Raizel and the twilight world

In the whirling hall, Margolin sees a woman who beckons to him. She looks neither young nor old, with long braids wound round her head in the old Sencimin style, and eyes he has loved all his life. She says she is from Sencimin, and that her father was Melekh the watchmaker. 'If I'm not out of my mind, then I'm seeing things,' he says. 'Raizel is dead.' 'I'm Raizel.'

Overjoyed, he takes her up to the empty chapel, where the wedding canopy stands ready. 'We could have stood there,' he says. He realises that by Jewish law he is not married, since he and Gretl had only a civil ceremony. He could marry Raizel right now; he only needs a penny. But his wallet is gone. 'But how am I going to get home?' 'Why go home?' she asks.

Then doubts come. She looks too young to be Raizel. He remembers the accident on Eastern Parkway: the man on the stretcher looked strangely familiar. He examines himself like a patient, and finds no pulse, no breathing; the weight and the aches of his body seem to be gone. Can one die without knowing it?

He thinks of an old belief: a soul 'hovering in the World of Twilight', detached from the body, clinging to the illusions of the past. He tells himself it is superstition, or drunkenness, or a hallucination. Yet she is still there. 'What's the difference? As long as we're together.' 'I've been waiting for that all these years,' she says.

The chapel fills; the music plays softly; the bride's father leads his daughter down the aisle. The story never says what is real. Was Raizel an illusion? Was Margolin the victim of the accident, his spirit drifting in the twilight world? This mixing of dream and reality is the story's power.