THE SICKROOM

THE BISHOP WAS RIDING OUTSIDE OF TOWN WHEN HE encountered a strange-looking animal. Determined to capture it, he pursued the animal until both man and beast were exhausted, and when he backed it up against a tree, it bared its sharp teeth, scratching and fighting as the bishop came closer and finally, after a struggle, he wrapped his cloak around it. When he was able to get a closer look, he was shocked to discover it was not an animal at all but instead a little girl, albeit a wild one, without doubt a half-breed, who could only grunt and growl. He brought the poor child to the nuns, who successfully subdued her, and cut her long tangled hair.

By the time The New Mexican printed a version of this story, it was already common knowledge. People had already been coming in a steady stream from as far off as Las Cruces to see the wild girl, and to commend the nuns on their good work in making her look just like the others. Needless to say, the nuns were very busy, and so, by the middle of the third week of Mr. Ehrenberg’s convalescence, they were apparently content to pass their nursing duties along to Eva. Despite their strict claims that a nurse needed training and a particular set of skills, their severe restrictions quickly devolved into a set of perfunctory reminders.

Eva had a routine. Each day she visited the orphan girls, distributing pencils or candies or tablets or bits of colored ribbon, before heading off down the narrow hallway to tend to Mr. Ehrenberg. The wild girl (christened Maria) always examined Eva’s neatly pinned hair so thoroughly that it had inevitably spilled from her topknot and onto her shoulders by the time she entered the sickroom.

Today, even before first light, she knew the day would be an exceptionally hot one, in spite of autumn having finally arrived. Her greatest concern went unmentioned and was reserved for the patient across the street, who, while definitely much recovered, still hadn’t ventured out of bed. After Abraham left for the store, she did not go back to sleep, but rather dressed and doused herself with a liberal amount of violet perfume. She had used up all of Henriette’s (the frosted bottle sat on the vanity like an artifact, refracting light through its empty glass) but she’d procured another bottle from a French trader who had been through town months ago. She told herself she wore the costly perfume in the charitable hope of bringing freshness to the dark and moldy space, which, befitting a sickroom, was stripped of adornment but was also utterly, depressingly empty of everything but Jesus on his cross—on the wall above the bed—who was of course near death and who (she couldn’t help but imagine the nuns discussing this) bore an uncanny resemblance to the Jewish patient below—frail and bearded and full of fresh wounds.

“Mr. Ehrenberg, where is your pain?” asked Eva, as she entered the room after knocking. She often felt her entrance struck the wrong tone; she was either too gloomy or too gay.

“My pain,” he replied, and then he paused a moment, considering. “My pain today is in my entire torso, my right shoulder, left foot, head, mouth, and behind the eyes. Also, it has crept into my stomach.”

“Well that is a great deal of pain,” Eva replied, and poured him a glass of water from the pitcher on the nightstand. “That is one more location than yesterday.” One of her favorite qualities in Mr. Ehrenberg was his tendency toward trivial honesty. Standing in direct contrast to tales of his bravery—tales she’d heard from Bea Spiegelman and the nuns—was his lack of anxiety about appearing frail or ungrateful; these disclosures of weakness—instead of being off-putting, as she might have expected—were exciting somehow.

“And where is yours?” he asked in his scratchy voice, his matter-of-fact pitch and tone. “Where is your pain, Mrs. Shein?”

Eva handed him the glass of tepid water and lowered her eyes as he drank. The cuts around his mouth had yet to fully heal, and water trickled down his whiskered chin. “Don’t be foolish,” she muttered.

“Sit,” he urged. “Complain.”

She sat in the red chair and folded her hands, touched a handkerchief to the back of her neck. “And what makes you imagine I am in any kind of pain?”

“Maybe I have a morbid nature. Or maybe I just cannot imagine, at this point…”—he trailed off, gesturing vaguely to the bleak surroundings—“how anyone could possibly not be in some kind of pain.”

“Maybe you wish for me to suffer?”

“No, that’s not it,” he said, taking his time, as if—at any rate—he had been willing to consider the possibility.

