The attic was vast. Four or five of Yehuda Leib’s houses could easily have fit inside.

The stillness was terrible.

He wanted to go now, wanted to be on his way, but he was in the very center of town, and the man Avimelekh might already have arrived.

Across the muddy snow of the road sat the study house. Issur Frumkin would be there for certain. If he so much as cracked the sliding panel beneath the wide synagogue eaves in order to leave, he could be seen.

He needed a distraction.

And then, as if by some dark miracle, all the people of Tupik began to march past him up the hill.

What was happening?

Where were they going?

No matter. This was the chance he had been waiting for.

As the flow of people began to dwindle, Yehuda Leib slid the entry panel back.

He took a deep breath. Silence held the road below.

Carefully, he climbed down into the snow.

It was time to go.

But there was one last thing he had to do first.

—

People kept looking at Bluma with pity.

All she wanted was for no one to look at her at all.

Just leave me alone.

The funeral had seemed simultaneously endless and perfunctory. There had been blessings, and the rabbi had said something about an old woman who sounded nothing like Bluma’s bubbe, and then they’d done what they’d all come to do: put her bubbe into the earth and, one by one, seal it up above her.

Bluma’s father took up the shovel late, but unlike Bluma, Feygush, and the others, he did not stop with a single symbolic clod. In fact, he did not stop at all. People shuffled around him to drop their handfuls of earth into the grave—still, he kept shoveling. Bluma could see the veins bulging in his neck as he shoveled, and shoveled, and shoveled.

And shoveled.

He had worked up quite a sweat by the time the grave was full, and on their short walk home, steam rose from him like silent prayer into the cold, gray afternoon.

People began to arrive at their door, bringing food, smiling sadly. Candles filled the house. Before long, the front room was packed with milling visitors—munching, chatting, looking at Bluma with pity.

Just leave me alone.

Soon she retired to the empty second level. She could not outrun the chatter of the guests on the first floor, but here, at least, it was muted, as if heard through a thick layer of earth.

There had been many distractions, of course, but whenever Bluma’s brain had come to rest that day, this was the place to which it had returned.

The spoon.

She could not see it, but she knew it was there, wedged against the wall beneath her bed, just where she had thrown it.