How long was the hearse driver gone? Five minutes? Ten? At the Marysinska Corner he stopped and turned around. “What if she’s only fainted?” he said. But by the time he returned there was no horse in the harness, only a horse’s bones. Even the head and the tail were missing. Even the hooves. It is not so important to know who, precisely, stripped the creature clean. Boys perhaps. Hungry people. With the tail of a horse you can make useful things. What mattered was that now there was no one to move the dead Jews. They just lay there. And all day long, the whole fourth day of the strike, an awful day really, the sun kept getting hotter. It sat over our heads like the blade of a sawmill, shining, gleaming, spinning around.

Strike Day Four, Evening

Where, in this confusion, this misery, was I. C. Trumpelman? For the whole of the strike he had not been seen. Rumors flew about, saying he was no longer in the Balut. Where, then? That depended on which Jew you asked. On a battleship with Roosevelt, said one man. Said another, Everyone knows he is telling the Pope about the sufferings of the Jews. And a third: Not the Pope. Our President goes right to the top. To Horowitz himself!

But the truth was, Trumpelman had not left the Ghetto. He was, on the evening of Strike Day Four, just where he should be: in the dining room of Tsarskoye Selo, having his meal. First Lipiczany would take a bite of chop and then, when he did not die, the old man was supposed to eat the rest. It was the same with the wine, with the potatoes. The boy tasted and tasted, but the Elder did not swallow a morsel or sip a drop.

The following were also present: Nomberg, Minister of Religious Affairs; F. X. Wohltat, representing the Civilian Authority; and Hasensprung, the President’s bodyguard. Not present: Madame Trumpelman, whose chair was empty. The guests were discussing the March of the Jewish War Veterans, which was less than twelve hours away.

Nomberg: “Don’t make a mistake. These are revolutionarles. Trained Bolsheviks. They don’t recognize the legal order. The decrees of the Judenrat don’t interest them. What are we going to do?”

Wohltat was sitting with his coat unbuttoned and his pants cuffs hiked well up from his shoes. “If the march is not crushed, if the strike is not quickly ended, everything will be lost. Our investments. Our profits. A fortune in reichsmarks.”

Hasensprung, a little tipsily, waved his hand. “We have reinforced the estate walls. We are digging trenches. Nothing to worry about.”

“These are starving people!” Nomberg was becoming excited. “Thousands of people. They know we have food here! A trench won’t stop them! Sandbags won’t stop them! We must request Grundtripp to bring in the army!”

“Yesterday I was shown a letter. It was from Warsaw, from Czerniakow, the Elder of the Warsaw Jews.” Wohltat’s skin was pale and glistening, like a sliced pear. “In this letter he says his Jews will make uniforms cheaper than ours. With no strikes and no buttons missing. That is why we must crush this demonstration!”