“Good night,” said Bluma. “Stay safe.”

Yehuda Leib shrugged as if to say, What can I do?

“I hope you get what you’re waiting for,” he said.

Bluma sighed. “Me too.”

And, unfortunately, she would.

—

She came trudging out of the woods haltingly, snowdrifts on her stooped shoulders. She jostled the door as she crossed over the threshold, and in the front room where she’d fallen asleep, Bluma’s mother moaned and rolled over.

Bluma’s bubbe saw this, and, disappointed she hadn’t managed to wake her daughter-in-law, she made a loud, rude noise with her tongue and tramped over to the staircase.

Up, as always.

Up, past her granddaughter, dozing, still dressed atop the bedclothes.

Endlessly, endlessly up.

She was tired—exhausted, really. As tired as she would ever get.

All she wanted to do was lie down and rest.

Arriving heavily at the top of the stairs, she found that someone had been in her room, and she made the rude noise again, this time to the universe at large.

With a weary shimmy, she shook what snow remained about her onto the floor, stumped over to the window, wheezed, coughed, and blew out the two dwindling candles that had been left burning on the sill.

Slowly, she turned back to prepare for bed in the gloom she felt entitled to.

And at this very moment, on the far side of the river crossing, a small bell began to ring.

—

If you arrived in Tupik at the end of a long day’s journey and wished to continue on the next day, the only place for you to go would be back the way you came. Just beyond the far shore of the muddy river, the ground became first unpleasantly moist, and then impassably swampy, and to make matters worse, a series of precipitous drops and rocky rapids in the river downstream made it impractical to pilot a boat, a barge, or any other vessel out on the water.

Tupik was a dead end.

It might, then, be a surprise to learn that an old stonework ferry shack still crouched low on Tupik’s riverbank. According to the town’s founding charter, as long as the Jews of Tupik provided, at their own expense, a ferryman to work the crossing, they would be allowed to continue to live and trade in the little town by the river. Of course, the nobleman who had granted the charter had been dead for hundreds of years, and his descendants had long since lost track of the bargain, but to the denizens of Tupik—like the rest of their people—it was no small thing to abandon an ancient agreement.

In those days, the ferryman was a fellow named Mottke, a devoted souse who was rumored never once to have bathed.