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,” she 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.
For the past year or so, he had been worried about not waking up. His doctor told him that this
