Dybbuks! He had not thought of it.

He was a man of reason, of course he had not thought of such a thing. And yet.

A dybbuk, cunning and agile as a snake, could take over a weak-minded female. In the Munich zoo he’d seen an extraordinary eight-foot snake, a cobra, so amazingly supple, moving in what appeared to be a continuous stream, like water; the snake “running” on its numerous ribs, inside its scaly, glittering, rather beautiful skin. His eyes rolled in his head, almost he felt faint, imagining how the snake-dybbuk would enter the female.

Up between the legs, and inside.

For he could not trust either of them: wife, daughter.

As a man of reason he did not want to believe in dybbuks and yet perhaps that was the explanation. Dybbuks had come alive, out of the primeval mud of Europe. And here in Milburn. Prowling the cemetery, and the countryside beyond. Dybbuks rising like mist out of the tall damp grasses that shivered in the wind. Snakeroot, cattails. Dybbuks blown by the wind against the loose-fitting windows of the old stone house, scratching their claws against the glass, desperate to gain entry. And dybbuks seeking entry into human bodies in which the souls are loose-fitting, primitive.

Anna. His wife of twenty-three years. Could he trust Anna, in her femaleness?

Like her body, Anna’s mind had softened with time. She had never fully recovered from the third pregnancy, the anguish of that third birth. In fact she had never fully recovered from their panicked flight from Germany.

She blamed him, he felt. That he was her husband and a man, and yet not a man to protect her and their children.

Yet in the night, another Anna came alive. In her sleep, in her lustful dreams. Ah, he knew! He heard her groaning, breathing rapidly. He felt her flesh-tremors. Their bed reeked with her sweat, her female secretions. By day she turned from him, averting her eyes. As he averted his eyes from her nakedness. She had never loved him, he supposed. For hers had been a girl’s soul, shallow and easily swayed by emotion. In their circle of young people in Munich, Anna had laughed and flirted with many young men; you could see how they were attracted to her, and she had basked in their attention. Now he could acknowledge, Jacob Schwart had been but one of these. Perhaps she had loved another, who had not loved her. And there came Jacob Schwart, blinded by love. Begging her to marry him. On their wedding night he had not known to ask himself Is my bride a virgin? Is hers a virgin-love? The act of love had been overwhelming to Jacob, explosive, annihilating. He’d had so little experience. He had had no judgment, and would have none for years.

It was on the ocean crossing that the dybbuk-Anna had first emerged. She’d been delirious, muttering and raving and striking at him with her fists. Her eyes held no love for him, nor even recognition. Demon eyes, tawny-glowing eyes! The coarsest German profanities and obscenities had leapt from Anna’s lips, not those of an innocent young wife and mother but the words of a demon, a dybbuk.

That day he’d found Anna in the shed. Hiding there, with the little one wrapped in a dirty shawl. Would you like me to strangle her? Had she been serious, or taunting him?-he had not known.

Now, he could not trust Anna to prepare their meals correctly. It was her practice to boil their well water, for very likely the well water was contaminated, and yet he knew, she was careless and indifferent. And so they were being poisoned, by degrees. And he could not trust her with other men. Any man who saw Anna saw at once her femaleness, as evident as nakedness. For there was something slatternly and erotic in Anna’s soft, raddled body and slack girl’s face; her moist, brainless gaze that excited masculine desire, even as it revulsed.

The sheriff’s deputies, for instance. Since Herschel’s disappearance they came by the house from time to time, to make inquiries. Jacob wasn’t always home when they came, Anna had to answer the door and speak to them. Jacob was coming to suspect, these inquiries might be mere pretense.

Often there were men wandering in the cemetery, amid the graves. Seemingly visiting the graves. Mourners. Or assuming that role.

Anna Schwart had become devious, defiant. He knew she’d disobeyed him by daring to turn on his radio, more than once. He had never caught her, for she was too clever; yet he knew. Now the radio tubes were burnt out and would not be replaced, so no one could listen to the damned radio. There was that satisfaction, at least.

(Jacob had loosened the radio tubes himself. To thwart Anna. Then he’d forgotten he had loosened them. When he switched on the radio now, there was silence.)

And there was Rebecca, his daughter.

Her lanky body was filling out, taking on the contours of the female. Through a part-closed door he’d glimpsed her, washing her upper body with an expression of frowning concentration. The shock of the girl’s small, startlingly white breasts, the nipples small as grape seeds. Her underarms that were sprouting fine dark hairs, and her legs…He had known that he could no longer trust her, when she’d refused to acknowledge the swastika marks raked in the lane. And years before, when he’d discovered her picture in the Milburn newspaper. Spelling champion! Rebecca Esther Schwart! The first he’d heard of such a thing. She had kept it secret from him, and from Anna.

The girl would grow up swiftly, he knew. Once she’d begun school she had begun to turn into one of those others. He had seen her with the slatternly Greb girl. She would grow up, she would leave him. A man must surrender his daughter to another man unless he claims her for his own, which is forbidden.

“And so I must harden my heart against them both.”

From the proprietor of the Milburn Feed Store he would acquire secondhand a Remington twelve-gauge double-barrel shotgun, a bargain at seventy-five dollars.

Five dollars more for a near-full box of fifty shells.

For hunting, Mr. Schwart?

For protection of my property.

Pheasant season isn’t till fall. Second week of October.

Protection of my home. My family.

It’s got a kick, a twelve-gauge.

My wife, my daughter. We are alone out there. The sheriff will not protect us. We are alone in the country. We are U.S. citizens.

A good gun for protection if you know how to use it. Remember it has a kick, Mr. Schwart.

A kick?

In the shoulder. If you grip the stock too loosely when you pull the trigger. If you are not practiced. A kick like a mule.

Jacob Schwart laughed heartily, baring nicotine-stained teeth in a happy smile. Kick like a mule, eh? Well! I am a mule.

“Fools! There was no one.”

Sometime in the slow dripping spring of 1949 the realization came to him. His deepest contempt wasn’t for the ignorant peasants who surrounded him but for the elderly Jews of his long-ago youth in skullcaps and prayer shawls muttering to their ridiculous god.

An extinct volcano god Yehovah.

In the night such truths came to him. He sat in the kitchen or in the doorway of the house, drinking. Exclusively now he drank hard cider from the mill down the road, that was cheap, and potent. The shotgun close by. In case of prowlers, vandals. He had no fear of the dead. A dybbuk is not dead. A dybbuk is fierce with life, insatiable. In this place where the tide of history had washed him ashore and abandoned him like trash. Yet his deepest contempt was for the bearded black-clad troll-elders of his long-ago boyhood in Munich. Cruelly he laughed seeing the sick terror in their eyes as at last they understood.

“No one, you see? God is no one, and nowhere.”