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Each of us enjoyed his fixed part in this comedy. Father was fond of acting the part of a vengeful deity, all-seeing and punishing wrongdoing, a sort of domestic Jehovah flashing sparks of rage and rumbling terrible thunder, but also compassionate and merciful, long-suffering and abundantly loving.

But occasionally he was overcome with a blind wave of real fury, not just theatrical anger, especially if I did something that might have been dangerous for me, and then, without any foreplay, he would hit me across the face two or three times.

Sometimes, after I had been playing with electricity or climbing onto a high branch, he even ordered me to pull my trousers down and get my bottom ready (he called it "The seat, if you please!"), then he beat me ruthlessly six or seven times with his belt.

But generally Father's anger was expressed not through pogroms but through courtly politeness and icy sarcasm:

"Your Highness has deigned to tread mud from the street all down the corridor again: apparently it is beneath Your Honor's dignity to wipe his feet on the doormat as we poor mortals take the trouble to do on rainy days. On this occasion I fear Your Excellency will have to condescend to wipe away his royal footprints with his own fair hands. And then Your Supreme Highness will kindly submit to being locked in the bathroom for an hour in the dark so as to have an opportunity to reflect on the error of his ways and resolve to make amends for the future."

Mother immediately protested at the severity of the sentence:

"Half an hour will do. And not in the dark. What's the matter with you? You'll be forbidding him to breathe next."

"How very fortunate for His Excellency that he always has such an enthusiastic counsel to leap to his defense."

Mother said:

"If only there was a punishment for having a warped sense of humor—" but she never finished the sentence.

A quarter of an hour later it was time for the final scene. Father himself would come to fetch me from the bathroom. Reaching out to give me a quick, embarrassed hug, he would mutter a sort of apology:

"Of course I realize you didn't leave the mud on purpose, it's just that you're absentminded. But of course you also realize that we only punished you for your own good, so that you don't grow up to be another absentminded professor."

I looked straight into his innocent, sheepish brown eyes and promised him that from now on I would always be careful to wipe my shoes when I came in. Moreover, my fixed part in the drama was to say at this point, with an intelligent, grown-up expression on my face and words borrowed from my father's arsenal, that naturally I understood full well that I was only punished for my own good. My set part even included an address to Mother, in which I begged her not to be so quick to forgive me, because I accepted the consequences of my actions and was perfectly capable of taking the punishment I deserved. Even two hours in the bathroom. Even in the dark. I didn't care.

And I really didn't care, because there was hardly any difference between being locked in the bathroom and my usual solitude, in my room or the yard or the kindergarten: for most of my childhood I was a solitary child, with no brother or sister and with hardly any friends.

A handful of toothpicks, a couple of bars of soap, three toothbrushes and a half-squeezed tube of Shenhav toothpaste, plus a hairbrush, five of Mother's hairpins, Father's toilet bag, the bathroom stool, an aspirin packet, some sticky plasters, and a roll of toilet paper were enough to last me for a whole day of wars, travels, mammoth construction projects, and grand adventures in the course of which I was, by turns, His Highness, His Highness's slave, a hunter, the hunted, the accused, a fortune-teller, a judge, a seafarer, and an engineer digging the Panama and Suez canals through difficult hilly terrain to join up all the seas and lakes in the tiny bathroom and to launch on voyages from