Winter Kept Us Warm

by Anne Raeff

  He shook his head. “Three is plenty,” he said. “Thank you. I’ll pay you back for everything.”

  That Monday, Lucas was not there when they came home from work. But they heard him come in late, long after they had turned off the light, heard him tiptoeing up the stairs, shutting the door to his room gently so as not to wake them, but they had been awake, worrying about where he had gone.

  The next evening, he stayed home, but they did not ask him where he had been the night before. They were afraid that if they asked him questions, if they tried to set rules, he would take off, and then what would become of him? Still, they knew that if he were to stay longer, they would have to do something. A fifteen-year-old boy could not just go wandering about at night. A fifteen-year-old boy could not spend his days sitting on the beach, watching the ocean, smoking.

  On Wednesday night Lucas came home at four in the morning—drunk. Leo had to carry him up the stairs, take off his shoes, get him into bed. “Thank you,” Lucas kept muttering. “Thank you, thank you.”

  The next day, Leo stayed home. Oliver didn’t think it was a good idea. “You’re getting too embroiled,” he said.

  “He needs guidance. He’s like us. Don’t you remember what it was like, how lonely, how frightening?”

  “But he can’t stay with us for good. It’s not realistic. Eventually we’ll have to tell the police. If someone finds out, we’ll be in serious trouble.”

  “So what do you want to do, send him back out on the street, back to that beach?”

  “I’m saying that we have to obey the law, Leo, go through the proper channels. What if his parents are looking for him, and they find him with us?”

  “Follow the law? We are against the law, Oliver.”

  “That’s why it’s so dangerous.”

  “We have to do something,” Leo said. “We can’t just send him out there with no one to protect him.”

  “No, but we have to be careful.”

  “I’ll call my lawyer. I’m sure there’s a way.”

  “Even then, Leo. What if he runs off again? We can’t get too attached.”

  “I know,” Leo said, but he already was.

  Lucas didn’t get up until two that afternoon.

  “I made coffee,” Leo said when Lucas came downstairs.

  “I thought you would be at work,” Lucas said.

  “Sit down,” Leo said, setting the coffee on the kitchen table.

  Lucas sat down, picked up the mug. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Where do you go?” Leo asked.

  “Out,” Lucas said.

  “Why?” Leo asked.

  “To make money,” Lucas said.

  “Not at the beach?” Leo said.

  “Not at the beach. I’m never going there again.”

  “But Oliver and I can take care of you,” Leo said. “We’d like you to stay. You could go to school. You have to go to school.”

  Lucas laughed. “You don’t know anything about me,” he said.

  “I know you need a home,” Leo said. “I know that if I had had a place to go when I was your age, someone to talk to who was like me, so many things would have been better.”

  Lucas did not reply, so Leo kept talking. He told Lucas about Bidor and how he had betrayed him.

  “Why did you tell me this?” Lucas asked.

  “Because I want you to know something about me,” Leo said.

  “I have no stories,” Lucas said.

  “Everyone has a story,” Leo said, but he understood that if he pushed the boy to tell more, he would flee.

  That night Lucas went out again, and this time he did not return. The next night, Leo and Oliver went to the cruises, looking for him. “He’s so light you can carry him up the stairs in your arms,” Leo said when anyone asked what he looked like.

  “He could be anyone,” one man said. “There are so many of them now.”

  They looked for Lucas every night for a month, until Oliver said that they had to stop. But Leo kept looking on his own, though he never told Oliver about it. On Thursday nights, when Oliver jammed with his jazz quintet, Leo went to one of the cruises, where he chose the youngest boy and took him out to dinner at a diner, telling him to order whatever he wanted. After dinner, he took the boy back to the cruise, gave him his card and a hundred-dollar bill, and asked him to call if he ever came across Lucas, but he never heard from any of them. Sometimes, late at night when Oliver was sleeping, Leo slipped out into the night and walked to the public beach where Lucas had been beaten. He didn’t talk to anyone, didn’t pass around his photo, hand out his card. He kept his distance, but he was sure that if Lucas were there in the darkness, he would find him.

  Back in New Jersey, Simone filled three journals with a novel titled The Story of Lucas. The first volume was about his life before he ran away from home. His father was a drunk, like Huck’s father. His mother ran off with another man, leaving him with his father the drunk, but after a few months she came back. Then she spent all her time crying about the man she had run off with, who had left her for another woman, until one day she found a new man and left Lucas alone again, though he had been alone all along. The second volume was about his journey to Los Angeles and how he wanted to be an actor, and the evil men who beat him up but didn’t touch his face, and how Simone had found him. In the third volume he gets discovered by Hollywood, becomes a famous actor, and marries a famous actress who can’t have children of her own, so they adopt twenty orphans and move to the mountains and build a house on the shores of a pristine lake that’s so clear you can see the fish swimming and the rocks at the bottom.

  What she didn’t write about was Lucas’s time with Leo and Oliver after she was gone, but at night, during those moments between wakefulness and sleep, she imagined the three of them walking along the beach, picking up shells. She thought of Lucas lying on the bed in her room when she visited Leo for the first and last time.

