His grandmother’s house was also scary at night, but only on the outside. Outside the house—he had sneaked outside once while his mother was busy with something else, enjoying the brief moment before she noticed he was missing and raced outside to find him—he could hear the clopping of the neighbor’s milk goat circling the tree where it had been tied when the fence was broken, and some other animals rustling about in their sleep, and he glanced back at the house, where he could see his grandmother standing at the stove by the lit-up window with a look of distraction on her face as she cooked. It was his grandmother’s house, not his grandfather’s. Wilhelm had never met his grandfather, and neither had Wilhelm’s father—he had died before Wilhelm’s father was born. His grandmother stood alone, framed in the window. Through the adjacent window, Wilhelm could see his father talking to her, frowning, pacing back and forth. It was strange, this view. Wilhelm knew it was one room, but if he hadn’t been inside before, he wouldn’t have realized it. It could have been just two little panels, a diptych, photographs framed side by side, not even related at all.

But inside the house it was cozy and warm and small and safe. Wilhelm’s mother sat on the crooked wooden floor with him after dinner as he drew on blank pieces of paper with charcoal pencils his grandmother had given him. He had found some leaves during the day, and his mother taught him how to make leaf rubbings, laying the leaves on the floor (Wilhelm had wondered whether this offended the floor’s dead wooden planks, but the leaves were from plants, not trees) and pressing against them with paper, scratching his pencils—gently now—back and forth and back and forth and back and forth across the paper until a leaf would emerge, magically, as if he had conjured it into being. Later, when he had made too many leaf pictures, he tried to trace his hand on the page. But it kept slipping off the paper, and soon his mother took his hand and gently pressed it down on the page for him, laying each of her fingers on top of each of his as he moved his pencil around their stack of hands, her thumb on his thumb. Her hand was warm and soft, and he felt, in each of his fingers where his touched hers, as if some gentle and beautiful current were flowing from her fingers to his. His pencil skipped, tracing her fingers instead of his own and catching their silhouettes on the paper. “See, now you’re making an image of your own hand, but you’re also making an image of mine,” she said.

“Her image is yours and yours is hers anyway, you should know, because all men are made in the image of God,” his grandmother suddenly said from her chair. Wilhelm’s grandmother spoke in a funny way that you could only understand after you got used to listening to her, and sometimes not even then, with all the wrong vowels and weird words and phrases, as if she were reading from some strange old book. (Yiddish, that was.)