Moscow greeted them with cold and severe frozen stone. They settled by the river, in a dank and small house. They missed their clean and dry house in Vitebsk, where despite the overall poverty Hershel had achieved respect; here, they had to build it all anew. There were few Jews in their new neighborhood, and Hershel ministered to them and-on occasion-their cows and horses.

The youngest of his six children was born in the fall of 1890. The cleansing of Moscow Jews started in 1891.

Their neighbor's house was burned, and Stars of David were painted up and down the street in ash. They complained to the gendarmes, but the disinterest of the authorities was palpable. They were advised to convert.

"Perhaps we should,” Hershel told Rosa.

She heaved a sigh and adjusted the baby in her arms, patting her back. “And what good will that do?"

"We'll have new papers,” Hershel said.

"Oh, my dear naïve husband,” Rosa replied. “Don't you know that they don't ask a Jew for his papers before they cave his face in? And you need to look in the mirror if you think you look like anything but a Jew."

America was starting to look much more attractive, especially when half of the Jewish population of Moscow were evicted, most of them in chains.

There was nothing special about Hershel's family, he supposed, and thus it did not seem fair that they were the ones who were saved. He remembered that day clearly-Passover, cold spring, snow still thick on the ground, but the smell of wet earth grew stronger with every day, telling that the spring, the true warmth and flowers and sticky first leaves, the pollen in the air and the fluff of shedding from tall poplars, the smell of sweet linden blooms, were not far off. It was the time when one dreamt of crocuses blooming under the snow, of seeds swelling in the dark earth, ready to burst forth with the fresh energy of new life, of renewal; it was also traditionally the time when the word ‘Christ-killer’ was heard more frequently than Hershel liked.

"I am a useful Jew,” he told Rosa. “Nothing bad will happen to us."

She sighed and said nothing, which was in itself an unusual event-Rosa rarely wanted for words. Hershel supposed that the sight of so many of their people in chains, the rumors of so many deaths ignored by the police took even her voice away; or perhaps it was the shame of remaining untouched by the misery, of being ‘useful'. She never called Hershel a traitor, but he suspected that she thought it, and perhaps more often than she would admit.

"What would you have me do?” he pleaded. “And what of the children?"

She shook her head, still silent and inconsolable, and left him alone in the dank dining room that still held the smells of the previous day's Seder, its low ceiling oppressive and dark. Light from the lone tallow candle flickered and exhaled thin streams of soot, adding to the deposits darkening the already hopeless dwelling.

That night, as Hershel learned later, the inhabitants of the underground grew restless, stirred up by the clouds of despair on the surface and their slow seeping underground. Hershel explained that this was how it usually went-the prevailing mood of one place reached the other, but the emanations and their effects were usually weak enough to be masked by the native emotion and mood. It was only at the times of great tragedy that they grew disturbing enough to spur the underground dwellers into action.

"I don't get it,” Fyodor interrupted Hershel. “I mean, no offense, but what was so special about that time? There were plenty of other tragedies."

"I don't know,” Hershel said. “We all have our reasons and guesses, but do they matter? Sure, there were other times. But I guess that time everyone had enough."

Hershel's house stood close enough to the river for him to be concerned about the spring floods, and in the spring the ice-bound river was clearly visible between the naked trees; he always worried about the children-especially his fearless and headstrong firstborn Daniil-playing on green and uncertain spring ice, where black freezing water could show itself through a crack like a slow smile at any moment. Hershel always kept an eye on the river, especially at night, fearful of the children's disobedience and of the incomprehensible ways of the world.

They came through cracks opening in the ice, they sprang among the trees. Hershel watched, terrified and yet not surprised, convinced that the grotesque creatures coming from every surface cranny, from every fresh snow patch, from every fork in the tree branches, had something to do with the exodus of his people. He was not wrong-he realized it when a large vaguely human head protruded through the only glass pane of the dining room window, without breaking it but instead seemingly originating within it, and demanded to know where the Jews were.

Hershel found himself at a loss for a proper answer; instead he just whispered, “Who are you? What do you want?"

The head chewed with its slack-lipped mouth. “I'm a friend,” it promised. “My name is Pan. We came to take you, to help you."

"Most have left,” Hershel said. “They took them to the Pale in chains; there is no one but the useful Jews left.” He was surprised at how much contempt colored his words.

"And these ‘useful Jews’”-the head repeated the words without grasping their meaning-"they want to stay here? Despite all the cries and complaints we heard all the way underground?"

"I don't want to stay,” Hershel said. “But where would we go? There's suffering everywhere, and too much of it to boot. What am I supposed to do?"

"Find those who want to leave,” the antlered head advised. “We will come back tomorrow, and we will take you somewhere where your suffering will be lessened.” The head whistled and disappeared back into the murky glass, and with it the rest of the apparitions were gone, as if they had never existed.

This description sounded suspiciously death-like to Hershel, but he didn't think he had a choice. Finally, a solution that would mollify Rosa; he called her and the children, and only then realized that unless they had been looking through the windows in the last ten minutes, they would have trouble believing his story.

Instead, he told them to knock on the doors of their neighbors and ask them if they wanted to leave. He didn't say where or why, only that whatever it was it had to be better than staying here, waiting for them to outlive their usefulness. Waiting to be killed or converted, waiting for Konstantin Pobedonostsev to give another one of his speeches, talking about Russia as the heiress of Constantinople and Byzantium, and Moscow-the third Rome. Waiting for him once again to remind everyone who killed Christ and who would never be forgiven for it. Hershel assumed that whoever the horned creature was, it was not friends with Christ; at that point, it seemed good enough for him.

But not for anyone else. It was his punishment, he supposed, for his former cowardice and minor but common betrayals. Everyone said that they were fine where they were, and some threatened to sic the Okhranka on him. Everyone liked to think that the worst was over, and that they were either important or inconspicuous enough to survive. Hershel smiled sadly at their self-deception and felt embarrassed by his conceit-he was not so different from them after all.

In the end, only Hershel's family wanted to go to the underground. There was a lesson in this, he supposed-a sad lesson of the sad state of the land, where the only escape possible was underground, and the only ones who cared about his life were the pagan deities he didn't even believe in.

Fyodor nodded, mute; he sat next to Oksana who snuggled against Hershel's and Rosa's youngest daughter, an eternal infant still in swaddling clothes. The girl babbled happily, and Oksana laughed. “Isn't she the cutest?” she asked Fyodor.