Ulli had not seemed disappointed to see him.
“Isaac,” she had said. “Isaac,” he said out loud in the shower. He emerged from his room invigorated and confident. “Isaac,” he whispered as he descended the stairs, stepping slowly, as if he were a dignitary, a Latin American general with a sash of medals.
“Ah, monsieur.” A middle-aged man with thick, graying hair and bad teeth approached him. “Madame would like you to wait in the dining room,” he said, taking Isaac’s arm and leading him across the lobby to the dining room. After a few moments Ulli appeared, carrying a plateful of oranges. “I thought you would like something fresh,” she said. She sat down, took up a knife, and began to cut carefully; the peel came off in one piece. She separated the sections, arranging them on the plate. “Take some, please.”
Isaac put a section of the orange into his mouth. Only when the orange had burst open did he realize how thirsty he was. He took another piece and another. “Aren’t you going to have any?” he asked.
“They are not good for my stomach,” Ulli said.
“But I cannot possibly eat six oranges myself.”
“Of course you can’t.” Ulli laughed. “But it would not be hospitable to offer only one orange.”
“But six?”
“I will not be offended if you do not eat them all,” Ulli said, smiling. Isaac ended up eating three oranges.
“In some strange way, I don’t think I was surprised to see you,” Ulli said.
“Don’t tell me you have turned into a psychic,” Isaac said.
“You know I have no use for such things,” Ulli said, and they left it at that. They were good at that, at leaving things.
“I thought the air here would do me good. The humidity is hard for me,” he said, knowing how ridiculous this sounded, for his decision to come had nothing to do with something as mundane as the climate. But he had to ease into things, give Ulli a chance to get used to his presence.
“The mountains are nearby, and so is the ancient site of Volubilis,” she said, following his lead. “I have not been on an excursion for a while. Perhaps we could go.”
“I would like that, but don’t feel you have to entertain me.”
“Of course not,” Ulli said, squeezing his hand. Had it really been almost forty years since he’d seen her?
“And now you must excuse me. I have to attend to my duties,” Ulli said.
“Can I help?” Isaac asked.
“Absolutely not. You are my guest.”
“Then I will explore the medina,” he said, for wasn’t exploring what one did when one arrived in a new place?
“I will ask Abdoul to accompany you.”
“Thank you, but I prefer to be on my own,” he said, resting his hand briefly on her arm.
“You are not too tired?”
“No, Ulli, I am not too tired.”
“You must take a card, then, in case you get lost, though you can’t, really. Eventually, no matter which direction you take, you will find your way out of the medina. And when you do, it will be like emerging from the Middle Ages.”
“And what if I just keep retracing my steps, only to find myself on the same street?” he asked.
“You have to have faith, Isaac.”
“Since when have you had faith?” he asked.
“Only in this. We are all allowed our occasional irrationalities, don’t you think?”
“I suppose,” Isaac said.
“The merchants can be quite aggressive, but it’s all an act, part of the charm,” she continued. “You cannot get angry. You must laugh or pretend that you’re hard of hearing. Or you can speak to them in Russian. That usually keeps them at a distance. I have found Russian to be very useful in that way.”
A young couple, looking as if they had not bathed in a while and were exhausted by the heat, entered the lobby and walked tentatively in the direction of the reception desk, so tentatively, Isaac thought, that if Ulli had not quickly moved to the desk, they would have turned around and walked out.
“Thank you,” he called to her, waving as he headed for the door, and she smiled, a smile both for him and for the couple, who had set down their backpacks and were taking out their passports.
Of course, she needs time, Isaac thought as he pushed open the door into the afternoon sun. What had he expected? For her to drop everything just for him? A hotel did not run itself. And he was perfectly capable of exploring on his own.
When Isaac was a child, he had wanted more than anything to visit Egypt. When Simone and Juliet were young, he thought of taking them to Europe, 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