  Then Leo called to tell them that Lucas was gone. She knew when Isaac got off the phone that something terrible had happened. Isaac made tea, brought it out to the living room. “Lucas has disappeared,” he said.

  “Maybe he’ll come back,” Juliet said, but Simone knew he wouldn’t.

  Later, after Isaac had tucked her in, assured her that Lucas was okay, that he knew how to take care of himself, she wondered whether he would have stayed if she had been there, but she didn’t let herself think about that for too long. Instead, she called for Isaac, not too loudly so as not to wake her sister, but loudly enough so that he could hear.

  “I won’t ever run away,” Simone said once he was there with her, sitting on the bed, stroking her brow.

  “Neither will I,” Isaac said.

  On those nights Simone asked Isaac to type so that she could fall asleep to the sound of the typewriter. “Make it a long letter,” Simone said. “It might take me some time to fall asleep.”

  “I will,” Isaac said, kissing her good night.

  On the day she finished The Story of Lucas, Simone decided it was time to learn how to type. She approached typing the way she did everything—with discipline and patience. She copied her favorite chapters from A Wrinkle in Time and typed her favorite poem, “The Tyger,” one hundred times until she could do it perfectly, including the punctuation, without a single mistake. When she was able to type ten pages without errors, she felt she was ready to type out the final version of The Story of Lucas. She did it in one sitting, setting up at her father’s typing table at dawn on a Saturday morning and working without a break until dinnertime. The next day, she proofread it and made corrections, though there were not many. When it was done, Isaac asked her what she had written. Isaac respected her project, had brought her lunch so that she could continue working. He knew she would show it to him when she was ready.

  “It’s a novel,” she replied.

&n
bsp; “Can I read it?” he asked.

  “Not now,” she said. “You have to be patient.”

  “I will be patient, then,” Isaac said.

  Simone placed both the typed and handwritten manuscripts in a box, upon which she wrote in thick Magic Marker: the writing of simone buchovsky. She put the box in the right-hand corner of her closet, next to the shelf that contained Leo’s gifts. After she finished The Story of Lucas, Simone did not add anything to the box until Mr. Modiano, her first patient, died. She wrote his story, The Story of Mr. Modiano, in five poems. After that she continued this tradition. When one of her patients died, she would memorialize the patient in a series of poems and put them in the box for safekeeping. The Story of Lucas would be the only work of prose in the box. Perhaps this was because prose was more suitable to honor the life of someone whose death had never been confirmed, who might be alive today, walking down a street, buying a pack of cigarettes, sleeping.

  The Wedding

  The wedding took place not too far from the Hotel Atlas, still within the walls of the old city, in the bride’s family’s palatial seventeenth-century home, which had an interior courtyard complete with fountains and magnificent tile work. Isaac and the musicians entered a large vestibule, where they added their shoes to the sea of footwear already accumulating. The musicians introduced him to the host, a plump, soft man with a prominent prayer bump on his forehead, who escorted Isaac personally to the grand room, where the wedding guests were seated on lavish cushions around brass tables piled high with pastries.

  “Please,” the man said, sweeping his hand in an arc through the air, indicating the vastness of his hospitality and goodwill. “I am most honored to have you as my guest.” He clapped softly, and immediately a fez-wearing young man appeared and led Isaac to a table along the wall at which a group of young men, students at the university in Fez, were sitting. “Please,” they said, sweeping their hands in the air above the table in the same manner as the host and making room for him to settle into the cushions.

  Once seated on the floor, Isaac was surprised at how comfortable he was. He stretched his legs out in front of him and kept his back straight, like the bufón in the Velázquez painting, he thought, though, of course, there was nothing dwarflike about him.

  The young men insisted that he eat pastries and drink tea, and Isaac ate heartily, trying all the choices, asking the young men about the ingredients. “I believe I taste a hint of cardamom and orange peel. Am I right?” he asked, chewing carefully, looking up to the ceiling as if he were tasting wine.

  “We do not know about spices. We don’t know how to cook,” they told Isaac.

  “That is a pity,” Isaac said. “One cannot truly appreciate food unless one knows how to cook.”

  The young men laughed in that way young men laugh when they think they know more than they do. When the students learned that Isaac was American, they asked him quite earnestly about American politics and why Americans hated Muslims, why they couldn’t understand that the terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks were not real Muslims, and Isaac attempted to explain—the usual explanations about oil and fear, accompanied by reassurances that the majority of the American people did not agree with the government. His tone was that of a teacher—didactic yet patient—as if he were in a classroom, leaning on a lectern.

  “Then why do they vote for people they don’t agree with?” the young men asked.

  “Many people don’t vote, even when it’s for president,” Isaac explained.

  “And why can’t they vote?” they wanted to know.

  “They can, but they don’t believe in the system, so they don’t vote.”

  “It is better to have a king,” one of the students said.

  “What if the king is bad?” Isaac asked.

  “Then he will be deposed, Insha’Allah, and a better king will come to the throne.”

