He looked like he was in his late forties; he’d been a child in 1940, seven or eight. Rachel couldn’t look at him.

“And you were from Dabrowa,” Hawkins said.

“Yes.”

“But you’re not one of them.”

Relkin looked surprised. “How do you know that?”

“You don’t live with them, you don’t dress like them, you don’t talk like them. You’re . . . you’re . . .”

“An outcast . . .” Relkin helped Hawkins.

“Yes.” Hawkins sounded sorry for him.

“Don’t sound like that; I want to be what I am, I don’t have to pretend like that bunch of old momzers.”

“Pretend what?” Hawkins asked.

“She knows what I’m talking about. Ask them about Dabrowa, and they’ll make you think that Poland was Paradise!” He laughed harshly. “Paradise, full of Polacks. Now you know that can’t be true. And they aren’t the only ones; all the old farts . . . singing dy de aye di di, hugging each other, dancing together like no one’d ever danced before . . .” Alone in Luria’s finished basement, Rachel thought, just the eight of them at night, dancing while everyone else was asleep.

“There’re the Westchester matrons, too,” Relkin said, “trying to love it all. To love and believe, the fat actors singing of the joys of being a Jew in a shtetl. To love and believe the artist who paints it with pink cows floating over the clean little houses and delicate brides. They don’t want to remember that the bride had smallpox, and the goyim are waiting just off the canvas to rape her and steal the cow.” Relkin laughed. “Don’t take my word for it. Try to send them back and see what they do.” Relkin took out a cigar and spit the bitten-­off end into the fireplace; then he said, “Belzec’s thirty-­five years ago, who cares?”

“I do,” Hawkins said.

“Why?”

Hawkins told him what had happened on President Street and in Laurel. Rachel looked out of the window trying not to listen. He got to the clay and Relkin paled and took out his handkerchief to wipe his face. But he didn’t say anything.

Then Hawkins said, “I know they were involved, but I don’t know how. All I know about them is that they come from Poland, that there’s some kind of bond between them and you’re like they are . . . yet not.”

Relkin said quietly, “Why is this Jew different from all other Jews?”

“Why?” Hawkins asked.

“Because my mother married a communist who wouldn’t kiss the rebbe’s ass. The rebbe, by the way, was Jacob Levy’s father. So, one man won’t kiss, pretty soon somebody else won’t, and before you know it you can’t get anyone to pucker up. Oh, they have reasons . . . the unity of community; safety in solidarity or some such bullshit.”

“Why was it bullshit?” Rachel asked.