To the southwest, above the heights surrounding the village of Ein Karem, clouds began to move, as though an unseen hand were drawing a curtain. Just as his mother used to go around the flat drawing all the curtains on winter evenings. One night, when he was three or four, she forgot to draw the curtains in his bedroom. He woke and saw a dim shape outside staring motionlessly at him. A long, thin shape surrounded by a circle of pale light. Then it went out. It materialized again, like moon-touched mist, at the other window. Then it went out again. He remembered how he woke in a panic and sat up in bed crying. His mother came in and leaned over him in a nightdress that had an exquisite scent. She looked long and white and moon-touched too. She held him in her arms and promised him that there was nothing there, that the shape was just a dream. Then she drew both the curtains carefully, rearranged his bedclothes, and kissed him on the forehead. Even though he eventually stopped crying and burrowed under his blanket, even though she stayed on his bed until he fell asleep again, Fima knew, even now, with utter and absolute certainty, that it was not a dream, and that his mother knew it too and had lied to him. Even now, half a century later, he was still convinced that there had been a stranger out there. Not in a dream but outside, on the other side of the windowpanes. And that his mother had seen him too. And he knew that that lie was the worst lie he had ever been told. It was that lie that snatched away his infant brother and doomed his mother to disappear in her prime, and himself to be here and yet not here all these years, seeking in vain what he had not really lost and without the faintest idea what it was or what it looked like, or where to look, or how.

Even if someday he found it, how would he know?

Maybe he had found it already, and dropped it and moved on, still searching like a blind man?

Cranes wheel and whirl and are gone.