Winter Kept Us Warm

by Anne Raeff

  “I never told anyone about Renate, not even Leo,” she said, and Isaac realized that she had told him not because she wanted absolution or forgiveness, but to acknowledge his love for her.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  “Please, Isaac,” Ulli said.

  Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar. The call to prayer surrounded them. It was as if they could feel the words brushing against their bodies. Their guardian took off his jacket, laid it on the ground before him, and kneeled. He raised his eyes to the heavens, which were beginning to take on a pinkish hue; then he bowed down, touching his forehead to the ground. When he finished his prayers, he stood up and came over to the bench.

  He coughed; Ulli and Isaac did not respond. “Everyone has gone home,” he said, and only then did they pull away from each other. Isaac stood up too quickly, which caused his head to spin so that he almost tipped over. Their guardian reached out to steady him, but he pushed him away.

  “I’m fine,” he said, righting himself.

  “We are fine,” Ulli said.

  “Please, sit. I will call a taxi,” their guardian said.

  “No, we will walk,” Ulli said, and Isaac took her hand.

  “Yes, we will walk.”

  Sleep

  “Maybe it would be good for you to get away from the hotel for a while, rest. You have not rested in so long, Ulli, and I would like to see the desert again,” Isaac said as they walked back through the old city to the hotel. “I haven’t been in the desert since the war,” he continued. “It’s funny; I always thought I would take the girls, especially since they liked the heat. You could think of it as work. You will be my tour guide.”

  Ulli laughed. “We could go tomorrow, after we get some sleep. When I first started coming to Morocco, I used to go to Todra Gorge. It’s all the way in the south, in Berber territory. There’s a nice hotel there, a simple one. Abdoul will drive us.”

  “Don’t you think a train would be better?”

  “There are no trains, only buses,” she explained.

  “Then we can take the bus.”

  “We will be more comfortable with Abdoul. He knows the way.”

  “You are the Morocco specialist,” he said, but she could tell he wanted to take the bus.

  “No, let’s go by bus. It will be an adventure,” she said.

  It was only once they were inside the hotel that Isaac realized how tired he was. Still, though they had said good night, rather than going to his room, he sat down in the lobby while Ulli checked in with the boy on night duty. He wanted to sit for a moment, use the inhaler before taking on the steps, listen to Ulli talking in Arabic in the other room. When Ulli came through the lobby on her way up to her room and found him sitting in the chair, he was thinking he would stay in Meknes for a while, learn Arabic. It would be good for his brain, keep him from losing his faculties.

  “Isaac, I thought you had already gone up,” she said.

  “I was just thinking,” Isaac said.

  “You should get some sleep.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m just going to check in with Abdoul before I retire, let him know that I’ll try to sleep for a few hours,” she said.

  Isaac waited until Ulli was out of sight before climbing the stairs. He knew it would not be easy, and he didn’t want her to see him struggling. Halfway up the stairs he had to sit down and use the inhaler again, and when he finally made it to his room, after taking off his shoes, he didn’t have the energy to undress, so he lay down on his bed fully clothed. He was almost asleep when he heard footsteps in the hall. Ulli, he thought, and he got up, went to the door, opened it just a crack. He watched her walk down the corridor toward her room.

  As soon as she was inside, he followed her. If someone had emerged from one of the other rooms, he might have lost his resolve. He might have turned around and gone back to his room, but he met no one. He knocked. Ulli came to the door. She was still dressed.

  “Isaac,” she said. “Come in.”

  “I’m not disturbing you?” Isaac asked.

  “No. Come,” Ulli said, holding out her hand. He took it, and together they lay down on her bed, and Isaac closed his eyes and thought of nothing, and as the sun burned off the last of the early-morning clouds and the guests of the Hotel Atlas packed their daypacks and checked their guidebooks and stepped out into the day, Ulli and Isaac fell asleep.

  Ulli awoke at around noon to the sound of Isaac’s heavy breathing. She tried to sleep again, fall into the rhythm of his breaths, but they were getting more and more labored, his body shaking from the effort. “Isaac, are you all right?” she whispered, but he did not awaken, and after a while his breaths became less desperate, so she fell asleep again, but she awoke soon afterward with a start, for Isaac’s breathing had taken on a terrible rattling. “Isaac,” she said. “Isaac.” He opened his eyes. “My inhaler. In my pocket,” he managed to say before starting to cough. She helped him sit up, and he took a deep puff from the inhaler, then slumped down again from the effort. “Shake it,” he said between coughs, holding it out to her. He took another puff, and then he fell back, and although the rattling and wheezing were even stronger than before, he fell asleep.

