Nisel Lipiczany sat on the edge of the wall, cupping his hands to hold his head. His legs dangled over the side. The whiteness of the mist hurt his eyes. He raised them to the clear air and saw, moving above the lumpy clouds, a red flag on a pole. He touched Trumpelman’s boot.

“Yes,” said Chaim, calmly. “The Elder has seen it.”

Nomberg saw the flag, too. “It’s a Bolshevik banner!” he shouted, and began to hop from log to log, moving toward the gate in the middle of the wall. “Fire!” he screamed. “Fire!”

Grundtripp, in his silver and black uniform, stood over a Death’s-Header quartet. There were two of his men for each of the Gatling guns, a shooter and a holder for the belt full of shells. It was one of the marksmen who spoke. “Herr Obergruppenführer! The flag is ours!”

Everyone stared as hard as he could. The icy wind whipped the banner out. There was a black iron cross on a field of red: the flag of the Kaiser in the Great War past. Another flagstaff came into view, this one with a banner consisting of geometrical figures and stripes. “The battalion of Montenegro!” Hasensprung, himself a veteran, declared. A third flag, and a fourth, and then a whole series of pennants appeared above the mist. They stretched all the way back to the Suburb center. In what armies had the Baluters not fought? There, higher than all the others, came the black Austro-Hungarian eagle, spread on a field of white and red. The Rumkowsky Regiment! Poland’s own! The bird had its talons out. With its double head it looked in two directions. Even Nomberg was moved.

Wohltat, excited, flapped his arms. “Look! Ha! Ha! The bugs are spilling out of the mattress!” What he meant was that, about two hundred meters off, the Jews were coming from the bank of fog. Some had their Imperial uniforms on, and here and there was a helmet with a spike. More Jews materialized. They kept marching forward. A thousand, two thousand. Not speaking. Not singing. But silently moving toward the sandbagged wall.

“Those are not veterans!” Rabbi Nomberg had noticed the strikers, the militant finishers, the comb-and-cork workers, who were mixed into the line of march. Pipe was there, and Kleiderman, and the Bloomgarden family, arm in arm. Kemp, Chaffer, Trilling, and Marx became visible, too. It seemed that the whole Ghetto was hidden there in the fog.

Bass and Szpilfogel picked up their long-distance rifles. They held their fire, though. The only thing you could hear was the swish of the sleeves of the marchers’ coats. Then both Guardsmen shot a bullet well over the heads of the crowd. They fired a second time, also into the air. The front of the column, the Rickshaw Guild members, halted, just thirty meters away. The Baluters bumped into each other. Confusion. Some people started backward. Then the cannibal woman stepped out of the fogbank, the wisps of fog mixed up in her hair. Kipnis and Einhorn came after, motioning with their arms. The whole procession started forward again.