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deliberately, eyebrows curving down, though his cherubic mouth smiled. It was a respectful, sincere expression. “And I can’t bring them back to life. I can’t do that!” he said.
    He looked back at the flames.
    “The parents of Gregory Belkin perished in the Holocaust in Europe,” he said. “And Gregory became a madman. And his brother a holy man, a saint, zaddik. And you became ascholar, and a teacher, with a gentle gift for making students understand.”
    “You honor me,” I said softly. There were a thousand little questions buzzing around me like bees. I wasn’t going to cheapen things.
    “Go on, Azriel, please,” I said. “Tell me what you want to tell me. Tell me what you want me to know.”
    “Ah, well, as I indicated we were the rich exiles. You know the story. Nebuchadnezzar came down on Jerusalem and slew the soldiers and littered the streets with bodies, and left behind a Babylonian governor to rule over the peasants who would tend our estates and vineyards and send the produce home to his Court. Customary.
    “But rich men, tradesmen, scribes like the men of my family? We weren’t slain. He didn’t come sharpening his sword on our necks. We were deported to Babylon with everything that we could carry, I might add, wagons of our fine furniture which he allowed us to have, although he had thoroughly looted our temple, and we were given fine houses in which to live so that we might set up shop and serve the markets of Babylon and serve the temple and the Court.
    “This happened a thousand times over in those centuries. Even the cruel Assyrians would do the same thing. They’d put to the sword the soldiers and then drag off the man who knew how to write three languages, and the boy who could carve perfectly in ivory, and so it was with us. The Babylonians, they weren’t as bad as other enemies might have been. Imagine being dragged back to Egypt. Imagine. Egypt, where people live just to die, and sing night and day of dying, and of being dead, and there was nothing but village after village and field after field.
    “No, we didn’t have it bad off.
    “By eleven years old, I had been to the temple itself, a page, as many a rich Hebrew boy was, and I had seen the great statue of Marduk himself, the god, in his high sanctuary atop the great ziggurat of Etemenanki. I had entered into the inner shrine with the priests, and the strangest thought had occurredto me! This big statue looked more like me than the little one I had which I had always thought bore a distinct resemblance.
    “Of course I didn’t chirp this out loud. But as I looked up at mighty Marduk, the great gold Marduk, the statue in which the god lived and ruled, and should have been carried each year in the New Year’s Procession, the statue smiled.
    “I was too clever to say anything to the priests. We were in the process of preparing the inner sanctuary for the woman who would come and spend the night with the god. But the priests noticed something. And they saw me look at Marduk and one of them asked, ‘What did you say?’ and of course I’d said nothing. But Marduk had said, ‘Well, what do you think of my house, Azriel? I’ve been so often to yours.’
    “From that moment, the priests were on to it. Yet things might still have gone differently. I might have had a long human life. I might have had a different path. Sons, daughters. I don’t know.
    “At the time, I thought it was hilarious and wonderful, and loved Marduk for this little trick. But we continued to ready the chamber, which was truly magnificent in plated gold, and the silken couch where the woman would lie to be taken by the god that night, and then we left, and one of the priests said: ‘The God smiled on you!’
    “I was stiff with fear. I didn’t want to answer.
    “Rich Hebrew hostages or deportees like us were treated very well, as I said, but I didn’t really talk to the priests, you know, as if they were Hebrews. They were the priests of the gods