and he laid the plastic packet aside on the small footstool between our chairs, far 
enough away from the fire for it not to be hurt, and then he looked again at the flames.
  
  I felt the most sudden overwhelming emotion. I couldn't talk. It wasn't only that we 
had mentioned my mother and father, killed in Poland by the Nazis. It wasn't only that he 
had reminded me of the mad plot of Gregory Belkin which had come perilously close to 
success; it wasn't only his beauty, or that we were together, or that I was speaking with 
a spirit. I don't know what it was.
  
  I thought of Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov and I thought, Is this my dream? I am dying 
actually, the room's filling with snow, and I'm dying, imagining I'm talking to this 
beautiful young man with curling black hair, like the carvings on the stones from 
Mesopotamia in the British Museum, those stately kings never feline like the Pharaohs but 
with hair that was almost sexual on their faces, dark hair, hair as thick as the hair 
around their balls must have been. I don't know what was coming over me.
  
  I looked at him. He turned slowly, and just for one moment I knew fear. It was the 
first time. It was the way he moved his head. He turned towards me, obviously listening 
to my thoughts, or reading my emotion, or touching my heart, or however one would say it, 
and then I realized he had done a trick for me.
  
  He was dressed differently. He wore a soft tunic of red velvet, tied loosely at the 
waist and loose red velvet pants and slippers.
  
  "You're not dreaming, Jonathan Ben Isaac, I'm here."
  
  The fire gave off an incredible burst of sparks. It gave off sparks as if things had 
been tossed on it.
  
  I realized that something else about him had changed. He had now his heavy smooth 
mustache and his beard curling exactly as the beards of kings and soldiers in those old 
tablets, and I saw why God had given him the large cherubic mouth because it was a mouth 
you could see in spite of all that hair, a mouth that talked to you, a mouth developed by 
nature at a time when mouths had to compete with hair.
  
  He started. He reached up. He touched the hair and then he scowled. "I didn't mean to 
do that part. I think I shall give up on it. The hair wants to come back."
  
  "The Lord God wants you to have it?" I asked.
  
  "I don't think so. I don't know!"
  
  "How did you make the clothes change? How do you make yourself disappear?"
  
  "There's little to it. Science will one day be able to control it. Today, science knows 
all about atoms and neutrinos. All I did was throw off all the tiny particles smaller 
than atoms which I had drawn to myself, through a magnetic strength you might say, to 
make my old clothes. They weren't real clothes. They just were clothes made by a ghost. 
And then to banish them, I said, as the sorcerer would say, 'Return until I call to you 
again.' And then I called up new clothes. I said in my heart with the sorcerer's 
conviction:
  
  " 'From the living and the dead, from the raw earth and from that which is forged and 
refined, woven, and treasured, come to me, tinier than grains of sand, and without sound, 
unnoticed, hurting no one, at your greatest speed, penetrating whatever barriers surround 
me that you must and clothe me in red velvet, soft garments the color of rubies. See 
these clothes in my mind, come.' "
  
  He sighed. "And it was done."
  
  He sat quiet for a moment. I was so mesmerized by this new red attire, and by the way 
it seemed to change him somewhat, give him a sort of regal air, that I didn't speak. I 
pushed another big log into the pyramid of the fire, and threw some more coal on it from 
the scuttle, all of this without leaving the sanctuary of my rotting and crunched old 
chair.
  
  Then and only then did I look at him. And at that same moment, when his eyes were 
utterly remote, I realized he was singing in a very low voice, a voice so low I had to 
strain to disentangle it from the soft devouring rush of the fire.
  
  He was singing in Hebrew but it wasn't the Hebrew I knew. But I knew enough of it to 
know what it was: It was the Psalm "By the Rivers of Babylon." When he finished, I was 
awestruck and even more shaken than before.
  
  I wondered if it was snowing in Poland. I wondered if my parents had been buried or 
cremated. I wondered if he could call together the ashes of my parents, but it seemed a 
horrible, blasphemous thought.
  
  "That was my point, that we have things about which we are superstitious," he said. 
"When I blunderingly asked about your parents, I meant to say, you believe certain things 
but you don't believe them. You live in a double frame of mind."
  
  I reflected.
  
  He looked at me deliberately, eyebrows curving down, though his cherubic mouth smiled. 
It was a respectful, sincere expression. "And I can't bring them back to life. I can't do 
that!" he said.

  
  He looked back at the flames.
  
  "The parents of Gregory Belkin perished in the Holocaust in Europe," he said. "And 
Gregory became a madman. And his brother a holy man, a saint, zaddik. And you became a 
scholar, and a teacher, with a gentle gift for making students understand."
  
  "You honor me," I said softly. There were a thousand little questions buzzing around me 
like bees. I wasn't going to cheapen things.
  
  "Go on, Azriel, please," I said. "Tell me what you want to tell me. Tell me what you 
want me to know."