pain too exquisite to be analyzed, yet too excruciating to be endured.

III

Venture back, will you, to the ice and red of that Russian dawn when on
the snow the footsteps that led toward the horizon were the color of
blood, and one woman, who could not keep her eyes ahead, moaned as
she fled, prayed, and even screamed to return to her dead in the
bullet-riddled horse trough.

Toward the noon of that day, a gray one that smelled charred, a fugitive
group from a distant village that was still burning faltered, as it too
fled toward the horizon, in the blackened village of Vodna, because a
litter had to be fashioned for an old man whose feet were frozen, and a
mother, whose baby had perished at her breast, would bury her dead.

Huddled beside the horse trough, over a poor fire she had kindled of
charred wood, Hanscha, the midwife (Hanscha, the drunk, they called her,
fascinatedly, in the Pale of generations of sober women), spied Mosher's
flung coat and reached for it eagerly, with an eye to tearing it into
strips to wrap her tortured feet.

A child stirred as she snatched it, wailing lightly, and the instinct of
her calling, the predominant motive, Hanscha with her fumy breath warmed
it closer to life and trod the one hundred and eight miles to the port
with it strapped to her back like a pack.

Thus it was that Schmulka, the red twin, came to America and for the
first fourteen years of his life slept on a sour pallet in a sour
tenement he shared with Hanscha, who with filthy hands brought children
into the filthy slums.

Jason, she called him, because that was the name of the ship that
carried them over. A rolling tub that had been horrible with the cries
of cattle and seasickness.

At fourteen he was fierce and rebellious and down on the Juvenile Court
records for truancy, petty trafficking in burned-out opium, vandalism,
and gang vagrancy.

In Hanscha's sober hours he was her despair, and she could be horrible
in her anger, once the court reprimanding her and threatening to take
Jason from her because of welts found on his back.

It was in her cups that she was proud of him, and so it behooved Jason
to drink her down to her pallet, which he could, easily.

He was handsome. His red hair had darkened to the same bronze of the
samovar and he was straight as the drop of an apple from the branch. He
was reckless. Could turn a pretty penny easily, even dangerously, and
spend it with a flip for a pushcart baub