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face. When I don’t answer her, she attempts to consume the meal her mother carried up. I look away as she devours, without hunger, the sausages. The squalid grease pools down her chin. My eyes trace the fading brown shadows that line the wallpaper. It’s bad enough she’s so young and a Gentile, but does she have to compound my guilt by gobbling down treyf? I should speak to her of this, but what can she do? Inform her mother that she will eat only ritually clean foods? Where would they find anyone to reconsecrate the kitchen and the pots? No, to mention it at all is to call into question the entire friendship, which I’m certain is illegitimate from any point of view.
    She lifts the cup from the tray, rinses her mouth with the last of its contents, swallows the mixture, and wipes her lips, not on her arms this time, but on a napkin, as I have shown her, in an attempt to please me. I raise my eyes from the wooden floor. A delicate black mask frames her eyes, a shadow beneath her skin, giving her the expression of a quizzical bandit. I know she does not eat so greedily because she is recovering from whatever is inside her, killing her. No, her appetite has returned because she is in love. With me. I have become the center for her of a universe that is daily shrinking. Preposterous, I tell myself.I do not know the exact laws regarding the living’s relationship with the dead, but I am certain, from any point of examination, that our liaison is unclean.

12
    She has found a small collapsible telescope and a compass beneath her bed, in a toy chest one of my children must have forgotten about long ago. Her pleasure in this simple discovery is endearing to watch. She begs me to please take her to the roof to search for the moon, as soon as the night is clear, as soon as her health will permit it. Squirming around on her bed, she spies through the window on her neighbors, muttering imbecilic phrases of her own invention, which I take to be her impression of two pirates in conspiracy.
    She sleeps with the compass tight in one hand and her arm curled around the spyglass, lying half in shadow outside the lamp’s trembling circle of light. I sit near her bedside, attempting to catch up with my account in the ledger book, retrieved from my offices across the courtyard, but my words are as dry and my sentences as circular as wood shavings. The Rebbe has been gone now for so long that I have given up any thought of entering the World to Come. Perhaps during all the days and years of my life, when our holy men spoke of it, I had heard incorrectly or misinterpreted some vital phrase. True, I could have studied more or even asked for clarification. But my mind was toomuch on business and I have only myself to blame. If only I had stayed closer to the Rebbe after my death, instead of wandering around so much, perhaps I would not have missed his sudden departure. Together, we would have ascended, migrating through the Heavens, a joyful song in our mouths, and I would have forgotten all about this world and its travail.
    Ola yawns and stretches in her sleep, mumbling nasally the phrase “empty shoes.” She repositions herself in her pillows and the telescope falls to the floor with a soft, almost apologetic
clink,
the sound of yet another thing breaking. Bending over, I retrieve the cylindrical tube from the floor, raising it to my eye, and peer through it out the window. The lens has sustained a crack, not severe enough to dislodge it from its casing. I scan my town and see it, as it were, divided in two, the vein in the lens rendering everything slightly askew.
    For a long time, there is nothing moving, nothing to see, but then, along the river, my eye trails a young boy running in the thickets near its banks. The sky is purple in the dawn. He flies through the grasses, as though chased, perhaps caught out too late. He hadn’t expected the sun to rise so soon. Can it be that one of us is living still, hiding out somewhere along the