“Any pain I have,” she said simply, “is of my own doing.”

“That is the second mysterious comment you’ve made today.”

“What was the first?”

He shook his head, as if perhaps he hadn’t meant what he’d said, or else that it didn’t matter.

“I mean to be anything but mysterious,” she insisted, flushing deeply and looking away. She could feel him staring and she finally offered: “Sometimes I have pain in my chest.”

“Mmn,” he intoned, as if he were not a badly-beaten young man but instead a confident physician, set to take her pulse. His face was changeable; it went from vulnerable to mysteriously handsome with one ambiguous expression. Though he didn’t have particularly striking features, his eyebrows arched in a way that lent him a certain distinction, and she half-expected him to say something wise. But he only coughed weakly while struggling to sit up, and she leaned over to assist him. She smelled his sickness—its insistent, dark acidity—and unexpectedly, inappropriately, she began to laugh. She sensed his thin arms shaking as she smoothed the blanket around him, before sitting down once again.

His reaction was curious; he looked neither offended nor amused.

“You’d like to know what kind of pain?” she asked, still unable to maintain a sober face. “As if I’m being stepped on,” she said, frankly. “As if I’m being crushed.” He was watching her, and she wondered if he could distinguish how her abrupt broad smiles were less a spontaneous expression of pleasantness and more like struggles within herself—quick, hostile clashes between inside and out, which always took her by surprise. “That is the kind of pain I have sometimes.” She fought against her instinct to bite down on her lip. “It comes out of nowhere and I have never told a soul.”

“Why not?”

“I suppose…I suppose I am afraid to find out that there is something terribly wrong with me.”

He tried to lean forward and his wince turned into a tentative smile. “Mrs. Shein,” he whispered, “I don’t think there is anything wrong with you.” He shook his head. “Not a thing.”

And she issued a silent promise—starting right then—that she would attempt to provide strength and serenity or, at the very least, a sense of capability, the way a good nurse ought to. “Sometimes,” she continued, with a complete disregard for her own instructions, “I am afraid of being buried alive.”

He nodded, excessively. “I am afraid of the very same thing,” he said. “I submit that I too am afraid of being buried alive.”

She inched the chair a hair closer to the bed, hating the scraping of wood against stone, announcing her every movement. “Sometimes when I lie awake at night, I can feel the inside of the pine coffin; I can hear the dirt and pebbles hitting the wood. I can even smell the soil.” She closed her eyes and realized that in her nightmare vision the earth smelled not unlike this room, with its crudity of illness and stone. Whether it was here—where Levi Ehrenberg’s blood and sweat mixed with fermented air—or in her imaginary underground (which felt equally as real, if far more lonesome), there was, aside from death, a palpable sense of what she could only imagine as some kind of distorted fertility. There was not only the sensation of dying in both of these miserable places, but also, inexplicably, of thriving. When she imagined being buried alive, it was the fear of that final moment in the dark that kept her so afraid. More than the sense of disorientation, she feared the inevitable knowledge that not only would she never be as fertile as the surrounding soil, but also that death would come for her simply because no one in the world was listening hard enough.

“Tell me,” he said, not fiddling with a button or the bed sheets, not looking at anything, indeed, aside from her, “why have you not told your husband such things?”

She felt her face flush as she heard his question—so unsuitable—come tumbling through the air. “Mr. Ehrenberg, that is hardly of your concern.”

He shrugged, and she saw what he was doing, how—such provocation!—he was goading her into discussion. Still, she couldn’t help responding. “And just what do you mean by that shrug of your shoulders? Don’t you think you’re being awfully smug?”

“He paid me a visit, your husband.”

“Did he? He is very busy.”

“Oh I can see that. I can see just how busy he is.”

“What—tell me—what do you mean by this remark?”

“As I said—I can see that he is busy.”

“Mr. Ehrenberg?”

“I tell you I don’t mean anything other than this: I don’t see how you can be content with such a man.”

“Mr. Ehrenberg—” Eva gasped, but not exactly in anger. She was ashamed to admit it, but in that first moment, she felt nothing besides a kind of outrageous relief. But then she was faced with a second thought. She sat up straighter. “How dare you say this?”

