Mashiach — the anointed one — he must be here, somewhere, born and walking the earth, waiting to pick up all the fragments of their nation, to bring peace

Leonora turns on her heel, quietly climbs the stairs, and leaves the courtyard. As she strides past, she startles a kitten, who runs — a black and yellow streak. A fly buzzes around her eyes and she swats it away, but even as she does so, it grows blurred and all she can see is a spot of darkness in a sea of late afternoon sunshine, darkness moving to the right and to the left, here, there, and as much as she waves it away, she cannot free herself.

Home. She needs home. She needs Ines. She unwraps the shawl from around her shoulders — she is hot, intolerably hot — and holds it in both hands as an offering. Wooden soles beating on the stone flagstones, she follows the narrow passageways, through the darkness of the late afternoon shadow, and past the warm, apricot sunlight, to home, home.

When she gets there, she retreats to her room and pours herself a glass of wine. She drinks it slowly, willing her hands to stop trembling.

A chevrat teshuvah. This is where Yishai goes every afternoon. She has heard of them, of course. But in her mind, she thought of them as something akin to the flagellants, that obscure Christian sect, who gather in town squares and give each other lashes and wear horsehair vests under their linen shirts, so that they are always in a state of suffering.

As a child, she and her friends would watch them, fascinated, even when the mothers and fathers who were passing through would scold them: Go home, go home, this is no place for a good Jewish child.

She thinks of Yishai’s face, not as earnest as Amram’s, but with an underlying seriousness, a graveness to his demeanor. She hopes that they do not hurt each other or themselves, in their quest for penance.

She puts down the goblet and paces her bedroom. Thoughts tumble about her like rocks falling from a mountainside.