Winter Kept Us Warm

by Anne Raeff

  “I will be fine,” Isaac assured him. “Please tell madame that I will not be having lunch at the hotel,” he added, bowing.

  He found the gas station and the store that sold used televisions, just as Abdoul had said, and the grand taxi station, the school. He followed the directions carefully, stopping at every intersection to assess his progress, and he arrived at the market without any glitches. “Volubilis?” he asked a toothless man who was probably quite a bit younger than he was, and the man pulled him by the sleeve toward a bus. After speaking to the bus driver, he pushed Isaac onto the bus. “Troi dirhams,” the driver said, and Isaac paid him. He was the only passenger on the bus, so he had his pick of seats. He chose one next to the window about a quarter of the way back. “Ici,” the bus driver called to him, pointing to the seat right behind him.

  “Thank you,” Isaac called back. “I am comfortable here.”

  “Ici. C’est mieux,” the driver insisted, and though Isaac didn’t see what was better about it, he moved up to the seat behind the driver.

  The driver was smoking, and the smoke wafted slowly toward him, riding on the thick, hot air. Isaac opened the window and leaned out, but the smoke reached him anyway, mixing with the smells of diesel and hot fruit. He concentrated on not coughing, counting his breaths—in and out, in and out—for he did not want the bus driver to think he was a nuisance, an old man, a foreigner who wanted to deprive him of one of his few pleasures. After a while, passengers started to board the bus, and the smell of smoke mingled with the smell of sweat. A young man with a duffel bag sat down next to him and lit a cigarette. This was the true test of endurance. The young man tapped Isaac on the shoulder, and when Isaac turned to him, he offered him a cigarette.

  “Non, merci,” Isaac said. “Je ne fume pas.”

  “Pff,” the young man snorted.

  “I have asthma,” Isaac explained, and the young man smiled skeptically.

  The bus was full now. The latecomers were standing in the aisles. Isaac was thirsty. He had forgotten to bring water, but as the bus finally set forth, the breeze diluted the smoke, and Isaac could feel his air passages relax. They stopped often, picking up more passengers, until there was no more standing room. As the bus finally picked up speed, the young man reached over him and closed the window.

  “But why?” Isaac asked.

  “The draft carries disease,” the young man explained.

  Isaac did not argue. If he were the praying sort, he would have prayed for the young man not to smoke again. Instead, he prepared himself for the next cigarette—which didn’t come. Perhaps it was too hot to smoke. The driver put on a tape, and the bus seemed to move in rhythm with the music. The scenery was pleasant—olive groves, dry earth, hills. They came to the town of Moulay Idris, and Isaac disembarked. “Not Volubilis,” the bus driver told him.

  “I know,” Isaac said. The bus driver said something in Arabic, and some people laughed.

  Isaac found himself in the middle of a small square. The green-tiled pyramids of the shrine loomed ahead. Why had he gotten off here? He had little interest in religious shrines, especially those he was not even allowed to visit, and he had been looking forward to seeing Volubilis after learning from the guidebook that the Romans “had dreamt of penetrating the Atlas but they had never managed to subdue the Berbers.” At Volubilis their imperial road had ended.

  Strangely enough, Isaac was not approached by anyone when he got off the bus, and even as he headed toward the shrine, no one paid him any attention. He felt invisible and consequently emboldened—courageous, in fact, though danger was not on his mind—and though he still could not give a reason for stopping here rather than continuing on to Volubilis, he was pleased with his decision. The shrine was there, right in front of him, and he found himself walking toward the entrance. non-muslims prohibited beyond this point, a sign said, but Isaac felt compelled to go inside, to see what it was that he was not allowed to see, to disobey the rules for once, after all these years of doing what he was supposed to do.

