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Miriam, watching a video, would see the cowboys’ long coats and wide hats, and she would say, They—they looked like that: they wore long black coats hanging almost to the ground, wide-brimmed black hats, and showed faces full of solemnity and hair instead of other features. Five of them, five, she said, stood in a dark row before the opening—the hole in the house—where the Fixels camped. Caught unaware, flustered, Yankel held his yarmulke smashed against his head with one hand. The first figure said: You, Yankel Fixel, have never looked into—you have never been touched by—the Torah. Their long coats made them look tall, as if their shadows had been added to their stature. In a close row they formed a fence of black posts, each post surmounted by a stiff brim. Glares were all on their side. From Fixel not a glimmer. For this case, his power of stutter was lost. The second figure said: You, Yankel Fixel, have never seen the seal of God. The way they spoke made them seem wound up, their voices coming from far off like an echo among mountains. The third figure said: You, Yankel Fixel, are fore-skinned as far as your face. (It was true.) Their pale visages, from which beards hung, appeared to be far away as well, their dark clothes a cave out of which a sibyl spoke. The fourth figure said: You, Yankel Fixel, have eaten unclean words; you have swallowed the poison of untruth. They each held a short black stick. The fifth figure was silent, everyone stood steady, and all were still. Finally, the fifth figure made a gesture that Miriam did not understand.

Yankel Fixel had been denounced.

This did not prevent him from enjoying the preferential treatment of a persecuted refugee. They—whoever the five Fates represented, a clutch of fanatical thugs, a row of wooden rabbis—had spoken to the false Fixel of their awareness and their displeasure, but they had not bothered to inform his boss or complain about him to anyone in the bureau that handled his affairs. So he had merely been confronted, not denounced. Denouncement might be in the offing. Rituals, he knew, proceeded by steps and stages. Perhaps Yankel should explain, he wondered aloud to his wife—she was, by his insistence, still Miriam—perhaps he should make plain the difference between his Jewishness and theirs: they had fled the ethically enviable condition of the victim, while he had fled the guilt of natal association, the animus of villainous authority. Might they understand, then, his plight? Was fleeing permitted only to potential victims? Might no one refuse the power and the privilege, the duties and indulgences, of the tyrant’s role? the honey and the money of the profiteer? or flinch from the hangman’s vengeance, the bigot’s bile, the fat cat’s claws, the smug burgher’s condescension, and the swagger of the bully? Must the offer of evil, Yankel asked the sky, like some hospitalities, always be accepted?

In case his five calumniators returned, Yankel hurried to prepare some strategies. We’ll admit we’re not Jews … we’ll admit it … but … but we’ll beg to become Jews … yes … beg. Miriam said, He said “beg.” I won’t beg, she said. If a man wants to become a Jew, the Jews say to him, Yankel said he’d read, they say to him—how does it go?—they say, Don’t you know that Jews are oppressed, prostrate, mistreated, undergoing suffering? and then we shall say, We know and we are not worthy of you. That’s the phrase. We … are … not … worthy … of … you. I am, though, Miriam said. I am mistreated. Here … right now … hear how I am undergoing suffering. O weh! Well, I won’t beg and I won’t say I am not worthy. I am a woman. They wouldn’t let me in their boys’ club anyway. You beg, my husband, you dirty your knees, you say to them: I am not worthy of you. Go on. You say it, she said she said. But the five Fates never returned.

As the war wound down, Jews began leaking out of England and landing in America, at first a few drops at a time and then in rivulets and finally in torrents. Yankel could not hope that the leaflet business would continue to prosper during peacetime, so he too began to consider such a move. Miriam, during this period, was working at a laundry during the early evening, boiling sheets and napkins, aprons and towels, standing for hours in steam, breathing bleach and starch and soap, keeping herself clean of imposture, repeating to herself, I know I’m me, Holy Mother, I shall not beg to be another, I shall not say, I am not worthy, I’m me, dear God, you can see I’m me.

Professor Joseph Skizzen remembered how his mother smelled when she returned to their shattered flat, how her odor glowed as though she were a fumigation candle as she made her way amid the dark stench of wet burned paper, wet charred wood, the peppery bite of powdered glass, the reek of oil and rubber, of smoke-stuffed sofas. And his father was insisting that things looked grim for them again. In the world, affairs and facts smelled rank. To get to America as Jews they’d have to have papers attesting to their circumcised and wretchedly safe Semitic state, their exilic condition, and these bona fides they didn’t have. They would need visas, no doubt, which they couldn’t get. The Fixels were, in fact, fakes.

