had visited her hometown only once. Ulli’s grandparents lived above the dress shop they owned. The apartment was damp and cold even in April, the time of their visit. They went to church on Easter Sunday, and Ulli’s grandfather came home drunk late that night. In the morning he didn’t get up to open the dress shop, and her grandmother was crying, and Ulli’s mother held her hand and her father shook his head. On this visit, her grandparents paid Ulli little attention. She only remembered her grandmother asking whether she liked school. She answered in the affirmative because she could sense that her grandmother was not interested in Ulli’s true feelings about the matter. At one point, when they were in the middle of dinner and Ulli asked politely for the salt, her grandmother said that she was very sweet, which made her start crying because she had no aspirations to be sweet. On the contrary, she dreamed of flying across the Atlantic like Amelia Earhart or being a leader of men like Joan of Arc.
“What’s wrong, dear?” her grandmother asked, making matters worse, but Ulli had known that it was useless to try to explain why she was crying to someone who thought that sweetness was a desirable quality, so she simply stopped. “There, there,” her grandmother said, reaching over and tapping her stiffly on the back, completely unaware that she had been the cause of the tears. “Children are such mysteries,” she said sadly, and Ulli wanted to tell her that adults were the strange ones, the ones who equated politeness with kindness, but she knew her grandmother would not understand. Her grandfather was even more aloof. When she looked in his direction, he turned away, as if he believed that by doing so, he would become invisible. Perhaps he did this with everyone, but she was too young to make a study of him.
In 1944 Ulli’s maternal grandparents were killed by German bombs. Upon receiving the telegram, her mother cried for five or ten minutes and then stopped abruptly, dried her eyes, and announced that she was going to take a walk. During the ten minutes that she was crying, Ulli tried to put herself in her mother’s shoes, concentrated on feeling her sadness the way her father had taught her to do with people at the races, but it didn’t work. Her mother finally returned soon after nightfall with a bag of oranges. Ulli had not seen oranges for months. Where her mother got them, she did not say, and Ulli did not ask. Her mother began setting the table with the white lace tablecloth and the good silver. She arranged the oranges carefully on her best Delft platter. They ate them all—three each—savoring every bite, not speaking. With her mother there were never many words, and Ulli never quite knew how to be with her.
They did have their times together. Sometimes in the evenings after dinner her mother would ask Ulli to read to her. “What would you like me to read?” Ulli would ask, and her mother always said it did not matter, that she felt like listening to Ulli’s voice; that was all. Ulli did not know whether her mother even listened to the stories she read from her favorite books, her mother never commented on them, but when Ulli looked up every once in a while to see whether she was paying attention, her mother was always looking right at her, sitting forward a little bit on her chair.
One time when Ulli and her mother were in the middle of ironing, her father swooped in and announced that he was taking Ulli to a concert. She had never been to a concert, so she was excited. She had to get dressed immediately or they would be late, and she ran to her room to do so, abandoning her mother and the ironing. It was only once the lights were dimmed and the concert started that Ulli thought of her mother standing at her ironing board, alone, but she forced the image out of her mind and concentrated on the bows moving up and down, convincing herself that her mother had no interest in going to concerts.
Perhaps she remembered this so vividly, remembered the music—it was Mozart, one of the later symphonies—because this might have been the first time she was aware enough to rationalize, to reinvent the story, create her own version of what in fact was happening, for isn’t that what so much of memory, so much of life, is—reinventing a more palatable version of one’s own actions? Ulli suspected that her parents didn’t know how much she struggled to balance their affections, to make sure that she divided herself equally. She never held it against them.
Ulli was sure that her mother knew about the secretaries, but she did not seem to mind being left at home, or perhaps this was Ulli’s hope, her version of what her mother was feeling. She supposed her mother preferred not to know the details. On the rare occasion when her father joined them for dinner, Ulli always felt that her mother was trying too hard to make pleasant conversation, so Ulli tried to entertain them both with stories about school and long summaries of the adventure books she loved to read. Sometimes Ulli talked so much that her father would have to remind her that the purpose of dinner was to eat.
Ulli did not know why her parents got married. There was not even a story about how they met. She liked to think that in the beginning there was something that drew them to each other, but all she knew about them as a couple was the fact of their being married and having her. It was only after Hermann that she understood how quickly passion could turn into unhappiness, but at least this realization gave her hope that her parents had once been happy together, that they could be this unhappy only because they missed something.
Despite the fact that she preferred silence to conversation, her mother insisted on English, and Ulli’s father happily complied, as he was quite proud of his linguistic abilities. In fact, he was the one who schooled Ulli in the mysteries of English spelling and the fine points of its grammar and punctuation, even though he had tremendous difficulties with r, th, and w.
In those days English was not the lingua franca, yet it was, perhaps, the one thing that held their family together, not because they used the words to communicate, but because the words, the language, set them apart from everyone else. Children went out of their way to hide such things as the foreign origin of a parent, so Ulli looked upon her parents’ decision to flaunt their difference with a certain degree of pride. On the rare occasions when they were in public together, her family would pretend they were wild characters and speak loudly in English about their various exploits. One of their favorite stories was that they were thieves who had just robbed an important jewelry store. Ulli and her father talked about where they would hide the goods and what they would do in Argentina following their successful escape. Even her mother found this amusing and would add embellishments to the story. Of course, after the National Socialists came to power, they no longer amused themselves in this way. In fact, they did not speak English again until the Americans arrived at the end of the war and English became a tool that helped them survive in the world rather than retreat from it.
When Ulli found the apartment, she informed her parents that she would be moving. They were surprised, though they should not have been, especially her mother. She supposed her parents believed that the worst was over, and perhaps it was.
“We’re together now,” her father said, even when it was clear that she had made up her mind. She knew he would miss her, but perhaps he was also afraid that without her, he and her mother would no longer be able to live in the same house together, that all the silence between them would finally suffocate them. The strange thing was that the opposite happened. Though Ulli rarely saw her parents those first years after the war, it was obvious that something between them had changed. They sat next to each other on the couch instead of on opposite sides of the room. Every evening from eight to nine, unless the weather was extremely inclement, they walked, not arm in arm, not holding hands, but together, with determination. At some point her mother started working at the business with her father, not as a typist, but as a bookkeeper, for she had always preferred numbers to words. Perhaps they had become tired of being unhappy. Ulli hoped they found again what it was that brought them together in the first place, but perhaps they were only pretending—to themselves, to Ulli—because they did not want to burden her anymore with their unhappiness.
Thus, in an effort to keep her parents from worrying too much about her, Ulli told them two lies: that she had found a job as a clerk in a clothing store and that she was sharing a small place with one of her coworkers. It was time, she explained, to be on her own. “But this is entirely unnecessary,” her father argued. “You have a job. What about the business?”
“I have no interest in typewriters,” she told him. Afterward she felt bad for being so blunt, but