Chapter One ONE
It is told:

Before Yosef died, the three Rosenthal children were summoned in turn to the attic where he’d spent his final decade, a bedroom with an en-suite and adjoining kitchen, all sheeted in a layer of dust; the last cleaner had given notice weeks earlier, and there’d been no need for a replacement. Tovyah, being the youngest, went third. No one said this was going to be the last time he would speak to his grandfather, but he wasn’t allowed up before he’d washed his face and changed into a clean shirt. His mother put one hand on his shoulder while she dragged a brush through his knotted hair.

“That hurts,” he said.

“Life hurts,” she replied, and straightened his collar.

He found the old man piled under blankets and propped up by several pillows, his posture not of relaxation but collapse. Zeide’s eyes were screwed shut and Tovyah thought he’d fallen asleep. But then Zeide said his name, as though reminding himself what the boy was called.

“I’m here,” Tovyah said.

Blinking a few times, the old man opened his eyes. He wanted to know if his grandson was doing well in school. Of course! Nineteen out of twenty in his latest maths homework, and no one else got more than fifteen. He left out the part where, after class, Jack Thomas rewarded his success with a Chinese burn.

Zeide coughed, then resumed his perpetual frown. “Gut.”

Tovyah had grown up terrified of his grandfather. His earliest memory was of firing marbles across the floor with Elsie, ecstatically happy until Zeide thundered down from the attic and screamed at them. “Five minutes together of peace! What’s so hard?” The old man waved his stick in the air, and Tovyah had feared the beak of the eagle-shaped grip would come swooping down towards him.

But illness had transformed the man. These days his hands wobbled and his speech was choked. Looking closely, Tovyah could see a line of red beneath each of his grandfather’s faded eyes, almost colourless themselves, like raw egg whites. As for the tautness in his bearing, the sharp edges, the irresistible glowering that could force even his mother into submission—all of that was gone.

Now Zeide’s breathing grew hoarse and uneven. Tovyah wondered if it might stop altogether, if he was about to witness the moment the line was crossed. Could the old man die before his eyes? What then? Sam Morris, who on weekends derived great frustration and a little sadistic pleasure from hammering basic Hebrew into kids like Tovyah, was cagey when asked about the afterlife. “That’s not for us to know,” he’d say, before changing the subject.

Zeide’s breathing returned to a steady rhythm. Attempting to push himself upright, he beckoned the boy closer. So this was it, the reason he was here. Now he would receive his grandfather’s parting gift, the great revelation, something he’d carry with him through the course of his life.

“Don’t make me shout,” Zeide warned. Tovyah approached his bed.

Doggedly, the old man rose and sank against the headboard until he reached a stalemate. The effort seemed to do him good. His voice rang out clearer now, more insistent. “The second son is very special. Abel was the second son, Isaac was the second son, and Jacob was the second son. I was the second son, and you also are the second son. Not Gideon, you.”

Unsure if a response was expected, Tovyah kept his mouth shut. He’d heard this sermon before. Zeide continued. “Tell me. You believe in God?”

The question struck, a blow from the dark. “Of course,” Tovyah said. His toes pressed into the carpet.

“No, not of course.”

Zeide coughed again and there was silence.

“Let me show you.” With pitiful slowness, the way he now performed every little action, he tugged at the sleeve of his night shirt. Tovyah wished his grandfather would stop, and not expose that ancient limb.

“You know what this is?” Zeide asked, holding the raised sleeve above the elbow.

Tovyah stared at the white forearm and couldn’t speak. The goose flesh, those horrible black marks.

“And you know what it means?”

Tovyah nodded.

“You don’t know. It means there are people who think they decide who is human and who is not human.” He paused, scratched his sagging elbow, and went on. “It has no point, a life without God. What meaning is there? Don’t shake your head. What means something to you?”

There was nothing to say.

“You think God cares you don’t believe in Him? God laughs.”

Still Tovyah didn’t speak. And soon, he didn’t have to; Zeide, having expended what small reserves of energy remained, drooped against his pillows. His eyes closed. When he spoke again, he asked his grandson if he had seen Ariel lately. Tovyah was used to this kind of talk, the dropped threads, the questions from nowhere. But he’d never known anyone called Ariel.

