Winter Kept Us Warm

by Anne Raeff

“Insha’Allah,” Abdoul said. “But I still do not think it is a good idea.”

  She did not, of course, tell Abdoul that she was the one who had sent him away. Had she really expected him to take the next train back to Rabat simply because she asked him to leave? He would be fine. There was nothing dangerous about Volubilis.

  Ulli went about her usual morning tasks, and at three she inspected the rooms that had been vacated that day, making sure they were ready for the next wave of inhabitants. Soon the new guests would begin to arrive. As she walked down the hall toward the staircase, she stopped at Isaac’s room and put her ear to the door. It was quiet. Of course it was quiet. He was in Volubilis. What had she expected to hear—weeping, the girls chattering away about the silly things they chattered about? She opened the door, looked in. On the stand in the corner near the window, Isaac’s suitcase was open, freshly packed, his clothes folded neatly. On the sink in the bathroom lay a wooden baby’s hairbrush with half the bristles missing. She picked it up and held it for a moment, imagining Isaac looking in the mirror, running the brush through his thin hair. How long had he been using this brush? Did he find it one day among the girls’ baby things, tucked away in a box in a closet or in the basement? Had he laughed at the thought that his hair was now thin enough for a baby brush? Ulli did not even remember the feel of her daughters’ hair, the contour of their scalps. She was sure, however, that Isaac did.

  After examining his bathroom, she sat for a while at the desk, upon which were some coins and the hotel stationery she continued to provide for guests despite the fact that no one wrote letters anymore. From the desk she moved to the bed, first sitting on the edge, both feet on the ground, as if she had just woken up and were taking a moment to contemplate the tasks of the day. She slipped off her shoes and lay down without disturbing Isaac’s pajamas. Ulli always pictured Isaac sleeping on his back, ready to jump up in case the girls called to him in the night, trembling from a nightmare or a strange noise, though when they still lived with her, they both slept through the night, waking only at dawn like birds.

  She closed her eyes. She had hardly slept after all, and perhaps here in his room she could. She imagined the girls sleeping in their beds, safe and warm while Isaac sat in his study reading, but this image didn’t comfort her, for she was the one who was supposed to have been awake, watching over them while they slept—and then there was the smell of him, the sound of his footsteps behind her, though she knew it was only the tap dripping. She rose, tightened the faucet, but it kept dripping. She would have to get Abdoul to fix it; there was nothing more annoying than a leaky faucet. Perhaps, she thought, if I tire myself out enough, when I go to bed tonight, I won’t hear the footsteps or smell the cigarettes on his breath. Perhaps I will sleep like a child, the way my children once slept in Isaac’s house.

  Ulli and Leo neither decided to have children nor took precautions to prevent their conception. Perhaps this attitude was a carryover from the war. If there were carrots in the market, they ate carrots. If a bombed-out building collapsed on a small child playing in the rubble, the child would be buried. This did not mean that mothers did not warn their children not to play in the rubble, but it also did not mean that children heeded their mothers’ admonitions. She and Leo took a similar approach to having children: if a child was conceived, it would be born, and if a child was not conceived, there would be no child. For a long time, almost ten years, there was no child, and though children were vaguely part of Leo’s plan for the future, Ulli was sure that he gave their childlessness little thought. As for Ulli, she did not long to be a mother the way some women do, but she was not opposed to it either, so when she finally became pregnant, neither of them was alarmed. It would be another stage of their lives, another part of the future.

  Ulli did not remember much about the birth. In those days they pumped women full of anesthesia, so she had no recollection of being in pain, not after the initial contractions. A nurse came by every once in a while, but until it was actually time, she was alone. She did remember the nurse counting and telling her to breathe, but she had not been prepared for any of it. Leo sat out in the waiting area with the other men. There was something she liked about that, about men waiting outside. She didn’t think she would like the way it was done today, with a roomful of cheerleaders and video cameras and breathing coaches.

