Winter Kept Us Warm

by Anne Raeff

  “Eat,” said the women at their table, picking out the best pieces of lamb and chicken for Isaac and Ulli. “Eat, eat, eat,” they said. Ulli wanted to explain that she didn’t eat meat, but she looked over at the bride, who had been deposited next to her husband at the table of honor, and she imagined each morsel of food that the bride swallowed pushing its way into the tangled mess of her bowels. She imagined the groom’s fingers, oily from the chicken, thick with the odor of fish, moving hungrily over the girl’s rigid body, and Ulli picked up the chicken and lamb that was put before her and ate it all, washing it down with Sprite.

  “I haven’t drunk soda since I was in the army,” Isaac said.

  “And I have not eaten meat since I opened the hotel,” Ulli said.

  Finally, there was nothing left except the bones and a few crusts of bread. The men in fezzes took the platters away and brought more tea, as well as nuts and oranges, which the guests, sated now, ate with less urgency. The bride was lifted again, and when the young men carrying her reached the door, they paused, turned her around so that the wedding guests could see her one last time, and for a moment Ulli was sure that the bride was looking right at her.

  “Where are they going?” Isaac asked.

  “To the nuptial chamber,” Ulli said. “The groom is already waiting there.” She put her hands under her thighs so that Isaac would not see that she was trembling.

  Ulli tried focusing on the music, but Renate’s face kept pushing its way into her consciousness. Where had the Russian soldiers taken her when they left the apartment? Did it happen out in the cold, in the rubble of the bombed-out buildings, or did they take her to one of the apartments abandoned by their frightened neighbors? Ulli imagined an apartment like the one she had shared with Isaac and Leo, a comfortable sofa, Oriental rugs, perhaps a hungry little dog whimpering in the corner.

  “Are you okay?” Isaac asked.

  Ulli held her breath, trying to contain her dinner. “I’m just a little woozy,” she said. She saw Renate lying there after it was over, the sound of their boots fading into the distance.

  “You need some air,” Isaac said, and he rose unsteadily from the floor, held out his hand, and pulled her up, and then she was standing, though she still could not feel her feet. “Come,” Isaac said, taking her hand.

  “The blind leading the blind,” Ulli said, and they stumbled through the crowd of dancing guests and retrieved their shoes. Their host stopped them on their way out.

  “You are not leaving?” he asked.

  “Just going for some air,” Isaac explained, and again their host called over one of the servants, who led them to the patio.

  “Please,” the servant said, pointing to a stone bench near one of the fountains. He stationed himself just a few feet away on the other side of the fountain. “Do not worry about us,” Isaac called to him, and he smiled. He was not worried, he said, remaining in position.

  Isaac put his arm around Ulli, pulled her in. She let her head rest on his shoulder for a moment, but she could feel the nausea building again, and she pulled away.

  Isaac stood up, then sat down again, though not as close to her as he had been. “What do you want me to do?” he said.

  Ulli did not answer, and Isaac thought that perhaps he had not spoken at all, that he had just imagined that he had spoken.

  “I miss Leo,” she said. “I miss everyone.” She turned to him, and her upper lip was twitching the way Simone’s lip trembled when she was trying not to cry.

  Isaac took her hand. “It’s okay,” he said, and then she could not stop the tears, just as she had not been able to stop the soldiers, or stop Leo from leaving her, just as she could not keep Isaac from walking into the hotel, from taking her hand.

  The Alley

  Leo left the office at about eight. Right up until he got into the car, he was planning to go directly home. He was looking forward to a quiet evening with Oliver, but it had been more than a week since he had gone looking for Lucas, and he had a sense that this could be the night, that Lucas had finally returned. He could have telephoned Oliver to tell him he would be late, but he didn’t like to lie, and Oliver still didn’t know about his weekly searches, though he had been doing them for almost a year now. Leo followed his usual routine at the Hollywood cruise, showing the Polaroid of Lucas—the one Oliver had taken the day he showed up at their house—to the men waiting around for tricks. They looked at the photograph, shook their heads.

