by Anne Raeff
“If you fall asleep, you’ll still freeze to death,” Leo said.
“Like in the siege of Stalingrad,” Isaac said. “That’s what happened. After a while people couldn’t stay awake. As long as you stay awake, you’re okay.”
Leo got up. “Well. I’m not taking any chances,” he said. “Come.” He held a hand out to each of them, and he pulled them up out of the snow. They ran then, holding each other up, ran as if something dangerous were following them, or as if they had someplace to go.
Ulli took them to her apartment. Until that night, she had never had a guest. For the first time, she used the living room. Their clothes were wet, and they were cold, so they made a fire and drank. The blue and green velvet sofas and armchairs and the heavy drapes and the dark wood molding that traced the ceiling frightened her, but with Isaac and Leo there, the room seemed almost cozy.
“Nice place,” Leo said.
Ulli told them how she had found the apartment and how she waited for the rightful occupants to return, hoping selfishly that they would not.
“You hoped for their deaths, then,” Isaac said softly, gently even, as if he were explaining something to a small child. There was nothing judgmental about his tone. He had simply established a fact.
“Yes,” she said, for it was true.
“Must you always be so serious, Isaac?” Leo asked, refilling their glasses.
“Not always,” Isaac said.
Leo lifted his glass. “To not being so serious, for God’s sake,” he said, and Isaac and Ulli lifted their glasses and drank, too.
They continued to drink. Leo demonstrated his photographic memory. He left the room with the prewar phone book and committed the first ten pages to memory. While Leo was in the kitchen memorizing the phone book, Isaac and Ulli waited in the living room. Isaac wanted to know where she had learned to speak English so well, and she told him about her mother and then about her father’s business and how she had come to despise the relentless staccato clicking of typewriters.
“Actually, I love the sound of typewriters,” Isaac said. “When I was stationed in Arizona, I sometimes stayed up all night typing. I would copy the newspaper from cover to cover just so I could hear the sound of the typewriter.”
Leo burst in, telephone book in hand. He rattled off the names, insisting that they check every one, though after the first few pages they did not pay very close attention. When he was finished, Ulli and Isaac applauded and they all drank to Leo’s photographic memory. Leo wanted to dance, so she turned on the radio and the two of them danced while Isaac watched. Then Isaac took over and Leo watched, but after one song, Leo took over again and the dancing turned intimate, and Isaac sat on the couch watching. Leo pulled her in closer, his arms thick around her, and he moved her toward the door. If Isaac had said something—“good night” or “where are you going?”—she would not have let herself be led to the bedroom, to the bed that was not her bed, but he was just watching, and she did not want someone who watched. She wanted someone who moved, and that was Leo.
The Desert at Night
Leo woke up the next morning feeling stronger than he had felt for the past three months, since the end of the war. It wasn’t until everyone was jumping for joy and starting to believe again in the future that the weakness had started. The doctors had told him that something was wrong with his heart, but he had gone through the whole war feeling the same as he always felt—as if there was nothing too heavy for him lift, no one who could pin him down. He felt strong enough for combat, although that, the doctors said, was out of the question. But then the war was over, and suddenly he couldn’t sleep. He lay awake at night listening to the murmur in his heart; in the morning he was hardly able to rouse himself and get out of bed. But in Ulli’s house that was not her house, in her bed that was not her bed, his heart seemed to be working like one without a murmur, a heart with a valve that would not slowly get more inflamed until one day it ceased to let blood flow through it, a heart that was not, as the doctors had put it, a time bomb. If it hadn’t been for the war, he would have gone blithely along, not knowing about his condition until one day he dropped dead, which is what everyone does. He supposed he was no different from all the other young men who had been going along and then they were sent off to war and suddenly they were dead.
