Winter Kept Us Warm

by Anne Raeff

  During her time as an interpreter she had traveled to many third world countries, but she had seen only the presentable parts—official buildings and conference centers, hotel rooms and the posh bars and restaurants frequented by the elite. It had never even occurred to her to explore further. Her interest was only in sitting in that booth, poised to spit out the ideas of the officials and negotiators whose words she believed were so very important. Now she asked to be posted to the most isolated areas, and instead of falling asleep to the hum of an air conditioner in hotel rooms with windows that could not be opened, she slept on a mat on the floor and fell asleep to the sound of lizards clacking and insects calling to each other in the night. Maybe, when she was stationed somewhere for a longer period of time, Simone and Juliet could join her and attend one of the UNESCO schools. They could learn to speak Wolof or Malay. It was in this way, by imagining the future with the girls, that she abandoned them in the present and, ultimately, forever.

  There came a time when she traveled to New York on UNESCO business but did not call Isaac, though she believed this was an anomaly, that on her next trip to New York she surely would. Perhaps she was waiting for Isaac to tell her that she must come to see them, that they had asked about her, missed her even, but he left it entirely in her hands. Was he trying to protect his daughters—for at some point that is how she had begun to think of them—from the complications of her unsatisfying visits, or did he continue to believe that Ulli would come through, that she would wake up one day and realize she wanted to be with them, with him? Or perhaps—and this was probably the most accurate interpretation of his behavior—he was afraid of losing them. She understood now that he had been holding his breath, waiting for the appropriate moment to suggest that it would be much easier for all of them if he officially adopted the girls.

  After several years as a projects reporter, Ulli became a field project manager, setting up educational projects first in Latin America, then in Africa and Asia. Since her work rarely took her back to Geneva, Ulli gave up her apartment. She sold the Scandinavian furniture and gave her textiles away to friends. They had served her well, but she did not need them anymore. She thought, at first, that she would miss her things, miss having a place to return to, but she did not. On the contrary, it comforted her to know that as soon as she was feeling settled in a place, it was time again to leave.

  Most of the projects she developed were in rural areas, which she preferred because she liked living simply, as the villagers did, though she was obligated by custom and UNESCO to hire someone to keep house for her, wash her clothes in the river, cook meals, clean. When the project was in a city, she was not permitted to live in the slums, where the education centers were located, but she insisted on modest quarters, though they were always quite spacious, more than enough for one person. There would certainly have been room for the girls.

  Five years after she left, Ulli was in a small village in Guatemala when it started to rain. They were celebrating the first graduating class of a school Ulli had been in charge of setting up. When the rains and winds grew ominous, the villagers, including the UNESCO teachers and Ulli, took cover in the church, which was by far the strongest structure in the village. The church was damp and cool, like the bomb shelters, and the rain and wind sounded like planes approaching. Except for the steady rumble of the women praying, no one spoke. Even the children were quiet. When a baby cried, the mother pushed its face into her bosom, muffling the sound. They waited, listening to trees crashing, listening to the wind and rain, waiting for the hurricane to lose its strength. For thirty-six hours they remained in the church, and then slowly, the wind died down, the rain withdrew, and they filed out of the church and into the square.

  Everything was covered with mud, thick and alive, like blood. The houses on the hills had been swept away. The air was so filled with mosquitoes that they had to keep their mouths closed lest they fly in. All around them were dead chickens and pigs, mangled bicycles, dishes, pots and pans, and felled trees.

  There was no escape for her, for any of them—the roads would be impassable for weeks—but she did not remember feeling trapped. Perhaps there was no time for that, for the cholera came on the heels of the rain. Slowly at first, the villagers began to get sick. They vomited blood and their insides churned and cramped and they lay in their own excrement. The church became a makeshift hospital since it was the only place free of mud. Ulli and the others who were not sick boiled water and spooned it into the mouths of those who were sick. Some of them became delirious and thrashed and flailed, so they had to tie them down and hold open their mouths, trickle the water in slowly so that they would not choke.

  After a few days, only a handful of people were still strong enough to tend to the sick and bury the dead. At night it was pitch-black in the church, so they waited, listening to their patients crying out in the night, waiting for the daylight. They survived on mangoes and avocados, and they slept in shifts, but one by one, everyone except Ulli fell ill, so she was left to care for them on her own. By day six, eight had died—three babies, three young children, and an old couple who, Ulli learned later, were both ninety-seven and had been married since they were fourteen. She carried them outside—the old man and woman were as light as children—and buried them all in the mud, thinking that later, once the villagers were well, they would find a better, more permanent place. On the seventh day, Ulli’s stomach revolted, and the fever started, but she refused to succumb, even as she heard the Russian soldiers approaching, their boots, always the boots, and the smell of cheap tobacco and their laughter filling the church. She had never been so cold, not even during the winter of 1945. It was a cold that nothing could have warmed, not vodka, not Leo’s arms around her, not music playing on the radio or coffee in the morning. It was a cold that came from inside.