  The day Simone was born, there was a blizzard. When they took her home a few days later, Leo spent hours with her at the window, holding her up to see the snow and the park and the sky. Whenever she cried, which was not often, Leo took her to the window, and she would immediately calm down. Even when she was obviously hungry, looking out the window held her attention, took her mind off whatever she needed.

  Since both Leo and Ulli worked long hours and traveled a lot, they hired Mrs. McDonnell to take care of Simone. During her interview she made a point of telling Ulli that her ancestors were among the first settlers, not at Plymouth but at another colony whose name Ulli no longer remembered. Mrs. McDonnell had been forced to leave her native Massachusetts because her husband was a New Yorker. She had met him at a dance during the war. His family owned a small grocery store in Brooklyn, and his father was ill and could not run it on his own. Her husband, Mr. McDonnell, was a very good man, she assured Ulli several times during the interview.

  Leo and Ulli were grateful to Mrs. McDonnell for taking such excellent care of Simone. “Such a sweet, sweet child,” Mrs. McDonnell always said when they returned and asked how the day had gone.

  With Simone in such good hands, Ulli was able to keep working and traveling. When Ulli came home from abroad, Simone was always peeking out the door as she emerged from the elevator. No matter what time Ulli’s flight came in, Leo allowed the child to be up and waiting for her mother, and Simone would jump into her arms as soon as Ulli put down her bags. She helped Ulli unpack her suitcase, putting the toiletries away in the medicine chest carefully, item by item, climbing on the toilet seat in order to reach. Simone was always a careful child. Ulli did not remember her ever breaking or spilling anything, and she learned to wash her hands and brush her teeth by herself right after she learned to walk. It was as if she were trying especially hard to make things easy for Ulli, to make sure her mother would have nothing to worry about when she was at work.

  When Ulli was getting ready for a trip, Simone sat with her while she packed her suitcase, handing her items as she asked for them. Ulli’s work was taking her farther and farther into the world—Jakarta, Singapore, Delhi—and the more of the world she saw, the more she wanted to be out there where things were happening, where decisions were being made. The longer she stayed away, the easier it was for her to be away from her daughter. When she was back in New York, she told Simone about the places she went, and Simone, being a curious child, asked questions. Ulli answered her questions patiently, providing her with as many details as possible. She hoped that with these details Simone would be able to picture her when she was gone, see her in her hotel room with the windows wide open and the fan spinning, hear the horns honking and rain falling on the roof, just as Ulli could picture Simone sitting on the living room rug paging through her favorite book, whispering the story to herself as she went along.

  Simone was especially fascinated by the fans. Ulli had likened them to helicopters. “Helicopters in the room?” Simone had asked.

  “Just the blades,” Ulli explained. “The things that spin and move the air around.”

  “Can I see the helicopters?”

  “Someday,” Ulli said.

  Of course, Ulli knew that she could not take Simone with her. Still, she liked thinking of them together, walking hand in hand through a busy market, eating a breakfast of tropical fruits on a sunny patio, and Ulli hoped her absences would inspire in Simone a sense of adventure, a desire to go out and see the world, though it turned out that it was Juliet who ended up being the restless one.

  Juliet was born in Sep
tember of 1961, just eighteen months after Simone. The pregnancy was a surprise, though Ulli knew it shouldn’t have been.

  “I hope it’s another girl,” Leo said when she told him.

  “Why?” Ulli asked.

  “Girls are better,” he said.

  “Why are girls better?” Ulli asked.

  “They don’t have to go to war,” Leo said, and Ulli thought about what the Russian soldiers had done. Leo was right. Girls don’t have to go to war; the war comes to them.

  They named her Juliet after Leo’s grandmother, who died in the flood, not after Romeo’s Juliet, though that is what people always assumed. Perhaps if Simone and Juliet had been clinging children who woke up in the middle of the night shaking with fear of monsters, or if one of them had been sickly, born with a bad heart like Leo or suffering from asthma like Isaac, Ulli would have given up her work. Perhaps not. But her daughters did not cry out in the night. Even when they got sick, when their bodies were burning up with fever, they were calm.

