinking about selling the house. I think I would be content enough in an apartment in the city, especially now that I don’t have a car, but I’m afraid the girls will read too much into it. Instead of understanding that I no longer want the house, they will convince themselves that I am moving because I can no longer take care of it. And then there’s Iraj to think of.” He had not meant to mention Iraj so lackadaisically. The plan had been to ease into Iraj, into all of it.

  “Iraj?”

  “I should have told you long ago. Juliet has a son.” He paused. “His name is Iraj.”

  Ulli didn’t answer right away. “There is so much we have to catch up on,” she said finally.

  “Yes,” Isaac said.

  On the plane, he had made a list of what he wanted to tell her. But after he saw Ulli again, he imagined the two of them at a table, he with his list, she with a cigarette, for that was how he remembered her, always with a cigarette, and he felt silly for making the list at all, for thinking that a list was what was needed.

  “You have quit smoking,” Isaac said.

  “Years ago. I don’t even remember what it tastes like.”

  “I used to like lighting them for you. It was a way to come closer,” Isaac said.

  “But you hated my smoking.”

  “I hated the smoke, not the smoking,” Isaac said, leaning back in his chair and clasping his arms behind his head.

  “It’s one of the things I miss about those days when everyone smoked. It gave us all something to focus on when we didn’t know what to say. Now we just have to face it all on our own.” Ulli set her hands on the table, as if she were about to get up, but she simply left them there.

  “He’s fifteen. I wanted to write to you when he was born. I don’t know why I didn’t. I kept putting it off, and then, when we realized that he wasn’t quite right—”

  “Not quite right?” Ulli prompted him.

  “He’s what they used to call slow. They have all sorts of other names for it now.”

  “Is he in school?” she asked, leaning in toward Isaac.

  “In a special program. We didn’t realize something was wrong until he was about three and still hadn’t begun to talk. The doctors said not to worry about it, that Woodrow Wilson didn’t speak until he was four. But that was an exception. He’s good at memorizing things. Every time he visits, we have what he calls our history projects. The last time we were together, he memorized all the wars of the nineteenth century and their exact dates. He loves to cook. He wants to be a chef, but he gets bogged down by details. He can spend half an hour cutting up a pepper, but he has talent, too. He knows intuitively how to blend ingredients. Once, when I was making leg of lamb, he insisted that we soak it in milk overnight to make it tender, so we did, and it was perfect.”

  “Do you have a photograph?”

  “I should have thought about that. But we don’t really take pictures. I have some, of course, but I didn’t think to bring them.”

  Ulli looked up at the ceiling, the way students do when they are reciting something they have been required to memorize, as if she were straining to imagine Iraj.

  “You would like him,” Isaac added. He tried to imagine her going for a walk with Iraj. Would she have the patience to stop to pet and talk to every dog, to wait for the green light even though there were no cars coming, to count all the out-of-state license plates?

  “And what about Iraj’s father?” Ulli asked.

  “Juliet met him when she was teaching in Turkey. He was a refugee there, a deserter from the Iranian army, but things didn’t work out. Iraj thinks that his father died in a bus accident. Juliet says that when he’s older, she’ll tell him the truth.”

  “Does the father know he has a son?” Ulli asked.

  “I don’t think so. She didn’t even know she was pregnant until she returned to the States, and as far as I know, she’s had no contact with him since then.”

  “You’re right. This would have been so much easier with a cigarette,” Ulli said. “This is the point where I would remove one slowly from the pack and you would reach for the lighter.” She paused. “But after it was lit and I’d taken my first deep drag, we would still have to speak.” She looked around the dining room, surveying it all carefully, as if she were looking for something that needed tending to. But the breakfast diners had long since gone, and the waiters had cleared the tables. Everything was in its place—the chairs all pushed in close to the tables, the floor swept. “I never managed to convince myself that the girls were better off without me,” Ulli said.

  “I should not have let you slip away so easily,” Isaac said, lifting his coffee cup to his lips and holding it there.

  “It was my choice, mine and Leo’s choice. There was nothing more you could have done,” she said softly.

  “Yes, but I should never have let you leave them so completely,” Isaac said.

  She turned toward him, using, it seemed to Isaac, all her willpower not to look away. “I am the one who ran off—”

  Isaac interrupted. “I was selfish too, Ulli. I wanted them to myself—without complications.”

  “Well . . .” Ulli paused, still holding hi
s gaze. For a moment it seemed as if the film had been lifted from her eyes, that they were as he remembered them, but when she spoke, it was there again. “What about Iraj? Do you think it would be best to tell him that his father is still alive?”

  “I do, but I am not the one to know what is best. We always think we are doing what is best, and then it so rarely is.”

  “Do you regret having adopted them?” Ulli asked.

  “No, of course not. I cannot imagine my life without them,” Isaac said.

  “You see. I could. I did imagine it without them. I chose a life without them, Isaac, and you didn’t,” Ulli said, putting her hands on the table, pushing down.

  Now it was Isaac who looked away. He couldn’t bear to watch her thinking about getting up, leaving him when they had just started talking. It embarrassed him to see her shame, her weakness, yet at the same time he couldn’t let her go. “I’m afraid that in an effort to steel them for life, in order to protect them, I taught them—too well—how to be alone,” Isaac continued. “They are good at that, at being alone. Even when they were young, they did not seek out other playmates, and I did not push them to do so. I thought the three of us were enough for one another, and since they never seemed unhappy about it, I believed that our little world was enough, that it was the whole story, and that somehow when they ventured out on their own, all they would need was the memory of their childhood with me.”

  “That is so much more than most people have,” Ulli said, removing her hands from the table. “You don’t think it’s possible to be alone and happy? I think those who learn to be alone, who can find pleasure in their own company, are, in the end, less disappointed than most of us. I say this because it has taken me a lifetime to achieve this.”

  “Yes,” Isaac agreed, “but not being disappointed is less than what I had hoped for them. What about love? Simone has been a live-in health-care worker for over twenty years. She’s never done anything else. She has spent her life watching over the dying, bathing them, preparing meals that they hardly touch, sitting with them on park benches or in front of televisions. I don’t know how she can stand the televisions. For me that is the worst of it—that constant transmission of inanities. She says she blocks it out, doesn’t even hear it. I don’t know how she can sit so much. It is what I hate the most about old age—the sitting.”