Back home, Leora was looking at the cat again. Sammy by then was about three feet long, with big round ears and ever-growing teeth. She sat down on the couch and began flipping through her magazine, which, she had discovered, is one of the most boring things you can do if you work at a magazine, because you’ve already read everything before the magazine comes out. Sammy climbed up on the couch beside Leora in a single stretch of his disturbingly long legs, but that seemed normal by then. He settled down on the cushion next to hers, and he looked so quiet and soft that she couldn’t resist stroking his back with its little white spots. As she touched him, he raised his head a bit, stretched open his mouth, and yawned, showing off his giant fangs glinting in the afternoon light. That was when she recognized him. He was an ocelot.

When Leora brought her ocelot to the East Mountain Zoo the next day, the zoo’s staff was overjoyed. Ocelots, they informed her, were an endangered species, with fewer than a thousand animals living throughout the world. Their numbers had declined mainly through poaching, though many ocelots had also been captured illegally for the pet trade. When Leora gave her best guess as to how one of these rare specimens had ended up living in her house, she was told that Jason’s father no longer worked at the East Mountain Zoo, and in fact hadn’t for at least a year. No one could explain how Jason might have gotten it. And Leora, with her tourist’s eye that could only see things at specific moments, couldn’t explain it either.

CHAPTER 3

BARBARIANS AT THE GATES

BEFORE HER DEATH, Naomi had dragged Bill Landsmann to enough Holocaust movies that he knew exactly what would happen in them. His son and daughter-in-law knew better than to take him to such things. But Naomi, forgivably naive, really seemed to think that these movies would help her get to know him better, better than she could get to know him through his slide shows—as if something in one of these films would inspire him to describe for her some forgotten image, something from his “past.” By the time Naomi died, he knew all the movies by heart.

These movies always started with a music box. That was because music boxes were in a class with organ-grinders, clowns, carousels, and calliopes—all those forcibly happy, vaguely European things that children are supposed to love, but which really only exist to make adults feel sorry for children, who have no choice but to die or grow up. And as Bill Landsmann noticed, these Holocaust movies always opened with a child, specifically a little boy—blond and adorable, of course, and generally played by some European child actor named Lukasz.

The boy starts out the film in his charming European-looking home, a beautiful oak-paneled apartment decked with lace, dark velvet curtains, and Royal Copenhagen china, not to mention the obligatory silver menorah prominently displayed on the mantel where the Christmas stockings would have been, to prove to the non-Jewish moviegoer that these people are just like everybody else, see, except that they really like candles.