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flee her homeland after her apothecary shop was set upon by enraged zealots who were convinced that she was guilty of the most hateful and egregious crime of witchcraft.
    So she knew what it was like to be the target of mass hysteria. It was one of the things we had in common.
    “What is it?” she said, looking up at me, the light catching the green speckles in her eyes.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Something you feel about this situation,” she said. “Something instinctive. Tell me what it is,” she prompted me.
    I don’t know how she picked up on it, but something had been bothering me from the moment we set foot in the house.
    “You said his name was Schildsberg?”
    “That’s what the maid told me. Why?”
    “It’s just—that’s not a typical Jewish name,” I said.
    “You’re telling me you think he’s not a Jew? Just from his name?”
    “There are other signs as well, but there’s only one way to find out,” I said, crossing over to the bed. I hesitated out of respect for the dead, and a primordial fear of the particularly harsh consequences of violating a prohibition dating back to the days of Noah.
    So I asked the dead man’s spirit to forgive me, then pulled back the sheets and confirmed my suspicions.
    “He’s not Jewish.”
    “Are you serious?”
    “This man is not Jewish.”
    “And here I was thinking all men were the same down there.”
    “He does not bear the mark of the covenant,” I said, covering up the body as best I could. “And even if he did, as Rabbi Yohanan said to Resh Lakish, ‘not all fingers are alike.’ ”
    “And where is that written?”
    “Babylonian Talmud, tractate Niddah, folio 66a.” She always wanted to know the exact sources of my Jewish wisdom.
    “You’re telling me I don’t know about the male member, Rabbi Benyamin?”
    “You don’t have to call me that when we’re—”
    “I know, I know. When we’re not in public.”
    Our eyes fell upon the dead man, and I tried to imagine the scene that had unfolded here during the nighttime hours—the clandestine visitor, the candlelight dinner, the anticipation of carnal pleasures enhanced by herbal concoctions, followed by a dreadful moment of realization that something was very wrong.
    Wasn’t ordinary coupling stimulating enough?
    Kassy broke the silence: “I’ve heard of Jews occasionally trying to pass as Christians when they need to flee in times of danger, but why on earth would a Christian pretend to be a Jew? Unless he’s hiding from some trouble with the authorities.”
    “There are better ways to hide from trouble with the authorities than posing as a Jew, I can assure you.”
    My eyes were drawn once more to the glittering trail of spittle running down the man’s chin. Some of the particles looked positively crystalline.
    And that second cup of wine.
    I imagined the effects of the wine rippling out, my thoughts skipping across the surface of the rich red liquid like a well-thrown pebble dancing across the waves, divorcing objects from their names and rearranging the frozen tableau before me in the manner taught to us by the eminent mystical scholar Abulafia three centuries ago, before the great expulsion from Spain.
    It was my strongest desire to share what I knew, to explore all those centuries of wisdom with this newcomer to our ways, this Protestant believer who was so full of questions, this wise woman with whom I shared the road of exile, this newcomer to Poznan just like me.
    All this in search of a solution to the riddle, Who was this man, and what had he done that made pretending to be a Jew seem like the safe course of action?
    “There are many outsiders,” I began, “who believe that the Jews possess otherworldly knowledge that can be redirected toward profitable enterprises. Perhaps they have heard of our skills at manipulating the letters of the Torah in order to find new meanings hidden in the holy text, and they imagine that we are just as skilled at manipulating the four