“Oh no,” Bill Landsmann laughed. “My wife, she travels with me sometimes, but really she does not like to travel. So I usually travel on my own.” He picked up the slide carousel and began putting it away, and Leora noticed a certain tenderness he had when he handled the slides, as if he were caressing a family heirloom, something he had inherited from someone long dead.

“On your own? That’s crazy! Don’t you get lonely?”

“Oh no,” he said again. “I think people can see more when they travel by themselves. I always find it much easier to see what I want to see when I travel alone. I am having an operation in a few weeks, and after that I would like to start planning my next travels.”

“Where to?” Leora asked, though she had begun to feel uneasy. There was something strange, almost obscene, she felt, about sitting with Naomi’s grandfather and not discussing Naomi, yet it was clear that neither of them wanted to be the first to mention her. The name hung in the air over every word they spoke, almost like a smell.

“Birobidzhan, I think,” he said. “That is a part of Russia now, near the Manchurian border. When Stalin was there, he made this place into a Soviet Jewish state. Near China, can you believe it? But it is true. That was a Jewish state.”

“Really,” Leora said with finality, no longer hiding her discomfort. The smell was beginning to cloud her nostrils, smothering her. She looked at the shelves of slides and stood up. “I should go now, Mr. Landsmann,” she said quickly, half afraid that he would try to make her stay. “I wish you the best of luck with your operation.”

But Bill Landsmann didn’t put up a fight. “I will see you soon!” he said, and escorted her to the door, not without remembering to return her sweater to her as she left—the ostensible reason for his invitation. Leora herself had completely forgotten about the sweater; if he hadn’t brought it out to her, she never would have asked. As Bill Landsmann watched her climb into her car and drive away, Leora had a feeling that he already knew when she would be back.

IT DIDN’T take long for Leora to realize that Bill Landsmann was stealing things from her to get her to come back to his house. Each time, it seemed, she “left something behind,” meriting a phone call and another invitation to look at a few more slides. First he stole her sweater, then her hat, and once even her wallet. The first few times she didn’t mind, finding herself vaguely fascinated by slides of the Jewish communities of Bukhara, Singapore, China, Turkey, Morocco, Ethiopia, Curaçao, Brazil, and Turkmenistan. Some of them haunted her dreams, like the close-up photograph of a shriveled man’s face, crowned with a multicolored embroidered hat whose threads hung loose around his ears, his eyes screwed into an angry squint, wincing at the lens. Yet each time, even during the carousels that featured little more than goat after goat, she was somewhat intrigued, not only by the fact that Jews lived in all these places but also by the fact that Bill Landsmann had bothered to seek them out and learn about their lives. But after she had heard more of Bill Landsmann’s scripts, it occurred to her that he was in fact casting her in the script. He had begun punctuating nearly all of the captions he read to her with little comments, and had begun punctuating each of those with a superfluous “yes?”: