Packed in airtight against the bite of the steely out-of-doors, most of the village of Vodna—­except the children and the half-witted Shimsha, the ganef—­huddled under its none-too-plentiful coverings that night and prayed and trembled.

At five o’clock that red dawn, almost as if a bayonet had crashed into her dream, Sara, her face smeared with pallor, awoke to the smell of her own hair singeing.  A bayonet had crashed, but through the door, terribly!

The rest is an anguished war frieze of fleeing figures; of running hither and thither in the wildness of fear; of mothers running with babes at breasts; of men, their twisted faces steaming sweat, locked in the Laocooen embrace of death.  Banners of flame.  The exultant belch of iridescent smoke.  Cries the shape of steel rapiers.  A mouth torn back to an ear.  Prayers being moaned.  The sticky stench of coagulating blood.  Pillage.  Outrage.  Old men dragging household chattels.  Figures crumpling up in the outlandish attitudes of death.  The enormous braying of frightened cattle.  A spurred heel over a face in that horrible moment when nothing can stay its descent.  The shriek of a round-bosomed girl to the smear of wet lips across hers.  The superb daring of her lover to kill her.  A babe in arms.  Two.  The black billowing of fireless smoke.

A child in the horse trough, knocked there from its mother’s arms by the butt end of a bayonet, its red curls quite sticky in a circle of its little blood.  A half-crazed mother with a singed eyebrow, blatting over it and groveling on her breasts toward the stiffening figure for the warmth they could not give; the father, a black-haired child in his arms, tearing her by force out of the zone of buckshot, plunging back into it himself to cover up decently, with his coat, what the horse trough held.

Dawn.  A huddle of fugitives.  Footsteps of blood across the wide open places of snow.  A mother, whose eyes are terrible with what she has left in the horse trough, fighting to turn back.  A husband who literally carries her, screaming, farther and farther across the cruel open places.  A town.  A ship.  The crucified eyes of the mother always looking back.  Back.

And so it was that Sara and Mosher Turkletaub sailed for America with only one twin—­Nikolai, the black.

* * * * *

The Turkletaubs prospered.  Turkletaub Brothers, Skirts, the year after the war, paying a six-figure excess-profit tax.

Aaron dwelt in a three-story, American-basement house in West 120th Street, near Lenox Avenue, with his son Leo, office manager of the Turkletaub Skirt Company, and who had recently married the eldest daughter of an exceedingly well-to-do Maiden Lane jewelry merchant.