But I myself wasn’t able to go very far with it. I think I didn’t have the courage, and after that summer I was never again so bold or so reckless. I had one boyfriend after another, all of them gentle and a little afraid of me, and then I got married and had two daughters of my own. The oldest has my husband’s sandy hair; if she were walking in a field in autumn, you could lose her easily. But the younger one stands out wherever she is. She grows and develops in contrast with everything around her. It’s wrong, dangerous even, to imagine that a person has any choice in her looks. And yet I’d swear that my daughter had something to do with the black hair and green eyes that always attract attention, even when she’s standing in a chorus of other children. She’s only twelve, and still small, but already men look at her when she walks in the street or rides the subway. And she doesn’t hunch, or put up her hood, or hide away behind her headphones the way her friends do. She stands erect and still like a queen, which only makes her even more of an object of their fascination. She has a proudness about her that refuses to grow small, but if it was only that, I might not have begun to fear for her. It’s her curiosity in her own power, its reach and its limit, that frightens me. Though maybe the truth is that when I am not afraid for her, I envy her. One day I saw it: how she looked back at the man in the business suit who stood across the subway car from her, burning a hole through her with his eyes. Her stare was a challenge. If a friend had been riding with her, she might have turned her face slowly to her, without taking her eyes off the man, and said something to invoke laughter. It was then that Soraya came back to me, and since then I have been what I can only call haunted by her. By her, and how a person can happen to you and only half a lifetime later does this happening ripen, burst, and deliver itself. Soraya with her downy mustache and her winged eyeliner and her laugh, that deep laugh that came from her stomach, when she told us about the Dutch banker’s arousal. He could have broken her in two with one hand, but either she was already broken, or she wasn’t going to break.

Zusya on the Roof

Heels dug into the tar paper, twenty-three floors above 110th Street, cradling his newborn grandson—how did he wind up here? It was not a simple thing, as his father would say. Simplicity was not his patrimony.

To begin specifically: Brodman had been dead for two weeks, but then, sadly, he had come back to this world, where he’d spent fifty years trying to write unnecessary books. There had been complications after surgery for a tumor in his bowel. Hooked to a respirator, bags for every fluid going in or coming out, for fifteen days his body lay on a gurney, fighting a medieval war against double pneumonia. For two weeks Brodman hung in the balance, dead and not dead. Like the house in Leviticus, he had been infested with plague: they scraped him clean and took him apart, stone by stone. Either it would work or it wouldn’t. Either the plague would be gone or it had already spread through him.