  Inside, there were men praying. He walked along the perimeter of the hall. What if I have an asthma attack here? he thought. He reached into his pocket. The inhaler was there, ready like a gun. He completed a full circle and began to walk around it again. Someone was following him, but he did not turn around. He could hear the man’s breathing—hard, as if he were running. Or were those only his own labored breaths? He realized then that the man was not following him, but was merely walking as he was, round and round. Is that what is done, like at the Kaaba in Mecca?

  He felt the phlegm rising, lodging itself in the back of his throat. He tried to clear his throat without coughing. He would sit awhile, in a corner behind a column, where he could use the inhaler, pull himself together.

  He could feel the coolness of the floor through his pants. He leaned forward and pressed one cheek against the column, then the other. In the distance, he heard water. The fountain, he thought. He breathed in deeply: there was a smell of cathedrals without the incense. It must be the stone. One would not think that stone had a smell, but Isaac knew it did, knew the way it lingered in the air. He thought of his mother. She would be waiting on the sidelines. When the treatment was over, she would take him to the chaise longue and wrap him in a wool blanket that smelled of animals. He liked lying in the sun. He liked the murmur of voices around him. He found it comforting. It was like listening to music.

  The place where his mother brought him to take the waters was in the mountains. There would come a day, she told him, after five, six, ten summers, when the waters would finally wash away the asthma. He had to be patient, though, very patient. He liked the mountains, but he would have preferred being near the ocean. He had the feeling that swimming in the sea would truly make him strong.

  The treatment took place in a room made of all marble—marble ceilings and floors and walls. He stood facing the wall and held on to a copper handle with both hands. Next to him, spread out along the wall, were the other “special cases.” One summer there was an old bald man whom Isaac imagined was being treated to make his hair grow back. He and the bald man were generally joined by a fat gentleman who wore a huge ring with a green stone. The three of them stood, clutching their copper handles, barebacked, with towels wrapped around their waists. Behind them were three men in white who aimed the fire hoses at them and counted in unison—“One, two, three.” Then the water was upon him, pressing him up against the wall.

  In the afternoons he spent long periods by himself. After lunch, his mother disappeared. She preferred to take her nap in her room rather than outside in the fresh air that she insisted was so good for him. He had his books to look at and paper and colored pencils. Often, while sitting peacefully on the chaise longue, he would have an asthma attack. Sometimes he had three or four attacks in an afternoon, but he never told his mother. He did not want to disappoint her, for she seemed to enjoy the hotel. There were some other Russian ladies who were different from the Russians they knew in Paris. They did not talk about politics. His mother drank coffee with them, but she did not speak much in their presence, though she smiled when she was with them and seemed to enjoy their company.

  If someone had asked him whether he liked taking the waters, he would have said that he did not, but the truth was, he could not imagine spending his summers any other way. He could not see himself riding bicycles or playing soccer. He could not imagine sleeping outside and singing songs way into the night and going for days without bathing, which is what the children of his parents’ friends did all summer long at a camp for young socialists. His father had wanted to send him to camp, along with all his medicines and strict instructions about not overexerting himself, but his mother would not have it. Secretly, Isaac was glad he did not have to spend the summer with the children of his parents’ friends. Although he considered them friends, he had enough of them during the year and was perfectly happy to spend two months wit
hout them, and without the noise and excitement that children brought with them wherever they went.

  Still, he did not think his summers were easy—the weight of an angry river crushing his back, pushing him up against the marble wall. He began to think of the men who controlled the water hoses as his enemies—they were the Bolsheviks, and he was the brave Menshevik, holding on for the true revolution. He muttered to himself, “Bolshevik pigs,” and chuckled as the first blast of water hit his spine. Though he did not really have a clear understanding of the difference between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, he knew the Mensheviks were good, because his father was one, and he knew the Bolsheviks were bad, because they stole the revolution and killed many of his father’s friends and forced Isaac and his parents to flee Russia when he was three.

