Winter Kept Us Warm

by Anne Raeff

  Ulli went one evening after work to the Pink Parakeet. She sat in the corner watching the men come in and out of the back room. At one point an elderly gentleman who was sitting at the bar bought her a drink.

  “I hope you like Manhattans. I couldn’t decide whether you were a Manhattan or a martini gal.”

  “I like both,” Ulli said.

  “Are you waiting for someone?”

  “Not really,” Ulli said.

  “That is the story of my life—not really waiting for someone,” the elderly gentleman said, laughing, though there was, Ulli thought, nothing funny at all about what he had said. On the contrary, it struck her as one of the saddest things anyone had ever said to her, and for just a moment she allowed herself to be relieved that this would not be Leo, that Leo would not be an elderly man in a bar not really waiting for anyone, but that meant that she would be the old woman alone in a bar or a café or a bedroom, waiting for no one. “Thank you for the drink,” Ulli said, getting up abruptly. “I must be going. My husband will be waiting.”

  But he wasn’t waiting. Isaac was, and Leo was gone. I don’t want to cause you any more suffering, said the note from Leo.

  Ulli wanted Isaac to leave her alone. “I’ll be fine,” she said, but Isaac stayed anyway, though he did not disturb her, retiring to the girls’ bedroom, where he slept on the floor on a pallet made of blankets. Ulli could not bring herself to lie down on their bed, so she poured a drink and sat in the dark in a chair by the window. She was hungry, but the thought of food repulsed her, so she sipped vodka, looking out the window, focusing on the light of a streetlamp that was in her direct line of vision, trying not to imagine Leo’s body against hers, trying not to remember his smell, but the more she tried to put him out of her mind, the more he was there.

  She went to the bathroom, put down the toilet seat, and sat to wait for morning, when she could go to work and lose herself in other people’s words. She closed her eyes, but it made her dizzy, so she opened them again, and there was Leo’s razor on the sink, as if it had been waiting for her. Her hand was steady despite the vodka. She made six tiny slits on the inside of her thigh, and for the first time since Leo’s revelation, she felt calm, the kind of calm, she imagined, that comes at the threshold of death, when all one can feel is pain. It was as if she were standing at the edge of an abyss and knew she was going to jump, and then Simone opened the bathroom door. “I saw the light on,” she said without entering the bathroom. Ulli knew she should say something comforting, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, to assure her daughter that everything was fine when it wasn’t. She should have gotten up, carried her back to her room, and read her a story about a mermaid or an orphan who discovers that his parents are alive and have been looking for him for years and now they have found him and taken him home to the palace where they live.

  Finally it was Simone who spoke. “Go to bed now, Mommy,” she said calmly.

  “I will in a minute,” Ulli said. Simone lingered, waiting for Ulli to leave the bathroom with her. Ulli looked down at the floor, counting the tiles, until Simone whispered, “Good night” and she could hear the soft rustle of slipper pajamas on the wooden floor. For a long time Ulli stayed in the bathroom, holding the razor blade in her hand, not moving. Finally she put the blade back in Leo’s razor and went into the bedroom.

  In the morning, she was glad Isaac was there to take care of getting the girls ready for Mrs. Donny’s arrival while she drank coffee and ate a piece of black bread with butter and honey that Isaac had brought from the Ukrainian bakery. “It will make you strong,” he said, and she ate it obediently because she had not eaten a thing since the day before.

  As Isaac and the girls went about the morning routine, she could hear Simone calling out gleefully, “Long may she reign, long may she reign,” and each time Isaac responded with an even more gleeful “long may she reign.”

  “What was that all about?” she asked Isaac after the girls were dressed and Mrs. Donny had taken over.

  “Oh it’s just something we say,” Isaac said, “something silly we read in a book about a queen who baked a cake that reached the clouds and was big enough for everyone in the kingdom to enjoy.”

  “That’s why she’s been asking us lately if we could bake a cake as tall as our building.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her it would be very difficult, almost impossible. I suppose that wasn’t very encouraging.”

