The trouble was, he could not swim. Worse, the water came up to his chin. One more step forward and he found himself revolving downstream. It was amazing, the speed of the current. It stripped off his socks. By holding his breath and moving his hands, Nisel could keep himself on the surface. But the coat he wore grew heavier every moment. It was weighing him down. Soon he could barely lift his arms to tread water. So he tried, half submerged, like a Houdini, to free himself of the garment. However, the buttons stuck. The wet hide clung to his body. He went under. As he sank, rolling over, he thought he was being embraced by I. C. Trumpelman, whose greatcoat this was. Chaim! he called, swallowing mouthfuls, and the horsehair coat slipped from his shoulders. He shot up, near the eastern bank. On his hands and knees he climbed onto land. The Lithuanian coat washed up fifty meters down the shore.

Have you ever seen a big, furry dog coming out of the water? How puny it seems! Only a third of its former size. That is how Nisel looked, half drowned, gasping, in just his shirt and his pants. But he could not lie there, exposed. Boats were passing. People could see him from the opposite shore. He crawled to the heap of his greatcoat. It was too heavy to lift. He dragged it to the top of the embankment and fell with it, exhausted, into a clump of reeds. He had not slept in the night; no wonder he dozed much of that day. He woke in the afternoon, his overcoat dried out beside him. His bones ached. He sneezed. Also, he was hungry. He put on his shoes, his wrinkled cap, and arose.

From hunger, and from a fever perhaps, he felt slightly dizzy. He walked with a little weave. He found the four sets of rails and started along them. Soon he had to make a decision. The tracks divided, two branching south, the others moving side by side straight ahead. It was something else he had not considered. How could he ask a Pole which way the blue passenger cars had gone? While he stood there, uncertain, a train came toward him speedily from the east. He scampered down the roadbed and hid behind a shack. It was a large, long, olive-green train, with as many cars as the old Warsaw-Berlin express. The people in it, staring out the windows, leaned on their hands. The train roared by, rotating its gold-colored bell. Nisel discovered the shed behind which he was standing was open. There were tools inside, and sacks filled with root vegetables and potatoes. The land here was divided into small plots, tended by inhabitants of the city. The boy stuffed his pockets with turnips, with beets, and resumed his journey. He chose the rails that bent away to the south.

That proved a mistake, though Lipiczany could not guess as much for quite some time. He plodded forward, kilometer after kilometer. With his head at an angle, he gnawed at a beet. After dark, he walked on the tracks themselves, adjusting his gait to the space between the ties. He stopped once, to improvise a pair of socks from his shirttails. Then he grew too cold and tired to go on. He saw the silhouette of a barn in the fuzzy moonlight, and made for it. When a dog barked there, he simply dropped where he was and wrapped himself in the horsehair coat. He fell asleep, instantly dreaming of his unknown mother and father: the woman with the gold hair and the man, in profile, pomaded. Three trains went by, waking him—all the wrong ones.