by Anne Raeff
“And now you must excuse me. I have to attend to my duties,” Ulli said.
“Can I help?” Isaac asked.
“Absolutely not. You are my guest.”
“Then I will explore the medina,” he said, for wasn’t exploring what one did when one arrived in a new place?
“I will ask Abdoul to accompany you.”
“Thank you, but I prefer to be on my own,” he said, resting his hand briefly on her arm.
“You are not too tired?”
“No, Ulli, I am not too tired.”
“You must take a card, then, in case you get lost, though you can’t, really. Eventually, no matter which direction you take, you will find your way out of the medina. And when you do, it will be like emerging from the Middle Ages.”
“And what if I just keep retracing my steps, only to find myself on the same street?” he asked.
“You have to have faith, Isaac.”
“Since when have you had faith?” he asked.
“Only in this. We are all allowed our occasional irrationalities, don’t you think?”
“I suppose,” Isaac said.
“The merchants can be quite aggressive, but it’s all an act, part of the charm,” she continued. “You cannot get angry. You must laugh or pretend that you’re hard of hearing. Or you can speak to them in Russian. That usually keeps them at a distance. I have found Russian to be very useful in that way.”
A young couple, looking as if they had not bathed in a while and were exhausted by the heat, entered the lobby and walked tentatively in the direction of the reception desk, so tentatively, Isaac thought, that if Ulli had not quickly moved to the desk, they would have turned around and walked out.
“Thank you,” he called to her, waving as he headed for the door, and she smiled, a smile both for him and for the couple, who had set down their backpacks and were taking out their passports.
Of course, she needs time, Isaac thought as he pushed open the door into the afternoon sun. What had he expected? For her to drop everything just for him? A hotel did not run itself. And he was perfectly capable of exploring on his own.
When Isaac was a child, he had wanted more than anything to visit Egypt. When Simone and Juliet were young, he thought of taking them to Europe, but he had wanted to put Europe behind him and he liked the efficiency of American highways and motel rooms in the middle of nowhere. It was important for the girls to know their own country before setting forth to explore the world, he told himself, so every summer they traveled up and down the East Coast, visiting national monuments and parks and Civil War battlefields. He could have taken them somewhere far away, but as an adult, he no longer felt the pull of exotic places. His trips to the Soviet Union were enough.
The sun burned his scalp through his thin hair. He wended his way past men younger than he but more bent, weighed down by woolen djellabas and hoods, shuffling in backless slippers. He felt young among them, lifting his feet up, standing straight, breathing in dust and summer smells—garbage and exhaust. He supposed he would have to eat eventually, but for now he liked feeling hungry. The hunger and the heat combined to make him light-headed, as if he were slightly drugged. Noises seemed to come from a distance: car horns, hawkers, music, steps.
Isaac laughed as he walked in the early-afternoon heat, thinking that it had taken him his entire life, more than eighty years, to get even this close to Egypt. Perhaps this was close enough, even though there were no pyramids here, and they had always been the attraction, that and the ostrich egg. If he had the ostrich egg still, he would have buried it here in Morocco, out in the desert maybe, because he would not get to Egypt. One must be realistic. But he did not have it, had not even thought about it since his daughters were young and he had told them about it, about how his father had brought the egg back from Egypt, where he had been building a bridge.
Isaac was ten years old when his father returned with the ostrich egg. It was before he understood that his father didn’t actually build bridges, but merely designed them. At the time he still thought of his father as a real bridge builder, swinging high up over the water, strapped onto a girder or tightroping across a cable. Isaac had wanted to be like his father, and he dreamed about building a bridge across the Atlantic Ocean. He imagined ostriches running round and round the pyramids, with men in white robes and long beards running after them, trying to catch them.
He brought the egg to school and showed it to his class. “This is an ostrich egg from Egypt,” he said, holding it up in the palms of his hands for the class to see.
