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family. Never in step, always out on your own. In everything, from what I hear, but especially here in our sacred place. Why, Raoul, why?”
    Raoul smoked and eyed the leather chairs, the large crucifix, the framed documents of divinity degrees, a portrait of Luther, alongside one of Marcus Wallenberg, Bishop of Linköping, 1819, and was comforted by these hard inanimate objects. “I want to thank you, and my cousins, for their concern over my spiritual welfare, Pastor. I appreciate it.”
    The pastor pulled up into a chair opposite his pupil. “Do you not believe yourself a sinner, Raoul?” He paused. “All of us?”
    “Tell me, Johann, are the Jews sinners too? And are they being punished by our Christ for not being believers yet? Is that why they are being persecuted and sent off to be murdered in Nazi camps now?”
    The pastor swallowed visibly. “Are you being intentionally perverse?”
    “No, not at all, sir.”
    “You are confusing current political struggles with essential spiritual truths and facts. Is this intentional?”
    “I am simply trying to apply principles to realities and see what the outcome is, Pastor.”
    The pastor reached out for Raoul’s hand, but Raoul refrained, and withdrew his hand, out of reach.
    “What happens now, here, on this globe, is less important than what occurs afterward, to our eternal souls.”
    “Perhaps. But for now, before eternity, I have immediate situations to take into account.”
    The pastor shook his head. “I will only repeat, from 2 Corinthians 5:7, ‘We walk by faith, not by sight.’ And from Ephesians 2:8, ‘By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God.’”
    Raoul had prepared, just in case, and chose a favorite essayist instead of Spinoza for his retort: “Let me quote to you from one of my bibles: ‘How many things that were articles of faith yesterday are fables today.’” He stood up and put out his hand, and the pastor hesitated, then shook his hand. “Montaigne’s Essays. ”
    Dryly, the pastor said, “I wish you luck, Raoul. And God’s blessing.”
    Raoul nodded, released the grip, and walked out of the office and back through the church. What had Johann meant, “from what I hear?”

    Professor Gellerman sat and considered the scene. Had he put Raoul too much in charge? Was he too strong there at the end? … Raoul’s rebelliousness against authority and against the church—that was fitting, in keeping. And maybe too he resented his cousins putting up the pastor to invite him over and gossiping about him? (“from what I hear …”) … What about the pastor? Would—or should—he have been more openly anti-Semitic? Quite possibly. But perhaps, by 1944, something of a guilty conscience in a Christian minister was certainly realistic … So what Manny had presented in the end was a Raoul of his own personal faith, neither religious nor patriotic, but human and humanistic, standing for justice and for fairness. That indeed sounded a lot like the Raoul that Manny had learned about and come to believe in. Not a well-costumed saint, but a very good man and a brave soul … Not the Church, not the State, not the Family, with all of their bullying chauvinism and lip-service pieties, would deter him from following his high principles. Nor would the Swedes with their self-interested neutrality, or the Hungarians and Nazis with their brutality, deter him. Raoul was a man on a mission, a life mission, it may be said, shaped early on by his pragmatic and open-minded grandfather, and sustained by his own firm independence …
    He went for a long walk, strolling briskly around the idyllic campus of huge trees, golf course, and oval pond, and onto the paths snaking around the redbrick buildings, and down along the boathouse and Dartmouth Canoe Club set alongside the Connecticut River; all the while, in the soft spring air, he passed joggers and walkers and bicyclists. So orderly, so bucolic, this site. Could