Then everyone rushed this way and that, trying to put Lunt’s plan into effect. Wolf-Kitzes squeezed his throat with his own hands. More Jews did the same. Philosoff looked up from where he was beating his head against the plaster wall. “I am doing it!” he wailed. “But nothing happens!”

Margolies stood on the table. “What if I unscrewed the bulb from the lamp? And then put my finger into the socket? We could do that, one after the other!” The Scotch Hotel waiter stretched upward and removed one of the unlit bulbs. Then he groaned, “It only tickles!”

Said Kornischoner, “I don’t have to kill myself! I’m not even alive! Yesterday I produced sixteen puffs, five rejected. For this I was given only as much soup as could be soaked into one slice of bread. The fewer puffs I make, the less food they give me, the smaller my strength to make puffs the following day. It’s a vicious circle!”

“This is awful! It’s so hard to kill a person!”

“I have it! Let’s throw ourselves out! Onto the cobblestones!”

“Yes! That’s the way!”

There was a rush for the window, a big jam-up. Two or three members tried to pull up the sash. Then the ones in front noticed, in the lamplight, the men in black uniforms below. “Watch out!” they warned. “They’ll see us!” Then they all whirled around and ran back to the table, where they dropped in despair into their chairs.

Somebody said, “It was too low anyway. Only two stories.” Then it was quiet again.

In not much more than a whisper, Fried Rievesaltes finally spoke. “Ladies, gentlemen, rabbis. I am sure you have noticed my buttons, those on my vest and the matching ones on my cuffs. These are real pearls. Is there anyone here who knows what a pearl is? I shall tell you. Long ago each one of these buttons was inside an oyster, the kind that people eat in France. Indian boys dive for these oysters at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. This button here, which cost at Palfinger’s one thousand zlotys, I am not speaking of the mounting and trim, was at one time nothing but a grain of sand. It’s a fact, Jews! This sand annoys the oyster, which makes a ball around it, the same as a gallstone, or a stone that is passed through the kidney. See? How smooth? How shiny? This takes the oyster years and years. Many times I thought how delightful to be an Indian pearl-diver boy. The Indian Ocean is blue. Here, feel it, Minister Verble. Minister Baggelman, you feel it, too. You have to open a thousand shells before you get this good a pearl. Those brown boys have just a scarf wrapped around them, and they dive down carrying a heavy stone. Past all the different varieties and kinds of fish. I read they can stay under at one time five or six minutes. I also read it’s like a garden there, with the pink rocks and the sea flowers. It was not my fate to be one of those people. My fate led me elsewhere.”