I am not a fake, Miriam said. You have made us fakes, she also insisted. You, a Yankel, have turned your children into liars, into Dvorahs and Yussels. Who are these folks? Abashed, annoyed, her husband would try to explain that people could choose to be otherwise than the selves that neighbors and the nation had shaped for them; that only an accident of birth separated Rudi Skizzen from Yankel Fixel; that she was Catholic because of her cradle; couldn’t she take the cradle away and be … well … British? This line of reasoning was not persuasive. Actually, he, her husband, the man who thrust himself into her so reliably Tuesday nights, as well as Saturdays sometimes, when the week had not been too strenuous, performing the act of ownership with only now and then a few huffs that couldn’t be helped so as not to disturb the children by moaning or threatening the thin mattress with his movements, was the same young man who had walked shyly along that rock-gardened country lane near Graz, steadily holding her left hand in his right and occasionally nuzzling her neck or nibbling an earlobe to hear her chuckle and chide him; he was the same because his convictions had not been revised; the heart that beat inside him kept up the same watchful rhythm as ever; he had no different a nose for disaster than before; and now the odor of the old order was overcoming him. He was a rare man, he told her, a wary man, a man of the middle, of leave-me-be, someone trying to stay out of moral trouble, a man of peace.

Gradually, a week at a time, the Rudi Skizzen who had wrapped himself in Yankel Fixel began to emerge as Raymond Scofield. He got a job in an offtrack betting parlor. He replaced his collection of Jewish jokes with quotations from music-hall songs and Gilbert and Sullivan. He left on his face a tentative slim mustache. He ate chips and tried to eat the fish. He spent more money than he should on movies. He bought a cloth cap. He practiced raising a finger to its bill. Not that he wanted to look touty. Not that he wanted to seem obsequious. What he wanted was to fade into the background, be a piece of household goods lost in the rubble of war; rubble from which the state summarily removed the family when it bulldozed blocks of bombed-out, burned-down, hovel-smelly buildings. This entailed considerable official confusion: Just who were they? Where should they be put? Confusion, especially among officials, his father said, was good, was promising, was an improvement. He told his wife she needn’t have her head shaved as he had suggested despite her screams of defiance, so she wouldn’t need the wig she refused to wear; that she could toss it down the broken stairs just the way she had already hurled it; and she’d never have a need to say, I am not worthy. Mary Scofield, he thought, should look for employment as a clerk. She should get rid of her accent by going to movies or listening to the BBC and then find safe work in an office. She should keep in mind that England was a class-driven society despite its constitution and its Magna Carta; a culture that could teach even the Viennese the importance of place and position. Stirring tubs of steaming dungarees was not for a Scofield who clearly had some social standing. Consequently they could claim to be only momentarily down on their luck.

Although his father could mimic British speech fairly well, his wife was unable to play the ape. Her accent could have held down papers in a wind. She refused, absolutely, to take on “Mary.” She was too worshipful of the real Mary, sick of subterfuge, and wary of the English, who struck her as snobs before all else; so, in compromise, Miriam she remained. Miriam Scofield was possible, Yankel—who was now Raymond, Raymond Scofield thought. Yankel Fixel was a bottom feeder, with a carp’s muddy name; Raymond—ah—Raymond Scofield would leap from the river to snap at the air. Calmed by the compromise, Raymond Scofield took a deep breath in order to think ahead. And from resentful, rebellious Miriam, Raymond Scofield stayed his hand, though she thought she saw it raised. The light was bad.

Infants and small children are sheltered from such changes, which take place at a level in adult life they hope, as they age, they will never reach. But the smells were different when they left the bomb-outs for simple bare rooms, institutionally disinfected, equal and anonymous; the look of their parents, the clothes they wore, the way they walked, the frowns they bore, were different, and to infants and small children the look of things, the sound and smell of things, the feelings, like atmosphere, that fill every emptiness, are all that life is. The warmth of their small stove was nothing like an open fire; they saw the world now through unbroken panes of greasy glass; they no longer had to pick their way among hazards, but the cream-walled room was cream walled night and day and all around them every way they turned. When Miriam came home, steamy and pungent, her smell seemed redundant in a room that was not a ruin, a room with a curtained corner for the commode, an uncovered corner for a stove, walls against which were pushed a small bed and two cots, no place where you could watch your pee fall through open floors for several stories. Miriam lay in Ray’s arms more often than before because brooming the floor of the betting parlor was easier on his energy, and because in that bed there was room and reason finally to conceive.

