In the morning Nisel woke, perfectly lucid. He knew he was surrounded by corpses. There was excrement on their legs; some of the women were bloodstained. He also knew he had to get away. Farther along the ravine people were working. They stood halfway up the canyon wall, tumbling dirt into the ditch below. The entire riverbed was being turned into a grave. Ahead of this falling earth, a platoon was walking slowly downward. They stopped over this body or that. One of these had already worked his way quite near. He was dressed like a Jew, shabby, middle-aged. But he was no bigger, or older, than Nisel. There was a pouch strapped over his shoulder and a blade of some kind in his hand. He turned slightly. Then Nisel realized that this was Konotop, one of the Konotop brothers, supposed to be drowned. His eyebrows still grew in a line, thickly, over his eyes. The two boys stared at each other. Nisel, on his journey, had nearly forgotten how to speak.

“I have to tell the Elder,” he finally said. “He doesn’t know the Others are killing the Jews.”

But Konotop, having no idea who this person was, did not answer. He bent over an anonymous woman and cut off the long, dark locks of her hair.

Lipiczany ran for his life, straight up the canyon wall. He thought each instant there would be a shot, an outcry, the yelp of a loosened hound. He reached the top, where the birches grew, and rolled onto his back. There he breathed, and swallowed, the air. He knew that he would die before he could follow the railway back to the Ghetto. Even if he had had the strength, the trip would take too long. At that moment a fresh load of Jews was leaving the transfer station. There would be trainloads more. So he simply lay there, listening to the roar of the grindstone. One miracle was that his cap, with its little button, was still on his head.

All that day the cart went back and forth, bringing the clothes, the bundles, back to the mill. The buckets rose wet over the rooftop, like mouths that bit and chewed at the sky. Nisel could not help sleeping. In his dream, his imagination, there was a spinning wheel inside the mill, like at the Mosk Works; and on this loom all the clothing and rags, the gray dresses and dark coats and dark trousers, were being woven into one gigantic cloak.

At dusk the train woke him up. The whistle blew and the steam came from many places, as if the engine had been punctured with holes. Out came the farmers-to-be, the mowers and threshers, the milkmaids. They went directly into the mill. In the course of that night Nisel crept down the hillside to the last of the third-class wagons and secretly climbed inside.

And that is how, the following morning, Nisel Lipiczany set off for the Ghetto. The trip, as we know, took the entire day. Most of that time he spent hiding beneath one of the wooden benches. But now and then he sat up and looked calmly out the window, like a passenger with a ticket. They arrived on schedule, well after dusk. It was a roundup night, and so the streets were deserted. The Radogodsh Station was empty, too. Nisel trotted into the Baluty Suburb. He did not look like a boy any longer. Scratched, crooked, filthy, he looked like a beast.