Chapter One

The boy arrived nameless and barefoot. They reckoned he could get by without shoes a while longer, until a suitable pair could be stolen. But names, they had plenty of those, more names than people to wear them. So they began calling him Shlomo, or Solomon, because once there had been a Shlomo whom everybody had liked-when he got killed in an ambush, they blew up a supply train in his honor-and because the boy's lidless, owl-like stare gave him a look of preternatural wisdom. Nobody cared that he must have been called something else. The past meant nothing to these hungry, half-crazed heroes, and few of them expected to know a future. They were like birds shot in flight who would not survive the long, thrilling plummet to the ground.

Meanwhile there was a world to love: mountain lakes that shone black and bottomless like the eyes of a god; sunlight as hard as ice shards; slow-motion waterfalls; a tang of smoke in the upper air; pointed trees and naked, bronze-toned rock; and beyond, unrolling in yellow and green, the vast plain of Northern Europe, like a primed canvas on which generals painted their wars.

Nobody knew where the boy had come from, and he seemed unable to tell them. Certainly he had traveled far because his feet were bleeding from the journey. He was undersized, like everyone who had grown up in the ghettos and the camps, and might have been any age from eight to twenty. He stared at them and at the black spruces and the pitiless blue sky. His eyes drank the world in and gave nothing back. For all you could tell, he was blind. For all you could tell, he was gripped by visions, searing glimpses of eternity