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said. "Does it matter? What it means is that you keep your own set of rules. Jews so ancient that they don't think the Talmud deserves all the authority it gets. Jews who can make a sandwich of beef and cheese."

"But not ham and cheese," she said, smiling.

"That Ruthie," said Piotr. "Do you think she really believes that feminist nonsense about the nice feminine Bible hidden inside the nasty masculine Bible?"

"She does for now," said Esther. "But like most college feminists, she's not going to let the theory stop her from marrying."

"And you're an expert on this?"

"I hear the women at synagogue talking about their daughters." She imitated them in English. " 'Oy! The younger generation always knows more than the older! Two thousand years Jewish women have more rights than Christian women ever had, but suddenly we're oppressed, and it takes my daughter to tell me?' "

Piotr laughed at her take on the matrons of the synagogue. "You know what I was thinking? She got so excited when she was spouting this ahistorical countertextual nonsense, and I caught myself thinking, 'What an idiot her teacher must be,' and thinking about her teacher made me realize - the kind of excitement she was showing as she mindlessly spouted back the nonsense she learned in college, that's just like the excitement some of my own students show. And it occurred to me that what we professors think of as a 'brilliant student' is nothing but a student who is enthusiastically converted to whatever idiotic ideas we've been teaching them."

"Self-knowledge is a painful thing," said Esther. "To learn that your best students are parrots after all."

"Ah, but students who fill their heads with my ideas and spew them back on command, they are at least saying intelligent things, even if they all come from me."

"Especially if they all come from you."

"It's my mission in life." He kissed her. "Filling empty heads."

"And mine is filling empty stomachs," she said. "Now that she's gone, we can have supper. I only had two pork chops, I couldn't have shared with her."

He looked at her sharply for a moment, then realized she was joking. "Really, what's for dinner?"

"Soup," she said. "Can't you smell it?"

"The house always smells like good food," said Piotr. "It's the perfume of love."

Over supper, they talked of many things and, sometimes, talked not at all, enjoying the comfortable silence that comes from long friendship, from shared life. Only when she was rising from the table to carry dishes to the sink did Esther broach the subject that was most on her mind.

"Do you think there's any chance that Vanya's lack of letters to Ruthie means that he doesn't want to marry her after all?"

"No," said Piotr. "I think he isn't thinking about her. He's thinking about his work."

"And when you're working, you don't love me?" asked Esther.

"We're married," he said, "and you're here."

"And if you were in Russia like Vanya, you wouldn't write to me either?"

He thought for just a moment. "I wouldn't go without you," he finally said.

"Very carefully chosen words," she said.

"I wouldn't be without you," he repeated. "Without you, I wouldn't be."

She kissed him and then washed the dishes as he returned to reading and grading student papers.

Cousin Marek was as good as his word, sitting there in one of the village trucks waiting for him. "Everyone's glad you're back," he said. "All grown." Marek laughed. "A Jewish scholar is supposed to have glasses and clutch a book."

"I do my share of book clutching. Can't help it that my eyes are still good."

"I was teasing you. Because you have shoulders. Seeing you as a boy, who would have guessed?"

The pole vault, the discus, the javelin, putting the shot, that's what had given him shoulders like a blacksmith. Sprints and hurdles, those were the cause of his thighs. Mile after mile of endurance running, that was what kept him lithe and lean. And all of this would sound foolish, Ivan knew, to a man whose massive muscles all came from the labor of farming. Ivan's body had been shaped by competition and meditation, Marek's by making the earth produce something for other people to eat. It didn't feel right to Ivan, to talk much about athletics. So he turned the subject back onto Marek himself. "You must still be carrying that calf up the stairs."

Marek looked puzzled.

"American joke," said Ivan. "A tall tale. The story is, a farmer carried a calf up the stairs every day. His wife asked him