“There are no ostriches in Egypt,” his teacher said, and the class laughed, but he just smiled, thinking they were stupid and knew nothing about the world because they didn’t have fathers who went to Egypt to build bridges. He did not try to argue with them; he already knew there were some things one could not argue about. So he put the egg back into its blue velvet bag and returned to his seat.
At dinner that night he told his father what his teacher had said. “He is right,” his father said. “I bought the egg from an African trader in the bazaar in Cairo. He was unusually tall, and he had a box of ostrich eggs. He wanted me to buy them all, but I told him I only had room for one. We haggled for almost an hour over the price,” his father said proudly.
After that, the egg fell out of favor. Isaac moved it from its position of honor on his desk to a dresser drawer, but every few weeks or so, he checked on it, just to see that it was still intact, and slowly he realized that it was childish to blame the egg for not being Egyptian. Neither the egg nor the ostrich had done anything to mislead him, so he stopped being angry. When he was bored or having difficulty with math or an especially convoluted passage from Virgil, he would stroke the egg and talk to it in his head.
He was disappointed in his father, who had proudly announced upon his return that he had not bothered to see the pyramids, had built the bridge and then returned to Paris, glad to be done with that country. Isaac could not understand his father’s lack of interest in one of civilization’s greatest achievements, for he naturally favored the past, which seemed so much more tangible than the future that so interested his parents. “The past is only important because it is what creates the future” was one of his father’s favorite phrases, and though Isaac never argued with his father, he disagreed with him about this.
While Isaac read about Spartans and Turks, Napoleon’s victories and defeats, the Hapsburgs, the Moguls, Genghis Khan, and Catherine the Great, his parents and their small circle of Russian exiles—Mensheviks who were allowed to live in France as stateless, passportless refugees with no right to work—concentrated on the future. They stayed up until all hours of the night even when they were tired from working the menial, under-the-table jobs that they could find. They typed away furiously on crippled typewriters to keep alive the free Russian press and the “soft” revolutionary principles of the Menshevik cause—what they referred to as the humane path to socialism—to prove to the world that though they had fled from Stalin’s madness (their deaths would have accomplished nothing), though they lived in dingy apartments in the outer arrondissements of Paris and were forced to build bridges in Egypt, they had not given up, would not give up until all the betrayers of socialism had fallen.
Yet Isaac did not take the ostrich egg with him when they left Europe. As he contemplated it for the last time in his room at the pensão in Lisbon, where they had spent eight long months waiting for the visas to America, he thought that bringing the egg would be a weakness on his part, a cowardly clinging to the past and to Europe, which had so obviously betrayed them. However, once he and the other refugees had all boarded the ship in Lisbon, he understood that the opposite was true: the ostrich egg was the one thing he should have taken with him, for it contained in its fragile shell more certainty than any future.
If they had been on an ordinary voyage, he might very well have walked right off
the ship and returned to the pensão to save the ostrich egg. But he was certainly not the only one who had left behind the wrong things. On deck, after realizing his mistake, he had tried to calm himself by touching the soft leather of his shoes, which was a trick his mother had taught him on his first day of school. “Pretend your shoelace is untied and just let your fingers rest on the soft leather of your shoes. You will see. Everything will be all right.” And although at the time he’d been skeptical about his mother’s advice, he found himself trying it out that first day during recess while the other boys ran around the playground. He knelt down and found that his mother was right. On the day they left Europe, the leather felt dry and cold. He realized then that he should have destroyed the egg instead of leaving it exposed and naked on the pensão’s rickety dressing table. There was a moment, brief, for that is what a moment is, when he almost decided to go back, not for it—they were too close to departure to even hope there was a possibility of retrieving the egg and bringing it safely back to the ship in time—but rather to return to the ostrich egg, to save it. It was then, after that brief moment of indecision, that he knew he would be a historian. He would not make the mistake his parents had made of trying to change history. He would stick with what was known.
