The second time Leah and David met was at a sabbath dinner at Leah’s family’s apartment, where he had been invited after her parents decided that the two would make a good match. The match was struck almost before they sat down.

“I will treat her only as a woman should be treated,” David stated at the dinner table, after awing Leah’s parents with an esoteric discourse on the legal obligations of the Jewish priestly class. Her parents were impressed.

“You can tell a fool by his face and a wise one by his eyes,” Leah’s father said after David had left. Leah winced when she heard it, thinking of her own eyes, but when her parents asked her if she wanted to make the match, she thought of those teasing fingers and said yes.

THE NIGHT before their wedding, Leah was plagued by dreams, first the one about her grandmother, and then still others. Asymptotic dreams, dreams where she tried again and again to do something, coming closer and closer to doing it but never quite accomplishing it. In one dream, she was in the factory stitching seams on the fingers of a glove. First she stitched up the side of the glove and formed the little finger, then the ring finger, and so on. But after a few minutes at three seams per minute, she realized that the glove was a never-ending glove. Each time she sewed a finger and moved on to the next finger, it seemed like she was just one finger away from the thumb, but the thumb never came, just more and more and more fingers, one after another.

In frustration she woke up, then fell back to sleep to find herself trying to open a box tied with twine. She kept winding the strings in and out of each other, trying to undo the knots, but somehow with each loop of the twine she managed to tie yet another knot, and another. Soon the knots began to form knots, and after a while Leah found her fingers and then her hands and arms bound to the box, until she couldn’t move anymore. When she woke up from that dream, sweating so much that Freydl’s feet slid off hers, she fell asleep again to find herself feeding Freydl’s cat, the one she had left behind with neighbors in their old town. She fed the cat its usual food, but it kept purring at her for more food, and more and more. After a while it began growing uncontrollably. Leah kept feeding it more, in the hope that it would be satisfied at last and stop, but it simply couldn’t get enough. The cat grew and grew until suddenly Leah looked up from the cat’s dish to find herself standing before a lion. That time she woke up with a scream. Freydl was such a deep sleeper that she didn’t even notice.