Mother and I pass a small storefront whose plate glass window, like a one-way mirror, reflects the two of us matted in pale late-autumn light. Actually, I see only myself because mother is on my far side and we are walking in lockstep, our feet ascending and descending in savage cadence.

Suddenly, mother drops my hand, darts from my side and vanishes inside the shop. I am startled by the abruptness of her disappearance: she, who is so often lost in unspeakable melancholy, is usually so... deliberate.

I peer through the window but I see nothing. I follow her inside, but I am still unable to distinguish objects in the half-light. Soon, however, I make out a treadle sewing machine in the corner, a dressmaker's dummy, a pair of shears atop a cutting table. Next to a metal clothes rack I see my mother. She has swooped up a black taffeta dress with a black and white satin bodice and is holding it in the air.

"I want this," she shouts with uncharacteristic glee. "It's mine."

I am embarrassed because I know it is not hers, and the proprietress, whom I now see out of the corner of my eye, is also disturbed.

"I don't care," my mother says, smoothing the dress against her and crossing one leg in front of her like a fashion model. "See? It suits me." The seamstress glares at my mother. My mother laughs. The seamstress looks over at me and shakes her head.

"This is not like you, mother," I say, wagging my finger at her. "Mothers are not supposed to be glamorous. You are acting like a child."

My mother ignores me and races around the tiny shop holding the dress in the air and shouting, "It's mine, it's mine," meanwhile pursued by the seamstress who tries to corner her.

I call to her, "Stop at once, mother. You are upsetting everyone and you are making a fool of yourself! I have never known you to be so frivolous."

She flashes me a furious look. "What do you know," she says. "'Maybe I have always longed for pretty frocks. Maybe you don't know me at all!"

"Mother, behave yourself," I plead, as she darts behind the cutting table. But either she cannot hear me, or she chooses not to. Suddenly she crouches and pries a small, square panel from the wall near the baseboard, and when the panel comes off, she scuttles into the opening.

"Mother, mother, come out. Please come out," I call to her, but there is no answer and the aperture is too small for me to crawl into.

I am frightened at being abandoned in this dark shop, indeed, at being alone in the world. I do not know how to get home and mother has disappeared, leaving me, a nine-year-old, to fend for myself. I try to imagine how I will find a house to live in, how I will get food and pay the rent, how I will iron my jumpers.

I crouch on the floor with my head in my hands, sobbing softly.

Soon, I feel a hand on my shoulder, and when I look up I see the seamstress with her finger to her lips. I try to make out her features, but she seems amorphous, as if I am seeing her through layers of gauze. She gestures for me to follow her, and we walk, hand in hand, over to the hole through which my mother disappeared. But now I see that it is much larger than I first had thought, in fact, large enough for me to crawl through.

Something about the dim room in which I find myself reminds me of the sepia photographs on my mother's dressing table. The small window, covered wlth crumbling butcher's paper, lets in barely enough light to see by. My grandfather's barber chair is in the middle of the room: in the corner, a narrow wooden cot draped with a ragged blanket: on the floor at the cot's foot, a pallet stuffed with rags. My grandfather sits at a makeshift wooden table sucking tea noisily through a lump of sugar, the glass balanced on a chipped saucer, his pinky finger raised delicately. He is reading the Daily Worker, open on the surface before him. I do not know where either the sugar or the newspaper came from, since supplies are scarce.

The Supply Office does not even bring in medicine or Matzohs anyrnore, only a few parsnips, or potatoes. Sometimes some dark, weevily flour. Jew flour, they call it. My grandfather shakes his head and turns the page.

"Barbarians," he says, as if reading my thoughts.

"Grandpa," I say. "Where is my mother?" But he continues reading as if he has not heard me, his stiff woolen army tunic open at the neck, one putteed leg crossed over his thigh.

I climb up in the barber chair and release the lever, whizzing around and around--something I am usually not allowed to do, but for some reason my grandfather doesn't stop me--and I spin until I become dizzy. When the chair finally comes to a stop I see, standing between my grandfather's legs, a little girl wearing an organdy dress tied with a satin sash. Her shoes are of crushed velvet and her legs are clad in white ribbed-cotton stockings. Her throat is wrapped in a poultice.

