All this came to an end when Greenkraut, who had been insured for a quarter of a million zlotys, one day ate a sausage and died. Three weeks later the Widow Greenkraut received, inside of an envelope belonging to the Public Health Department, a bank check for the entire amount. But the next day, when she attempted to cash it, there were no funds left in the account. The poor woman looked once more at the envelope with the colorful stamps: postmarked Paris, Republic of France!

In minutes, it seemed, the news spread through the town. By evening a small crowd had gathered outside the house at Lepecky Number 6. Blum, the importer, was there, and H. Korngold, and the big furrier, Szapiro, in his wing-tip shoes. It got darker and darker, but these wealthy people refused to go. “Trumpelman! Trumpelman!” They shouted his name for hours.

Dawn came. The bells from the Protestant steeple started to ring. Finally Fiebig hurled his large shoulder against the doctor’s door. It easily opened. Miss Wysocka, with her dark hair in a bun, was there.

“Gone!” she cried, shamelessly weeping. “He has disappeared!”

At that moment, from far down Lepecky, Mister Zweideneck appeared, shouting almost identical words. “Gone! Disappeared! Madame Zweideneck is missing!”

The Jews simply stood there, pulling on their lower lips. It was all clear to them now. The Lithuanian and his mistress had absconded, and not one among them—not Mosk, half-fainting from spots, or the bachelor Plumb, at the wheel of his Daimler Double Six, would realize from his investment of thousands and thousands the sum of a single grosz.

If only he had run off for good, if only that were the rise and fall of I. C. Trumpelman, practicing physician, then the fate of so many Jews would have been different. But he came back, he returned, like a burning bird from its ashes. Perhaps he had never left, that is what some people said. They thought he and his paramour, the full-lipped Zweideneck woman, had hidden themselves in some part of the city, or else in a farmhouse nearby. There were reports that she would steal back to her old neighborhood, to visit her sleeping children, and that he sometimes went to the Astoria Café in disguise. Certainly such a thing is possible: ten years afterward a number of Jews, forty or fifty or sixty, managed to hide out that way in the Aryan part of the town. On the other hand, he might have gone to Paris, after all, or to Zagreb, or even to the moon. All we can say for sure is that he disappeared for two years and then, at the time of the epidemic, returned. And so our history changed. Or else—this is a thought that sometimes comes to us who are still living—it did not change, and everything that happened was destined to be. In that case the reappearance of Trumpelman did not affect the way our lives were twisted, like rags, one jot.