A middle-­aged man was kneeling next to him on the sidewalk. His face was very pale against his black hair, and his wide-­brimmed black hat threw a shadow over his face which made him look a little unearthly. Good unearthly, like an angel. Sure enough, he smiled, the sweetest smile Hawkins had ever seen, and he said, “Nu, you wake up. Gut.” Then he frowned and asked, “Do you know where you are?”

Hawkins looked past him up the street. “Nostrand Avenue,” he said.

The man beamed. “Good, good. Do you know who you are?”

“Yes,” Hawkins answered.

“Nu?” the man said.

“I’m Roger Hawkins.”

The man looked like Hawkins had just said something brilliant. “I’m Jacob Levy,” he said. He took Hawkins’s hand, and even though he was short and very thin, he helped Hawkins to his feet.

Levy was forty-­eight then; he was a rabbi and he owned a small bookstore on the corner of Nostrand and President. He had books in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and some in English, and in ten or twelve years, Hawkins read Pushkin, Dostoevski, Goncharov, and Tolstoy. He even read Sholokhov, and Olyesha, who Levy said had offended the government and had disappeared. He read English and American novels, too: Henry James, Dickens, George Eliot. He even bought a set of Gibbon, thinking that if he could read Sholokhov, he could read anything. But three pages of Gibbon put him to sleep, and he never got past the first chapter. Levy confessed that he never had either, but he believed his English, not Gibbon, was to blame.

Levy was dark and frail-­looking and he never raised his voice or lost his temper. If Hawkins wanted to stop reading something Levy thought was good, Levy would spend hours convincing him to go on. They sat at the folding table in the front of the bookstore, drinking tea, with Isaac Luria always there on a raised chair, his long legs bent up, holding an open book. When Levy left Hawkins alone to take care of a customer, Hawkins would try not to look at Luria. Once he did and caught Luria staring at him. Both men looked away.