ABSTRACT
It was an utterly dreadful winter, with the frosty air raw and suffocating, the clouds an especially dirty quilt that had slipped down on the hunched shoulders of a sunken sky. Great-grandfather Aaron had been bedridden since the previous autumn and was slowly dying on the narrow carpet-covered couch, looking around affectionately with sunken gray-yellow eyes and never unstrapping the phylactery with its scriptural texts from his left arm. With his right hand he held to his stomach a flat electric bed warmer enveloped in worn gray serge, the acme of technological progress at the turn of the century, which his son Alexander had brought from Vienna just before the Great War, when he had come back home as a young professor of medicine after eight years of studying abroad.
