Modena and Ulla's relationship

Modena and Ulla’s relationship moves from an intimate shared past through a painful separation to a reunion that vindicates the certainty with which Modena waits for her. After Ulla leaves for Germany, Modena is left severely disfigured and apparently abandoned; he nevertheless believes she will return and continues to imagine a life they will share. Her eventual return makes his seemingly delusional hope an unsettlingly accurate reading of a bond that neither distance nor the passage of time has erased.

Shared Life and Separation

Before their separation, Modena and Ulla had places they used to visit together. Modena later tells Lin that he no longer goes to Leopold’s or to any of those other places. This withdrawal has a practical consequence: Ulla will not be able to find him by returning to their old haunts. It also marks the relationship’s absence in the city. The places remain, but the shared routine that once gave them meaning has been interrupted.

The break is bound up with the physical aftermath of violence. Lin thinks of Ulla as having left Modena on a bloody bed to die, and sees the scarred survivor before him as someone she might now find horrifying. The scene makes the separation look final from the outside: Ulla has gone to Germany, Modena’s face has been transformed, and Lin cannot imagine her returning to him. Yet the account gives no simple explanation that resolves their history into blame or indifference. Modena says he is glad Ulla went to Germany, even as he rejects Lin’s insistence that she will not come back. His response holds concern for her welfare alongside an unwavering belief in their future together.

Modena’s Vigil and Imagined Home

Modena turns waiting into a deliberate routine. He watches Lin and the people around him, including Karla, Lisa, and Vikram, because he believes Ulla may come to one of them when she returns. He has stopped appearing at the places where they were once together, so watching others becomes his way of making sure he will learn when she is near. His expectation is not presented as a passing hope: he describes a plan for how he will find her and meet her again.

He has also prepared a home for that anticipated life. Modena has an apartment, though he does not own it, and has paid more than a year’s rent in advance. It is small but comfortable, and the main window looks out toward the sea. He remembers that Ulla loves the sea and had always wanted a house near it. The detail gives his faith a material form: his expectation is bound to an actual room, a view, and a place he imagines as theirs. His preparations are made despite the prospect that Ulla may never return, and despite Lin’s inability to share his confidence.

His search extends to the President Hotel, a place Modena knows Ulla loves, in the Back Bay area she favours. Ramesh goes inside on his behalf and checks whether a guest named Ulla Volkenberg is there; Modena himself stays outside and does not enter. After a Lufthansa flight arrives from Germany, he wonders whether she might have come on it. He checks after every flight, turning the possibility of her return into a recurring practice rather than a single dramatic bet. Lin observes that Modena speaks calmly about this prospect, then drinks his tea with contented abstraction. That composure makes the certainty more difficult to dismiss and, to Lin, more disturbing.

A Changed Modena

The man who explains these plans is strikingly different from the Modena Lin remembers. When they were both regulars at Leopold’s, Modena could go weeks, sometimes as long as a month, without speaking to Lin. Now, although Lin has had to pursue him into a blind alley to get him talking, Modena becomes disconcertingly voluble. His altered face and newly talkative manner force Lin to adjust to a survivor who is at once recognizable and changed.

Modena’s speech also carries the sound of a life between languages. Lin notices how his Spanish accent moves fluently between Hindi and English, blending words from both into a hybrid way of speaking. Listening to that softness, Lin wonders whether this vocal music had been part of the mysterious bond between Modena and Ulla, and whether they had talked together for hours when alone. The thought remains Lin’s speculation, not a confirmed account of their private life; still, it makes their intimacy legible through the quality of Modena’s voice as well as through his memories and plans. When the meeting ends, he looks nervously from side to side before leaving, but his attention immediately returns to the possibility of finding Ulla.

Return and Recognition

Ulla does return. In a later account, she is found sitting on a bed with Modena lying across her legs, his head near her shoulder. She explains that she inherited substantial money from her father, whose family was wealthy in the German town where she was born. Her family had cut her off while she was heavily involved with drugs, and she received nothing from them for years, until her father died. After inheriting the money, she decides to come back and look for Modena. She says she feels guilty and cannot live with herself otherwise.

Ulla finds him waiting, and the two are together when the visitor sees them. The scene unsettles that observer, who compares their pose to Michelangelo’s Pietà: Modena rests across Ulla’s legs, his damaged face visible beside her. The comparison gives their reunion the shape of an image of tenderness amid suffering, but the observer also admits that the sight feels strange and disturbing. The reunion does not undo Modena’s disfigurement or erase the years of separation. It does, however, replace Lin’s confident prediction of rejection with the fact of Ulla’s return and closeness.

Lin recognizes the reversal directly. He had believed Modena was crazy to insist that Ulla would come back; after hearing how she found him, he acknowledges that Modena was right. The relationship’s significance lies in this gap between what can be inferred from appearances and what the people involved still feel. Modena’s scarred face seems, to Lin, to make reunion nearly impossible, while Ulla’s return reveals that guilt, memory, and attachment have carried her back to the man he never stopped expecting to see again.