You see, my dear, good husband, I harbor no more unjust suspicions. I never say now that Genendil stole either the spoon or my husband. I know it is not her fault, and I am convinced that His blessed Name only meant to do us a kindness when He brought you and Leeb the reader together on the ship, so that he should take care of you--it is all just as you wrote. There is only one thing that will never be as you think. You may jump out of your skin, but you will never send for the child, to take it away from me to America. Because our child, for your sake and for that of your pious forefathers, has been gone this long time; it has been hidden somewhere in the burial ground, in a little room without a door, without a window. You may cry to heaven, but you shall not know where its little bones lie! No tombstone, nothing to mark it--nothing at all! Go, look for the wind in the fields! Askerah[131] has taken it under her wing. And since you have such a wonderful memory, and remember everything I said and everything I did, I will tell you a story which you may recollect. It is a story about a shawl I did not know what to do with. Should I put it on and run for the doctor for the child, or stop up the broken pane with it to keep the snow from blowing in, or wrap it round the child, because the poor thing was suffocating with its throat? And it was cold, bitterly cold. I ran to and fro several times, from the window to the cradle, to the door, and back from the door to the window--I tell you, I ran! I think, my dear husband, you will not forget that moment, because, as you say, we are bound one to the other, you to me and both of us to the child, and now the child is not there, we two may as well go, too. Well, what will Genendil say? To tell the truth, I have decided to let my hair grow and dress as they dress in America, and do you know that, beside this, I have a sweet voice and can chant all the prayers, and now, since I have been at my brother Menachem Mendil's, I have heard drunken peasants sing all sorts of songs--and I have learned them and I sing every whit as well as Genendil, if not better; and at night, when I slept under the open sky, the Queen of Sheba came and taught me to dance--and a whole night long I danced with the Queen of Sheba in the eye of the moon.