“I said it once and I will not say it again. I won’t ever say it again.”

“No,” she said. “No you won’t. We’ll pretend that you never said it.”

“That’s right,” he said. “We’ll pretend.”

She wanted to get up, to go to the door, but she didn’t want his eyes following her just then, and so she stayed right beside him in the red-painted chair, looking at the bed frame, the floor.

“Do you know why I chose to rest at the Shein Brothers’ door?” he asked.

“I don’t want to hear you talk about him.”

“I only want to say one more thing.”

“And then you’ll stop?”

He nodded. “Do you know why I collapsed at Shein Brothers’?”

“Mr. Ehrenberg,” she said, “you were surely delirious at the time; I doubt anyone would believe you were in any state to make a choice.”

“But I did choose. I remember.”

“You probably liked the way it looked.”

She looked up and he was grinning briefly, until his cuts obviously stung. “That’s just what your husband said.”

“And what else did my husband say?”

“Why not ask him?”

“Maybe I will,” she said. And then, against all her better judgment—judgment for which she’d worked hard—Eva smiled.

Not much could be heard of the outside world, as the walls were so thick and without windows, but Eva could make out some shouting and the particular bark of a dog she always noticed, a mutt who slept in the shade under whichever buggy was closest to the convent. He was a black, scruffy dog, a small one; he looked old and sick but he’d looked old and sick when she’d first arrived in Santa Fe. She had given him the name El Maestro, and his bark was infrequent but unmistakable.

“Do you hear that barking?” she asked.

He nodded.

“He is my favorite of all the dogs in this town.”

“There are so many, no?”

She nodded. “But this one…his bark is one of complete indignation. It’s as if he is saying, This is a total outrage! Don’t you see I am meant for more than these dusty streets?” She never spoke these childish thoughts aloud and as she did so, she felt not embarrassment but a piece of unexpected joy. “It’s as if he isn’t a dog at all.”

Levi Ehrenberg cocked his head as if he was trying to understand exactly what she meant. “‘She is an ailing pussycat,’” he began. “‘And he is sick as a dog. In their heads, I think, they neither are altogether right.’” This he delivered with what seemed like an apologetic air, as if he were sorry he’d taken so many liberties but also as if he would have liked to take a great many more. “Heinrich Heine,” he said.

“I know,” she said, nodding.

“You know?” he asked, and he looked troubled—his eyes radiant, his temples glinting with sweat.

“Yes,” Eva assured him, suddenly concerned that amid all this conversation, his fever had begun to soar.

He shook his head, puzzled by, it seemed, something far greater than her intimate acquaintance with the poetry of Heinrich Heine, and Eva abruptly felt as if she were seated beside an awkward dinner guest and it was up to her to lead the conversation back on track. “Did your family send you to make good here? I bet they sent you off on that terrible ship, waving and waving until their arms were sore.”

He shook his head and played with a button between his chest and belly; soon it would come loose and would have to be mended. “No,” he said. His fingertips were square and wider than the fingers themselves. “I came to America to escape my family.”

“Oh,” she hesitated, “I see.”

“Nobody says that, do they? Surely nobody likes to hear that.”

She thought of her family’s parlor: the Kaddish prayer of mourning, the pairs of wet and sunken eyes. She thought of the voices steeped in sadness; she could not meet a single sympathetic gaze and she felt certain that at any moment, she would cry out in confession and it would all be revealed just how deeply she was at fault. She thought of her father’s library, how he sat behind his desk alone or sometimes across from a friend. All that week, she had stood behind the door, listening: Our Henriette? her dear father had faltered, repeating himself again and again; he’d never sounded so confused. It seems as if she is in the next room, as if her hair is still in braids.

“I’d heard there were Germans who were thriving here,” said Levi Ehrenberg. “I’d heard of your husband. I admired him, you see. I had heard that he’d traveled to California, that he’d fought in the Civil War. And I suppose I expected a more generous soul. I was naïve. Everyone is after his own personal fortune in the end. I am guilty of the same.” He cracked his knobby knuckles one at a time. The sound was both crass and satisfying. “I needed—I need—help.”