  “Hey, let me see it again.” A man he had never seen before came over and grabbed the photograph out of Leo’s hand. There was something about him that made Leo wary. The real Hollywood hustlers kept up their looks. This guy had a paunch, and his fingernails were dirty.

  “Nah, I thought he looked familiar, but the guy I was thinking about had dark hair,” he said, returning the photograph to Leo.

  Leo handed him his card. “If you see him, please give me a call.”

  “I sure will,” the man said.

  Leo started walking toward his car. “Hey, wait,” the man said, running after him. “Maybe I have seen him.”

  Leo stopped. “Well, just give me a call if you see him again,” he said.

  “That’s it?” the man asked.

  Leo was suddenly tired. All he wanted was to go home. He wanted to have dinner with Oliver. Oliver would be waiting. He took out a hundred-dollar bill. “Here,” he said, holding it out to the man.

  The man grabbed the money the way he had grabbed the photograph.

  “Hey,” he said, suddenly joined by three other men. “I forgot to tell you something, you dirty faggot,” he said.

  Leo ran. He ran for a long time. He did not know he could run so fast or for so long. My heart, he kept thinking, but his heart was fine. “You can’t escape,” the men called from behind him, keeping up but letting him stay ahead. They were wearing him out, playing with him like cats play with their prey. Maybe, he thought, he could outrun them. He had his new heart now. Then they were upon him. He fell. They were dragging him now. Keep your head up, he said to himself, keep your head up. They let go, and he let his head drop to the ground.

  “Just leave him there. He’s learned his lesson,” he heard one of the men say, and then they were upon him again with renewed fury, kicking him in the ribs, the head, the crotch. They lifted him up again; two of them held him while the others took turns punching him in the face. He could see into their mouths as they were screaming, but he could no longer hear. What if he could never hear again? What if he could never hear Oliver playing the clarinet or the waves crashing against the shore? He started crying, and they let him fall to the ground. One more kick, and then there was nothing.

  A young man who wanted to be an actor found Leo later that night. He located a phone booth and called 911. For Oliver, the worst part was not that Leo’s killers were never brought to justice or that the police had given up on the case so easily. Each time Oliver picked up his clarinet, he imagined Leo and a stranger in that dark alley near the cruise while he was home listening to “Begin the Beguine,” waiting. He thought of that until eventually he stopped picking up the clarinet altogether.

  “I couldn’t go to the funeral,” Ulli told Isaac. “I wanted to. I bought the plane ticket, but I couldn’t share my grief with anyone—with Oliver. I couldn’t face the girls, couldn’t face you.”

  “I know,” Isaac said. He had gone, had sat with the girls on the sidelines. “The eulogies went on for hours. They all loved him, talked about how good he was, how generous, how full of life.”

  “He was the only one of us who was happy,” Ulli said.

  “I was happy too. I had the girls.”

  “That is a different sort of happiness,” Ulli said.

  “You mean it’s not love,” Isaac said.

  “I didn’t say that,” Ulli said, but they both knew that is what she meant.

 
“I really did buy the plane ticket,” Ulli said.

  “I understand,” Isaac said, though he had been angry with her for not being there, for having to lie for Ulli yet again, having to tell the girls that her work was more important than a funeral.

  “Do you ever hear from Oliver?” Ulli asked.

  “No, but I know he died last year. His obituary was in The New York Times. It seems that after Leo was killed, he became active in the gay rights movement. He sold Leo’s business and dedicated all the money to the cause. In the obituary it said that the last time he played the clarinet was at Leo’s funeral.”

  “Leo would not have wanted that,” Ulli said.

  “No, he wouldn’t have, but he would have understood that Oliver couldn’t go on as before, that sometimes one has to give up what one loves in order to move forward.” Isaac paused. He did not say that he understood why Ulli had given up the girls or that giving up the clarinet was in any way comparable.

