The bleeding had stopped. The thermometer inside his armpit read 39.4 degrees. The skin was once more a normal color. “Is it possible?” murmured the physician, and, as if in response, Lipiczany opened his eyes. They were black, wet, and held in miniature the overhead light and the figure bundled in a camel coat. Trumpelman leaned over the wizened little face, lined like a man’s. He had sucked one of his sweetmeats to within a millimeter of its liquid center. He passed the fragile glazed ball from his mouth to that of his patient. It was a kind of kiss.

III

Approximately six months after these events, in the fall of 1933, the Widow Greenkraut received a brief message:

Madame:

I know I have made you suffer. If I could cut off my right arm to avoid this, I would cut off my right arm. For years I poured on my head the ashes of shame, remorse, and regret. Now I am able to send you the sum of Zl. 1500, which is one-quarter of the total paid me by Greenkraut before he died. In this way I lighten my burden as I crawl through my last years to death.

I. C. TRUMPELMAN

In November, Szapiro, the furrier, received a similar letter containing a slightly smaller amount. So did Fiebig. Rabbi Nomberg, the following January, got the same. In short, everyone who had purchased insurance from the Lithuanian was slowly, a little at a time, getting his premiums back. Even Zweideneck, who never again saw his wife, and who had lost his tire business because of the worldwide depression, was paid back half the zlotys he had invested.

Whether for good or for ill, the Jews are a softhearted people. They forgive and forget. As time went by, as the messages and the bank drafts for zlotys continued to arrive, people began to think of Trumpelman in a more brotherly way. Korngold, upon seeing the former Deputy in the Central Square, removed his hat. A more telling incident took place in the steam chamber of the Rumkowsky Geyser. A number of Jews were sitting on the wooden platforms, sighing now and then. Suddenly one of them stood up and walked to where Trumpelman was sitting, a little apart. “We are naked! This is how we came into the world, without any money, and how someday we shall depart. I am saying this for everybody to hear: we are all men here, just human beings, and nobody is different from anybody else.” This was not just a rich man speaking, somebody like Szapiro or Plumb. It was Mosk, the magnate, himself.

The seasons passed, one after the other, and it became clear to all that Trumpelman had devoted his life to the Hatters’ Asylum. He lived there in an attic room, with slanting rafters, in which he could barely stand. He was now the official physician of the Orphanage Number 2, for which the American Hatters gave him the same salary—every grosz of which went to pay off his debt—that had previously gone to Doctor Zam. As for young Zam himself, he never appeared on Krzyzanowsky Street again. His little blue roadster was often seen parked in front of the Hotel Europa, in an upper floor of which he maintained a suite of rooms. But what he did there, and why his patients were pale Polish girls, of good families, too, and indeed where his riches came from—all that was simply a matter of speculation. This much may be said: the young physician, in his French cuffs and knitted vests, so intelligent, so expertly trained, a Warsaw product, seemed bound to disappoint those who had placed such high hopes in him and in his generation of Europe’s Jews.