but he had wanted to put Europe behind him and he liked the efficiency of American highways and motel rooms in the middle of nowhere. It was important for the girls to know their own country before setting forth to explore the world, he told himself, so every summer they traveled up and down the East Coast, visiting national monuments and parks and Civil War battlefields. He could have taken them somewhere far away, but as an adult, he no longer felt the pull of exotic places. His trips to the Soviet Union were enough.
The sun burned his scalp through his thin hair. He wended his way past men younger than he but more bent, weighed down by woolen djellabas and hoods, shuffling in backless slippers. He felt young among them, lifting his feet up, standing straight, breathing in dust and summer smells—garbage and exhaust. He supposed he would have to eat eventually, but for now he liked feeling hungry. The hunger and the heat combined to make him light-headed, as if he were slightly drugged. Noises seemed to come from a distance: car horns, hawkers, music, steps.
Isaac laughed as he walked in the early-afternoon heat, thinking that it had taken him his entire life, more than eighty years, to get even this close to Egypt. Perhaps this was close enough, even though there were no pyramids here, and they had always been the attraction, that and the ostrich egg. If he had the ostrich egg still, he would have buried it here in Morocco, out in the desert maybe, because he would not get to Egypt. One must be realistic. But he did not have it, had not even thought about it since his daughters were young and he had told them about it, about how his father had brought the egg back from Egypt, where he had been building a bridge.
Isaac was ten years old when his father returned with the ostrich egg. It was before he understood that his father didn’t actually build bridges, but merely designed them. At the time he still thought of his father as a real bridge builder, swinging high up over the water, strapped onto a girder or tightroping across a cable. Isaac had wanted to be like his father, and he dreamed about building a bridge across the Atlantic Ocean. He imagined ostriches running round and round the pyramids, with men in white robes and long beards running after them, trying to catch them.
He brought the egg to school and showed it to his class. “This is an ostrich egg from Egypt,” he said, holding it up in the palms of his hands for the class to see.
“There are no ostriches in Egypt,” his teacher said, and the class laughed, but he just smiled, thinking they were stupid and knew nothing about the world because they didn’t have fathers who went to Egypt to build bridges. He did not try to argue with them; he already knew there were some things one could not argue about. So he put the egg back into its blue velvet bag and returned to his seat.
At dinner that night he told his father what his teacher had said. “He is right,” his father said. “I bought the egg from an African trader 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
