Zone to another, avoiding human contact. On one of these walks Ulli found the apartment of a family who had disappeared. It was on a day when she felt that she could not spend another moment with her parents, sitting in their un-bombed home, talking about the future of their typewriter business, which to her seemed not like a future at all, but a return to the terror and drudgery of the past. On her previous walks around the city she had not been moved to wander into any buildings. Her whole purpose was to stay outside in the open, to breathe in the air. Interiors suffocated her. But she found herself climbing the worn wooden stairs, holding on to the banister, listening to her footsteps echoing in the stairway, pushing the door ajar, sitting down on the sofa, just sitting, waiting perhaps for someone to find her, to order her to leave. Outside, the day turned to dusk, the furniture to shadows. She grew hungry but could not bring herself to get up.
At some point she must have lain down, for that is how she found herself in the morning when the sun flooded the room with light, and since she was reluctant to leave the quiet of the apartment, she drew a bath and lowered her body into the hot water until it grew cold and she began to shiver. It was then that Ulli decided that she could not return to her parents’ house, could not go on working at her father’s typewriter business, even though there was no lack of opportunity there. “An army needs typewriters, and there will, whether we like it or not, always be armies,” her father liked to remind her.
Ulli’s father had been too old to serve in the war; by its end, he was over sixty. He had not done badly during the war, not well, not great, but he had managed to keep the business going. In fact, at the end, there were no typewriters left in the warehouse, though they had not all been sold. The Nazis had confiscated what was left, melted them down for the final effort. Ulli was the one who supervised the process, writing down all the serial numbers, as her father insisted, so there would be a record. Whether this was because her father expected to be reimbursed at some point, or whether he simply could not give up his meticulous business practices just because bombs were flying and the Soviet Army had reached their borders, she did not know.
Ever since she could remember, her future had been the business. She was her parents’ only child, so her father began grooming her for the business from a very young age. When she was six, her father taught her how to type. He wanted her to have an appreciation for their product, to master it, was how he put it, almost as if it were a wild beast that had to be tamed. He had developed a special training method and never hired secretaries who already knew how to type. “Once you have gotten used to bad habits, it is difficult to break out of them,” he said. Instead, he schooled his secretaries himself, and as a result, they were fast and accurate and graceful. “My pianists,” he called them.
Every evening for an hour and on Sunday afternoons for two hours Ulli practiced, so that by age twelve she was a prodigy—one hundred and twenty words a minute without one mistake. Her fingers flew across the keyboard as quickly in French or English as they did in German. Her father was proud of her progress and often brought her to his office, where she showed off her peculiar form of acrobatics and was given sweets and kisses by her father’s secretaries. Each time Ulli reached a new personal best, her father rewarded her with a special outing to the racetrack or the zoo or for a drive to the country. She liked going to the racetrack the best, liked the sound of the horses’ hooves and the way she could feel people holding their breath, clenching their fists, their hearts beating.
Her father never gambled, but he taught her how to concentrate on one person in the stands, how to watch and let herself feel as if she were that person, feel his joy when he won, his disappointment when he lost. “That way you can have fun without risking anything,” he said, and she believed this was possible, because he was her father and because she was still too young to understand that nothing was possible without risk. After a day at the races, her father always took her to dinner at one of his favorite restaurants, where he ordered champagne and let her have a whole glass for herself. During dinner they would go over the day’s races, counting up the money they would have won or lost had they bet.
Sometimes one of the secretaries accompanied them on these outings. It was rarely the same secretary, but each one went out of her way to please Ulli, bringing her chocolates and telling her that she was “such a pretty girl.” Once, Ulli said that she would rather be smart than pretty, which caused that particular secretary to burst into laughter, as if this were the most absurd desire one could possibly have. Of course, all the secretaries were pretty, and they were all excellent typists, though by the time Ulli was an adolescent, none of them could type more quickly than she could. As far as she could tell, none of them was particularly smart, which didn’t seem to bother her father. Perhaps he was simply looking for some lightheartedness to relieve him of her mother’s somber presence.
Ulli’s mother was much younger than her father. She was British, from a dreary town in northern England, and had met Ulli’s father when he was working in London for some kind of shipping company. The family had visited her hometown only once. Ulli’s grandparents lived above the dress shop they owned. The apartment was damp and cold even in April, the time of their visit. They went to church on Easter Sunday, and Ulli’s grandfather came home drunk late that night. In the morning he didn’t get up to open the dress shop, and her grandmother was crying, and Ulli’s mother held her hand and her father shook his head. On this visit, her grandparents paid Ulli little attention. She only remembered her grandmother asking whether she liked school. She answered in the affirmative because she could sense that her grandmother was not interested in Ulli’s true feelings about the matter. At one point, when they were in the middle of dinner and Ulli asked politely for the salt, her grandmother said that she was very sweet, which made her start crying because she had no aspirations to be sweet. On the contrary, she dreamed of flying across the Atlantic like Amelia Earhart or being a leader of men like Joan of Arc.
“What’s wrong, dear?” her grandmother asked, making matters worse, but Ulli had known that it was useless to try to explain why she was crying to someone who thought that sweetness was a desirable quality, so she simply stopped. “There, there,” her grandmother said, reaching over and tapping her stiffly on the back, completely unaware that she had been the cause of the tears. “Children are such mysteries,” she said sadly, and Ulli wanted to tell her that adults were the strange ones, the ones who equated politeness with kindness, but she knew her grandmother would not understand. Her grandfather was even more aloof. When she looked in his direction, he turned away, as if he believed that by doing so, he would become invisible. Perhaps he did this with everyone, but she was too young to make a study of him.
In 1944 Ulli’s maternal grandparents were killed by German bombs. Upon receiving the telegram, her mother cried for five or ten minutes and then stopped abruptly, dried her eyes, and announced that she was going to take a walk. During the ten minutes that she was crying, Ulli tried to put herself in her mother’s shoes, concentrated on feeling her sadness the way her father had taught her to do with people at the races, but it didn’t work. Her mother finally returned soon after nightfall with a bag of oranges. Ulli had not seen oranges for months. Where her mother got them, she did not say, and Ulli did not ask. Her mother began setting the table with the white lace tablecloth and the good silver. She arranged the oranges carefully on her best Delft platter. They ate them all—three each—savoring every bite, not speaking. With her mother there were never many words, and Ulli never quite knew how to be with her.
They did have their times together. Sometimes in the evenings after dinner her mother would ask Ulli to read to her. “What would you like me to read?” Ulli would ask, and her mother always said it did not matter, that she felt like listening to Ulli’s voice; that was all. Ulli did not know whether her mother even listened to the stories she read from her favorite books, her mother never commented on them, but when Ulli looked up every once in a while to see whether she was paying attention, her mother was always looking right at her, sitting forward a little bit on her chair.
One time when Ulli and her mother were in the middle of ironing, her father swooped in and announced that he was taking Ulli to a concert. She had never been to a concert, so she was excited.