  Sometimes when Ulli was far away, a sudden shot of fear would run through her, hit her right in the stomach, and she was sure that something had happened to Simone or Juliet, that one of them had fallen and hit her head on the corner of the glass coffee table or that Mrs. McDonnell had forgotten to raise the bars of the crib and the baby had tumbled onto the floor. The only way Ulli could calm down was to imagine running through the streets to their apartment, running up the stairs, for the elevator was always so slow, bursting into the living room, only to find Juliet sleeping soundly in her crib and Simone playing with her stuffed animals on the living room floor with Mrs. McDonnell nearby, sitting in the armchair, listening to one of her radio shows.

  As much as Ulli missed her daughters, when she was home in New York for long stretches at a time and immersed in the day-to-day drudgery of her family’s existence, she was often overcome by an overwhelming desire to flee. It was not uncommon that sometimes, when she was in the middle of bathing them or when Simone wanted Ulli to read her the same book over and over because it was raining outside and they could not go to the park, Ulli had to summon all her willpower not to scream or run out of the room. Sometimes, after work, the dread of going home was so great that she would stop first at a hotel bar to have a drink, to ease the transition from words that carried with them the weight of nations to words like silly Billy and pajamas and nighty-night.

  Ulli wondered whether her mother had felt this too, the day-in-and-day-out drudgery of motherhood, but she did not write to ask her, nor did she tell Leo how she felt. He was working more now too and often did not come home until late. What he did when Ulli was gone she did not know, did not ask, but that was something she did not let herself think about. She worried, instead, about his heart, imagining him collapsed in the street or at his desk at the office, and her own heart would start to beat faster.

  When Leo was home, however, he cheerfully helped out more than she supposed other fathers did, much more than her colleagues, whose wives were all home safe while they were on the other side of the world, much more than her father, who had always come home late and, as far as she could remember, had never even tied her shoelaces.

  Once, when she was out with her colleagues and they were talking about their children, bragging about the usual things—their athletic accomplishments, their grades and musical talents—Ulli asked whether they thought their wives were happy just taking care of the children. “Don’t you think they get bored?” she said.

  The men all looked at her as if she were asking whether they thought their wives were having affairs, and then they laughed, as if they suddenly realized that she was joking.

  “I’m serious,” Ulli said. “I get completely bored if I have to spend an entire day with them alone. Don’t you?” Of course they had never spent a day alone with their children. All they had to do was take their kids out for ice cream or bring them an exotic gift from India, and—when they were all having drinks halfway around the world—talk with their colleagues about how wonderful their kids were.

  “I guess I never thought about it that way,” one of them said. Ulli lit a cigarette and called over the waiter. “This round’s on me,” she said, and her colleagues did not protest.

  She wondered now what Isaac would have said if she had talked to him about what she was feeling. Perhaps he would have had some good advice, but perhaps not. Perhaps he would not have understood at all. Neither Leo nor Ulli, nor Isaac himself, could have known that he would be so comfortable with children—a natural uncle, Leo called him. When Simone was a baby, Isaac lay on the rug like Gulliver, his long legs and arms stretched out, and let Simone crawl all over him, grab his glasses, pull his hair. Then he scooped her up and galloped around the house.

  One day shortly after Simone turned three, Isaac asked if he could take her for the weekend. There was a special exhibition at the Brooklyn aquarium on sharks from around the world, which he thought Simone was old enough to enjoy. Mrs. McDonnell disapproved. It was not right, she said, to leave the child in the hands of a bachelor, but Simone enjoyed spending the weekend with Isaac so much that weekends with Isaac became a monthly tradition.

  When they were together, Isaac and Simone spent a lot of time in the library. He would find a remote corner of the stacks and set her up on a blanket while he worked. She liked the books, the smell of them, Isaac said. She would make her way up and down the rows, sniffing every volume, carefully taking them out the way Isaac had shown her. In the evenings they listened to music, and after dinner he took her out for a long walk. She liked the night, he told them. When Ulli asked him how he could get any research done with a child around, he told her that Simone never disturbed him. “She’s always so quiet. She can sit on the rug in my study without making a sound. I asked her once how she could be so quiet, and do you know what she said?”