Though, to her relief, she did not, which Ray put down to the slow and silent—almost insincere—thrusting that was required, as if the children, now both in public school, didn’t know what their restless tossing and turning meant—to a degree, anyway. They are doing the blanket-bouncing business, they said. Ray urged Miriam toward another job. She felt clean as a creamery, of course, but he was sure his sperm could not live inside a womb so under the influence of soap.

Ray began to consider seriously what would be required, in terms of proper papers, friends, bribes, funds, to continue their journey to the New World, which now included Canada—indeed, Canada now looked easier. But they had no British papers, no Austrian ones, no identity, which the recently named Raymond Scofield should have found appealing, and indeed he would have, under slightly different circumstances, reveled in it, though he kept spelling his fresh name “Schofield,” a mistake that was dangerous. The Fixels were on some bureaucrat’s hands, the result of a national sympathy now silently regretted, and it seemed to Ray likely that those hands would be happy to release him from their responsibility. Release him, perhaps he thought. To be in the singular for the first time.

How is this possible, Miriam would frequently exclaim, she said, when trying to convey to her grown-up boy her husband’s preoccupations, because Ray would treat her exclamation as a question, and then misunderstand its obvious import. When we left Graz, Ray would maintain, we undid our ties; we left our prior selves behind like old clothes on their way to rags; we joined the dispossessed, yet were not one of them, either; and lived among ruins, and were seen only by corpsmen, clerks, and firemen when the cracks grew large enough to make us visible: that is why I can become a Scofield; it is a world of opportunity; anything is possible for us. But for the Jews … Jews have to be Jews now. They can never be French or Polish or German again. Opfer. He used the German word. They will always be Opfer. Opfer forever.

What gave Ray moral weight was the news: of the war’s victorious progress—or its calamitous outcome, according to Nita, who stubbornly retained her Austrian affections—news that justified his forebodings, that more and more stamped his harsh judgments with righteousness and made the family’s bizarre move as prescient as the foreknowledge of a prophet. You may seem clean because you smell of soap, he said, but I am clean on both sides of my conscience; your hands may be wrinkled they are so overwashed, but mine are smoother and whiter than paper. He held up his palms. You can see right through. The work my hands have done need not be hid; therefore I cannot be Austrian; an Austrian’s hands should slink back into its sleeves. And you too can enjoy an untroubled heart. Nita nodded without agreement. Her husband’s Thanks to me was loud though unspoken. My heart has been kidnapped, she said, borne with my babies away into a world of wreckage. I could have lived in my village a quiet harmless life … and held my hands out to anyone. Ray made a face yet not one of denial. You would have shaken hands that made profits, he insisted, that made killing implements; that fingered folks for the police; that helped in roundups; that made murder: hands of an uncle who supplied a troop, hands of a cousin who drove a truck, a nephew who sold clothes. You would be unaware: of the neighbor’s son who shot gypsies, homos, Jews, and the dentist who drew the gold from their teeth. There are so many slyboots, friends whom the Nazis fondled. You would have met on the street in Graz where you had gone to buy a hat—this one, that. You would have sat in a seat on the same train. You would not stare out the window but pretend to read as the train rolls past wire, cleared trees, a camp. You would have smiled at a man who had strung some of that wire, who had held a megaphone, who had taken advantage of imprisoned women. That would stain even well-washed hands and overcome nature’s fondness for pale ones because even a Negro’s palms are pink. Your graceful fingers would not be gnarled by honest work; they would slowly take the shape of claws. To desire an Austrian nationality is to accept the acts of assassins, tacitly to agree to—my God—mayhem and massacre. Now that you are no longer Nita, you are free of such disgusting contaminations. Don’t let their sort be lichen on some forest rocks, unseen and unremarked, or taken for granted like the persistent damp of Vienna’s stones, its postered kiosks, its gray streets. To the pure, to the stateless, my Nita, anything is possible.

Including … betting on a winning horse. Ray worked six months as a janitor at the betting parlor before he placed a modest sum upon the nose of a long-shot nag, not even in hope, more out of curiosity, and received immodest winnings, winnings which took him by surprise, took him aback, shook him up, shook him so he saw a solution in the sum he suddenly had in hand. This was the sort of shock Miriam later imagined her husband to have had: after a life of undeserving failure, a sudden unmerited success. Once you’ve placed a bet, you’ve made your bed, she said. Once you’ve been bitten by a bet and you’re ahead, you’re dead. Because bettors were mainly men of low principles, she was certain, often at loose ends, frayed in the bargain, men whose knowledge of the world was entirely set in terms of shortcuts, which, if you took enough of them, would allow your journey to zig in a ceaseless circle, to zag without seeing an end. Conceivably he could have lost his money in a game of cards and run shamefully away. To hide from whom, however? He could have gone from sin to sin, his appetites as sharp as razors, if he’d known what sin was or where sins were or how, even, to begin a stretch of sinning; but, though he could spot evil in a rubber stamp, he couldn’t tell a streetwalker from a floor lamp. Eventually, both police and such parlor patrons as confessed to Ray’s acquaintance concluded that he had secretly spent his money on documents, on plans, on bribes, on a steamship ride.

