Winter Kept Us Warm. Anne Raeff

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