At that time, however, other Jews were still having babies, and this was, for the Hatters’ Asylum, the second big problem. No one was leaving, but new foundlings were coming in. Even with the house next door, there was no room to put them. Nor was there enough money for food or warm clothes. What Trumpelman did was go to the fine houses on Lepecky, on Leczyca, and put his foot in the door. If no Jew was home, he waited. If he had to beg, he got to his knees.

Mosk, the man of a hundred thousand spindles, lived in an English-style mansion, made from red brick, with a row of white columns. One day Trumpelman forced the rich man to answer his door. There was no begging here. “My children are hungry!” the Lithuanian, in his high voice, started yelling. “Pay up! No chiseling! Trumpelman won’t let you make a deal! A doctor has to do away with diseases! This wealth, this richness, is a sickness! You are a danger to us all!” It was as if the Asylum Director were having a fit. He put his arms around two of the pillars and began to strain. His face became red, his hat fell off, and it seemed to Mosk that the old man was full of strange power, like Samson, with Samson’s wild, magical hair. In a moment the house would tumble down.

“Wait!” cried the mill owner. “I’ll pay!”

So, like a salesman, Trumpelman moved through the city. And wherever he went, from doorstep to doorstep, at his table in the Astoria Café, or even riding in Plumb’s twelve-cylinder Daimler, he was accompanied by a small, quick figure, like a pale shadow, never more than two or three meters away. This was Nisel Lipiczany, with the pinched face and the tooth that was chipped. He always held his head to one side, squinting, as if he were looking into the sun. Any light was too bright for his eyes.

“Poor little fellow,” said Plumb, at the wheel of his two-ton limousine. “What’s that noise he’s making?” Both men turned to look at the boy, alone on the rear leather cushions. Nisel’s heart sometimes swelled large inside him, making him suck in, and swallow, great gulps of air. He smiled at Chaim.

There is a certain kind of goose that thinks the first thing it sees must be its mother. If a member of this species should hatch on a day when its real mother is gone—let’s say, for example, she has been eaten up by a wolf—and if a hen, or a pig, or even a person, the farmer himself, is walking by, then the little gosling will peep with joy and follow the moving form wherever it goes, for the rest of its life. There have been cases of such geese running after clothes on a clothesline, or a cardboard box pulled on a string. When the actual mother comes back—there was no wolf, after all—the gosling will pay no attention. Don’t be surprised to hear of this. Peasants, mimicking calls, have always led ducks to the water and sheep to the slaughterhouse. What is new, a contribution of our own times, is that the same can be done to a man. Lipiczany, his fever broken, waking from his coma, saw the light in the hair of the man above him, felt on his face the wash of his breath. At that instant the orphan—silly goose!—attached himself to his ersatz father.