Rudi Skizzen would have said it was God’s will, and certainly Yankel Fixel would have felt that it was Meant: that despite every likelihood he would find himself in just this job, where temptation of some type would lead him to a wager, and where, against extravagant odds, he would come into considerable cash—the purchase of a passage—but for Ray Scofield, a man who had decided to live a life free of divinities—including anything that might be written in the skies—for him it was just luck, it was a sudden advantage, a chance, an unsought, unearned opportunity.

Miriam learned of his expressed attitude toward the bet and its lavish payoff while Ray Scofield’s disappearance was being investigated. The investigation itself was confused, for at first the authorities did not know exactly whom they were looking for: Austrian, Englishman, Jew. Nor did the wife appear to have a clear understanding of the sort of man her husband was. For instance, they learned from people at the betting parlor of Ray Scofield’s success at the track, and in the course of their questions, just how he had taken it: not as a gift from God, not as the final arrival of Good Fortune, nor as a Matter of Course, but simply as an accident, similar to a sudden fall; but his wife would not accept that reaction, for she said her husband would have fallen to his knees and thanked God, after apologizing, first, for the sin in his wager. His suits and sleeves and collar might change, she claimed, but his heart would never alter.

She and the children had come home, if that’s what you could call it, to find not even his customary shadow. Naturally they had worried and fretted for a time before going to the police. Something had befallen her husband, Rudi Skizzen—no, in her nervousness, she seemed unsure—something awful had happened to Yankel Fixel. And he worked where? In the leaflet house, she answered—no, the betting office, not so far. Yet so very far. All those bombs had missed them only to have this—whatever it was—happen, come out of nowhere, to make her Rudi a … what …? a what …? an Opfer, a victim … a runaway. She couldn’t believe it. Do you believe it, she repeatedly asked Dvorah, forgetting that her daughter was supposed to be Deborah now. I’m glad he’s gone, I hate him, his daughter said. You don’t hate him. He changed my name. Maybe he’s hurt somewhere. He took us from our home and changed our names, Dvorah went on relentlessly, repeating the sentence. You were too young really to remember. Graz? I remember. No one is too young to remember. And my name I remember. His horrid beard. He shaved, dear, he shaved. To leave us on a weekend, his daughter said. Miriam howled. Deborah howled. How … how is this possible? But there was no answer from the authorities until many months had passed, months during which Miriam had to fend off foster care for her kids, quit the laundry, try the church, and go on the dole. Then the authorities learned, while apprehending some counterfeiters, of Raymond Scofield’s purchases: a passport, a ticket, a license to drive. Drive? Rudi rode a bike. Drive? That didn’t matter, the authorities explained; it was a useful document. Miriam felt bereaved. Dvorah felt abandoned. Yussel appeared to feel nothing at all.

The young priest who heard her confession became solicitous. He dropped round. Unlike the Jews who had confronted Yankel, this priest had no face fuzz; you could see his smooth red cheeks and red lips, always moist as if they were sides of a stream. He had a properly soft voice, full of concern, and he tried to joke with the children, though it was clear, Miriam said, it was Miriam who interested him. Her round flat Slav face seemed huge where it perched like a lollipop above her now bone-thin body. Her dark hair was already flicked with gray. Miriam began to worry about what she wore because she could feel his eyes fixed on her in far from a fatherly way, and this attraction did her more good than baskets of fruit. She smiled for him while Dvorah glared.

It would be so romantic, Miriam thought, if her beauty pulled this priest from his church like a cork from a bottle. She longed to hear him say: I cannot help myself; I must have you; you have enslaved me; for you I give up Communion, I give up Confession, I give up Latin, I give up God, and so on, though she had no interest whatever in responding to such amorous advances beyond tittering and smiling and saying the equivalent of “pshaw” in her Austrian. Her devotion to the Deity did not prohibit a daydream flirtation with one of his representatives. In another age and class she would have rapped Father’s knuckles with her fan and laughed like bubble-risen wine. Nor could she maintain this fantasy in front of the mirror in her mind. Maybe, she thought, like a farmer, he sees how I would look when properly fattened for the market. The image gave her hope: that one day she would be.

