had siblings, he was, as far as I can remember, the first child I ever lifted and carried, and I was surprised by his lightness. Years later, carrying my own son, mine and Yoav’s, I would sometimes think of Gigi. Stirring, he muttered something incomprehensible, sighed, and resumed sleeping on my shoulder. I walked down the stairs with him, his body limp and legs dangling, back through doors and down corridors, and by some trick or accidental shortcut I emerged at last through a low door that led into a short corridor, which itself spilled into another corridor that finally deposited me in the large foyer where Leclercq had first greeted us under the enormous glass light fixture, just barely swaying above his head like the sword of Damocles, or so I thought then, unnerved as I was by the castle at night, which I only had the courage to navigate because Gigi continued to exhale his warm and gentle breath in my ear. I retraced the steps Yoav, Leclercq, and I had taken the day before. Passing the large mirror again, I half expected to find the boy exposed as a ghost, void of reflection, but, no—there, in what little light there was, I could make out the outlines of our two figures. When I came to the door, or what I thought was the door Leclercq had unlocked for us in order to show us the view of the garden, I shifted Gigi’s weight into one arm and tried the handle. It gave way easily. Leclercq must have forgotten to lock it behind us, I thought, and stepped into the room, intending just to glance for a moment at the view of the garden in the gray light of dawn, a light I’ve always loved for the threadbare fragility it brings out in all things. But the room I now stood in was dark and had no view, or the view had been cut off by heavy drapes, and though it was possible that Leclercq had returned to draw them before going to sleep, it seemed unlikely. As the seconds passed, I began to sense that the room was far larger than the one I had previously been in, more like a hall than a room, and I became aware of some sort of mute presence in the shadows, shadows, I soon was able to make out, that were crowded with shapes of various sizes assembled in long rows, a great, melancholy mass that seemed to extend in all directions before dissolving into the far corners of the vaulted hall. Although I could see very little, I sensed what the shapes were. I was suddenly reminded of a photograph I’d come across some years earlier while researching the work of Emanuel Ringelblum for one of my college history courses, an image of a large group of Jews in Umschlagplatz, adjacent to the Warsaw Ghetto, all of them crouching or sitting on shapeless bags or on the ground, awaiting deportation to Treblinka. The photo had struck me at the time, not just because of the sea of eyes all turned toward the camera suggesting that the scene was subdued enough that the photographer could make himself heard, but because of the thoughtful composition which the photographer had clearly taken pains over, taking note of the way the pale faces topped with dark hats and scarves were mirrored by the seemingly infinite pattern of light and dark bricks of the wall behind them that trapped them in. Behind that wall was a rectangular building with rows of square windows. The whole gave the sense of a geometric order so powerful that it became inevitable, where each common material—Jews, bricks, and windows—had its proper and irrevocable place. As my eyes now adjusted and I began to see, rather than just vaguely feel with some unnameable sense, the tables, chairs, bureaus, trunks, lamps, and desks all standing at attention in the hall as if waiting for a summons, I remembered why that photograph of the Jews in Umschlagplatz had come back to me at exactly that moment, remembered, in other words, that it had been during that same period of research that I’d also come across photographs of various synagogues and Jewish warehouses that had been used as depots for the furniture and household items the Gestapo looted from the homes of deported or murdered Jews, photographs showing vast armies of upended chairs, like a dining hall closed for the night, towers