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By Root 1242 0

open all day long. We received a constant flow of neighbors, acquaintances, and relations. Kind neighbors volunteered to make sure there were soft drinks for all the visitors, and coffee, cakes, and tea. From time to time I was invited to their homes for a while, for a hot meal. I politely sipped a spoonful of soup and downed half a rissole, then hurried back to Father. I did not want him to be there alone. Not that he was alone. From morning until ten or ten-thirty in the evening our apartment was packed with comforters. The neighbors rustled up some chairs and arranged them in a circle around the walls of the book room. Strange coats were piled on my parents' bed all day long.

Grandpa and Grandma were banished to the other room for most of the day, at Father's request, because he found their presence too much. Grandpa Alexander would suddenly burst into noisy Russian weeping, punctuated by hiccups, while Grandma Shlomit never stopped running back and forth between the visitors and the kitchen, wresting their cups and cake plates from them almost by force, washing them carefully with dish-washing liquid, rinsing them well, drying them, and putting them away in the cupboard. Any teaspoon that was not washed immediately after use seemed to my Grandma Shlomit to be a dangerous agent of the forces that had brought about the disaster.

So my grandfather and grandmother sat in the other room with those of the visitors who had finished sitting with Father and me and yet felt it proper to stay a little longer. Grandpa Alexander, who had loved his daughter-in-law and always dreaded her sadness, walked up and down the room nodding his head with a kind of furious irony and occasionally bursting into loud wails:

"Why? Oh why? So beautiful! So young! And so talented! So gifted! Why? Explain to me why?"

And he stood in a corner with his back to the room, sobbing aloud as though he were hiccuping, his shoulders trembling violently.

Grandma rebuked him:

"Zussia, stop that please. That's enough. Lonya and the child can't stand it when you behave like this. Stop it! Control yourself! Really! Learn a lesson from Lonya and the child, how to behave! Really!"

Grandpa obeyed her instantly, sat down, and buried his face in his hands. But a quarter of an hour later another helpless bellow would burst from his heart:

"So young! So beautiful! Like an angel! So young! So talented! Why?! Explain to me why?!"

My mother's friends came: Lilia Bar-Samkha, Ruchele Engel, Esterka Weiner, Fania Weissmann, and another woman or two, childhood friends from the Tarbuth gymnasium. They sipped tea and talked about their schooldays. They reminisced about my mother as a girl, about their charismatic headmaster, Issachar Reiss, whom all the girls had secretly been in love with, and his rather unsuccessful marriage. They talked about other teachers, too. Then Aunt Lilenka had second thoughts, and asked Father delicately if he minded them talking in this way, reminiscing, telling stories. Would he rather they talked about something else?

But my father, who sat all day long wearily, unshaven, in the chair where my mother had spent her sleepless nights, only nodded apathetically and motioned for them to continue.

Aunt Lilia, Dr. Lilia Bar-Samkha, insisted that she and I must have a heart-to-heart chat, although I tried to get out of it politely. Since the other room was occupied by Grandpa and Grandma and some other members of my father's family, and the kitchen was full of kind neighbors, and Grandma Shlomit was constantly coming and going to scrub every bowl and teaspoon, Aunt Lilia took me by the hand and led me to the bathroom, where she locked the door behind us. It felt strange and rather repellent to be in a locked bathroom with this woman. But Aunt Lilia beamed at me, sat down on the covered toilet seat, and sat me down facing her on the edge of the bath. She eyed me in silence for a minute or two, compassionately, with tears welling in her eyes, and then she started talking, not about my mother or the school in Rovno but about the great power of