eyes as if to acknowledge that their rubashka shirts and bandannas, khaki shorts and chukka boots, did perhaps resemble the uniform of some children’s brigade. For their part Yehezkel and Yigdal, between whom Jocheved made no attempt to distinguish, assured her that the pretty sprig they remembered had blossomed into exquisite fruition in her married estate. She touched her thick curls, blushed in an excess of pride in her truant boys, despite the fact that one was given over to wickedness and the other a hostage to his own loopy imagination. Reunited with her brothers, it seemed to Jocheved, at least tonight, that her life had progressed in a triumphal arc from the pestilent ghetto in Lodz to the Upper West Side of New York City.
They filled each other in on the histories they’d missed the way you’d pitch stepping stones from either bank of a stream. Each item of information—Jocheved’s silent partnership with her husband, Yehezkel and Yigdal’s labors on a collective farm in the Galilee—constituted another stone that brought them a little closer to connecting their respective pasts. They chose, however, only the steadiest and least slippery stones, letting lie the more misshapen and bruising to the touch, for both parties had memories that might not advance their proximity. In this way the ordinarily taciturn brothers and the sister intent on drawing them out passed several charmed hours together; they ate the rolls, drank the cloying wine, and determined that all concerned could not be more content with their lot. The twins had remained unmarried, though in the communes the men and women felt little need for official sanctification of their unions; but they were without wives or issue, having dedicated themselves with the zealotry of the Essenes of old to the creation of a Jewish state. Jocheved listened with a slightly affected awe to their tales, since her time as a man among men had made her no stranger to the anomalies of human behavior that her brothers described. In the small hours when their sister despaired of her husband’s returning home that night, Yigdal and Yehezkel, enlivened by the happy occasion, declared they would go downtown to fetch him. Jocheved protested: No subways or buses would be running at that late hour and taxis would be scarce; they should sleep awhile and wait until morning. But the brothers were restless, insisting that they would walk if they couldn’t find transport; they could in any case use some air, and besides, sleep was something they had learned to do without in the Holy Land.
THE FIRE AND its attendant explosion, about which a number of unresolved theories had evolved, took three hook-and-ladder brigades and a corps of volunteers to put out. Since the Ice Castle occupied the entire block, the devastation had been largely contained; the neighboring structures suffered only minor damage, and though several firefighters collapsed from inhalation, only one life was lost. But the ash pit which was all that was left in place of the Castle smoldered for days, as if some volcanic landscape complete with smoking fumaroles had erupted in the midst of the ghetto. In the dreary aftermath of the event the twins found themselves unable to abandon their newfound (and newly desolated) sister. Her son, whom they’d discovered in his reckless effort to extract his father from the catastrophe, remained in apparent shock, and was therefore incapable of tending to his mother in any useful way. Informed of the misfortune, their compatriot and charge, Zerubavel ben Blish, was sympathetic. He downplayed the inconvenience, assuring the twins he could manage on his own, though he nevertheless delayed the continuation of his tour and accepted more invitations to speak at Jewish venues around the city.
In the meantime it seemed to the brothers that they had become re-acquainted with their beautiful sister only to see her fade into a black bombazine specter before their eyes. They’d encountered her luster just in time to see it cruelly snuffed out. Overnight her native composure had folded into a grim passivity, her sable hair uncoiling into gunmetal gray. If she said anything, it was only to utter some self-indictment, such as, “This is my fault for the obscenity I was,” while the untidy attitudes she assumed in the chair she never vacated during the week-long shivah period were oddly genderless. Only on the subject of money did she recover any of her former energy. Due to receive a generous settlement for the factory, whose destruction the twins urged