Winter Kept Us Warm. Anne Raeff

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.

      One Sunday, Hermann’s wife came to her parents’ door and left a note with their maid, Renate. The message was on a piece of stationery that had been folded and torn in half. Before Hermann, Ulli had been in the habit of doing her homework at the kitchen table while Renate finished the evening’s tasks. When Ulli first started coming to work in the kitchen, Renate had tried to be quiet, setting the dishes down without letting them knock against each other, keeping the cutlery from clanging, but after a while she got used to having Ulli there with her, and often, when she finished her work, Renate made tea and they sat together at the table, Ulli working and Renate reading one of her women’s magazines. Sometimes Renate would interrupt Ulli to show her a dress or shoes that she particularly liked, and once, Renate had shown Ulli a photograph of the boy from her village whom she loved. Georg was his name. In the photograph he was holding a lamb.

      After reading the note, which read, I must speak to you immediately. I am waiting across the street. If you look out the window, you will see me. Hannah Meyer, Ulli was annoyed with Renate, rather than with herself, who had brought it on. She was sure that Renate had read the note and understood its implications, so after that day Ulli avoided Renate as much as possible, and Renate accepted Ulli’s distance as easily as she had accepted her presence.

      Ulli had folded and crumpled the note, clenched her fist around it, and went directly, without looking out the window, to meet Hermann’s wife.

      “I am Ulli Schlemmer,” she said, holding out her hand.

      Hermann’s wife took her hand and produced a forced smile. “Hello,” she said. She moved closer, looking her straight in the eye. She had tiny teeth, like those of a child, which made her look both young and old at the same time. She looked at Ulli for what seemed to be a long time, as if she were trying to memorize her features so that she could paint her face afterward. Ulli did not avert her eyes, but focused her gaze on the woman’s lips and tiny teeth until Hermann’s wife said softly, “He does not want to see you anymore.”

      “He would tell me himself if that were true,” Ulli said calmly, though her heart was beating furiously.