and she ran to her room to do so, abandoning her mother and the ironing. It was only once the lights were dimmed and the concert started that Ulli thought of her mother standing at her ironing board, alone, but she forced the image out of her mind and concentrated on the bows moving up and down, convincing herself that her mother had no interest in going to concerts.
Perhaps she remembered this so vividly, remembered the music—it was Mozart, one of the later symphonies—because this might have been the first time she was aware enough to rationalize, to reinvent the story, create her own version of what in fact was happening, for isn’t that what so much of memory, so much of life, is—reinventing a more palatable version of one’s own actions? Ulli suspected that her parents didn’t know how much she struggled to balance their affections, to make sure that she divided herself equally. She never held it against them.
Ulli was sure that her mother knew about the secretaries, but she did not seem to mind being left at home, or perhaps this was Ulli’s hope, her version of what her mother was feeling. She supposed her mother preferred not to know the details. On the rare occasion when her father joined them for dinner, Ulli always felt that her mother was trying too hard to make pleasant conversation, so Ulli tried to entertain them both with stories about school and long summaries of the adventure books she loved to read. Sometimes Ulli talked so much that her father would have to remind her that the purpose of dinner was to eat.
Ulli did not know why her parents got married. There was not even a story about how they met. She liked to think that in the beginning there was something that drew them to each other, but all she knew about them as a couple was the fact of their being married and having her. It was only after Hermann that she understood how quickly passion could turn into unhappiness, but at least this realization gave her hope that her parents had once been happy together, that they could be this unhappy only because they missed something.
Despite the fact that she preferred silence to conversation, her mother insisted on English, and Ulli’s father happily complied, as he was quite proud of his linguistic abilities. In fact, he was the one who schooled Ulli in the mysteries of English spelling and the fine points of its grammar and punctuation, even though he had tremendous difficulties with r, th, and w.
In those days English was not the lingua franca, yet it was, perhaps, the one thing that held their family together, not because they used the words to communicate, but because the words, the language, set them apart from everyone else. Children went out of their way to hide such things as the foreign origin of a parent, so Ulli looked upon her parents’ decision to flaunt their difference with a certain degree of pride. On the rare occasions when they were in public together, her family would pretend they were wild characters and speak loudly in English about their various exploits. One of their favorite stories was that they were thieves who had just robbed an important jewelry store. Ulli and her father talked about where they would hide the goods and what they would do in Argentina following their successful escape. Even her mother found this amusing and would add embellishments to the story. Of course, after the National Socialists came to power, they no longer amused themselves in this way. In fact, they did not speak English again until the Americans arrived at the end of the war and English became a tool that helped them survive in the world rather than retreat from it.
When Ulli found the apartment, she informed her parents that she would be moving. They were surprised, though they should not have been, especially her mother. She supposed her parents believed that the worst was over, and perhaps it was.
“We’re together now,” her father said, even when it was clear that she had made up her mind. She knew he would miss her, but perhaps he was also afraid that without her, he and her mother would no longer be able to live in the same house together, that all the silence between them would finally suffocate them. The strange thing was that the opposite happened. Though Ulli rarely saw her parents those first years after the war, it was obvious that something between them had changed. They sat next to each other on the couch instead of on opposite sides of the room. Every evening from eight to nine, unless the weather was extremely inclement, they walked, not arm in arm, not holding hands, but together, with determination. At some point her mother started working at the business with her father, not as a typist, but as a bookkeeper, for she had always preferred numbers to words. Perhaps they had become tired of being unhappy. Ulli hoped they found again what it was that brought them together in the first place, but perhaps they were only pretending—to themselves, to Ulli—because they did not want to burden her anymore with their unhappiness.
Thus, in an effort to keep her parents from worrying too much about her, Ulli told them two lies: that she had found a job as a clerk in a clothing store and that she was sharing a small place with one of her coworkers. It was time, she explained, to be on her own. “But this is entirely unnecessary,” her father argued. “You have a job. What about the business?”
“I have no interest in typewriters,” she told him. Afterward she felt bad for being so blunt, but it had seemed the only way to extricate herself.
He did not answer. He simply walked out of the room.
“What will he do without you? What will become of the business?” her mother asked, but Ulli didn’t reply. Ulli kissed her mother on the forehead as if she were a child. She realized that this was the first time she had kissed her mother since the night the Russians came. Then she left. She did not take anything with her. The apartment had everything she needed.
In the beginning, she was always half waiting for the original tenants to return. For the first few weeks she disturbed as little as possible. She slept on the kitchen floor on a pallet made from extra blankets she had found in the closet. She used only one dish, one fork, one knife, one spoon, one cup. She emptied the ashtray after each cigarette. She dusted the family photographs—the father in uniform, the wedding portrait, the children. There were two boys who, judging from their toys, had a fondness for automobiles. She forced herself to believe that they had gotten out before the Russians arrived, that they were living happily in the countryside with a plump great-aunt, milking cows and churning butter.
But they did not return, and she was relieved.
She started rearranging things to suit her needs. She threw away their toothbrushes. She still slept on the floor in the kitchen next to the radiator, where it was warmest. She found that she liked sleeping on the floor. It made her feel as if she were accomplishing something, as if sleeping on the floor was making her strong, building up her endurance, or training her for a very difficult future. After a while, though, she began to use the previous occupants’ things. She slept in their beds, ate at their table, and examined their photos. Ulli came to think of the apartment as her own.
The Meeting
Postwar Germany was rife with opportunities, and Ulli soon found her place in the postwar economy. She stumbled upon her new livelihood in a bar frequented by American soldiers and young German women who were looking for salvation in the arms of a homesick boy from Iowa or Alabama. When she first started going to these bars, she too believed in this possibility, and she often found herself waking up in an overly soft bed in a dingy hotel room next to a pimply boy with sour breath and a hangover who talked about his mother’s cooking and cars. It took quite a few such encounters before she realized that it was safer—and more lucrative—to play Cyrano for the lonely soldiers and their hopeful German girlfriends than to play at love herself.
The business started out quite innocently. Because of Ulli’s skill with English, soldiers solicited her help with the women they were interested in wooing. A soldier would ask her, for example, to tell a prospective candidate that she had a beautiful smile. The woman would laugh, he would buy her a drink, and she would ask him where he was from. At this point Ulli would ask him to tell her about his hometown, and she would tell the woman about
