He’d retired from teaching years ago, and was said to be writing the masterwork that would synthesize a lifetime of scholarship. But no one had seen the pages, and rumors circulated around the department at Columbia. As far back as he could remember, he had known the answers—his life had floated on a great ocean of understanding, and he’d had only to dip his cup. He had not noticed the slow evaporation of that ocean until it was too late. He had ceased to understand. He had not understood for years. Every day he sat at his desk in the cramped back room of the apartment filled with tribal art that he and Mira had bought cheaply forty years ago on a trip to New Mexico.

For years he’d sat, but nothing had come. He’d even thought of writing his memoirs, but got only as far as filling a notebook with the names of people he’d once known. When his old students came by, he sat under the primitive masks and held forth on the predicament of the Jewish historian. The Jews had finished writing history long ago, he said. When the rabbis closed the canon of the Bible, it was because they felt they had more than enough history. Two thousand years ago the door was shut on sacred history, the only kind a Jew had any use for. Then came the zealotry and the messianism, the savagery of the Romans, the river of blood, the fire, the destruction, and, finally, exile. From then on, the Jews decided to live outside history. History was what happened to other people while the Jews were waiting for the Messiah to come. In the meantime the rabbis busied themselves with Jewish memory only, and for two millennia that memory had sustained an entire people. So who was he—who were any of them—to rock the boat?

Having heard it all before, his students came by less and less. Ruthie could bear to stay for only fifteen minutes. His older daughter had long ago been lost to him. Occasionally, she took a break from throwing herself in front of Israeli bulldozers in the West Bank to call home. But if he picked up, instead of Mira, she hung up and went back to the Palestinians. For a moment, he would hear her breathing. “Carol?” But he was answered by the dial tone. What had he ever done to her? He had not been a good father. But had he been so terrible? Absorbed in his academic life, he had left the girls in Mira’s hands. Had there been something beneath that choice? What interest they might have had in him waned. At night, when Mira braided their coppery hair before bed, the delicate lacework of their days had come spooling out, the triumphs and the disappointments. He was neither expected nor wanted during this ritual, so he kept to himself in the back room, converted into a study after Carol was born. But the sense of being shut out, powerless and irrelevant, stoked his fury. Later, he always regretted the things he said.