At the mouth of the medina, Isaac hesitated, unsure whether he was strong enough to tackle the cramped chaos, the shrillness of commerce, but he could not turn back now, could not return to the hotel with nothing to report, with no accomplishments. He took a deep breath and plunged in. I will end up where I end up, he thought, letting himself sink into the shadows of the covered streets. He laughed and pushed onward. “I am in Morocco in the medina,” he said out loud. “Imagine that.”
He stopped at a nut stand and bought a bag of cashews, his favorite snack, and another of dried figs, which he devoured as he walked. He had not been that hungry in a long time, for since his retirement, he’d been in the habit of eating as soon as he detected the slightest presence of hunger. He stopped at a food stand and ate a kebab at a crude wooden table with several other men. He ate fast, as if he were in a hurry, as if he had to be back at his shop to meet an important customer. He was proud of himself for watching first to see how much the other men paid, surprised that no one approached him promising the most beautiful rugs in the world, the shiniest brass, the highest quality leather, as Ulli had said would happen.
Isaac continued on after his lunch, past shops that smelled of cheap, recently cured leather. He sensed vaguely that men were calling to him, but they did not pull at his sleeve or run after him. Then there were the tailor shops, each hardly large enough to hold the tailor and his scissors and threads. Isaac came to the section devoted to slippers, where the salesmen held them over their hands as if they were puppets or mittens. In every shop they sold the same kind of yellow slippers. He had never owned yellow shoes and thought it would be nice to buy a pair, but he had no idea how much he should pay for them.
Isaac knew about shoes and, though it was more than sixty years since his job at Florsheim’s, he still felt at home in shoe stores. He loved the smell of shoe polish, and his shoe-shining kit was always well stocked with brushes and cloths and black, brown, and neutral polish. He wanted to ask the merchants whether they held the slippers to their noses when no one else was around, let the leather come alive so that the animal from which it was taken was reborn—just as Isaac had been reborn in New York when he was finally far away from danger and the old arguments of Europe.
Isaac picked up a pair of the yellow slippers without realizing what he was doing. He noted that the leather was not of a good quality. It was stiff and hard, smelled of curing. “Very beautiful, very strong, and very cheap,” the merchant said, taking the slippers from him and clapping them together like cymbals.
“Yes,” Isaac said. “I am just looking.”
“Looking? Looking is no good. Sit down.” He pushed Isaac onto a little stool and began removing his shoes.
“Thank you. I do not need slippers.”
“Yes, yes,” the merchant said, pushing them onto Isaac’s feet. “Stand,” he said. “You will see how comfortable.”
Isaac took a few steps in the slippers.
“Perfect,” the merchant said, though they were obviously too big. If he had been a serious salesman, he would have been able to tell by the way Isaac walked.
“Too small,” Isaac said.
“No, perfect,” the man insisted. A price was mentioned, and Isaac explained that he did not need them. Another price was mentioned, and again Isaac explained. Once more, he was pushed onto the stool, and the slippers were removed, wrapped in newspaper, and put into a pink plastic bag. “Eighty dirham,” the merchant said. Isaac paid dutifully, put on his shoes, took the bag, thanked the slipper merchant, and left.
With the pink plastic bag, he was no longer invisible. The merchants who before had let him go by without a word, without even a nod, beckoned to him from their medieval stalls like prostitutes from murky corners. Not that he had ever been the type of man beckoned by prostitutes. Even when he was stationed in Germany after the war, when there were more prostitutes than teachers, he was usually spared their advances. There was something about his height and the determination of his steps, the way he always looked purposely ahead, that discouraged attempts to rope him in. That is not to say that he avoided prostitutes altogether. He had been a soldier, after all, but each time—how many times was it? Two, maybe three?—he regretted it, as he now did the poorly made yellow slippers. Copper pots, silk rugs, Berber knives, jewelry, European underwear, fine cloth, belts, goldfish, watches. What if I put my hands over my ears and scream? Isaac asked himself, but he dared not do it. He had a feeling they would laugh.