Eva instinctively looked away, as if to look out a window, which this dark room was conspicuously without. He wasn’t feverish, she realized; he was smart. He’d known more than he’d let on about the town and its inhabitants but he had not wanted to come across as an opportunist. She thought of Heinrich, so averse to admitting he was painting their portraits for money; his pride had been too strong and at the same time—although she had seen through it—she had also admired him. “And so what happened?” Her gaze traveled the length of the wall; she realized she sounded perturbed. And interested. “What happened with your family?”

He took a few labored breaths. “My family was—they are—in the business of smelting.”

“Smelting,” she repeated. She could hear the faint sounds of footsteps outside the door; the heat was flat, hard. He was truly unwell; the nuns said he cried and sometimes screamed in his sleep. Nearly all of his ribs were broken.

He looked up from his loose button and let out a sneeze, followed by a scowl. She realized, that with all those broken ribs, the sneeze must have been excruciating.

“Gesundheit.”

“Thank you,” he said, and wiped his nose with his sleeve. “I’m sorry.”

“Please,” she persisted. “Your family. Smelting.”

“Yes,” he said. “It was profitable. We’re eight sons and I am the youngest. I had a younger sister Sophy but she was thrown by a horse—”

“How terrible.”

Mr. Ehrenberg looked almost happy for a moment, thinking of his sister. “She was twelve,” he said, and then stopped himself with a shake of his head, redirecting his story. “Each of us worked for my father. I saw my brothers every day and we ate dinner together every evening and my mother forbid us to speak of business but we did. We always did. I liked to talk of business. I liked to sort out problems; even invented problems, solving them before they arose. As if life would not serve up enough problems, I had to go invent some in advance. One night I argued with my eldest brother over a small matter; who knows what it was. ‘Hear me out!’ I hollered. ‘What does it matter if he hears you, Levi?’ was the second eldest’s response. I demanded to know what he meant by that and he laughed.” Levi squinted and shrugged, cocked his head as if he couldn’t quite see straight. “He had taken too much wine.”

“Why did he laugh?” asked Eva, immediately aware that she had asked a stupid question.

“That laugh might have decided it,” he mused, before dropping back into his story. “‘You are the youngest,’ my drunken brother said clearly. ‘You will never be a partner in this business.’ And I looked to my father to contradict them, but he did not even look up from his plate.”

“Awful,” Eva said, but she wasn’t suitably surprised or appalled. She’d learned a great deal more about men and trade since arriving in this town years ago.

“I rose from the table that evening,” Levi continued, “I put on my coat and I walked out the door.”

“But where did you go?” She realized she was clutching her hands, and had she been able to see the expression on her face, she would have been ashamed to admit it was one of plain delight.

He inhaled and this set off a round of coughing while Eva waited, and with dignity and with no small measure of patience, he waited until the coughing entirely stopped before he resumed speaking. “I went to work for our greatest competitor. He was a slave driver—brutal but honest; I saved money. I also lived in a cellar like a dog, abandoning the laws of kashruth, abandoning all my prayers.”

“I would not have thought you were a religious man.”

“I was,” he said. “And I am not anymore.” He’d never sounded more certain, and it was this certainty that brought her close to tears; it was as if he’d revealed in great detail the various reasons one could not count on God.

“You never saw your family again?”

“I knew that nothing would ever change.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t get far enough away.”

“And now everything has changed,” said Eva.

“And now everything has changed.”

         

ONE LATE AFTERNOON EVA RELAYED HOW, ON THE CROSSING, SHE had her fortune told.

“And what was it?” asked Mr. Ehrenberg. “What did the fortune-teller say?”

Eva blushed and then blushed harder at the thought of her red cheeks. “She predicted I would have many children.”

“You’re not telling me the truth, are you?”

“What a thing to say. Of course I am.” The palm-reader had actually said this. But she had also said, You keep secrets. “In any case, I don’t believe in palm reading. My husband does. He welcomes prognostications of any sort. Isn’t that funny? He never would have struck me as the superstitious sort.”

