Читать книгу Winter Kept Us Warm - Anne Raeff - Страница 12

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 the day, she walked for hours, from one end of the American 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. She had to get dressed immediately or they would be late, 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.