  On the eighth day, the Red Cross finally reached them. The Red Cross nurses found Ulli pacing up and down the aisle of the church, muttering, “I cannot rest, I cannot rest.” When they tried to calm her, she fought back. “You can’t take them. I won’t allow it,” she said, and she kicked a nurse hard in the belly, knocking her down so that she broke her arm on the cold stone floor of the church. They had to give Ulli a sedative. But she did not remember this, nor did she remember the Red Cross nurses caring for her while she hovered at the edge of death for almost a week. In the end there were twenty dead. If it had not been for Ulli, the Red Cross workers said, there would have been many more.

  “You are a very strong woman,” they told her.

  When Ulli was well enough to travel, she flew to Geneva, where, at a special UNESCO ceremony, she was presented with a plaque commemorating her service and bravery. As they handed her the plaque, she thought not of those she had saved but of the ones who had died, and she wondered whether it was this terrible impotence that soldiers feel as medals are being pinned to their breasts, whether they think not of the ones they have saved, but instead of the ones they have killed. Ulli thought of Simone and Juliet, saw them smiling and waving to her as she boarded the plane for Switzerland, and she wanted to cry out, I’ll be back soon, but she knew they couldn’t hear her, not then and not now. So as the UNESCO official droned on about her dedication and sense of duty, she focused on the work that still needed to be done, on all the schools that needed to be built, all the people who would learn to read, and she knew that she would never go back to the responsibilities she had abandoned. This was her life now, her purpose, and it was time to write to Isaac. Of course she knew that the idea of her, the mother who was no longer with them, would become part of who they were, part of their longing, their anger, but it would have been worse to take them from Isaac, who would never waver, never even dream of fleeing. Leo, she knew, would agree.

  California

  After Ulli left, Leo still took Simone and Juliet every other weekend in accordance with the divorce agreement. Instead of the usual bedtime stories they got at Isaac’s house, Oliver
played for them once they were bathed and tucked into their beds, even though the clarinet, rather than lulling them to sleep, kept them wide awake and giggling in their room. But always, by the second night of their stay with Leo and Oliver, they started to become homesick. “Are we going home today?” they would ask, though they never cried when Leo said, “Not just yet.”

  When Leo dropped the girls back at Isaac’s apartment, they jumped into Isaac’s arms as soon as he opened the door. “Isaac, Isaac, we’re home!” they said, and they ran off to their rooms, to their books and toys, their world, without saying goodbye to Leo, who stood at the door thanking Isaac again for his help and kindness until Isaac called to the girls, “Come say goodbye to your father,” and they came dutifully to kiss Leo good night and thank him for taking them wherever he had taken them.

  Despite his new life with Oliver, New York bore down on Leo. His own happiness oppressed him, though he knew, of course, that it was not the city itself but the constant reminder of his betrayals. He felt the weight of suits and ties and hats, of the cold, and the drone of the subway underneath, of umbrellas, all of it pressing on his chest so that he was sure something had gone wrong with his heart; but his heart was tip-top, his doctor assured him, showing him the even lines of his electrocardiogram. “You need a vacation,” the doctor told him. “Get out of the city.” Which he and Oliver did, but outside the city there were too many trees blocking his view, closing in on him like water. Even his business bored him, though it continued to grow steadily. Leo and his partner had twenty salesmen in their full-time employ and four secretaries who typed the ever-increasing volume of policies and contracts in triplicate at breakneck speed. Leo imagined that Ulli had felt a similar suffocation, though in her case it was unhappiness that oppressed her, and he was not angry with her for fleeing, just sad for Simone and Juliet, for all of them.

  A year after Ulli left, in 1966, Leo sold his half of the business to his partner, and he and Oliver moved to California, where Oliver played the clarinet for the Hollywood studios and Leo started a new business. Within three years he had a team of fifty full-time salesmen and offices in both Santa Monica and Beverly Hills. They bought a house on the beach. They bought a car and then another car. At night they fell asleep to the sound of waves crashing on the shore. The waves did not sound like Dover Beach’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” or the thunderous rush of the Johnstown flood, but they produced a steady song that played whether Leo and Oliver were there to listen to it or not. It was a comfort to Leo to know that the waves would keep on coming, keep on pounding the shore long after he could no longer hear them.

  Every morning, Leo took a long walk on the beach, picking up shells and sea-polished stones that, for the first year of his life in California, he sent to his daughters once a month. He grew used to missing them, and it was almost as if this act of missing them were more powerful, more real, than having them with him.

  Not even a year after Leo moved to California, Isaac and the girls moved to New Jersey. There, Isaac hoped, they would begin anew, away from reminders of what they had lost, surrounded by quieter sounds of birds chirping and crickets. He got his license, bought a car. In the winter they shoveled snow; in the fall they raked leaves and the girls jumped into the piles, and when he kissed them good night, their hair smelled of autumn.

  From Ulli there was only silence. On the girls’ birthdays, Leo sent presents. They recorded, according to Isaac’s instructions, each gift on a card, noting the date and the title of the gift. For the sake of history, it was important, he told them. The cards were then placed in chronological order in a shoebox labeled important items in the lives of simone and juliet buchovsky. The girls kept the gifts safely tucked away on a shelf in their closet—not, Isaac imagined, because they did not like or appreciate them, but because they did not think of them as real, but rather as artifacts from a parallel life they would never live. When Leo visited, Simone insisted that they remove the gifts from their place in the closet. “We don’t want him to feel bad, to think we don’t like his presents,” she said. Isaac agreed it was the right thing to do.

