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river? The boy is carrying something, food perhaps, and when his hat blows off his head, he does not hesitate or look behind. Neither does he stop to retrieve it. Instead, he pumps his arms harder, jumps into the air, and disappears through the crack in the lens. He is gone. I search the banks but cannot find him. A silver glow seems to emanate from where he must have jumped into the reeds.
    The sky changes its mind, dropping buckets of red over the blue, until finally the dawn reveals itself as a soft yellow light. Ola stirs, opens her eyes. She pushes her arms like rolling pins across her face.
    “Panie Chaim,” she says, putting on her glasses. “Tell me …”
    “Yes, my Ola?”
    “What happens when we die?”
    “We mustn’t speak of such things,” I tell her. She looks worse than ever this morning, worn out, as though the effort it cost to sleep the night has exhausted her completely.
    “Who will come for me?” she says, sitting up on her elbows. “Jesus or the Virgin Mother?”
    It takes a moment for me to understand these words and when I do, I don’t know what to tell her. She’s a child, after all.
    “It’s not exactly like that,” I say.
    “But you’ll be here to guide me?”
    “Ola, please.”
    “Tell me the truth.”
    “What is the truth? Who knows the truth? Do I know the truth?”
    “Does it hurt?”
    “Such nonsense!”
    “Panie Chaim?”
    “No,” I say, sighing brusquely. “It doesn’t hurt.”
    How can I tell her the truth, that we wander the earth like an audience at intermission waiting for the concert to resume, unaware that the musicians have long since departed for home?
    “It’s like listening to beautiful music,” I say, trying to sound wistful.
    “That’s the angel song,” she says knowledgeably.
    Ah, but these people have such simple faith!
    “Is that what it was?” I say.
    “That’s what the Father says.”
    “Yes, but you can hear it all the time,” I say. “You don’t have to die for that.”
    It’s a deafening silence, I think to myself.
    “If you’re good,” she says.
    “If that’s what the Father told you, then, of course, it must be so.”
    They fill their heads with such rot, these priests! How we feared them as children, in their black ghouls’ cloaks. They’d rap our heads with knuckles as hard as rocks if they caught us so much as looking crossways at their church. We used to run by, as children, on our way to cheder, our hearts pounding against our ribs, out of fear for these black demons, certain they were neither man nor woman with their pointy beards and their wide billowing skirts.
    “I’ve been good,” she says. “Haven’t I?”
    “Of course you have.”
    “I cried when they killed you.”
    “I’m sure you did.”
    “I didn’t want them to.”
    “Of course you didn’t.”
    “The guns were so loud.”
    “Were they?” I say. “I didn’t notice.”
    “Terribly so.”
    “I don’t remember.” And in truth I don’t. “In any case,” I say, “it didn’t hurt.”
    To change the subject, I tell her a story of two pious Jews, two Hasids, who find a boat that takes them to the moon. The boat leaves the river and sails into the sky, where the night is thick with the moon’s luminous tide. On the way up, the two men argue about who is to blame for what is happening to them. They blame each other, naturally. But when they arrive, they discover pots of silver waiting for them there. These they load onto their boat, which they have tethered to a long rope girdling the moon. But the silver is too heavy for the boat, and they have piled so much of it into their frail craft that the boat sinks, pulling the moon out of the sky and leaving the earth in darkness.

13
    Because the night is finally clear, we ascend the interior staircase to the roof. Ola is so weakened that the large coat I force upon her is almost too heavy for her to wear. She kicks off the bulky leather shoes I brought for her at the first step, unable to lift