Winter Kept Us Warm. Anne Raeff

      The Arrival

      The journey from Rabat was not easy. On the long train ride Isaac stood in the crowded aisle outside the compartments, leaning his head out the window to save himself from the cigarette smoke. After the first stop, about thirty minutes in, a young man forcibly dragged him to a nearby compartment. “Asseyez-vous, monsieur,” the young man screamed, as if he were telling him to go to hell rather than trying to help him. Isaac explained about his asthma. He would die if he inhaled so much smoke in a closed-in compartment. He phrased it that way so his meaning would not be mistaken for politeness, but the young man had ignored him, pulling him into the compartment as he spoke, yelling at the other passengers to move over. Make room for the old man, Isaac imagined he was saying, and he laughed as he fell into the seat they had cleared for him.

      As soon as he was seated, Isaac could feel his throat and lungs clamping up. His laughter turned into coughing. The man sitting next to him offered him water, but it was air he needed, so he gathered his strength, pulled himself up, and ran back to the corridor, to his space at the window. He reached for his inhaler, but he didn’t need it. The sea air was enough.

      After that, they left him alone.

      The train stopped frequently and lingered at each station. He did not allow himself to look at his watch, knowing that would only make the journey seem longer. And then, finally, they were in Meknes. One minute longer, he told himself as he stepped off the train, and he would have slumped to the floor right there in the aisle.

      At the station in Meknes, he engaged a taxi. The driver asked him whether he had a reservation. “The Hotel Atlas is always full,” he said.

      “There will be room,” Isaac assured him.

      “But you do not have a reservation,” the driver insisted.

      Why, Isaac thought, had he not simply said that he had a reservation? Why had he never learned to lie even when it made things easier?

      The taxi smelled of smoke, though the driver wasn’t smoking. Still, Isaac rolled the window down just in case. This upset the driver, who explained that the air-conditioning was on, despite the fact that it was hotter in the cab than outside, where, Isaac was sure, it was already near one hundred degrees.

      “Ah,” Isaac said, making sure there was not even a hint of sarcasm in his tone. The last thing he wanted was an argument with a taxi driver.

      His parents had been in a taxi accident in New York shortly after arriving in the United States from France in 1942, where they had been living in exile. His parents and the driver had been arguing, the driver insisting that the West Side Highway was faster, but his parents wanted him to take Amsterdam Avenue. “The lights on Amsterdam are timed,” they explained.

      “I know, I know. Do you think I’m some kind of idiot?” the taxi driver said, turning around to face Isaac’s parents and losing control, driving into the divider. Somehow none of them had been seriously injured, but after that, Isaac’s parents lost their interest in the outside world. They retreated to the Russian classics and the safety of their dark apartment. Sometimes Isaac caught them speaking Yiddish, which he had never heard them speak before, though as soon as he walked into the room, they reverted quickly to Russian.

      After the accident, Isaac’s parents rarely went out, and they never got into a car again or left the city, not even to visit their oldest friends in Connecticut. His parents, who had not allowed themselves to be vanquished by Stalin or Hitler, had, in the end, been defeated by an ornery taxi driver. It was as if their brush with death had given them the license to admit defeat, to accept that their exile was now permanent.

      But Isaac had been happy to be in New York, far from the old battles of Europe. Still, he had planned to enlist in the army as soon as his parents were settled. He wanted to be part of the fight against fascism. Though he was not particularly optimistic about the world’s future, or even sure that war was the best solution, now that it was on, he wanted to do something. But then his parents had been so shaken by the accident, so derailed, that he did not feel he could leave them. He knew it was just a matter of time until he was drafted, so he relaxed for the first time since the war began. He got a job at Florsheim’s, fetching shoes from the storeroom for the salesmen, and when he was not working, he explored the city.

      His favorite activity was walking from their apartment on 106th Street to Brooklyn, across the Brooklyn Bridge. Once, before he gave up on trying to get his parents to embrace their new home, he took them to see the bridge. His father was an engineer, a builder of bridges. Perhaps, Isaac thought, standing in the wind, looking up at the sky, they would be comforted. They went to see the bridge on a Sunday in spring. His mother had thought there was something not quite right about walking on a bridge just for the sake of walking. “It is not a park,” she said.

      “No, it is not a park,” Isaac had agreed. “But that is what is so wonderful. Only in America would people take a leisurely Sunday walk on a bridge.”

      “And why is that wonderful?” his mother asked.

      But Isaac could not explain. His father walked slowly, his hands deep in his pockets. They walked from the Manhattan end to the Brooklyn end, and then they turned around and walked back. Isaac pointed out the elaborate spiderweb mesh of the cables and various buildings of the Manhattan skyline. Then the three of them took the subway back to their dark apartment on