  “As long as there’s hope,” Isaac said. “Children must be able to hope that they could someday bake a cake that reaches the clouds and believe that if they did, they would share it with everyone.”

  “But they never do. Share, I mean.”

  “No,” Isaac said, “but that’s what I love about being with the girls. It reminds me of my own childhood, when I believed that kings and queens could be good and that soldiers were brave.”

  “I don’t remember believing that as a child. I remember believing in heaven and that if I was good, I would get to go there one day and fly around with angels.”

  “My parents made sure that I didn’t believe in heaven,” Isaac said.

  “But they let you believe in the goodness of kings and the bravery of soldiers?”

  “Because they believed it themselves. Maybe the only way they could continue believing that some causes were worth dying for was by passing that belief on to me, though they didn’t do a very good job, I’m afraid.”

  “You don’t think there are some causes worth dying for?”

  “No,” Isaac said.

  “I don’t want them to be afraid to stand up for what is right.” She did not say that she wished she had been strong enough to do so, but Isaac understood.

  “These are different times. Their lives will be different from ours, more hopeful,” he said.

  Maybe there was hope for others, but not for her, Ulli thought. She had survived a war, found Leo, moved to a new continent, had children, and now Leo was gone, like the family who had lived in the apartment in Berlin. How easily they had faded. How quietly their photographs had remained tucked away in the backs of drawers while the apartment took on the rhythms of her life. Yet Leo’s presence was even stronger now than before he left. His smell was in the towels and sheets; his laughter clung to the walls, reminding her that what she had thought was real had been only a dream, and she felt that if Leo no longer thought about her, she would cease to exist.

  “Why don’t I take the girls for a couple of weeks until you and Leo figure out what to do,” Isaac suggested.

  “Are you sure it won’t be too much for you?” she asked, though she knew it wasn’t. Isaac was so good with them, so calm. He could carry them both at the same time—Simone on his back, her arms wrapped around his chest, Juliet in his arms.

  “Of course not,” Isaac said. “I think it’s for the best.”

  “We could tell them that Leo and I have to go away for business, but that we’ll return in two weeks, in time for Simone’s fourth birthday. I don’t want to tell them anything until we know what’s going to happen.”

  “Of course not,” Isaac said.

  The birthday celebration was the first time Ulli and Leo had been together since Leo left the note, left all his clothes, even his toothbrush to remind her of him. On the day of Simone’s fourth birthday, Ulli, Leo, and Isaac took Simone and Juliet to Radio City Music Hall and then out for ice cream at Schrafft’s. Ulli and Leo bought Simone a set of handmade puppets as well as a colorfully illustrated book of myths from around the world. Isaac’s gift was the simplest. Another child would not even have thought of it as a present, but he knew Simone, knew her better than Ulli did. His gift was a telegram. Isaac sent it with the following message: happy birthday, my dearest simone. love, isaac. Leo read it to her, and Isaac said, “When you are all grown up, you will have this telegram to prove that you once were four.” S
he slept with the telegram under her pillow every night for months afterward.

  The day after Simone’s birthday party Isaac helped Ulli pack up Leo’s things. She wanted to send them to Oliver’s place so that they both would have to participate in the gravity of his departure, but Isaac called the Salvation Army and they came and carted everything away. “Fine-quality goods,” the driver said as he tore the receipt from the pad with a flourish.

  “Can you take it all?” Ulli asked.

  “Everything, like the furniture?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not today. We’d have to get a bigger truck,” he said.

  “Then when?”

  “Are you sure?” Isaac asked.

  “I can’t stand to have any of it,” Ulli said, so they came back and took the lamps and sofa, the crib, the bookshelves, the books she had brought with her from Germany, the Gourmet magazines, the ashtrays (there were so many of them), the record player and the Billie Holiday records, the pillows and sheets and dishes and pans, everything except the girls’ toys, which Isaac brought to his apartment, though he had already accumulated a menagerie of stuffed animals and an entire arsenal of games and books for Simone and Juliet to play with when they stayed with him. When everything was gone, Ulli sent the girls away with Isaac. “Just for a few days,” she told him, and he said that he would keep them for as long as she needed. That night she slept on the floor in the empty apartment without blankets or cushions.

