Up here, there was no one to glare—no one to wish he simply wasn’t.

The time passed slowly. Feet and hooves trod the mud below. Fires were kindled, burned, went out. The dim gray sky began to darken.

The hour came and went for afternoon prayers.

It really was a shame. He had promised his mother that he would stay out of trouble.

But he’d had very little choice in the matter. There were a lot of things you could say about Yehuda Leib, but he wasn’t a bastard. That much he knew.

He remembered his father, though his mother thought this was impossible.

The memory was warm, almost hot, and it smelled of wax and wood and sweat and wool.

It was a very good memory.

He had been a small boy, and his father had held him with one arm. It had been Yom Kippur, he thought, the holiest day of the year, because all around him he remembered clean white garments. His father’s garment had been white, and over it he had worn his striped prayer shawl. Yehuda Leib remembered looking up at the raucous, colorful ceiling of the synagogue, painted with vines and figs, eagles, lions, and unicorns, red and blue and tawny and white, and then his father had pulled his attention down to the front of the room, and someone had blown the ram’s horn, and there had been a great riot of supplication from the congregation, and he’d looked up, and there had been tears in his father’s eyes, and he’d reached out and taken the edges of his father’s beard softly in his fat little fists, and his father had smiled, and the tears had fallen onto his cheeks.

That was all he remembered.

Sometimes he thought the memory felt holy because of the synagogue, and sometimes he thought maybe it was the other way around.

He would have given anything to see his father’s face again. He would’ve given the right eye out of his own head.

But it was impossible. Whenever he asked about him, his mother told Yehuda Leib that his father had died, and then she became very sad for a day or two.

After a while, Yehuda Leib learned to stop asking.

But he never learned to stop wondering.

“Rabbi!”

Instinctively, Yehuda Leib lay flat against the slope of the roof below.

He knew that voice. That was Moshe Dovid Frumkin. The last person Yehuda Leib wanted to see was Issur’s father, the butcher, a man who wore blood as comfortably as others wore clothes.

“Rabbi,” called Reb Frumkin again, and now Yehuda Leib heard the soft, round voice of the rabbi reaching out in response.

“Moshe Dovid,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

Moshe Dovid Frumkin let out an aggrieved sigh, and Yehuda Leib wriggled around to see the two men talking in the street below.