“I cannot say how many days passed. For much of the time I was not fully conscious. I awoke at last to the sensation of movement—no longer drifting but cutting purposefully through the sea. Under a crust of salt, I opened my eyes. What I saw was this: the fin of a beast, protruding above the water, no more than an arm’s length away; and a second fin, moving rapidly toward me, coming up to the timber on the other side. It is true that my spectacles had long since been swept away. And possibly my senses had become crazed. Was this a dream? An hallucination? I can only repeat I saw the double fins, and felt myself propelled swiftly—for the remainder of that day, the whole of that night—through the water. I remember the sounds the dolphins made: grunting sometimes, the snap of their air holes, at night a whistling song. Before the next dawn they suddenly dove away, and I continued forward a moment until I struck the shore. When the sun rose I saw a city, it was the city of Galveston, rising out of the sea.”

Now everyone was sleeping. Even Nachman Kipnis, who had struggled to stay awake. The minute his eyes closed, however, he saw a genuine city, with towers and traffic and windows of glass—and not the muddy little port, half on a sandbar, that Galveston must have been at the time.

Not long after, the orphans got better. In a week their fever was gone and their skin became smooth and clear, the skin of healthy young children. The drapes were pulled back from the windows. Bright daylight came in. Immediately Mann Lifshits, the toddler, rode young Krystal around like a jockey on a horse. And Gutta Blit walked upside down on her hands. Thus the Hatters’ Asylum weathered the attack of what seemed to be spotted fever, but which turned out to be only measles of a new kind. Everyone knew the danger was over when Bettsack, the schoolmaster, and old Rabbi Lunt, with his hump, his sport jacket, returned to Krzyzanowsky for their regular lessons.

“Here. Here. Also here,” Lunt would say, smearing honey with his finger onto their books. Then the boys had to read aloud: Free will is granted to every man. If he wishes to direct himself toward the good way and become righteous, the will to do so is in his hand; and if he wishes to direct himself toward the bad way and become wicked, the will to do so is likewise in his hand.

As for Bettsack, his question was, “How many legs has a spider? Six? Four? Twelve?” It was a thrill when he opened his shoebox and let the children count the eight woolly legs for themselves.

There was an exception to this rosy picture. Nisel Lipiczany did not get well. From the start his symptoms had not been like the others’. His fever went up to forty-one degrees Celsius, then held there all night long. His joints swelled, first in one part of his body, then in another. Worst of all, he could not hold still. Wherever you put him he rolled: off the bed, over the floor, in and out of your arms. Only during the stories did he seem to relax, throwing the balls of his wrists over the side of the bed and turning his face, pinched like a monkey’s, toward where the familiar voice was calmly rising, calmly falling, like the sea.