Levi Esser listened to the ever-approaching thump and rumble of the Russian artillery.   Rumor had it that they were only days away.   He lay on his bunk in the darkness surrounded by a cacophony of coughing and retching.   Disease was rampant throughout the camp and ran neck-and-neck with the gas chambers in a race to exterminate the inmates.   Levi thought that as the Russians closed in the Nazis would take to their heels but instead they threw themselves into their gruesome work with even greater energy and efficiency.   With the crematoria no longer able to cope they had taken to burning the bodies in long, open trenches.   Dante would have been hard pressed to describe the hell in which Levi Esser found himself and yet, in spite of all, he clung to the hope that his plan would work.   The book was the key, that wonderful hymn to life he read and re-read long before Hitler had plunged the world into misery and despair.  

Esser passed the time mentally lining up the facts of his own situation with omens and  coincidences in the book. It was an exercise he had undertaken many times. First. He had a son named Rene, Bloom had a son named Rudi and both of them had died.   Second.   Bloom met a young man named Stephen and he met a young man named Shimon.   Third.   Bloom rescued Stephen from the guards in Nighttown and got him safely away.   Yes.   Yes.   Daybreak couldn’t come fast enough for Levi Esser.   As he waited he comforted himself by fingering her gently, tracing her curves and hollows and feeling the smooth texture of her skin.   His violin was both his love and his lifeline because the Nazis seldom included the camp orchestras in their dreaded 'selection' parades.  

Later, as he walked in the purple lush of daybreak, he tested himself to see just how much of the book he could remember.   It too had begun at morning.   In a tower by a snotgreen sea.   He stopped to think.   The sea?   He closed his eyes and remembered walking along a deserted beach where the only sound was the lap and slide of waves as they caressed the shoreline.   That was the time he felt closest to god but now, it felt as if god had abandoned him, that god had abandoned the world.   He walked again and sent his mind back to the book.   

What was next?   Ah, yes!   Bloom cooks breakfast.   A pork kidney, peppered and fried in butter.   A shiver ran from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck, teased his taste buds then slithered down his spine again.   He knew it was wrong to entertain such thoughts never mind to eat the flesh of a pig, but he had, and many times at that!   He stopped and groped inside his jacket for his violin.   Like the woman in the book he was dying for a touch.