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By Root 1013 0

years, his remarriage, his feelings, my feelings, the last days of my mother's life, her death, her absence, these were topics about which we never spoke. We sometimes clashed, with a polite but very tense mutual hostility, about Bialik, Napoleon, and socialism, which had begun to fascinate me and which my father saw as the "red epidemic," and once we had a terrible row about Kafka. Most of the time, though, we behaved like two lodgers sharing a small apartment. The bathroom's free. We need margarine and toilet paper. Don't you think it's getting rather cold: shall I light the heater?

When I started to go away on weekends and during festivals to visit my mother's sisters, Haya and Sonia, in Tel Aviv, or to Grandpa Papa's house in Kiriat Motskin, my father gave me money for the fare and added a few pounds "So you won't have to ask anybody there for money." "And don't forget to tell somebody there that you mustn't eat anything fried." Or "Please remember to ask somebody there if they'd like me to put the things from her drawer in an envelope for the next time you go."

The word "her" covered my mother's memory like a slab of stone with no inscription. The words "anybody there" or "somebody there" signified the breaking of all ties between him and my mother's family, which had never been renewed. They blamed him. His relationships with other women, my mother's sisters in Tel Aviv believed, had cast a cloud over their sister's life. Plus all those nights when he had sat at his desk with his back to her and his mind on his research and his little cards. My father was shocked by this accusation and wounded to the quick. He viewed my trips to Tel Aviv and Haifa more or less the way the Arab states, in that time of boycott and denial, viewed visits to Israel by neutral individuals: we can't stop you going, go where you like, but please don't call that place by its name in our presence, and don't tell us anything about it when you get back. Anything good or bad. And don't tell them about us. We don't want to hear and we don't care to know. And make sure they don't put any unwanted stamps in your passport.

Some three months after my mother's suicide came the day of my bar mitzvah. There was no party. They made do with my being called up to the Torah on Saturday morning at Tachkemoni Synagogue and mumbling my way through the weekly reading. The whole Mussman family came, from Tel Aviv and Kiriat Motskin, but they found their own corner in the synagogue, as far as possible from the Klausners. Not a word was exchanged between the two camps. Zvi and Buma, my aunts' husbands, may have given a little, almost imperceptible nod. And I ran back and forth between the two cantons like a dizzy puppy dog, trying my best to look like a happy little boy, talking endlessly, in imitation of my father.

Only Grandpa Alexander unhesitatingly crossed the iron curtain, kissed my grandmother from Haifa and my mother's two sisters on both cheeks, three times, left right left, in the Russian manner, and pressed me to his side as he exclaimed delightedly: "Nu, what? A charming young man, is he not? A molodyets young man! And very talented, too! Very very talented! Very!"

Some time after my father's remarriage, my schoolwork went downhill so badly that there was a threat of expulsion from school (the year after my mother's death I had been moved from Tachkemoni to Rehavia High School). My father took it as a personal affront, and was outraged; he punished me in various ways. Gradually he came to suspect that this was my form of guerrilla warfare, which would not stop until I had forced him to let me go to the kibbutz. He fought back: every time I entered the kitchen, he would get up and leave without saying a word. But one Friday he went out of his way to accompany me to the old Egged bus station halfway down Jaffa Road. Before I boarded the bus to Tel Aviv, he suddenly said:

"If you wish, please ask them there what they think about this kibbutz idea of yours. Needless to say their opinion is not binding on us and does not interest us that much, but