His grandfather continued. “Elsie plays with him sometimes, doesn’t she? He’s only a little boy. Be gentle.”

“With who?”

“Ariel! Listen. He has colour on his face. Here.”

Zeide was tapping the ridge of his eyebrow, and Tovyah felt his memory prickling. The dimmest of recollections, a shadow at the edge of his mind. On some distant night, he’d been woken by voices from Elsie’s room. He’d tiptoed over, wondering who Elsie could be talking to. There was a little light spilling from the open door. And when he peeped through the crack, he saw Elsie’s face lit up by her reading lamp. Sitting on the end of the bed, with hands folded in his lap, was a boy his own age. No one he knew. And above his eye was a dark patch, reminding Tovyah of the dappling you get on cows. When he spoke, the language that came out was not English.

Tovyah couldn’t be sure if this was a true memory, or something he’d dreamt. It was so watery in his mind. Zeide, meanwhile, was squirming.

“Where am I going?” he said.

Tovyah didn’t understand.

“Will they keep me locked up, or set me free?”

The boy lowered his gaze. No answer was required; his grandfather was talking nonsense to himself again.

“Listen!” Zeide said, alert to his grandson’s presence once more. “Watch out for Elsie. And Gideon. The second son protects the others, yes? He carries the torch. Now help me change my pillows. They’re scratching. Filthy chicken feathers!” When this was done, he told Tovyah to refill the glass by the side of his bed. For a moment, the boy lingered. Was there nothing more? His grandfather’s bent finger and fierce eyes sent him on his way.

Before he reached the kitchen, he was ambushed by his brother and sister on the landing. They led him to Elsie’s room, and Gideon shut the door. “So?”

Tovyah was conflicted. Elsie was his closest ally in the family; the perfect daughter, she always defended his minor lapses to their parents—chocolate and milk within a few hours of Sunday roast, flicking the light one sleepless sabbath to see where he was peeing. But Gideon made him uncomfortable. His brother was sixteen now, had a man’s hard voice, and made a point of standing in front of the bathroom mirror, door wide open, his face slathered in shaving cream. It wasn’t just his body that had changed. His interests were evolving too; he no longer participated in the games and fantasies that filled Tovyah and Elsie’s free time.

Gideon was speaking again. “Come on, Tuvs! He told me I was the spitting image of his brother Mendl, who I guess was some kind of war hero, and then he said I was gonna move to Israel. And he basically told Elsie she’s a prophet.”

Elsie clicked her tongue. “He said I hear the voice of God.”

“Same diff. What did you get?”

Tovyah glanced from his brother’s face, filled out like risen dough, to his sister’s. He wanted to talk to Elsie alone.

“He said the second son is special. You know, like Isaac.”

Gideon waited a moment, expecting more. “That’s it? You got a Torah lesson? I know you’re not his favourite, but man, that sucks.”

Elsie looked like she was working something out. “Did Zeide forget how to count? I’m pretty sure the second child is me.”

Gideon shook his head. “You’re a girl. Girls aren’t sons.”

“Don’t be so literal.”

If Tovyah mentioned that Zeide had tasked him with protecting the others, he knew he’d be laughed at. Why didn’t he get any wondrous predictions about his future, something he could boast about with his brother? Like so much else, it wasn’t fair.

“And he showed me his tattoo!” he blurted.

“No way,” Gideon said.

“I swear!”

Gideon laughed. “Of course he showed you the arm. He’s always whipping it out.” He yanked up the sleeve of his shirt, looked down at his own forearm, and gasped in mock horror.

Elsie slapped Gideon’s knee. “It’s his first time seeing it.”

“All right, all right, fair enough,” Gideon said, pulling down his sleeve. “That shit is pretty real. Specially at your age. Was there, like, a reason he showed you?”

Tovyah said Zeide just wanted him to see it.

“You sure he wasn’t threatening you?”

“I’m sure.”

“My first time was on holiday. Bournemouth or Cromer or somewhere, one of those little bitch-towns on the English coast they used to drag us to. This was before your time, Tuvs. We got undressed on the beach, and I said, ‘Zeide, you’ve got a tattoo! Awesome!’?”

