Mr Finkelstein turned back and looked in the old man’s tiny eyes. Now with the business behind him the old man had a moment to waste. Pointing behind Mr Finkelstein he said, ‘They came in and they broke it, the momseirem.’

Turning around, Mr Finkelstein saw a headstone lying on its face. He walked over to it with the old man and stared down. Upon the smooth back of the stone which now looked up at the sky a yellow swastika was painted.

It turned something in his stomach. For the stone in falling had dug a hole in the soft earth of the grave. Tears threatened his eyes and he turned away and looked at the old man.

‘Did they catch them?’

‘They did it at night. Nobody knew till this morning.’

‘They shouldn’t leave that mark on it that way.’

‘They’re getting something to wash it away with. What will be, mister? In America noch.’

Mr Finkelstein looked into the old man’s watery blue eyes. The mystification he saw there, the sadness and the death of hope that this had happened ‘in America noch’- the face and the slumped attitude of the old man somehow recalled his father to him. He shrugged his shoulders and hoisting up his carton of toys walked up the winding road to the gate.

On the trolley home he sat in a quiet mood as does one whose life is approaching a verge, an unwanted climax, a moment that need never have come and yet, despite all planning and all illusory hope, was coming closer and would soon arrive. He felt within him that peculiarly philosophical brooding that is the cemetery’s souvenir to its visitors. And he saw again, as he had seen it many times before in his life, how terribly wrong his father had been and so many other fathers who lay beside him there. That Itzik, that peddler – there was a meaning to his story. And it was not that the Jew was fated to a bloody end. (Mr Finkelstein did not intend to die that way, nor would he allow his children to die that way, nor his tall wife.) The meaning, he saw again as he rode the trolley through Bushwick, was that this Itzik should never have allowed himself to accept a role that was not his, a role that the baron had created for him. When he saw that the baron was bent on diverting the peasants’ wrath from himself, he should have allowed his indignation to carry him away and gotten on his wagon and driven directly home. And then when the pogrom came, as it would have no matter what he did, he could have found strength to fight. It was the pogrom that was inevitable, but not its outcome. Its outcome only seemed inevitable because that money was in his house as the horses’ hoofs came pounding into the village. That money in his house had weakened him, it was the blindfold they had put upon his face and he had no right to let them put it on him. Without that blindfold he would have been ready to fight; with it he was only ready to die.