Jake detected a note of smugness in Yehudah’s voice, which he had somehow expected. That was what bothered him, he realized. Mad Hatters always seemed so smug, as if having no doubts about one’s own life were itself the highest virtue. As a scholar, Jake believed, in the deepest sense of believing, that this wasn’t true, that doubt itself had the power to be the very agent of truth. He knew that the people who had changed Jewish life for the good hadn’t been the ones who didn’t question life as it was, but those who did and who therefore demanded better—the brotherless daughters in the Book of Numbers who had demanded their father’s inheritance despite their gender, the prophet Jeremiah who had insisted that people pray to God and build houses and plant gardens even in exile, the rabbis who had required that the mother’s religion, not the father’s, determine whether a child was Jewish so as not to abandon children of rape, the obstinately secular Theodor Herzl, who actually stated, exactly fifty years before the creation of the state of Israel, that there could be a state of Israel in exactly fifty years. Yet despite everything, Mad Hatters still roamed the planet, remnants of a seventeenth-century religious revival in the Carpathian Mountains who somehow felt the need to act smug while selling diamonds to professors of Jewish history. That pissed him off.

But there was something different about Yehudah, Jake thought, something slightly off from your standard Mad Hatter. What was it? He had, of course, looked at Yehudah’s ring finger already—as he had been looking at every man’s ring finger lately, on the streets, at the university, on the bus. Wide rings, narrow rings, round rings, flat rings, gold, silver, platinum, Jake didn’t really care what they were so much as he cared why they were. Behind the rings on these legions of unfamiliar men, he thought to himself each time he spied one on the bus, stood legions of women, one woman for each man’s ring, tied to each other by tiny invisible strings attaching her ring to his, a web of millions of invisible strings crisscrossing the whole city, the whole country, the whole world. But then he remembered that some religious Jewish men don’t wear wedding rings; only the women do.

“Are you married?” Jake asked, glancing at the Mad Hatter’s beard. Then he suddenly remembered who he was talking to: Abramovitch’s son-in-law. God, did he feel dumb.