“Do you mean before you knew him?”

“I suppose. Even now, it surprises me.”

“How did you meet?”

“Mr. Ehrenberg,” Eva said, “you don’t exactly sound as if you want to know.”

“It’s true,” he admitted. “I was being polite.”

“You’re not very good at politesse, are you?”

He shook his head slowly. “Give me your hand,” he said.

Eva laughed. “Do you mean to tell my fortune?”

“No,” he said. She was sure he would explain further, but moments passed and Eva realized he had no intention of doing so.

They sat in silence; she kept both hands in her lap. Even without a view outside, she could sense the sun was setting; the temperature slightly dropped. At first the silence was uncomfortable, but after a while Eva found she was sitting lower in her chair and that her breath was growing deeper, almost sleepy. Her gaze remained mostly on the floor and the walls, but when she heard church bells, she finally looked at Levi Ehrenberg and she sensed his focus had not wavered. He grinned as best he could—some of the swelling had gone down—as if to reassure her that despite whatever the palm-reader had told her, the future was unknown.

         

“WHO IS JULIE?” SHE ASKED, DAYS LATER. SHE WAS STANDING WHERE a window should have been. He was slurping from a bowl of broth.

“Julie?”

“While you were gripped with fever.”

“Oh,” he said, putting the bowl down on its tray.

“Yes?”

He began fiddling with his button.

“I should not have asked,” said Eva hastily. But she felt inexplicably betrayed.

“You know.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He looked at her queerly. “But don’t you?”

“Well of course I don’t.”

“Very well,” he said evenly, “who might you guess she is?”

Eva felt her face go maddeningly red, before blurting, “Well, I should think she was a girl you loved.”

“So you did know.”

“I know nothing. This isn’t a game.” She sounded angry but she wasn’t; with him, she never was.

“I’m sorry. But it’s an unhappy story. Of course most love stories are.”

“How dramatic,” she said, somewhat embarrassed and somewhat amused at just how much she sounded like her husband.

He looked at the ceiling as if he were about to ask her something grave, but instead he said, “I think I would like to take a walk.”

“But you mustn’t. Not yet.”

“Will you help me out of this bed?” he asked.

“Will I—?”

“Or should I call for Sister Blandina to assist me.”

“That isn’t necessary. I only think you should wait for Doctor Sam to come and examine you again. You do not want to do more damage.”

“Come here,” he said. “Please.”

She touched his shoulder, which was burning hot through crude cotton. “Did you really sleep through the night last night, the way the nuns described?”

“I did,” he said. His lower lip was fuller than his top lip; it was this small imbalance, she realized, that gave him his strikingly youthful expression. “I have hardly any fever, if any at all.”

She examined him for a moment longer than absolutely necessary. “Can you manage to move your legs this way?”

He looked away and seemed to use all of his concentration to get his bare feet to the floor. His feet were pale and wide, with high arches and tufts of reddish hair on his toes. For a moment she saw his feet as separate from him; they may as well have been prehistoric creatures, jarred samples for men of science, swimming in viscous liquid.

“Ready now?” she asked him.

“I am only injured, Mrs. Shein, I am not a child.”

“Are you ready to stand, Mr. Ehrenberg?” She pulled him to his feet before he could answer, surprised by her own strength. “Well,” she said, as he stood beside her, winded but upright, “I thought you were taller.”

“It’s possible I might have shrunk,” he said, “prostrate in that bed for so long.” His hands gripped her arm; he was shaking but he tried to hide it.

“There is no use in pretending you are stoic now. You mustn’t forget that I know too well how much you love to complain.”

He attempted a smile, but it was a twisted one, an acknowledgment that he was far more embarrassed than he would ever admit to be hanging onto her, to be rooted to the middle of this cell of a room, for fear that if he took a step he would fall. “The nuns say there is a ghost in this room.” He looked around, as if adjusting to the shift in perspective, and then he took a step.

She led him toward the door. “You believe in ghosts?”

“Of course. I have seen far too many to ignore them.”