Perhaps if he had been in combat he would have allowed himself to be afraid of death, but sitting there in his office, at his goddamn desk job, typing and calculating and organizing files, he did not feel he had the right to worry about his heart, not when there were others lying in the mud facedown, blood pouring out of them, with no one there to help. So he continued on, and he reenlisted just to prove he could keep going. What else could he do? Go home? There was nothing for him there. The world was out there for him to discover. The world was so much more than Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Where was Ulli? That had not been a dream, for he could smell her on the sheets, and he turned over on his belly and breathed it in, the smell of slightly sour milk and, he thought, if salt had an odor, of salt. Now he could hear her voice and Isaac’s in the next room. He could smell the coffee too, and it mixed with the smell of Ulli in the sheets and the sound of their voices and the new strength in his thighs that was almost like pain. He would finish this cigarette, and then he would rise and dress, splash some water on his face, and join them in the other room.
It was Isaac who had found her, noticed her in the bar where they sat drinking vodka: “She is not like the others.” He had said it not as a compliment, but rather as an observation as one might say, Look, there’s a cardinal, the first one this spring.
Isaac was right. She wasn’t like the desperate women with sultry smiles glued to their faces and that awful clownish lipstick they thought was so alluring.
“She’s not wearing lipstick,” Isaac continued. “You know that Hitler hated lipstick, didn’t allow anyone around him to wear it. The Aryan woman, he believed, is beautiful in her own right and doesn’t need adornments.”
And then they had had that ridiculous argument about whether she was a Nazi because she was not wearing lipstick, and Isaac had been surprised that Leo had gotten so bent out of shape and insisted on buying her a drink, which she did not touch, which Leo ended up drinking just to embarrass Isaac, who, of course, remained calm and unfazed despite Leo’s theatrical gesture. Yet it was Isaac’s idea to ask her to join them when they saw her a couple of days later. It was Isaac who said, “Look, there’s the woman without lipstick. Should I invite her to join us for a drink?”
It wasn’t just her lips that made her different. She was tall, almost as tall as Isaac, and she walked fast. Later, when they were walking back to her apartment in the snow, Leo noticed that he liked watching her walk. Her legs had a sense of purpose. He imagined her running like a horse through a field, her thigh muscles bulging, her belly taut. He thought now that watching her walk had made his own legs feel stronger, had brought them back to their normal selves. Later, in her room, when she’d wrapped her arms and legs around him, he was not sure he would be able to break loose, despite his renewed strength, despite this strange desire, but he hadn’t wanted to break loose. He wanted to be there with Ulli.
What time was it—morning, still, or afternoon? Could it already be afternoon? Hard to tell with this weather, this endless gray, the snow, the dreariness of it all, just like Pennsylvania, where he could not return, not ever. But why—it occurred to him as he was just about to leap out of bed, for he felt that he could leap, that he should leap—why was Isaac still there? Why was he sitting at a table with Ulli, drinking coffee, as if he were Leo’s goddamn conscience? He remembered now that Isaac had also danced with Ulli, and he had watched them waltzing around the living room, stumbling over the furniture but always catching each other before they fell, like Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush, dancing at the edge of the precipice. Yet now, remembering their dancing, listening to their voices in the other ro
om, Leo felt no jealousy. On the contrary, all was calm. Was this, he thought, finally the beginning of peacetime?
He emerged from the bedroom. Ulli and Isaac looked up from the table. “Would you like some coffee?” Isaac asked, as if it were his apartment, his coffee, his cups and saucers.
“Sure,” Leo said.
Isaac brought the coffee, and Ulli lit a cigarette.
“What have you two been talking about?” Leo asked.
“I have been teaching her Russian. She has an uncanny gift for pronunciation. Listen,” Isaac said, and Ulli started counting, adin, dva, tri, chetyre, all the way to one hundred, and she would have kept on going, but Leo said, “Have you been up long enough to learn all those numbers?”
“She’s a brilliant student,” Isaac said.
“I guess it’s the language to learn now that they are the new enemies,” Leo said.
