“I believe,” said Rimona, “that he really had the two twin aunts who were killed. And you just have to look at his fingers to see that the part about the pianist in Bucharest is true too. But please, Azariah, don’t tell us any more about youself now. Some other time. Let’s sit quietly for a few minutes and see what we can hear. Then whoever wants can go to Sheikh Dahr and whoever is tired can rest.”

Many birds were about, but none were singing. They were talking to each other in sharp, clipped tones that were neither joyful nor peaceful but quiveringly alive as if to announce some impending danger. Behind their raucous chatter the wind whispered conspiratorially, while something blew from the ruins of the village as light as a murderer’s fingers, as hushed as a rustle of silk.

Azariah noticed it too and knew that it would be only a matter of hours before the winter returned. One night in his childhood, after they had slipped out of Kiev, when they were hiding in the dark cellar of an abandoned farmhouse before the long flight to Uzbekistan, they cooked and ate a little yellow cat. It was Vassily the Russian convert to Judaism who killed it with a blow of his fist when the animal rubbed up against him to be petted. The blizzard outside and the damp within caused the fire to go out before the cat was done, and they had to eat it half raw. But crybaby Zhorzi didn’t want to taste it even though he was hungry, and when Vassily said to him, “If you don’t eat, you won’t be big and strong like Vassily,” he cried even more until Vassily finally clamped a large, red-freckled hand over his mouth and said, “If you don’t shut up, Vassily will make you go fff-ff-f-t just like the cat. You know why? Because Vassily is hungry, that’s why.”

Suddenly, sickened by all his lies, the white ones as well as the black, Azariah confessed to himself that he too had eaten a piece of his own cat after all.