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By Root 981 0

in what was being said, or observe with a slight inclination of the head—at such moments her voice would take on a dark, winelike quality—that here her ear seemed to catch an almost Scandinavian note in the work of a writer who was present, an echo of Hamsun or Strindberg, or even of the mystical writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg. Thereupon my mother would resume her previous silence and alert attentiveness, like a finely tuned instrument, while they enchantedly lavished on her whatever they did or did not have on their minds as they competed for her attention.

Years later, when I happened to bump into one or two of them, they informed me that my mother had been a very charming woman and a truly inspired reader, the sort of reader every writer dreamed of when hard at work in the solitude of his study. What a pity she left no writings of her own: it was possible that her premature death had deprived us of a highly talented writer, at a time when women writing in Hebrew could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

If these notables met my father at the library or in the street, they would chat with him briefly about Education Minister Dinur's letter to the heads of the university, or Zalman Shneour's attempt to become Walt Whitman in his old age, or who would get Professor Klausner's chair when he retired, and then they would pat him on the back and say, with a gleam in their eyes and a beaming expression, please greet your lady wife warmly from me, what a truly wonderful woman, such a cultivated, discerning woman! So artistic!

As they patted him affectionately on the shoulder, in their heart of hearts they may have envied him his wife and wondered what she had seen in him, that pedant, even if he was extraordinarily knowledgeable, industrious, and even, relatively speaking, a not insignificant scholar, but, between ourselves, a rather scholastic, totally uncreative person.

I had a specific role in these conversations at the café. First of all I had to give polite, intelligent answers, just like a grown-up, to such difficult questions as how old I was, what class I was in at school, did I collect stamps or have a scrapbook, what did they teach us these days in geography, what did they teach us in Hebrew, was I a good boy, what had I read by Dov Kimche (or Yaari, or Kadari, or Even-Zahav, or Shenhar), did I like all my teachers? And occasionally: had I started to take an interest in young ladies yet? And what would I be when I grew up—a professor too? Or a pioneer? Or a field marshal in the armies of Israel? (I came to the conclusion at that time that writers were phony and even somewhat ridiculous.)

Secondly, my task was not to get in the way.

I had to be nonexistent, invisible.

Their café talk lasted at least seventy hours at a time, and for the whole of this eternity I had to embody an even more silent presence than the softly humming fan on the ceiling.

The penalty for breach of trust in the presence of strangers might be complete house arrest, from the moment I got home from school, every day for a fortnight, or the loss of the privilege of playing with friends, or cancellation of the right to read in bed for the next twenty days.

The big prize for a hundred hours of solitude was an ice cream. Or even corn on the cob.

I was hardly ever allowed ice cream because it was bad for the throat and gave one a chill. As for corn on the cob, that was sold on street corners from a container of boiling water set on top of a Primus stove, the hot, fragrant corn on the cob that the unshaven man wrapped in a green leaf for you and sprinkled with cooking salt. I was hardly ever allowed it because the unshaven man looked distinctly unwashed, and his water was probably teeming with germs. "But if Your Highness behaves impeccably at Café Atara today, you will be allowed a free choice on our way home: ice cream or corn on the cob, whichever you prefer."

So it was in cafés, against a background of endless conversations between my parents and their friends about politics, history, philosophy, and literature, about power struggles