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sick and asleep, and the others are out of the house. Noah has been having nightmares again.”
    I looked at the two of them.
    “I came just to give him a lesson,” I said.
    “You have a good relationship with him,” his aunt said.
    “Anything you do, anything, we’ll be grateful for,” his uncle said.
    I accompanied her to the bedroom at the end of the hallway. She knocked on the closed door, then waited. She knocked again. I felt the apprehension stirring within her. She knocked a third time. Still there was no answer. She opened the door.
    The room was baking hot. It faced the back of the house, its two windows giving out on clotheslines and fire escapes.
    “Noah,” she said.
    He lay in the bed and looked out the windows.
    “It’s Davita,” she said.
    “Davita,” he murmured. He turned his head slightly and looked at me.
    She pushed me gently into the room and closed the door.
    The room was furnished with a bed, a dresser, and a desk and chair to the left of the bed. To the right were two windows.
    “I’ll open the windows,” I said.
    I raised the shade and opened the window on the right side of the room. Afternoon sunlight fell upon him. He looked ashen. Heat moved into the room and I closed the window. I had put Rachel’s drawing on the desk.
    “Rachel gave me something for you.”
    He took the drawing and let it lie face up on the bed fora moment. He seemed reluctant to look at it. Then he did, taking in its splash of colors.
    “Tell Rachel thanks you,” he said.
    He reached under his sheet and brought out the notebook I had gotten him. But he could not open it. He lay with head against the pillow and with the notebook on his chest, and he said, “Thanks for you came.”
    “Thanks for coming. Where’s your Hebrew notebook?”
    “It here somewhere.”
    “We’ll need it to write in.”
    He turned his face to the ceiling. “Tisha B’Av bring memories. From Tisha B’Av to first day Rosh Hashana, memories.”
    He lifted his head and looked at me. “I wanting to tell you about Reb Binyomin.”
    He put his head back on the pillow and spoke again to the ceiling. Nothing came out. He tried to push up on his elbows, and raising his sleeves to adjust the sheet, he exposed his left arm, the arm that bore the concentration camp number. He sat up, covered by the sheet. I took the chair near the desk and brought it to the bed and sat down on it. He was talking again, in a rush of language. Now I hear him again over the years, talking slowly about it, thinking what he and his brother had done.
    “It began with my brother,” he said. “We were ten years old. I told you my father was a bookseller. We had our store on the market square and one day I found a book of drawings. I copied some of the drawings in the book and then I drew my apartment house and the courtyard. I gave the drawings to my brother.”
    He stopped and took a deep breath. Then he continued.
    “My father said to me during supper, holding up my drawings, You did these? And I nodded, wondering where he had gotten them and thinking a good scolding was in store for me. He was religious, though not one of the fanatics; tall and trim, he wore a skullcap inside the house and a hat outside, wore modern clothes, and had a short dark beard, a pince-nez, and a refined manner. He spoke Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and German. He said to my mother, What do you think of this? She said, looking at the drawings, He’s only ten. My little sister, six years old, asked if she could see the drawings, and my father showed them to her, twelve sheets of paper, and my sister went oooh! Then my father asked me if he could show the pictures to Reb Binyomin.
    “Reb Binyomin was the caretaker of our synagogue. A man in his late sixties. Stocky, white-bearded, dark, burning eyes, skin furrowed deep on his forehead, his face frozen with remorse. A non-Jew, about my father’s age, and his boy, about my age, swept and cleaned, prepared wood for the stove. Reb Binyomin