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By Root 1108 0

my mother and I, walking arm in arm past the building called Talitha Kumi on our way to Terra Sancta Building to take Father away from his work. The time was one-thirty p.m. A cold wind mixed with sharp drops of rain was blowing from the west. It was strong enough to make passersby close their umbrellas so they would not blow inside out. We did not even attempt to open ours. Arm in arm, Mother and I walked in the rain, past Talitha Kumi and the Frumin Building, which was the temporary home of the Knesset, and then we passed the Hamaalot Building. It was at the beginning of the first week of January 1952. Five or four days before her death.

And as the rain grew heavier, Mother said, with an amused tone to her voice:

"Shall we go to a café for a bit? Our Father won't run away."

We sat for half an hour or so in a German Jewish café at the entrance to Rehavia, in JNF Street, opposite the Jewish Agency Building, where the prime minister's office was also located at the time. Till the rain stopped. Meanwhile, Mother took a little powder compact and a comb from her handbag and repaired the damage to her hair and face. I felt a mixture of emotions: pride at her looks, joy that she was better, responsibility to guard and protect her from some shadow whose existence I could only guess at. In fact I did not guess, I only half sensed a slight strange uneasiness in my skin. The way a child sometimes grasps without really grasping things that are beyond his understanding, senses them and is alarmed without knowing why:

"Are you all right, Mother?"

She ordered a strong black coffee for herself and for me a milky coffee, even though I was never allowed coffee-is-not-for-children, and a chocolate ice cream, even though we all knew perfectly well that ice cream gives you a sore throat, especially on a cold winter day. And before lunch to boot. My sense of responsibility forced me to eat only two or three spoonfuls and to ask my mother if she didn't feel cold sitting here. If she didn't feel tired. Or dizzy. After all she'd only just recovered from an illness. And be careful, Mummy, when you go to the toilet, it's dark and there are two steps. Pride, earnestness, and apprehension filled my heart. As though as long as the two of us were sitting here in Café Rosh-Rehavia, her role was to be a helpless girl who needed a generous friend, and I was her cavalier. Or perhaps her father:

"Are you all right, Mother?"

When we got to Terra Sancta Building, where several departments of the Hebrew University were relocated after the road to the campus on Mount Scopus was blocked in the War of Independence, we asked for the newspaper department and went up the stairs to the second floor. (It was on a winter's day like this that Hannah in My Michael slipped on these very stairs, and might have twisted her ankle, and the student Michael Gonen caught her by the elbow and said he liked the word "ankle." Mother and I may well have walked past Michael and Hannah without noticing them. Thirteen years separated the winter's day when I was in Terra Sancta Building with my mother from the winter's day when I began to write My Michael.)

When we entered the newspaper department, we saw facing us the director, gentle, kindly Dr. Pfeffermann, who looked up from the pile of papers on his desk, smiled, and beckoned us with both his hands to come in. We saw Father too, from behind. For a long moment we did not recognize him, because he was wearing a gray librarian's coat to protect his clothes from the dust. He was standing on a small stepladder, with his back to us and all his attention concentrated on the big box files he was taking down from a high shelf, leafing through and returning to the shelf, before taking down another and another file, because apparently he could not find what he was looking for.

All this time, kind Dr. Pfeffermann did not make a sound, but sat comfortably in the chair behind his big desk, his smile growing broader and broader in an amused sort of way, and two or three other people who worked in the department stopped working