“What are you painting?” she asked.

“A mural,” he answered. “A surprise for the Elder’s wedding.”

The wedding! The wedding! Now that the secret was out, no one talked about anything else. It was said, for instance, that the Bulgarian king had been invited and that Weizmann, the statesman, was pulling all sorts of strings to reserve a seat in the church. There was even a rumor that the Big Man would appear. That summer, in honor of the occasion, the Judenrat provided little gifts—a pot of ersatz honey, a double ration of bread—to each couple getting married. Thus, weddings became a fad. Jews who hardly knew each other got engaged. It wasn’t unheard of for the same bride and groom to show up in front of two different rabbis. Such marriages—this was a joke that went around—lasted only as long as the extra loaf of bread.

But the truth was that the wedding fever was caused not so much by hunger as by hope and joy. It was as if the citizens of the Balut had been waiting for a reason to be gay. In the great wave of optimism that swept the Ghetto even the most disturbing news was seen in a favorable light. When the patients were suddenly removed from the hospital, when the prisoners disappeared from the Tsarnecka Street jail, everyone accepted the explanation that the former were being transported to rest homes, the latter to work on the unfinished dikes. Then all the clothes came back, but not the people inside them. Suits and shoes and dresses piled up inside the Virgin Mary Church. Here was a difficult moment, a time for unthinkable thoughts. But before the Baluters could give way to despair, a big patch of postcards came through the Jewish mail. Each one—including that of Professor Potash, who had been seized in the hospital, not yet recovered from his awful burns—said much the same thing. Life goes on. We grow stronger. Here there is marmalade.

It was the same with the prohibition on births. The majority argued there was no room for babies in a full-employment ghetto. These infants, nonworkers themselves, forced pregnant women and new mothers to leave the factories, to abandon their sewing machines. What did it matter that the increased production made huge profits for the Lords and Masters? Or that they were putting uniforms on their own oppressors’ backs? What counted was that because of these very things the Jews had become indispensable at last. Thus, to the Baluters, the marriage of Trumpelman was not to any particular person—no one even thought of Phelia Lubliver, who had not been seen or heard of for months—but to his people as a whole. The union was like a pact between them that they would survive.

If the bride had vanished, there was no shortage of the groom. From somewhere the Elder had found a pure white horse, a stallion, and he rode it throughout the Balut. It must have been Muszkat’s runaway nag, except this horse seemed larger, more splendid. It was like one of the pink-lipped team that had pulled the Conqueror’s movable stage. Wherever Trumpelman rode there was a crowd. Sometimes it would press closely around his stallion, so that the Elite Guard had to link hands to hold everyone back. At the Chancellory, at Dworska Number 20, it was impossible to get near the Elder’s door. But here, in the streets, you could come close; if you wanted to ask, “What about horsemeat? Can a Jew eat it? The rabbis won’t tell,” you got an answer: “Never mind the rabbis! It’s an emergency! Horsemeat is kosher!”