When the baby was born, a boy, she wanted to name him after Aaron, but since her father Aaron was still living, she couldn’t use the name. Instead she named him Nadav, a strange name, not the sort of name anyone had used much in the last three thousand years. When people asked her about it, she told them it had been her dead husband’s name, and then they didn’t ask any more questions. No one likes to dig up corpses. A few weeks after the baby’s circumcision, she went to a nearby town to have the baby’s portrait taken, and nine months later she sent her parents the sepia photograph of the newborn baby, who had since grown big enough to crawl and wander away from his mother. When the baby got a little bigger, she picked up with the baby and moved far away, to Galicia in Austro-Hungary, to settle in the town where Aaron’s brother Hayyim lived with his wife Sarah and their beautiful children.

Leah had dreamed that she would tell them everything, confiding in unfamiliar faces and ignoring the shame it would bring them. But when she arrived at their house, something stopped her. When she saw his brother’s face at the door, a face so familiar, and the face of the young woman beside him, and the faces of the two little girls squeezing in the doorway behind them, and the face of the little boy that the woman was holding in her arms—a child just a few months older than hers, stretching his little hands toward her own child until both babies burst into a chorus of wailing—she threw her story overboard. She introduced herself to them simply as his dead brother’s friend, a failure from America looking for work. They welcomed her, pretending to believe her. But the wailing of the two baby boys, and the way the man smiled at Leah and reached for Leah’s child to comfort him, and the way the woman tried to draw her own child away, was enough to convince her that they knew—that they assumed the child was Aaron’s, and that it was a bastard child, and that now she was spreading his shame, looking for someone to hide all three of them: herself, the baby, and their dead brother’s memory. And wasn’t that, after all, the truth? That evening, the babies played together. When their mothers tried to separate them, when it was time to go to sleep, they both wailed again, refusing to sleep until they were put to bed side by side.

In the letter she had sent to her parents with the newborn baby’s photograph, she wrote that her husband had died in a fire, not long before the baby was born, while traveling in a distant city.

Chapter 6 A Long and Dreamless Night

CHAPTER 6

A LONG AND DREAMLESS NIGHT