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said, stretching for the bottles. "Mama--"
    "Ma-ma, Ma-ma," Erich mimicked in a baby voice. He swung one of the bottles menacingly over the curb. "You coming with us, or are you going home with one?"
    "I told you, I--"
    Glass and milk splattered. Sol jerked backward to avoid both...and found himself pressing hard against the seat of the taxi, which was slowing as it neared the hospital. Light filtered through the car's window, foggy with the breath of its occupants.
    "Moon...melting moon," Erich whispered, eyes open wide and staring upward. "Jungle..." Fur glistening wetly, two black-and-white long-muzzled monkeys hunched over him.
    Sol blinked hard and put on his glasses. Quickly, the image vanished. No monkeys...only the attendants. A dream, he told himself. Only a bad dream.
    But then, why was he still frightened?

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
    May l922
     
    Solomon kicked off his shoes and stretched out on top of his eiderdown. He was so tired--and shaken. A few minutes of sleep and he would start studying again, he promised himself. In less than two months it would be his bar mitzvah. He had studying for that and schoolwork and--
    His eyes closed.
    "Studying dreams, again, Spatz?"
    "Wha--who--oh, it's you." Sol could feel sweat running down the back of his neck. He shifted his position slightly and glanced at the bed to make sure there were no damp patches. Erich knew nothing about the bedwetting; Sol wanted to keep it that way.
    "Still having nightmares?" Erich narrowed his eyes and stared at Sol.
    Sol nodded. "What about you?"
    "The Bull dream," Erich said. "If it's the last thing I do, I'll pay my father back--"
    It had been three and a half years since the accident and, though they were less frequent, the nightmares had not stopped. The day after the accident, groggy with painkillers, Erich swore he could hear Bull gurgling as Herr Weisser drowned him in the canal. He had been dreaming about it ever since. Sol's nightmares were also always the same: Erich screaming; Erich hanging limply from the grate, blood curling down his arm; the woman begging God to let her die; and the monkeys--always the monkeys. Superimposed over all of it, swollen and bloody and bruised, Erich's three crushed fingers--
    He looked at Erich's hand, at the pale flesh and the scars, red and raised, like symbiotic vines that had wound themselves around his fingers and taken root. Eventually the scars would turn white, the doctor said. Whiter than the flesh--
    "Want to go for a walk--feed the birds--make trouble?" Erich asked.
    "Have to study."
    Erich perched on the edge of the bed. "Look, Spatz, I have an idea. Remember when Karl almost drowned at the swimming meet? Remember how he was terrified of water after that, until they made him go swimming again?"
    "What's that got to do with me?"
    "Saturday, you and your papa went to synagogue and I was helping in the shop. I got into the furrier's sub-basement--"
    "How?"
    "I have my ways." He took a key chain from his hip pocket. Attached to the chain was a small book-shaped leather pouch which Sol knew contained Erich's lock picks. "There's a padlocked sewer-entrance down there--"
    "You went inside!"
    "I went looking for that woman you told me about." He raised his voice and mimicked a woman's voice. "Oh God, let me die. I did not know...I did not know."
    A thin shiver ran down Sol's spine--the kind his mama said meant a goose had walked on his grave. The nightmares, the fear--how foolish he had been! Maybe there had never been a woman's voice! He should have thought of this before, after the accident and Erich's grand mal seizure, when the doctor told them about some of the strange things that happened to people who had seizures. Sometimes they could not remember anything about what had happened before and after the seizure, and sometimes--during the seizure--they spoke in tongues. Erich's seizure must have been coming on when he was hanging from the grating. He could have mimicked a woman, like now, Sol thought.