There had been a time when she had considered a life other than this. There had been a time when she had friends who wore blue jeans and mocked tradition. When she married Aharon, she understood that she was signing up for the life of her parents. But he had been so handsome and fiery, standing at their dinner table speaking passionately about the Torah, he’d made her believe in it all again. The dramatic young Torah scholar! A jewel of Jewish manhood! She’d thought he was the rock upon which she could anchor her belief, that the world of the frum made sense as long as their love was in the center of it. What she hadn’t understood was that the lifestyle she’d chosen would go on and on, but his ardor for her would not. What she had taken for a rock had been no more substantial than passion’s first blush. What bride understood this?

She had already disobeyed him a little. Her parents, bless them, had moved to Israel to be close to their grandchildren shortly after Yehuda was born. The last time she’d visited them with the children she’d seen her younger brother, Samuel, surfing on the Internet. Would there be—she’d asked him—an on-line network of Holocaust survivors? With a little searching, Samuel found a newsgroup. He posted a message there under her direction:

Looking for anyone who knew Rabbi Yosef Kobinski, Lodz ghetto and Auschwitz.

She was almost relieved they hadn’t heard anything back yet. Of course, she hadn’t told Aharon. It had been a whim. Nothing would come of it.

The children were playing quietly below; the baby was sleeping.

The binder was heavy. She got it onto the kitchen table, where she could still watch the children. But after a while she forgot to watch, and when they came in an hour later she plopped them down in the living room with new coloring books she’d been saving for a rainy day and continued searching.

All the way back to Jerusalem, Aharon could not stop seeing the scene Biederer had painted: the frail camp prisoner, Kobinski, dressed in filthy stripes, and the sharply dressed Nazi guard, Wallick, struggling hand to hand, the one hopelessly outmatched but determined, the other toying, cruelly, and then the two of them vanishing to the astonishment of the onlookers.

Ezekiel’s chariot. Even he could see that stank of mythmaking. A flash of light. Could it have been the weapon? Could Kobinski have managed to make the weapon, somehow? Had it been on him that night? Had the two of them been vaporized? Or was there something else going on entirely?

By the time Aharon reached home it was late. He dragged himself in the door with the weariness of the walking dead.

“It’s about time,” Hannah said to him, coming from the kitchen. Her cheeks were pink. “I started supper. It’s chicken.”

“I’m not hungry. So where are the children?” he called out, louder. “My son and daughter don’t have a kiss for their papa?”

The children used to run to him when he entered, but they hadn’t for months now. Devorah and Yehuda peeked cautiously from the living room. Aharon knelt down, held out his arms.

“Come here, Devehleh.”

The little girl ran to him with restrained eagerness. Then Yehuda. Aharon found himself clinging to the boy. Yehuda, his eldest, his son, was nine years old—the same age as Isaac Kobinski in that picture. He turned his wooly face to the boy’s small shoulder when he felt tears.

“Papa, what’s the matter?”

Aharon let him go, pushed himself upright. “Nothing. Everything’s fine; why shouldn’t it be?” He wiped his eyes. His son and daughter stared up at him in shock until he shooed them back to their games. He felt weighted with grief, as if he’d been sitting shivah.

“Aharon,” Hannah said, tenderly, but she didn’t come to him.

He wanted to reach out for her, but the gap felt so wide. He rubbed his lips with trembling fingers. “I’m not hungry, but maybe I should eat.”

“Come into the kitchen while I cook. Come on.”

The baby was in the kitchen high chair, happily munching on a sliced apple. Aharon kissed the warm and scented top of her head before slumping into a seat. Hannah used tongs to turn the pieces of chicken in a hot pan, then came to sit with him. “Was it so bad?”

He looked at her. Of course she had guessed where he’d been. “Oh, Hannah. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. Am I tracking a madman? Am I crazy myself? What?”

“Shhhh.” She patted his hand.

“God has given this to me, and I’m failing Him. I’m not capable. Nothing is fitting together. Nothing makes any sense!”

He knew this dark emotional tide was temporary. It was the images Biederer had tried to poison him with, not just that last battle in the woods but all of the terrible atrocities. And he had never, never wanted this.

“God knows what He’s doing!” he said fiercely. “If He punishes, there must be a good reason. Who are we to question?”

Hannah regarded him with wary concern. “You had a bad day. Tomorrow you’ll feel better.”

“Lo.”

“Stop then,” Hannah said impulsively. “Aharon, please. Sometimes you have such a look… I’m afraid for you.”

“God wants what He wants. Jonah tried to run away. Look where it got him.” The words, and all they brought with them of the simple, straightforward God of the Torah, made him feel better. He sat up a bit straighter and searched in his pocket for a handkerchief.

“What?” he asked, because the fact that his wife had something to tell him was written all over her face.

“Nothing.”

“There’s something, what?”

“I…” She shook her head and leaned forward in her chair, burying her face against his vest. “I love you, Aharon Handalman. I still love you.”

“Of course,” he said, but he heard the doubt in her voice and gripped her tightly.

7

When it was taken seriously, Copernicus’ proposal raised many gigantic problems for the believing Christian. If, for example, the earth were merely one of six planets, how were the stories of the Fall and of the Salvation, with their immense bearing on Christian life, to be preserved? If there were other bodies essentially like the earth, God’s goodness would surely necessitate that they, too, be inhabited. But if there were men on other planets, how could they be descendants of Adam and Eve, and how could they have inherited the original sin, which explains man’s otherwise incomprehensible travail on an earth made for him by a good and omnipotent deity?

[F]ailure to adjust early in evolution may be just what is needed for success later on, that stress and strife are ingredients of long-range harmony, that pain is vital to birth and creation.