After five rings, she picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Leora! Your school day is over, yes?”

“Mr. Landsmann?” She almost dropped the receiver.

He laughed. “You recognized my voice!”

“Mr. Landsmann, where are you? How did you call me? How did you know I was here?”

“Relax,” he said. “Look outside, see?”

Slowly, Leora turned around in the booth until she could see outside the school’s glass front doors. About fifty yards down across the school’s front lawn, surrounded by piles of fresh-cut grass, a figure whom she could only assume was Bill Landsmann stood next to the other pay phone, waving at her. This still left several things unexplained, but Leora was too stunned to think about them.

“Listen, Leora, do you have maybe a few minutes? I would like to show you something. Not at my house—somewhere else.”

The thought of Bill Landsmann existing somewhere outside of his collection of slides intrigued her, though she didn’t want to admit it. She began breathing again. “You mean now?” she asked.

He coughed. The wind was blowing outside, and it was becoming difficult to understand him. Leora wished he would just hang up the phone and come inside. But he didn’t. “Yes, now, or perhaps later also. If we go later, you can come back to my house too, and I can show you some more of my sli—”

She cut him off. “Actually, now would be just fine,” she said. “I have to go home in an hour, though.” Nothing too tedious could really happen in only an hour, Leora reasoned, particularly if there were no slides involved. And besides, there was something compelling about it. For the first time, she was being invited to join Bill Landsmann on his travels.

“Good, then,” Bill Landsmann said. “Why don’t you come outside, and we will go for a little walk.”

THEY WALKED about half a mile together, mostly uphill. Leora saw that they were walking toward East Mountain, the town nature reservation. As she moved along at Bill Landsmann’s side, she looked at everything discretely, as if each scene that appeared before her eyes were unrelated to the one before: the newly grown, uncallused leaves blossoming above her head; the few fallen fresh leaves beneath her feet; the tiny, dirty, soaked child’s glove that lay by the side of the road. Bill Landsmann, who had been looking at the ground, spotted that glove on the ground too—she saw his eyes darting to it—and Leora wondered if he felt the same way she did, a certain sadness too deep and delicate even to name, when he saw a child’s glove abandoned in the street. But Bill Landsmann didn’t dwell on the glove. Instead he suddenly looked up and into the distance, as if he could see the place from afar. And the two of them walked on together.

“This place we are going,” he said, clearing his throat, “reminds me of the Jewish cemetery in Prague. You have been there?”