  “Like what happened to Idris I?” Isaac asked.

  “Idris was a martyr. He died because he refused to turn his back on God. He was killed because of human greed.”

  “And why does God allow this greed?” Isaac asked.

  “We must trust in God. We must trust in what he does,” one of them said, and Isaac nodded in acknowledgment of what the young man had said.

  The music grew louder, and the wedding guests, including their table companions, got up to dance, women in one group, men in another.

  The young men stood up. “Come, let us dance,” they said, and Isaac rocked to his feet and followed them to the center of the hall where the men were. “Like this,” they said, raising their arms and shaking their shoulders, and Isaac raised his arms and shook his shoulders, closing his eyes, letting the music guide him, but he grew dizzy, so he opened his eyes, and there was Ulli sitting at a table of women on the other side of the room. The women did not make any attempts to pull Ulli into their conversation. She was looking into the distance, in the direction of the musicians.

  Isaac walked toward her, moving with the current of the dancers, redirecting himself to take advantage of the flow. He had wanted to appear right in front of her, but instead he came up from the side, stood near her table for a moment, watching her before making his move.

  “Ulli,” he said, but she did not hear him because of the music. “Ulli,” he said again, putting his hand on her shoulder.

  She turned around then. “Isaac,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was invited by the musicians. I met them on the bus on the way back from the shrine of Moulay Idris.”

  The music was getting louder. “What?” Ulli said.

  “I have been to the shrine of Moulay Idris,” he said. “Inside,” he added, sitting down on the floor next to her.

  “I was worried,” she said.

  “You told me to go away.”

  “I know,” Ulli said. There were circles under her eyes, and on her left cheek was a bruise the size of a coin.

  “What happened?” Isaac asked.

  “Nothing,” Ulli said, covering the bruise with her hand. “So tell me, how did you get in to the shrine?”

  “I just walked in,” he said.

  “Perhaps you are invisible,” Ulli said.

  Perhaps that is what you want, Isaac thought, but I am not invisible. I am here. “I thought for sure someone would stop me,” he said.

  “Maybe they decided you were a Muslim,” she offered.

  “Maybe they didn’t want to have to scold an old man. It’s quite something how much we can get away with at our age.”

  “I hate that,” she said, “the pity. I would rather be pushed and shoved about like the rest of humanity.”

  “I guess people figure we’ve had our share of that,” Isaac said. “Or maybe God was watching over me,” he added, and for a moment she thought he meant it, but then he laughed. “You thought I was serious, didn’t you?”

  “Just for a moment,” Ulli said.

  “Well, a lot can change in forty years. I suppose we shouldn’t assume that nothing has changed.”

  “You always said that the more things change, the more they stay the same,” Ulli reminded him. “Do you still believe that?”

  “I don’t know whether I ever believed it. Like all aphorisms, it is true and false at the same time.”

  “What an Isaac thing to say,” Ulli said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just something you would say.” She put her hand to her cheek again, pressed on the bruise, felt her pulse in it, a throbbing and then a dull pain spreading into her jaw and throat.

  “I’m sorry I sent you away. It’s just that it’s been so long, and it isn’t easy. Isaac, I’m sorry.”

  He wanted to be angry, angry that she said she was sorry, angry about the girls, about her leaving him at the breakfast table, but all he felt was
relief to be in her presence.

  Four young men carried the bride and groom in on golden thrones, parading them around for all to see. The groom was not a young man. His suit, though obviously expensive and of good quality, might have fit him when he was twenty, but his thick thighs caused the fabric to pull at the crotch, and his belly strained against the jacket. The bride, who could not have been more than sixteen, sat frozen on her throne, looking straight ahead. She looked like someone with a gun held to her head.

  Ulli knew the look. This was not her first Moroccan wedding, nor the first time she had been witness to the ceremony of an arranged marriage. She had seen the faces of fearful brides, makeup caked onto rigid faces, hands clasped nervously in laps, but she felt that this girl’s fear was different. This girl knew she would not learn to love this man who was about to become her husband, knew that she would never want his touch, that she and her husband would not talk at night in the dark about their dreams of the future. No, this bride was sure about what was to come, like Renate as she took her first step toward the Russian soldiers. The bride sat tall on her throne, her hands calm in her lap. Ulli wanted more than anything else to close her eyes, but she forced herself to look. What would she have done if she had caught the bride’s eye? Would she have smiled and waved at the girl the way she had waved at her daughters when she left them?

  “Poor girl,” Isaac said, but Ulli did not respond. He wanted to touch her, but he was afraid she would pull away.

  The music resumed at an even more frenzied pace; the whooping of the wedding guests became warlike. Around and around they paraded the bride, whose expression never changed. The groom’s golden throne passed so close to their table that Ulli felt a drop of his perspiration fall on her hand, like acid burning through her thinning skin. Her legs had fallen asleep, and she wanted to get up, stretch them, return them to life.

  The servants brought food, covering the brass table with delicacies—a chicken, a plate of couscous with an entire leg of lamb, salads of all kinds, a grilled fish, pigeons, bread.