  Ulli found another apartment near the UN. It was on the thirty-seventh floor, the windows almost all floor-to-ceiling glass, and one could see the East River from every room. At first she avoided getting too close to the windows, and when she did, she never looked down, let alone stepped out onto the balcony, but little by little she grew more comfortable with the drop. Rather than something to dread, it became a comfort. She moved her bed as close to the window as possible and ate her dinners alone at a table, also glass, looking out and down at the city. Ulli outfitted the new place with modern furniture made of chrome and leather and glass. She put in thick white carpeting. All the walls, even in the girls’ bedroom, were white and bare except for one large abstract monochrome painting that hung in the living room above the sofa.

  Isaac hated the apartment. “The girls will be afraid to go near the windows,” he said when she showed it to him just after she got the keys.

  “They will get used to them,” Ulli said.

  But the girls weren’t afraid of the windows. On the contrary, they were drawn to them, spending hours sitting on the floor, their noses pressed to the pane, counting taxis, watching the clouds.

  “They’ll spill their juice on the white carpet,” Isaac said, but they never did. Perhaps, if they had not been so adaptable, if they had shaken with fear when she held them up to the window, Ulli would not have allowed herself to focus so fervently on missing Leo, on loving him still, even though nothing had been at all the way she thought it was.

  Her only respite was when she was in her cubicle and the words took over, rinsing her mind of thought, submerging her very self. Then she could breathe. But as soon as the words stopped, Leo filled her mind, and she did not know how she would survive the rest of her life. She did not know how she could keep riding up the elevator, unlocking the door, preparing coffee, bathing, putting on shoes, taking them off, making sure the girls brushed their teeth, cutting their fingernails. Sometimes late at night when Simone and Juliet were fast asleep, she called Leo just to hear his voice. “Ulli?” he would say. “Are you all right?” and then she would hang up.

  Often she woke up in the middle of the night thinking that someone was in the apartment. Even though one could not hear footsteps on the plush carpeting, she heard footsteps. She heard wood creaking. Accompanying the footsteps was the smell of Russian tobacco and whistling. The footsteps drew nearer, but she could not bring herself to rise from the bed. Instead she sat stiff and trembling, soaking the sheets with her sweat, counting the steps as they drew nearer. Every time the soldiers came, she lay paralyzed in her bed instead of running to the girls. She could not imagine how she would ever be able to protect them from real danger when she could not even protect herself from her own memories. She lay awake waiting for dawn, when she could escape into the unfixable problems of the world—the threat of nuclear destruction, drought in Africa, starvation.

  With Isaac acting as diplomat, the divorce went through in just a couple of months. Isaac was pleased with the results of his negotiations, and he pointed out on more than one occasion that if all ambassadors had such an easy time of it, there would be no need for armies. It was decided that the girls would live with Ulli. When Ulli was out of town for work, the girls stayed with Isaac, and Leo would take them every other weekend when he was in town, which he rarely was, owing to getaways with Oliver and business trips to California, where the need for insurance seemed to be growing at an exponential rate, or so he told Isaac. “It would be a crime not to take advantage of the building boom,” he said, to which Isaac replied that he did not think that not making large amounts of money was a crime, and Leo laughed and slapped Isaac on the back, something he had started doing since he met Oliver, though Oliver was not at all the backslapping sort. Instead Oliver greeted everyone, men and women alike, with fluttery kisses on both cheeks, sometimes even returning to the first cheek for a final peck.

  Four months after the divorce, Ulli was offered a supervisory position as lead interpreter for UNESCO—in Geneva. As her boss, Mr. Sengupta, was telling her about the position, she suddenly felt hungry, voraciously hungry. “Of course we would be sorry to see you go, but it’s an excellent opportunity, even though Geneva is not New York—nothing is, but Switzerland is . . . ultimately, so much more civilized than America, don’t you think? Take your time. You don’t have to decide today,” he added, putting his hand on her shoulder.