“Maybe someday we will live in a world without enemies,” Ulli said, and Leo lifted his cup up in the air and proclaimed, “To a world without enemies, to peace.” Ulli and Isaac raised their cups in the air and repeated, “To a world without enemies, to peace.” And Leo laughed, not because he thought that peace was funny or improbable, but because he remembered at that moment how he and Ulli had laughed the night before about cigars. No, peace was a serious thing, as serious as war, though it never seemed to last for very long. Still, it was something to strive for, something to help them move out of the past and into the future.
Leo got up and placed his arms around them. This was a beginning, he thought, a new way to look at things. This was the future now, pulling them in closer, as if into the frame for a photo, though there was no photo, no one there to take it, no camera.
Leo had never left Pennsylvania before he enlisted, had hardly left Johnstown, where he was born, as were his parents and his grandparents and great-grandparents, who had lived through the Great Flood of 1889. In Johnstown, there was before the Flood and after the Flood. The Flood was like a war, and people spoke of those who died as of those who had fallen, though they had not fallen, but been swept away, which is what war does too—sweeps you up and takes you somewhere you have never been before.
When the war came, Leo was one of the first to enlist, not out of a sense of duty or patriotism or because he hated Hitler—for he did not know enough about Hitler to hate him—not because he dreamed of glory or because he had spent his childhood reading about adventures in faraway lands, but simply because he wanted to go where people were not afraid of water, where they didn’t sit around waiting for the next time the waters got loose, which, they were all sure, despite the new engineering, despite the vows of politicians, was bound to happen. Even war, he thought, was more hopeful than Johnstown, for after a war things do not go back to exactly how they had been before.
When he enlisted, he had been ready for bullets and bombs, or so he thought, but he would never find out how he would have acted in the real war, because the army doctors had discovered the murmur in his heart and declared him unfit for combat. Instead, he ended up in the prisoner of war camp in the desert, where there was not really any danger at all and way too much time to think about things he should not have been thinking about.
When he first met Isaac at the camp in Arizona, he thought that Isaac was like him, not like the boys in the locker room who jacked each other off for laughs and because it was so much more trouble to find a girl to do it. Perhaps Leo thought Isaac was like him because he had not known men like Isaac, men who read books and talked about history, men who liked poetry and art and did not talk about tits and cunts. Perhaps it was because Isaac was so thin that Leo confused his thinness with fragility. So Leo spoke to Isaac of things he had never said before, not about the boys in the locker room, not about the sad man in the bathroom at the bus station in Pittsburgh, but about Johnstown and its terrifying past, which hung over the future like death. Though Isaac’s English was not quite right and he often lacked the specific words he needed, it was Isaac who put into words what Leo had been feeling—his fear of being swept away, carried off by the tide of history without ever taking part in it.
The world would be different after the war was over, Isaac was always saying, and Leo wanted that. When the war was over, he wasn’t going to look back, wasn’t going to go home to Johnstown. He was not going to live the way people had lived before. And because he thought that Isaac was like him, he was sure they could find their way together, and he let this belief grow and it became like music welling up inside his head.
Isaac, Leo realized, was the first man he had ever really liked, not loved, not desired, but just plain liked for his decency and intelligence, as a friend. In the beginning, when they were still getting to know each other, Leo tried to feel desire for Isaac, to imagine what it would be like to kiss him, to feel his flesh, but thinking of Isaac in that way made him feel even more alone than he felt when he thought of other men, men with hard stomachs and arms and thighs, men who played football and fought in wars. So Leo settled into having a friend, but he worried that Isaac would make a move, say something irrevocable that would make it impossible for them to be friends, that a proclamation or an attempted kiss would always be between them. But nothing like that happened because it turned out that Isaac was not like Leo.