“I don’t believe that people are either alive or dead. My sister is far more real to me than anyone.”

“Even me?” he asked, taking another step. “Even as I smell wretched and I lean on you like this?” He briefly exaggerated his dependency, and she felt the surprising weight of him, the heat of his exertions. He felt so alive, so utterly real and she thought: This simple touch, this flesh—isn’t this what ghosts dream of?

“Even you,” she said stubbornly. She could smell his unwashed hair. It smelled like a stable, like the dairy farm she knew as a girl, but she might have been projecting this earth-sweet scent because his hair was tawny. It reminded her of hay. “And this ghost who lives here? Have you seen him?”

“The ghost is a woman,” he said, gaining more strength in his footing. “An unhappy Sister.”

“Is there any other kind?”

“Oh I think so. They do enjoy a good meal now and then. Sometimes their breath smells of wine.”

“Have you ever seen a male ghost?”

He shook his head and they stepped into the dark hallway, neither of them mentioning the fact that he was actually walking and doing so quite well.

“Ghosts are usually female,” she decided. “Why is this, do you think?”

“Women are more romantic.”

“Are you saying that ghosts are romantic?”

“I am saying that women are.”

Were they to have mentioned the fact of his sudden vitality, they would have had to look at each other—he in his badly sewn patient’s attire, and she in her closest approximation of the latest in Godey’s Lady’s Book—and neither one would have been comfortable taking the other in. She looked down the hallway and listened for footsteps, almost hoping for a reason to deposit him back into the sickroom, but there were none.

“Are you getting tired?” she inquired, and he answered that he felt better now than he had at any moment since leaving his family’s home. She nodded and realized she was ashamed to admit that she had not actually pictured him getting well, that she imagined coming here and speaking to Levi Ehrenberg indefinitely, as if he would exist solely in these lost hours when only a ghost could possibly serve as proof that these conversations took place. Without realizing it, they had stopped walking and were now standing side by side in the hallway. She was acutely aware of her arm brushing against his and when she felt him turn to look at her, she did not face him until she was yielding through her arms and legs, soft at the knees as if she needed to sit down. She finally turned to him and when she did, it was as if she’d never seen him before. He was so close she could feel his shallow breath.

“Oh God,” he said miserably. “I am in love with you.”

“Don’t say that,” she responded, “please don’t.”

“I won’t.”

“You must lie down now.”

But he refused to move.

“I’m sorry I said it,” he replied.

“You should be,” she said. “So am I.”

“But I’m not sorry. I know it will do no good to say those words but I said them all the same, and I meant it. So now you know.”

She tried to guide him back to his sickbed but he was sluggish. She wanted to run before something happened, before she allowed something to happen; a kiss or his stumbling to the hard, stone floor—she could imagine both too clearly and either way she was responsible. “Please,” she whispered, her face hot, “I know you can walk.” She nearly pushed him back to his bed. “Now I know?” she asked, frustrated and out of breath from the strange, bitter struggle of helping and fighting him.

AFTERWARDS SHE LINGERED UNDER THE ACACIA TREES IN THE COURTYARD, staring at the muslin tent, while her eyes adjusted to the vividness of the outside world that was slowly inching toward autumn. The last living rose of this terrible hot summer drooped so low to the ground that Eva almost took it upon herself to chop off its withering head. The heat stood its ground even as haze began to obscure a sky so blue it was bullying. There were no nuns in sight. Their silence felt conspiratorial. No herd of pale faces set off by black and white, no cluster of both the slouched and the straight, announcing their uniform presence with the same sounds as different types of women in dresses all over the world: the fanfare of fabric, the bursts of unanticipated laughter. Eva imagined them competing to explain the story of the wild girl. How she had been Mexican or a Pueblo Indian or most likely both, how her fingernails had been as long and soiled and curled as tree roots, how she had tried to eat a shoe.

