Ivan slapped the table in frustration. "Listen to yourself! Listen to her. You of all people know that language is the one thing that can't be faked. She knows too many words that we don't know. She has an accent that neither of us could have guessed at - the vowels are shaped right, but not exactly as predicted, and the nasals are already fading sooner than we thought. A modern scholar would have taught her using the assumptions of modern scholarship. The nasals would be pure. The palatals more pronounced."
"Unless he realized that these vowels should be different - "
"Father!" said Ivan. "You sound like... like one of those boneheads who thinks the Trilateral Commission is controlling every nation to fulfill some nefarious plan! What conceivable motive could anyone have for putting on such a fraud? What great wealth and power await the plotters who are able to train a young woman to fake proto-Slavonic as her native language? You know every scholar in the field, personally - which of them did it? Whose creature is she?"
Father shook his head. "I don't know. I just can't - you're not a liar, Vanya, so I have to assume you're being fooled yourself. But I watched her all during dinner, and I... I liked her, but I thought, of course I like her, they chose her because she's likeable, if you want to run a con game you choose somebody that people will like and trust, and... but you're right, who is the 'they' I'm assuming? It makes no sense at all. But... even if - Sleeping Beauty, I thought it was a French fairy tale - but even if it happened, why you? Why us?"
"Why not us?" asked Ivan. "It has to be somebody."
"And why now? No, I know your answer - why not now?"
Ivan laughed. "There, that'll put the last nail in Occam's coffin."
"You can cut yourself when you use somebody else's old razor, anyway," said Father. "For the time being, then, will I have to pretend to live in this fantastic universe you've conjured up?"
Impulsively, Ivan took his father's hand. They hadn't held hands much - like good Russians, they greeted with a kiss, and the last time Ivan could remember clasping his father's hand in anything but a handshake was when he was little, and Father helped him cross streets in Kiev. But the hand felt familiar to him all the same. Some memories don't fade, some physical memories are forever. The feel of your father's hand; the sound of your mother's voice. Only, Father's hand was smaller now. No, Ivan's was larger, but to him, it was his father who had shrunk, who no longer had the power of the giant, of the god, to enfold him and keep him safe. If anything, it was Ivan who was the guide now, the one helping the other to cross the perilous, unfamiliar street. "Father, Mother knew about this. Not the whole thing, but she told me when I got engaged to Ruthie that I shouldn't, that it was wrong. Like an old story out of Jewish folklore, she told me that I was already bound by oath to someone else, and it would be an offense to God for me to marry another. I thought she was completely wacked out, but... she was right. I had already married Katerina eleven hundred years before."
"Her intuitions," said Father. "When I first claimed the right of a Jew to immigrate to Israel, she told me No, I mustn't do it, you had things yet to learn in Ukraine. And then after we went to Cousin Marek's house, she stopped being agitated. She was perfectly happy to go when we left. Now that you've told me the story, I do see a pattern. You had seen Sleeping Beauty. That's all that was needed. Having seen her, you'd go back." Father sighed deeply. "She couldn't explain it to me. I'd never have believed her. I'm only pretending to believe it now."
But he was not pretending, not now. He had recognized that it was the only story that made sense of things. "So did Mother know everything all along?" asked Ivan.
"No, no," said Father. "If she had known what it was you needed to do, she would have told me, even if I didn't believe it. It wasn't even her idea to go stay with Cousin Marek. No, she just had a feeling. So... I didn't take it seriously. A feeling! What's a