Behind the mansion, the ground sloped away into untended fields and low, swampy sections. No one knew why the Conquerors had included so much undeveloped land in the Ghetto. One opinion was that young people were going to be given agricultural training, to ready them for a life in Palestine. Once, the man in the gray suit was heard to say to Franz Xavier Wohltat, “What’s this? A park? A zoo? We should put elks in it. They have the right kinds of noses.” But it was not long before people started dying; then everyone realized that the open area, the marshland you couldn’t walk through without sinking, was meant to be a graveyard for the Jews.

It so happened that Hersh Einhorn was practically the last child to be allowed into the New Hatters’ Asylum. There was no room for the hundreds of others who tramped out from the heart of the Suburb to the estate walls. “I have no mother! I have no father!” they cried. “Let me in!” The fat orphans who lived inside the Asylum were not supposed to have anything to do with the thin ones who lived outside. It was a rule often broken. Szypper, Myer Krystal, and some others made it a habit to throw bags full of sugar over the walls, or, from the sheep’s backs, miniature bales of nicotine-colored wool. From these things the homeless children made a sort of living. The wool was sewn into patches, the six-pointed stars; the sugar spun—sometimes with sand added to it—into flower-shaped, iris-shaped, treats.

Patches! Pretty patches! Cheap! Cheap!
Irises! Good ones! An hour in the mouth!

The sound of these voices, the very sight of the children, must have been like a persecution, like torture, to Trumpelman. From the top floor of the mansion you could see them playing on the far side of the wall. Half would lie in a hollow dug from the ground, while the other half stood over them, with screwed-up faces, with sticks in their hands; then everyone would switch places, the Jews would become the High and the Mighty, and the High and the Mighty would lie in the ditch like the Jews.

One morning when the Elder was walking inside the estate, a boy went berserk and somehow or other climbed onto the wall. His mouth was foaming. “I am a dog, a dog!” he shouted. “Now the Others will pet me!” Then he jumped down and ran at Trumpelman, as if he meant to bite him. The old man scooped him up under an arm and brought him to the top floor of the Asylum. There he set the wild child, his name was Leibel Shifter, down. “Little birds!” he said to the orphans. “This is your nest. Let the whole world go crazy! Here—Trumpelman swears it—you will survive the war!”

But that same day the Elder went to the cellar and began to open the wine. He poured it out and then, with his boot heel, stamped on the bottles. He smashed them to pieces. That night a moon came up, almost a full one, over Tsarskoye Selo; the top of the wall sparkled from the layers of broken glass.