It was a relief—not only for the Lithuanian, but for the Hatters’ orphans—when night came, when the stories began. In the dim room, the windows were covered with droplets of steam. It was warm, it was dreamy; the voice with the lisp rose and fell. The cigarette glowed. The rest of the world, with all its unlucky children, no longer existed. It was like being hypnotized.

What happened to Trumpelman—it was enough to enchant any child—was that after his shipwreck, he was captured by Indians. Not a tribe with feathers, with painted cheeks. Not Indians who whooped or shot arrows from bows. These were not even “redskins” because some disease had turned them mostly yellow. They looked more like Chinamen than anything else.

Night after night, week after week, the Elder told the story of how the natives seized him, how they forced him, a boy not yet twenty, to march countless miles, and then held him in a trench with roots to eat. He knew it was winter, because he was shivering beneath a hide. But he had no idea of time, whether it was day or night, or whether the thoughts that he had were his own or pieces of an endless dream.

“At last, on a morning, three young men—they had baggy cotton pants and blankets over their shoulders—came under my roof, stooped down, and released me. They raised me to my feet and at once I fell again. So, half fainting, I was carried out, to what fate I did not know, into the dawn.” The light in the Asylum was rushing out like a tide. The sun sank through the thousand crooked chimneys of the Balut. Only the tip of the Elder’s cigarette, like a pulse, continued to glow.

“I was brought by the three yellow men to a fourth, lying upon the ground, surrounded by all manner of seashells. His skin was dry, his eyes shut, and his breath, when it came, made clicking sounds. My children, this was a sick man, and it was made clear to me that I, without knowledge, with no schooling, and truly half-dead myself, was expected to cure him. Of course I protested, but to no avail: something had convinced them that this Jew, with his boy’s Adam’s apple, with his earlocks, was a man possessed of healing powers.

“Thus I dropped to my knees, and while in prayer it came to me to blow my breath onto the patient. This I did, and then I touched him with my hand. Whereupon the sick man sat up and declared that his pain had been driven away. When the others realized that he was well again, they all began to touch their breasts, and then rub their hands on my chest, and then touch their breasts again. A feast of oysters, a spitted hare, were set before me. It was from that day that I began my career as a medicine man.”

Lipiczany was sitting on the floor, with his elbows on his bent knees and his palms helping to prop up his heavy head. He felt that his heart had run out of room, that it was about to spill over. If anyone had thought to place young Nisel’s chest under a radium cannon, he would have found that the boy’s heart was in fact so swollen that his lungs were squeezed nearly off the picture. Now the boy saw that Julius Szypper and Nachman Kipnis—not in their nightshirts, but in their padded winter clothing—were standing. Not just standing, but moving slowly, slyly toward the door. He opened his mouth, he tried to say something, but it was Trumpelman’s voice he heard.