IV

A last glimpse, that’s all it will be, of that day. Quite late, when they should have been sleeping, Nisel and the other orphans moved in file down the stairway of Tsarskoye Selo. They gathered at the newlyweds’ door. One of the boys, Shifter perhaps, nudged it open. Then they cried out together, “Sing for us! Sing for us! In your shiny dress!”

Madame Trumpelman was sitting in bed, with her black hair twisted behind her. Her husband, in a robe, was standing nearby. They both turned toward the shaft of light that poured through the crack in the door. “They’re here!” she said.

“Only the children,” the Hatters’ Director replied.

“No! Up there! I mean over there!” She was whispering, hissing. She pointed over the heads of the orphans to where a tiny white-winged moth, the last of the season, had flown into the room.

Trumpelman laughed. “Ho, ho! A moth, Miss Lubliver!”

“Kill it! Drive it away!”

The children shrank back, into the hallway, onto the stairs. The Elder leaned over his wife, touching her shoulder. “But why, my dear?”

“It’s an act of darkness! Forbidden to see!” She clutched him, then pushed him off.

Groaning, Trumpelman left the side of the bed. He moved into what looked like a film projectionist’s beam. “Go!” he commanded. “Leave!” He waved his arms. The moth flew upward. He stretched on his toes. The little creature went higher. He leaped at it, and the moth disappeared.

“There!” said the woman. “On the wall!”

It is the custom among some Orthodox Jews to sweep clean a room before each act of love. They rid it of mice. They catch all the flies. They put insects in paper bags. Like one of these zealots, Isaiah Trumpelman now flung himself at the dusty mark on the wall. He chased it from one side of the room to the other. At last, using his robe, he maneuvered it out of the door.

“There is another!” cried the bride. She was pointing at empty space. Trumpelman did not move. He stood there, unclothed. “I have it,” he said.

“One more! See? A fly! A fly!”

He closed the door. Quietly he said, “I have it, too.”

Then everything was still. Lipiczany did not retreat with the other children. He lay down, like a dog, before the shut door. Behind it, he knew, the Elder was making the long line of his sons.

Chapter Five

The Five Day Strike

I

A new year, this one 1941, came around. At six in the morning thousands of workers poured from the mill gates, and thousands more tramped in. The sky was dark and the moon still out, cracked like a dish at the edges. The two shifts did not exchange a word. Each man had his own thoughts, which did not much differ from those of another: So what if horsemeat is kosher, if there isn’t a horse? No one dared think back even as far as Trumpelman’s wedding. Those times, the good times, were gone. As for the lives the Jews had lived outside the Suburb only a short while ago, they were already fading into a fabulous, forgotten past.