  “What?”

  “She said that she was thinking. ‘There’s so much to think about,’ she said. ‘Like what?’ I asked her. ‘Like why it gets dark at night,’ she said.”

  Why, Ulli thought, did Simone not say things like that to her? Or maybe she did, but Ulli just didn’t recognize the wonder in her words the way Isaac did. Maybe she was too busy thinking about work or trying so hard not to think about how long it had been since Leo had pulled her toward him in the middle of the night or woken up singing one of his silly songs.

  Open-Heart Surgery

  Not long after Simone started spending weekends with Isaac, Leo got a new heart, or rather a new valve for his old one. He preferred, however, to tell people that he had gotten a new heart since a new valve didn’t sound particularly impressive or dangerous, and the operation had been both—so cutting-edge that they filmed the whole procedure, during which Leo’s blood had to be rerouted to an external pump so they could cut out the damaged valve and replace it with a new one that would last, the doctors assured him, for a hundred years.

  “You will live longer than all of us,” Isaac said when Leo told him about the valve’s durability.

  “The valve will live longer than any of us,” Leo said. “That is all we know.”

  They were all there when he woke up—Ulli, Isaac, and Howard. Ulli sat on the bed next to him, holding his hand. Isaac and Howard were standing, one on each side of the bed. Now we are four, Leo thought, and then he closed his eyes again, not knowing how to be among them all.

  What had Howard told them? Why had he come? Of course Leo hadn’t told him not to, hadn’t thought to take that precaution. All he was thinking about before was, what if I don’t wake up, what if they botch it? But they hadn’t botched it, and there he was, alive, but he wasn’t ready to be awake yet, to embrace the life he had before him. He would rest. He needed rest. Later, when he wasn’t so tired, he would live, so he let their voices, the three of them, lull him to sleep.

  “He’s still tired,” Isaac said.

  “Yes,” Ulli said, sq
ueezing Leo’s hand. He squeezed back, and he could tell by the trembling in her hand that she was crying. He wanted to comfort her, say that everything was fine, that he wasn’t tired at all, just confused.

  When he awoke the next time, he was alone. “What time is it?” he called out, but no one answered. Since speaking those few words had used all his strength, he closed his eyes again and slept, and when he woke up, daylight filled the room, and they were four again.

  Later, Ulli would look back on that first awakening and wonder about Howard, about his presence there, about how he trembled when he put his hand on Leo’s shoulder. Leo had opened his eyes and said, “Are you there, Howard?” and Howard had said, “Of course I’m here. Where else would I be?” Why had she accepted Howard’s explanation—a fellow salesman, Leo’s competitor in the life insurance business. Before Leo arrived on the scene, he told her, he had been the salesman of the year, ten years running, but now Leo had his own business and was far ahead of him. “So far ahead,” Howard had said. “But I’m back in first place again for life insurance, so I shouldn’t complain.”

  At the time, she hadn’t thought about Howard, about who he was or why he was there. She simply appreciated his kindness, the way he put his hand on her shoulder and told her that everything was going to be all right, that Leo was safe. That was all that mattered.

  During Leo’s convalescence Ulli liked thinking about him at home with the girls while she was at work. She imagined them sitting on the floor together, building castles with blocks, even though Mrs. Donny, as Simone called her, was there since Leo was not supposed to exert himself. Ulli liked coming home to the girls freshly bathed, ready for bed, the table set for dinner by Leo, who had taken up cooking and made elaborate dinners, which they ate after the girls had been put to bed.

  At one point, when Leo was strong enough for company, Ulli asked whether they should invite Howard for coffee some Sunday afternoon. Since the long-ago work parties, they had never invited anyone over except for Isaac. Howard had been so kind when Leo was in the hospital. It was, she said, the right thing to do.