  It was toward the end of his last summer of taking the waters—he was seventeen—that one of his fellow patients, a Dutchman, died during the treatment. Isaac was in his usual place, and the patient stood to his left. The man was his parents’ age, neither young nor old. They had never spoken, though they endured the hoses together every morning. Not even five minutes into the treatment, the Dutchman fell to the floor, and the man in white lowered the hose so the water would still hit him right in the middle of the back, just as he always did when someone fell. He would not have stopped until the end of the session if it had not been for Isaac, who knew immediately that the Dutchman was dead. He could see the man’s eyes staring blankly at the wall. Isaac turned around and faced the water head-on. The water hit him right in the chest, and though he had nothing to hold on to, he did not lose his footing. “He’s dead!” Isaac screamed over the noise of gushing water. “He’s dead!” he screamed again, pointing to the man slumped on the marble floor.

  Now, as Isaac opened his eyes and saw the arches of the shrine above him and the crowd of men around him, as their faces went in and out of focus in time with the throbbing of his head, he realized that he could have simply walked away, refused to be subjected to the water. Holding on had not been the only option. Sometimes escape was an act of strength.

  “Monsieur, monsieur—” The voice of a young boy reached him from what seemed like very far away, but the boy was standing over him, pulling on his sleeve. Who was this boy with sleep in his eyes, shimmering almost in a shaft of light?

  “You collapsed, monsieur,” the boy explained, and then Isaac remembered getting off the bus, the shrine.

  The others were talking, arguing, pointing at him. They were not pleased. The boy said something to them, and they lowered their voices, shaking their heads, still not content.

  “Please,” Isaac said to the boy. “Help me up.”

  “But you are too weak,” the boy answered, so Isaac got up by himself. The boy tried to help him then, but Isaac pushed him away.

  “I am not a child,” he said, realizing that this must sound strange to the boy, who was, in fact, a child. The men surrounded him, moving in. “What do they want?” Isaac asked the boy.

  “It is nothing,” the boy said. “Come.” He took Isaac’s hand, and they walked toward the door. When they reached the door, Isaac had to fight off the urge to turn around, to wave at the surly crowd they had left behind. “Go now,” the boy ordered him, and Isaac walked out the door.

  On the bus back to Meknes, there were musicians. They did not stop between songs, or perhaps what they were playing was one continuous song folding back on itself, repeating rhythms and melodies and then diving into the unknown without warning. One of the musicians squeezed through the standing passengers, collecting money. Isaac was generous, as he was pleased with their performance and imagined that it was not easy to play so vigorously while standing in a moving bus, especially when the temperature was surely over one hundred degrees. They were on their way to a wedding, they told him, an important wedding of the daughter of an important man. “You must come. You cannot leave Morocco without having gone to a wedding,” they said, and the drummer wrote the address on the inside cover of a matchbook and handed it to Isaac.

  “Thank you,” Isaac said, putting the matchbook into his pocket.

  They began playing again, and he kept his eyes closed, concentrating on the music. There was something about it—the combination of all the seemingly contradictory sounds—that was strangely peaceful, almost like Berlin after the war. He could see Ulli at the kitchen table, leaning in like a woman in a Vermeer, but it was nighttime and there was no light coming in through a window, no scene outside a window. There was no window at all. There was just Ulli sitting at a table, conjugating verbs. He always imagined it like this: he would be lying on the sofa in the living room, listening to her studying, and he would get up quietly, go to the kitchen, watch her from the doorway. Leo would be in the other room, sleeping, unaware of what was about to happen. Isaac would not say a word as he approached, but she would know he was coming. She would be waiting, and he would pull her up from her chair, turn her around. There was always the wall. He was ashamed of the wall, the harshness of it, but he could never think of it any other way. He always pulled her hands above her head. Yet there was a tenderness to it always, a slowness, slow the way dreams are slow, and then they stayed standing, clutching each other until they felt cold, for, though it was warm in the apartment, it was still winter and there were drafts. They wrapped themselves in Isaac’s blanket and lay on the rug, holding each other until they were warm again. After a while they fell asleep, and in the morning Leo found them there and did not wake them. He showered and got dressed and slipped out the door, and they did not hear any of it because they were sleeping.

