When the task was completed the Judenrat stood from their chairs. Paradyz was the first to speak. “I won’t think of the few who are going. I’ll think of the many we’ve saved.”

“I put down rich people,” Rievesaltes said. “But my men won’t touch them. We’ll bargain. We’ll talk. After we come to an agreement I’ll write out the names of any three Jews.”

Popower was grinning. He beamed. “A moment ago life seemed terrible to me. I didn’t want to go on. Now it seems sweet and good.”

Baggelman lifted his arms, as if conducting. “Yes! Thanks to our redeemer! Our Moses!”

Trumpelman held up his hand, in which the filled sheet of paper was lodged. “Do you mean the Elder? Don’t thank the Elder. He has done his duty, no more.”

“No! No!” Schpitalnik shouted. “It was you who brought us back from the brink!”

The rest of the Council members crowded around their leader, tears of relief, of gladness, in their eyes. They cried, “Bless you! Bless you!”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the way people thought in our town. It did not matter what the facts were. Never mind that the poison was just sleeping pills. There would always be Jews to believe, even in the last days of the Ghetto, that the Elder possessed the power to call the dead back to life.

II

That night a wind blew and dark clouds whistled across the sky. A kind of humming could be heard throughout the Suburb. The sound rose, fell, then died out completely—only to strike up again. Was this the moan, the sigh, of those fifty Jews who even then were being taken away? For some time it was too dark to tell where the strange sounds were coming from. Then, out of the bottom of a hen-shaped cloud, dropped the shining white egg of the moon. At Tsarskoye Selo the ripe fruit on the fruit trees began to glow, and the glass on the wall lit up also, like a gunpowder trail. It was the mansion itself that was growling, droning, like a hive of bees.

On the ground floor the Trumpelmans, man and wife, were sleeping. Far above them, inside the attic, hundreds and hundreds of musical instruments were heaped into piles. Gleaming brass—the trumpets, the bugles—leaned against the walls. Woodwinds of every type were stacked in the corners. There were pianos, clavichords, harps, guitars. The violins and violoncellos formed wooden mountains. Standing apart, biggest of all, were three double basses. They throbbed, they groaned, although no one was bowing their strings.

These were the instruments that had been confiscated from the Ghettoites. Only Smolenskin, with his gramophone, could make music now. Yet each time the blast of the gale blew through the old house, the taut strings, the piano wire, began to vibrate and trill. Chimes tinkled against each other. A quiver ran through the stretched skins of the drums. It was as if the missing musicians of the Balut had picked up their instruments and started to play.