Bill Landsmann sat down on the bench, and Leora sat down beside him, not saying anything. Searching for something to do during that silence, she found herself staring at the Hebrew name on the stone. Nadav. It looked bare and empty, and then Leora realized that the name was incomplete. Usually, on tombstones, a person’s Hebrew name is given with his father’s name as well, as in “Nadav son of X.” But here there was no X, apparently. Then Leora examined the English dates on Nadav Landsmann’s grave and tried to do the math in her head. 1899–1946. That would make him—fifty-seven? No, forty-seven. It seemed like a young age to die. But if Nadav Landsmann were still alive, Leora thought, he would have been remarkably old, like one of those shriveled central Asian women in Bill Landsmann’s slides. He was Naomi’s great-grandfather, after all. Leora watched the leaves in the water for a few moments before daring to say anything. And when she did speak, her voice sounded strange, at least to her own ears.

“Why is he buried over here?” Leora asked. “This isn’t near any cemetery, is it?”

She was somewhat curious, but mostly she was just making conversation, to keep from drowning in that guilty silence. That was her last mistake concerning Bill Landsmann: avoiding guilty silences. Because when Bill Landsmann spoke, he said, “A suicide cannot be buried in a Jewish cemetery, even if he is a Jew. That is Jewish law.”

Now Leora was really struck silent, the sort of bottomless silence that only comes from being afraid to ask questions. But as she felt herself falling into that silent ocean, deeper than the fifty years between them, she suddenly decided to blurt out two words:

“What happened?”

Bill Landsmann shrugged, not looking at her. After what seemed like an eternity, he declared, “Perhaps we can just say that he did not like to travel.” He still didn’t turn to face her. “I thought I might tell Naomi about him, someday. My son named Naomi after him, even though I didn’t want him to. But I never did tell Naomi about him. I thought that you might—” And then, although Leora barely noticed it at first, Bill Landsmann started crying—silently, staring down at the ground and pinching his eyes shut, shuddering with a pulse that shook his small, hunched back.

Leora watched him as he tried to obscure his face in the collar of his jacket. And then, suddenly and shudderingly, she once again saw herself and Bill Landsmann as if from the outside: a young girl in a black coat sitting on a bench, a white-haired man in a dark jacket seated beside her, his elbows resting on his knees, his head in his hands, staring down at nothing. The stone wasn’t visible from this perspective, just the shimmer of the puddle between fallen fresh leaves and blades of pale green grass. Above the two people seated on the bench hovered a canopy of fresh leaves, high above, and the blue sky etched a delicate pattern between them. The man trembled, the girl shifted uncomfortably, the wind blew a loose blade of grass onto the girl’s coat, and in Leora’s disembodied observation she crouched down, framed the composition, and blinked, trapping it forever on the slide film of her retina.