Instead, he put his hands in his pockets and trudged onward. The card Ulli had given him was there, sharp-edged and practical. He clutched it for reassurance, but he was determined not to use it. And so he kept walking, looking straight ahead, ignoring their calls, ignoring the tugging at his sleeve. At one point he felt a crowd gathering around him, but he kept walking, feeling the crowd move with him. He felt as if he were walking through waist-high water, through streets thick with floating garbage—plastic bags and bottles, pineapples, a mattress, newspaper—somewhere he had never been before. It weighed against his chest and flooded his lungs. He had never understood why so many people loved the smell of rain and talked about how it cleansed the air, how they could breathe more freely after it had fallen.
The crowd of merchants drew nearer, encircling him, pulling him this way and that, grabbing at his clothes, hammering him like a summer downpour. He counted slowly, following each breath. His doctor had taught him to do this. He said it was a form of meditation, but Isaac did not think of it as such. It was purely a method to keep breathing, to be conscious of the act of breathing. There was no other goal, no desire to clear the mind, to focus on peace or understanding or nothingness. It was all about breathing. Yet it was the thought of collapsing there in the medina and everyone coming to his aid—carrying him into one of the shops, opening his shirt, listening to his heart—more than the counting that kept him moving forward, kept his lungs sucking in the thick smells of cigarettes and cheap leather and male sweat. And then he found himself catapulted out of the covered lanes of the medina and into the shocking brightness of the plaza. He could feel his pupils contracting from the light, his lungs expanding. He did not dare to look back, but he knew they had not followed him. If they were laughing, it did not matter. He had made it to the safe zone. He had emerged, as Ulli had told him he would, from the Middle Ages.
Isaac arrived back at the Hotel Atlas tired but with no desire to rest. “Isaac,” Ulli said, “look at you.” And she was right. His shirt was drenched in sweat, his hair disheveled, his shoes covered with dust.
Isaac held up the slippers. “For you,” he said.
Ulli opened the bag carefully. She held them up. “Thank you, Isaac,” sh
e said.
“They are not of good quality,” he apologized.
“No,” she said, “but I will wear them with pleasure.”
He said he would take a shower, and then they would have a late lunch together in the garden. “Nothing heavy,” Ulli promised. Before his retirement, Isaac had not been in the habit of eating lunch at all. He fortified himself with a good breakfast—yogurt, fruit, kasha, or a thick slice of bread—and then he was set for an uninterrupted day in the library or in class. Sometimes he would get light-headed from hunger by three or four, but he always knew it would pass, and then he could sail on until dinner at seven or eight.
He lingered under the hot water of the shower longer than he had planned. He had almost forgotten the pleasure of cleaning up after physical activity. He lay down on the bed. There was an almost imperceptible breeze passing through the room. He would not have noticed it if he had dried off. He did not want to keep Ulli waiting, but he was so tired that he did not have the strength to rise from the bed. He would rest for just a while. Ulli would not mind.
He was awakened by a knock at the door. Ulli’s voice. He knew that he was awake, that she was knocking and calling to him, but he could not answer. He tried to get up, but his eyes were closing on him. When he awoke the next time, it was almost dark. Someone had covered him with a light cotton blanket. He was shivering. But it was so hot before in the market. He felt that there was someone in the room, someone sitting next to him on the bed, touching his forehead, his lips, or was that just his imagination?
The next time he awakened, he was alone. He was bothered, briefly, by a flickering light from a sign across the street. He heard people talking, the sound of water. For some reason he was worried about fire. If there’s a fire, I won’t be able to get up from the bed, he thought. He pondered going to the window to see how high up he was, to see whether jumping was a possibility, but the idea of placing his feet on the floor, of walking to the window, of parting the curtains made him weary. Before he fell asleep again, he wondered if this was what dying felt like.