When the rain came with barely a breeze of forewarning, it was as if she’d been biding time in the sun while waiting for rain all along, so that she might finally have reason to duck under the muslin tent. She didn’t know what she was expecting there, but what she discovered was an abundance of strawberry bushes. She had not seen a strawberry since her time in New York, when she had eaten so many that she’d been forced to spend pitifully long stretches in the hotel suite’s WC. As the rain beat down on the fortified muslin, she sat, lightheaded, in what she realized was a makeshift hothouse; the bushes were green and the strawberries large as plums. Suspecting strange and extreme cultivation methods, she greedily picked two handfuls and ran back through the storm.

“Look what I have for you,” she cried, carrying the sour-sweet scent of berries into the sickroom, the breath of running through rain.

He did not react with as much spirit as she might have hoped. His expression barely changed. She knew then that nothing would make him happy now besides the one thing, and that she could never return.

“Why have you come back?” Outside, the wind whistled through soaked jade leaves; she could hear the faint groaning of wagons being stopped, mules being calmed and tethered. Levi did not smile. He blew his nose almost defiantly, vulgar as a daft old man.

She could feel her face go florid and she pulled out the few remaining hairpins that had held her hair in place. “You don’t want these?” she asked, releasing the berries onto the bed tray. “They’re sweet.”

“No,” he said, almost bitterly. “Just—please—please go.”

She headed for the door without turning her back and so she saw how, in his silence, he never looked away. The rain hit the building in a steady wash; a stream of weather passing time, creating travel obstacles, rich earth, a mood.

         

SHE DID NOT RETURN THE FOLLOWING DAY. SHE TOLD HER HUSBAND that she was satisfied in knowing she had done her sickroom duties to the best of her ability and that she had been guilty of neglecting her household. After making an elaborate production of what Chela should cook for dinner for the next five evenings, as well as issuing an invitation to the Spiegelmans (reciprocating at long last, after Abraham had nearly given up on asking her to do so), she took a luncheon of coffee and a piece of cheese, while embroidering a handkerchief for her husband, stitching his initials in gold along with a scarlet heart hidden inside, where no one but he could take notice. She opened a trunk, which sat beneath her vanity, and removed a dusty box. Then she arranged herself out back at a rickety table and chair, opened the box to find her commonplace book, and immediately made her first drawing since before Henriette had died. It was only afterwards, while pressing a particularly bright strawberry leaf and an iridescent moth between the book’s thin back pages, that she realized her new drawing was of a Bible, and it was not a Bible born of her imagination—the kind she used to draw as a girl, adorned with cherubs and scrolls—but the very one that had sat on Levi Ehrenberg’s bed tray, a simple Bible encased in worn leather and cracked at the spine, beside untidy piles of the orphan girls’ drawings and a seemingly unused comb.

Her commonplace book (she’d had it since her fourteenth year) was full of drawings of flowers from Flora’s Dictionary whose names she’d entirely forgotten, brightly colored tropical birds with lacquer-black beaks, and plants so exotic they looked like insects (copied from a book in Father’s library entitled Wild Curaçao). Further along there was a carefully pasted section of feverish notes in meticulous order from girlfriends she had long since lost—not to her marriage, not to her moving worlds away, but to her own withdrawal, to her secretive nature and broken dates and promises due to her time with Heinrich, to what she now realized she had never been able to so much as hint at in the confines of these pensive girlhood pages, so afraid she was of being caught. As she glanced back even further, toward the beginning of her inscriptions, as she ran her fingers over enthusiastic calligraphic lists of girls’ names and boys’ names, the names of German provinces, French cities, potential and unusual pets, she wondered at what point in Levi Ehrenberg’s reading had he cracked the Bible’s leather spine and set it down. She wondered if, instead of the Bible, he would have preferred Balzac or Goethe or even a picture book for children. And since he only had the Bible (obviously borrowed, as it was written in French), she also wondered if he’d attempted to read the stories he’d known as a boy, even though he didn’t, as far as she could gather, understand French. She wondered if he enjoyed reading, and she thought it was odd that in all of their conversations, such a question had never arisen. They had spoken in peculiar fits and starts, in a language at once familiar and distant. She never asked what she wondered now: If, when undertaking the supremely private act of reading, he searched for comfort or instruction or if—like she did—he searched for escape.