his limbs or itchy eyes or dizziness when he got up from his reading chair—was all “fairly common for the elderly.” This did not comfort him. He did not like the term the elderly. He did not mind elderly as an adjective, but the noun, he felt, was patronizing. He did not tell his doctor any of this. His doctor did not think of language in this way. For him it was a tool, like the light he shined into his patients’ eyes or his stethoscope. His doctor had insisted that it was not healthy to harp on the end of life—he never used the word death—but here Isaac was, despite the doctor’s orders, thinking about it once again.
“It is not a topic I choose to think about,” Isaac had explained to the doctor. “It is simply there, waiting for me when I have time to think, which is almost always. I feel as if I am back in my adolescence. There was a period from when I was maybe fourteen until seventeen or eighteen, until we left Europe, during which I would lie awake at night getting myself worked into a state about my eventual nonexistence. One day, I would not know that I had existed or that I no longer existed. My consciousness would simply be deleted from the world.”
“I don’t think of it that way at all,” the doctor told him. “I think of being reunited with the earth, and I feel at peace.”
“But I did not come from the earth, so how can it be a reunion?” Isaac asked, and the doctor thought for a moment and then said, “It is a manner of speaking.”
He wanted to tell Ulli about the doctor. He knew there was a phone by the bed. He could lift the phone and dial zero for the front desk, but he could not make his arm move. He tried. He grew angry with himself for not being able to pick up a phone. How feeble can one be? he thought. How ridiculous that Ulli must be the one to find me.
Sunstroke
Ulli felt responsible for Isaac’s sunstroke, for letting him go out by himself at the hottest time of the day, especially after such a long and tiring journey. She knew all too well how grueling that train ride was. When she first came to Morocco, before she bought the old Mercedes, she often had to travel to Rabat by train—always with a bagful of cash to pay the hefty bribes to ensure that the necessary paperwork for the hotel was processed and submitted to the proper officials. She should have gone with him to the medina. She had her trusted staff to handle things while she was gone, but she was not ready yet to have him so near. Isaac didn’t seem frail. He did not have the stoop of an old man. He was old, of course, as she was, his reddish hair gone thin and gray, yet he stood as he always had—tall, still tall. She did not easily admit to the limitations of age. The older she got, the closer to death (for that was what getting old meant, and tiptoeing around it certainly wouldn’t make it come any more slowly), the more she felt like an adolescent. Though it seemed irrational, she could feel, all in the same moment, a tremendous impatience to get things done, along with a conviction that she still had all the time in the world to do them.
Isaac was certainly not the first guest to have succumbed to the powers of the sun. Every summer, despite her warnings, there was at least one. She had learned that a doctor was not necessary, that plenty of fluids and rest were all that was required, which was how she handled Isaac. She stayed by his bed, made sure that he drank water whenever he awoke, kept his face cool with a washcloth soaked in ice water.
But why had he come? Her first thought when he walked through the door was, of course, that something had happened to the girls. As he said their names, her heart had feared the worst, her palms had begun to sweat. Yet what right did she have to worry about their well-being? None. 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.