“I expect he hit you,” Elsie said.

“You’re damn right. ‘Nu, nu,’ he said. ‘Zis iz nawt awesome.’ Thumped me round the back of my head so hard I fell over. Hannah told me he never wanted the tattoo, that bad men put it on him. And for years, I thought the old guy was some kind of gangster.”

Satisfied there was nothing more to wring out of his little brother, Gideon left to cook dinner—something he said Eric and Hannah would be in no mood to do. Calling their parents by name was another thing that made Gideon so different, suddenly. Elsie was less impressed. She said it was pretentious, a word Tovyah didn’t know.

Now that the two of them were alone, Elsie studied her younger brother. Her expression softened. “Did Zeide also tell you he wants to be incinerated?”

Another word Tovyah didn’t know. But he was a quick child, and in a flash the meaning came to him. A black gate holding back terrible light, an orange glow, flames. The smell of ashes, like after a barbeque.

Unable to sleep a few nights before, Tovyah had wandered from his room and settled at the top of the stairs. Gripping the bannisters, he’d listened to a puzzling conversation his parents were having in the living room below. An argument. According to his mother, Zeide wanted to be cremated. The last few months, she’d gone up to the attic daily, just to sit and hear the old man talk. This in itself was odd; she’d always had a distant, even frosty relationship with her father-in-law. But since she’d got it into her head to write a book about his life story, the two were inseparable. This, Eric did not like.

Nor did he like the idea of cremation. “Impossible,” he declared. And Tovyah, slinking down several steps to hear better, understood why. The law commands that the dead must be buried. Anything else is a desecration.

“Yes,” Tovyah said now to Elsie, speaking very seriously. “He doesn’t want to be buried under the ground.”

Elsie smiled. “Who does?”

Tovyah still had the empty glass with him when he left his sister’s room. As it turned out, the request for water was the last thing he heard his grandfather say. When he returned to the attic, he found the old man sleeping with his mouth open, teeth bared, and a little drool running down his chin. Snoring uncomfortably, Zeide fought to dislodge something at the back of his throat, while Tovyah crept from the room.

All the next day, nothing happened—no one died. Elsie was noticeably quiet, keeping her door closed throughout the afternoon. At dinner, she bolted her pasta and asked to be excused from the table before either of her siblings had finished. Alone once more, she worked on a long poem for her grandfather. When she read it aloud to the family the following morning, Tovyah thought it was beautiful. Though some passages were hard to understand, the final image imprinted itself with total clarity: a silhouette receding into a dark tunnel, following in the path of a smaller, murkier shape, a boy’s shadow. Elsie wanted to chase the figure of her grandfather before he disappeared, but she had to let him go. If she chased him, she was afraid of the face that might turn to meet her.

“I don’t like it,” Hannah said. She did not believe in fulsome praise. She believed, without having been told, that her children appreciated her honesty. She believed everyone appreciated her honesty.

“I think it’s wonderful,” said Eric, whose preference for his daughter above his other two children was an open secret.

“Tunnel as symbol for death? It’s a whopping cliché.”

“She’s thirteen! To you it’s a cliché, to her it’s a discovery.”

Elsie bristled. “I’m not a child, Dad.”

“Ignore your mother. It’s a lovely metaphor. A variation on an ancient trope.”

“But it’s not a metaphor,” Elsie said. “It’s a description. A metaphor is something that isn’t really happening.”

That evening, when Tovyah’s mother pushed open his bedroom door and finally delivered the news, he had an urge to go upstairs and look. He had seen a dead mouse, flattened against the curb with blood pooling round its head, but he’d never seen a dead person. Not even in pictures. “It’s ok if you want to cry,” Hannah said. She was not crying. She kissed her youngest on the top of his head and left the room. Gideon was out with friends at the time, officially playing five-a-side, unofficially doing who knows what. The report of Zeide’s death filled Tovyah with a coiled unease. Once, playing a game with Elsie in which they’d imagined themselves arctic explorers, he’d been trapped in his mother’s wardrobe. When his sister left the room tittering, he couldn’t find the handle to let himself out. Panic-stricken, he threw his shoulder against the door, and cried for help. Nobody came. Again he cried out but still nobody came. Soon his shoulder hurt and his mind spun. He groped among the coats and dresses, felt something rough against his face. When he stopped crying and listened, he couldn’t hear a sound. A frightening realisation swept through him: if, for a joke, Elsie had gone out, there was no one in the house. Only Zeide, cocooned in his attic. Eventually, he found the interior handle, just within reach. But if he hadn’t? How long would he have spent enclosed in that dark space, bellowing sporadically? Impossible to say. There would have been no way to measure the passing seconds. Just indivisible darkness, folds and folds of limp cloth.

