Another fanfare. Another announcement. “Presenting the Mayor of the Poles!” This gentleman had not thought to wear a hat. The skin of his scalp, completely hairless, still had a deep summer tan. Poof! Poof! The boys took his picture. He placed a large box on the gift table and turned to his left, toward the distinguished visitors’ section.

The Big Man, after all, was not seated there, though he had sent, it was rumored, a diamond or an auto or some other fabulous gift. The King of Bulgaria was also missing, as was Weizmann, the Zionist leader. But there were at least two other heads of state: Lender, the Chairman of the Lukow Jewish Council, and, from Sosnowiec, Chairman Moses Merin. They sat stiffly, in top hats, separated by an empty chair.

Andrei Schpitalnik, the pianist from the Astoria Café, made the organ thunder again.

“Jews! Guests! What an honor! Look who is coming now!” Schotter, in his excitement, kept thrusting his hands into his armpits. “Here is the boss of the biggest ghetto of all! Ladies and gentlemen, the head of the Quarantine Area of Warsaw—Czerniakow, Certified Engineer!”

The President of the Warsaw Judenrat stood at the far end of the aisle. Then he slowly marched down it. Everyone leaned forward to get a glimpse of such an important man. He turned to his left and to his right, tipping his hat. He was bald underneath it, with just a fringe of hair around the back. He had a bow tie and little fluttering eyelids. There was an obvious hook in his nose. Hard to believe this was the king of hundreds of thousands of Jews.

At the gift table Czerniakow stopped, pulled a plain white envelope from an inside pocket, and set it down. Then he took his seat, between the two other Council Chairmen, in the distinguished visitors’ section.

A delay, a pause. People began to grow restless. Delicious smells, maddening smells—from real soups, from yellow butter—drifted up from the banquet tables at the back of the church. While they were waiting, the Jews tried to think of something else. Some reached for the colored sunbeams, which turned their hands green and blue. Others, for a distraction, began to whisper about what Klapholtz had painted on the ceiling. Billowing strips of canvas hid the actual mural from view. The artist himself was still there, as he had been each day since June, putting on final touches. What could this work be? An abstract design, in the modernist manner? Some people thought so. But others argued that the wedding gift would be a portrait of the Elder, with his cloak stretched over the Ghetto, like a gigantic enlargement of a six-grosz stamp.

Schotter, to fill this time, started to speak again. “Ladies and gentlemen, what a great and happy day! A day for celebration. And that reminds me, not long ago I met a wise man, a real sage, and he told me that there wasn’t a doubt that Horowitz was going to die on a Jewish holiday.” What was this? Impossible! A joke! The Jews in either grandstand stared across at each other, with widening eyes. “Naturally, I wanted to know how he could make such a prediction. Where did he get his information? ‘Any day that Horowitz dies,’ the wise man told me, ‘will be a Jewish holiday.’”