“Do you remember how, after my shipwreck, I succeeded in curing the wild Indians, each and every one? Alas! With the winter and its frozen streams, its leafless forests, a new sickness came. It made the men and women and children of the village swell up, in the way that you have seen our citizens do. The time came swiftly when there were more of our number dead than remained alive. Starvation! Starvation, my dears!”

Chaim paused for a moment, trying to breathe. The walls, because of the candles, went on fluttering, flapping. No one interrupted the words of the dying man.

“Never in my life have I felt as helpless as I did then. The Indians fell before me, weeping, in their frenzy scratching their scalps and their skin. I was the legend among men, the white god who had come from the sea. Yet all my magic, my healing art, had dropped from me, just as, during the unaccustomed heat of the previous summer, my very skin had cracked and fallen aside. Bitterly then did I curse the fate that had caused me, a Lithuanian, a Jew, to board the Baltic steamer. Bitterly!

“One night three braves, their faces and upper arms completely chalk-covered, came to the hollow where I slept. Their torch flames woke me. These three then told me that they understood I had lost my luck—luck is what, in their own language, they called it—but that if I would follow them they would show me how to regain it. Willingly, I rose and fell in behind them.

“After some time the path that we followed began to incline more steeply upward. It was a mountain we climbed. We continued in darkness, never pausing, until at some agreed-upon signal my companions planted their torches and set about stripping the branches from two saplings that stood nearby. When they had done this they bent the top part of both trees toward one another and bound each to each. Then, with many tears, groaning in sorrow, they bade me to stand beneath the wooden arch. This I did. Each brave then leaped backward, as if the space beneath the bent trees were filled with fire, and from some distance they stared at me, still sighing, their white faces long, sad, and grieving. I could not help thinking they were like three mourners who look lovingly at one who is about to be shut up within a bier. Suddenly they fell upon me with knives, stabbing me, and with great skill passed their leather thongs beneath the muscles of my shoulders and over the bowed trunks of the trees. By means of this harness they drew me upward until my feet no longer touched the ground. Then they seized their flaming torches and vanished without a word down the mountainside.”

What a wonderful, thrilling story! The orphans must have been spellbound, hanging there, not by leather straps, but upon the fragile thread of the Elder’s words. All of their lives had been spent inside the Asylum, inside of Poland, and suddenly here they were—half Indians, with painted faces, with arrows and bows. And when the Director of the Asylum continued—sighing now, his voice dropping lower than ever—it became more exciting still.