Winter Kept Us Warm. Anne Raeff
She had a right only to the familiar sadness that surfaced when she thought of them, when a memory of them made its way into her consciousness while she was scrubbing the floor or making beds, or if she paused for a moment while doing the bookkeeping. Lately she had been picturing them at the window of her apartment in New York, not standing against the pane, but keeping back, as if they were afraid the glass would not keep them from falling. She did not try to stop these memories, for she learned that it was best to give them free rein. Otherwise, they became like an oppressed people, inclined to rebellion, and then she was confronted with an army of thoughts that came at her with rocks and placards.
Keeping vigil in the chair next to Isaac’s bed, watching him sleep, listening to the distant wheezing in his chest, she imagined him sitting with the girls when they were sick, reading their favorite stories, taking their temperatures, shaking the thermometer down and placing it carefully underneath the tongue. She didn’t remember having done this for the girls, didn’t remember them ever being sick, though surely they had been. She imagined that the nanny—what was her name, something with a D, something Irish—had cared for them when they were sick.
But she would watch over Isaac now, sit with him until the fever broke. That was something she could do, finally. Perhaps she would even sing a song, something cooling to combat this heat. Schubert would be nice, the one about the trout in the stream. She had loved the song as a child, but then Hermann had ruined it. How could she have forgotten that she had tried singing it for Hermann as she sat at his side while he lay on the bed in the Hotel Vienna, refusing to open his eyes or to let her touch even a wisp of his hair. “What a stupid, frivolous song,” he had said. This was the first man she had chosen.
She knew Hermann first as Herr Meyer, her mathematics teacher in her last year at the Realschule. All the girls were taken with him, smitten even, but Ulli thought she had a more mature appreciation of him. He was not like the other teachers. He did not have his students keep their notebooks neat or much care if they kept notebooks at all, though of course they did. Herr Meyer put up with their need to copy what he had written on the board as he talked them through the problems, speaking quickly, writing just as fast. “Wait,” they would call, “not yet,” and he would stand by patiently, waiting until they told him it was okay to erase the solutions and begin again with a new set of problems.
In Herr Meyer’s class they engaged in what he referred to as speed mathematics, and it was a rare event when someone else in the class beat her to a solution. “Faster, faster,” Herr Meyer would call out, holding a stopwatch high above his head, running, despite his pronounced limp (he had lost his leg in the last war) from one student to the other. “Too slow, way too slow.”
But there were times, perhaps once a week, when Herr Meyer became the opposite. On these days he would stare at the board, chalk in hand, as if he had forgotten why he was there, and then suddenly he would jump to attention and say, “Let us take a look at question six.” The strange thing was that the students did not take advantage of his disorientation. They did not giggle or throw papers or talk among themselves. At the time, Ulli believed it was out of respect, like an orchestra waiting for a conductor to raise his baton; later she understood it was out of discomfort.
Ulli’s involvement with Herr Meyer began in October 1937, when she was seventeen. It started off innocently enough. He invited her and a few others to meet with him twice a week after school for lessons in what he referred to as “the beauty of math.” She looked forward to these sessions and to working out the problems he gave them, which often took her past midnight to complete. After one such occasion Herr Meyer asked, as they were walking out together, “How about a coffee?” Ulli agreed, and they talked, he more than she, about their childhoods, their aspirations. “When I was young, I wanted to be a poet,” he said. “I had the usual romantic notions about the life of poets, but then the war came, and when I returned, I found comfort in the reliability of numbers.” That was the only time he ever spoke to her about the war.
They did not talk in private again for a week. In class she continued to be attentive and diligent. They met again by accident; later it became clear to her that it had not been an accident at all. She was in the habit of stopping by a used bookstore on her way home from school, for she had always maintained an interest in reading, and it was here where she ran into Hermann. She should have realized that it was unusual for him to be there so soon after the end of the school day.
“Hello,” she said.
“It’s a wonderful store, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes,” Ulli said.
He reached over and took the book she was holding, pulling on it gently. “Sophocles—a good choice,” he said, flipping through the pages. “The Greeks will never disappoint you.”
“No,” she said, hoping that she would be like the Greeks, that she would also not disappoint him.
“Perhaps you would like to join me for another cup of coffee?” he asked.
Ulli accepted. The café was crowded, but they found a table in the back. Hermann offered her a cigarette, her first. She took to smoking easily, following his lead, letting the smoke waft slowly out of her mouth, feeling the taste coat her teeth and gums.
Ulli was not a girl particularly interested in romance, and she had not, up to that point, felt anything close to desire. She did not fawn over movie stars or write about boys in her diary. In fact, she did not keep a diary. She found that writing down the events of her life only made her feel bored and ordinary. Yet she knew what was going to happen with Hermann, and she longed for it, felt it in her stomach and her limbs, felt him pulling her away from ordinary life into one full of passion and the beauty of advanced math.
“Will I see you here tomorrow after school?” Hermann asked as they were leaving the café.
“Yes,” she said.
The next day, she arrived before he did, so she stood outside in the sun. It was a beautiful day, warm and balmy, and she did not mind waiting. It did not occur to her that he might not show up. He appeared soon enough, walking briskly toward her despite his limp. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I was enjoying the sun,” Ulli replied.
Every day for a week, it was like this. She waited, he arrived a little bit late, and she said she was enjoying the sun. Their visits lasted one hour. She had not been aware that there was a time limit until Hermann apologized to her about it on the third or fourth day. “I wish we could spend more than an hour together,” he said sadly, looking at his watch, “but I must go. I do not want my wife to worry.”
Of course, she knew he was married. They knew such things about their teachers. She wondered now whether he had said it in a last effort to stop himself from doing what he was going to do, whether he thought the mention of his wife would send Ulli running, but it was too late for that.
They arranged to meet at the end of the week at the Hotel Vienna. Ulli put on her most fashionable clothes to meet him there at four o’clock sharp. Her hands were shaking when she presented herself to the desk clerk, as Hermann had instructed her to do, and the desk clerk handed her the key to the room. She did not think, as she took the key, that she was about to commit adultery, that this was her teacher whom she liked and respected and that he had a wife who loved him.
The hotel still had an open elevator that rattled its way up and down the floors without stopping, so that one had to jump on at just the right moment. As a child, Ulli had loved these elevators and would annoy her mother by waiting until the elevator passed the floor before jumping on. On that day, however, she boarded when the elevator was perfectly aligned with the lobby floor. When she arrived at room nineteen, she knocked before unlocking the door. Hermann rose to greet her and led her to the table near the window, where a bottle of brandy and two glasses were already filled. He made a toast. “To you,” he said.
He instructed her to go into the bathroom until he called for her. She stood in the bathroom, waiting so long that she grew tired and was about to sit on the edge of the bathtub, when she heard his voice. “You can come now,” he said.
She emerged slowly, focusing on keeping