The wounds of the Holocaust seem to haunt every Jewish person that I know, but I didn’t expect those wounds to extend to the utopian bubble of the Makers. I guess it’s a mild relief to know that the Makers did offer some help to those persecuted during the Holocaust. That they occasionally extend the barest of interventions.

My father doesn’t have much family still alive, and he’s never seemed able to talk about them, but I know that his mother’s mother was a Holocaust survivor. I feel the echo of shared generational trauma with Michael. I never thought I could share any kind of history with a Maker.

Michael continues. “My mother always tried to hide her heritage, not wanting to call attention to having provincial ancestry, and she often spoke of the atrocities of the world that had allowed so much hate and destruction. But Bubbe—she wanted me to know that even though she’d left it behind, there had been beautiful aspects of her old life. She told me that while she had seen the worst of the world during the war, that was not all there was to provincial life. I was a thirsty audience for all her memories of the place that she had loved that no one else here seemed to care about or want to remember.”

The sounds of laughter and chatter float by on the breeze.

“Does your sister have the same affection for the provincial world?” I ask.

Michael laughs. “Not at all. She was always more enamored with my grandfather’s side of the family. My great-great-great-plus-a-few-more-greats-grandfather was a religious Kabbalist recruited by the Mystics.”

“Oh. Was it more common for the Avant guilds to recruit from the provincial world in those days?” I ask.

He laughs again, but this time the sound is hollow. “Yes. Our society is made up entirely of recruits. We are a people defined by exile. Outcasts who wanted a better life than one under the Imperialists we fled from. But try pointing that out to those who resist new recruits now, and you’ll find them spouting the same rhetoric our society was founded to combat.” He sighs and looks down at my face, and that’s where his gaze stays.

We sink into a quiet kind of communication that involves only our eyes and my fast-beating heart. The sun has all but disappeared, and it’s one of those magical hours where the edges of reality begin to fade, and the moment itself has the fuzzy edges of a memory. We tiredly gaze at each other, the silence heavy and meaningful.

“Did you enjoy today?” He breaks the silence, and I can’t tell if he’s looking at my eyes or at my mouth, because I have stopped looking at his eyes to look at his mouth. There is tension in his lips, in his jaw, in his throat.

“Yes,” I say.