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By Root 1168 0

room for a few minutes and kindly close the door behind me. I closed the door, but this time I pressed myself against the door because I wanted to hear. They spoke to each other for half an hour in Russian. Then Father asked me to look after my mother for a few minutes, and he went to the pharmacist's and bought some medicine or syrup, and while he was there, he phoned Uncle Tsvi in his office at Tsahalon Hospital in Jaffa and he also phoned Uncle Buma at work at the Zamenhof clinic in Tel Aviv. After these calls Father and Mother agreed that she should go to Tel Aviv that very morning, Thursday, to stay with one of her sisters, to get some rest and a change of air and atmosphere. She could stay as long as she liked, till Sunday or even till Monday morning, because on Monday afternoon Lilia Bar-Samkha had managed to get her an appointment for a test at Hadassah Hospital in Heneviim Street, an appointment that without Aunt Lilenka's good connections we would have had to wait several months for.

And because Mother was feeling weak and complained of dizziness, Father insisted that this time she should not travel to Tel Aviv alone, but that he would go with her and take her all the way to Auntie Haya and Uncle Tsvi's, and he might even stay the night: if he took the first bus back to Jerusalem the next morning, Friday, he could manage to get to work for a few hours at least. He took no notice of Mother's protests, that there was no need for him to travel with her and miss a day's work, she was perfectly capable of taking the bus to Tel Aviv on her own and finding her sister's house. She wouldn't get lost.

But Father would not hear of it. He was gray and stubborn this time, and he absolutely insisted. I promised him that after school I would go straight to Grandma Shlomit and Grandpa Alexander's in Prague Lane, explain what had happened, and stay overnight with them till Father got back. Only don't be a nuisance to Grandma and Grandpa, help them nicely, clear the table after supper, and offer to take the rubbish out. And do all your homework: don't leave any of it for the weekend. He called me a clever son. He may even have called me young man. And from outside we were joined at that moment by the bird Elise, who trilled her morning snatch of Beethoven for us three or four times with clear, limpid joy: "Ti-da-di-da-di..." The bird sang with wonderment, awe, gratitude, exaltation, as though no night had ever ended before, as if this morning was the very first morning in the universe and its light was a wondrous light the like of which had never before burst forth and traversed the wide expanse of darkness.

60

I WAS ABOUT fifteen when I went to Hulda, two and a half years after my mother's death: a paleface among the suntanned, a skinny youth among well-built giants, a tireless chatterbox among the taciturn, a versifier among agricultural laborers. All my new classmates had a healthy mind in a healthy body, only I had a dreamy mind in an almost transparent body. Worse still: I was caught a couple of times sitting in out-of-the-way corners of the kibbutz trying to paint watercolors. Or hiding in the study room behind the newspaper room on the ground floor of Herzl House, scribbling away. A McCarthyite rumor soon went around that I was somehow connected to the Herut party, that I had grown up in a Revisionist family, and I was suspected of having obscure links with the hated demagogue Menachem Begin, the archenemy of the Labor Movement. In short: a twisted upbringing and irreparably screwed-up genes.

The fact that I had come to Hulda because I had rebelled against my father and his family did not help me. I was not given credit for being a renegade from Herut, or for my helpless laughter during Begin's speech at the Edison auditorium: the brave little boy from "The Emperor's New Clothes," of all people, was suspected here in Hulda of being in the pay of the crooked tailors.

In vain did I endeavor to excel in farm work and fail at school. In vain did I grill myself like a steak in my efforts to be as brown as the rest of