  “Leo made me believe that things could be simple and safe, like his stupid insurance policies, and then he just threw it all away to end up dead in some alley somewhere,” Ulli said.

  “Ulli, you can’t blame Leo for what happened, and you were miserable with him, had been for a long while.”

  “That’s because he was so far away, and I didn’t know why, and he didn’t have the courage to tell me.”

  “But he did. He did tell you.”

  Ulli was silent.

  “I should have told you about Bidor,” Isaac said.

  “And why didn’t you?”

  “Because Leo was sure he was finished with all that, and what did I know about such things? I suppose I was angry too, angry with myself for not having the courage to tell you what I felt, angry because I was so afraid to lose you and Leo too. It was a trade-off. If I couldn’t have you, I could always be near you, as long as you and Leo were together, but then look what happened. You left and have been away all this time.” Isaac took Ulli in his arms, pushed her head to his chest, buried his face in her hair, breathed in the smell of her, his lungs reaching for her, for breath, but Ulli pulled away, sat up, her body rigid, frozen, as if the danger were right there in front of her, looking her in the eye.

  “There’s something else,” Ulli said.

  Isaac waited.

  “Her name was Renate,” Ulli began. “She was exactly the same age as me and had been working for our family for five years, since she was nineteen. She was from the country, like all maids were in those days. I didn’t know much about her except that she had brothers who were soldiers on the Eastern Front. She had a boyfriend from her village. His name was Georg.”

  Renate was tall and bony, with big hands and feet, and so thin that one could see the veins in her forehead. In the evenings she retired to her small room next to the kitchen, where she made embroidered coverlets that she sold to make extra money. She always showed Ulli and her mother her handiwork before she brought the pieces to the shop to sell, and Ulli always made a point of admiring them—even though she wasn’t really interested—because she knew Renate was proud of her skills.

  Renate stayed with Ulli and her family until the end, until the Russians arrived.

  They knew they were coming, so the night before the soldiers marched into their neighborhood, in order to keep herself from thinking about what was to come, Ulli typed. She typed faster than she had ever typed before, banging furiously on the keys, copying entire chapters from her old school textbooks. At one point her mother asked her to stop, but she couldn’t, and her mother didn’t ask again.

  In the early morning before dawn, while their neighbors crouched trembling in the bomb shelters, waiting this time not for the sirens but for the sound of boots on the stairways, Ulli and Renate and her parents waited in the apartment. It was her father’s idea. “The most obvious hiding place is sometimes the most difficult to find,” he said. So they waited, listening to the shouting and the breaking windows. They watched through the tiniest slit in the curtains as the soldiers emerged from the bomb shelters, pulling women and children by their hair, the men walking in front, rifles pointed at their backs.

  They heard them coming up the stairs, ringing doorbells, bashing in doors when there was no response. When their doorbell rang, Ulli’s father went to answer it. “Hello,” he said as the soldiers pushed past him into the living room, where Ulli, her mother, and Renate were sitting. They must have looked as if they were waiting for guests, Ulli thought later, because the soldiers started laughing hysterically. Her father laughed nervously too, thinking that this would assuage them, but one of the Russians punched him in the nose. He stood strong, so the soldier punched him again and then again, until he crumpled to the floor. The soldiers pushed Ulli, her mother, and Renate into the master bedroom and shut the door, leaving them alone to wait. They could hear them outside the door, could smell the cigarette smoke, while they trembled inside, each in a separate corner of the room.

  After a while one of the soldiers opened the door and looked in, then left. The next time he opened the door, he put one finger up in the air. “One,” he said in German. “One woman.” They did not look at one another or move. He said it one last time, raising his rifle. He aimed it straight at Ulli. Renate stepped forward.

