style="font-size:15px;"> “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 her balance, as if she were walking on ice rather than carpet.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said.
“I’m not,” she said, looking right at Hermann, at his nakedness, at the shiny roundness of his stump leg.
He began to instruct her. His voice came to her as if from a great distance, and she followed as if hypnotized. “Take off your clothes, slowly, slowly, put them on the chair, stop, turn around, stop, turn around again, yes, like that, come here now. Touch me, like this,” he said, guiding her hands up and down the length of his hairless body, along the stump that was once his leg. “Slowly, gently,” he said, and she felt that her hands were burning.
This was her first experience with the erotic.
“Am I hurting you?” she asked him.
“Why would you think such a thing?” he asked.
Hermann lay still on his back, passive, completely immobile, while he instructed her on how to move on top of him. She let herself sink into his flesh. Though he was not fat, there was a softness about him, especially in his belly and arms.
He sometimes said “faster” or “not so fast, slowly,” and Ulli did exactly as she was told until she reached orgasm. Shortly afterward, she felt him shrinking inside her.
After that, they met twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, at the Hotel Vienna. They drank brandy. They made love, sometimes as they had done that first time, sometimes more like the way he taught math, fast, fast, fast, grabbing her, pushing her down on the bed. Afterward he would hold on to her very tightly and make her promise she would not leave him. “I need you,” he would say, or “You have saved me.” She did not ask what she had saved him from, for she understood that it was not that kind of saving.
In the beginning, he brought her gifts—a Montblanc fountain pen, chocolates. She always ate the chocolates on the way home. The other presents she kept hidden in the closet of her room.
Ulli and Hermann did not talk about grand things, such as the meaning of life or love and pain. They spoke about his work and how difficult it was for some students to understand the simplest mathematical concepts. Often they would prepare his lessons together or she would help him grade tests. After she graduated that spring from the Realschule and began working at her father’s business, she amused him with tales from the world of commerce, which he scoffed at, though he enjoyed helping her practice her sales pitches. A great deal of their time, when they were not making love, was devoted to mathematics. Hermann gave Ulli difficult problems to solve and then lay naked on the bed, watching her think. He liked that she would not give up. Sometimes she had to take the problems home with her to work on. “The homework,” they called it.
There was nothing extraordinary about the time they spent together, but perhaps that is precisely why it was extraordinary. They were simple together. At night before she fell asleep, Ulli would imagine him lying next to his sleeping wife but thinking of her, wishing he could come to her, and she half believed that he would, that one night she would hear pebbles hitting her window.
They continued on like this through the summer and into the next winter. By the summer, Hermann became melancholy. When Ulli asked him what was wrong, he shook his head. “I am just so very, very sad. But I would be dead if it were not for you.” She believed that was true. Maybe their time together had kept him, however briefly, from falling into the abyss. Instead of making love, he asked her now only to touch him, to run her hands slowly up and down his body the way he liked it, to kiss him while he lay there softly weeping. It did not occur to her to refuse him or to ask anything in return. Later, Ulli would leave the hotel trembling.
Now he preferred the lights off, the curtains drawn. He wanted the room to be in a permanent state of dusk. “Dusk is the most beautiful time of day,” he said. Often he would not even let Ulli take off her clothes.