Already angry at the flight of her father, Dvorah was jealous and outraged and shamed by her mother’s little play. Which she dimly understood was only a dance. It was as if, for a moment, with this woman, the priest was allowing himself another life … and not merely that he was, for a change, an unemasculated man but that he was actually a rowdy one, preying upon a poor abandoned refugee woman, as so many did, a Romeo without scruple or regard. He had a way of running a pale shiny-nailed hand up his black-sleeved arm—she told Joseph often of it in the after years—a gesture that told her he was wishing her stockings were just as dark and felt the same. Years and repetitions later, she knew that caress would feel like the path of a barky stick.

Finally, the priest managed to pry her story from her, so when she said she believed that her husband—what’s the rascal’s name now?—had probably been an Opfer, the victim of foul play, having been seen coming into money by a lot of lowlifes; or when she said she believed her husband had simply preceded them to the New World—the New World where they would begin again, each self as new as a store shoe—and that he would in a while send for his family to live decently in some hilly Austrian part of that far-off Yankel country, moreover in a sharply peaked cottage at the end of a rocky flower-dotted lane—Oh, we are almost there, she said—to a house with curtains in the summer, shutters in the winter, and an open gate; not an absconder, Miriam maintained, not a fugitive from their marriage, a runaway who had left her with two young children to seek his own good luck in America just because he’d won a wager on a horse. When she went on, her eyes closed and dreamy-faced, through the possibilities, the priest simply said, Yes, yes, I understand, but remember he left your country, as you say, suddenly, and he was just that abruptly no longer an Austrian, just that cruelly a Jew, a refugee, a Scofield who could enter Canada as easily as he could place a bet where he worked, and so, dear lady, he could leave you.

This was not endearing. The priest, however, while he wished to win her to his side, meant only—we must imagine—to the side of religion. You must return to the church, you must purge yourself of every taint of Jewishness, no matter how feigned; for it was sacrilegious to have behaved as your husband did; did she realize he had endangered their souls, the souls of her children as well as her own? I wouldn’t wear a wig, Miriam said in her defense. I never really kept kosher. I didn’t eat with noise. I didn’t hide money under pillows. I had no family, no friends. My husband—I didn’t walk behind. I didn’t learn jokes or how to tell them. She remembered Yankel’s favorite, though, which he had memorized for her use, and whose form he had carefully explained, failing to realize that it was never the women who told them. It seemed there were ladies having tea at a fine house. That was the setting, the situation, he said, ladies, tea, fine house. The hostess, a woman rather well off in the baking business, is passing and repassing a huge plate of butter cookies. That was the action, the send-off, passing and repassing the cookies, he insisted, the joke is now on its way. I already ate three, one of her visitors is supposed to say, sighing as she eyes the full fan of delicacies the cookies form on the plate being held out to her. That cocked the pistol, it was the setup, he explained. Excuse me, her hostess then says, you’ve had five, but take another, who’s counting? That, Miriam instructed the priest in her turn, was the clincher, the blow, the snapper. She remembered, and her voice was full of satisfaction. The joke, he said, was clearly not Catholic.

The priest could hear how Miriam’s heart remained faithfully beating in her husband’s chest, and perhaps it was then that he decided to desist from his social attentions and help her as her confessor should, instead of watching her face in wonder as he might the moon. Miriam must join her husband in America, retie her family ties, and give the absconder one great big surprise. Because Raymond Scofield had obligations: he had mouths to feed, children to raise, and a wife to instruct. The trouble was, no one knew where he was, who he might be at the moment, or whether he was even alive.

Oh, how I wish we were ordinary, Dvorah wailed whenever she was given the opportunity. Couldn’t we be common? just plain people? normal even? Only in Austria, her mother always answered in tones of such triumphant outrage that Dvorah shut up and went into a sulk so severe a little wailing would have been a comfort.

The magic formula that determined Miriam’s frequent appeals to numerous authorities went this way: Miriam and the children needed to join her husband and their father, whom she retained in his role as a Jew for strategic reasons she saw no advantage to mention. Reuniting families was a holy and patriotic duty. So Miriam and the children, now some years later, set sail for the New World, perhaps not as their husband and father had, in flight from a contaminating present, but to secure a past that had seemed to Miriam to have been at peace. This world may be new, she told Debbie and Joey, but we shall remain as we were, as old as an Alp. Remember that.