They had walked—that much Bluma knew. She could feel it in her legs and her aching, frigid feet, step after step after step after step until they finally fell. Even now, used to months of the pumping rhythm in her legs, she felt uncomfortable, restless, as if they ought to go on.

Why had they stopped? What had caused them to fall?

Then, lifting her head from the snow, Bluma looked down at her bare pink feet and saw what had tripped her up:

There, as if waiting, orderly and neat, her thick woolen stockings lolling out like laughing tongues, were the old boots she had stepped out of at Death’s threshold. Beside them, in a tangled jumble of lace and leather, were Yehuda Leib’s.

Gratefully, she sat up, reaching forward.

“Yehuda Leib,” she called. She didn’t have to look up in order to know that he was there.

Yehuda Leib raised his head from the ground, and when he saw the shoes at his feet, he made a grateful little sound: not quite a grunt, not quite a sigh, but full to bursting with relief.

For a long moment, they sat side by side, slipping their feet into socks and stockings, passing laces through hooks and eyelets, knotting and double-knotting.

All around them, fat drops of falling water drummed on the icy surface of the snow.

Bluma stood, working her frigid toes into the warm wool of her stockings, flexing her feet, stretching her legs.

Yehuda Leib remained sitting in the snow, admiring the sight of his shod feet.

Somewhere, a bell had been ringing, and before long, Bluma traced the sound to its source: there, low in the branches of a birch tree, someone had strung an old bronze handbell, scratched and battered and green with age.

Softly, Bluma reached up and laid a soft finger to the humming bell, bringing an end to its lingering tone, and in the newfound silence of the grove, Yehuda Leib was certain he could hear rushing water.

“Oh,” said a voice nearby. “Oh, how good it is to see you.”

The voice was familiar—and the face behind it, too—but neither Bluma nor Yehuda Leib had ever heard it speak so clearly before.

“Mottke?” said Bluma.

“Hello,” he said, waggling his fingers.

And, all of a sudden, Yehuda Leib understood where they were.

Just behind smiling, slump-shouldered Mottke, he could see the rushing water, the ferry. There was the muddy street that led up into town, and, just beyond it, the first battered houses of Tupik.

“Oh, Bluma,” he said, but she had already seen.

“I know,” she said, weary, hungry, happy.

“I imagine you would like to cross over,” said Mottke.

“Yes,” said Bluma, and “Please,” said Yehuda Leib.

Mottke’s leathery smile deepened. “It would be my particular pleasure.”

Yehuda Leib pushed himself up to his aching feet.