EPILOGUE

THE SMALL GRAVEYARD on the edge of Kalman Senderovich’s estate was usually choked with brambles, but it had been cleaned up to bury Sorel Kalmans. Until the girl reappeared from the forest, disoriented and chilled, claiming she’d been afflicted by a dybbuk on the night before her wedding and run in a panic, scarcely knowing where she was, surviving on forest berries and roots for days all alone. When the coffin was dug up, it was found to be empty, only a few handfuls of damp clay in the bottom, as if the drowned body had simply gotten up and walked away.

The miracle was imputed to the holiness of the Esroger Rebbe. It was, in its way, not even surprising.

The brambles were already growing back when Alter-Yisrael, Adela, and Sam brought the body that had once been Isser to lie in the false Sorel’s grave. Rumor had it that Kalman and his daughter were moving into the city itself, that the half-mad girl refused to step foot again onto the land where she’d fallen victim to the demon. Kalman Senderovich was going into the business of cutting railway ties, which was better conducted from the northwestern side of Esrog, far from the river.

Soon enough the whole estate would be eaten by the forest. No one would ever know that the empty space in the graveyard had been filled after all.

The body would lie nameless, undisturbed.

No one was looking for Alter-Yisrael or the Sefer Dumah. The book had never been missing, as far as anyone knew. On Shavuot the rebbe would look in the locked box and find the contract miraculously rewritten, but he would tell no one, just as he had told no one of the book’s existence to begin with. He liked to think his own great-grandfather had returned to make the changes.

Alter-Yisrael pushed a handful of earth into the grave, then Adela, then Sam. One of Old Rukhele’s crows had followed them from the river and stood on a nearby headstone, croaked “Rekh, rekh, rachamim” until Alter-Yisrael offered it a piece of a raisin bun, and it fell silent.

The scent of new growth rose out of the soil as the waning moon crept up over the trees.