While waiting for the verdict, he dreamed wildly. Such hallucinations! Drugged, his temperature soaring, he dreamed he was the anti-Herzl, lecturing from coast to coast to crowds so huge they watched simulcasts of the simulcasts. A West Bank rabbi issued a fatwa on his head, with a ten-million-dollar bounty funded by a Jewish casino king. Hunted for treason, Brodman was hidden in a safe house somewhere in the heart of Germany. Outside his window, he could see the rolling hills of—Bavaria? Weserbergland? He was spared the details for his own good, in case he should break down and place a phone call to his wife, Mira, or his lawyer, or Rabbi Chanan Ben-Zvi of Gush Etzion. And if he did call the rabbi, what would he say? I surrender, come and get me, third dirt road on the left, past the dairy farm where Brunhilde is singing “Edelweiss” at the udders, and don’t forget your assault rifle? Or maybe the rabbi planned to slit Brodman’s throat with a carving knife.

From the German safe house, he held counsel with Buber, Rabbi Akiva, and Gershom Scholem, who relaxed on a bearskin rug, scratching behind its ears. He sat with Maimonides in the back of a bulletproof car; there was no end to the talking. He saw Moses ibn Ezra and heard Salo Baron, to whom he called, waving his arms to disperse the smoke. He couldn’t see him, but knew he was in that swirling nebula, breathing heavily—Salo Wittmayer Baron, who knew twenty languages and had testified at Eichmann’s trial, the first man to receive a chair in Jewish history at a university in the Western world. Salo, what have you brought on us?

Enormous things happened to him during those feverish weeks, unspeakable revelations. Unbuttoned from time, transient and transcendental, Brodman saw the true shape of his life, how it had torqued always in the direction of duty. Not only his life but the life of his people—the three thousand years of treacherous remembering, highly regarded suffering, and waiting.

On the fifteenth day, his fever broke and he woke to find himself cured. His body was habitable; he would live a little more. All that remained, according to the passage in Leviticus, was the ritual atonement that called for two birds, one to be sacrificed and the other left to live. One killed, the other dipped in the blood of its kin, shaken seven times around the house, then set free. Such reprieve! He never read the passage without crying. But he shall let go the living bird out of the city into the open fields, and make atonement for the house: and it shall be clean.

While he was hallucinating, his only grandchild arrived into the world. In his weakened state, Brodman half believed that his own mental work had performed the labor. His younger daughter, Ruthie, didn’t like men. When she’d announced that she was pregnant at forty-one, Brodman had accepted it as a miracle of immaculate conception. But the happiness was short-lived. A few months later, he’d gone in for a routine blood test, which led to a colonoscopy, which led, a month and a half before the child was due, to the discovery of his own gestation. If he believed in such things, he might have taken it for something mystical. Sweating and moaning, in horrific pain from his gut, he had pushed the idea of the child through the tight passage of incredulity and borne him into existence. It had almost killed him.