  When the bus finally reached the marketplace, Isaac was drenched in sweat, but he stood up without having to hold on to the luggage rack above his head. He even lingered awhile and bought a thin wooden kif pipe from an old man whose fingers were stained yellow from tobacco. “If you want something for your pipe, I will send you to the right person,” the man said as he was wrapping it up in newspaper.

  “No, thank you,” Isaac said. “I do not smoke.”

  “Comme vous voulez,” the man said, going back to the pipe he was carving, bending his head, it seemed to Isaac, more deeply over his work than necessary.

  “I bought it because it’s beautiful,” Isaac said, but the man did not look up.

  “Have you been to the shrine of Moulay Idris?” Isaac asked.

  “Yes, everyone has been to the shrine of Moulay Idris,” the man said, still not looking up from his work.

  “I have just come from there,” Isaac said.

  “You are a Muslim?” the man asked, looking up now from his carving.

  “No,” Isaac said.

  “Then you are not allowed to enter,” the man said.

  “No one stopped me. I simply walked through the door,” Isaac explained.

  “God will not be happy with you,” the man said, waving him off with a kingly impatience, and Isaac turned away. What would be the point of trying to explain that he had not been testing God or his laws, but testing himself?

  He set forth in the direction of the hotel. He wanted to see Ulli. Perhaps she had changed her mind. Perhaps she had been worried all this time, wondering where he was, and she would be standing at the door, wringing her hands.

  He heard music, and he thought at first that he was merely remembering the sound of it from the bus. He turned around, and then there they were, walking abreast down the street toward him and the medieval gate through which he was about to pass. It was as if they were coming to get him. “Monsieur,” the drummer called to him, waving.

  “Where are you going?” asked the fat fellow who played the violinlike instrument.

  “My hotel is just down there,” Isaac said, pointing down the street.

  “The Hotel Atlas?” the fat fellow asked.

  “Yes, how did you know?”

  “We play there once a year for the owner’s birthday. It�
�s a lavish event, and all the important people of Meknes are invited,” one of the others said.

  “In the winter,” Isaac said.

  “Yes, in the winter,” the same fellow responded.

  “But you must come with us to the wedding,” said the oud player, who had been standing off to the side, seemingly disinterested.

  “Thank you, but I must return to my friend,” Isaac said.

  “But your friend is invited too. Everyone is invited,” they said in unison, as if they had rehearsed it.

  “My friend cannot leave the hotel. She has her guests to look after,” Isaac said.

  “Your friend is the owner?” the drummer asked.

  “Yes, Ulli, Madame Schlemmer.” He did not know how to refer to her. “So you see, it is not possible,” Isaac said, bowing slightly.

  “Surely she will be there too. Everyone who is important will be there,” the portly musician said. “It would be a great insult if she did not attend.”

  “Very well, comme vous voulez,” he said, laughing at his own joke, and as soon as he said it, he felt invigorated. “To the wedding, where the important people are.”

  And hooking arms with Isaac, the portly musician and the oud player led him down the street toward the wedding.

  Family

  Abdoul had run back to the hotel to tell Ulli that Isaac was on his way to Volubilis, all alone. And he was going by bus. Abdoul wanted to go after him in the Mercedes. If he left right away, he would be able to catch him before he boarded. Part of Ulli wanted to let Abdoul run after Isaac, but if he wanted to go to Volubilis alone on the market bus, who was she to stop him? “He is old, Abdoul, but not an imbecile,” she said instead.

  “I did not say he was an imbecile, madame, but not only imbeciles make unwise decisions,” Abdoul replied. “Remember the sunstroke?”

  “I am sure he will be fine. If something happens, people will look after him.”