“Who is asking?”

      “No one’s ever questioned that. I’m the one who grills the subjects,” Wendy responded.

      “So we’re reversing it now,” Jacob Lamdan added, smiling. “How did you get to your dissertation topic?”

      Wendy looked at him and sighed gently, trying to suppress the queasiness she’d been feeling since the plane’s takeoff in New York, still with her in the air, now somewhere over Europe. “I almost didn’t. I’m studying newly religious American Jews in Jerusalem, to see how they discuss changes they’ve made in their lives. What they feel they’ve gained, what lost, what is constant, what radically new in their religious incarnation. I can’t believe I’m finally on this plane; I only got a dissertation Fulbright late last spring, after being rejected from everything else. So,” she said pausing, both hesitant to declare her pride in an as-yet-unwritten project and proud of her achievement thus far, “I guess it was basherte.” Her use of the Yiddish word was forced for a third-generation American in her twenties; it was solely to impress Lamdan, a professor of Talmud at Princeton, where she was a graduate student in Religious Studies.

      He gazed at her, sitting next to him, closer together than they would be anywhere other than the cramped seats of an international plane flight. “I have a hard time with this thing fate. If everything is so basherte, why am I here, when so many others who deserve to be alive much more, are not? I can’t accept that all is foreseen. Humans have free will. Sometimes, we make terrible mistakes.”

      Wendy’s left arm was on the armrest of the seat to his right. She could see the indelible mark of the six blue digits on his left arm even in the hazy dimness of this not-yet-morning hour. “But you’re religious? Do you really mean there’s no basherte, no . . . greater power . . . behind it all?”

      He was surprised by her question; students weren’t usually bold enough to challenge him. Most held him in awe and approached him with reverence, distance. Lamdan never had Wendy in class; even though she was a student in his department, she didn’t have the Hebrew background to take his type of courses. Had they been somewhere else, he would probably never have thought to answer her seriously.

      “No simple answers, young lady.”

      She decided, glancing sideways at him, not to let go of the matter. “The people I’m studying don’t seem to think so. The prevailing view is that once you make a leap of faith, it’s all easy.”

      “Halivei, would it were so. Listen, I’ll tell you a story.”

      Wendy liked the soothing cadences of his voice, the soft accent his first languages, Yiddish and Hungarian, lent to his English. His voice and tone were melodic, as though he would begin to chant a sacred text at any moment. She had never sat so close to a professor; their knees were aligned, virtually touching. His frail skinny body, forty or fifty years older than hers, wasn’t attractive. His stomach was practically concave, his skin pale and his clear blue eyes as sharp as the laser of his intellect, able to bore into unprepared students and terrify them, she had heard from departmental chatter. His soft smile and the