  In the morning, the Russians cleaned up the broken glass and the chairs and tables that they had hurled through windows. Trucks arrived with potatoes and carrots, and the bravest of their neighbors, or the hungriest, emerged from their houses and lined up in the street to receive food. Ulli and her parents did not go out, but they watched all this from the window, from behind the curtains. In the evening Russian soldiers and German women strolled arm in arm as if nothing had happened. Days went by, but even when they were left with only two potatoes, they did not leave the apartment. After the potatoes were gone, they drank only water. Ulli’s father believed that they should starve themselves together.

  “In the beginning it will be terrible,” he said, “but after a week or two, we will no longer feel hungry.”

  Ulli was ready to take on the challenge, ready to suffer, and for three days she was almost invigorated by her hunger, by the knowledge that soon her life would be over. She tried to keep a diary, but she couldn’t bring herself to write about how she had let them take Renate away, so she gave up. There was, after all, nothing left to accomplish.

  Ulli’s mother preferred to keep moving, so she cleaned—scrubbed the floors, washed all the clothes and linens, even the clean clothes that were hanging in the closet. Her hands were permanently waterlogged, her fingertips fish-belly white and wrinkled. Ulli’s father read the same newspaper over and over and tried to convince her mother not to work so hard.

  “You will lose your strength,” he said.

  But to Ulli she said, “Your father is the strongest. Let him be the last one alive.”

  It turned out that Ulli’s father was not the strongest, or perhaps he was, because aren’t the strong the ones who want to live, who don’t give up so easily? In any case, he could not take the hunger. On the fourth day without food, Ulli caught him eating paper, crumpling it into bite-size pieces, chewing slowly and looking straight ahead, as if he saw before him a vision of a holiday meal.

  When Ulli told him that she was going to go out in the morning to find food, her father began to cry, at first softly and then harder, and she stood in the doorway, not knowing whether to comfort him or run.

  “Leave me alone now,” he said after a while, and she obeyed.

  Ulli awoke the next morning to the smell of eggs frying and Mozart’s Fortieth Symphony, her father’s favorite. She thought at first that she was hallucinating, but it was too soon for hallucinations. When she emerged from her room, the table was set with the good dishes and silverware. The candles were lit. In addition to eggs, there was bread and carrots and cheese and sardines.

  They devoured the food in minutes. A
fter that, Ulli’s father went out every morning to buy food. He found a place where the bread was not stale. He averted his eyes when he passed the Russian soldiers. Sometimes they said things to him, but he just kept walking. He would not let Ulli or her mother leave the apartment.

  “Remember what happened to her,” he said, unable to say Renate’s name. So her mother cleaned and Ulli slept, and sometimes she found the energy to read a book. She ate and forgot what it had felt like to be hungry.

  For eight weeks the Russians were there, but when peace was settled and the Allies drew the lines, Ulli’s street fell just within the American Zone. The Russians departed, and Ulli and her parents were spared once again, spared the grim decades that were to come for their neighbors on the other side of the line.

  The Americans threw chewing gum and chocolate from their trucks. Ulli and her parents ran out into the street with everyone else, and they clapped and waved and ate chocolate and chewed chewing gum, and her father started talking about selling typewriters to the Americans. It was then that Ulli began looking for Renate. For one week, she set forth every morning, walking until she no longer knew why she was walking.

  “That’s how I found the apartment. I was looking for Renate. Instead, I found you and Leo,” Ulli said, allowing Isaac to hold her again.

  “I almost told you, first during the Russian lessons and then later, when I left the girls. I wanted you to understand that I wasn’t just running away from what happened with Leo. I wanted you to understand that I never felt that I could protect them, that they were not safe with me.”

  Isaac wanted to say that he had also felt that he could not protect them, that whenever the girls were out of his sight, he was always holding his breath and imagining the worst. Even when he was near them, when they were fast asleep in their rooms, he felt it. That is what it means to be a parent, he wanted to say, but she spoke first, saved him from being cruel.