"But it's hard now to be anything but the young man I was when it started. When I 
bought their lies. When I became a ghost and not the martyr they promised. Lie still now, 
Jonathan, sleep. Your eyes are clear and your cheeks have color."
  
  "Give me more of the broth," I said.
  
  He did.
  
  "Azriel, I would be dead without you."
  
  "Yes, that much is true, isn't it? But I had my foot on the Ladder to Heaven, I was on 
it this time, I tell you, when I made this choice, and I thought when it was all over, 
the Temple destroyed, the Stairway might come down for me again. The Hasidim are pure and 
innocent. They are good. But battles they must leave to monsters like me."
  
  "Lord, God," I said. Gregory Belkin. A lunatic plan. I remember fragments . . . "And 
there was that beautiful girl," I said.
  
  He put down the cup of broth, and wiped my face and my hands.
  
  "Her name was Esther."
  
  "Yes."
  
  He opened the curled and damp magazine for me. It was now badly creased as it was 
drying out in the warm room. I saw the famous photograph of Esther Belkin, on Fifth 
Avenue. I saw her lying on the stretcher just before they had put her into the ambulance, 
and just before she had died.
  
  Only this time I focused on a figure in this photograph which I had noticed before, 
yes, in television broadcasts, and in the larger cover photographs of this very scene. 
But I hadn't until now paid any real attention to the figure. I saw a young man by 
Esther's stretcher, with his hands raised to his head, as though crying out in grief for 
her, a young man blurry and indistinct as all the other crowd figures in the famous 
photograph, except for his heavy beautifully shaped eyebrows and his mane of thick black 
curly hair.
  
  "That's you," I said. "Azriel, that's you there in the photograph."
  
  He was distracted. He didn't reply. He put his finger on the figure of Esther. "She 
died there, Esther, his daughter."
  
  I explained that I had known her. The Temple was new then, and controversial rather 
than solid and immense and indefatigable. She had been a good student, serious and modest 
and alert.
  
  He looked at me for a long time. "She was a sweet, kind girl, wasn't she?"
  
  "Yes, very much so. Very unlike her stepfather."
  
  He pointed to his own shape in the picture.
  
  "Yes, the ghost, the Servant of the Bones," he said. "I was visible then in my grief. I 
will never know who called me. Maybe it was only her death, the dark horrible beauty of 
it. I'll never know. But you see now, you feel now, I have the solid shape of that form 
which was nothing before but vapor. God has wrapped me in my old flesh; he makes it 
harder and harder for me to vanish and return; to take to the air and to nothingness and 
to reassemble. What is to become of me, Jonathan? As I grow stronger and stronger in this 
seeming human form, I fear I can't die. I will never."
  
  "Azriel, you must tell me everything."
  
  "Everything? Oh, I want to, Jonathan. I want to."
  
  Within an hour, I was able to walk about the house without dizziness. He'd found my 
thick robe for me, and my leather slippers. Within a few more hours I was hungry.
  
  It must have been morning when I fell asleep. And then waking in the later afternoon, I 
was myself, clearheaded, sharp, and the house was not only safely warmed by the fire, but 
he had put a few candles around, the thick kind, so that the corners had a dusty soft 
nonintrusive light.
  
  "Is it all right?" he asked me gently.
  
  I told him to put out a few more. And to light the kerosene lamp on my desk. He did 
these things with no trouble. A match was no mystery to him, or a cigarette lighter. He 
raised the wick of the lamp. He put two more of the candles on the stone-top table by the 
bed.
  
  The room, with its wooden windows bolted shut as tight as its door, was softly, evenly 
visible. The wind howled in the chimney. Again came the volley of flakes dissolving in 
the heat. The storm had slackened but the snow still fell. The winter surrounded us.
  
  And no one will come, no one will disturb us, no one will distract us. I stared at him 
in keen interest. I was happy. Uncommonly happy.
  
  I taught him how to make cowboy coffee by merely throwing the grinds into the pot, and 
I drank plenty of it, loving the smell of it.
  
  Though he wanted to do it, I mixed up the grits for a good meal, showing him again how 
it came in little packets, and all one had to do was boil the water on the fire, and then 
stir the grits to a thick delicious porridge.
  
  He watched me eat it. He said he wanted nothing.
  
  "Why don't you taste it?" I said. I begged.
  
  "Because my body won't take it," he said. "It's not human, I told you."