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By Root 993 0

and emotional; he silently shed an old man's tear on Father's shoulder and murmured some formal words of condolence. Our acquaintances from the cafés came, and the Jerusalem writers, Yehuda Yaari, Shraga Kadari, Dov Kimche and Yitzhak Shenhar, and Professor and Mrs. Halkin, and Professor Bennet, the expert on Islamic history, and Professor Yitzhak (Fritz) Baer, the expert on the history of the Jews in Christian Spain. Three or four younger lecturers, rising stars in the firmament of the university, also came. Two of my teachers from Tachkemoni School came, and some of my classmates, and the Krochmals, Tosia and Gustav Krochmal, the broken toy and doll repairers, whose little shop had been renamed the Dolls' Hospital. Zerta and Yakov-David Abramski came: the one whose eldest son Yonatan had been killed at the end of the War of Independence by a Jordanian sniper. The sniper's bullet hit twelve-year-old Yoni in the forehead when he was playing in his yard that Saturday morning years ago, at the very moment his parents were sitting with us, sipping tea and eating cake. And the ambulance went down our street hooting on its way to pick him up and again a few minutes later as it drove past with its siren wailing on its way to the hospital, and when my mother heard the siren she said, We spend all our time making plans, yet there's someone out there in the dark laughing at us and all our plans. And Zerta Abramski said, That's right, life is like that, and yet people will always go on making plans because otherwise despair would take over. It was ten minutes later that a neighbor came and gently called the Abram skis over and told them less than the truth, and they were in such a hurry to run after him that Aunt Zerta left her handbag behind with her wallet and her papers inside. When we went to see them the next day to offer condolences, Father silently handed her the handbag after embracing her and Mr. Abramski. Now they tearfully embraced my father and me but they didn't bring us a handbag.

My father suppressed his tears. In any case, he never wept in my presence. He firmly believed that tears were fitting for women but not for men. He sat all day long in Mother's old chair, his face growing darker day by day since as a mark of mourning he did not shave, greeting his visitors with a nod and nodding to them again when they left. He barely spoke during those days, as though my mother's death had cured him of his habit of breaking any silence. Now he sat silently for days on end, letting others do the talking, about my mother, about books and book reviews, about the twists and turns of politics. I tried to sit opposite him: I hardly took my eyes off him all day long. And whenever I passed close to his chair, he patted me wearily once or twice on the arm or back. But we did not speak to each other.

My mother's parents and her sisters did not come to Jerusalem during the mourning period and the days that followed: they sat and mourned separately, in Auntie Haya's apartment in Tel Aviv, because they blamed my father for what had happened and couldn't bring themselves to see him. Even at the funeral, I was told, my father walked with his parents while my mother's sisters walked with their parents and not a word was exchanged between the two camps.

I was not present at my mother's funeral: Aunt Lilia, Leah Kalish-Bar-Kamcha, who was considered our expert on feelings in general and children's upbringing in particular, feared the burial might have an adverse effect on the child's psyche. And from then on the Mussmans never set foot in our home in Jerusalem, and Father, for his part, did not go and see them or make any contact, because he was very hurt by their suspicions. For years I was the go-between. During the first week I even carried oblique messages concerning my mother's personal effects, and a couple of times I conveyed the effects themselves. In the years that followed, the aunts used to interrogate me cautiously about daily life at home, about my father's and grandparents' health, about my father's new wife and even about