Cemetery? They were going to a cemetery? “To Prague? Yes, I was there last summer with my family,” Leora answered stiffly. “It was beautiful. Are we going to a cemetery?”

“Yes, very beautiful,” Bill Landsmann said thoughtfully. He was listening very selectively. Perhaps, Leora thought, his mind was on that glove after all. “You know, in Prague, in the Middle Ages, the Jews were not allowed to bury their dead except in a very small piece of land by the river. So the cemetery is—”

“I know,” Leora interrupted. “I—”

“—only this one small piece of land. But they had to use this one very small piece of land for six hundred years, so they buried their dead on top of each other, and put their gravestones all on top.”

“I know. I was—”

“This cemetery in Prague, even today, it is fifteen feet above the street level, because everyone was buried only in this tiny cemetery. They still managed to fit everyone.”

“I know.”

“Oh, you were there?”

Bill Landsmann continued talking about the cemetery in Prague, but Leora stopped listening to him. Instead she began thinking again about that lost glove, about where the other glove might be, about the child who had lost it, about whether somehow, in some alternative life, all the lost gloves in the world might be reunited with their owners, and with the other halves of their pairs, so there would no longer be sad and lonely child’s gloves abandoned on the streets. And the two of them, Leora and Bill Landsmann, walked on together.

“See, it is like the cemetery in Prague, because it is high off the ground,” Bill Landsmann said.

They had arrived at a spot near the top of East Mountain, after walking for what felt like a long time alongside a little stream—a stream Leora recognized from the waters-of-Babylon sequence in Bill Landsmann’s first slide show. Now they were in a tiny clearing in the woods that was about the size of his living room. Leora looked around. Considering all of Bill Landsmann’s travel experience, this choice of destination seemed disappointing at best. There was nothing but a patch of grass, soaked through with puddles, and a little park bench. Leora was about to turn around and demand to know why he had taken her there when she noticed a rectangular island of dark brown stone among the puddles at her feet, with an inscription on it:

NADAV
5660–5707

it read in Hebrew across the top. Below that, it read in English:

NADAV LANDSMANN
1899–1946

Leora glanced at Bill Landsmann, who was looking down at the plaque, his attention, for once, completely fixed. “My father,” he said. “He is buried here.”

An immense puddle covered most of the area below the plaque, a rectangular puddle, almost the shape of the grave. Full fathom five thy father lies, Leora thought. Of his bones are coral made. She peered into the puddle and saw Bill Landsmann’s glasses and white hair looking back, interrupted by a wafting leaf. Bill Landsmann had sunk into a deep silence, which Leora found irritating. It hardly seemed noteworthy to her that Bill Landsmann’s father should be dead.