But that period of his schooling had come to a close seventy years ago. Now there remained but one last thing to learn of death, and that lesson would come soon enough. Weisen neither feared death—he had seen it in all its permutations so that he understood there was a kind of peace in it—nor welcomed it—he had fought too hard to live during his years in hell to give into it simply because he was a tired old man. “What are you thinking about, Zaydeh?” asked Leah, Weisen’s granddaughter, noticing the sour expression on his face. “Dying.” “Oy, not this again.” “One day, Totty, the rain will come. It will lift me up like an oil spot off the gutter and wash me into the sewer. One day I will be here, then I will be gone. No one should mourn an oil spot and that is all we are … less, maybe.” “Zaydeh, please stop it. I hate it when you get this way,” she said, as she drove out of Kennedy airport and onto the Van Wyck Expressway. “You hate that I talk the truth?”