No wonder his grandfather didn’t want to be interred: he didn’t want to be packed into a small box for eternity, shouting at darkness, slack linen against his face.

Although Yosef Rosenthal kept little company in his final years, an impressive crowd met the coffin at the burial ground. All of Eric and Hannah’s friends, the adults who populated Tovyah’s universe outside of school, showed up. Up front was Sam Morris, his black yarmulke an island on the sea of his bald head, his eyes like a pigeon’s, broadcasting disbelief. Behind him walked Ida from the kosher butchers, who sometimes made jokes Tovyah didn’t get and that turned his face red. Then came Bryn Cohen and his second wife, Clare; the Konigsbergs and all their stocky children; Freddy Marx with the knot of his tie loose as a schoolboy’s; Jane and Jonathan Strasfogel, swapping pleasantries with Benny Michaelson, whose father had married out, bestowing on him the humiliation of converting. (Rumours, there were, of adult circumcision.) As they approached the newly dug hole in the ground, Gideon kicked Tovyah’s ankle and directed his attention to Ruth and Rebecca Solomon, sometime baby-sitters, and heroines of much nocturnal speculation. They were trailed by unmarried Lotte (let us not forget her in our prayers); all three Shaw sisters; Yehuda with his repulsive face-mole; and enormous Harry Nathan arm-in-arm with slim, six-footed Vera, a couple once described by Hannah as the dish who ran away with the spoon. There were as many faces again that Tovyah didn’t recognise. All black-garbed, solemn-eyed, and silent, as if to bid goodbye to a departing era. Was Zeide so important?

Rabbi Grossman, clutching his script in his tiny hands, took a few goes to unclog his throat. In an interval between Hebrew incantations, he praised (in English) Yosef Rosenthal’s heroism as a witness and a survivor, a man who refused to give up no matter what, as evidenced by a sight no less miraculous than that of his adult son, and his three beautiful grandchildren. By law of averages, none of them had any right to be born. And yet despite tremendous forces of antagonism, here they were today, healthy, united, and loving.

At this moment, Eric placed a hand on each of his son’s shoulders, and Tovyah had the strange sense that without their support, Eric would fall down on the spot. He had never seen his father cry before. Looking up at that familiar face, transformed by grief, Tovyah flushed with guilt; he’d thought only Elsie was upset. Soon, he too was crying.

Like any verbal will whose instructions confound its listeners, Yosef’s final wishes were simply ignored. Following centuries of custom, Eric decreed that his father would be wrapped in his tallit and buried in East Ham Cemetery next to Janet of beloved memory. Only Elsie objected. As the body was lowered, she stood back, clicking her tongue. And when her mother handed her a small round stone to place on the grave, she stowed it away in her pocket. “This is all wrong,” she said. Elsie was drawing attention to herself now, but Hannah let it go. “Funerals do funny things to people,” Eric said later.

Afterwards, the family huddled in the attic and sat shiva along with various honoured guests invited to complete the minyan. There was much weeping and rocking back and forth. All the mirrors in the house were covered with black cloth, and for seven days the portals to those illusory depths were closed.

That was in summer, the last of the century. And so, Yosef Rosenthal, child of the twenties, never made it to the new millennium. He was a Jew born into Warsaw’s lower middle class, whose first home was long ago obliterated by ancient hatreds and modern politics well beyond the reach of his imagination. As the course of his life bundled him across first countries then eras, his memories of childhood came to seem no more than a series of pleasant tales, an evening’s diversion. Meanwhile, the surviving world made less sense with each passing year, until, by the end, coughing away his last hours in that dusty attic, he hardly believed in it at all.