“Wow, I see you’ve got everything catalogued here. What are all those?” Leora’s mother asked, looking at the bookshelves.

Bill Landsmann looked at her as if to answer her question, but he didn’t. “It is wonderful to have you,” he repeated. “I thought we might have something in common. I have visited seventy-two countries, with a special eye to Jewish history. Oh”—he stopped and looked up as a tall woman entered the room—“and this is Anna, my wife.” To Leora, Anna also looked vaguely familiar, a burgundy-headed woman whose hair matched the couch. Leora’s father stood up to shake Anna’s hand, but she only smiled at them, a wide and gracious smile, and hurried to the other side of the room, where she opened the door to a small closet. She took out a screen, the kind Leora remembered using to watch filmstrips in elementary school, and set it up against the window.

“Today I will show you some slides of many various places in the world,” Bill Landsmann continued. “I have arranged these particular slides so that they show the story of the Bible, displayed in pictures and works of art.” Anna went back to the closet, this time emerging with a folding chair and a music stand, which she arranged on the far side of the room, opposite the screen. Then she went back into the closet a third time. Leora began to think of this as a sort of magic act, like a magician pulling random objects out of a black hat.

Anna came out of the closet with an ordinary slide projector. She placed it on an end table near the folding chair and plugged it in, completing the magic act before disappearing into another room.

Meanwhile Leora had forgotten entirely about Bill Landsmann, who had not said a word since Anna had reappeared. Now she noticed that he had wandered over to the bookshelves. He was holding the dangling black notebook, and Leora watched as he leafed through it for a moment, squinting though his thick glasses. Then he looked up at the bookshelf and stood on his tiptoes. It seemed, in Leora’s eyes, as if something were stretching him from floor to ceiling, his waist narrowing in the center like a taut rubber band. He selected box number seventeen. Once he had brought it down, he pried it open to reveal a loaded slide carousel, which he placed on the projector. He then removed a pile of typed onionskin sheets from inside the box, placed them on the music stand, and turned on a flashlight. The lights in the room went out.

“I would like to welcome you on a tour around the world,” Bill Landsmann announced, reading from the script on the music stand, “a tour on which you will see the many sites of the Hebrew Bible, appearing in images around the world. We will begin with Genesis, with the story of the creation.” And so the story began, formless and void, in the darkness on the face of the deep, and the voice of Bill Landsmann hovered over the waters.