Biederer sighed. “I’ll tell you who it hurt—his son, Isaac. Sometimes I saw tears running down his face as they walked away from the line with their pitiful bowls. Once I heard him urge his father as they walked past me, ‘Eat, Papa; eat now,’ and his father said, ‘We must first find a seat,’ in a pleasant voice. Oh, the poor boy—what a curse, to have such a great rebbe for a father!”

Something trembled on the tip of Biederer’s tongue, trembled like the moisture on the edges of his eyelids. But he shook his head. “One thing at a time.” He took an enormous breath. “What else did Wallick do to Kobinski? Latrine duty, all the time. Horrible. Truly horrible, such a great scholar crawling around in absolute filth. Disgusting! Wallick wouldn’t allow him any help during the day, but when his followers got back from their own labor sometimes he would still be at it and they’d finish for him.”

Biederer pointed those smoking fingers at Aharon. White streamers drifted around his face like premonitions of his shroud. “I’m telling you, the stink of such a place—you can take it maybe two minutes without vomiting. Buckets and buckets of the worst… ! It’s not just normal slops, see. Everyone was sick with diarrhea, typhus, every illness known to man. And the smell starvation gives a man’s guts… ! This is hell, I’m telling you.”

“Please,” Aharon said weakly. He could smell it. A distinct scent of urine and feces was in his nostrils. He stood up and went over to the window, no longer caring about Biederer. He opened it fully, pulling up the blinds. He leaned out and gulped in fresh air. But the air outside was so hot by now that it did little to clear his head, only sat in his lungs like wet towels.

“But none of this—none of it broke Kobinski.”

Biederer’s voice came from behind his head, like the voice of the dead. There was that heavy weight in the old man’s voice again, something large unsaid. But this time, Aharon had the feeling he would say it. Aharon couldn’t stop him. He couldn’t even open his mouth to talk.

“Not…” Biederer said with a thick tongue, “not until Wallick began to mess with his son.”

“Please, Lord.” Hot tears of pain and frustration filled Aharon’s eyes. He pushed against the sill to stand. He went over to the chair and picked up his coat. “Shalom, Mr. Biederer.”

“Okay, Rabbi Handalman,” Biederer said, his hands out and down in surrender.

“No, I’m sorry, but—”

“So I’ll stop,” Biederer said firmly.

Aharon stood still, coat and hat in hand. The sweat tickled as it ran down his cheeks into his beard. Biederer made a gesture upward with his outstretched hands—nu?

“I don’t need to hear any more.” Aharon put on his hat.

“There’s more. So we’ll skip the son. I can’t say I blame you there. But I have something you want. It’s about the rebbe’s work. So sit.”

Aharon fingered his coat for a moment. He slowly removed his hat and returned to his seat. He was beginning to hate Biederer. The old sadist, he had some kind of perverted desire to pass along that black chip in his heart, poisonous and festering.

“It was after Wallick had… well, Isaac was no longer in our barrack.”

“He was dead,” Aharon said with a resigned sigh.

“No,” Biederer said, eyes bright and terrible. He took another cigarette. “But you don’t want to hear about that, so you won’t hear. Since you’re so delicate, Rabbi Handalman. I know your type. Yes, I know your type.”

Aharon clenched his fists on his hat brim. “Say what you have to say.”

“After Isaac left the barrack Kobinski finally began to wake up to reality—you know what I’m saying? He became obsessed with finding a way out of Auschwitz. Somehow Anatoli managed to smuggle in a map of the area. Kobinski pored over that map, drawing lines and numbers. Some said he was using astrology; others said it was devils’ work.”

Aharon sat forward on his chair rigidly. What was this?

“He told us he had found a gateway.” Biederer looked sheepish, as if knowing it sounded crazy. “A gateway to… to Heaven. It was out in the woods, about a mile from camp. If we could only get to it.”

Aharon felt a surge of disappointment. This was what he had come here for? Sat through all this horrible sewage of the past? “That’s ludicrous!”

Biederer shrugged. He leaned back, tapped his foot, but there was a stubborn look in his eye, the look of a true believer. “Maybe. And maybe some people even back then didn’t believe him—maybe most people. But some did,” pointing his cigarette/fingers at Aharon. “Some said he was a great kabbalist, that he could call down a heavenly chariot like Ezekiel. And maybe some just thought they had nothing to lose.”

“This is the escape attempt?” Aharon said, connecting this with what he’d read at Yad Vashem. Biederer nodded.

Aharon huffed. “But everyone was killed that night! Rabbi Kobinski—may he rest in peace—he must have been driven over the edge. I’m sorry for it, but it’s true.”

Biederer leaned forward and took his cup, drank from it. He shook his head. “No, Rabbi Handalman.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it worked.”

Aharon stared at him, astonished. There was something so calm and triumphant on Biederer’s face that Aharon was intimidated to stillness.

“You can think what you like—who can stop you? But what happened, happened. I didn’t go. I was afraid; that’s God’s truth. About ten men from our barrack went. Only two returned—Anatoli was one of them. They managed to slip away from the others in the darkness and made it back to camp. They told us.”

“Yes?”

Biederer’s wizened face was practically glowing. “That night they got out of the camp and reached the place where Kobinski said they would find the gateway. The guards caught up with them there. They rounded up the prisoners, were going to bring them back to camp to be executed. But Kobinski challenged Wallick, and they struggled—hand to hand, hand to hand… like Jacob wrestling with the angel!”

Biederer closed his eyes, his face triumphant, as though he was viewing in his mind’s eye a scene he had imagined many times before. He took one last drag on his cigarette, holding the moment on his tongue. “Then the chariot did come, in a flash of light, and took them both.”

“What?”

“They disappeared, Rabbi Handalman. Kobinski and Wallick together—vanished! And no one ever saw either one of them again.”

The older children were playing quietly in the apartment courtyard with the neighbor children. The baby was asleep in her crib. Hannah Handalman sat at the kitchen table, looking out the window.

She knew Aharon had gone to Tel Aviv to see one of the survivors on her list, Biederer. He didn’t tell her. He was going for a drive alone, he said. But he didn’t go for drives, her husband. Jerusalem was all the world to him. Where else would he go on a whim? And then there was the look on his face, the look of a man going to a dentist for a root canal.

Hannah was fighting temptation. She’d had the misfortune to notice that Aharon had left his bags in the hall last night and that one of them, a large black bag, was the bag that contained the Kobinski array binder. When Aharon left this morning, he did not take it with him.

Unfortunately, that left her in a predicament. She told herself her husband had been very clear about not wanting her interference. But then, she thought perversely, she had been very clear about wanting him to spend more time with her and the children. And did she get that? No.

The more she contemplated the situation, the more hotly rebellion burned in her breast; it was like a clawed little mammal with a mind of its own. If Aharon had been a loving husband, if he’d been warm and tender and asked her nicely, there was nothing she wouldn’t do for him. Their marriage itself proved that.