“My body cut off most of the light from outside. I had the flashlight, but I didn’t turn it on. The air was thick with dust and smelled of mold. There was a sharp stinging sensation in my nostrils, probably, I thought, from mouse droppings. I closed my eyes and felt the words like small stirrings against my skin. I drew my knees up to my chin and sat perfectly still. As still as an unopened book. I remembered reading a story in which being dead was described as being a book on a shelf. You stayed dead until and unless someone took you off the shelf and opened you.”
“And he draws that child out of the embrace of the dead as out of a womb and as he cradles it in his arms, weeping, he writes letters on my forehead with his trembling finger. I feel the letters, Aleph, Vav, Rash, Mem, form and settle on my skin as he moves into me and becomes me, and as I absorb them they line up into my name. Avram. And as my name claims me, cradling me in the arms of its letters, I remember the World and its joys and griefs and I see the letters of my name are now doors, each letter a door, and one of them opens to a room near the sea where a black-haired woman smiles at me as all around us again our stories are nestling and whispering and waiting again to be born.”
“He pulls against the weight, fighting its soft sinking into the snow. Beads of sweat form on his face, freeze and fall tinkling. The burning coldness he gasps into his lungs moves to his stomach, his heart: he feels his bones growing thin and brittle. Bird bones. He bends forward and draws harder and he is light and hollow boned as a bird and he lets the lightness flow back and hollow the rope, pass into the sled and its burden and he rises with it now in the swirling white cloud, into the sky, up and up until he is above the mist and can see it below, the black spear tops of the firs sticking out of its milky thickness and now the whole forest stretching below him, the church spire of the town, the market square teeming with men and women and animals embracing and bowing and jumping up and down in a strange dance, a pattern which only could be seen from above. He soars, carried up in a draft that pushes his chest and stomach like someone pressing a pillow up against him and at the top of his gyre he can see everything, the Prussian border to the north and west, the Russian border to the north and east of the Pale, locked together like teeth; he flows in between, a human being smuggling his own human heart. He sees the cracks between nations swarming with dark sea-salt crusted city of Danzig, the twisting streets and narrow alleys of Bialystok, the red domes of Moscow; if he soars higher he will see Jerusalem itself, a tawny city straddling mountains like a sleeping lion.”
“But Raḥel knows now that they are lying to themselves. That is the wisdom revealed to her, as if she were the prophetess, Miriam. They would not live. Not this time. This is the end of their history in this place. This was the wisdom the bones were confiding in her, in her own bones, whispering into the tiny beautifully-formed ear of the fetus floating in her womb, as if her womb is a Genizah, as if the child floats in a repository of all the stories of their ancestors, the stories it should have carried into the world and then forgotten, the child whispering into the whisper of her blood.”