The door at the back of the church opened and closed. In a moment a small black figure, its hair matted, its head held at an angle, came from behind a pile of cushions. Trumpelman saw him, and stared.

“Julius! Julius!” cried the apparition. Its voice was croaking.

Trumpelman steadied himself on the point of his cane. “Lipiczany!”

The boy howled: “Julius Szypper is dead!”

“Szypper?” The Elder staggered. “One of my little ones?”

Lipiczany gripped his own body, as if to force out the words. “Chaim! You have to stop the roundup! Stop all the roundups! Warn the people! The Others have betrayed you! The Jews are not going to farmlands! They are being killed in a forest! Every one!”

The crowd in the church heard what Lipiczany was saying. Immediately the Jews began to cry out to each other, to wail. There was a tremendous, earsplitting commotion. Then, in her dark dress, in her dark-dotted veil, Phelia Trumpelman rose from the chair on which she had been sitting. Her belly was far too swollen to hide.

“Don’t listen to him! This is an agitator. He wants to spread panic. He’s a known Lipskyite!”

“No! No! They take off their clothes! There’s a mill wheel! The Baluters are in a ravine!”

Now the converts joined in the wailing. They beat their breasts like the Jews.

“Don’t stand there!” cried the Ghetto Queen. “Seize him! It’s a Bolshevik plot!”

Two or three men lunged forward, but Nisel darted away. He ran to the Elder and gripped his hand. He was still wearing the old man’s horsehair coat. “Chaim! Listen! A yellow bus!”

Trumpelman drew his lips back from his teeth. It was a tic he had developed. “What nonsense! It’s nonsense! There is no forest!”

The boy was shaking. He squeezed the Elder’s fingers. “I saw this with my eyes!”

“What if it’s true? What do you want the Elder to do? To announce it? What suffering then! What a massacre! It’s better if they think they’re going to a farm.”

Nisel stepped slowly backward. He turned his face, black like a chimney sweep’s, away.

“Oh!” he cried. “You knew!” Then the sooty tears rushed from his eyes.

Just to the rear of Madame Trumpelman a man stepped forward. This was one of those Jews who did not know enough to remove his hat. Now he did so, revealing a head that bulged in the back. Professor Zygmunt! Next he threw open the front of his raincoat and took out a ticking clock. “I-I-I-I am not afraid!” he shouted, and at once set off the alarm. For a bit nothing happened. Then there was a flash of light, all around the professor, followed by quite a loud bang. An immense cloud of feathers—feathers from chickens, from geese, from swans even—rose into the air, swirling everywhere. It was during that storm, like a snowstorm, that Madame Trumpelman lost her unborn male child.

Chapter Eight

Makbet

I

On Assisi Street, inside the House of Culture, a number of boys and girls were ice skating. At least, from the orchestra seats, from the balcony and boxes, it looked as if the stage must have been covered with a sheet of ice. That’s how smoothly the children moved across it. They kept their hands behind their backs, the way skaters do, and glided about on bent knees. These were the students from the Vocational School. The girls wore red mufflers and plaid, pleated skirts. The boys were in black—black trousers, black cutaway coats, but with white shirts and, at the neck, white ruffles. From one side of the stage to the other they went, hand in hand, or alone. Sometimes a girl would throw up her arms and start rapidly to spin, or a boy would loop or leap; but mostly the whole group just skated along, swaying a little, with serious, thoughtful faces. Alone in the orchestra pit, on his gramophone machine, Smolenskin played marches from Aida.