  Ulli felt fear now, finally, not the distant fear she had felt when the man held the knife to her throat, not Renate’s fear. Her fear. She could not lose Isaac now, when she had barely found him. Her whole body trembled, yet she felt calm.

  She called Abdoul, and they stood over Isaac, listening to him breathe. Abdoul wanted to call a doctor, but the rattling had grown less violent and Isaac woke up and took a few puffs from the inhaler. Perhaps he would be fine. Perhaps all he needed was to sleep. She imagined the scene, the doctor arriving, Isaac annoyed at her for making such a fuss.

  “Let’s wait and see how he is later,” Ulli said. “I’ll be fine now,” she told Abdoul, but he insisted on staying with her.

  They sat together, watching Isaac, until the air began to cool again and the sun went down and it was night. Again the rattling grew more intense, and Isaac began to twitch and flail, though he did not wake up. Ulli placed a cloth soaked in cold water on his forehead to help stem the flow of sweat that was streaming down his face and into his eyes. She held his hand. For a while he seemed calmer, but then, suddenly, his eyes popped open. He stared into her eyes, as if he were communicating to her everything that he had not been able to tell her all these years. She did not look away. “You must go see the girls,” he said. “You are the last one now.”

  “I will,” she said.

  “You promise?”

  “I promise,” she said, and he closed his eyes and slept.

  In the morning Isaac’s breathing was even more labored, and Ulli agreed to call a doctor. The doctor examined Isaac, shaking his head as he listened through the stethoscope. He pronounced Isaac’s condition “very serious, very grave.” Isaac’s lungs were filled with fluid. His heart was weak.

  They called an ambulance, and the paramedics tried to lift him from the bed, but he protested, his eyes taking on the glazed intensity of fury. Ulli believed that she saw in those furious eyes his final wish: to stay there, in that room, with her. So she told them all to leave, the doctor, the paramedics, even Abdoul.

  “I will be waiting for your call,” the doctor said.

  Once the doctor was gone, however, Abdoul returned. “I will not bother you. If you need something, I will be here,” he said gravely.

  “If you insist,” Ulli said, but she was relieved that she would not be entirely alone.

  Ulli sat with Isaac through the long day, until it grew dark again and until long after the first call to prayer. Abdoul brought her tea and some bread and cheese, which she left untouched on the table. Isaac was tranquil for short periods, and during those peaceful interludes she recited all the poems she knew by heart in all th
e languages she had learned, beginning with Pushkin and ending, when the sun filled the room again with light, with “Dover Beach”:

  Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  “You were the only one who remained true to all of us—to me, to Leo, to our daughters,” she said, and she was sure he could hear her and sure that she saw something in his eyes, a glimmer of recognition, of forgiveness, though later she decided that this was one of those beliefs, like God and salvation, to which the living selfishly cling when the dying have already let go.

  At dusk Isaac awoke, agitated, pulling at his hair and scratching his chest and arms and legs. Ulli could not bear to watch it, but she could not leave either, so she began pacing up and down the room. Abdoul took a small pipe containing kif out of his pocket, lit it, and held it out to her. “It will soothe him,” he said.

  “But won’t it hurt his lungs?”

  “The smoke is calming. It’s not like tobacco,” he explained.

  Ulli tried holding the pipe to Isaac’s lips, but he clenched his teeth and jerked his head.

  “Let me try,” Abdoul said. He knelt on the floor next to Isaac, humming a slow, deep melody until Isaac began to relax. He took a puff from the pipe, held it, leaning in until his mouth met Isaac’s opened lips and he was able to blow the smoke directly into Isaac’s mouth.

  “You try,” he said to Ulli, handing her the pipe. “Take some for yourself first,” and she did, breathing in, holding the smoke deep in her lungs. Then she imitated Abdoul, pressing her lips to Isaac’s, letting the smoke flow into his mouth.

  “Again,” he said, and after three more puffs, Isaac was calm.

  They stayed with him, listening as the rattling got fainter and fainter, until it stopped completely and Isaac was gone.

  Together Ulli and Abdoul washed the sweat from Isaac’s body. When they were finished, she asked him to leave her alone. She sat next to Isaac, but she did not touch him, for he was no longer Isaac. This was simply his body, an object, like a branch or a chair. How stupid of me to think that at my age there can be anything but endings, she thought.