"Strawberry cakes," my grandfather intones, pulling her closer. "Fine-tooth combs, hummingbirds' nests with eggs in them, houses with crimson doors, black radishes and marrow, a parrot on a perch, cherries brighter than rubles..." My grandfather strokes the little girl's forehead and her eyelids flutter shut. He unties the poultice from her throat. "Toast with jam," he continues. "White dumplitngs floating in golden broth, pots of geraniums, almond puddings with cream..."

The little girl, lulled by the sing-song, sways against him. Her lips slacken. Then my grandfather reaches down her throat and plucks out her tonsils. "You must be just so," he explains softly.

"But you said it was to be a party," she cries, the snapdragons and larkspur on her dress now spattered with blood.

"You shall see," my grandfather says, patting her hand. "Today is a very special day." He strips the blanket from the cot, bundles his barber's shears and their few belongings into it, and ties the parcel with a strip of cloth. I follow them past numbered doors thick with paint to a rutted passageway crowded with people, some with makeshift rucksacks on their backs, others lugging shabby suitcases. Some of them support old people who are pressing handkerchiefs to their faces. Some are crying. Some sing softly, a low keening sound. A few women carry infants suspended from their necks in slings made of rags. Here and there, some people sink to the floor, overcome with emotion.

The passageway is cylindrical, like a conduit, and we must walk single file. We wade through rubbish. The stench is indescribable--a mix of rotting cabbage, fish, unwashed bodies, excrement.

Hooves clop on cobblestones. A wooden cart drawn by a donkey creaks by, heaped with gold rings and watchfobs and molars. Puffs of vapor spill from the beast's nostrils into the chill air. The little girl shivers and presses herself against my grandfather's tunic.

The driver raises his switch and lashes the donkey's flank, drawing blood. The donkey brays loudly and flings its head back, spraying viscous ropes of saliva onto its haunches and onto the blossoms of the little girl's dress. The little girl trembles and clings to my grandfather's legs.

"Papa," she wails. "I want back!" With that, she wrenches her hand away from my grandfather's and races back into the conduit.

I run after her. "Do you know where my mother is?" I shout to her. She casts a terrified look over her shoulder, turns a corner, and scuttles down a dark passageway shouldered by narrow houses the color of ashes.

I try to catch up to her, but soon I am hopelessly lost in a maze of twisting streets whose arteries keep branching off in a network of diverging and converging paths. In a state of utter despair, I follow an avenue that seems more direct than the others. It runs at a slight incline, but soon it begins to angle sharply upward, becoming so steep that climbing makes my legs ache and I can scarcely catch my breath. My shoes feel filled with lead.

Presently, I hear a faint rustle like leaves on a windy day, or a bird flailing its wings or perhaps molting, and from the corner of my eye I see some movement at the base of the wall. With a flutter of fabric my mother emerges from the cloaca of the wall wearing the black taffeta dress, the black and white satin of the bodice wrapped around her head like a babushka. She looks exactly like a Russian peasant, which, in fact, my mother is.

But wait, the person who emerges looks nothing like my mother but like a small child who comes only to my knees. "Mother," I cry out. "See what you have done to us because of your greed?"

But my mother doesn't answer, does not even blink. Her features remain as bland and expressionless as a doll's, which, indeed, I see she now is--her face covered with smooth shiny vinyl, the blue eyes and curlicued brown lashes artfully painted on the surface, a small indentation in the cheek meant to represent a dimple, the corners of her mouth turned upward in an idiot's grin.

I know, somehow, that if I were to remove her head, I would find a smaller mother inside, and inside that smaller mother an even smaller one, and so on, the smile dwindling, the eyes narrowed, the features growing sharper and more pinched, until I came to the ultimate mother, shrunken, tiny as a date, whom I would have to bear in the palm of my hand everywhere I went for the rest of my life, and who, because of her smallness, could never open to reveal anything.