by Anne Raeff
For the past year or so, he had been worried about not waking up. His doctor told him that this was a fairly common fear for the elderly. His doctor often informed him that what he was feeling—aches in 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 i
n 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.
“It’s a wonderful store, isn’t it?” he asked.
“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. Touching him became a form of meditation, a cutting-off of the will, of the self. She felt neither 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.