“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 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