  She went to Isaac’s room to gather his things—his wallet and passport, pocket watch, address book. She got the toiletry bag from the bathroom, his clothes from the chair, and put everything into his backpack. It was his shoes that made her cry. They were sturdy walking shoes, almost new. He probably bought them just for this trip, she thought. She imagined him at the store, trying them on, walking around to make sure that the heel did not slip, that the toes were not too cramped. They were sitting neatly next to the door, waiting to be of service.

  Abdoul had returned to her room when she came back with Isaac’s backpack. “Let me help you, madame,” he said, taking it from her, though it was not heavy, even with the shoes.

  “Thank you, Abdoul. You have been very kind.”

  “Perhaps you can sleep, madame? You are looking tired,” he said, but there was no time to sleep. She had to make arrangements for the body to be sent back to the United States, send Abdoul to the bank to bring back cash for all the bribes she knew she would have to pay to make things go smoothly, make the call, though that would have to wait until nighttime so that Simone would receive the news during the light of day and—Ulli knew this was the real reason—because she needed the quiet and solitude of night to face her.

  At midnight Ulli told the boy on night duty to go home, assuring him that he would be paid his usual wages even if he left early. She sat for over an hour in front of the phone, listening to the buzzing from the fluorescent light in the entryway, trying to figure out how to identify herself when Simone answered. Was it better to go with a formal approach: This is Ulli Schlemmer. Or should she plunge in with a simple announcement: This is your mother. There was nothing in between. She tried to imagine how it would be when she walked through the gate at the airport and they were waiting for her. What if she didn’t recognize them? What if they were standing there holding one of those signs with her name on it, the way taxi drivers do, or even worse, what if they ran up and embraced her? What if they cried?

  Finally she just picked up the phone, dialed, and, in the end, “This is Ulli” was all she managed to say.

  There was a silence on the other end, and then she heard Simone’s voice. “I’m ready,” Simone said.

  Ulli explained what Simone already knew and said that she was making preparations to accompany the body to New Jersey. Of course Simone said it wasn’t necessary. As long as she helped with the arrangements, they would manage on their side. He was going to be cremated. Those were his wishes. But Ulli insisted that she wanted to do it, and Simone agreed. “If that is what you think is best,” she said kindly, the way, Ulli imagined, she spoke to her patients when they insisted on getting up without her help or said they did not need a bath. She said she and Juliet would pick her up at Newark. They agreed that Ulli would email the flight information once everything was arranged. All this took just five minutes. There were no more details to discuss, but they did not hang up.

  “What did he say?” Simone finally asked. “At the end.” And Ulli understood what she meant—that they should have been there with him, through the night and a day and then another night, listening to his last breaths, that Isaac’s death was yet another thing she had taken from her daughters. The fluorescent lights flickered. The buzzing stopped. And then it began again.

  Acknowledgments

  Winter Kept Us Warm and the characters contained therein would never have made it beyond the borders of my mind and the memory of my laptop had it not been for the help and encouragement of the following people and organizations:

  Thank you, Carolyn Kuebler, and the New England Review for setting the Buchovsky family free and sending them on their first journey into the world. Thank you, Nancy Zafris and the University of Georgia Press, for choosing my collection for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and, thus, breathing life into my diminished spirit. Thank you to my steadfast and true agent, Esmond Harmsworth, who stuck with me and this book until it could find its proper home. Thank you, Dan Smetanka, for taking on this project and for your brilliant and direct editorial guidance. Thank you to all the hardworking Counterpointians: Jennifer Kovitz, Alisha Gorder, Megan Fishmann, Sarah Baline, Wah-Ming Chang, Maxine Bartow, and Nicole Caputo. Thank you, Andy Allen, for the wonderful cover.

  For giving me three and a half quiet and productive weeks of writing in Spain, the country where I first started writing in earnest decades ago, I thank the Fundación Valparaíso.

  For her constant support and encouragement through childhood and adolescence and to this day, I thank my sister, Catherine Raeff. Thank you, also, to my friends around the world who have stood by my writing and to my students past and present who keep me “real” and hopeful about the future. Thank you to my parents for their stories, many of which were the seeds for this book.

  Finally and always, I owe all of my accomplishments, literary and otherwise, to my wife, Lori Ostlund, my first reader, my editor, my muse, and, still, my harshest critic.

  © Dennis Hearne

  About the Author

  anne raeff’s short story collection, The Jungle Around Us, won the 2015 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. The collection was a finalist for the California Book Award and named one of the 100 Best Books of 2016 by the San Francisco Chronicle. Her stories and essays have appeared in New England Review, ZYZZYVA, and Guernica, among other places. She lives in San Francisco
with her wife and two cats.