  “Can I have until tomorrow?” Ulli asked, though she knew she would accept the offer.

  Within a month Ulli was on her way to Geneva. Simone and Juliet, now five and four, were to stay with Isaac for another few weeks until she got settled in her job. Isaac and the girls came to the airport to send her off. The four of them sat at the gate waiting for the boarding announcement. When it was time for her to go, Simone and Juliet presented Ulli with a small box. “Open it on the airplane,” Simone said.

  “Are you sure this is the right decision?” Isaac asked. There were tears in his eyes.

  “Isaac,” Ulli said. “We will visit; you will visit.”

  “Of course, but I’ve grown quite fond of them,” Isaac said, pulling out his handkerchief to dry his tears. She had never seen him cry.

  They were still there, the three of them, looking out the window, waving as she walked up the stairs and into the airplane. The plane took off, and Ulli opened the box, which was lined with tissue paper and contained honey-roasted peanuts and a note from Isaac: They made them themselves with just a little help from me. Isaac. All around the note were the imperfect circles that Juliet was fond of drawing, and Simone had written her name in thick blue crayon letters. Ulli had no idea that Simone could already write her name. She imagined Isaac teaching her, cupping her hand, guiding the pencil across the page. They are better off with him, she thought as she ate the honey-roasted peanuts and watched the city disappear beneath the clouds.

  The Hurricane

  Ulli sent postcards to her daughters from the various places she visited for her work. She spent a great deal of time picking out these postcards, feeling that the perfect image would have more meaning than the few words she wrote on the back: Greetings from Yogyakarta. This is the sultan’s palace. Wouldn’t it be fun to live here?

  Isaac wrote faithfully, reporting on the girls’ progress, always including their scribblings—rows and rows of Juliet’s crooked circles and sometimes two entire pages of the latest letter that Simone was practicing. At the bottom Simone always added a lin
e of q’s because that was her favorite letter.

  Ulli returned to New York often. She kept her apartment there, and the girls stayed with her when she was in town. She told herself that since she was coming to New York frequently, it might be best to wait for the summer to bring them back with her to Geneva. She could take them to Berlin then to meet her parents. Isaac did not pressure Ulli about making a decision. When she talked about bringing the girls to Geneva for a visit, Isaac agreed that it would be good for them to see where they would be living before making the final move. “The scouting expedition is just as important as the battle itself,” he said. But Ulli did not make concrete plans for them to visit, and Isaac did not bring it up. Later she realized that this must have been a difficult time for him, that it was unfair of her to take advantage of the fact that he would never push her to make a decision because he was afraid that if he put pressure on her, he would never have a chance, though, of course, he never did have a chance.

  Eventually Ulli moved from the furnished apartment provided by UNESCO to her own place. She bought Scandinavian furniture and decorated the walls with textiles she bought on her travels. She liked the geometry of textiles, the lack of complications. On the weekends she was in Geneva, she went hiking in the mountains. She got her driver’s license, though she did not make the leap and buy a car. Yet she was restless. The work, which had once required so much concentration that she would emerge dazed from the interpreter’s booth, now required barely more effort than walking. She needed a new challenge, something that would keep her from thinking about the decision she had made, something that would keep her from wishing she could go back, for she knew she wouldn’t, that she was not strong enough, not brave enough to repair the damage she had done by leaving. So when a position as chief reporter for UNESCO’s education projects opened up, she applied and, to her surprise, since she had no experience in either education or reporting, got the job. The first time she had to give a presentation to her colleagues and superiors on her findings, she was trembling so much that she thought she would not be able to go through with it. Everyone was sitting around the conference table, waiting attentively, pens poised to take notes, and she wanted more than anything to run to the safety of her booth, but she didn’t. She gave her report, beginning slowly, softly, then picking up speed and strength as she went along, as her colleagues nodded in approval and their notepads filled with her words.