He takes her hand with its flashlight in his, guiding its light to the doll in the upstairs bedroom, the one standing next to the easel, the one wearing the ring on her forehead. The flashlight beam flickers, jittering along the doll’s waist. He reaches with his other hand under the tiny easel and turns on the light behind the slide. The painting glows in the darkness.

Jake turns on his flashlight and points it below Leora’s face, trying not to shine it in her eyes. “I tried to fix it, Leora,” he says, feeling his voice beginning to shake. “I wanted to fix up the whole house. Really—I bought all these things for it, and I was working on it, I’ve been working on it all day, and I was planning it for weeks, but then the flood came, and I couldn’t—”

But Leora, her face streaked with water, interrupts him, her own flashlight beam moving back to the doll beside the painting. “I like it this way, Jake. It looks more like a real house.”

And then she notices the ring.

NINETEEN-SEVENTEEN. Nadav was not yet eighteen years old, and he and Isaac had just been drafted. Nadav was grateful. Tired of the endless track of study with no future in sight other than to become one of the teachers he had grown to revile, Nadav saw in the war an open gate. Isaac felt differently, of course, but there wasn’t much anyone could do about it, especially with no money to bribe petty officials or to help them run away. The “brothers” cut their hair, shaved the soft beginnings of their beards, and went off. But the war gate opened wider than Nadav had ever imagined.

What was horrifying wasn’t so much the numbers of the dead, the piles of bodies in the bombed-out anthills. Nor was it the proximity to the dead, the friendships forged by months spent breathing on each other in the trenches and then severed by a single shot, nor even the dead themselves, their bodies destroyed in ways that men had never destroyed other men’s bodies before—blown to bits, flung over barbed wire, pierced by machine-gun fire, choked by chemicals from poison gas. What was horrifying was the fact that no one, not only not the privates but also, even more horrifyingly, not even the officers or even the generals, had even the most fleeting notion of what was really about to happen on those battlefields. Paging through a book years later in a library in Vienna, Nadav once glanced at a photograph of an elite French battalion being sent off to the war in 1914. They were riding on horseback, carrying swords.