desire nor disgust, neither fear nor pain.
One day when she arrived, he said that he had thought she would not come.
“Am I late?” Ulli asked, though she knew she was not.
“No. I just had a feeling,” he said.
One night at home she took out the gifts Hermann had given her and lay with them on her bed. Eventually she started taking off all her clothes and imagining that he was there, writing on her body with the Montblanc fountain pen, but after a while she could no longer imagine the feel of the pen on her body, so she wrote on herself, drawing circles around her navel and breasts. The next day, she arrived at the hotel convinced that he would find all the carefully drawn swirls too beautiful to reject. She was so excited that she arrived early, which was not allowed, so she walked around the block until it was time.
As soon as she entered the room, she began undressing, slowly, the way he liked, taking time to fold every piece of clothing carefully. She was afraid that he would stop her, but he did not, and he did not look away. When she was completely naked, she traced the circles she had drawn with her fingers, beginning first on her stomach and then moving slowly to her breasts. But he only lay there, watching.
After the Montblanc circles, things got worse, and there were times when he said not one word to her. When she threatened to leave, he would repeat over and over in a monotone, “Please, please do not go.”
“How can I help you?” Ulli asked. “Please, tell me.”
“No one can help me,” Hermann said. She held his hand and stroked his brow, and finally he fell asleep, and she sat at the edge of the bed counting his breaths just to have something to do.
Hermann knew that another war was imminent. “Can’t you smell it—the rot, the sweat?” he asked over and over. She could. She could smell it on him, and she was afraid. This, what she had with Hermann, she realized, was not love. She wanted to feel, to run, to walk through the streets, to sing. She had mistaken Hermann’s devotion to speed and pain for passion, but she was afraid of what would happen if she left him alone in the hotel room, lying on the bed, thinking of war. She could not, she felt, abandon him.
One Sunday, Hermann’s wife came to her parents’ door and left a note with their maid, Renate. The message was on a piece of stationery that had been folded and torn in half. Before Hermann, Ulli had been in the habit of doing her homework at the kitchen table while Renate finished the evening’s tasks. When Ulli first started coming to work in the kitchen, Renate had tried to be quiet, setting the dishes down without letting them knock against each other, keeping the cutlery from clanging, but after a while she got used to having Ulli there with her, and often, when she finished her work, Renate made tea and they sat together at the table, Ulli working and Renate reading one of her women’s magazines. Sometimes Renate would interrupt Ulli to show her a dress or shoes that she particularly liked, and once, Renate had shown Ulli a photograph of the boy from her village whom she loved. Georg was his name. In the photograph he was holding a lamb.
After reading the note, which read, I must speak to you immediately. I am waiting across the street. If you look out the window, you will see me. Hannah Meyer, Ulli was annoyed with Renate, rather than with herself, who had brought it on. She was sure that Renate had read the note and understood its implications, so after that day Ulli avoided Renate as much as possible, and Renate accepted Ulli’s distance as easily as she had accepted her presence.
Ulli had folded and crumpled the note, clenched her fist around it, and went directly, without looking out the window, to meet Hermann’s wife.
“I am Ulli Schlemmer,” she said, holding out her hand.
Hermann’s wife took her hand and produced a forced smile. “Hello,” she said. She moved closer, looking her straight in the eye. She had tiny teeth, like those of a child, which made her look both young and old at the same time. She looked at Ulli for what seemed to be a long time, as if she were trying to memorize her features so that she could paint her face afterward. Ulli did not avert her eyes, but focused her gaze on the woman’s lips and tiny teeth until Hermann’s wife said softly, “He does not want to see you anymore.”
“He would tell me himself if that were true,” Ulli said calmly, though her heart was beating furiously. She felt both a terrible relief and all the old longing she had felt when she watched him racing around the classroom with the love of the infinite beauty of numbers.
“He will not be at the hotel on Tuesday,” Hannah Meyer said.
Ulli did not respond.
Hermann’s wife put her hand on Ulli’s arm gently, as if she were trying to comfort her. “You are just a child,” she said.
After Ulli stopped seeing Hermann, her days were devoted to her father’s typewriter business, which was booming as Germany geared up for war. At night, alone in her room, she cried, not because she missed Hermann, but because she did not miss him, and because she understood that what he had seen in her was not joy or strength or life, but weakness. She realized then that Hermann had chosen her because he thought she was like him, and it was this, this desire to prove him wrong, that gave her the strength to leave the Hotel Vienna behind.
Then the bombings began.
At first, while her parents and neighbors crouched trembling and silent in the bomb shelter, Ulli waited for the end, ready to confront the horrible death that awaited her. She believed that her lack of fear was a sign of strength, of bravery even, but with each attack it became more difficult to keep her fists unclenched, especially during that dreadful silence between explosions. She found that the more she gave in to her fear, the more Hermann receded into the background, and she understood then that she was afraid because she refused to give in, because, unlike Hermann, she wanted to live.
Now, all these years later, as she got up from her chair to leave Isaac, his fever finally broken, his breathing even and relaxed, she understood that though Hermann had tried to take her with him into his despair, he had also saved her. For what if, instead of allowing herself to be pulled into Hermann’s soft and unhappy arms, she had been sucked into the fervor of the Hitlerjugend—the mountain excursions with fresh air and milk and plenty of sun, the facile camaraderie, the simple passions like hatred and pride and love of country? If she had allowed herself so easily to fall into Hermann’s arms, would she not also have looked for passion in the mass hysteria offered by National Socialism? Thus, in his strange way, had he not saved her from the worst of it by keeping her bound to that hotel room, so far removed from the tragedy unfolding around them? Yet he had pushed her back out into a world where the bombs were falling and where, in 1945, the bombs would finally stop.
The Apartment
It was terrible, the winter of 1945. If she believed in God, Ulli would have had to believe that God felt they had not been punished enough, that Europe needed more battering, more misery for its uncountable sins. By the end of the war, after hundreds of air raids, almost half the residents of Berlin had abandoned the city, escaped to the countryside, but Ulli and her parents had stayed behind, partly because they had no relatives in the country and partly because the buildings on their block stayed standing to the end, though all around them was shattered glass and rubble heavy with snow. At night the bombed-out structures groaned like dying soldiers, and Ulli lay awake listening to beams and bricks breaking loose and falling. Otherwise, the nights were quiet, some would have said it was a deathly quiet—the bombed-out blocks, the snow, the hunched citizens in frayed coats clutching bags of potatoes and carrots, more snow—but it was this quiet, this absence of sirens and airplanes overhead, the absence of bombs falling, that saved Ulli from despair.
During