Though Isaac and Leo had arrived at the camp in Arizona on the same day, they were assigned to different divisions and would probably not have met if it hadn’t been for the Uzbeks. The Uzbeks, Bidor and his father, arrived with the first batch of Russians, many of them deserters who had followed Hitler’s retreating army out of the Soviet Union. Some, however, were patriots, or so they claimed, though they were not patriotic enough to commit suicide—as the Red Army required them to do—rather than be taken prisoner by the Germans, which is what happened. So they all ended up—the Germans and their Russian prisoners, the Uzbeks—in Arizona. Swept away by history, swept away to safety across the Atlantic, where the Americans treated them well—ice cream every night for dessert, plenty of cigarettes, clean sheets, a warm blanket, a pool table, Ping-Pong, a library.
When the Uzbeks arrived, no one knew what they were, so Isaac, as the camp’s chief interpreter, was called to get them settled in and to figure out where they came from. On their first meeting with Isaac, Bidor and his father sat very straight in their chairs in Isaac’s office, their hands flat on the table, as if they were not accustomed to chairs and tables. This, Isaac told Leo later, was his first clue. Isaac took the seat opposite them. He smiled and introduced himself to them in Russian. They looked at each other, but did not answer. He touched his chest and repeated his name. Then he pointed to them and, still in Russian, asked them their names. The younger man understood, and so Isaac learned their names. Then Bidor, the son, spoke the one Russian word he knew—chai. Isaac called for tea, which the orderly brought, and they drank it in a few gulps, and when they were finished, they nodded in appreciation. “You’re welcome,” Isaac said to them in Russian, and they nodded again. Then Isaac sang a song. It was a French song, something silly from his school days about a soldier going to war, and when he came to the end of the song, he held his hands out, palms up toward the Uzbeks, asking them to sing. They understood and sang a long song with many verses, but in them Isaac could feel the galloping of horses on the open steppe. He started naming cities—Tashkent, Samarkand, Kabul—and they smiled, though he did not know whether they smiled because they recognized the names or simply to be polite, but the older man started drawing with his index finger on the table. Isaac asked the orderly to bring paper and pencils, and the Uzbeks drew horses and mountains and a ship on the ocean and trains—many trains and many angry soldiers. In turn, Isaac drew himself on the deck of the ship that had taken him and his parents from Lisbon to New York. He drew New York and the river and all the tall buildings and trains too, trains moving slowly through the desert. They drew for hours, but Isaac still did not know exactly where the two men were from,
though he was fairly sure they were Central Asian, which would have been enough information for the army. Still, Isaac was not satisfied.
After dismissing the Uzbeks, Isaac went to the Records Office, where Leo sat typing up the week’s purchase orders. Isaac didn’t quite barge into the office, because the door was open and no one was keeping him from entering, but he walked in with great determination, on a mission, it would seem, of great importance. “Yes?” Leo said, and Isaac walked right up to his desk, which is when Leo realized how tall he was: in order to look him in the eye, Leo had to tilt his head way back, as one does when sitting in the first row at a movie theater.
Isaac immediately started telling him about the two men, one older, one young, who weren’t Russian and didn’t know how to sit in chairs, and how he must find out where they were from because it was such a mystery—so interesting, didn’t he think, that they had ended up so far away from wherever they were from.
“Hold on there a moment. Have a seat, have a cigarette,” Leo said.
“I don’t smoke,” Isaac said, pulling up a chair and sitting down. “I have asthma. That’s why I’m here and not over there.”
“I’ve got something with my heart.”
“Is it serious?” Isaac asked, looking Leo straight in the eyes, as if he were a doctor about to impart bad news.
“Yes, but I don’t feel a thing.”
“I haven’t had an asthma attack since I’ve been here in the desert. I like the desert. Do you?”
“Yes,” Leo said, though until that moment he had hardly given the desert any thought. It was out there. That was all. After Isaac had fully explained about the Uzbeks who were not Uzbeks yet, not to Leo and Isaac, and after they had gone through the names of the soldiers stationed at the camp in search of Turks and had found only Armenians, when Leo was lying on his cot smoking the last cigarette of the night, he thought of Isaac standing in the desert in the hot sun, just standing there looking around at nothing, and he wanted to be there with him, not because he wanted to touch him, but because he wanted to see what he saw.