The year wore on. Battles were fought. Men were killed. The leaves changed color and fell. Napoleon retreated and, in due course, was overthrown.

Soon thereafter, the girl was led beneath a wedding canopy, where she traded the name of her father for the name of her husband, and from that day on, she lived in his house, cleaned his mess, boiled his chicken soup, and waited for him to return home at night.

But something odd happened: one day, the girl looked into the mirror and found that the face staring back at her was no longer her own. She had loosened, wrinkled, worried herself into something that no longer resembled her at all. Only her lips remained the same—locked in a light, tight frown.

That evening, her husband did not come home.

It was not long before she knew that he would not be returning at all.

The frown deepened.

Before the week was out, the lady who had been a girl took her son, Zalman, and moved far away from the village of her birth to a place where no one knew, and where no one would whisper: all the way to a tiny, out-of-the-way shtetl called Tupik.

She took a small room in the attic of the baker’s house and apprenticed her boy in the bakery on the ground floor.

The baker died. The bakery passed to the lady’s son, Zalman.

She remained in the attic.

And as if in a chrysalis of silence, the lady in the attic turned into an old woman. Before long, as she was eldest, the women of Tupik began to call upon her to attend the births of children, and for more than a generation, every boy and girl born into the shtetl of Tupik was caught by the old woman’s hands.

But only two of them made any lasting impression on her.

The first was a scrawny boy, born before his time into a blustery, rain-soaked evening. When his tiny eyes blinked open, bright and clear and icy blue, they focused perfectly into hers.

She had seen that expression before: once, as a girl, long ago, crouched in the brambles, fingers stained, fear in her heart, sweetness on her lips.

Eight days later, breaking with her custom, the old woman went to the synagogue to hear what name the boy would be given.

It was Yehuda Leib.

And that evening, the child of her son, Zalman, was born—a girl named Bluma—and as the baby emerged, pink and squalling, the old woman found herself filled with a sense of unutterable gladness.

But when she looked down at her granddaughter’s face, another feeling stole into her heart: a sort of guilt, of pity and compassion.

There, as if reflected in a little mottled mirror, was her very own mouth, locked in a light, tight frown.

—