why God had given him the large cherubic mouth because it was a mouth you could see in spite of all that hair, a mouth that talked to you, a mouth developed by nature at a time when mouths had to compete with hair.
He started. He reached up. He touched the hair and then he scowled. "I didn't mean to do that part. I think I shall give up on it. The hair wants to come back."
"The Lord God wants you to have it?" I asked.
"I don't think so. I don't know!"
"How did you make the clothes change? How do you make yourself disappear?"
"There's little to it. Science will one day be able to control it. Today, science knows all about atoms and neutrinos. All I did was throw off all the tiny particles smaller than atoms which I had drawn to myself, through a magnetic strength you might say, to make my old clothes. They weren't real clothes. They just were clothes made by a ghost. And then to banish them, I said, as the sorcerer would say, 'Return until I call to you again.' And then I called up new clothes. I said in my heart with the sorcerer's conviction:
" 'From the living and the dead, from the raw earth and from that which is forged and refined, woven, and treasured, come to me, tinier than grains of sand, and without sound, unnoticed, hurting no one, at your greatest speed, penetrating whatever barriers surround me that you must and clothe me in red velvet, soft garments the color of rubies. See these clothes in my mind, come.' "
He sighed. "And it was done."
He sat quiet for a moment. I was so mesmerized by this new red attire, and by the way it seemed to change him somewhat, give him a sort of regal air, that I didn't speak. I pushed another big log into the pyramid of the fire, and threw some more coal on it from the scuttle, all of this without leaving the sanctuary of my rotting and crunched old chair.
Then and only then did I look at him. And at that same moment, when his eyes were utterly remote, I realized he was singing in a very low voice, a voice so low I had to strain to disentangle it from the soft devouring rush of the fire.
He was singing in Hebrew but it wasn't the Hebrew I knew. But I knew enough of it to know what it was: It was the Psalm "By the Rivers of Babylon." When he finished, I was awestruck and even more shaken than before.
I wondered if it was snowing in Poland. I wondered if my parents had been buried or cremated. I wondered if he could call together the ashes of my parents, but it seemed a horrible, blasphemous thought.
"That was my point, that we have things about which we are superstitious," he said. "When I blunderingly asked about your parents, I meant to say, you believe certain things but you don't believe them. You live in a double frame of mind."
I reflected.
He looked at me deliberately, eyebrows curving down, though his cherubic mouth smiled. It was a respectful, sincere expression. "And I can't bring them back to life. I can't do that!" he said.
He looked back at the flames.
"The parents of Gregory Belkin perished in the Holocaust in Europe," he said. "And Gregory became a madman. And his brother a holy man, a saint, zaddik. And you became a scholar, and a teacher, with a gentle gift for making students understand."
"You honor me," I said softly. There were a thousand little questions buzzing around me like bees. I wasn't going to cheapen things.
"Go on, Azriel, please," I said. "Tell me what you want to tell me. Tell me what you want me to know."
"Ah, well, as I indicated we were the rich exiles. You know the story. Nebuchadnezzar came down on Jerusalem and slew the soldiers and littered the streets with bodies, and left behind a Babylonian governor to rule over the peasants who would tend our estates and vineyards and send the produce home to his Court. Customary.
"But rich men, tradesmen, scribes like the men of my family? We weren't slain. He didn't come sharpening his sword on our necks. We were deported to Babylon with everything that we could carry, I might add, wagons of our fine furniture which he allowed us to have, although he had thoroughly looted our temple, and we were given