There was a little stone house in the park where they had their picnic and she let Garfield take her back of it, and lay next to him in the grass and soft weeds. They heard other couples laughing and breathing hard, saying things to each other, and she lay still on her back in the sun and let him fondle her, then she did the same things to him, but he couldn’t keep an erection long enough that time to enter her. He saw her almost every day after that, until after a week of just touching each other, slowly, more tenderly, he thought, than he’d ever touched anything, he made love to her. She laughed softly and whispered in Russian, “Wonderful . . . oh, wonderful.”

Tepel gave Garfield the bottle. “You’re thinking of Ada, aren’t you?”

Garfield nodded and drank a little from the bottle; he wasn’t drunk anymore, or even high, and he didn’t feel as if he had been drunk. He was clearheaded and melancholy.

“You know”—he switched to Yiddish because he could say things more precisely in Yiddish than he could in English—“with every mile now,” he said, “I believe the inspector and his lover more; I feel as if I’m getting closer to something that Ada got me away from. If it hadn’t been for her and you, and being poor and unconnected, I think that in some way I can’t tell you about, an important part of me would never have gotten out of the camp. But now, driving in the moonlight . . . even here on the highway with the McDonald’s over there and the Roy Rogers across the way, and the people settling down to watch the eight o’clock program, or help their kids with their homework, or make love, or drink Cokes or gin or play cards . . . in the middle of this I feel as if I’m going back to Theresienstadt.”

Tepel asked in Yiddish, “You think we’ll find something?”

“I don’t know,” Garfield said, “but if we do, run. Wolf. If they built it, they’ll use it.”

They were a little drunker when they got to Laurel. They drove past Ryder’s church and the L & L Stationery and Bookstore. They parked the car down the road and walked as quietly as they could, only weaving a little, to the shul. They held each other’s arms and went up the dark path next to the hedge. They squatted painfully next to the window and looked in. They saw the little pig night light, and the box covered with a flowered drape. The drape hung still; the shadows around it were shallow and benign. They were surprised at the tameness of the scene and they looked at each other and shrugged.

“Big deal,” Tepel said.

Garfield nodded. “But what would they keep in there?” he asked.

“Prayer books,” Tepel answered.