  They set up the stuffed animals and dolls on their beds as if that is where they had been all along, and they propped the hula hoop up in the corner of their room behind the door. They consolidated their National Geographic maps and the charts of the Greek gods and dinosaurs, making room on the walls for the signed photographs of famous actors, friends and clients of their father, most of whom they did not recognize. The only gifts that were always on display were the Inuit statues Leo had bought on a trip to Alaska, which he presented to them on what none of them knew would be his last visit. They liked the smooth solidness of these artifacts. They appreciated their weight. “They feel like the cold of Alaska,” they said, holding them up to their cheeks.

  When Leo came to New York on business once or twice a year, he came for dinner. Sometimes he was with Oliver and sometimes he came alone, but he never stayed the night, even though there was plenty of room. Isaac, Simone, and Juliet always prepared a special meal—couscous or beef Stroganoff, the girls’ favorite, and Leo always brought gifts and vodka, but both Leo and Isaac made sure not to drink too much, not to get to the point where they would start talking about Berlin and the apartment where they had been so happy together.

  Only once, the summer after Simone’s ninth birthday, did Simone and Juliet visit Leo and Oliver in California. Leo said he wanted Isaac to come along too, but Isaac knew that, though his presence would make things easier for everyone—he would play his usual ambassadorial role, be the good friend, the stable and responsible father—Leo needed to do this on his own. There was also a part of him that wanted the girls to be homesick, to miss him, their father. Thus he declined, explaining to Leo that he needed to devote the summer to getting started on his next book. It was to be his most important contribution to the field—an in-depth study of the reign of Catherine the Great and the westernization of Russia.

  “Once the fall semester begins, there won’t be much time for my own work,” he explained.

  “You could do it here,” Leo suggested. “We could set up a study for you in one of the extra rooms.”

  “But I need to have access to the archives at the New York Public Library,” Isaac said.

  “There are libraries in California,” Leo said.

  “You know that isn’t the issue,” Isaac said.

  “You’re right. You’re always right,” Leo said, so it was decided.

  But Simone and Juliet didn’t want to go without Isaac. “We will write to each other like we did when I was in the Soviet Union and you stayed with Katya Ladijinskaya. Leo and Oliver’s house is right on the beach. You’ll fall asleep listening to the sound of the waves,” Isaac told them.

  “What if the waves keep us awake?” Simone asked.

  “They won’t,” Isaac said.

  “What if we get scared in the night?” Simone asked.

  “Then you can call for Leo and Oliver,” Isaac said.

  “What if they won’t come?”

  “They will,” Isaac said. “But you won’t be afraid. You’re never afraid in the night.”

  “But the night will be different there,” Juliet said. “We won’t understand it.”

  “You will learn to understand it. It won’t be easy, but you have to learn to do difficult things by yourselves,” Isaac said.

  “We do difficult things by ourselves,” Juliet said. “Yesterday I rode my bicycle to the store to buy yogurt and apples and I rode all the way home, uphill, holding on with just one hand because I had to carry the bag in the other. And we made you breakfast on your birthday. And we always do our homework all by ourselves.”

  “This is a different kind of difficult,” Isaac said. “Leo misses you. All this time he has missed you.” He paused, remembering Ulli’s words: “I don’t want them to be afraid to do what is right.” “He needs your h
elp.”

  “We’ll try to help him,” Simone said, “but if we are very afraid, can we come home?”

  “You have nothing to fear but fear itself,” Isaac said, which is what he told the girls on the rare occasion when they were afraid. Even though they didn’t really understand what Roosevelt’s words meant, he knew the words were still a comfort to them because they knew he was convinced of their truth. “It will be an adventure. Do you know of any girls your age who get to fly in an airplane all by themselves?”

  “No,” they said.

  “There you have it. You’ll be pioneers—the first young girls from Tenafly, New Jersey, to brave the skies solo.”

  “I get the window,” Juliet said.

  “You can take turns,” he said, and he imagined them sitting on the airplane, looking out the window as the houses below them got smaller and smaller, until they broke through the clouds and all they could see was sky. What do you know about love, Leo? he thought. What do you know about love?

  The Story of Lucas

  Leo watched Simone and Juliet walk through the gate at the Los Angeles airport holding hands, each with a Pan Am flight bag slung over her shoulder. Although there had always been a serious quality to the girls, especially Simone, this time they seemed more than serious, solemn, as if they were foreign dignitaries walking to the podium to give an important speech. Leo understood then that he was no longer their father, and he was filled not with sadness but with anger that he had been forced to make this decision, to choose Oliver over them. And so, while Leo stood there stiffly, his fists clenched, it was Oliver who ran to them, lifted Simone and Juliet into the air one by one, twirled them around until Leo was able to join them, to take his daughters into his arms and say, “Welcome, my children. Welcome to California.”